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Tagged: modernity

A drawing of a woman reading a magazine while leaning on the countertop of a kitchen, electric appliances in the background.

Ideal Family, Citizenship, and Hygiene: Representations of Electric Household Appliances in Early Republican Turkey

By Nurçin İleri. Early Republican discourse on hygiene-focused modernization in Turkey intersected with the visual and rhetorical representations of electric household appliances. Those appliances functioned less as everyday tools than as material and symbolic markers of an imagined modernity. Rather than reflecting local realities, they projected a normative vision of the future and of women’s roles in society and the household. While these technologies ostensibly eased women’s labor, they simultaneously disciplined it, making women both carriers and regulated figures of modernity.

The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink – A Conversation with Nina Studer

Diana Abbani in Conversation with Nina Studer. In her book “The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink”, Studer explores the history of absinthe through the lenses of cultural, social, and colonial history. She uses absinthe as a lens which allows to look at racial inequalities, gender inequalities, class inequalities and more. She is led by the question how a consumption shared between various groups – men, women and children, bourgeoisie, artists and working classes, colonizers and colonized – could be viewed and interpreted as having vastly different consequences, depending on both a person’s belonging to one of these groups and to behaviors associated to these groups.

Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentic Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities

By C. Ceyhun Arslan. This blog essay examines the relationship between medicine and modernity in three Middle Eastern narrative sources. The author argues that these texts depicted medicine as something that not only heals bodies but also reforms entire societies and brings modernity to their communities. They also emphasized that medical doctors should not only keep up with the Western science; they should also have a good understanding of the local customs.

“I was intrigued by how a familiar space, when destroyed, reveals both its essence and the nature of the war” – 5in10 with Vadym Ilin    

Vadym Ilin’s project uses the destruction of Ukrainian late Soviet city districts during the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine as a means to explore the change of the concept of the ‘Soviet Man’s identity’. The research starts with an investigation of how the late Soviet urban landscape shaped Soviet identity and formed the so-called “civilization of panel high-rise buildings”.

Picturing the Labor Landscape: The Silahtarağa Power Plant and Istanbul’s Electrical Infrastructure

By Nurçin İleri. This essay centres on a series of photographs, which I first came across at an auction in November 2020. These black and white images depict Istanbul’s first urban scale power plant, the Silahtarağa campus and extension of the grid to the city in the early 1910s.

The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity

By Regina Elsner. Russian Orthodoxy is often suspected to be pre or anti-modern because of its difficulties engaging with a plural and secular society – for example, when relating to democracy, human rights, or gender diversity. After the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church associated increasingly with the agenda of the political elites in Russia and other successor states of the Soviet Union.

Writing(s) on Time in Modernity

By Clara Frysztacka. “Zeit-Schriften der Moderne” is a study of the construction of historical time in “classical” modernity at the end of the long 19th century. The pioneering work of Reinhard Koselleck on historical semantics as well as postcolonial historiography invite us to think about modernity …

Electric News in Colonial Algeria

By Arthur Asseraf The news you read may change every day, but the system that underlies it has not changed much since its emergence in the 19th century. Then, the...