Scientific Progress Doubts and Hopes

Abstract

Our scientific and technological world must be accepted, whatever the reservations guarding above all the preservation of a genuinely humane existence on this Earth. The most difficult problem facing humanity is the present population explosion which appears at present insoluble, as humanity shows itself unequal to this challenge. Equally daunting is the prospect of nuclear war, and only if we can make reason and responsibility the yardsticks of our actions, is there any hope.     

An Army of Educators: Gender,Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961

The conventional scholarly narrative of gender in post‐revolutionary Cuba is that the revolutionary government prevented the emergence of an expressly feminist movement by addressing women's basic needs and simultaneously eliminating autonomous space for female organising. Recent scholarship has increasingly considered women's participation in revolutions in order to understand women's roles in post‐revolutionary societies. Looking beyond armed insurrection for instances of female participation in revolution, this article considers women's roles in the Cuban Literacy Campaign. An analysis of the testimonies of female former volunteer teachers and of the official rhetoric and content of the campaign suggests that the broader narrative of cooption, while certainly accurate overall, threatens to obscure instances in which women did challenge traditional gender norms in meaningful ways. This paper argues that the Cuban Literacy Campaign and the participation of women in that campaign significantly impacted Cuban patriarchal culture at a crucial moment of consolidation for the revolutionary regime. In other words, though the male‐led revolution did not give women the space to organise against patriarchy, by actively participating in the revolution, women did help change the nature of Cuban patriarchy.     

论人地关系的异化与人地系统研究

以工具的使用、农业文明的出现、文明社会的产生和工业革命为标志,人地关系发生了四次异化过程,形成了由自然环境、人类环境、社会环境和人类共同组成的、为人类所特有的人地系统。所谓的人地关系是人地系统中各组成部分之间相互关系的总称。人地系统受自然、技术和社会环境共同驱动,其核心是资源（自然环境）—生产（人为环境）—消费（人类）三者之间的平衡。人地关系研究的任务在于揭示人地系统的驱动机制以及系统内部相互作用机制     

The Contribution of Reinhold Niebuhr's ‘Moral Ambiguity’ to Contemporary Discussions on the Morality of Intervention and the Use of Force in a Post-Cold War World

Abstract

The post-Cold War world poses challenges to traditional principles guiding the ethics of the use of force. Military intervention and the current war on terror are two phenomena that challenge just war criteria such as just cause, right authority, and reasonable hope for success. The just war tradition is helpful but needs to be expanded and re-thought to address the pressing issues of our time. This paper suggests Reinhold Niebuhr's category of ‘moral ambiguity’ as a contribution to the discussion. His application of moral ambiguity to his situation during World War II and the Cold War witnesses to the depth that such a category can add to current international circumstances fraught with moral complexity. Though it too requires critique, contemporary discussions on military intervention reflect many of Niebuhr's evaluations of the ambiguity in the use of force as different global actors seek humane alternatives to provide relief to intense human suffering.     

Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike

The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011. They have proven that Arab political life is more complex than the false choice between authoritarian rule or Islamist oppositions. The popular uprisings witnessed the emergence of “the Arab peoples” as political actors, able to topple entrenched authoritarian leaders, challenging repressive regimes and their brutal security apparatuses. In our contribution we want to analyze the political dynamics of these uprisings beyond the salient immediacy of the revolutionary events, by taking, as our guide, Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet The Mass Strike (2005 [1906], London: Bookmarks). An interesting theoretical contribution to the study of revolution, Luxemburg's book provides us with tools to introduce a historical and political reading of the Arab Spring. Based on fieldwork and thorough knowledge of the region, we draw from evidence from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the more gradual forms of political change in Morocco. Re‐reading the revolutionary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco through the lens of The Mass Strike offers activists on the ground insights into the dialectic between local and national struggles, economic and political demands, strike actions and revolution. The workers protests in Tunisia and Egypt during the last decade can be grasped as anticipations of the mass strike during the revolution; the specific mode in which workers participate as a class in the revolutionary process. This perspective enables an understanding of the current economic conflicts as logical forms of continuity of the revolution. The economic and the political, the local and the national (and one may add the global), are indissoluble yet separate elements of the same process, and the challenge for revolutionary actors in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the connection, organization and fusion of these dispersed moments and spaces of struggle into a politicized whole. Conversely, an understanding of the reciprocity between revolutionary change and the mass strike allows activists in Morocco to recognize the workers' movement as a potentially powerful actor of change, and trade unionists to incorporate the political in their economic mobilizations.     

Geographers and the Discourse of an Earth Transformed: Influencing the Intellectual Weather or Changing the Intellectual Climate?

This article considers how geographers might choose to respond to many geoscientists' claims that we are entering ‘the age of humans’. These claims, expressed in the concepts of the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and global tipping points, make epochal claims about Earth surface change that are also far‐reaching claims upon Earth's current inhabitants. The scale and scope of their normative implications are extraordinarily grand. After describing the content and wider context for these claims, the history of some geographers' engagement with global change research is sketched and their current contributions described. Wider alterations in the modus operandi of global change scientists seem to offer a perfect opportunity for geographers to demonstrate the intellectual and societal value of their discipline's ‘integrative’ aspirations. However, the article suggests that this opportunity is likely to be used in a rather conservative way that downplays the sort of wide, deep and plural forms of integrative analysis that a post‐Holocene world surely calls for. Such forms exist in geography but are currently not, by and large, feeding into wider debates in global change research about how to understand and influence the future of Earth and humanity. The question is: how might they serve to alter the intellectual climate prevailing in global change research as Future Earth becomes the new umbrella for its next phase of development?     

Albert Einstein,Physicist (1879–1955)

Abstract

Einstein's ideas changed man's thoughts about the totality of physics. These ideas were so fundamental for human thought that Einstein belongs to all the sciences and to all cultures. If ever there was a scientist whose centenary ought to be commemorated in an interdisciplinary journal, Einstein would be that one. This is because of the all-pervading influence of the revolution in physics in which Einstein played so paramount a part. Here we look back to what one man was able to contribute to transforming everyman's thought about the physical world. For the most part the lasting consequences are evident and well-known. Nevertheless, we have to observe that in some respect – not necessarily those emphasized by Einstein – the implications are still scarcely apprehended.     

The German Argentines between Nazism and Nationalism: The Patagonia Plot of 1939

Abstract

When seizing control of the US embassy In Tehran in November 1979 during the Iranian revolution, militant students not only took sixty-one US citizens hostage, but also captured thousands of pages of official documents. During the 1980s, they published seventy-seven volumes of selections in order to prove to the world that the United States had colluded with the Pahlavi regime, and to discredit Iranian moderates by revealing their former ties to US officials. In keeping with the militants' perception of the embassy's role in Iran's domestic politics, they entitled the publications Documents from the US Espionage Den (Asnad-i Lanah-yi Jasusi).¹ Surprisingly, among the papers published is one by Harvard University anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer entitled ‘Religion and Progress in Iran’, apparently written for a state department colloquium on Iran held on 25 May 1979. In the introduction, Fischer characterizes the Islamic Republic as a ‘challenge to modernization theory’: ‘Iran has been a major test case for modernization theory throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was the case where the constraint of capital was theoretically removed, and therefore the case where transformation from the third world into the first world was expected to be most feasible.’²     

(Education for) Sustainable Development in Geography Education: review and outlook from a perspective of Germany

Nearly 15 years after the Rio Conference and 10 years after the Lucerne Declaration on Geographical Education for Sustainable Development we are interested to what extent the goals of this declaration have been implemented? What role does Geography play in Education for Sustainable Development in higher education? We analyzed the modules of 107 degree programs with Geography as a degree major or as a teacher training subject at 55 German universities, technical colleges and universities of education. We conducted a quantitative text analysis in which we searched the key words “Sustainability”, “Sustainable Development”, “Education for Sustainable Development” and “Nature-Society Studies” in the Module Regulations. Our data indicate great heterogeneity between the degree programs. The key words were predominantly found in majors in “Human Geography”, “Geography” and teacher training programs for “academic high schools”. Aspects of the results considered in the paper include: (a) differences in the orientation of degree programs, (b) varying degree of implementation in the modules, (c) different conceptual understanding of the principles of sustainability, (d) the extent to which concepts of Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development are mixed, (e) heterogeneity between mandatory courses and electives.     

Digging Holes in Popular Culture: Archaeology and Science Fiction Miles Russell (ed.) with a Prgace by Douglas Adams

Abstract

The heritage management policy in the UK is to delegate management and protection of scheduled ancient monuments to quasi-autonomous heritage agencies. These agencies are an improvement on what preceded them: the dry, conservative and underfunded Ministry of Works. However, by analysing the way in which Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments manages the castles in North Wales one can see that the current system has many inherent failings. Underfunding, a lack of commitment to education and preservation and the artificial division of responsibility along modern pseudo-national boundaries are evidence that the current policy has run its course and now needs to be re-thought. Furthermore, there must be more effort made to present a more inclusive heritage by accepting that the heritage sites in Wales exist within a multicultural Britain and a world of shared human experience. Emerging as a model for future heritage management is Denbigh Castle in North Wales. The site was abandoned in 1998 after Cadw decreed that it did not generate enough income. Subsequently rescued by the local council, it is now thriving. Denbigh stands as an example of how a heritage site can be integrated with the local community that has lived in its shadow for hundreds of years.     

Letter to the Editor

Abstract

The last decade has seen an increasing awareness of the global impacts on our environment of modern technological civilization. To understand and deal with these impacts, we need to develop a science of the biosphere – a science that views life on the Earth from a planetary perspective. Recent scientific and technical advances make this science possible now. These advances include the development and testing of satellite remote sensing of Earth resources; advances in computer-based data acquisition, storage, analysis and dissemination; development of interdisciplinary efforts among scientists who recognize the need for this science; and the development of mathematical theory and computer simulation methods appropriate for the study of the biosphere. This review describes the basic needs for this new science and the advances which make the science possible.     

Cultural policies for sustainable development: four strategic paths

Abstract

In the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, the role of culture is limited. We argue that culture’s absence is rooted in the longue durée of interplay among theoretical and policy debates on culture in sustainable development and on cultural policy since the mid-twentieth century. In response to variations in concepts and frameworks used in advocacy, policy, and academia, we propose four roles cultural policy can play towards sustainable development: first, to safeguard and sustain cultural practices and rights; second, to ‘green’ the operations and impacts of cultural organizations and industries; third, to raise awareness and catalyse actions about sustainability and climate change; and fourth, to foster ‘ecological citizenship’. The challenge for cultural policy is to help forge and guide actions along these co-existing and overlapping strategic paths towards sustainable development.     

Archaeology,Cultural Property,and the Military

Abstract

Poland's ‘silent revolution’ which led to the disintegration of the Communist regime in 1989 was inevitably reflected in the financial situation of archaeological research. Some well-established institutions which lost their secure government funding were disrupted or even destroyed.

Cuts in the numbers of research staff (by around 30%), the change of research priorities from purely problem-oriented studies towards rescue excavations and the introduction of the market mechanism (in the system of grants and short-term contracts) began a process of painful reorientation and restructuring.

The challenge posed by private enterprise, by a gigantic programme of highways construction and by the emergence of wealthy sponsors brought about changes in the mentality of Polish archaeologists, changes which took place under the influence of growing surveillance by society at large and by the communications media.

Notions of social responsibility, ethics, effectiveness and financial transparency should define this ‘new’ reality which has been taking shape under the pressure of daily problems. However, far from all working archaeologists are able to understand this challenge.     

‘Will you be my mentor?’ Feminist mentoring at mid-career for institutional change

Abstract

This collaborative paper written by mid-career and senior faculty employed in public and private institutions explores the challenges of feminist mentoring at mid-career. We engage this problematic using dialogical writing as a means to highlight our experiences and needs for mentoring, while simultaneously co-mentoring one another to protect each other from cynicism and despair. Placing these experiences and dialogues in conversation with the existing literature on mentoring, we address the ways that mentoring can both reproduce and transform the neoliberal university, while simultaneously exploring the tensions these possibilities produce in the context of mid-career feminist mentoring. We discuss particular challenges associated with mid-career mentoring, focusing primarily on our roles as feminist, anti-racist mentors to non-traditional students and junior faculty. While recognizing that there is no clear solution to the challenges of feminist mentoring and institutional change, we examine various models of mentoring, highlighting both the potential and limitations of informal mentoring in producing institutional change. Our intention is that this dialogical piece of writing allows us to support each other as we share our own reflections, while offering mentoring advice for colleagues at different career stages. While mentoring can open up the possibility for minor disruptions and is an essential coping mechanism, it is just one small part of the struggle to challenge the structural inequality of the academy.     

Internationalisation of the Curriculum: Designing inclusive education for a small world

Responding to the globalisation of commerce and communication and driven by competition in the multi-billion dollar international market for higher education, many universities are seeking to market their educational provision internationally. Feedback from some disappointed 'customers' has created pressure for change in the way that instruction is designed and delivered. This pressure is beginning to affect teachers in subjects perceived as international in perspective. This paper reviews the strategies suggested by Western universities to achieve internationalisation of the curriculum. Internationalisation is a major project that affects all aspects of a university's provision, including its priorities for staff development and career rewards. The challenge for course developers is to design a curriculum that serves global rather than national priorities, which does not rely on prior knowledge of local provenance, where students from all sources share equal opportunities for advancement in an inclusive learning environment, and which serves to introduce stay-at-home students to the demands of an increasingly multinational world of work.     

Notes and News

Abstract

The history of industrial activity in an area not normally thought of as an engineering stronghold shows how some highly significant engineering developed; up to the 1950s more people were employed in engineering in the Bristol area than in any other single trade. Bath, as a centre of tourism and of 'polite' society, is archetypal of British attitudes to industry yet the development here of Stothert &; Pitt crane and pump making and the forgotten lessons of the Day two-stroke engine of 1891 show the vital importance of manufacturing industry to the creation of wealth in Bath as elsewhere. Yet we continue scandalously to ignore the proper study of our industrial past in favour of more attractive but much less significant aspects of our history, and thus fail to learn the many lessons that history could reveal. This paper is a revised version of an invited lecture given to the Association for Industrial Archaeology, at its ninth annual conference at Bath in September 1987.     

The Relevance of Cassirer and the Rewriting of Intellectual History

Summary

This essay aims to discuss the historiographical implications and premises of Peter Gordon's masterly book Continental Divide, in which he re-evaluates the Davos meeting between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. This impressive reminder of the prospects of intellectual history deserves to be paid serious attention, particularly in European philosophy departments. Gordon's book exemplifies how problems of systematic philosophy can be clarified by a detour through history.

I want to highlight three aspects of Gordon's book that fundamentally transform and deepen our understanding of intellectual history in general and the Davos meeting in particular. First, I highlight one of the main merits of Gordon's study: his emphasis on the plurality behind the term ‘continental philosophy’. This opens up a whole new perspective on a seemingly well-known event within the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Second, I address Gordon's methodological premises, which challenge and fundamentally transform our understanding of intellectual history. Third, I attempt to summarise, from an intellectual history perspective, Gordon's argument about Cassirer's relevance. Here we are faced with the task of realigning and legitimising philosophy in a radically historicised world. To adumbrate the core of my comment I should say that I am thrilled by Gordon's book. I agree with nearly everything he says apart from his conclusions. In a closing remark I will try to explain the reasons for this surprising divergence.     

Archaeology and the study of indigenous peoples in Siberia

Abstract

This paper provides a brief outline of the inter-relationship between changes in the Russian state's policy of control in Siberia and academic study of the indigenous cultures in the area. Although the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Siberia were classified according to some of the same stereotypes that were (and are) applied in other parts of the world (representing them as remnants of the evolutionary process, noble savages or ecological guardians) these frameworks emerged in distinctive political, ideological and economic contexts during Russia's turbulent history.     

Explaining the evolution of ironmaking recipes – An example from northwest Wales

Building on insights from previous Darwinian studies of technology, this paper explores the potential of evolutionary models to explain diversity and change in bloomery ironmaking recipes. Bloomery, or direct process ironmaking, involves the solid state reduction of iron oxide to metal and was the predominant means of producing iron in the pre-industrial world. The most archaeologically accessible record of bloomery practice is slag, an essential by-product of the smelting process. Ironmaking recipes can be characterized by their slag chemistry using a combination of multivariate statistics, ternary phase diagrams, and oxide ratios. Models derived from evolutionary theory are used to explain the shape, structure, and trajectories of ironmaking lineages identified from patterns of slag chemistry in terms of invention, selection, and socially mediated constraint processes. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by its application to slag excavated at Llwyn Du, a late medieval bloomery in northwest Wales.