Public discourse

Contemporary international relations are deeply influenced by historical reflection, and how a state deals with its legacy directly affects its international image and identity. Germany’s postwar reckoning with the Second World War serves as a paradigmatic case, where the construction of cultural memory reveals an evolution of historical consciousness shaped largely by official initiatives. Cultural memory, understood as the transmission of historical memory through cultural symbols, in the German context refers specifically to the ongoing critical engagement with Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. This memory is not static but has undergone a tortuous development from initial rejection and silence to active assumption of responsibility, eventually becoming a core component of German national identity. Memorial days, as state-sponsored vehicles, function both as pivot points for historical reflection and as witnesses to the transformation of cultural memory. Focusing on the commemorative date of 8 May (the end of the war in Europe), this paper analyzes the dynamic nature of German cultural memory. The findings show that in the early postwar period, German society resisted the notion of “collective guilt,” and under Adenauer the government maintained a conservative stance. Brandt’s “Warsaw Genuflection” marked a turn toward active remorse. Under Kohl, the concept of a “spiritual‑moral turnaround” was advanced, and the Nazi past gradually became “normalized” in public discourse. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Holocaust memory has been integrated more deeply into national identity, with an increasingly ritualized and educational focus on 8 May. Germany’s experience demonstrates that confronting historical truth is essential for building a peaceful identity. Its path toward reconciliation through cultural memory offers a reference for the international community, promoting a shared commitment to learning from history and cherishing peace.

A couple of questions in media effects research have generated many empirical tasks and as little consensus as the link between violent video game play and real-world aggression. Public argument consistently conjures up the medium after mass shootings, while scholarship has actually produced meta-analyses reaching contrary conclusions from overlapping proof. This review synthesizes experimental, longitudinal and population-level research released between 1961 and 2020, making use of twenty peer-reviewed sources situated in Web of Science, Scopus and PsycINFO that report a quantitative estimate linking violent media exposure to an aggression-related outcome. Short-term experiments find tiny rises in aggressive affect, cognition and laboratory-measured behavior, however, these estimates reduce when publication bias is modelled and rest on outcome measures of contested validity. Longitudinal designs yield effects in the exact same tiny range, with the biggest prospective meta-analysis reporting a standardized coefficient of 0.11. Population-level analyses of crime data discover no positive association between violent media consumption and violent offending. A reanalysis that anchors these contested syntheses to a common analytical scale reveals consistent yet extremely small adverse effects. Collectively, the literature supports a modest association with aggressive behavior, while failing to substantiate the causal claim linking exposure to serious violence—a narrative that disproportionately dominates public discourse.

The South African Open Science Policy 2026, published by the Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation, is formally committed to the democratisation of knowledge and epistemic equity. Yet a critical reading reveals that the Policy reproduces, through its own discursive architecture, the epistemological hierarchy it claims to dismantle. This article analyses the Policy as a discursive text, drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and Foucault’s concept of the regime of truth to explain how a policy committed to democratisation can simultaneously enact epistemic exclusion. The primary argument is threefold. First, the Policy constructs “Open Science” as a nodal point around which a chain of equivalences is built from STEM-derived norms, including reproducibility, FAIR data principles, journal metrics, and natural science models of citizen science. Second, we argue that this hegemonic articulation reconstitutes a hidden antagonism between positivist and interpretivist epistemological traditions, reawakening a binary opposition that the paradigm wars of the twentieth century had ostensibly resolved. Third, the incommensurability between these traditions means that applying STEM-derived criteria universally to all research constitutes not evaluation but category error institutionalised as governance. Six dimensions of epistemological closure are examined: the reproducibility criterion, the FAIR data mandate, the marginalisation of CARE principles, the protective rather than epistemic treatment of indigenous knowledge, the structural absence of humanistic output forms, and the natural-science-centred design of the citizen science framework and its consequences for participatory research traditions. Five policy interventions are proposed through which the Policy’s stated commitment to epistemic equity could be made operational across the full disciplinary spectrum.

سیاست علم باز آفریقای جنوبی ۲۰۲۶ که توسط وزارت علوم، فناوری و نوآوری منتشر شده است، به طور رسمی متعهد به دموکراتیزه‌کردن دانش و برابری معرفتی است. با این حال، خوانشی انتقادی نشان می‌دهد که این سیاست از طریق معماری گفتمانی خود، همان سلسله‌مراتب معرفتی را بازتولید می‌کند که مدعی برچیدن آن است. این مقاله سیاست مذکور را به عنوان یک متن گفتمانی تحلیل می‌کند و با بهره‌گیری از نظریه گفتمان Laclau و Mouffe و مفهوم رژیم حقیقت نزد Foucault، توضیح می‌دهد که چگونه یک سیاست متعهد به دموکراتیزاسیون می‌تواند همزمان به طرد معرفتی منجر شود. استدلال اصلی مقاله سه‌وجهی است: نخست، سیاست «علم باز» را به عنوان نقطه گره‌ای می‌سازد که زنجیره‌ای از هم‌ارزی‌ها حول هنجارهای برگرفته از STEM، از جمله معیار بازتولیدپذیری، اصول داده FAIR، شاخص‌های نشریات و مدل‌های علوم طبیعی از علم شهروندی ایجاد می‌کند. دوم، ما استدلال می‌کنیم که این مفصل‌بندی هژمونیک، خصومت پنهانی میان سنت‌های معرفتی پوزیتیویستی و تفسیرگرایانه را بازسازی می‌کند و دوگانگی‌ای را احیا می‌کند که به ظاهر جنگ‌های پارادایمی قرن بیستم آن را حل کرده بودند. سوم، نامقیاسی میان این سنت‌ها به این معناست که تعمیم معیارهای برگرفته از STEM به همه پژوهش‌ها، نه ارزیابی بلکه خطای مقوله‌ای است که به صورت حکمرانی نهادینه می‌شود. شش بُعد انسداد معرفتی بررسی می‌شود: معیار بازتولیدپذیری، الزام داده FAIR، به حاشیه‌راندن اصول CARE، برخورد حفاظتی به جای معرفتی با دانش بومی، فقدان ساختاری اشکال تولیدات علوم انسانی و طراحی چارچوب علم شهروندی با محوریت علوم طبیعی و پیامدهای آن برای سنت‌های پژوهش مشارکتی. پنج مداخله سیاستی پیشنهاد می‌شود که از طریق آن‌ها تعهد اعلام‌شده سیاست به برابری معرفتی می‌تواند در سراسر طیف رشته‌ای عملیاتی شود.