Suchergebnisse

Abstract
"Digitalization is coming" is the mantra of our society. In recent decades, the environment has been transformed into a high-frequency electromagnetic field by the increasing number of antennas. At present, the roll-out of the new generation of 5G wireless networks means that urban spaces will be littered with thousands of new antennas, invisibly hidden in all sorts of housings such as street lamps, advertising pillars, and neon signs. This development is not stopping at the countryside either. This essay uses media theory and examples from art and technology to speculate on how the changes in urban space and atmosphere can be understood, but also why 5G is a perfect case for techno-criticism and conspiracy theories alike. The waves of wireless networks are spreading to reach even the smallest niches, driven by mobile telephony and wireless Internet. In the future, the environment in which we are immersed and which pervades us will always be an electric field flowing through us. Like any other radio network, 5G is invisible and abstract, and no one can see the artificially generated high-frequency radiation. At the same time, almost all of us have a sensor in our pocket with our mobile phone, telling us where the network is and how strong the radiation is.

Abstract
This article situates the recent explosion of online and app-based sports betting within longer histories of datafication and financialization in sports business and culture. The author tracks four histories in which media technologies and financial logics dissolved previously stable sporting events, athletes, and results into aggregations of data and derivatives that could be leveraged and wagered on. Photography established feelings of confidence and objectivity in horse-race results during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Screen and computational technologies since the 1970s have enabled Las Vegas casino sportsbooks to overwhelm bettors with data abundance. Television and web-based play moved poker at the turn of the millennium away from surprise, chance, and reading people toward probability, risk, and reading data. Around the same time, fantasy sports and management-based video games mirrored financial markets in transforming athletes and leagues into derivatives, that is, disaggregated units that could be reassembled in new digital permutations. Each story helps position contemporary online sports betting within a longer historical arc in which gambling and speculation moved to the center of global economy and culture.

Abstract
This article uses the contradictions and complicity of conclusions to think through the United States' collective student loan burden while grounding this burden at its historical roots in the mid-twentieth century. In particular, it is concerned with the impasse surrounding the Biden administration's conclusion of the federal student loan payment pause and demands for full student loan debt cancellation. Reading with Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism, it suggests that this impasse entails a relation of optimistic cruelty: the active infliction of the affective and material conditions of capital as a means of leverage over oneself and others to maintain a status quo. Attendantly, this article draws attention to the centrality of liquidity/discipline to the conditions of indebtedness within financial capital, highlighting three foundational developments in the emergence of student loan debt: the creation of the Guaranteed Student Loan Program as the country's first universal program of student loans in 1965; the establishment of the Student Loan Marketing Association as a government-sponsored enterprise to provide private liquidity for the federal program in 1972; and the successful push to enact bankruptcy reforms to protect the viability of Sallie Mae from the early 1970s on. The establishment of liquidity/discipline at the industry's inception has allowed student loan indebtedness to flourish into the present and highlights the optimistic cruelty of concluding the federal payment pause to enforce a wholly insufficient status quo.

Abstract
This article interrogates the tension between the way that the condemnation of hate performatively establishes and reinforces discursive and affective boundaries for public debates and the embrace of hate by anti-racist, abolitionist, feminist, and queer activists, that is, their claim that hatred is a valid response to the existential violence inflicted by borders or the police. The cases of activists embracing hate indicate that the boundaries set by the condemnation of hate are too limited to appropriately account for the violence of the status quo. The condemnation of hate, rather, appears to veil this violence, that is, as a way to curb the means to critique and overcome the status quo. The article offers a critical engagement with studies on hate that pathologize the hateful subject, juxtaposing these studies with cases of activists affirming their hatred for politicians, straight people, or San Francisco tech workers. It thereby broadens understandings of hate by proposing that hate as a response to harm can be part of anti-racist, abolitionist, feminist, and queer struggles and provide valuable epistemic effects grounded in theory rather than conspiracies. The article consequently challenges the condemnation of hate by contesting that hate is necessarily illegitimate.

Abstract
The question of whether there is increasing social integration among EU citizens in Europe as a spill ‑over effect of the ongoing process of system integration, as expected by utilitarian perspectives on integration, has been discussed in many contri‑ butions so far. In particular, the question of how the economic strength and develop‑ ment of macro ‑units affects European social integration has gained new momentum after the 2004 enlargement, when economically weaker ECE countries became part of the EU. In this contribution, I focus on the impact of regional economic strength and development on European social integration. I analyse the relationship between the economic situation and development of NUTS‑1 regions and individual European identity using Eurobarometer data for the years 2004, 2010 and 2015. Using descrip‑ tive and multivariate quantitative approaches, I show that regional economic strength is weakly correlated with European identity, although not significant in multivariate models. However, citizens who believe that the EU is an economic advantage are more likely to identify as Europeans and are more prevalent in regions with higher economic growth. I conclude that convincing citizens of the economic benefits of EU membership could result in increased European social integration in the long run.

Abstract
The successes of right -wing populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as a repeated distancing from the European Union, raise the question of whether there is such a thing as European citizenship at all. Citizenship is not understood as formal nationality, but as a sense of belonging. This ties in with the considerations of political cultural research. This article uses representative surveys to address the question: What about European Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe? The results show that the feeling of belonging to the European Union in Eastern and Central Europe is better than its reputation and not lower than in Western Europe. However, there are differences in the recognition of plurality between the majority (not all) of Eastern European states compared to the majority of Western European states. In particular, the integration of Muslims is more strongly rejected. The same applies to the social acceptance of homosexuality. This partly explains the success of right -wing populists in Central and Eastern Europe and marks a certain cultural difference, which is primarily directed against a wet model of democracy that is considered too open to plurality. In short: Central and Eastern Europeans also see themselves as Europeans and EU members, but their ideas of a European democracy differ from Western ideas – especially in peripheral regions.

Abstract
This paper examines how regional contextual factors influence Eurosceptic voting in Eastern Central and Western Europe. It employs a theoretical framework of multidimensional regional periphery and relative deprivation to explore how economic, spatial and demographic factors can generate collective feelings of deprivation among regional inhabitants. This relative deprivation is supposed to manifest as political discontent expressed at the EU level, either by attributing responsibility for regional peripherality to the EU or by blaming national institutions, potentially spilling over to the EU level. Based on an integrated dataset encompassing economic, spatial and demographic indicators as well as election data from the European election 2019 for 1169 NUTS 3 regions within the EU, the findings support the hypotheses. Poor economic performance in a region, relative to the national average and historical levels, increases Eurosceptic voting, and the impact of an ageing population is significant. Spatial infrastructure conditions have minimal direct but moderating effects: Eurosceptic parties benefit more from economic underperformance, if the infrastructure is also poorly developed. The paper further shows differences in cue -taking between Eastern Central Europe and Western Europe suggesting that citizens in Eastern Central Europe consider the EU more often as saviour than as creator of regional deprivation. The paper underscores the importance of regional contextual factors and infrastructural effects, and highlights the need to avoid one-size-fits-all explanations for Euroscepticism in Eastern Central and Western Europe.

Abstract
Peripheralisation is determined in socio ‑demographic, economic, political and identitarian factors. It is, many say, by definition, characterised by a willingness to migrate, in particular among the younger generations. European citizenship comes with the right to migrate – to relocate, to work and to be treated as equals in many respects to the local citizenry. In this research paper, I explicate the results of twenty interviews in six CEE countries with 7 th ‑graders who were asked what they thought of European citizenship. Those who knew what this is give widely divergent answers, but there are two dominant themes running through their perspectives: they do not feel great affection for the EU, and whilst willing to migrate, they do not appreciate the need to do so. Thus, they feel the EU does not live up to its promises to deliver equality for all Europeans. One explanation they give for this is that 'the Iron Curtain did not dissolve very well': the burden of history is acutely experienced.

Abstract
In the early 2020s we live in the transition period between two world systems, the Old World Order (OWO) and the New World Order (NWO), in a deep 'polycrisis'. Therefore, the term transformation has recently appeared in official EU documents as well as in political science literature. The transition to the NWO has begun with this crisis management and it will produce a radical transformation of the entire global architecture in the 2020s. In its conceptual framework this paper focuses on the contrast between 'de‑coupling' and 'de ‑risking', as it has been explained very markedly in the recent speeches of the president of the European Commission, Ursula van der Leyen (EC 2023a), and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan (The White House 2023). This contrast symbolises the US policy, concentrating more on cutting or reducing connectivity among the various policy fields, versus the EU policy turning them safe and interdependent. These approaches represent the US and EU attitude in the emerging New World Order, and primarily in their relationships to China.

Abstract
The 'liberal world order' can be considered as an historic exception in the history of 'realist anarchy' of international relations. This exception is the result of many factors and it has been significantly influenced by the power of the United States. Thus, the agenda of the world order can be analysed in the context of American foreign policy. The place of Central Europe – and in the Visegrad countries – can be analysed in this frame. This approach elaborates the basis for further inquiries also of the Central European-American relations but here the goal is to understand the place of the Visegrad countries in the context of the American led liberal world order. The goal of this study is to theorise the world order, and to identify the role of the United States and the place of the Visegrad countries in it. Furthermore, the study tries to draw theoretic conclusions in the light of the 'Biden doctrine' – which is theoretically coherent with the liberal characteristic of the order – to the Visegrad-US relations.