Category: Blog

Following the recent elections in Moldova and Bulgaria, I created a map with states in Europe that have a pro-Russian government / president, have in power a nationalist-conservative government, or have in their Parliaments a small but emerging nationalist-conservative representation. The situation is dire! There are a few points to be taken from this map. […]

The results of the recent presidential election are being digested by both supporters’ groups. There are many scenarios emerging right now, some really bleak, some more optimistic. The fastest to accept the results were the financial markets. After all, Trump is a Republican, a party that favours free markets. But this article is not about […]

I have seen many social scientists arguing that the poor predictive power of the American polls were due to the “shy voter” effect. The shy voters are people who conceal their preferences from polls, thus distorting the relevance of the statistical measures. They are right about the phenomenon that perhaps made the Brexit polls erroneously […]

I remember some stories about communist Romania (specifically the late decade of communism when the loan pay-back policy of Ceausescu impoverished the tovarasi  of the country and brought the economy to collapse) from my parents when the electricity would stop running in the evening to make people save money. The night time was conceived as […]

There are two potential solutions at the moment regarding the outcome of the British referendum. Either the politicians will enforce the popular will, or they will ignore it until it will fade away from the public eye. However, I don’t see how ignoring it or ever turning away from the result could work in practice. […]

Josselson (2004) offers a reinterpretation of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic dichotomy and applies the main ideas of faith and suspicion to the practicality of research. Of particular interest to this strand of hermeneutic phenomenology is the narrative and the modes in which the researcher can ambivalently deconstruct and empathise with the text under analysis. The ‘faith’ hermeneutics […]

Several months ago, I presented a paper at a conference in Paris hosted by the prestigious Ecole de Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales. I was the only master’s student presenting at the conference. It was a paper about empowering the researched through visual studies. Look how I got to this topic. I am an economics […]

I took part in the Social Media, Activism, and Organisation Symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London on the 6th of November. Here are some of my impressions: I believe that there is an overtheoretization of the field. The main speakers of the conference seemed to push the boundaries and claim that Social Media is actually […]

The cultural imperialism concept stems from the broader notion of imperialism and hegemony used in various social sciences, mainly in international relations. The concept has been used to explain the inequalities in the balance of power between different nations in the world that are actors on the international stage. Michel Focault reinterprets the notion of […]