bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cowboys, Aliens, and Sixtysomethings: Age and Nostalgia in Kasdan’s Later Films
Authors: Davies Brett
Published: January 2025

Lawrence Kasdan’s films in the 1990s and 2000s tended toward “the nostalgia mode.” Wyatt Earp (1994) is a throwback to the golden age of Westerns, French Kiss (1995) is a Riviera-set romantic comedy, Mumford (1999) is a Capra-esque comedy-drama, and Dreamcatcher (2003) is a sci-fi B-movie. While serving as nostalgic entertainments, this chapter contends that these movies reflect similar themes to those at the center of Kasdan’s more socially conscious pictures: the tribulations of white (usually male) professionals as they attempt to assert control in hostile environments; and altruism is valued, the non-white and non-able-bodied characters often consigned to the role of beneficiary. These films display a conservatism at odds with Kasdan’s expressed liberal outlook, the needs and wants of the central characters prioritized even as their behavior is self-serving and morally dubious. The series of genre pictures was broken by one final piece reporting upon Kasdan’s own generation: Darling Companion (2012) explores his cohort’s move towards retirement and the change in the way that baby boomers view themselves. The chapter argues that, as Kasdan’s final directorial feature, there is poignancy in his summation of his generation’s loss of cultural currency.
A Postcolonial War in Reverse
Authors: Rhee Suk Koo
Published: January 2025

The sixth chapter reads Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest in the historical context of the rightist uprising that took place during the Korean War in Sinch’ŏn, Hwanghae Province, North Korea, an uprising that was followed by civilian massacres and counter-massacres. Hwang rewrites the deadly clashes between right-wing and left-wing forces as a crusade against Communism, with a hidden postcolonial dimension that dates back to the conflicts during Japanese rule. The novel centres on the insistence of the large landlords on their semi-feudal rights and the demands of the tenant farmers for economic justice. This rewriting of the anti-communist uprising as a reverse postcolonial conflict constitutes a counter-discourse to the official memory of the South Korean government. Contextualised within the post-war system of Korean division, the novel summons to trial the anti-communist, right-wing Christians for helping to solidify this division, all the while suggesting a form of communal responsibility based on the ethics of mea culpa as a prerequisite for inter-Korean reconciliation. This dual gesture, a gesture that encourages the South to rise from its old, vengeful victimhood and to take a more constructive initiative in inter-Korean relations, constitutes the author’s proposed first step towards a reunification of the two Koreas.
Design Idioms in Steppe Metalwork
Authors: Andreeva Petya
Published: January 2025

This chapter delves into the four primary tropes of steppe art. It traces how they were swiftly disseminated across nomadic communities on the Eurasian steppe, from the various “hu” cultures on the Chinese northern periphery (e.g. Linhu) to the Pontic Scythians in Eastern Ukraine. The author argues that a certain “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression was so omnipresent in nomadic visual cultures that it transcended political and geographical borders and entered often unexpected domains. The text identifies the transfer of certain steppe idioms from nomadic metalwork to Chinese and Persian monuments – a trajectory that defies canonical assumptions about the hierarchy of “minor” and “monumental” arts. In so doing, the chapter asks: what made some animal-style tropes more malleable and transmittable than others? What cultural, ecological and economic factors enabled such receptivity in sedentary Eurasian empires? Why was China the most successful in adapting steppe zoomorphism into its creations and thus buying into the nomadic market?
Predication and Genesis
Authors: Hogrebe Wolfram , Hamilton Grant Ian , Wirth Jason
Published: January 2025

This book draws two hypotheses from the metaphysics outlined in F.W.J. Schelling’s unfinished masterpiece The Ages of the World. The first is that what knowledge there is must issue from any world it claims to be knowledge of, while the second is that any such world therefore boasts an auto-epistemic structure, a capacity for generating knowledge that qualifies it as constitutively autopoietic. Knowledge of the world therefore belongs to it, rather than having it as its content. Looking forward rather than back, predication, or the genesis of meaning, therefore adds to the world while further covering the obscure depths that it withholds from epistemic scrutiny. Hogrebe’s fearlessly philosophical book, here translated into English for the first time, develops these hypotheses in order to demonstrate vital connections between a Schelling-informed German idealism and contemporary logic and metaphysics. Not only did Predication and Genesis stimulate contemporary Schelling studies to new, speculative heights but, as the accompanying essay by Markus Gabriel argues, it forged a Schelling whose contributions to problems in logic, epistemology, and ontology remain salient to contemporary concerns in these fields. Translated with an Introduction by Iain Hamilton Grant and Jason M. Wirth, both prominent contributors to Schelling studies, this volume, in addition to the essay by Gabriel, contains an author’s preface to the present edition, his preface to the Italian translation (2011), and a reader’s guide to Hogrebe’s major works.
The Second Brain
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter draws from neurogastroenterology to explore the gut as a “second brain” that thinks on its own (Gershon, Oldfield). Human peristalsis evolved as a form of mental and bodily archiving, for the processing and thinking of the world (Salisbury). Following the progress of substances through the peristaltic tube, the chapter considers the ambiguities of volition in relation to our fecal habitus. The discourse of regularity in early 20c childcare manuals, where women facilitate toilet training as the disciplining of the viscera, is understood as a Foucauldian capitalization of time in the body. Massumi calls the second brain an “interoceptive perceptual apparatus” which accounts for “autonomy of affect.” Toilet training and habit clinics are key to this internal perceptual and affective system. Moreover, disciplinary techniques stress carefully calibrated regularity rather than cleanliness where fecal habitus is concerned. This regulatory training of the bowel is central to Marx’s “mediation, regulation, and control” of man’s metabolism with nature. While Arendt is ambivalent about inner organs, this chapter argues that although the peristaltic system is seemingly “shapeless,” it is also susceptible to the shaping forces of the world it processes, and extends an enteric form of deliberation into meaningful world-making.
The Creative Devolution of Reverse Peristalsis
Authors: Walton Jean
Published: January 2025

This chapter animates feminist new materialism and delves into the papers of Dr Frederick Parkes Weber (FPW) at the Wellcome Library, to explore his treatment of working-class patient Rosa Strosmann for her “reverse peristalsis” (she vomits feces). FPW’s voluminous papers document his ambivalence about psychoanalysis and his attempts to prove that the peristaltic system can function entirely in reverse. Having ruled out an organic cause, FPW gives the patient colored enemas then observes her vomit them, to prove that her fecal vomiting is authentic, not feigned, and concludes that her reversed peristalsis is of nervous origin. Their libidinally charged “collaboration” over decades results in multiple articles about reversed peristalsis, but also tertiary sex characteristics: hysteria and malingering. Strosmann’s peristaltic reversal is contextualized by discussion of a lack of public toilets for working women in London. Her case is also illuminated by Sandor Ferenczi’s experimental approach to hysterical symptoms of the gut, where biology outweighs ideational content (Wilson). When traumatized, the biological substrate begins to think, “expressing wishes…or even complicated thoughts…the language of organs.” FPW treats Strosmann by hiring her as a cook for the hospital’s Kosher kitchen, thus inserting her into a larger peristaltic system of consumption and excretion.
1900–3
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

Graham’s works of this period remain mostly focussed on the characters and landscape around his home, but in 1900, his estate and house were sold to pay off family debts, and the mood of his writings changes. They become more nostalgic, contemplative, but retain their ‘tactical’ message of presenting a diverse community, again very different from the ‘Kailyard’ school. Two of these works include descriptions of distant relatives, one of whom was wildly eccentric, the other reclusive, described with surprising ribaldry and candour. This period also included his most celebrated sketch ‘Beattock For Moffat’ an extraordinary lyrical snap-shot of the lives and preoccupations of ordinary people.
1904–10
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

A deeper melancholic nostalgia for his erstwhile home slowly creeps into Graham’s ‘sketches’, with the evocation of landscape, and the flora, fauna, and climate of Menteith. This may also have been influenced by the death of his wife in 1906. The preponderance of mist, common to that district, is increasingly present in his works, as an obscuring, mystical element, where history can impinge on the present, or as a transformative medium blotting out man’s presence completely. At this juncture, Graham is less inclined to introduce his sometimes jarring foreign references, to create a more cohesive , atmospheric narrative.
Postscript
Authors: Munro Lachlan , Graham W. R. B. Cunninghame
Published: January 2025

An assessment of Graham’s writing on Scottish topics, his current reputation, and his place in the canon of Scottish literary artists. This chapter also examines the historical context of Graham’s writings, economic depression and the societal changes, that created a particular transitory environment. It thus asserts that Graham, as a semi-aristocrat, was entirely unique in the world of Scottish literature in documenting these changes, and recording a world, and a way of life that was quickly disappearing.
The Body Politic
Authors: Singer Robert
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the sex worker, both male and female, as a signifying subject-object in international naturalist cinema. The prostitute, as s/he is linked with paintings, photographs, and literary narratives of the "fallen woman/man"—a corrupted and corrupting sex worker as sympathetic or predatory individual-is reappropriated in naturalist cinema as a gender-specific or transitioning purchased product, an alluring, sexually commodified representation. These films feature the laboring body in states of precarious survival and decline and frequently indicate manifestations of the wound trope. In particular, the spectatorial position assumed by the film viewer varyingly invokes three specific interpellated positionings informing the sex worker trope: the requisite (male-female-transitioning) prostitute/sex worker, the worksite/brothel and particulars of the milieu, and the engaged clientele. The sex worker labors and survives under the domineering cloak of invisibility, walking the streets or in brothel settings, as the naturalist film narrative produces momentary visibility.
The Novel and the Arts of Modern Vision
Authors: Orestano Francesca
Published: January 2025

The essay adopts the perspective of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) to investigate the aspects of Dickens’s fiction that have produced the most remarkable impact on the so-called next millennium. Calvino suggests that ‘visibility’ is the category that best conveys and highlights modern responses to Dickens’s art, both by way of criticism and within the form of modern fiction. Following this critical track, the essay moves from early critical assessments that acknowledged a connection between the visual art of Hogarth and the verbal art of Dickens: subsequently it dwells on the work of those twentieth-century authors, especially Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, who best seem to incarnate the Zeitgeist of the modern and who include Dickens and his art among their models.
Caricature
Authors: Maidment Brian
Published: January 2025

Dickens began writing in the 1830s in a society increasingly immersed in the material presence of visual culture, much of it humorous or satirical. How did Dickens’s early work connect with or respond to the available mass of prints, especially caricature? This chapter explores two central ideas. First, in what ways do the visual and the verbal intersect in such works as Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1836–37)? Second, how far was Dickens influenced by the evolution of print forms and genres in the 1830s and 1840s that were increasingly interested in rapidly drawn forms of social observation and in the deployment of graphic images in narrative forms that prefigured the formal structures of the novel? The first illustrator of Pickwick, Robert Seymour, was of particular significance through his interest in the potential of sequences of prints, and his work suggests various models for moulding observation and comic social commentary into narrative forms.
New Media and Cyberspace
Authors: Curry Emma
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers several key ways in which Dickens has found a home in cyberspace in recent years, and explores the potential of this online presence to reframe and reinvigorate assessments of Dickens’s literary style. With reference to online corpora, reading groups, and crowdsourced creative initiatives, the chapter highlights how the hyper-connected, illimitable space of the internet can enable increased attention to Dickens’s distinctive language, by allowing readers to create powerful tools for tracing patterns and stylistic tics across Dickens’s career; by enabling the recreation of aspects of the serial reading experience; and by encouraging creative reworkings of the original texts to flourish. In exploring the rich and various forms in which Dickens’s work surfaces online, this chapter argues that we can gain a fresh sense of the longevity and creative impetus of Dickens’s writing, and of the ways his language continues to energise communities of readers across the globe.
AI in the real world, AI in the movies
Authors: Murphy Paula
Published: January 2025

This introductory chapter is divided into two parts.
The first part outlines aspects of the science and philosophy of ‘real world’ artificial intelligence that are explored in the films in this book. Topics include definitions of intelligence, the Turing Test, the Dartmouth conference, the Chinese Room Experiment, affective, ambient and distributed intelligence, consciousness upload and the Singularity.
The second part outlines the main characteristics of AI film. It begins with an overview of humanist, posthumanist and transhumanist attitudes and the types of AI presented: digital, robots and combinations of the two. The themes and tropes of AI film are then set out including doubles and parallels, the AI ‘reveal’, parent-child relationships, AI reproduction, death and mortality, the ‘unfinal’ death of the AI, and immortality.
War! What is it Good For? Law, Violence, the ‘Laudes Regiae’ and Laudatory Reggae
Authors: Bikundo Edwin
Published: January 2025

Whereas both law and music have provided justification for specific uses of violence as a necessary evil, that overlap between two is seldom considered beyond relatively obscure aspects of Ernst Kantorowicz’s work and Giorgio Agamben’s allusions to that work. Which is to say that although law and music have provided means explaining the role of violence (a lay theodicy) this remains unexplored and under theorised. Musicality with its cadences, both tones and rhythms, is uniquely placed to consciously marshal the unconscious impersonal centripetal-centrifugal forces that simultaneously promise to bring society together while threatening to tear it apart. This moreover is all done sub rationally - taking the place of any transcendent logical legitimation of the society under ritual formation. This chapter examines, and stages encounters between war, law and music spanning The Laudes Regiae medieval acclamatory hymn and George Frideric Handel’s ‘the Lord is a Man of War’ to Bob Marley’s speech set to Reggae ‘War’ and Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ in relation to the international law on the use of force. The chapter argues that the common relation combining music, law and violence is that each singly and together can be directed to either aggregate or disaggregate - ceremoniously, the body politic.
Putting Turkey in Perspective
Authors: Toros Emre
Published: January 2025

This chapter continues the discussion with a particular focus on the last two decades when electoral integrity problems rose to the top of the political agenda in Turkey. It sets a functional classification of electoral integrity problems and operationalises this classification, primarily focusing on formal and informal institutions – such as electoral management bodies (EMBs) – and media structures. Finally, it locates the current Turkish case within this framework in a comparative perspective.
How do Public Perceptions of Problems with Electoral Integrity Shape Trust in Government?
Authors: Toros Emre
Published: January 2025

This chapter analyses the link between electoral integrity and trust in government. It argues that as the credibility of the elections worldwide appears, more and more are called into distrust owing to doubts about false news, widespread voter fraud, voter intimidation, cyber-attacks and gerrymandering. Findings presented in this chapter show that if citizens believe that the election has been rigged, they start to question the very foundations of democratic governance. It can be particularly damaging in countries where the rule of law is weak, as it raises questions about the ability of the government to ensure that other aspects of governance are also conducted fairly and transparently.
“Lies like truth”: History, Fiction, Genre, Innovation
Authors: Gieskes Edward
Published: January 2025

Chapter 4 discusses the history play before roughly 1600. “The English History Play” is almost always discussed as a distinctively new and distinctively English dramatic genre and this chapter looks at the form at its putative moment of origin. The history play is a notoriously hybrid form and this hybridity has, almost since the first attempts to label these plays, raised questions about what these plays “are” in terms of genre. The chapter argues that this effort, in many ways, obscures what is actually distinctive about this ad hoc grouping of plays. Through discussions of the intellectual context of an increased interest in history—Annabel Patterson’s work on Holinshed is only one example of this—the chapter shows that the “genre” of the history is both less innovative than often argued and more durable and pervasive.
The Anthropocene Crisis
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2025

Opening with some thoughts on how animality in Kafka’s Der Bau (The Burrow, 1931) enables us to think beyond the human and about human-induced climate change, the Chapter moves to an analysis of Ferdinand Khittl’s Die Parallelstraße (The Parallel Street, 1962). I analyse the film’s convoluted narrative showing how the story’s eco-anxieties are linked to the history of European colonialism. Questions of climate metamorphosis figure importantly in the second case study, Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens’ La Cinquième Saison (The Fifth Season, 2012).
Epilogue
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2025

The epilogue of the book offers some concluding remarks with respect to the importance of understanding Kafkaesque cinema as a critical category that can enable us to rethink questions of politics and aesthetics. I conclude with some thoughts on how film scholarship can benefit by engaging with the sister art of literature and contemporary literary theory.
Yeats, Blake and the Romanticism of the Arts and Crafts Movement
Authors: Trodd Colin
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores how the work of William Blake, an important Romantic influence on Yeats, was filtered through the culture of the late Victorian age. Elucidated are the ideas and practices associated with a seldom regarded romantic wing of the Arts and Crafts Movement, including figures such as C. R. Ashbee, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, Phoebe Traquair and W. T. Horton – beliefs and works that might be labelled Craft Romanticism. Yeats’s interpretations of Blake and William Morris are shown to relate to his understanding of this Craft Romanticism. The chapter further argues Yeats ascribed central importance to his own commentary on both Morris and Blake, believing that their individual endeavours only found realisation through his visionary acts of criticism.
Preservation and Proportion in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’
Authors: Hanna Adam
Published: January 2025

The Hugh Lane Gallery, as it is now known, is arguably one of the locations most strongly associated with Yeats. This chapter provides a fresh reading of the 1937 poem, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, that evokes the museum’s spaces and significance in such a compelling way. It interprets this text as a complex event, which not only implicitly addresses the history of Dublin’s Charlemont House, into which the Gallery moved in 1933, but also seeks to shape the national imaginary of modern Ireland. This is shown to supplement the national story encoded in the 1937 Constitution with a sense of the legacies of the Ascendency and of art itself, as well as the seemingly antithetical forces of Catholicism and revolution. Also key to the chapter is an understanding of both poem and museum as complex spatial practices that have a materiality of their own.
‘We must have a new kind of scenic art’: Yeats’s Set Design and Stagecraft
Authors: Golden Seán
Published: January 2025

This chapter analyses the evolution of Yeats’s staged productions of theatrical art. It traces a change from an early conception of theatre as a vehicle for poetry to a more inclusive understanding of the entirety of the theatrical spectacle as a form of poetry in its own right. It is shown that the mature Yeats strove to achieve a performance that was multisensory, intersubjective and often (in key moments) nonverbal, achieving a post-symbolist synthesis through the combination of many artforms.
The role of a «short-term» preoperative endocrine therapy for adjuvant therapy guidance in early HR+ HER2-negative breast cancer
Authors: Druzhinina D. I. , Frolova M. I. , Stenina M. B. , Julikov Ya. A. , Evdokimova E. V. , Petrovsky A. V. , Artamonova E. V.
Published: January 2025

In the absence of widespread access to genomic tests there is an urgent need for additional methods that influence the choice of adjuvant therapy in patients with early luminal Her2-negative subtype of breast cancer (BC). The IMPACT and POETIC trials have shown that Ki67 level decrease up to ≤10% after a “short-term” (2–4 weeks) preoperative endocrine therapy (ET) is a favorable prognostic factor. This test allows some patients to avoid adjuvant chemotherapy associated with immediate and delayed adverse events.

Aims of the study. To evaluate the impact of “short-term” preoperative endocrine therapy for guidance of further treatment for patients with primary operable luminal Her2-negative breast cancer stages T1–3 N0–1 M0.

Results. The study included 123 patients, 76 (60.8%) received tamoxifen and 47 (37.6%) – aromatase inhibitors (AI). Most patients – 69 (55.2%) were >50 years old, premenopausal – 58 (46.4%), menopausal – 67 (53.6%). The average age was 52 years (30–82). With the initial Ki67 level>10% (N= 107), Ki67 decreased in 24 (22.4%) up to ≤10% after “short-term” ET, and remained >10% in 83 (77.6%). According to the PREDICT calculator, the benefit of adjuvant chemotherapy (AChT) was assessed as high in 35 (28.5%) patients, and 10 of them (27.8%) were able to avoid Ch T. In 86 patients with a relatively low estimated AChT benefit (<5% at 10 years) there was no response to “short-term” ET, which led to the AChT prescription in 13 cases (15.1%).

Conclusions. “Short-term” course of preoperative endocrine therapy is a simple, accessible and reproducible method for personalizing of adjuvant therapy in patients with luminal HER2-negative breast cancer.
Examination of the carbon monoxide diffusing capacity in children with oncohematological diseases after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
Authors: Kudinova T. V. , Skvortsova Yu. V. , Karelin A. F. , Bostanov D. E. , Lukina O. F. , Tikhomirova E. A. , Stefankina E. V. , Zakharova A. Yu. , Balashov D. N. , Shelikhova L. N.
Published: January 2025

The article presents the results of the study of the diffusion capacity of the lungs (DSL) for carbon monoxide by single inhalation (DLco) in children with acute leukemia (AL) and acquired idiopathic aplastic anemia (AIAA) after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). A comparative analysis of the DLco indicator before the HSCT and on the 30th, 90th, 180th, 360th days after it was carried out. Its significant irreversible decrease was revealed starting from 30 days after HSCT during the year of follow-up in most patients with AL. In children with AIAA, a significant decrease in DSL was also registered after a month of follow-up, however, by a year of dynamic control, the changes were less pronounced than in AL group, and the average DLco value was restored to indicators before transplantation. This method is important to use in a comprehensive assessment of the functional state of the respiratory system for the timely diagnosis of pulmonary complications after HSCT.
Long-term side effects of neurotoxicity of antitumor therapy in children who survived lymphoid tumors
Authors: Kuznetsova E. I.
Published: January 2025

Relevance. Improving the diagnosis and treatment of children with lymphoid tumors (LT) contributes to an increase in the number of cured patients. Antitumor therapy has a side effect on the nervous system, and can lead to neurotoxic consequences. Due to the increased life expectancy of children cured of LT, the assessment of the long-term neurotoxic effects of antitumor therapy is relevant.

Objective: based on the literature data, to study the long-term neurotoxic side effects of antitumor therapy in children cured of LT.

Material and methods. When writing a literature review, data were analyzed in specialized medical databases Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science on research in children cured of lymphoid tumors from 1993 to 2023.

Results. In cured children from lymphoid tumors, the long-term neurotoxic effects of therapy containing methotrexate in high doses are manifested by neurocognitive decline and structural changes in the brain. Late peripheral neuropathy caused by vincristine affects the quality of life of patients in physical and social aspects. However, the prognostic parameters of long-term neurotoxic effects in children cured of LT have not been determined. The issues of monitoring patients in the long term have not been sufficiently studied. This will contribute to the rehabilitation and long-term follow-up of patients with oncohematological diseases, and improve their quality of life.
Planeación y calidad de áreas verdes en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua
Authors: Romo Aguilar María de Lourdes , Ojeda-Revah Lina , Maldonado Marín Juan Diego
Published: January 2025

In Mexico, urban green areas are usually viewed as a recreational space, however, little attention is paid to their quality. In Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua there is a deficit of these spaces, and only a few are maintained. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to analyze the number, spatial distribution, and quality of urban green areas in relation to territorial planning using the Physical Activity Resource Assessment Instrument, and the Community Park Audit Tool. The findings show that the lack of planning for green areas results in a lack of equipment, poor quality of service, high levels of insecurity and incivility, as well as a lag for certain sectors of the population. Based on these results, the goal is to to provide quality elements for planning in order to have an impact beyond considering the green areas as just a number.
THE ROLE AND INSTRUMENTS OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION IN THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
Authors:   Peter the Great Saint Petersburg Polytechnic University, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, BAYRAMLI N.S.O. ,   North-Western Institute of Management - a branch of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation,   Azerbaijan Center for Humanitarian Cooperation
Published: January 2025

Public diplomacy is a set of measures aimed at forming a favorable foreign policy image of the country and promoting its interests in the international arena. Unlike traditional closed diplomacy, public diplomacy implies direct interaction of the state with the foreign public, the use of various communication channels and mechanisms of influence. It should be noted that public diplomacy plays an important role in modern foreign policy, ensuring the active participation of countries in the global information exchange, as well as ensuring the formation of favorable conditions for the implementation of national interests of states. The South Caucasus, which includes Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, is an important geopolitical region located at the “crossroads” of the interests of many world powers. For the Russian Federation, this region is of particular importance due to historical, cultural, economic and strategic factors. Thus, against the backdrop of the growing influence of NATO and EU countries in Transcaucasia, as well as the aggravation of regional conflicts, Russia’s public diplomacy in the South Caucasus is becoming more important than ever. In this regard, studying the role and instruments of public diplomacy of the Russian Federation in the South Caucasus is of considerable interest and practical significance for understanding Russia’s foreign policy and the specifics of its interaction with this region.
LIFE GUIDELINES AND VALUES OF MODERN STUDENT YOUTH IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIO-CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF RUSSIAN SOCIETY (BASED ON THE RESULTS OF A SOCIOLOGICAL SURVEY)
Authors:   Institute of Socio-Political Research of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISPR FCTAS RAS), Moscow, Russian Federation, LIKHANOVA T.YU.
Published: January 2025

Studying the life orientations of students is important for understanding the processes taking place in the minds of the younger generation, which is being formed under the influence of various factors and subjects. The purpose of the study is to determine the characteristics and dynamics of the student youth’s life orientations based on their value and target priorities. The results of the study of student life orientations and their dynamics demonstrated a shift in value priorities towards the values of individualization, as well as strengthening the position of adaptation values. The values of socialization related to social interaction and integration in society have receded into the background. On the one hand, bringing the values of individualization to the fore means stabilizing the socio-economic situation in the country, when young people can shift their focus from values that ensure survival to the values of self-improvement and self-actualization. On the other hand, the priority of individualization values marks the cultural and value transformation of Russian society, the risk of an intergenerational value gap. The analysis of the dynamics of gender differences in value orientations indicates the transformation of gender roles, the shift of the traditional focus for men from adaptation to individualization, as well as the increasing role of women in maintaining adaptation mechanisms.
DOCUMENTS FROM REGIONAL ARCHIVES ON NEW HOLY MARTYRS AND CONFESSORS - PATRONS OF SOBRIETY (ON EXAMPLE OF THE MOSCOW DIOCESE)
Authors:   Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russian Federation, ENUKOV M.V.
Published: January 2025

This article presents an overview of documents of state regional archives (the Central State Archive of the City of Moscow and the Central State Archive of the Moscow Region) which may be a source about life and activity of new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Orthodox Church of the 20th century - active figures in the temperance movement of the Moscow diocese. The performed search for new biographical data about holy martyrs-confessors of sobriety of Moscow diocese allows us to conclude that the parish and consistorial church documentation of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, stored in the funds of the Central State Archive of the City of Moscow, has a significant information potential. First of all, it is necessary to note such a type of church sources as parish registers and clergy lists containing information about the clergy and church servants and members of their families. Additional information on the genealogy of the Orthodox clergy of the pre-Soviet period can also be found in census tales, confessional lists and marriage searches. In the funds of the regional archives of the Soviet period, the most informative sources on the subject are the service records of the clergy and church servants of the 1920s-1930s and documents of the Soviet judiciaries established after the October revolution. The publication will help everyone who studies the biographies of the martyrs and confessors of Russia and is interested in obtaining new information about their lives.
NATIONAL OPERATIONS OF THE NKVD 1937-1938: GERMAN, POLISH AND HARBIN
Authors:   Ural Federal University named after the First President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation, LUBNIN A.S.
Published: January 2025

The article analyzes three main national operations of the period 1937-1938: German, Polish and Harbin. Based on published materials and historical sources introduced into scientific circulation, the reasons for the beginning of the operations are studied, the circle of people subject to repression is identified and the charges brought against them are examined. The author comes to the conclusion about the harmful activities of the German, Polish and Japanese special services in relation to the USSR, and also about the fact that some repressed Soviet citizens had direct or indirect connections with these countries. The main measures of punishment for these people were long-term imprisonment or the death penalty, and in relation to members of their families - the eviction of cities and the distribution of children to orphanages and special shelters.
WORKERS AND EMPLOYEES OF CONCESSION COMPANIES IN ALTAI: WORKING CONDITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTIVITY AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES
Authors:   Altai State University (AltSU), Barnaul, Russian Federation, DEMCHIK E.V. , MAMZIN M.V.
Published: January 2025

The efficiency and productivity of an enterprise directly depend not only on the actions of management, but also on the conditions under which the employees work. This article examines the socio-economic and legal status of employees in concession companies in the Altai mining industry during the period of rapid development of capitalism in Russia. Within the scope of this article, we attempt to analyse imperial legislation, the number of employees, types of positions, and their household and financial conditions using examples from the implementation of concession policies in the region. Our research methodology is based on the «microhistory» approach. The text highlights the evolution of regional labor laws, changes that were directly related to the Altai gold mining industry. Information is provided on the number of employees and types of work in mining enterprises. The comparative results of wages at individual concessions in the region and on a national scale are summarized. The main social and domestic challenges faced by employees at concession companies in Altai, such as a lack of access to quality healthcare and unsanitary living conditions, are discussed. Additionally, efforts by concession management to address these issues are presented.
THE FIRST ATTEMPTS TO BREAK THROUGH THE FINANCIAL BLOCKADE OF SOVIET RUSSIA (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE ISSUE OF AN INTERNATIONAL LABOR ASSISTANCE LOAN)
Authors:   Moscow Exchange PJSC, Moscow, Russian Federation, GOLITSYN YU.P. , SOKOLOV A.S. ,   Ryazan State Radio Engineering University named after V. F. Utkin, Ryazan, Russian Federation
Published: January 2025

The article considers an attempt by the Soviet leadership to use the capabilities of the international financial market to overcome hunger in the country. The process of developing and implementing for this purpose a bond loan of International labor Assistance to Soviet Russia among foreign proletarian organizations is described. Special attention is paid to the participation of the Comintern in the agitation and distribution of loan bonds. The difficulties of placing a loan abroad are shown. Some results of one of the first attempts to break the financial blockade by Soviet Russia have been summarized.
La degradación del género bucólico: el romance de Quevedo «A la orilla de un brasero»
Authors: Parada Juncal Samuel
Published: January 2025

El presente artículo pretende estudiar la degradación satírico-burlesca que sufre la pastoral clásica durante el Barroco español. Para ello, se valorará en primer lugar la situación de la bucólica durante el siglo XVII, a partir de las ideas de diferentes autores del período, que insisten en sus limitaciones y agotamiento, así como en la excesiva reiteración de sus motivos más característicos. El detenido análisis del romance de Quevedo «A la orilla de un brasero» permitirá conocer, por medio de un ejemplo textual, una de las múltiples desviaciones que padece la modalidad pastoril durante esta centuria, en un momento en el que este género se encuentra en su ocaso y se contamina de otras posibilidades pertenecientes a distintas tradiciones poéticas.
Response of yield and associated traits of wheat genotypes to temperature fluctuations at Dera Ismail Khan
Authors: Khan Muhammad Rizwan Jamil , Hassan Ayesha , Aslam Mustansar , Khan Muhammad Mohibullah , Ullah Kalim , Ali Laraib
Published: January 2025

Wheat is the third largest staple food crop accounting for approximately 4% of cropland and its demand is continuously increasing to feed the growing world population. Average surface temperature and recurrent heat waves are continuously rising from last few decades that adversely influence yield potential of various crops including wheat. Temperature differences can be fashioned by cultivating at diverse planting times. Aim of current investigation was to appraise impact of planting times and thermal high temperature (growing degree days) on yield of 8 cultivars. Crop was exposed to four planting times in wheat crop season 2022-23. Experiment was carried out in randomized complete block (RCB) design with 3 replications. Results revealed that planting times depicted significant variances for all considered yield and associated traits. Similarly, cultivars too exhibited highly significant differences for plant height, physiological maturity, spike length, spikelets/spike, grains/spike, thousand grain weight and grain yield/plant however 50% days to heading and tillers per plant depicted non-significant differences among genotypes. Interaction of planting time to genotypes was also significant for 50% days to heading, days to physiological maturity, spike length, spikelets/spike, grains/spike and 1000 grain weight however it was non-significant for plant height, tillers/plant and grain yield per plant. Cultivar AZRC-Dera produced highest grain yield/plant on account of maximum spikelets, grains spike-1, tillers and thousand grain weight. Highest grain yield was recorded in planting times from 1st November to 20th November due to accumulation of more heat units whereas late cultivation reduced production on account of less accumulation of heat units. Therefore it is determined that wheat should be planted from 1st November to 20th November in Dera Ismail Khan to have good harvest
Research on the coupling control mechanism of yielding-bolt-grouting in deep water-enriched roadway and its engineering application
Authors: Zhang Jihua , Rui Qiao , Wang Lianguo , Yang Yushun , Chen Jiarui , Shen Wei , Wang Chengwu , Liu Weili
Published: January 2025

Groundwater seepage can easily cause large deformation and fracture instability of the surrounding rock in deep roadways, and the coupling support of “yield-bolt-grouting” can effectively control the occurrence of such accidents. This paper takes the specific engineering geological conditions of deep water-enriched roadway as the research background, revealing the coupling control mechanism of yield-bolt-grouting. The mechanical characteristics of the yielding tube were determined using lab analysis, and an investigation was conducted for the support control mechanism of high-strength yielding bolts. The control mechanism of grouting reinforcement is summarized, and a comprehensive coupling control technology system of “yield-bolt-grouting” is proposed based on the rheological large deformation characteristics of the surrounding rock of deep water-enriched roadway, with high-strength yielding grouting anchor rods and high-strength yielding grouting anchor cables as the core. The on-site monitoring results indicate that this technology effectively controls the deformation of the surrounding rock. The research results provide new ideas and technical approaches for controlling the surrounding rock of deep water-enriched roadways.
Conventional and complementary alternative medicine therapies for renal anemia: a literature review
Authors: Lu Ching-Ming , Hsu Yuan-Hsuan , Lin I-Hsin , Kuo Ko-Lin , Liao Jian-Fu , Huang Hui-Fen , Lu Ping-Hsun
Published: January 2025

Renal anemia stems mainly from chronic inflammation with elevated hepcidin levels, iron deficiency, and reduced red blood cell lifespan. Inadequate erythropoietin (EPO) production, worsened kidney function, leads to symptoms such as low energy, fatigue, and impaired physical function, significantly affecting patients’ quality of life. We conducted a comprehensive search across electronic databases including PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Airiti library, and Wanfang, to compile recent clinical trials and pilot studies on conventional and complementary alternative medicine approaches for renal anemia. This discussion focuses on the hypoxia-inducible factor prolyl hydroxylase domain (HIF-PHD) axis theory, from lab research to clinical applications. It explores non-extracorporeal treatments for renal anemia, including pharmaceutical interventions, dietary strategies, and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The article details the effects of Roxadustat, Ferumoxytol, and Epodion.

Clinical studies show that modulating the gut microbiome can reduce inflammation and improve renal anemia. Clinical trials suggest that CAM therapy can improve renal anemia through mechanisms such as enhanced iron metabolism, anti-inflammatory effects, reduced hepcidin levels, and increased EPO and HIF expressions. By synthesizing this information, the review aims to furnish valuable insights and treatment recommendations aimed at ameliorating renal anemia in individuals grappling with chronic kidney disease.
Acquisition of innate B cell properties and generation of autoreactive IgA antibodies by follicular B cells during homeostatic proliferation
Authors: Kampe Laura , Melcher Christian , Westphal Katrin , Brand Korbinian , Föger Niko , Lee Kyeong-Hee
Published: January 2025

The physiologic process of homeostatic proliferation serves to restore the pool of peripheral lymphocytes in response to lymphopenia. However, functional changes in B cell responses during homeostatic proliferation are still only insufficiently characterized. Mature peripheral B cells consist of functionally distinct B cell subsets, such as adaptive follicular B cells (FoBs) and the innate B cell subsets, marginal zone B cells (MZBs) and B1a B cells. During homeostatic proliferation, B cells undergo antigen-independent clonal expansion and differentiation into antibody-producing plasma cells (PCs). However, it is still largely unknown which B cell lineages are involved in the formation of antibodies in response to lymphopenia and what functional properties these antibodies have. Employing adoptive transfer of different mature B cell subsets into lymphopenic Rag2-/- hosts, we here show that not only innate B cells – MZBs and B1a cells – but also adaptive FoBs were capable to differentiate into PCs and to produce IgM and class-switched IgA serum antibodies in a T cell-independent fashion during homeostatic proliferation. In light of the poor reactivity of FoBs to innate stimulation in vitro, the observed high expansion capacity of FoBs, their sustained repopulation of lymphoid and intestinal organs and their particularly prominent ability to induce class-switched auto-/polyreactive IgA antibodies in this antigen- and T cell-independent system was rather unexpected. These properties, which are more typical for innate B cells, were associated with a striking plasticity of FoBs that transdifferentiate into MZB-like cells under lymphopenic conditions. Together, our study indicates that the reconstitution of antibodies in response to lymphopenia-induced homeostatic B cell proliferation is mainly elicited by innate MZB-like B cell responses via antigen- and T cell-independent pathways resulting in the selection of autoreactive IgA antibodies. In addition, our data point to the pathogenic potential of the conversion of conventional adaptive B cells, which are the most common population of mature B cells, into innate-like B cells and the production of autoreactive IgA antibodies during homeostatic proliferation. This process could also manifest as clinical complication of therapy-induced lymphopenia in the context of transplantation and cancer in human patients.