Decorum or Deterrence?

ABSTRACT

Capital punishment – specifically public execution – is here investigated not simply as a judicial punishment, but as a lens through which to view the civil and socio-political development of Malawi from the colonial to early independence eras. Public executions were an exceptional measure, employed at times of marked social and political unrest, being ordered by the colonial government in response to the Chilembwe Uprising in 1915 and by Prime Minister Banda in 1965 in the aftermath of the Cabinet crisis and Chipembere Uprising. This article looks at the continuities and changes in the practice and signification of these judicial killings.     

The right to evacuation: the self-determined future of post-Fukushima Japan

Abstract

Since the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, rights advocacy has been gaining traction in Japanese politics. This paper argues for the rationale that led to the current legal development in post-Fukushima Japan—the Nuclear Disaster Victims' Support Act, which emphasizes the right to evacuation—and presents the grassroots struggle against public authorities. The right to evacuation is the right of citizens to avoid exposure to radioactivity by allowing victims—in this case, the victims of Fukushima—to choose their living location, whether that means permanently evacuating to a new area, returning to their original homes after evacuation, or remaining where they are (i.e., not evacuating). In any of these situations, necessary support from the government is guaranteed. I claim that while the right to evacuation represents a vision about how people in Fukushima can choose to survive and develop their own self-determined future, it requires a set of tools to achieve it. As such, this paper also argues the ways in which Japanese civil society groups play a significant role in helping bring the grassroots voices of people in Fukushima to the law-making process, as well as actual implementation. Advocacy to achieve such a fundamental human right is gradually progressing and moving away from the perception of being merely a criticism of government; rather, advocates are presenting alternatives and giving government a chance to change itself.     

Reasons for the lack of argumentation and debate in the Far East

This essay examines Chinese and Japanese attitudes towards speech communication, particularly in public settings. Social, linguistic, and philosophical perspectives are used to explain the absence of dialogue and debate. Section one argues that geodemographic factors influenced East Asia to exalt human-centered hierarchies over prepositional truth in their thought systems. Section two looks at the hieroglyphic character and grammatical presuppositions of Chinese and Japanese, to explain a mind-set more oriented towards imagery and sympathetic understanding than to definition and distinction. Section three traces the views of the leading East Asian philosophies towards oral communication—Confucianism, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and the Ming-chia (School of names), respectively—finding yet other grounds for East Asian rejection of argumentation. This essay does not intend to imply the superiority of Western logic or thought patterns to East Asian ones. Rather, it is intended to alert a Western audience as to the culture-boundedness of Western appreciation of discussion and debate, as well as to the deep-seated Sino-Japanese prejudices against these communication styles.     

Museums: Impact and value

The role of museums and their place within society is no longer one which we can take for granted. Eschewing the notion of funding based on ‘public good’, successive iterations of public sector reform have progressively required museums to prove that they are worthy of public support. Notions of ‘worth’ have increasingly been tied to the achievement of government policy and enforced through making attainment of key policy directions a condition of funding agreements. Current government policy aimed at ‘building social capital’ in both the Britain and Australia expects museums to prove that they ‘make a difference’ in terms of long-term social impact. However, unease over the imbalance created by what many perceive to be an overly ‘instrumental’ approach to assessing the role of museums has generated growing criticism and a parallel conversation about ‘intrinsic value’. Impact and value—the twin peaks of current discourse about the role of museums in contemporary society—are the subject of a recent study carried out in Australia, which is described here.     

Conservation in the United Kingdom

British conservation is respected around the world for its excellence, based on a tradition of caring for heritage material, backed up by high‐quality training and research. This paper charts the origins and development of the conservation profession in the United Kingdom and provides a comprehensive overview of the number, location and variety of conservation specialists currently working in the UK. It looks at those working in both the public and private sectors. The findings are based on a number of surveys conducted by the professional bodies and by government agencies such as the Museums & Galleries Commission (MGC). Most of the information relates only to museums, but the most recent survey of conservators by the MGC also looked at provision in libraries and archives.     

Research at Arts Council England

Arts Council England is the national development agency for the arts in England, distributing public money from government and the National Lottery. The rationale for research at Arts Council England is explained, including the drivers behind a commitment to an increased research capacity. It is summarized how research takes place in the organization, the context in which work is undertaken and the key reporting requirements. Arts Council England works across a broad spectrum of artforms—from literature and the publishing sector, through dance and opera, to visual and multimedia arts. The research addresses all of these artforms as well as cross-cutting agendas such as employment, education and economic impact. Five broad areas are considered: evaluating the impact of Arts Council England's spending; audiences and participation in the arts; cultural employment and the arts economy; tools for the sector; and disseminating findings and informing policy. Details are given of some of the main research projects under each of these areas, and what is known now and where there are gaps in knowledge and challenges for the future are highlighted.     

Which intercultural competences for teachers,educators, and social workers? A literature review

Europe seems to be going through a historical period characterized by the fear of otherness, conceived as an attack on the positive values of liberal society. This fear manifests itself, according to several researchers, through neo-assimilationist tendencies in public policies in many European nations: an example of this trend can be considered the reintroduction of the language and knowledge requirements of the country for new immigrants as a prerequisite for obtaining permanent residence and citizenship.At the same time, in both academic and public debates, the tendency is spreading to affirm that it is necessary to overcome the multicultural approach in favour of a new paradigm capable of dealing with the complexities typical of the superdiversity that characterizes European nations: the interculturalism. This trend is in contrast to the thinking of several researchers who believe that the theoretical principles and the practical aims, which are at the basis of multiculturalism and interculturalism are complementary to each other. Multiculturalism tends to focus more on the level of public discourse and political debate while interculturalism is aimed more at more meso and micro-level. It is believed that teachers, social workers and educators play a fundamental role in making the members of the majority of a State more open to comparison and exchange with subjects coming from other historical and geographical contexts. The purpose of this review is to identify the intercultural competencies that these professionals should have to counter the fear and closure towards diversity, which is constantly increasing in European societies.     

Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its Mediterranean Neighbours in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries

As scholars of people's physical environments, we tend to view the past according to our own forms of categorisation rather than those of contemporaries. From a medieval Mediterranean perspective, the fragmentation of scholarship caused by modern disciplinary constraints—Islamic, Byzantine, Western—has artificially set apart cultures which had more in common than has hitherto been acknowledged. This is a comparative study of the dress and textile cultures of southern Italy, particularly Apulia, Egypt and the Fatimid Caliphate and regions in the Byzantine Empire, as recorded in dowries, wills and other documents. This article also demonstrates how using the Mediterranean as a framework for comparison allows us to identify new areas where cultural differences really lay.     

Escaping to the country: Media,nostalgia, and the new food industries

Over the past decade in the West, television cooking shows have popularized interest in the provenance of food against a backdrop of public concern about the practices of industrial food production. This article explores two series that offer self-sufficiency as a solution to the problem of industrial agriculture. Escape to River Cottage and Gourmet Farmer each centre on a narrative of a city-dweller moving to the country to set up a smallholding. With their nostalgia for an earlier—simultaneously unproblematic and emotionally fulfilling—time of food production, these series imagine a Utopian lifestyle in which audiences are encouraged to choose to produce and consume differently. That it is (middle-class) men who are rediscovering traditional food practices highlights how media discourses surrounding food production can become entangled in gendered representations that give rise to niche food products and experiences designed to ameliorate feelings of risk and uncertainty in contemporary food systems.     

Contact with a multicultural past: A prejudice-reducing intervention

This paper introduces the notion of contact with a multicultural past as a new type of indirect intergroup contact. It presents results of a study which evaluated the effects of an educational program utilizing the proposed framework. The program aimed to facilitate the engagement of Polish students (N = 427) with historical Jewish heritage in their places of residence. The intervention proved highly successful at increasing students' knowledge of and interest in local history which both contributed independently to an increased inclusion of the outgroup (Jews) in the self and in turn to more positive attitudes towards them. The implications of using contact with a multicultural past in societies with low levels of direct intergroup contact are discussed.     

A potential pitfall of integration: The case for identity conflict to facilitate social change

Building on intersectional awareness literature, this paper examines how another individual difference regarding one’s perception of identity intersections — bicultural identity conflict (BII-C)— predicts immigrants’ interpretations of their social environment and general orientation to take action to support immigrants from one’s heritage group (GOA-I). While previous research has shown that BII-C, or perceived conflict (vs. harmony) between multiple cultural identities, is related to negative intergroup outcomes, we extend this research to examine how BII-C relates to social change actions that promote a more equitable society. An experimental study with 165 first- and second-generation immigrants living in the United States found support for a moderated mediation model. BII-C moderated the relationship between discrimination and the degree to which participants attributed discrimination to societal factors. These attributions were associated with GOA-I. Future research should consider additional individual differences, beyond intersectional awareness and BII-C, to see how these orientations may also act as a lens through which people interpret their social environment and are willing to take action to change it.     

Emotional energy and sub-cultural politics: alternative bands in post-1997 Hong Kong

The paper attempts to work out the link between the structuring of the public domain and hegemonic masculinities in contemporary Kerala, South India. Using the debates around an incident of sexual harassment that happened in 1999, it argues for a conjunctural understanding of the contemporary where various events and moments in history are replayed through narrativization and popular memory. The paper goes on to analyse the debates around the incident that produce a ‘narrative public domain’, to foreground the various notions of masculinity that construct and structure it in relation to notions of female sexuality and changing structures of family. These notions of masculinity could be, the paper argues, a starting point for a historical inquiry into Kerala's modernity – an inquiry that would throw light on the past and the ways in which the contemporary is produced through its historical legacies.     

Reconciling before educating? Narratives of conflict and peace among teachers in Côte d’Ivoire

While teachers are generally perceived as positive agents of change in post-conflict countries, recently researchers have started questioning teachers’ ability and willingness to teach ‘peace’ after conflict. The vast majority of these studies have been qualitative in nature. The current paper makes an important contribution to this debate by analysing quantitatively how teachers’ narratives of the violent past affect their teaching practices in Côte d’Ivoire, a country that emerged from violent conflict in 2011. Drawing on a survey conducted among secondary school teachers (n = 984) in Abidjan, we show that teachers remain sharply divided along ethno-political lines concerning their perceptions of the past conflict and current peace and reconciliation process. There also exists a potentially problematic relation between these narratives and teachers’ teaching practices: Teachers in support of the narrative associated with the current government seem much more willing to discuss their country’s violent past in the classroom than others.     

Ragged Houses and Candlelight. The Romance of the Jewish Past and Memory Work in the Last Decade of the Communist Rule in Kraków,Poland

It has often been proposed that the Jewish past of Poland had been largely forgotten and that first popular commemorations of the destroyed minority took place after the fall of Communism in 1989. Challenging this chronology the present article examines the commemorations in Kraków, the cultural capital of Poland, in the 1980s. It analyses the work of local Jewish museum and preservation projects developed during the decade and establishes that the Jewish past had been remembered in the city since at least 1980. It demonstrates that local, mid-ranking officials, a group situated mid-way in the polar opposites of the government and the society, were responsible for this rediscovery of the Jewish past. In particular, this article points towards the heritage preservationists and comments on their importance for urban memory work.     

Culture jamming and Brandalism for the environment: The logic of appropriation

This article explores creative activism for environmentalism through an examination of culture jamming. Specifically, it looks to the action of the Brandalism project during COP21. This was the replacement of bus stop advertising with original artworks. This form of creative activism is unique in that it addresses the advertising industry as a key battlefield over cultural meaning and environmental sustainability. Through its use of the logic of appropriation inherent in culture jamming, this case challenges critiques about the incorporation of culture jamming within consumer culture. This work theorizes the case through the new politics of consumption, political consumerism, and culture jamming. It argues for the logic of appropriation, before it introduces the case study and explores the visual narratives of environmentalism: corporate greed, inadequate politicians, consumer saturation, Earth in mourning, and public commitment to the environment. Finally, it evaluates the contribution of Brandalism as a form of creative activism for environmentalism.     

Authoritarianism, perceived threat and exclusionism on the eve of the Disengagement: Evidence from Gaza

Major political events such as terrorist attacks and forced relocation of citizens may have an immediate effect on attitudes towards ethnic minorities associated with these events. The psychological process that leads to political exclusionism of minority groups was examined using a field study among Israeli settlers in Gaza days prior to the Disengagement Plan adopted by the Israeli government on June 6, 2004 and enacted in August 2005. Lending credence to integrated threat theory and to theory on authoritarianism, our analyses show that the positive effect of religiosity on political exclusionism results from the two-staged mediation of authoritarianism and perceived threat. We conclude that religiosity fosters authoritarianism, which in turn tends to move people towards exclusionism both directly and through the mediation of perceived threat.     

Giacomo Casanova: Three Episodes from His Life as a Charlatan

This paper will analyse three major episodes of Casanova's Histoire de ma vie during which Casanova comes to grips with practices of charlatanism or magic, either as a “patient” or actively: 1. His cure, as a child by the sorceress of Murano to whom he is taken by his beloved grandmother.

2. His guest in the little Italian village of Cesena for a buried treasure whic he prides himself on being able to discover with the help of a sacred knife.

3. His inventive, libertine scenarios elaborated for the particular purpose of “regenerating” (dazzling and pleasuring) the marquise d'Urfé, known as Séramis, an old aristocrat with a passion for occult knowledge.

Casanova's attitude towards all that has to do with gambling, deception, chance, and all the ways to influence it is thoroughly complex and ambiguous. It is one of the features of his Venetian mentality; and it is also a phenomenon of the time, which is wrongly called the “century of the Enlightenment”. More narrowly, close scrutiny of these three occasions should allow us to grasp how Casanova saw his place in the couple of the dupe and the trickster. This paper will show how he understood the world and its underlying forces, and what type of intelligence — more baroque than Cartesian in inspiration — was at work in him.     

Planting virtual lemons: performing forest protection in the context of political performativity

The socialist People’s Democratic Republic of Laos (Lao PDR) has some of the largest intact forests in Southeast Asia, yet these are being quickly depleted by illegal logging, slash-and-burn farming, increasing population pressures, monocrop plantations, mining and dam building. Foreign government and nongovernmental organizations stage “infotainment” theatre plays to educate and inform the Lao public of its role in protecting the forests even though government projects and concessions are the primary causes of forest destruction. Because all the nationally subsidized performing arts troupes are government mouthpieces they cannot critique the government’s role. Foreign aid agencies funding the dramas are also made complicit in the hypocrisy of promoting forest protection to those with the least power to do so, while both performers and spectators know who is profiting the most from the sale of forest products. This article examines theatrical performances regarding forest protection presented in this context of performativity in which the state manipulates socialist rhetoric to conceal its actions that enrich its officials and capitalist partners at the expense of the rest of the Lao public.     

The Changing Media Representation of T. E. Lawrence and Celebrity Culture in Britain, 1919–1935

Abstract

This article presents a new analysis of representations of T. E. Lawrence to explore how the media created celebrity identities in interwar Britain. Examining his appearance in seventeen national newspapers and in newsreels between 1919 and 1935, it shows how earlier press depictions that borrowed from Lowell Thomas’s portrayal of him as the mythical ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ were disrupted by a nascent media-driven celebrity culture which aimed to uncover intimate details of the lives of the so-called ‘real’ people that were believed to exist behind the outward personae of the famous. By the late 1920s, the press’s attention had switched from Lawrence as an imperial adventurer to focus on the intensely private man who lay behind the public image of the ‘Blonde Bedouin’. This shift in emphasis denoted a significant change in the way celebrities were presented by the news media in interwar Britain. Journalists intensified their exposure of celebrities’ private lives to amplify the empathetic connection between the public and the famous at a time when new modes of self-fashioning were configured through expression in private, domestic life. This shift was also informed by growing anxieties regarding how public figures communicated their social authority to the new audiences of the interwar mass media, newspapers and newsreels exposing famous people’s private lives to generate emotional connections with members of the public which would strengthen concepts of social leadership and trust.     

Storying a Social Drama: How Discourse and Practice Prevent Transformation Through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

In a sociohistorical moment during which racism has become more widely accepted as a social fact, U.S. scholars and practitioners of education continue to struggle with how schooling might participate in its eradication. In suburban, elite, Midwestern Pioneer City Public Schools, a series of initiatives I refer to as “the transformation” aimed to eliminate racial predictability in standardized test scores through efforts (a) to redistribute children from a racially and economically isolated elementary school across the district's four elementary schools, and (b) to train all district staff in a particular brand of culturally relevant pedagogy. In this article, I argue that Pioneer City School District was unable to address the transformative goals of culturally relevant pedagogy—in part because of irresolvable tensions between an explicitly anti-racist theory and the authoritative discourses suggesting that racism is a thing of the past.