Czech society continues to face challenges in increasing the representation of women in science, particularly in middle and senior management positions and in disciplines such as technical and natural sciences. This article seeks to elucidate the historical context of this issue by examining the career trajectories of female scientists during two distinct regimes: state socialism prior to 1989 and the democratic market environment thereafter. The study highlights the enduring influence of gender stereotypes and barriers within the scientific field, with particular emphasis on women’s maternal roles. Through the analysis and interpretation of personal narratives, the study explores the development and path dependency of this phenomenon, offering insight into the longstanding undervaluation of women in managerial positions within the sciences.
Abstract This article is an analysis of the brief feud between two modern Tamil prose writers— Kalki and Pudumaipittan—who were deeply embroiled in the economies of modernity such as the magazine, short story, novel and film in the 1930s and 1940s in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This culturally relevant literary feud facilitates an examination of two of the divergent strands of modern Tamil literary culture of the 1940s—a popular strand that produced past-based narratives that relied on the proliferation of identity-based regionalist politics at that time, and a self-consciously modernist strand that aimed at realism and innovation. The article is divided into two sections—one focusing on the historical transformations of Tamil modernity that shaped the two prose writers under study and the other section focusing on the contrasting literary legacies of these two writers in order to highlight the tensions that existed with the trends of modernity in Tamil Nadu. This examination of the feud foregrounds some of the major concerns of Tamil modernity such as the impact of new forms of media, the construction of competing literary canons, Western influence in regional writing, and the evolution of modern Tamil identity. The public feud between Kalki and Pudumaipittan brings into focus the impact of nationalist discourse, regionalism, emerging rationalism and literary modernism on the creation of a post- independence Tamil literary culture.
Abstract This article situates maritime life within Enlightenment debates on empathy, equality, and human rights during the Age of Revolution. While intellectual history has often overlooked seaborne experiences, this study highlights how sailors, enslaved people, and other maritime actors were portrayed as rational, emotional beings in travel literature and personal letters. Juxtaposing the sentimental writings of Haafner, Le Vaillant, Barrow, and Logan with the private testimonies found in the Letters as Loot ( Brieven als Buit ), the paper demonstrates how depictions of suffering at sea, through disease, coercion and violence, reflected and reinforced evolving enlightenment ideals. The article argues that travel writers and seafarers played an underrecognized role in shaping contemporary cultural and intellectual discourse by modeling empathy and framing seaborne individuals as autonomous agents. Despite the era’s prevailing racial hierarchies, these narratives contributed to a broader cultural shift toward recognizing a common humanity.
This essay offers a thought experiment at the intersection of historical inquiry and medical ethics, engaging longstanding debates about the obligations owed to victims of unethical past practices. While scientists have grappled extensively with whether and how to use data derived from morally abhorrent experiments, I argue that this question is equally a problem for historians. The ethical stakes of working with archival materials produced by oppressive regimes-particularly records of surveillance and coercion-differ in important ways from debates over the reuse of data from non-consensual human experimentation. Yet both raise a shared ethical concern: whether such materials risk enabling more effective forms of harm in the present. Rather than offering a definitive answer to what the present owes the past, this essay examines how historical methods can illuminate the applied use of ethically compromised data today. In doing so, it highlights the relevance of these questions for the study of surveillance history and the contemporary circulation of surveillance data.
Contemporary surveillance no longer resembles traditional covert observation; it is increasingly participatory, embedded in everyday platforms where people exchange privacy for connection, convenience and validation through digital devices and services. This essay offers a personal account of Hyperreality (2024), a site-specific art exhibition, as an artistic observation on the emerging aesthetic and economy of surveillance. Hyperreality overlays museum windows with dozens of near-abstract paintings produced by a custom-built painting machine from an intimate digital archive. Drawing on Baudrillard's hyperreality alongside accounts of algorithmic culture and surveillance capitalism, it argues that identity formation and the fulfilment of basic social needs are increasingly shaped by data-driven representations that can overshadow lived experience. The work offers a critical lens on how contemporary infrastructures convert personal and intimate experiences into monitored, monetizable signals, while shaping what we take to be "real."
