Making Cultural Heritage Significant for the Public. The Role of Researchers in Encouraging Public Awareness and Local Pride

The municipality of Olavarría, Buenos Aires province, Argentina, has a rich, diverse, and ancient natural and cultural heritage, although this is not well known by the local community. For this reason, an itinerant exhibition was developed to promote public access to scientific information and community awareness concerning the importance of local heritage. This project was the starting point of an integral programme of public outreach and science education, whose main goal is to facilitate intellectual and physical access to academic knowledge by local communities. After seven years of development, several lessons have been learned, including the need to increase stakeholders’ participation and the exploration of new strategies of communication in order to engage different segments of the public.     

Communism and Museums in Bulgaria

Despite the growing interest in Eastern European countries since the fall of the communist regimes in the late 1980s, they still remain obscure to Western Europeans. Media information on Eastern Europe focuses mainly on politics or the attractions of holiday resorts and, consequently, the history and local customs of the countries, their cultural affairs and different cultural institutions are little known. This paper describes the way Bulgarian museums developed during the governance of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1946–1989). It is hoped that revealing information on their operations within a broad historical and social context will lead to a better understanding of the country’s cultural affairs at a time when Bulgaria has become the latest member of the European Union. The findings are a result of PhD research.     

War Dead and the Restoration of Military Cemeteries in Eastern Europe

This article examines the rebuilding of World War II cemeteries and mass graves. It compares the cult of the war dead in Germany, Romania and Russia and analyses examples of restorations of war cemeteries by these countries in Moldova. This reveals how the former war allies and adversaries now collaborate, as well as their attempts to overcome the political and ideological divides of recent decades through the reburial and remembrance of the war dead. The search for the war dead occurred at a time when each of these countries was “coming to terms” with its recent totalitarian past and, at the same time, was looking for recognition in a new international context. The convergence of the private and the political in the remembrance of the dead led at times to reconciliatory discourses and at others to a restatement of the “sacredness” of the past or of exclusivist national ideals.     

Governing relations between people and things: Citizenship, territory, and the political economy of petroleum in Ecuador

Ecuador is the fifth largest producer of petroleum in Latin America. Petroleum has brought prosperity to many Ecuadorians, effectively becoming the nation's most important natural resource. It also has inspired intense political mobilizations. While the best known of these are led by Amazonian indigenous peoples, petroleum has also generated other important but not as well-recognized mobilizations. This paper focuses on the political mobilization of Amazonian agricultural settlers and petroleum workers in relation to petroleum. While these actors do not share common livelihood or cultural struggles, the discourses that frame their mobilizations in relation to petroleum have common elements. Their dissatisfaction with the political economy of petroleum in the 1990s and 2000s, for example, generated high profile protests and civil unrest that centered not on stopping production, but on demanding a more ‘responsible management’ of petroleum by the state. The paper brings together political economy, mechanisms of subject formation, and the material qualities of petroleum to explore how petroleum production in Ecuador has shaped common views on citizenship among these actors that center on petroleum as a site of regulation of social life.     

The ‘She-Land,’ social consequences of the sexualized construction of landscape in North Patagonia

This article voices a perspective founded in gender geography and regional history, through the study of the symbolic constitution of core and peripheral areas inside Chile and Argentina. This analysis focuses upon the Patagonian territory and aims to reveal the use of female stereotyped metaphors as the basis for territorial subalternity. At this point, revision of Patagonian history shows that this construction of landscape is related to territorial integration, and could have been seen as gender ideology because of the metaphors involved in the State's arguments. This idea is illustrated with an ongoing nationalist discourse established in Patagonia since the 1930s, which operates as a permanent patriarchal reference and allows the projection of gender metaphors in land. It also takes the particular experience of Patagonian women to question the recognition of the problem behind the construction of landscape and the geographical and historical patriarchal order. As a result of this process, the possibility to argue against the subordination of the region emerges from highlighting feminine metaphors of land and feminine praxis, which nowadays confront both the landscape's official interpretation and an unequal access to resources.     

University–Industry Knowledge Transfer and Network Patterns in Romania: Does Knowledge Supply Fit SMEs' Regional Profiles?

Universities' potential to contribute to regional value creation has been extensively discussed so far and significant literature has been devoted to celebrated cases in highly industrialized and developed countries. Assuming that it would be misleading to generalize from “exceptional” cases, some authors have focused their attention specifically on the influence of universities in less developed areas regions and countries, where university–industry relations are far from being a Triple Helix. This paper focuses on the mechanisms of university–industry knowledge transfer (KT) in Romania, a post-communist country with relatively weak regional innovation performances, except for the capital region Bucharest-Ilfov. The purpose of the study is to construct an index to compare university–industry KT across the eight Romanian regions. Data to be aggregated are collected from 90 Romanian higher education institutions and refer to their KT potential in terms of human, financial and relational inputs, outputs and outcomes (patent applications, new products and services, spin-offs and commercial income). Finally, universities' regional KT performances are compared to small and medium enterprises territorial patterns and issuing policy implications are discussed.     

Rafael Pinedo’s Trilogy: Dystopian Visions and Populist Thought in Argentina’s Turn-of-the-century Narrative

The three short novels written by Rafael Pinedo (Argentina, 1954–2006) before his untimely death are increasingly attracting the attention of academic researchers, not only because of their complexity but also because of their take on Argentine politics and ideology. The following article analyzes how these novels operate within what Tom Moylan defined as a critical dystopian narrative. By narrating each story as a future world in agony, where all social interactions are described with a militant pessimism, the novels envisage the consequences of the populist’s policies grip on the country’s social and cultural environment. I argue that Plop (Casa de las Américas Prize 2002), Frío (Finalist for the 2004 Planeta Prize), and Subte can be read as a trilogy since they propose a radical thought experiment about the limits of the social and cultural practices of populist policies, as well as a mise-en-scène of its hijacking and betrayal of utopian values. The article also underlines how, despite its pessimistic tone, the novels offer a glimmer of hope by returning to basic concepts of community and empathy.     

Literature,crisis, and Spanish rural space in the context of the 2008 financial recession

ABSTRACT

The novelistic production related to the 2008 financial crisis has been partially studied from the lens of the label of “literatura de la crisis.” In this article, I analyze the complex and essential transformations suffered by literary writing practices in contemporary Spain where ill attention has been devoted to the social, political, and aesthetic implications of neoliberal globalization in rural areas. Departing from a thorough conceptualization of the notion of “literatura de la crisis” and its paradoxical impact over the most recent literary production, I study the rural discourse and the emerging academic challenges for the assessment of the rural experience in literary works. In conclusion, I set the main principles for the development of a transposable model of textual analysis that will shed new light on the cultural representation of the rural sphere in the aftermath of the 2008 financial recession.