Europa: Velika iluzija

Prevela: Silva Mežnarić

Rethinking professional practice: the logic of competition and the crisis of identity in housing practice

The relationship between professionalism, education and housing practice has become increasingly strained following the introduction of austerity measures and welfare reforms across a range of countries. Focusing on the development of UK housing practice, this article considers how notions of professionalism are being reshaped within the context of welfare retrenchment and how emerging tensions have both affected the identity of housing professionals and impacted on the delivery of training and education programmes. The article analyses the changing knowledge and skills valued in contemporary housing practice and considers how the sector has responded to the challenges of austerity. The central argument is that a dominant logic of competition has culminated in a crisis of identity for the sector. Although the focus of the article is on UK housing practice, the processes identified have a wider relevance for the analysis of housing and welfare delivery in developed economies

Human rights, legitimacy, political judgement

This paper grapples with Bernard Williams’s prima vista enigmatic assertion that ‘[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions’. Though Williams’s approach to thinking about human rights has a number of affinities with other ‘political’ and ‘minimalist’ understandings, we highlight its distinctive features and argue that it has significant implications for our understanding of human rights along a number of key dimensions. We then proceed to explain how Williams’s way of thinking about human rights coheres with certain aspects of the reasoning of one of the most important international human rights courts, to wit, the European Court of Human Rights. This lends further plausibility to the view that a politically realistic understanding of human rights, of the kind urged by Williams, should be taken seriously, since it is a plausible candidate for the explanation of important aspects of human rights practices. We close by examining the suggestion that thinking in these terms is worryingly conservative

The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe

The situation in collective memory studies that share a nexus with the discipline of International Relations (IR) is currently reflective of the traditionally West-centric writing of European history. This order of things has become increasingly challenged after the eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU). This article examines Poland’s and the Baltics’ recent attempts to enlarge the mnemonic vision of ‘the united Europe’ by placing their ‘subaltern pasts’ in contest with the conventionally Western European-bent understanding of the consequences of World War II in Europe. I argue that their endeavours to wrench the ‘European mnemonical map’ apart in order to become more congruent with the different historical experiences within the enlarged EU encapsulate the curious trademark of Polish and Baltic post-Cold War politics of becoming European: their combination of simultaneously seeking recognition from and resisting the hegemonic ‘core European’ narrative of what ‘Europe’ is all about

‘Like being on death row’: Britain and the end of coal, c. 1970 to the present

ABSTRACT The introduction draws on the work of Raymond Williams to identify the ‘structures of feeling’ that surround the figure of the coal miner in contemporary British culture. As an analysis of the media coverage of the closure of the UK’s last deep-coal mine in December 2015 demonstrates, mine workers were cast as ‘residual proletarians’ whose modes of being and consciousness were portrayed as both admirable and pitifully out of date. The introduction goes on to demonstrate the dominance that selective memories of the miners’ strike of 1984/1985 exert over contemporary understandings of coal mining. Drawing on the work of Williams again, the introduction reflects on how certain images and tropes have reached hegemonic status while others have been marginalised. The introduction concludes by arguing that historical scholarship must extricate itself from the stranglehold of ‘1984/85’ and contends that the true significance of coal for contemporary British history lies in the extraordinary range of emotions, meanings and significations with which both the industry and the miners were invested by the contemporaries themselves

The sound of revolution: BBC monitoring and the Hungarian uprising, 1956

Radio played a vitally important role during the 1956 Hungarian uprising: as an information service, diplomatic interlocutor and cultural mediator. Broadcasters and the authorities that stood behind them on both sides of the Iron Curtain mapped, interpreted and, at times, appeared to influence the course of events on the ground. The BBC Monitoring Service Transcription Collection offers an essential and unexplored perspective on the mediated experience of the Hungarian uprising, in the context of the wider political warfare battle of the cold war

Historical ‘signposts’ and other temporal indicators in the Czech lexicon

This article posits that the Czechs employ a great many historical markers, previously applied to other events of national importance, which help to shape collective memory and right the ‘wrongs’ of the past. It is argued that these temporal indicators share a number of clearly defined characteristics, and that their use is too systematic and calculated to be merely a function of the constraints of the lexicon. The first part of the study considers in detail questions of semantics (especially the distinction between denotation and connotation), the lexicographical sources available to the researcher, and the lexical ‘signpost’ in context, while the second part focuses on practical examples of lexical re-appropriation since 1918, with particular reference to dictionaries and the Czech National Corpus.University of Wolverhampto