Articles

Les Back learns a few lessons about the importance of paying attention from the examples of Primo Levi, radioman Studs Terkel and literary traveller Flemming Røgilds. They animate an alternative way to live, achieved through two people hearing each other. This active listening can create another set of social relations and ultimately a new kind of society.

“There is no need for the western political artist, too often a disaster tourist, to sail the seven seas looking for injustices to denounce. Inequality and exploitation saturate the ground on which we stand, they are in the grain of everyday life.” Conceptual artist Victor Burgin launches an excoriating attack on documentary art as the “new doxa”.

The digitisation of the book has brought a new balance of power in the trade, with established publishers locked in struggle with the new digital distributors for control of production. Pascal Fouché, author of an encyclopaedia of the book, discusses whether publishers are prepared for the challenge posed by the dematerialisation of the printed word.

Lithuania’s capital is close to the heart of many different groups and nationalities who have at one time or another called it “home”. Better that they unite in their love of the city than fight for isolated fragments of its magical, multi-layered past, writes Tomas Venclova.

During the twentieth anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbolic wall consisting of dominoes was toppled. The dominoes were painted on both sides, something that could only have been done with a great deal of forgetting, writes Jacob Kimvall. In reality, there was graffiti only on the western side of the Wall, and that was put there illegally; but during the anniversary, unity seems to be more important than historical accuracy.

The much anticipated US finance regulatory bill, passed at the end of last month, is a compromise between government regulators and Wall Street, writes George Blecher. As for solving the even more pressing problems of the US economy, the bill offers no new solutions.

Between 1941 and 1989, Hungary’s hand-tied politicians were at the mercy of the Great Powers and their struggle for hegemony in Europe. A study of US diplomatic documents shows the extent to which realpolitik determined US policy on Hungarian national independence.

It’s ironic, says a Latvian art critic, that the current saturation of the visual world by infinitely reproducible images via the Internet has driven artists back to older forms of representation.

Today, a new struggle for control of Russia’s universities is underway between a “black”, private model and a centralized and seemingly more transparent state model. Yet the two are but different expressions of the same thing, writes Alexander Bikbov: spontaneous capitalist neoconservatism. What’s more, governments elsewhere in Europe are seeking to emulate the successful example of the Russian state in extracting profit from the public university.

What began as a row over the French government plans for “masterization” and the revision of the status of teacher-researchers escalated in March 2009 into a prolonged and explosive dispute over Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to overhaul France’s poorly-funded public universities, writes Françoise Benhamou. Though joined in some measure by students, who brought new demands to a conflict that was already very complex, the teacher strikes had the paradoxical effect of hitting the financially worse-off students.

The understanding of the role of higher education that characterized the Soviet era has been reborn in post-Soviet Lithuania as a blind drive towards utility, writes Almantas Samalavicius. The hard sciences have won the struggle over state funding at the expense of the humanities, while falling standards have caused an ongoing brain-drain to the West. The most recent reforms indicate that the only remedy on offer is based on the logic of the market, as Lithuanian universities steadily go the way of the rest of “common property” after independence.

Barbara Holub’s drawings prompt recognition without us having experienced the situations they represent, writes Ines Gebetsroither. They create an opportunity to reassess habitual ways of seeing, and tell us: there are no innocent images; the images are already in us.

Critique of Bologna in Romania is a pretext for academic complacency and professional self-preservation, writes Corneliu Balan. The problem is not the Bologna system as such but the subordination of education to political interests and the privatization of the universities.

The reaction from universities to demands for reform – both from the private sector and society – has been a state of paralysis and resistance in the name of autonomy and academic freedom. The only way universities can recover from their crisis legitimacy, writes Boaventura de Sousa Santos, is through radical democratic restructuring. Countering the brain-drain from poorer to wealthy nations – so far the main result of the transnationalization of education – will only be achieved by embarking on a counter-hegemonic process of globalization creating genuine equality of access.

The rapid expansion of the student protests across the German-speaking space was largely a result of Web 2.0 and the different networking possibilities it offers. Refuting derogatory references to a “facebook rebellion” as the tired expression of a ’68 fixation and tackling the charge that the virtual sense of “being there” undermines active participation, Jana Herwig, Max Kossatz and Viola Mark examine what the student protests reveal about changing the face of political activism in the era of Web 2.0.