The chapter traces the emergence of testimony as a new literary and memorial form in Soviet (Estonian) literature in Ülo Tuulik’s documentary novel In the Way of the War (1974). It places Tuulik’s text in the context of the new Soviet war literature that is critical of the sacrificial heroism of the Great Patriotic War narrative. By focusing on the experiences of the affected community and on documentary material of witness testimony, the text is similar to later work by Ales Adamovich and Svetlana Alexievich. Tuulik also develops a meta-documentary reflection on the difficulties of searching for a new literary form framed by the Aristotelian discourse on truth and probability.
Urban Living Labs (ULLs) have gained prominence as approaches to fostering sustainable urban mobility through experimentation, co-creation, and stakeholder participation. This editorial critically examines their potential and limitations in advancing inclusive, accessible, and sustainable mobility transitions, drawing on contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Transport Geography. Four interconnected themes emerge: the conditions for meaningful co-creation, the relationship between experimentation and transformative change, the geographical situatedness and transferability of ULLs, and the methodological and reflexive challenges of Living Lab research. The contributions demonstrate that participation does not necessarily translate into decision-making power, while short-term experiments often struggle to generate lasting institutional, behavioural, or systemic change. They further demonstrate that ULLs are shaped by local contexts and by the institutional and funding arrangements within which they operate, potentially reproducing existing power relations and technocratic priorities. We argue for a more critical and reflexive approach to ULLs, emphasizing equitable knowledge production, meaningful stakeholder influence, context-sensitive learning, and more nuanced evaluation of transformative impacts. Ultimately, realizing the transformative potential of ULLs requires moving beyond experimentation as an end in itself towards sustained processes of democratic engagement and structural change in urban mobility governance.
This paper presents epistemic borderwork as routine academic practices which shape the credibility of knowledge through territorial exclusions, particularly affecting Brown and Black scholars researching outside their racialized or geographical identities. The analysis is situated in Estonia's off-white academic space, where academic hierarchies are negotiated in relation to the West and Estonian insider legitimacy. Here, epistemic borderwork operates through three domains: testimonial misattribution, testimonial quietening, and the routine delineation of academic labor. Testimonial misattribution frames non-white scholars as representatives of their identities rather than legitimate scholarly voices. Testimonial quietening restricts academic recognition by confining scholars to presumed cultural contexts. The routine delineation of academic labor reinforces hierarchies among universal White scholarship and contested racialized provincial knowledge. Empirically, this paper draws on auto-ethnographic journaling by a Pakistani researcher based in Estonia. The paper concludes by highlighting how recognition and support foster democratic non-hierarchical knowledge production.
This study examined domain-general cognitive predictors of mathematics computation and compared cognitive profiles of primary school students with a mathematical learning disability (MLD), low achievement (LA), and a control group (CG). Students completed the WRAT-5 Mathematics Computation subtest and the computer-based Testing Tool for School Psychologists (TTSP), which assesses executive functions, reasoning, and verbal abilities (N = 140). Regression analyses were conducted on the full sample, whereas group comparisons were performed on a classified subsample (n = 88; MLD n = 18, LA n = 21, control group n = 49) for whom group membership could be determined based on mathematics performance and teacher reports. Regression analyses showed that visual attention, verbal reasoning, and vocabulary knowledge jointly explained 37% of the variance in mathematics computation scores. Students with MLD and LA performed more poorly than the control group across most cognitive domains, with broader and more pronounced weaknesses in the MLD group. Visual attention uniquely differentiated students with MLD from both LA and CG. The findings underscore the importance of attention- and language-related domain-general abilities in understanding mathematical attainment and distinguishing profiles of mathematical difficulty in primary school.
This article examines the trend in fathers' uptake of parental leave following the 2004 parental leave reform in Estonia and analyses the factors that determine whether fathers take leave. The reform introduced generous earnings-related parental leave benefits paid over a long period but did not implement a fathers' quota. The study population includes children born between 2004 and 2018. We use a register-based dataset and logistic regression to analyse variation in the probability that fathers take parental leave. The main explanatory variables are fathers' earnings and educational attainment. Following the reform, fathers' uptake of parental leave more than tripled over the study period. We find a strong positive association between fathers' earnings and their use of parental leave, likely due to the full replacement of previous earnings and the high ceiling on parental leave benefits. Incorporating an interaction between parents' income levels into the regression analysis suggests that economic optimisation plays an important role in fathers' decisions to take leave, while relative resources with the couple also matter. This study expands the geographical scope of research into the determinants of fathers' parental leave use. We find both similarities as well as differences in fathers' leave uptake compared to Nordic countries.
