The lifetime of Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was marked by dramatic transformations in Europe. Cityscapes, aesthetic codes, social orders, political cultures, international travel and means of warfare developed beyond recognition; entire catalogues of hopes and fears were torn asunder and replaced by new ones during not one but two wars. Amidst all these changes, Huizinga grew to become one of the most famous historians of his time. To this day, his works are treated as monuments in the cultural historical field. This book examines how these transformations and 'experiences of loss' affected and informed Huizinga's historical perspectives. Most centrally, this book contends that Huizinga's historical works helped to accommodate and give meaning to his own experiences of uncertainty and rupture, thus offering him a way of life in turbulent times. This project offers an original and comprehensive analysis of an iconic historian writing in the age of collapse
The plight of Vietnamese migrants in the UK has featured prominently in recent media and public policy debates on modern slavery, illegal border crossings, and labour exploitation. Yet little attention has been paid to their subjective experiences of border crossings, nor the wide range of categories they pass between. Vietnamese migrants coming to the UK in search of work face a complex array of decisions surrounding the respective costs and risks related to a chosen migration route which must be weighed against personal and collective expectations. These complex decisions are compounded by a shifting and highly stratified immigration and borders regime which renders migrants more vulnerable through restricting rights and increasing surveillance. This chapter explores the experiences and imaginaries of the UK border among migrants who have crossed the UK border, as well as those who intend to make the journey. We explore the contrast between the expectations and realities of UK borders through in-depth interviews with Vietnamese migrants. We argue, notwithstanding knowledge of the risks involved in border crossings and the hostile border enforcement regime, imaginations of opportunities for transforming local livelihoods remain powerful and deep-seated political and cultural narratives for Vietnamese migrants.
Luxembourg is a prototypical small state and the only remaining example of over a two dozen of grand duchies in history. In this chapter the focus is laid on persistency and change of governance in security affairs, that is, the question of how a Luxembourg political entity overcame a variety of challenges of the (European) security environment until 1940. Indeed, to comprehend the 'survival' of the Grand Duchy in face of the vicissitudes of the military-political setting since the princedom's creation by the Treaty of Vienna (1815), one needs to deploy the full array of the Small-State theory debate in security policy and in the politics of international relations: bandwagoning, balancing, freeriding, hedging, shelter-seeking. Based on this longue durée approach, the contribution expands on 'extantism' to reintroduce this concept to Small-State Studies.
The first collection of essays in the English language dedicated to the cultural achievements and politics of one of the most important ruling houses of late medieval Europe. The house of Luxembourg between 1308 and 1437 is best known today for its principal royal and imperial representatives, Henry VII, John the Blind, Charles IV, and Charles's two sons, Wenceslas and Sigismund - a group of rulers who, for better or worse, shaped the political destiny of much of Europe during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. While some of the Luxembourg cultural legacy can still be experienced directly today in and around Prague and southern Germany, and through the literary and musical works of Machaut, Froissart, and Wolkenstein, it reached much further across Europe: from England to present-day Romania, and from the Baltic Sea to the Italian peninsula, alongside the dynasty's homelands in what is now Luxembourg, Belgium and France. However, this culture has not always attracted the scholarly attention it deserves. This volume explores the pan-European impact and influence of the Luxembourgs in a variety of fields: art and architectural history, material culture, Czech, French, German and Latin text production, gender and intellectual history, and music. Embracing the subject matter from multi-disciplinary and transnational perspectives, the essays here offer new insights into the late medieval cultures of the Luxembourg court. Particular subjects treated include the making of the "Wenceslas Bible"; Machaut at the court of John of Luxembourg; and Charles IV's patronage of multilingual literature. On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND.
This chapter thinks through international law and posthuman theory by way of an example of 'posthumanist commoning'. It explores the posthumanist and the commoning dimensions of the legal and political collective actions at hand. It does so by telling the story of the 'insurgent lake' of Rome – the 'lago bullicante'. Bullicante is an archaic Italian term that signifies both 'to boil' (bollire) and 'to get agitated' (agitarsi). The 'lake that boils and gets agitated' refers to the artificial/natural lake that was accidentally created in 1992, when an underground parking lot was illegally constructed and inadvertently hit an aquifer, thereby flooding the construction site and nearby area, creating a one-hectare large lake in the heart of the city. With the lake, an insurgent political subjectivity emerged to resist and care for its preservation. Both the subjectivity and the struggle are articulated and practiced in non-liberal, non-individualistic, and in-human (or more and less than 'human') terms, thereby giving rise to a distinctive mode of 'becoming common'. Drawing on the lago bullicante, I argue that this mode of 'posthumanist commoning' enacts particular practices of ecological resistance, refusal, and reparation. The transversal alliances forged within networks of transnational resisting collectives help exploring how posthuman theory can inform international law. It does so by availing methods of reconfiguring the categories of the human, the land, and its living ecology, while also revealing critical blind-spots and methodological/conceptual limitations of both posthuman theory and international law.
This volume brings together contributions on the background to the Russian attack on Ukraine from a (socio-)linguistic, linguistic and literary-historical and political perspective. The emphasis is not on day-to-day political events, but on facts and contexts that have received little attention to date. This reveals gaps in knowledge, misinterpretations and distortions that are deeply rooted not least in Western societies. Here, recognized experts bring together a wealth of background knowledge on the historical and current contexts of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In doing so, they help to reduce information deficits and correct misconceptions about the Eastern Slavic linguistic and cultural area.
In 2020, a group of European researchers got a European Union (EU) grant to do a project called TRANSFORM. The objective of TRANSFORM was to integrate the principle of responsible research and innovation (RRI) into the research and innovation policies of three European regions: Lombardy, Brussels, and Catalonia.
This book tells the story of how TRANSFORM translated RRI into practice, all the way from philosophy of technology to EU policy jargon, to the project contract, and finally into the real-life events in these regions. Responsibility was translated in creative ways, with surprising goals and ambiguous outcomes. Armed with these stories, the book analyses the broader context of the desire for better governance of technoscience and draws two lessons: Firstly, that there is more governance than one may see at first sight, and secondly, that there is a need to rethink the borders of technoscience and the spaces in which it resides.
The book proposes to think of governance in technoscience, rather than governance of technoscience.
The book considers the poetics of twenty-first century climate change fiction, focusing on realism and exploring the realist mode as a means to engage readers with what is without doubt one of, if not the, most pressing problem of our day: climate change
This book explores the mechanisms and elements of populism to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches. Much as populism has been researched, it remains a contested notion without coherent definition and methodology and shaped by dimensions such as ideology, communication style, discourse, mobilization, and organization. It has simultaneously mobilized emotions, produced symbols, affected subjectivity and gender relations, and can manifest itself in different ways and appear in hybrid forms, such as in the cases of Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chávez, and Donald Trump. International expert contributors explore how such a variety of phenomena can be explained and analyzed, expanding the scope of populism research by proposing a multidimensional and complex understanding of populism. They argue for a greater epistemological differentiation and propose a methodology that integrates different fields of politics. This complex approach makes it possible to analyze populism as a multifaceted phenomenon and to understand how populisms affect politics and society. Aimed at postgraduates and researchers in populism as well as scholars in political science and sociology, media, communication, cultural, gender, and global studies, the volume also contributes to a better understanding of manifestations of right-wing and authoritarian populism in the twenty-first century.
This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond. Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories.Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili's standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa. The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.
Auf Talcott Parsons' Schultheorie wird zwar immer wieder verwiesen, ihre systematische Aufarbeitung stand jedoch bisher aus. Diese Leerstelle füllt die vorliegende Monographie. Sie bündelt Parsons' allgemeine soziologische Theorie und seine Bildungssoziologie, formuliert Gegenstand und Anspruch von Schultheorie und ordnet Parsons in den Kontext funktionalistischer Schultheorien (Fend, Dreeben, heimlicher Lehrplan) ein. Schließlich skizziert sie eine auf Parsons gründende und mit Blick auf die heutige Schule und die aktuelle Schulforschung weiterentwickelte normativfunktionalistische Schultheorie.
For years, exploration of seabed natural resources has been ongoing while exploitation in deep marine areas remained unrealistic due to land-based mineral availability and costs. However, mounting pressures from the green transition, climate change, and long-lasting fears of terrestrial minerals scarcity now bring exploitation prospects closer to reality.
This is has caused concern to a growing chorus of States, scientists, industries, NGOs, and parts of civil society due to the potential environmental and social impacts of these activities. As a result, the idea of a moratorium or 'precautionary pause' is gaining ground. Yet, an important number of interpretation and implementation issues of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1994 Agreement remain to be answered as a means to move forward in accordance with international law.
This multidisciplinary book, designed to become the essential handbook on the matter, provides a global overview of the national, regional, and international regulatory frameworks applicable to the exploration and exploitation of seabed minerals on the continental shelf and the Area, as well as the related state of the science on the matter.
By presenting historical and geopolitical context crucial to understanding regulation evolution, the book equips readers with foundational legal and policy knowledge. It furthermore addresses contemporary and prospective issues and offers unique insights into regional and national practices, including non-Party States to UNCLOS.
Drawing on interview data collected in three projects exploring domestic abuse in LGB and/or T+ people's intimate relationships, this chapter examines sexual consent in LGB and/or T+ people's abusive relationships through a queer lens. Three themes are considered. First, Catherine Donovan and Marianne Hester's two 'relationship rules' underpinning abusive relationships are applied. These determine that the relationship is for the abusive partner and on their terms; and that the victim/survivor is responsible for everything, including their partner's abusive behaviour. Participants' accounts show how these relationship rules can delegitimate victim/survivors' attempts to exercise consent and conversely legitimate non-consensual sex. Second, Carole Pateman's 'sexual contract' is drawn upon to demonstrate how abusive partners mandate sex whenever and however they wish, while victimised partners feel duty-bound to acquiesce. This, it is argued, reproduces cis-heteronormative sexual scripts based on public stories about love and intimacy and conventionally gendered binaries such as initiator/follower. Third, accounts demonstrating how more experienced LGB and/or T+ partners can exercise experiential power to instil norms about sex and intimacy are analysed. It is concluded that these abusive practices frame the context in which sexual victimisation occurs in LGB and/or T+ people's intimate relationships and inhibit victims/survivors from recognising and naming sexual violence.
Chakshudana or rituals of opening the eyes are practiced across multiple South Asian communities by artists, sculptors and priests. The ritual offers gods access to the mortal world, this practice applied to the study of art offers a distinctive perspective to interrogate the complex engagements with paintings, sculptures, found objects, fragments, built environments, and ecologies. This volume takes as its focus the process of seeing—to look closely, remaining true to the object, but also to see widely, from multiple subjective stances and diverse bodily engagements from walking to dreaming, from glancing to looking askance, and hypnotic stares, and to see beyond the visible. It examines art history through nuanced considerations of materiality, aesthetics and regional specificities. The essays emerge from current research building on the contributions of Michael W. Meister, W. Norman Brown Distinguished Professor of History of Art and South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, whose works laid the foundations for the study of South Asian visual and material culture. The essays in this book underscore methodological resonances rather than privileging conventional categories of media or chronology exploring artistic media including temples and paintings, as well as Bengali quilted textiles, manuscript 'lozenges,' and metal repousse. This volume, part of the Visual Media and Histories Series, will be of interest to students and researchers of history of art, religious studies, history, as well as the allied disciplines of anthropology and folklore studies.
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. The higher education and research system faces a constant dilemma. On the one hand, research and higher education are run by autonomous, interrelated academic communities, often described as collegial governance. On the other hand, they are an instrument for the fulfillment of goals that are often external to the academic community. What, then, is the role of academics and academic knowledge in governance of higher education and research, and how does this reflect on and impact their aims and overall place in society? Fostered through joint workshops and an open dialogue, this double volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations develops a deeper understanding of collegiality, examining through a unique comparative perspective how it is translated and practiced in different settings across the world. Concentrating on challenges to collegiality and the erosion of faculty governance, this first installment analyzes global waves of reforms, ways in which various kinds of managerial modes of organization and control come to reshape universities, and how this intersects with the evolving missions of universities as institutions. Revealing the globalization, homogenization and variation that have come to characterize the collegiate system, University Collegiality and the Erosion of Faculty Authority critically considers the state of and future of the higher education system, and how we can consciously shape it moving forward.
