Brolly

Outsiders under Empire

2025-05-15T04:25:50-04:00

#speakforPeace

This article reproduces in full the keynote speech given at “V.N. Karazin” Kharkiv National University, School of Foreign Languages, for the 17th International Conference “Methodological and Psychological Issues of Teaching Foreign Languages: Reaching for School and University Integration” (25 April 2025, Kharkiv, Ukraine)

1. Chaos and Synthesis. History makes it plain: at the turning of eras, when civilisations collide and empires fall, Barbarians assert their presence—undeniable, no longer tenable to ignore. Rising from the periphery, once unheard and unseen, they surface amidst upheaval with such force they reshape the world itself, marking the boundary between what was and what is to come.

Today, this pattern of volatile junctures takes on fresh significance and urgency. We find ourselves at what is arguably the most consequential threshold yet: the dawn of the digital and AI age. Propelled by the most powerful technological revolution ever recorded, unprecedented in its speed and scale. Boundaries of space and time blur. Real-time global communication, vast networks of video, data, and algorithmic flows unsettle the coherence of inherited structures—of knowledge, identity, and authority—by forces we are only beginning to understand. In this climate of uncertainty and extraordinary possibility, new centres of power emerge while older categories lose their hold.

Like the Barbarians of history. Who arrived not merely to disrupt but to reconfigure, and ultimately to reconcile. And just as in earlier times of civilisation, we are compelled to reorient, engage in new terms and develop modes of understanding equal to the intensity of the present. What we seek, therefore, is not a fixed doctrine but a mode of thinking; not consolation but a sense of orientation; one that acknowledges the rift rather than denying it, and works with contradictions toward reconciliation, instead of suppression.

2. Sparks Between Shadows: The Dialectics of Fusion Thought. It is on this ground Fusion Philosophy takes shape—a framework I am developing in response to these dynamics. A philosophy, in short, for the antinomies of our age, and a hermeneutic practice invested in making sense of contradictions. It seeks understanding through dialectics—not to suppress but to overcome and sublate them into pathways toward goodness, beauty, and freedom—unfoldings of God, the Absolute.

3. Case study. Herder’s Barbarian. A Tale of History’s Unlikely Agents: Destruction, Transition, Reconciliation. To illustrate this, I turn to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s concept of Barbarian—a model uniquely suited to the concerns of Fusion thought. In Herder’s writings, the barbarian appears in three distinct forms, I’ll call them the scourge who destroys, the wanderer who unsettles, and the sculptor who transforms. These figures are not just historical archetypes. They express philosophical structures—forms inherent within the evolution of human understanding. Instances of the dialectics between order and disruption, tradition and renewal, loss and possibility. Herder’s barbarian becomes thus a symbolic agent of transformation, surfacing when old forms collapse and new ones have to take shape. Through this lens, a triad of disruption, transition, and reconciliation is uncovered—a model for both historical analysis and conceptual renewal.

4. Conclusions. Beyond Binary – Thinking in the Afterglow of Contradiction. Drawing from Herder’s theories on barbarisms, this case study highlights how Fusion Philosophy offers an interpretive and heuristic approach, not as a rigid system but as a means of encountering and synthesising. It recognises that thought, like history, progresses not in straight lines but through fusion and emergent forms. From Herder’s barbarians to the disruptive forces of today’s geopolitical map, this paper explores how thinking can evolve beyond mere oppositions towards an understanding that is both fluid and generative so as to seek sense amidst intellectual fragmentation, technological revolution and post-truth menaces.

J.G. von Herder set in motion a dialectics that extends far beyond its eighteenth-century origins among the Sturm und Drang literary and philosophical movement, exposing faults and untapped beneficial possibilities that surface whenever the world undergoes a fundamental reconfiguration—just as it’s doing now.

"Bringing off a Successful Swindle"

2025-03-23T15:57:11-04:00

Compared to George Orwell’s best-known works, 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945), his earlier fiction has attracted significantly less critical attention. Yet, these novels deserve attention for the way Orwell draws on his own life, lending them some autobiographical quality, and for their exploration of many of the same socio-political concerns that preoccupied him as a journalist and essayist. One such concern is his representation of the lower tier of the private school system—an interest shaped by his experience as a private school teacher. This essay examines how Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), reflects the capitalist ethos that was present in the educational climate of fourth-rate schools. By tracing the milestones of the protagonist Dorothy’s teaching career, I argue that her failure to reform the curriculum and her powerless resistance to Mrs Creevy, the proprietress of Ringwood House Academy, expose deeper structural flaws within the educational institutions of suburban London in the 1930s.

Pedagogical Aspects of Theological Education in the 2020s

2025-05-15T05:50:01-04:00

This paper is part of a two-paper series. This second paper discusses the role of interreligious dialogue, interreligious education and interreligious studies in theological education. The paper discusses interreligious education and how its collaborative approach enables theology students to learn the dynamics of different religions by being taught by teachers from differing religious faiths. Religious education with school children also benefits as key differences between similar religions being taught in local communities can be understood. The paper explains how, at the societal level, religious tolerance of someone else’s religion becomes embedded as a universal right. The second section of this second paper discusses interreligious multi-faith development work. There is a strong emphasis on how theological education should be of value to the local community where the learning takes place, alongside using a partnership approach to deliver public goods. Multi-faith education concentrates on a collegiate approach to development, which in practical terms is local regenerative work. Another societal benefit of interreligious multi-faith development work is more nuanced. In an interreligious approach, harmony and trust are built up by differing religions, not trying to compete. The focus is on collegiate interreligious theology education and partnership development work in order to deliver social goods.

Assessment of Entrepreneurial Aspirations and Challenges in Business Education

2025-05-15T05:59:32-04:00

The main purpose of this study is to assess the entrepreneurial aspirations and challenges of business students in Adamawa State. Three specific objectives were used, research questions were formulated to guide the study. The theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) was adopted. The researchers adopted a descriptive survey design. Multi-stage random sampling technique was used to sample the respondents. The targeted population was the whole tertiary institution in Adamawa State. In stage one, 6 tertiary institutions that offer business education programs were target namely: Modibbo Adama University, Yola (MAU), Adamawa State University, Mubi (ASU), Federal College of Education, Yola (FCEY), College of Education, Hong (COE), Federal Polytechnic, Mubi, (FPM), and Adamawa State Polytechnic, Yola (ASPY). In stage two, in each of the tertiary institutions, 20 students were randomly sampled, which gave a total of 120 students. The data obtained were analysed using simple percentages. Findings reveal a complex view of entrepreneurship that extends beyond traditional business creation, encompassing elements of social innovation and personal fulfilment. Students displayed a generally positive attitude towards entrepreneurship, influenced strongly by their involvement in practical entrepreneurship-related activities and their familial backgrounds. However, they also identified significant barriers, including financial constraints, fear of failure, and a lack of practical experience, which hinder their intentions to pursue entrepreneurial ventures.

Women Poets of the Irish Troubles

2025-05-15T05:06:59-04:00

Northern Ireland’s Troubles turned the 20th century into a prolonged battleground. The country was divided by religion: Protestants versus Catholics. These conflicts led to the loss of thousands of lives and terrorism throughout the country. Male authors’ writings from this period have received consistent focus. This paper seeks to explore female authors and the defining characteristics of their work as they engaged with themes of violence, nature, and individualism. Six women who lived and wrote during that period are contextualised and examined.

From Traveling for Enjoyment to Traveling for Eroticism

2025-05-15T05:23:09-04:00

Tourism is not only a form of short-term migration that involves excessive consumerism in a colonial setting, where the paying client is served in the way in which colonial elites were served, by servants whose mobilities tend to be far more limited. There’s more than this, as there is religious tourism, business tourism, intellectual tourism and some other types. However, tourism bears in its consumerist excess the urge to engage in sexual experiences. Sex has been a part of tourism for a very long time. As Martin Oppermann says, ‘‘While some countries may be more renowned for the availability of commercial sex, sex tourism exists everywhere”. Men (predominantly) travel from more developed countries to less developed ones in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean for sex that is either not available or more expensive or qualitatively less pleasurable at home. But this is not restricted to men, because there is now a stream of discreet travel by affluent western women to places in the Caribbean and Africa, where sex with local men is explicitly anticipated. However, Heidi Dahles and Karon Bras also note similar relationships developing between local beach boys (who develop an ‘entrepreneurial romance’ style) and western women tourists in Indonesia. According to many recent analysts, sex is not motivated purely by the “consummation of commercial sexual relations”, and there are “complex processes by which individuals choose to seek sexual gratification, first within prostitution and secondly as part of the tourist experience”. Whether characterised as “sex” tourism (commercial sex with the locals) or “romance” tourism (commercial sex with the trappings of a “real” relationship), this practice has inspired a good deal of academic research in the social sciences and popular literature as well. This paper offers, therefore, a critical analysis of the selected films focusing on the varied motivations that contemporary popular culture passionately pursues in its quest to gratify sexual impulses, even within the context of tourism.

White Girl in Asia

2025-05-15T05:34:26-04:00

From time immemorial, mobility has always played an important part in the lives of individuals. Some have migrated for health issues, some for various social and political ones, and some for a change in their daily routine. In this process, travel has not only fulfilled their primary aims but has also gifted various experiences which have helped them to relook, relearn and reconstruct their identity. Generally, when a Western traveller’s encounter with Asian destinations gets portrayed in the media, many issues arise. Issues like ‘Otherization’, representations, or the Eurocentric gaze create huge buzz among the audience. Especially when the traveller is a female, these issues become more problematic. Things like Voyeurism and male gaze increase the list. Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (1974), loosely based on an autobiographical erotic novel by Emmanuelle Arsan, portrays these issues.

The plot of the book and film features Emmanuelle, a young, rich, and lonely housewife who undertakes a journey from Paris to Thailand and explores different spheres of sexual pleasures. Emmanuelle’s journey is twofold. Firstly, it refers to her sexual mobility, from innocence to experience. Secondly, it shows her spatial journey, her transition from Paris to Thailand, from a studio-like, lonely apartment to the busy markets and a countryside villa. This article attempts to read how mobility transforms Emmanuelle, and how the interaction between global and local has been represented in the movie.

Totalitarian Future

2025-05-15T04:44:44-04:00

The major point of this paper could be reduced to the following: Chinese totalitarianism merged Oriental despotism with Marxism and provides the framework for China’s global predominance. The article will follow a certain outline. First, it shows why Western observers could not understand China. Secondly, it shows how Oriental despotism enjoys a lot of “socialist” features and how Marxism was finally blended with Chinese tradition. Finally, the result of this blending would be elaborated upon.

Journey Through the Vowels of Human Time

2025-05-15T04:59:26-04:00

An uninterrupted flow of thoughts (images, memories, analyses, desires, etc.)—content of human time in discontinuity/continuity. The discontinuous is suspended and thus becomes continuous when it emerges voluntarily: this is effort or duration; since in human time it is necessary to be and not just to exist, unlike non-human time: a stone exists, but it is not, any more than plants and animals, which seek only to reproduce, even if they are internally adapted by various modifications. But they are not the mainspring, unlike humans, who manifest this through gestures that are both mechanical (breathing, tingling, rubbing, crossing and uncrossing of limbs, touching of the face at each external and internal interaction) and, at the same time, through selected gestures assembled into attitudes (movements that are, however, ritualised according to the action and the place where they occur) at a given social-historical moment.

Human Time thus seems to be a Flow, either voluntarily organised into effort and/or duration, or involuntarily into subdued passion which nevertheless manifests itself through internal gestures (to the point of gurgling, coughing, breathing more or less loudly) or external gestures (yawning, tiredness, boredom, excitement, interest, moving in a geometry of perception). The whole thing can be tumultuous; the imaginary, this very movement of floating thoughts, comes up against the symbolism of internal and, above all, external conventions; it thus consists of creating and not just acclimatising, because human persistence also wants to refine and not just be powerful, and this within three limits: motivational finality or eschatology, goal-mean or teleology, result or “form” or eschatology; but the “waters change” defy, indulge in, for example, sophistry (or negative refinement), this dispersion aimed for itself.

The aim here is to reflect on these impressions/expressions of the human Time Flow; that of a Self-given from its three angles (Conative Subject: that of differential preferences, Political Actor: creator of relationships, Social Agent specialising in a particular skill) and which, at any given moment, can/wants to juggle between persistence alone (the game of the Same within the Identical, the Same, the Similar) and refinement through change (the innovative game of the Other within the Multiple, the Diverse), according to the chosen development factor (refinement, persistence, dispersion, dissolution), in a position of reinforcement or reduction within each action undertaken by one of these three aspects of the Self.

Mapping the Past

2025-03-30T11:50:16-04:00

Colonial rule in South Asia has undeniably reshaped the region’s spatial and cultural landscape. However, the tremors of colonisation’s aftermath, which include partition, genocide, refugee movements, etc., have acquired characteristics which reek distinctly of their regional epicentre. South Asian countries, as is true of most postcolonial nation-states, often posit their territorial space, defined through cartographic borders, as the most essential and fundamental factor in determining the abstract concept of nationality. Though the nationalistic discourses celebrate the sanctity and inalterability of the territorial space, this is not as fixed as discourses would lead one to believe. This article intends to examine the transience of territorial space that is continually reconfigured along linguistic and ethnic lines, which consequently determines the belongingness or alienation of an individual in the given geopolitical scenario. The ‘post-memory’ of displacement, alienation and loss that haunts the post-Partition generation of migrants and their sense of homelessness that is distinct from, yet as poignant as that of their ancestors, will be examined through the textual framework of Siddhartha Deb’s debut novel The Point of Return (2002). The article will present a nuanced study of the tension emanating from the fractured interface between nationalism and sub-nationalism, which is adroitly portrayed by Siddhartha Deb in this novel.

Rethinking Global Culture

2025-04-24T00:05:10-04:00

This paper examines the theoretical contributions of Arjun Appadurai to the study of cultural globalism through four of his major works: The Social Life of Things (1986), Modernity at Large (1996), Fear of Small Numbers (2006), and The Future as Cultural Fact (2013). Appadurai’s innovative concepts, such as “scapes”, “imagination as a social practice” and “ethics of possibility”, have reframed how we understand cultural flows, identity, and globalisation in the 21st century. By reviewing existing scholarship and applying thematic analysis, this study synthesises key insights from his works and explores their relevance in contemporary debates on global culture, nationalism, and future-oriented thinking. This paper contributes to cultural sociology by emphasising the continued importance of Appadurai’s ideas for understanding the disjunctures and potentials of global modernity.

Reviewing the Intersection of Epistemicide, African Digital Platforms and Digital Storytelling

2025-03-24T12:11:46-04:00

Digital storytelling emerges as a key ‘epistemic site’ for knowledge reclamation and narrative sovereignty, potentially challenging dominant knowledge hierarchies. This paper reviews the potential of digital storytelling to counter the so-called ‘epistemicide’. The review extends beyond traditional epistemological critiques to theorise about the role of digital platforms in countering epistemicide. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework where digital storytelling acts as a vehicle for epistemic resistance and justice. This theoretical framework responds to previous calls for decolonial methodologies that prioritise lived experiences and counter the dominance of centric epistemologies. To support this framework, the review highlights the role of African digital platforms in fostering alternative knowledge systems and examines how participatory digital storytelling can contribute to social justice. This review paper, hence, claims that digital storytelling can be a site for narrative reclamation, sovereignty, and decentralisation. The paper advocates for an epistemic decentralisation model that reimagines digital media as a domain for inclusivity. Such inquiries about the systematic integration of digital storytelling in both global and local knowledge systems or settings and whether it constitutes a potential site of epistemic dialogue are recommended. An understanding of the role and effectiveness of digital storytelling in countering epistemicide and the intersection between digital storytelling and epistemic justice, mainly among Indigenous communities, necessitates such virtual ethnographies.