The paper aims to answer how deaf/Deaf practice inferred the sound. The author analyses the Reddit discussion on deaf experiences with sound. Using Steven Feld’s concept of acoustemology, which is one’s sonic way of knowing and being in the world, the author discusses the meaning of sound in the deaf/Deaf epistemological experience. The sound is a pharmacon. For the deaf/Deaf, the sound brings both positive and negative, expected and unexpected. Ernesto Laclau’s term of emancipation is used to explain how d/Deaf sound practices entail this ambiguity. The author describes four sound emancipatory strategies: expect unexpected, sound management, fabrication of sound, and semiosis. The deafness condition breaks down the perfect ideas of sound and silence, placing us in the sound continuum. Sound is perceivable, but the significance it brings is sometimes debatable. Sound emancipatory strategies enable d/Deaf people to tell their own story of experiencing sound, take control over the sound and show their expertise on it, free their hearing process, and break speech hegemony.

The aim of this article is to analyze women’s experiences of household food production, distribution and consumption as a response to the difficulties and challenges of daily life. The adopted perspective integrates research from food studies, historical sociology, and gender studies. The author’s intention is to discuss the multifaceted, gendered nature of food practices, highlighting their transformations, and modes of continuation. References to the analysis of alternative food networks draw attention to both contemporary and post-WWII food practices and introduce to the discussion concepts which remain important for contemporary society, e.g. community and sustainable solutions. This analysis is based on a review of literature, particularly oral histories and autobiographical accounts by both urban and rural women, and references various documented food-related activities. As demonstrated in the article, presentation of women’s food-related stories involves exploring alternatives to the scarcity economy of state socialism and contemporary anonymous mass production. These alternatives, embedded in the space of the kitchen, the farm field, or the allotment garden, are more than just coping strategies – they appeal to such values and ethical norms as mutual assistance, trust, and reciprocity. They can be interpreted through the lens of creativity and resourcefulness, as well as in terms of power relations and resistance in the context of everyday crises.

The Call of Duty franchise is well-known for its setting in historical warfare and is frequently discussed under the themes of realism or its treatment of history. Whilst this is helpful to address historical inconsistencies and the often-resulting lack of critical perspective on warfare in general, it is perhaps more accurate to refer to Call of Duty as a site of memory. Call of Duty is not interested in an accurate historical retelling of war, rather, it is to evoke cultural memories usually produced by (popular) media related to specific events, repurposing them for entertainment. By analysing Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War through its Vietnam War missions, I explore the formal and narrative qualities of the game to examine what the game chooses to remember. Two key aspects can be found in its gameplay: the game takes on an exclusive U.S.-American perspective on the Vietnam War. Second, Vietnamese characters are largely absent or only exist as enemies. I will then discuss the game’s use of the Vietnam War as a catharsis for its storytelling and how it fails to live up to any subversive potential it has concerning its treatment of memory. This essay will then conclude with final thoughts on how the Vietnam War is remembered in international politics and how its remembrance is also related to intergenerational divides within the Vietnamese diaspora.

In 2016, Kanye West released his highly anticipated eight album, The Life of Pablo, on a streaming platform Deezer, where it remained exclusively available for over a month. This prevented audiences from several countries, where the service has not yet launched, from accessing it. As a result, Japanese electronic music producer, Toyomu, created his own version of the album, without hearing the original. Browsing the internet, he tracked every sample and every lyric that West used, and assembled them into an original work, comprising an “imagining” of how The Life of Pablo could have sounded. His endeavor, while ingrained in the cultural logic of remix, goes beyond it, comprising a unique musical entity that eludes easy categorization. Therefore, the paper employs Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to account for its specificity. This entails a shift from a relational and processual understanding of the musical album, already implied in West’s work, to mapping the topological structure of possibilities, defined by invariants and attractors, that hints at real but not actual vectors of its becoming. As such, Toyomu’s undertaking provides an opportunity to further rethink the concept of the musical album in a time when it was already decentered by the transition from material objects to digital data.

The article aims to analyze the ways in which Larissa Lai, in her short story Rachel, appropriates and racializes the figure of the cyborg by re-visioning and retelling the story of one of the most iconic characters in the history of cinema, the android Rachael from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (and, by extension, her literary predecessor).

Using postcolonial theory as well as theory of science fiction as the primary methodological frameworks, the article demonstrates how – by infusing the character of Rachael/Rachel with a hybrid identity – Lai engages in a discussion concerning race, belonging, and the power struggle between the central and the peripheral. This struggle, in turn, is embodied by the liminality of the cyborg, who may be interpreted as a metaphor for all that eludes (and actively rejects) the colonial Self–Other binary. This, in turn, highlights the tensions accompanying the intrusion of the peripheral into the hegemonic and allows for a more in-depth discussion of the processes concerning negotiation of identity.

Moreover, the paper focuses on the way in which Lai constructs the metaphor of the Othered, racialized cyborg in order to deconstruct the notion of the cyborg perceived as a neutral (i.e. white) entity, writing against the hegemonic canon. In this way, the racialized cyborg stands as the symbol of transgression, rebellion and rejection of the center/periphery dichotomy, one which eschews the (neo)colonial binaries and becomes a source of anxiety for the hegemonic discourse.

The starting point of the article is an analysis of the volume PL +50 (2004), edited by Jacek Dukaj and the short stories by Łukasz Orbitowski: Nadchodzi and Popiel Armeńczyk (2017). The interpretation of those alternate stories is used as a point of departure for posing a broader question regarding the social and cultural functions of constructing a coherent imaginations regarding the future. Particular attention is paid to the dominance of negative visions of the future and the dangers of describing what is yet to come in overly optimistic colors. The article combines the methodology arising from the analysis of alternative histories, affect studies and memory studies to indicate that theory of premediation (Richard Grusin, 2010) can be especially useful in order to explain the positive social impact of negative visions of the future. Premediating threatening future can be – as indicated for example by B. Hirst and M. Topcu – the first step towards improving the present.

The review is devoted to the book by Małgorzata Radkiewicz Refleksje zza kamery. Reżyserki o kinie i formie filmowej [Reflections from behind the Camera: Women Directors on Cinema and Film Form]. The publication showcases a deeply feminist frame of reference not only in its theme which is women directors’ theoretical oeuvre, from Alice Guy-Blaché to Alexandra Juhasz, but also in its concept. The author presents their reflections on cinema in the broader context of changing social norms, cinematic language, feminist philosophy and other minority discourses. The review highlights the importance of translating and publishing those reflections in Polish, however it pays particular attention to the author’s proposal of alternative form of scientific discourse and historical narrative. Radkiewicz changes traditional structure – which, typically, is linear, final, unified and focus on progress and hierarchization – for more open, horizontal and activating. That approach led to placing the book as a parallel to feminist, avant-garde endeavors of presented women directors. It could be positioned as a new narrative mode in the process of (re)writing film history by women and other minorities and inspire future relocations.