is associate editor of the Lithuanian cultural journal Kulturos Barai and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Architecture and Urbanism (Routledge) and Lituanus (Chicago). He holds a PhD in architectural history and theory and is a professor at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and Vilnius University. He is the author of twelve books on architecture, urbanism, literature and higher education and has edited ten volumes of essays.
The results of Greece’s snap general election, triggered by Syriza’s defeat in May, are eagerly awaited. Support for the far-right Danish People’s Party has collapsed, while Lithuania has grown more conservative. But isn’t there more to European politics than national swings and roundabouts?
Eurozine’s series of reports on national debates in Europe in the run-up to the EP elections continues. Views from Maribor, Vilnius and Paris suggest that, amidst the European ennui, the green shoots of grass roots democracy may be showing.
Maths-based economics seems to be stuck in something of a rut. Almantas Samalavičius, editor of Eurozine partner journal ‘Kulturos barai’, spoke to Professor Joshua Farley, an ecological economist at the University of Vermont (UVM), about the failure of mainstream economic thinking to explain economic reality, and why the dominant discourse nevertheless remains so powerful in academia.
Culture has become a major instrument of Russian propaganda. Nowhere is this more so than in the Baltic countries, where Russian media are widely consumed, and where politics, business and the cultural sector combine to promote Russian interests. A Lithuanian perspective.
Recent cuts in higher education spending fuels the commodification of knowledge, the precarization of academic work, and de-solidarization within the scienitific community. Almantas Samalavicius of the Lithuanian journal Kulturos barai talks to Slovenian ethnomusicologist about Ana Hofman about neoliberalism and higher education.
If the university is to survive, faculty are going to have to rethink their roles as critical public intellectuals, connect their scholarship to broader social issues and learn how to write for and speak to a broader public. Of this much, the cultural critic and doyen of critical pedagogy Henry Giroux is convinced.
The audit culture resulting from neoliberal policies has had a deleterious effect on all sectors of society, and no less so on the universities, says higher education expert Jon Nixon. Clearly, the logic of austerity constitutes an existential threat to the great humanistic traditions of scholarship.
Why is it that those in power cannot think outside the categories of economics and techno-science when faced with the spectre of widespread joblessness and natural disasters caused by an excessive reliance on techno-science? Sajay Samuel says it’s time to stop and reflect.
From the planned rewilding of London’s Upper Lea Valley to performance indicator software designed to manage 663 of China’s largest cities, Warren Karlenzig knows what he’s talking about when it comes to urban sustainability projects. And yet he’s never been more daunted by the dizzying speed of growth and unfathomable scale of today’s cities.
Following the massive bailouts, stimulus spending and quantitative easing of recent years, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and went back to sleep, says Richard Heinberg. But the coming global energy crisis will likely provide the jolt that wakes everyone up again.
Today’s media, combined with the latest portable devices, have pushed serious public discourse into the background and hauled triviality to the fore, according to media theorist Arthur W Hunt. And the Jeffersonian notion of citizenship has given way to modern consumership.
Nicholas Bradbury made his literary debut this year with the novel “Market Farm”, a reworking of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” for the free market era. He talks here about influences for his satirical take on the current financial crisis and potential grounds for hope for the future.
At some point, there is a tilt; there always is. Then we shall settle down into our new historical system. Wallerstein foresees one of two possibilities: more hierarchy, exploitation and polarization; or a system that has never yet existed, based on relative democracy and relative equality.
Green economist Molly Scott Cato acknowledges the extraordinary advances that economic growth has brought. However, she insists that only by learning to flourish within limits can we hope to regain our sense of the good life.
Given the relation between economic production and ecological degradation, Joshua Farley is convinced that economic growth must stop. It is just a question of when. And whether cooperation will displace competition as the dominant concept in the economic paradigm.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Almantas Samalavicius and the philosopher Norman Lillegard consider the dangers of relativism, the crisis of education, pleonexia and the economic crisis, and whether literature should provide moral instruction.
