There is very much more to Daniel Defoe's inspired piece of ‘faction’ about Robinson Crusoe than seeing it just as a boy's adventure story. Its influence was widespread, judging by the great scale of new editions and reprintings, both internationally and through many translations. It can be read as a sophisticated myth of the ascent of man, of economic growth by dint of the work ethic, of the imperative of ‘improvement’ and the determination to master nature. It has implications for natural rights theory, the Lockeian justification of private property and the role of the ‘civilised’ European facing a hostile, alien habitat.

The paper sets out to analyse the mechanisms and functions of the national landscape as a cultural invention through literature, underscoring how literature, more than other media, most clearly articulates its conflictual complexity, being both descriptions of and reflections on identities. The national landscape is part of a more general story of how place and identity are interconnected. Through analyses of texts by Nadine Gordimer, John Michael Coetzee, André Brink and the Danish romanticist and scientist Hans Christian Ørsted, it is suggested how the European reflection on national identity in relation to landscape and language from the period of nation-building in the 19th century is both repeated and criticized in the emerging new nations of the post-colonial era. On the one hand, the parallel between European and non-European reflections helps us to deconstruct the naturalized homogeneity of national identity in Europe and invites us to criticize the attempts to reduplicate this simplicity in the conception of identity in post-colonial conditions.

Roman Jakobson famously defined poetry as pivoting on the metaphorical axis with parallelism as a major feature, and James Kugel argues that parallelism is the defining feature of biblical poetry. The parallel structure – including its variations of symmetry and antithesis – is crucial for classical Chinese poetry. In drawing on both Chinese and Western critical views on the symmetrical structure of parallelism and antithesis, this paper will explore the relationship between the cognitive and linguistic correlation in the formation of parallel structure in literary language, particularly poetry, and argue for the basis of parallelism as deeply embedded in the mind and manifested in literary expressions.

Today Western European welfare states find themselves in a paradoxical situation: parts of working life are in need of labour that is difficult to find nationally – and internationally. While this is partly due to inflexible policies, it is also due to competition for labour among Western countries. At the same time, asylum seekers are constantly arriving, often to be joined by family members. The authorities are confronted with a mismatch between the supply of, and demand for, immigrants. The receiving countries do not get the labour they want, while many of those who actually come cannot be incorporated productively for various reasons. This situation illustrates the squeeze facing today’s welfare states – in this article exemplified with the Norwegian case – between the logic of humanitarian responsibilities and the concerns of the national economy.

Fusion, which powers the sun and stars, is potentially an environmentally responsible and intrinsically safe source of essentially limitless energy on earth. The potential of fusion has been recognized for over 65 years, but mastering fusion on earth has proved to be an enormous scientific and technical challenge. It involves heating a large volume of dilute gas, containing equal parts of deuterium and tritium, to over 100M°C (M°C=one million degrees celsius) while preventing it from being cooled by touching the walls, from which it must be isolated using a ‘magnetic bottle’. This has now been done, and the Joint European Torus (JET) – which is the world's leading fusion research facility – has produced 16 MW of fusion power. The next step, which is to build a power station sized device called ITER, will be taken by a global collaboration. ITER will be twice as big as JET in linear dimensions, and will integrate all the technologies needed in a fusion power station. ITER should produce at least 500 MW of fusion power, ten times more than needed to heat the gas, and confirm that it is possible to build a fusion power station. Time is, however, needed to further develop the technology in order to ensure that it would be reliable and economical, and to test in power station conditions the materials that will be used in its construction, which will have to stand up to intense bombardment by the neutrons that carry the energy out of the magnetic bottle. Up to now, fusion has not been developed with any sense of urgency: since devices called tokamaks emerged in 1969 as the best candidates for bottling hot gases, at least 15 years have been lost due to delays in decision making and inadequate funding. In view of the urgent need for new, large-scale, emission-free sources of energy, and given the fact that – assuming it can be made to work reliably – the economics of fusion power look reasonable, the time has come to develop fusion on the so-called Fast Track. This involves: building ITER and the essential International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility in parallel, which will take ten years; using the results to finalize the design of a prototype fusion power station (generally called DEMO for Demonstrator); and then constructing DEMO, which will take another ten years. Assuming adequate funding, and that there are no major surprises, DEMO could be putting electricity into the grid within 30 years.

The idea of Europe has changed with time. The notion was originally identified with three concepts: that of freedom, of Christianity, and with civilization. Later it was associated with diversity, democracy and then with nationalism. Only very slowly has the idea of a common identity leading to integration come to the fore.

Ten non-violent revolutions are considered, characteristic for the second half of the 20th century, that profoundly changed our world and our perception of it. Perhaps the most important of those, the demographic revolution, resulted in unprecedented changes both in population size and structure. An attempt is made to analyse the ‘big perhaps’, some of the incompletely comprehended economical, medical, social, ethical and political consequences of present and projected demographic changes.

The extra-terrestrial scenario of the origin of life suggested by Svante Arrhenius (1908) as the ‘panspermia’ hypothesis was revived by the discovery of a low-temperature quantum limit of a chemical reaction rate in 1973. Entropy factors play no role near absolute zero, and slow molecular tunnelling can lead to the exothermic formation of quite complex molecules. Interstellar grains or particles of cometary tails could serve as possible cold seeds of life, with acetic acid, urea and products of their polycondensation as quasi-equilibrium intermediates. Scenarios of the origin of life should consider the appearance of a typical feature of living species—chiral purity of their aminoacids and sugars. Very cold solid environment hinders tunnelling racemization under conditions typical for outer space. However, the decisive problem of the origin of chiral purity of the Earth's biosphere is the mechanism of the spontaneous breaking of mirror symmetry rather than the search for some ‘advantage factors’ which can promote gradual accumulation of enantiomeric excess. Extra-terrestrial (cold, solid phase) scenarios of the origin of life seem to be more promising from that point of view than terrestrial (warm) scenarios. In a scheme of five main stages of prebiological evolution some problems important for further investigation are briefly discussed.

The Nordic countries of Europe have many common traits. They are small countries in Northern Europe, they have been Lutheran since the Reformation, and they had, for centuries, a strong landholding peasantry but a weak aristocracy. They developed a comprehensive welfare state after the Second World War, and they are more sceptical about European integration than people from other countries in Western Europe. Despite attempts to create a Nordic union and the existence of a Nordic Council, their joint Nordic orientation has been subordinated to the national interests of the individual Nordic countries. They are clear-cut nation states with a nationalism that is not fierce, but represents a kind of official, controlled and uniform national spirit. With respect to parliamentary politics and social policy the main features of the countries have been called the Nordic Model. The model still exists, but rests on shakier ground than before.

One way that the American government has changed in the past 50 years is through the establishment and expansion of organizations providing technical expertise for decisionmaking. This essay reviews the performance of current structures from the diverse vantage points of elites, bureaucracies, the general public and activist minorities, drawing on studies of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, and the cultural theory of Mary Douglas et al. The apparently mature institutional landscape may well be ripe for change.

Data aggregations are an under-acknowledged site of social relations. The social and technical specifics of how data aggregate are arenas for rich debates about how knowledge ought to be produced, and who should produce it. Consumer goods such as fitness trackers create conditions where data scientists or professional researchers are no longer the only ones making decisions about how to aggregate data. Users of these products also rework their data to discover something medically significant to them. These practices call attention to a modality of ‘scaling up’ datasets about a single person that is different from, and until recently largely invisible to, clinical approaches to big data, which privilege the creation of a ‘bird’s eye’ view across as many people. Both technical questions how to build these aggregations, and social questions of who should be involved, betray broader epistemological issues about how new knowledge is created from electronic devices.

Infectious diseases still jeopardize human health and even lives. In spite of the variety of advanced treatment methods, prevention is considered to be the most effective way to fight infections, and vaccination, no doubt, is one of the most effective preventive measures in the history of mankind. The vaccine controversy is based on a dispute over morality, ethics, effectiveness, and/or safety. There is no 100% safe or effective vaccine; however, benefits clearly overweigh risks. Ironically, as the numbers of cases of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases are falling, the controversies relating to vaccine safety are growing. Vaccines are generally victims of their own success. Controversies can afflict the positive acceptance of immunization, decrease the coverage and uptake and finally threaten the health of children and adults.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been dominated by multifarious crises that have given way to individual and collective wounds resulting from environmental disasters, exile and migratory movements, war, terrorism, radicalism and other disturbing historical episodes. Our main contention is that trauma and/or excessive exposure to vulnerable situations can be relieved thanks to diverse narrative practices. Accordingly, we explore the field of Trauma Studies since its emergence to its current evolution towards the vulnerability paradigm, examining the different meanings of vulnerability not only from the perspective of the life sciences but also from the social sciences and its application to the humanities. Then, we move on to the notion of resilience and how it can help us articulate and/or move beyond trauma and vulnerability. In keeping with this, considering the ethical and political relationality between the self and other, we highlight one’s tendency to be affected by the other’s wounds and vulnerability as well as the inevitability of interdependency and interconnectedness between people and non-human entities. Thus, we explore the role of literature in giving voice to the voiceless and to unheard experiences of suffering as well as in representing the demise of the sovereign self and the rise of human and non-human interconnectedness after being exposed to traumatic or disastrous events, as represented in contemporary literatures in English.

This article investigates how Turkey implements its responsibilities of an international refugee protection regime at policy level, and it focuses specifically on empirical scholarship about the domestic responses to Syrian refugees. While refugee protection draws on the principles of humanitarianism and non-refoulement in general, how it is understood and delivered is complex and situation-specific. In the exponentially growing literature on Syrian refugees in Turkey, the scholarship often takes for granted the policy responses without highlighting their relations with practices. With situational analysis of the secondary documents, this article introduces refugee protection policies and regulations and makes an analysis of domestic responses in different fields concerning Syrian refugees. This critical appraisal finds that Turkey’s responses mostly include humanitarian social protection and lack rights-based legal protection. This pushes Syrian refugees into exploitative situations.

This article discusses the gaps in the cognitive demands of education as higher levels of education became socially and culturally necessary. These gaps are related to major transitions between education levels, such as the transition from preschool to primary school, from primary to secondary, or from secondary to tertiary education. Gaps reflect deviations between the concepts and skills prescribed for learning by a specific population and the readiness of this population to cope with the demands of the task within the time frame prescribed. The history and the cognitive developmental profile of the gaps is outlined. This article focuses on the gap between secondary and tertiary education. It is explained that a major reason for the gap is the vast expansion in the population of youth attending university studies. We outline a programme for bridging this gap, which extends from primary to university education. We emphasize changes in principle-based and critical thought that are needed by many students if they are be able to grasp science as intended by universities.

The existing policy and academic debate on the social mobility of Roma have been focused almost entirely on entry barriers (the cost of entry into the mainstream society), whereas exit barriers (the cost of exit from the traditional Roma lifestyle) have been acknowledged and studied to a much lesser extent. In this study we advocate that from a policy perspective it is important to understand differences between the two types of social mobility barriers, as they have different causes and hence have to be addressed by different policy instruments. However, it is important that both types of social mobility barriers are addressed simultaneously, as they interact and reinforce each other mutually. Further, addressing social mobility barriers of Roma requires a change of both formal and informal institutions. Therefore, policy measures have to be implemented and sustained over a long period of time in order to have a sustainable impact on the social and economic integration of Roma.

Taking its starting point from the distinction between axial and non-axial civilization, the article focuses on the peculiar aspects of the Japanese process of modernization, which has its roots in a historical experience in which the notions of hybridity and crossing were unsuitable. In fact, what we see in Japan is not the encounter and mixture of different and heterogeneous aspects, although there is hardly anything original or pure in it. There is a sort of Japanese uniqueness, that cannot be found in a specific content, but in a general attitude that consists of a sort of deconstruction of any type of content. This process enables one thing to be put next to another without leading to conflict, even if originally the two may have been antithetical. Therefore, juxtaposition is the notion that best explains the type of procedure employed by the Japanese when they deal with something that does not come from their culture.

The People’s Republic of China’s dramatic transformation has not only benefited its people, but has also led it to become a major player in the world. Here we examine how deeply perceptions of China have penetrated into the public’s perceptions in a wide variety of nations around the world – the US, 11 nations in East Asia, and 22 in Latin America. We ask a series of questions: how much do people know? How do Americans evaluate China? And how do publics in East Asia and Latin America view China’s influence in their nations and around the world? We also examine some of the ways in which perceptions vary, both across nations and within nations, such as by partisanship. In addition, we report the results of an experiment using an advertisement the PRC ran in the US to assess how successful they were in shaping public opinion about China. We conclude that our studies, and those of others, provide a strong baseline for assessing the effect of an emerging superpower on citizens around the world.

Since the fall of the apartheid regime South African higher education has begun to undergo a process of fundamental transformation. First-world universities, which were beneficiaries (however unwilling) of past racial inequalities, have had to adapt to the urgent needs of what is a post-colonial and, for the majority of its citizens, a third-world society. South Africa, therefore, provides a particularly sharp example of the encounter between a higher education system established within the European tradition, in terms of both its institutional and its academic culture, and a society in the process of radical change. This encounter has been mediated through the work of the National Commission on Higher Education which attempted to produce a compromise that would enable South African higher education to be both ‘Western’ (in terms of academic values and scientific standards) and also ‘African’ (in terms of its contribution to building the capacities of all the people of South Africa). The tension between the university's claims to represent universal knowledge and the counter-claims that ‘local’ knowledge traditions should be accorded greater respect, therefore, is much sharper than in Europe.