“Lift Up a Living Nation”: Community and Nation,Socialism and Religion in The English Hymnal, 1906

The lead editors of The English Hymnal (1906), Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams, found Victorian hymnody in need of serious revision, and not just aesthetically. This musical book was intended as an expression of the editors' Christian socialist politics involving in the participation of the congregation. This article examines how they achieved this by the encouragement of active citizenship through communal music-making, using folksong tunes alongside texts which affirmed community. This article argues that the editors wedded religion and high-quality music with a focus on citizenship drawn from British Idealism; using a cultural movement to seek social change.     

State power,prostitution and sexual order in Taiwan: towards a genealogical critique of ‘virtuous custom’1

This paper considers, by way of conjunctural analysis and genealogical investigation, the policed culture of sex under the regulatory regime of ‘virtuous custom’ as sustained by the now defunct Police Offence Law (abrogated and replaced by the Social Order Maintenance Law in 1991) between the 1950s and 1990s. It attempts to trace the historical process whereby the social/sexual order came to be established in postwar Taiwan, thus articulating the cultural specificity of gendered/sexual subjectivities as formed within that particular geo‐political terrain. Examining the police technology as well as the official/journalistic discourse of sex, this paper demonstrates that ‘virtuous custom’, a nationalist ideological construct predicated upon the Confucian sage‐king paradigm, operated as a norm of sex whose boundary was secured through the policing of non‐familial/non‐marital sexualities, arguing further that both female sexuality and male homosexuality have been historically regulated by the state through its banning of prostitution. As the normative regime of ‘virtuous custom’ has become even more hegemonic due to the rise in recent years of anti‐prostitution state feminism, contesting the new social/sexual order on the grounds of its ideological operations and practices represents the most challenging task for progressive sexual and gender politics in Taiwan today.     

Stewart,O’Reilly,and The Rumble 2012: Alternative Political Debate in the Age of Hybridity

This study explores the internet-only political debate held in the run-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election between political-entertainment personalities Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly. Independently produced and financed through a version of crowd-funding, the debate offers a window into the fundamentally hybrid nature of contemporary mediated political discourse. A novel form of hybrid celebrity politics afforded by emergent technological, economic, and cultural forces, the so-called “Rumble in the Air Conditioned Auditorium” interwove televisual celebrity, political advocacy, affective spectacle, and deliberative exchange. In so doing, it spoke to the increasingly complicated nature of representation, authenticity, and the possibilities of political speech in a hybrid media age.     

The Street Robber and the Gentleman Highwayman: Changing Representations and Perceptions of Robbery in London, 1690–1800

Owing to the growth of urban crime, the expansion of print culture, and changing cultural attitudes, a remarkably diverse range of positive and negative images of robbery were disseminated in eighteenth-century London. Attitudes in the 1690s were already ambivalent, but repeated negative reports in newspapers and trial accounts contributed to the identification, in the 1720s during a perceived crime wave, of the ‘street robber’ as a particularly threatening criminal. In response, the concept of the polite gentleman highwayman emerged, epitomized in representations of James Maclaine at mid-century. From the 1770s, however, the appeal of the gentleman highwayman began to wane, and all forms of robbery came to be seen as equally undesirable.     

‘The Talke of the Towne’: News,Crime and the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century London

This article reconsiders ideas of the public sphere in the seventeenth century, by focusing on how public opinion is shaped by the movement of information between media and between receivers. It contends that the scholarly preoccupation with a public sphere viewed exclusively in terms of politics obscures the fact that contemporaries did not distinguish between politics and subjects such as crime in their newsgathering. Examining the case study of James Turner, a burglar in the 1660s who became a cause célèbre in London and beyond, this article shows how crime news were eagerly exchanged, informing discussions and constructing public opinion.     

Religion and politics in Malaysian nation-building: a “double-movement” of hegemonic and plural Islam

This article looks at links and fractures in the development of Political Islam in Malaysia. It looks at the various bases of divides in Malay political mobilization. In the early colonial period, Malay–Islamic political elites were divided along the lines of language and schooling, while the postcolonial era saw the divisions taking on a more ideological basis, marking the deepening of intra-Islamic contestation. The double-movement in Political Islam’s expansion can be seen as moving in two opposite directions. While, on the one hand, the incorporation of Islamic governance in the state had taken on a centralized and hegemonic character, the splintering and pluralization of Political Islam had also occurred in an equally extensive manner.     

Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Similarities in the Norman Influence,Contact and “Conquests” of Sicily,Southern Italy and England

The establishment of the so-called “Norman World” is a debated phenomenon. The influence of the Normans can be found throughout Europe in matters of politics, warfare, and cultural interaction. The empire established by the Normans from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries was based upon the fighting prowess and military might of a people led by notable men such as William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard. The similarities and differences between the Norman conquests of the eleventh century reveal reciprocity in contact, influence, and exchange among Norman populations. Similarly, the autonomy and distinctness of Norman populations from England to the Mediterranean remained. This article explores the extent of Norman contact, areas of influence and methods of exchange during the most active Norman conquests of the Middle Ages.     

The role of adoptive parents’ intergroup contact in fostering the well-being of adoptees: The “extended intragroup contact effect”

The present study examines the effects of a new cultural socialization strategy on the well-being of transracially adopted adolescents and emerging adults. Specifically, we propose a novel strategy focused on the role of adoptive parents’ positive contact with members of their children’s ethnic group of origin, which we labelled “extended intragroup contact.” The hypothesis was that observing ingroup members (adoptive parents, belonging to the family ingroup) engaging in contact with another ingroup (members of children’s original ethnic group) would be associated with adoptees’ meaning in life and, in turn, with well-being. A self-report questionnaire was administered to 120 families, each composed of transracial adoptees (all born in Latin American countries) and their adoptive parents. The results were generally supportive of predictions, showing that knowing of positive interactions between members of two different ingroups (family ingroup and ethnic ingroup) had beneficial effects for the well-being of transracial adoptees. The theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed, focusing on the importance of investigating extended intragroup contact as a strategy for improving the well-being of disadvantaged group members.     

Ethno-national boundaries in the construction of “dirty-work” occupational identity: The case of nursing care workers in diversified workplaces

Diversified domains, such as workplaces, are suitable social fields for the study of ethnic identities, because identities are constructed through comparison and negation, that is, by identifying what or who the “other” is. In the present study I explore the talk of hands-on nursing care work, a stigmatized occupational field, to illuminate ethnic identities and the strategic boundary work that care workers conduct. The study is based on 14 months of field work and 51 interviews and observations at two Israeli geriatric wards with highly diverse staff. I show that actors negotiate their care worker identity by the opposite strategies of making and unmaking ethno-national boundaries. The first strategy denies and erases ethno-national boundaries by stressing universal professional values and individual virtues; the second one demarcates boundaries between ethno-national groups, using perceived cultural differences. The discussion addresses these antithetical evaluation frameworks in relation to theories of boundary making and unmaking.     

The presence of museums in the lives of Canadians, 1971–1998: What might have been and what has been

This chapter reviews data from seven large‐scale national surveys that measured cultural participation in Canada from 1971 to 1998. It assesses what the data imply regarding the numbers and types of people visiting museums, and how these have changed over time.

While overall participation rates have sustained the levels of the 1970s, participation rates in 1998 do not reflect the growth in participation projected then. Furthermore, the spectrum of people visiting museums has narrowed, rather than being ‘democratised’. Those with post‐secondary education have always been more likely to visit museums but now represent a majority of visitors for the first time.

That museums are now attracting relatively fewer people and fewer types of people suggests a diminishing presence for museums. Nonetheless, museums’ audiences are noticeably less elite than often portrayed, and there are opportunities for changes in policy and programmes designed to reach more people. Ultimately, though, the surveys give only limited insight into the role of museums in the lives of the general public, and new types of research and measurement are needed.