Suchergebnisse

Anyone who wants to know what is really happening in schools, behind all the hype and political rhetoric about the privatizing reforms in education, should read this book. It clarifies how private interests are influencing the public education process

This thesis investigates how effective works of fiction are, through their depictions of past worlds, in providing us with a resource for the study of the history of the period in which that fiction is set. It assesses past academic literature on the role of fiction in historical understanding, and on the processes involved in the writing, reading, adapting, and interpreting of fiction. It contends that the creation and consumption of fiction has not been looked at in a holistic way in terms of an overall process that takes us from author to consumer with all of the potential intermediate steps. The thesis proposes and describes such a process model, each step within which contains a number of key elements, namely actors, actions, influences, artefacts, and finally the real and imagined worlds of the fiction. It begins with the author, who through actions of perception and adaptation, and affected by various external influences, social, political, and aesthetic, mediates with elements of his or her contemporary world and incorporates them into the imagined world of the initial artefact, the novel. It describes how at each stage in the process other actors (critics, adapters and curators) engage with previous artefacts such as the novel and previous adaptations, and their own set of influences, and through actions of reception, adaptation and interpretation create further artefacts such as critical reviews, adaptations and tourist interpretations that comprise further imagined worlds that can be compared to the author's original imagined world, and by extension, the original past world. Using a number of case studies of English novels of the period from 1800 to 1930, the thesis assesses what the practical evidence of the process in action tells us about the ability of a novel to act as an adjunct to contemporary records in providing insights into that original real world. These studies incorporate analysis of the novels themselves, and of subsequent artefacts such as film and television adaptations, curated literary places and guidebooks, and both professional and lay reviews. The thesis concludes that fiction in its various forms, and especially in its adapted and interpreted forms, whilst not a pure historical document as such, has the ability to provide us with a vivid perception of a past world. It contends that the process model could be used as an aid in the teaching of History or English Literature, or as an aid to the general consumer of fiction, to help remove the layers of imagined worlds that potentially lie between us and a past historical world, thereby reducing the ability of that layering to create a misleading view of history.

In my article, I examine the use of foreign currency in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) border economy since the 1980s. I focus not on the US dollar so beloved of elites in Pyongyang but on the steady uptake of Chinese renminbi by nonelites, a phenomenon that emerged first from the economy of the border region that the DPRK shares with China. Relying on testimony from structured interviews conducted in 2014 with former DPRK citizens now based in the Republic of Korea, I position the expansion of foreign currency usage within the history of contemporary DPRK marketization, specifically linking that expansion to economic shocks felt in 1992, 2002, and 2009. I conclude by discussing the threats and opportunities presented by the rising tide of foreign currency possession and use. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

2014 Summer. ; The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 sought to empower Native communities to reattain their ancestral human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. Issues both in theory and in practice have arisen in regard to the law and have made implementation difficult and controversial. This paper seeks to analyze the power provided by the legislation and how it applied in the practice of compliance. This power dynamic is then reconciled within the repatriation ethic of the United States as well as internationally. As the scope broadens, an international repatriation ethic emerges that establishes repatriation of culturally affiliatable human remains and sacred objects as a basic human right for indigenous peoples.