Developing safe and sustainable food production for its population has been central to China's 'Modernisation Project'. Yet recent fieldwork in three Chinese cities suggests that there are two conflicting views on what a 'modern' agriculture should look like. For the government, modernisation implies a rational calculation of scale and a mirroring of global trends. But an alternative interpreta...

In this theoretical essay we criticize theories of modernity and explore the possibility that the modern epoch is coming to a close while a new configuration is emerging: the global age. Building upon sociologist Martin Albrow’s work The Global Age, we claim that Albrow’s scholarship did a remarkable job at outlining the shift away from modernity, but that greater clarity is needed in laying ou...

The scientific and technological advance has been a major driving force of modernization for centuries. However, the 20th century was full indications diagnoses deep crisis modernity. Currently, debates on limits to growth, pollution, climate change indicate serious threatening lack sustainability so-called ‘first modernity’. This modernity motivated scholars develop concepts modernizing modern...

Academic courses on interculturality have become a rapidly growing discipline in the West, where supranational bodies such as the EU and UNESCO promote intercultural education as a path towards improved global cultural relations. Through interviews with students who completed a university course on interculturality, this essay investigates the tenets of interculturality and problematises whethe...

Phenomenology questions the basic foundations of Modernity. In particular, it challenges Descartes‘ attempt to found the scientific method with absolute certainty. Phenomenology is defined by the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Even though each of them developed their own way within Phenomenology, their theories are determined by a critique of the Cartesian method. For them, Desc...

In the early 1990s, as the Soviet system disintegrated and the three worlds of the post World War II era collapsed into one world, in political and corporate rhetoric this was the triumph not just of America and its allies, but of modern capitalism. This new world order was global and globalization was the driver of change. The selfassuredness of this narrative of change contrasted sharply with...

The term ‘shock’ has been central to accounts of the origins of technological and artistic modernity. Its appearance ranges from Baudelaire’s use of the term to describe urban experience in the 1860s and the phenomena of ‘railway spine’ in the same decade to the psychology of shell-shock; from the aesthetic categories of Krakauer, Benjamin and Brecht in the inter-war period to later titles like...

modernity has been interpreted from different angles. scholars such as derida and lyotard talk about the end of modernity and the beginning of a new era called post-modernism, though thinkers like habermas do not believe in that.habermas who do not believe in the end of modernity and the beginning of post-modernism, finds modernism as the only way to human liberty who has chosen a wrong path an...

the so-called “third world” has often experienced modernity and its version of the “city” in some of their most grotesque forms where iran has not been an exception. in other words, north-atlantic powers have historically played the midwife for a father-figure-like modernity and its “third world” concubines, the result of which has been the birth of “monstrosities” of all kinds. focusing mainly...

this article investigates the possibility context of the unveiling genesis (taking off the hijab, i. e. the islamic veil) in iran and elucidates the dynamics possibility of the first attempt to unveil. an archaeological method of foucaultian approach is adopted to reach this goal. the article demonstrates that “unveiling” is one of the implications of modernity and should be considered in light...