The author reconstructs the Romantic concept of imagination, drawing attention to its relations with the esoteric tradition, and then presents the significance of the idea of imagination for pedagogical reflection in the period of Romanticism. What is also undertaken is the motif of the continuity of Romantic ideas in the 20th century, with special regard to the 20th century youth counterculture and the relations between the countercultural concept of imagination and the discourse on education.
Bulgarian migration to the UK has gradually increased since the country’s EU accession and the re-moval of barriers to free movement of labour across the EU. The sustained popularity of the UK amongst those dreaming for a fresh start through migration, despite the hostility faced by Bulgarian immigrants, poses a paradox that cannot be explained with the ‘push–pull’ and cost–benefit calculation models pre-vailing in migration research. This article proposes a more balanced understanding of migration moti-vations on the basis of would-be migrants’ own perceptions. Drawing on biographical interviews with self-ascribed ‘ordinary people’ with long-term plans for settling in the UK, I shed light on individuals’ imaginings and expectations of life after migration. Firstly, I analyse the notion of ‘survival’ through which my informants articulated frustrations with their precarious financial situation, their inferior social and symbolic positioning within society and their inability to partake in forms of consumption and lifestyle that would allow them to experience a sense of social advancement. I then explore would-be migrants’ imaginings of life in the UK (and ‘the West’) which depict an idealised ‘normality’ of life, in which they conveyed longings for security and predictability of life, social justice and working-class dignity and respectability. These insights into people’s disappointment, desperation and disillusionment with a precarious present help us to understand the continuous construction of an ‘imaginary West’ as an ideal ‘elsewhere’, in the search of which migrants are ready to undergo hardship and stigmatisation. By engaging with the existing debates in migration studies and literature on Bulgarian migration, this article exposes the deficiencies of economic reductionism, which presents migration decision-making as a conscious, rational and calculative act and, instead, demonstrates that, very often, people are led by dreams and idealisations that are reflective of their emotions and life-worlds.
Sophie de Grouchy in her Letters on sympathy analyses the notion of sympathy, as a starting point using a critique of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. She also points out that sympathising with other people’s joys brings us pleasure, other people’s good experiences make us happy (especially if we are the ones who contribute to their well-being) and we want to see other people happy and not suffering. As she assumes, we naturally seek other people’s well-being and not their harm. De Grouchy underlines the role of imagination and reason, discerning coincidental good deeds and those that are an effect of intended actions. The paper aims to reconstruct a way in which de Grouchy seeks the grounds for morality in sympathy that is based on feeling and observation of physical pain and pleasure. This presentation of her theory that Polish readers are not closely accustomed with is a good starting point to inquire whether the argumentation presented by the author of the Letters on sympathy is coherent within her theory and whether it has proper justification.
The article presents the ways of defining and understanding hope in Polish, English and American literature. The basic theses are: 1) hope is an ambivalent phenomenon, 2) hope is connected with the work of consciousness and imagination, 3) hope conjures up visions of the alternative existential and social solutions, 4) hope is a passion and a way of knowing, 5) hope constitutes the keystone of artistic and academic activity.
In recent years, the rate of urban growth has increased rapidly especially in Egypt, due to the increase in population growth. The Egyptian government has set up new cities and established large factories, roads and bridges in new places to solve this trouble. This paper investigates the change monitoring of land surface temperature, urban and agricultural area in Egypt especially Kafr EL-Sheikh city as case study using high resolution satellite images. Nowadays, satellite images are playing an important role in detecting the change of urban growth. In this paper, cadastral map for Kafr El-Sheikh city with scale 1:5000, images from Landsat 7 with accuracy 30 meters; images from Google Earth with accuracy 0.5 meter; and images from SAS Planet with accuracy 0.5 m are used where all images are available during the study period (for year’s 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2017). The analysis has been performed in a platform of Geographical Information System (GIS) configured with Remote Sensing system using ArcGIS 10.3 and ERDAS Imagine image processing software. From the processing and analysis of the specified images during the studied time period, it is found that the building area was increased by 28.8% from year 2003 up to 2017 from Google Earth images and increased by percentage 34.4% from year 2003 up to year 2017 from supervised Landsat 7 images but for unsupervised Landsat 7 images, the building area was increased by percentage 35.9%. In this study, land surface temperature (LST) was measured also from satellite images for different years through 2003 until 2017. It is deduced that the increase in the building area (urban growth) in the specified city led to increase the land surface temperature (LST) which will affect some agricultural crops. Depending on the results of images analysis, Forecasting models using different algorithms for the urban and agricultural area was built. Finally, it is deduced that integration of spacebased remote sensing technology with GIS tools provide better platform to perform such activities.
Whereas Wincenty Pol’s topographical verse has usually been viewed as an expression of a ‘sentimental geography’, this article proposes a new reading of a well-known poem A Song about Our Land by Wincenty Pol in terms of ‘imagined geography’, a key term of an approach inspired by geopoetics and postcolonial studies. ‘Imagined geography’ refers to a poetic map, i.e. travelogue laced with motifs from the repository of national heritage. Its images, reshaped by the writer’s imagination, form an ideologically charged whole in which an emotive sense of place or scenery (‘touching the heart’) uncovers a complex cultural stratigraphy of the ‘imagined geography’. In the light of this approach, based on the insights of geopoetics, Wincenty Pol’s poem can be treated as textual representation of a map of the real and the symbolic territory of Poland.
This essay is a new reading of Jan Barszczewski's collection of stories Szlachcic Zawalnia czyli Białoruś w fantastycznych opowiadaniach [Nobleman Zawalnia, or Belarus in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination] in the context of the 19th-century reception of the Arabian Nights and, more importantly, as an example of a genre which combines the oral and the literary traditions to express the identity-fostering experience of living at a time of upheaval and epochal change. This approach has little interest in revisiting the connections between Barszczewski's tales and Belorussian folklore. Instead, it places his stories in their direct historical context, i.e. a series of famines in Belarus the first decades of the 19th century, and the significance of 1816, the year in which the action of the stories is set. It is no coincidence that it was also the Year without a Summer, a catastrophic global climate anomaly, which made a great impact on the Romantic imagination.