Why women succeed,and fail,in the arts

I examine and test hypotheses for the differential performance of men and women in the arts. I consider whether observed outcomes are best accounted for by differing innate and genetic endowments across the sexes, variations in training opportunities, maternal responsibilities, or discrimination in the marketplace. More generally, I also consider how social mechanisms can give rise to observed patterns of unequal achievement.     

Beginning in the Middle: Deleuze,Glissant, and Colonial Difference

Abstract

This essay reads Rosi Braidotti's philosophical nomadism from a decolonial perspective with the goal of uncovering the irreducible colonial difference which underlies the Eurocentric ontological vision embedded in Braidotti's reading of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, I read Edouard Glissant in tandem with Deleuze through the notion of the ‘middle’, a key concept which grounds the three thinkers' ontology of multiplicity. To this end, I borrow Nelson Maldonado-Torres' Fanonian critique of Eurocentric ontology and show how Braidotti fails to escape from the trap of Eurocentrism due to her inability to capture the abyssal and totalitarian character of coloniality imprinted in the cry of the damné. Against Braidotti's simplistic misreading of Glissant as a future-oriented constructivist, I argue that the enigmatic trope of Relation in Glissant opens up at the middle space of groundlessness constituting the ontological edifice of the colonial subject: revealing the abyssal middle in which the ineffable experience of shared suffering never stops haunting the freeing knowledge of relation.     

War,Philanthropy, and the National Institute of Hygiene in France

The Rockefeller Foundation helpedestablish two health research institutes inFrance during the German occupation and Vichyrule. These institutes were the precursors ofthe Institut National de Santé et de laRecherche Médicale (INSERM), the Frenchequivalent of the National Institutes of Healthin the United States. This essay rescues theseinstitutes from oblivion, and examines theirorigins and their significance.     

17世纪德国汉学研究——以基歇尔、米勒、门采尔、巴耶尔为中心

在欧洲东方学的历史上,17世纪的德国汉学居于领先地位,当时的法国和英国等国家都尚未有较为深入地汉学研究.本文通过17世纪德国汉学的三个代表性人物,物展现德国17世纪汉学研究的基本成就和特点.这三位汉学家在德国开启了欧洲本土的汉学研究.18世纪后欧洲汉学属于法国,但在17世纪,欧洲汉学的重镇是德国.     

Lope de Aguirre,the Tyrant,and the Prince: Convergence and Divergence in Postcolonial Collective Memory

Abstract

In Latin America, collective remembering is shaped by stories of colonizers whose voracious ambitions left an indelible mark on the landscape and its people. This essay examines a set of narratives about a legendary colonizer, Lope de Aguirre, that continue to be invoked in the collective imagination on the island of Margarita, in Venezuela. Drawing on Bormann's Symbolic Convergence Theory and Bakhtin's work on cultural discourse, this analysis shows that on the one hand, the narratives converge to support official records of Aguirre as an archetype of colonial brutality. Yet on the other, alternate versions of the stories reveal a more discordant picture, one that complicates Aguirre's character and reevaluates his influence on the island and in the wider context of Latin America.     

The neurotic academic: anxiety,casualisation, and governance in the neoliberalising university

Based on empirical research conducted with academic staff working on fixed-term contracts, the article explores the subjective experience of anxiety in the UK’s ‘neoliberalising’ higher education (HE) sector. As HE undergoes a process of marketisation, and the teaching and research activities of academics are increasingly measured and scrutinised, the contemporary academy appears to be suffused with anxiety. Coupled with pressures facing all staff, 34% of academic employees are currently working on a fixed-term contract and so must contend with the multiple forms of uncertainty associated with their so-called ‘casualised’ positions. While anxiety is often perceived as an individualised affliction for which employees are encouraged to take personal responsibility, the article argues that it should be conceptualised in two ways: firstly, as a symptom of wider processes at work in the neoliberalising sector; and secondly, as a ‘tactic’ of what Isin [(2004). The neurotic citizen. Citizenship Studies, 8 (3), 217–235] refers to as ‘neuroliberal’ governance. The article concludes by proposing that the figure of the ‘neurotic academic’ is emblematic of the contradictions facing the contemporary academy.     

江西丰城白马寨匾额语义与空间关联研究

中国古代的民居建筑往往会迎合主人的心理追求,凭借环境要素,构建建筑与文化的空间关联性,匾额便是这种人居意识的物化体现.江西丰城白马寨明清古建筑群现存大量匾额,具有丰富的文化内涵和鲜明的地域特色,是赣中地区民居建筑匾额文化的突出代表.以白马寨为例,从横向和纵向两个维度展开,横向维度进行文化释义和类型分析,纵向维度探究匾额...     

Science Diplomacy Policy Processes in Comparative Perspective: The Use of Scientific Cooperation Agreements in Canada,India, Norway,and the UK

There is growing attention to science diplomacy among scholars, policymakers, and scientific associations around the world. However, there continues to be contestation around the concept of science diplomacy, currently framed alternately as a new understanding of diplomacy, part of the global challenges discourse, central to the internationalization of science, and typifying competitive innovation. This contestation is furthered by the involvement of a broad array of policy instruments and actors in science diplomacy. In response, this paper focuses on a single policy instrument, examining eight bilateral and multilateral scientific cooperation agreements led by Canada, India, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Kingdon’s multiple streams framework is employed to explain how the interplay between policy actors, the policy agenda, policy problems, and policy alternatives leads to the creation of science diplomacy policies. Across the cases, all of the current science diplomacy discourses were applicable, holding stronger explanatory power in the problem and policy streams of the policy process while not obviously matching processes seen in the political stream. The findings also identified a gap in the current framing in understanding how geopolitical dynamics impact the creation of science diplomacy policies and how different policy actors negotiate, exploit, or are subject to these forces. By stabilizing one element of the ongoing debates around science diplomacy, the paper contributes a deeper examination of the array of policy actors and their involvement in different stages of the policy process leading to the formation of scientific cooperation agreements as tools of science diplomacy.

     

Expulsion, compensation, and the legacy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society

This article examines the treatment accorded by the Max Planck Society to scientists who were dismissed from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during the years of National Socialism, 1933–1945. Legal claims for compensation reveal a lack of understanding between the majority of German scientists and their persecuted colleagues after 1945. In respect to the Max Planck Society, they also reveal a lack of willingness to accept moral responsibility.     

Hidden in the Middle: Culture,Value and Reward in Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics – the so-called shotgun marriage between biology and computer science – is an interdiscipline. Despite interdisciplinarity being seen as a virtue, for having the capacity to solve complex problems and foster innovation, it has the potential to place projects and people in anomalous categories. For example, valorised ‘outputs’ in academia are often defined and rewarded by discipline. Bioinformatics, as an interdisciplinary bricolage, incorporates experts from various disciplinary cultures with their own distinct ways of working. Perceived problems of interdisciplinarity include difficulties of making explicit knowledge that is practical, theoretical, or cognitive. But successful interdisciplinary research also depends on an understanding of disciplinary cultures and value systems, often only tacitly understood by members of the communities in question. In bioinformatics, the ‘parent’ disciplines have different value systems; for example, what is considered worthwhile research by computer scientists can be thought of as trivial by biologists, and vice versa. This paper concentrates on the problems of reward and recognition described by scientists working in academic bioinformatics in the United Kingdom. We highlight problems that are a consequence of its cross-cultural make-up, recognising that the mismatches in knowledge in this borderland take place not just at the level of the practical, theoretical, or epistemological, but also at the cultural level too. The trend in big, interdisciplinary science is towards multiple authors on a single paper; in bioinformatics this has created hybrid or fractional scientists who find they are being positioned not just in-between established disciplines but also in-between as middle authors or, worse still, left off papers altogether.     

Diet-specific social support,dietary acculturation,and self-efficacy among Chinese living in the United States

This study conceptualizes diet-specific social support from family members and friends as a part of the functional content of social relationships and examines differences in its levels and predictiveness among immigrants with varying degrees of dietary acculturation. Using an online sample of 505 Chinese immigrants living in the United States, the results show a decline in the amount of support received by acculturated immigrants in both computer-mediated and face-to-face contexts. However, acculturated immigrants need less social support to produce the same level of self-efficacy than do immigrants who retain their Chinese identity. The findings suggest that the decline in the amount of received support may signal a cultural shift in the ways social support operates to achieve its health-protective function. Implications for diet-specific social support, dietary acculturation, and immigrant health are discussed.     

The craft of urgency: performing prosperity,running capital,and the making of a buying crowd in home presales in Nanjing,China

ABSTRACT

This article examines home presales – the selling of future residential properties – at the urban fringe of Nanjing, China. It argues for an analytical focus on urgency as a temporal quality that creates the local housing market and facilitates urban accumulation. I examine how urgency, grounded in a linear imagination of urban development, motivates home presales for developers, estate agents, and homebuyers. In particular, to speed up the turnaround time of investment, developers conjure up a vision of prosperity by building extravagant sales centers to organize home presales. Estate agents working at the sales center organize promotional events to attract, register, and manage a buying crowd. If properly managed, the buying crowd could reach the size of a festival-like presale, whereby hundreds of apartments are sold within one day. Capital at the urban fringe accumulates through the synchronization of these activities in which the sales center crafts an affective temporality of transaction by cultivating and managing an exuberant buying crowd. The craft of urgency emphasizes the performative agencement that assembles the condition for urgency to come into being.