Abstract The aim of the study was to analyse the mechanisms of design functioning in a cross-cultural space and to determine the conditions for preserving the interpretative integrity of cultural meanings in the process of their transfer. The work was carried out as a sequential multi-stage qualitative analysis, within which theoretical models were compared with descriptions of design practices and cross-cultural data on reception, and the results were formalised through the typologisation of recurring mechanisms and strategies. It was established that design should be considered as the materialisation of culture not only at the level of form, but also through institutional evaluation regimes, rules for legitimising decisions, and usage scenarios that determine which meanings become visible and which are reduced or suppressed. A comparative analysis showed that intercultural design could not be explained within a single concept, since cultural hybridity best describes the emergence of new forms at the intersection of traditions, transculturality clarifies the mechanisms of adaptation of cultural meanings to different audiences, and glocalisation and digital glocalisation capture the coexistence of local meanings with supra-local standards and platforms, including the shift of cultural “locality” into the realm of interaction and personalisation.
Abstract This article reconsiders Annika Tetzner’s Red Ribbon as a retrospective child-centered Holocaust narrative by an adult survivor rather than as contemporaneous child testimony. It argues that the book’s specific contribution lies not in child focalization or imagination per se – both established devices in children’s literature – but in their coordination as a relational ethics of limited knowledge. Working primarily from the 2011 Czech edition, translated from English by Hana Michlová and Robin Král, the article distinguishes the adult author, the retrospectively constructed child perspective, and testimony actually produced by children. It also addresses conflicting contemporary paratexts concerning the book’s autobiographical and documentary status. Close readings of maternal speech, hunger, Jánuš, Pan Maximus, Dráček, and the recurring destination “the East” show how historical pressure becomes intelligible through relations of care, need, loneliness, gratitude, and loss. Authenticity is treated as a mediated effect shaped by retrospection, contested memory claims, translation, and the present author’s English renderings of Czech quotations, not as documentary completeness.
The environmental and cultural polycrisis is a challenge for the imagination, but it also calls for practical redirections in behaviour. This essay complements the conceptual nonhuman turns elicited by the Anthropocene by shining a light on a marginal site of long-standing nonhuman encounters: the garden. Gardens are vibrant spaces where human individuals experience nonhumans as cocreative agents, exemplifying “how to live ecological knowledge” (Morton, T. (2018). Being ecological. Pelican, an imprint of Penguin Books). This essay examines garden life writings from the 1870s to the present. These are relational narratives based on actual lives and spaces which reflect on the many ways in which nonhuman lives encompassing plants and fungi, but also animals, bacteria and myriads of visible and invisible critters impact human feelings, thoughts and behaviours. Gaining momentum from recent insights into plant intelligence, symbiosis, material vibrancy and an ongoing search for ways to embrace kinship, sympoiesis and relationality, garden life writings map a panorama of ways in which nonhuman collaborators engender shifts in perspective. This essay explores a range of examples, making a case for considering a the ‘more-than-human’ as a productive extra spin in the nonhuman turn.
Christos Nikou’s Fingernails (2023) presents a world in which romantic love is subjected to clinical measurement and institutional certification. The film recasts the contingency of intimate life as a problem to be managed and resolved. I argue that the Love Institute’s power lies not simply in assigning relationships a determinate status but in making intimacy administrable: it turns the couple into a measurable unit and relational variation into actionable percentages. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts of axiomatization and molar–molecular organization, I trace how measurement reorganizes uncertainty, prompting subjects to interpret changing attachments through institutional categories. Through its use of duration, sound, space, and performance, the film registers how institutional practices organize affective variation without settling its meaning. Feminist engagements with becoming-woman extend this tension to Anna’s line of flight, understood as a situated transformation vulnerable to recursive capture: institutional procedures and habits of interpretation continue beyond the Institute, shaping her self-examination and acts of resistance. Rather than exposing ‘true’ love beneath institutional error, Fingernails refuses both certification and embodied feeling as final authorities on intimacy. It instead reveals what is at stake when intimate contingency is forced into a definitive verdict.
This study examines the representation of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, in CNN’s online coverage from a critical discourse perspective. Drawing on Yule’s (1996) taxonomy and a descriptive qualitative research method, the research analyzes how linguistic triggers contribute to narrative construction through implicit assumptions. The results showed 310 presuppositional instances in CNN articles; the most frequent types were existential (39.68 %), factive (21.61 %), and lexical (20 %). These triggers help construct Sinwar’s identity and the surrounding events by drawing on specific entities, disputed facts, and historical contexts. Meanwhile, the least apparent presupposition types are non-factive (14.52 %), counterfactual (3.23 %), and structural (0.97 %). This shows that journalists favor factual events over hypothetical or unproven events. Finally, the study found that CNN’s structured use of presuppositions is a discourse strategy that shapes the conflict from a particular perspective, conferring legitimacy on certain characters and narratives, rather than merely serving as an objective reporting strategy that shapes the global image without over-debating. This shows that presupposition analysis, and its role in shaping knowledge about media discourse practices, is important, as is its impact on readers’ understanding of events.
