Scientific problem of the article is to find out how the dominant hegemonic norms affect Lithuanian sport and to what extent do they match (guarantee and help to realize) the strategic interests of society in sport? The question posed in the title should be addressed not to the particular personalities or organizations, not even to their power or intentions, but to powerful and pervasive and not always visible hegemonic norms. The aim of the article is by examining two cases to reflect and critically evaluate the hegemonic norms (i.e., competition) which seem to be establishing itself more strongly in the world of sports, as well as to raise awareness of the alternative worldview. A. G ramsci’s hegemony theory helps to form critical look at the penetration and impact of hegemonic norms on society and to reflect on alternatives or even to overcome the script of hegemony. Despite some existing obvious problems in the country’s sports, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form particular solutions or affect them in particular direction, because the development of sport (at least in the discussed cases) is based on the competitiveness which pervades most of sports management. The lack of identification of hegemonic norms and the lack of critical reflection create conditions due to which the norms are anchoring even stronger while strategic interest of society derepresented. Sports administrators usually being actively involved in sports, educated, having various experience in different countries, being the country’s patriots, at the same time are also exposed to the same forms of hegemony and not always see unpopular but important alternatives. As investment in sport increases, the ability of sport to fulfill public interest decreases. Through the examination of particular examples article discusses main assumption: might it be the case that the alleged advantage of competitiveness in reality is only the falsification of a public interest?

This paper argues that where appropriations or invocations of the past have contributed to projects of social and political change, they have usually done so with little or no recourse to the historical past. Instead, activists and campaigners have used various forms of vernacular past-talk to unsettle those temporary fixings of ‘common sense’ that limit thinking about current political and social problems. The example of such past-talk discussed here is the work of the art-activist collective REPOhistory, which sought between 1989 and 2000 to disrupt the symbolic patterning of New York’s official and homogenized public memory culture by making visible (‘repossessing’) overlooked and repressed episodes from the city’s past. In effect, they challenged the ways in which history’s dominance of past-talk within the public sphere was constituted by exclusions of subjects on grounds of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status. REPOhistory fused politically-engaged art practices with Walter Benjamin’s belief in the redemptive potential of dialectical encounters between past and present. To assess the value of their art-as-activism projects (“artivism”), this article will situate REPOhistory’s practices within a frame of ideas provided by Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. In a series of street sign installations that mixed visual art, urban activism, social history, and radical pedagogy, REPOhistory exemplified why the past is too important to be trusted to professional historians.

The article contributes to the theoretical and empirical discussions about the social exclusion of religious minorities in contemporary Lithuania. It is based on the data of the empirical qualitative research – focus group and semi-structured interviews with members of religious minorities in Lithuania. The theoretical part of the article focuses on the relationship between religion and social exclusion and the features of its manifestation; it discusses Pierre Bourdieu and Antonio Gramsci’s theoretical insights. The analysis of empirical data conducted according to the three levels of societal life – macro, meso and micro – that were reflected in the respondents’ narratives demonstrated that social exclusion of religious minorities is manifested at every level of societal life: religious communities and their members are stigmatized and marginalized and their activities in the public sphere are restricted.