This paper examines George Bernard Shaw’s use of satire in his 1894 drama Arms and the Man, focusing on how he satirizes and undermines the Romantic warrior myth. At the center of this indictment is the so-called “chocolate cream soldier” which indicates a character whose pragmatism and interest in self-preservation represent a stark departure from 19th-century war literature’s idealized, masculine portrayal of soldiers. Not a brave, self-sacrificing hero, Shaw’s soldier is a man of common sense, unheroic, and deeply skeptical of the romantic myths that are told about war and honor. In this character, Shaw offers a biting critique of the contradictions and perils embedded within conventional tales of imperial heroism. In substituting a figure who is cowardly according to social norms but intellectually honest and grounded in a sense of principle for the conventional ideal of the warrior, Shaw provides an alternative conception of masculinity. This reimagining is not just a literary effect, but a political challenge. Engaging interdisciplinary solutions, norms of masculinity, economic pragmatism, and anti-romantic theories, this paper argues that Shaw’s satire reads as a critique of imperial nationalism and its socio-economic foundations. The “chocolate cream soldier” lives on to give Shaw a mouthpiece for his sardonic skepticism about war, revealing the ancient myths of honor and duty for the sentimental fig leaves they are, hiding not just wartime realities but also the depressing business as usual. Moreover, this paper situates Shaw’s work within the broader intellectual context of his time and demonstrates how Arms and the Man itself anticipates modernist and even postmodernist doubt. Shaw’s takeoff on the war hero prefigures later literary developments in a tradition of skepticism about big ideological narratives and moral certainties imposed by them. The play becomes a place of dislocation wherein the traditional binaries of valor and cowardice, idealism and realism are constantly rendered unstable. Shaw’s aggressive approach leaves his characters and anyone who watches the bonus disc, “A War Movie,” no choice but to grapple with the uncomfortable realities of how war, masculinity, and socio-political influence operate. Finally, this thesis posits that Shaw’s satire is not primarily literary, but fundamentally political and economic. By debunking cultural myths with wit and irony, Shaw reveals the moral and financial cost of clinging to outdated heroic values. Arms and the Man can be seen, then, as a cross critique of literature and ideology themselves: An exploration of what heroism means in a world of material usefulness and critical manipulation.

ABSTRACT In this article I advance the inquiry of democratic citizenship in the digital age or ‘digital citizenship,’ for short, through an ideology critique of what I refer to as the ideology of digital empowerment. According to this ideology, which was prevalent from the early 1990s until the early 2010s, digital technologies would effectively contribute to democratic citizens’ political empowerment. Following the introduction, I explain the basic ideas I explain the basic ideas of such an ideology critique and distinguish between its empirical, genealogical, functional, and normative levels of analyses. Then, I identify Aristotelian, Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Kantian understandings of this ideology to show its past existence across a broad range of conceptions of democratic citizenship. Following that, I empirically analyse these understandings, showing for each of them that the reality of digital citizenship did not hold up to the ideology’s promise. Subsequently, I provide a genealogical analysis of how the ideology came into being by describing the crisis of democratic citizenship at the end of the 20th century, and I complement this analysis by identifying the belief management mechanisms that supported the ideology’s dissemination. In the penultimate section, I pursue a functional analysis of the cultural, psychological, and social conditions that explain why citizens kept endorsing the ideology despite it being erroneous. Finally, I conclude by sketching, from today’s perspective, a normative analysis that addresses the technological oligarchs’ damage to democratic citizenship which this ideology facilitated.

ABSTRACT This article provides the first scholarly analysis of Kazım Öz’s Fotograf (2001), Bahoz (2008), and Zer (2017) as a cohesive trilogy, titled here East of the Euphrates. It argues that the trilogy functions as a subversive counter-history through the road movie form, challenging Turkish state-sponsored nationalism and militarism by constructing a symbolic geography where the Euphrates River and the eastward journey become metaphors for Kurdish identity, resistance, and collective memory. However, the article also advances a dialectical critique: while Öz’s project is politically courageous and cinematically innovative, it simultaneously reproduces essentialist binaries, didactic frameworks, and a romanticised politics that constrain its emancipatory potential. Through close textual analysis, genre study, and ideological critique, the article examines the trilogy’s treatment of anti-colonial discourse, its systematic semiotics of state violence, and its alignment with European road cinema conventions. It concludes that the trilogy’s power lies in its unflinching confrontation with erasure and assimilation, yet its rigid moral cartography and underdeveloped character interiority ultimately substitute doctrinal certainty for the open-ended exploration that the road genre promises. In doing so, the article situates Öz’s work as a radical yet contested cinematic intervention within Kurdish political filmmaking and transnational cinema studies.

This study examines how artificial intelligence (AI) is framed and governed within Philippine educational policy, considering its implications for equity, teacher autonomy, and learner agency. The objective is to understand the power dynamics and ideological presuppositions that inform AI-centric reforms. This research employs an integrative analytical methodology that incorporates critical policy analysis, discourse tracing, thematic coding, and ideological critique. Methodological integrity is established through rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, adherence to the PRISMA protocol for systematic document review, and the application of the CASP Checklist to assess the credibility and pertinence of 21 significant policy documents published between 2021 and 2025. The findings reveal that prevailing policies primarily depict AI as a tool for modernization, operational efficiency, and data-driven governance. At the same time, critical concerns regarding ethics, human rights, and democratic participation remain insufficiently addressed. These accounts pose a substantial risk of exacerbating existing inequalities between well-resourced and under-resourced educational institutions. In response, the study advocates for the ARISE Framework (AI Rights-based Inclusive Systems for Education). This nascent governance model prioritizes structural preparedness, pedagogical agency, critical scrutiny of AI discourses, and rights-centric oversight. The study emphasizes the imperative of equity impact assessments, transparency requirements, accountability systems, and the continuous development of critical AI literacy among educators and students. These initiatives ensure that AI integration aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 4, thereby reinforcing rather than undermining equitable and inclusive educational opportunities.

Soviet historiography was subjected to attempts at critical reassessment and significant ideological pressure. Despite the confident recognition of Yavornytskyi's figure as a successful and significant researcher of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, archaeologist, ethnographer and historian, the scientific field of the Soviet period under study positioned Dmytro Ivanovich's activities in the perspective of criticism of "bourgeois nationalism" and "Cossackophilism". The scientist made a great contribution to the detailed description of the formation of historical figures in the Ukrainian Cossacks, which is why the researcher was accused of excessive idealization of Cossack history. This article examines the problem of historiographical reflection of the image of Yavornytskyi in the period of 1940 – 1950s. of the last century. The prevalence of the critical approach of Soviet historians is traced, who tried to maximally contrast Yavornytsky’s creative work with the Marxist-Leninist historical concept, focusing on the researcher’s “limitedness” and his errors in “methodology”. The author concludes that despite the scientist’s death in 1940 and the indispensable relevance of his works, their scientific interpretation in subsequent decades was strictly limited by the established ideological framework. Although Yavornytsky’s scientific and cultural work became the basis for popularizing the history of Southern Ukraine, it was in the 1940s – 1950s that a pro-authoritarian critical image of the researcher’s activities was actively formed, which significantly differed from the apologetic assessment of his works in a somewhat later period, in the 1960s – 1980s of the twentieth century. The characteristic features of ideological criticism of Yavornytsky's activities in the period under study are highlighted and described: in particular, the author was often accused of excessive romanticization of historical narratives of the Cossack period, which did not correspond to Soviet concepts of historical knowledge. The then authorities demanded the promotion of narratives of class analysis and the fight against "feudalism", to which Yavornytsky's work did not correspond well. The article substantiates the idea that during the period of increasing anti-Ukrainian vectority of the development of Soviet historiography, local history remained a niche that had the potential to preserve fragments of the national historical narrative. Dmytro Yavornytsky's achievements in the field of history could not be underestimated even by communist-oriented historians, which was confirmed by the gradual return of interest in the figure of the scientist in the 1960s, after the short-term virtual disappearance of his name as a historian from historiographical use in the 1940s and 1950s.

ABSTRACT This study examines the stylistic and narratological strategies employed by Elnathan John in Born on a Tuesday to represent religious extremism in Northern Nigeria. Anchored in model of stylistic analysis and principles of narratology, the research adopts a qualitative descriptive approach to explore how linguistic patterns, narrative structure, and focalisation construct ideology, identity, and power relations within the text. Focusing on the experiences of Dantala, a teenage boy drawn into militant religious networks, and the influence of figures such as Mallam Abdul-Nur, the study analyses lexical choices, syntactic structures, rhetorical devices, and narrative techniques – including first-person focalisation, tense variation, and narrative sequencing – across sermons, dialogues, and internal monologues. Findings show that John’s use of repetition, declarative sentences, and sermon-like rhetoric mirrors the rigidity of extremist ideology, while code-switching, shifts in narrative perspective, and focalisation foreground sociolinguistic diversity, ethical tension, and internal conflict. By situating linguistic features within plot development, characterisation, and narrative design, the study demonstrates that style and narrative form function not only as aesthetic tools but also as mechanisms for ideological critique, social commentary, and psychological insight into the processes of radicalisation.

This research offers a fundamentally new perspective on the intellectual dynamics of 20th-century French philosophy through the lens of a non-canonical appropriation of Karl Marx's heritage. The novelty of the study lies in identifying a unified problematic field (from epistemology to ontology of events), formed by a radical rethinking of Marx's critique. For the first time in this context, the key role of Gilbert Simondon's thought is considered as a conceptual bridge between Althusser's structuralist "scientific" reading and Deleuze's post-structuralist philosophy of flows and becoming. In this examination, the hidden line from Simondon to Deleuze reveals an immanent transition from ideology critique to the ontology of productive forces, which constitutes the main internal tension of "French post-Marxism." The article demonstrates how central categories of contemporary thought were constructed through dialogue with Marx: the ideological state apparatus in Althusser, biopolitics in Foucault, control society in Deleuze, and event-based politics of truth in Badiou. The methodology of the study is built on a strategy of conceptual confrontation that reveals productive tensions between key readings of Marx. The rejection of a linear history of ideas allows tracking how conflicting ontological premises reinvent Marx's categories. Through a problem-oriented confrontation, the transformation of critique from ideology to the ontology of power and ethics of subjectivation is demonstrated. The result is a map of philosophical divergence that asserts the heuristic greatness of Marx as a source of radical questions of modernity. This approach consciously provokes a philosophical conflict of interpretations to reveal the radical heterogeneity within the very tradition of "French Marxism." The relevance of this intellectual reconstruction is determined by the contemporary crisis of legitimation, pervasive financial abstraction, and new forms of alienation. The philosophical tools forged by Althusser, Simondon, Foucault, Deleuze, and Badiou in working with Marx's heritage are now essential for diagnosing the society of digital platforms, algorithmic governance, and atomized individualism. This is why the unorthodox reception of Marx uncovers the critical potential of his thought that remains untapped within both traditional Marxism and the liberal consensus. They offer not ready-made answers but powerful methodologies for analyzing power, desire, and revolutionary subjectivation. Ultimately, Marx's greatness, re-embodied in French thought, appears not as an archival monument but as a living source for understanding and overcoming the abstract violence of capitalist modernity.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 science fiction film, Solaris, is a profound philosophical inquiry into the human psyche, memory, and the limits of scientific rationality. This review examines how the film utilizes specific cinematic techniques, including deliberately slow pacing, symbolic mise-en-scène, and its political context within the Soviet "Era of Stagnation", to explore the central conflict between logic and emotion. Focusing on protagonist Kris Kelvin’s struggle with a materialized memory of his deceased wife, Hari, the analysis argues that Solaris ultimately privileges the pursuit of emotional truth over objective, rational fact. The film asserts that unresolved personal history and the need for love fundamentally shape identity and drive human choice, culminating in Kelvin’s decision to embrace a known illusion for emotional satisfaction. In doing so, Tarkovsky crafts not just a critique of rigid ideology but a timeless reflection on the complex, irrational nature of being human.

ABSTRACT This article is an attempt to provide a comprehensive critique of Marxist and anarchist ideologies by examining their intersections and divergences within socialism with a reflection on the exploitative nature of capitalist systems, the alienation of labor, and the inevitability of revolutionary upheaval. We contrasts Marx’s centralized, state-oriented vision of socialism with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s anarchist emphasis on decentralized, cooperative systems. The critique expands into an exploration of capitalism’s adaptations in response to socialist pressures and working class consciousness, highlighting its reforms such as welfare provisions, cooperative structures, and mitigated exploitation, albeit with enduring systemic contradictions. This study evaluates the failure of authoritarian socialist regimes, notably the USSR, and argues for a synthesis of African philosophical constructs – such as Nkrumah’s Consciencism and Anyiam-Osigwe’s holistic theories to overcome the limitations of both capitalism and Marxism. Additionally, the article revisits the anarcho-syndicalist experiments, particularly in Spain, as an alternative model of equitable resource distribution and governance, and thus advanced a synthesis on African communal values like Ubuntu and Ujamaa, proposing a new socioeconomic paradigm emphasizing moral integrity, collective responsibility, and limited government. We advocate re-imagining democracy and social organization to align with universal moral and cosmic principles, transcending the exploitative frameworks of existing systems.

Intimate artificial intelligence requires secure data privacy to protect users’ freedom of expression and sexual privacy. This article uses critical political economy theory to evaluate the privacy and platformization of RealDoll’s sex robot. A critical discourse analysis of 496 artifacts collected from RealDoll revealed a lack of transparent data procedures. While regulation is a significant point of tension in the sex robot industry, without government oversight, the issue remains a discursive strategy to debate the rationale of sex robots at large. Data also shows corporate stakeholders’ interest in expanding beyond the sex industry into the technology sector, viewing their robot as a platform with general applications. This research adds to institutional critical studies on AI privacy and the regulation of sexual products.

Set in a racially and economically marginalized South Bronx middle school during the late charter school era, and informed by a retrospective autoethnography, this study engages curriculum inquiry to examine how the International Baccalaureate (IB) program operates within the racialized governance of neoliberal education reforms, where symbolic prestige coexists with—and often obscures—racial capitalism and neoliberal racism (Lipman, 2011). Drawing on currere as a narrative and temporal mode of inquiry, this study uses narrative vignettes constructed from field notes, written reflections, institutional documents, and embodied memory to illuminate how the IB’s cosmopolitan rhetoric, embodied in the school’s “RISE” core values (Responsibility, Integrity, Scholarship, Excellence) circulates across the manifest and latent curriculum. While the prescribed curriculum and accountability structures promise rigor and global citizenship, the latent curriculum enforces neoliberal disciplinary norms and conceals structural inequities, including segregated facilities, underinvestment, and the erasure of students’ lived experiences. Framed through theories of cultural capital and social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1973, 1986), in dialogue with intersectional and decolonial frameworks (Fregoso Bailón, 2025; Kumashiro, 2012; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), the study advances narrative as a method of ideological critique and argues for decolonial approaches to teacher preparation and policy grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy, critical reflexivity, and material redistribution.

This study examines exposition of the plot in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man (1988) and Water (2006) to introduce characters, settings, and central conflicts, serving as a precursor to the novels’ major thematic concerns. Employing a qualitative, interpretive approach grounded in Seymour Chatman’s structuralist narratology, particularly his distinction between story and discourse, the analysis explores the effect of expository passages on readers’ understanding of gender oppression, cultural memory, trauma, and ideological critique. In Water, the widow ashram functions as a symbol of patriarchal, religious, and economic subjugation, while Chuyia’s forced marriage reflects systemic discrimination. In Ice-Candy Man, the child narrator Lenny presents pre-Partition Lahore, subtly anticipating communal violence and the commodification of Ayah’s body. Exposition in both novels operates not as mere background but as a thematic device, establishing early ideological frameworks that reveal patriarchy, trauma, gender vulnerability, and cultural fragmentation.

In the second half of the 1950s in China were debates about the shortcomings of the economic education system established according to the Soviet model. Some professional economists criticized the postulates of Marxist political economy and called for the use of useful components of Western economics. They considered the Soviet version of Marxism unsuitable for solving China’s practical problems, pointed out the low level and absence of theoretical achievements of economic science in the USSR, and called on the authorities to ease the ideological and educational pressure on the economic community. The supporters of this viewpoint were labeled “rightists” dreaming about restoring capitalism in China, and the Chinese interpretations of Malthusianism and the theory of interest were criticized. Marxists blamed the Soviet educational model for dogmatism and disconnection from Chinese reality; its influence served as explanation of teachers’ one-sided attention to foreign economic history with insufficient interest in current issues of the development of the PRC. The recommendations to fill the courses with Chinese materials, to rethink the template of the Soviet political economy textbook, to strengthen the class character of the education, and to pay more attention to exposing “reactionary” economic theories came to the fore. The disputes of 1957–1958 enhanced the line of bringing economic theory closer to practice, popularizing Marxist political economy, and combining the political training with professional education. The main direction of changes was the Sinicization of the Soviet system of economic education without completely rejecting it. The intensification of ideological criticism in the field of economic science, along with the active promotion of political economy among the masses, has led to simplification of the interpretation of theoretical issues.

Introduction: This article examines Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) as a filmic artifact that configures a critique of neoliberal psychopolitics through conspiratorial paranoia, corporate satire, and comic violence. Methodology: it combines textual sequence analysis, comparison with Dogtooth, and contrast with contemporary anti-cinema through a framework that articulates post-Marxism, critical theory, and ideology critique. Conclusions: the film relocates Lanthimos's early obsessions, isolation, discipline, and captured language, into a transnational and corporate scale, producing an allegory about dystopian propaganda, the desire for authority, and the decomposition of the American imaginary.

This research article examines Arundhati Roy’s literary and political writings as a unified intellectual and ethical project that transcends conventional boundaries between fiction, political critique, and philosophy. It argues that Arundhati Roy’s corpus constitutes a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse in which literature becomes a form of political praxis and moral intervention. Integrating narrative imagination with political critique, Arundhati Roy constructs an epistemic framework where power is understood as a structural condition embedded in institutions, ideologies, cultural practices, and everyday life. Her work exposes the persistence of colonial logics in postcolonial societies through neoliberal capitalism, corporate globalization, militarized nationalism, caste hierarchy, patriarchy, and religious majoritarianism. The study demonstrates how Arundhati Roy’s fiction and essays collectively produce a moral epistemology of resistance in which justice is defined as dignity, resistance as responsibility, and politics as ethical struggle. Through fragmented narrative forms, subaltern-centered epistemologies, and ideological critique, her writing destabilizes dominant discourses and reconstructs alternative ways of knowing society. Marginalized figures emerge as epistemic agents, transforming storytelling into a site of knowledge production and resistance. Arundhati Roy’s critique of development, globalization, militarism, and neoliberal governance reframes political violence as ethical violence and economic injustice as moral failure rather than policy malfunction. Positioning Arundhati Roy as a postcolonial philosopher of resistance, this article argues that her intellectual project does not seek institutional solutions but consciousness transformation. Her work functions as conscience literature that reconstructs moral imagination, redefines the role of the writer as an ethical agent, and reconfigures literature as a battlefield of ideology.

This meta-analysis explores the urgent need for critical media literacy (CML) in K-12 education at a time when digital environments are engineered to manipulate, polarize, and overwhelm. Grounded in critical theory and postmodernism, the paper synthesizes recent literature to expose the shortcomings of current media literacy approaches—namely their emotional avoidance, structural silence, and lack of ideological critique. Drawing on works by Jason Stanley and others, the author argues that students are not just consuming content—they’re being consumed by it. This paper offers actionable recommendations for educators and curriculum designers working to resist disinformation, clickbait culture, and the commodification of truth.

Higher education in India has increasingly emerged as a contested political arena, particularly under the dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). No longer viewed merely as sites of teaching and research, universities and higher education institutions (HEIs) have become central to struggles over ideology, nationalism, governance, and knowledge production. This paper critically examines the BJP's politics of higher education by analysing policy reforms, institutional governance, curriculum restructuring, student politics, and debates surrounding academic freedom and dissent. Drawing on policy documents, secondary literature, and critical political theory, the study argues that the BJP's approach to higher education reflects a broader political project aimed at reconfiguring state–university relations and redefining national identity through education. The paper demonstrates that initiatives such as the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 represent a hybrid framework combining cultural nationalism, neoliberal market rationalities, and centralised governance. While framed as reforms to enhance quality, flexibility, and global competitiveness, these measures also enable greater state influence over institutional autonomy, curriculum design, and academic governance. The promotion of Indian Knowledge Systems, the restructuring of regulatory mechanisms, and the growing emphasis on discipline and managerial control reveal an attempt to reorder epistemic hierarchies and align universities with ideological and national priorities. At the same time, the study highlights that universities remain sites of resistance and democratic engagement. Student movements, faculty associations, and civil society actors continue to contest policy interventions, defend academic freedom, and articulate alternative visions of education and citizenship. The paper concludes that the politics of higher education under the BJP is best understood not as a uniform process of ideological imposition but as a dynamic and contested terrain, with significant implications for academic freedom, social justice, and the future of democracy in India.

This article examines Sa'ad al-Dīn al-'Uthmānī's contribution to Islamic constitutional jurisprudence through qualitative, analytical-descriptive analysis of his books, peer-reviewed articles, and political speeches. The study addresses a significant research gap by moving beyond existing ideological critiques to systematically reconstruct his constitutional vision and its juristic foundations. Employing thematic coding, the research maps his arguments onto core dimensions of constitutional thought, including sources of political authority, the distinction between religious and political communities, and the protection of rights. The findings demonstrate that al-'Uthmānī rejects the notion of a fixed "Islamic political system" and instead conceptualises state structure as an ijtihādī domain grounded in maqāṣid al-sharī'ah. He reinterprets Khilāfah as a contingent historical construct and affirms the compatibility of Islam with a civil, democratic state based on popular consent, rule of law, equality, and citizenship. His approach, which distinguishes between religious and political communities, sharī'ah and positive law, religious and civil legislation, and Islamic principles versus historical manifestations, offers a maqāṣid-oriented framework that bridges da'wah and political activism, tradition and modernity. The article concludes that al-'Uthmānī provides a coherent model for articulating Islamic constitutional jurisprudence in plural, democratic contexts, while identifying the need for future empirical and comparative research on the practical application and contestation of his ideas.

In the 1990s, faced with the crisis of the humanistic spirit and the inward tendency of literary theory under the background of market economy, cultural poetics fell into the dilemma of reality intervention under the framework of “aesthetic center theory”. In order to break through this limitation, academic circles have put forward the theoretical concept of “critical poetics”. By integrating the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Zhao Yong advocates the establishment of a “two-winged” research path between “aesthetic analysis” and “ideology criticism” in order to cure the “insufficiency of intervention” in cultural poetics. Sun Shicong proposed “returning to Adorno”, emphasizing that through historicization and institutional analysis, the critical edge should be directed at the power network that shapes artistic production, injecting critical poetics with problem awareness and methodological vitality to deal with China’s reality. The vigorous practice of contemporary non-fiction writing provides a solid textual carrier and realization path for the concept of critical poetics. It takes interventionist gestures as its core, responds to the call for “intervention in reality” through the “physical presence” of the writer, and practices “historical and institutional analysis” through solid field work. Through the in-depth description of marginal experiences and the connection with critical theory, non-fiction writing elevates individual dilemmas to structural criticism and explores the ethical possibility of “reconnection” in “collaborative writing”. It has thus become the realistic fulcrum of the critical poetics conceived by Zhao Yong and Sun Shicong. It not only embodies critical theory in Chinese experience, but also provides an operational practical paradigm for theory to intervene in reality.

Christoph Schuringa’s Social History of Analytic Philosophy is a lesser but worthy sequel to Gyorgy Lukacs’s comprehensive ideology critique of twentieth century philosophy in The Destruction of Reason . Like Lukacs, Schuringa identifies analytic philosophy’s weak critical sensibility with its bourgeois liberalism, which impedes its ability to address adequately class, gender, and race discrimination. Schuringa is most interesting when he turns to the revival of metaphysics within the analytic tradition, especially modality, which is pivotal for the political imagination, given its focus on what can and ought to be. Saul Kripke is the focal figure, whose relationship to deconstruction and artificial intelligence is probed.