The Role of Universities in Urban Regeneration: Reframing the Analytical Approach

Universities have resources for urban dynamics that are difficult to provide by other means. For this reason, these organizations are crucial actors in urban regeneration. This article sets out a conceptual framework for the analysis of the role played by higher education institutions in urban renewal initiatives. It is based on an integrated analysis of the uses of the university both as promoters of business innovation and in terms of their civic and social outcomes. Urban regeneration of cities in decline is used as a “strategic research site” to understand universities’ potential. The discussion is organized around four types of contributions: physical infrastructure, human resources, economic development and civic engagement. The debate enlightens the options for integrating universities' capabilities as an asset for urban regeneration and sets out implications for the institutionalization of practices and decision-making in this field.     

Beyond Dichotomy: Concepts of the Nation and the Distribution of Membership

Abstract. Globalisation, fragmentation and the emergence of identity politics challenge the myth of the homogeneous nation-state. They also lend increasing importance to processes of national boundary construction. This article argues that the dichotomy of ethnic and civic nations which traditionally informs much of social science discourse on nations and nationalism is inadequate to analyse how nations distribute membership. The same is true of the Meineckean distinction between cultural and political nations. Both typologies fail to account for some actually existing types of national boundary construction and they suggest that, in any instance, the process of boundary construction is homogeneous, universal and generic. As a consequence of these shortcomings, the ethnickivic dichotomy needs to be revised, by disentangling different organising principles at work in defining the boundaries of ethnic and civic nations: ancestry, race, culture and territory.     

Towards a more emotional geography of civic pride: a view from an English city

This article argues that civic pride has been relatively under-explored in geography and deserves greater attention as an emotional and political value associated with place. Through a case study of Nottingham, England, I examine how local civic actors perceive and express civic pride and the values it encompasses, using a discourse analysis of interviews, policy material and local media. I illustrate how civic pride is connected with everyday feelings of identity, community and what people value and aspire to in a given place, and demonstrate how we might think critically about civic pride’s connections to and relevance beyond local government. The analysis illustrates how, in the context of recent developments across British cities, civic actors and institutions engage with and value the city in different ways and that a diverse set of discourses and practices can emerge from a shared concern to protect civic identity and autonomy. Bringing together emotional and urban geographies literature, this paper challenges geographers to think carefully about how place-based values like civic pride can shape and reproduce often well-meaning but problematic discourses and practices within cities, but also how the underlying meanings and values associated with pride can surface in resistive and progressive ways.     

Citizen Paul

In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul twice evokes his rights as a Roman citizen. When he crosses from the jurisdiction of the Jewish to that of the Roman court, Paul in effect completes his definitive mapping of Jewish law as a local affair whose peculiar practices must be subsumed and refigured by the universal order promised by the Messiah to all nations. Paul's real and epistolary journeys to Rome effect a symbolic translation westward of Jewish civic themes, linking the destiny of the Jews to the European political tradition. Yet Paul does so by evacuating the central mark of membership in Israel, namely the covenant of circumcision, of its continued validity. Rather than either salvaging Paul's universalism as the basis of modern democracy or critiquing his cultural politics, I use the concept of citizenship to begin calculating the consequences of Paul's multiple memberships in three distinct juridical orders: the Hellenistic city‐state, the nation of Israel, and the Roman Empire. My goal is not to re‐localize or de‐legitimate Paul's universalism in the name of individual cultures, but rather to recall the integral dream of universalism to its dialogue with diverse citizenship protocols, including Jewish ones, as well as to disclose the universal dimension of seemingly local civic rituals and routines.     

Civic Education and Political Knowledge in Australia

As part of the renewed emphasis on national identity and citizenship, interest in civic education in Australia has increased. Although both Labor and Liberal national governments have been committed to introducing civic education, there is little research to show that the politically knowledgeable citizen is the more sophisticated and competent citizen. This paper uses survey data collected in 1996 to examine the extent of political knowledge in Australia and to analyse its consequences for political literacy, competence, and participation. The results show that the median citizen could answer two out of seven factual questions correctly, with women, the young and those with less education being more likely to provide incorrect answers. The relationship between knowledge and attitudes and behaviour shows that factual knowledge increases political literacy and, to a lesser extent, competence. However, knowledge has little effect on political participation, a major goal for civic education among politicians. Overall, the increased political knowledge that civic education creates is more effective in generating positive views of democratic institutions, and less effective in shaping political behaviour. The democratic citizen is expected to be well informed about political affairs to know what the issues are, what their history is, what the relevant facts are, what alternatives are proposed, what the party stands for, what the likely consequences are. (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee 1966, 308)     

Naturalising the Highlands: geographies of mountain fieldwork in late-Victorian Scotland

Through a detailed examination of two late-Victorian field clubs dedicated to the exploration of alpine botany in the Scottish Highlands, this paper contributes to work on the historical geographies of civic science. By focusing on the scientific and social character of mountain fieldwork it analyses the reciprocal relations between the spaces, practices and science of Highland botanising and wider concerns with sociability, character and civic virtue. In so doing it investigates the transposition of a variety of discursive resources from evolutionism to tourism into the language and practices of botanical science. This focus enables the paper to complicate more general accounts of natural history in the Victorian period and to consider a number of methodological issues relevant to reconstructing the historical geographies of science.     

Crafting Aboriginal Nations in Taiwan: The Presbyterian Church and the Imagination of the Aboriginal National Subject

Abstract

This study argues that since the end of World War II, the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church’s practical institutionalised arrangements for evangelisation have had the unintended consequence of creating an imagined multi-layered aboriginal national Subject. The argument is founded upon analysis of three main points. First, aboriginal members’ daily practices within the three-level federalist church polity formed in their minds an acquired “schema”, a ready-made cognitive structure that could be easily appropriated by them to imagine their own nations in a certain way. Second, when the Church promoted the translation of the Bible and hymns into aboriginal vernaculars for practical evangelising reasons, it unintentionally created tribe-based cultural-linguistic mediums as national languages upon which the contents of aboriginal nations could be elaborated and reproduced. This step further consolidated tribe-based ethnic categorisation and facilitated the reification of aboriginal nations. Third, since aboriginal ministers and elders were institutionally endowed with many strengths in comparison to other aboriginal elites, they came to serve as human activators in formulating and spreading the imagination of the multi-layered aboriginal national Subject.     

文化多元与社会和谐观照下的遗产保护——以两次国际博协大会决议为中心

对比2007年和2010年两次国际博协大会决议可以看出,尊重与保护文化多样性是近年国际博协的主要政策导向。决议从多个方面倡导世界各国的博物馆在遗产保护中秉持多元文化理念,加强自身所应承担的道德责任,促进不同民族之间相互理解和相互包容,进而促进人类公平、正义与社会和谐。     

Civic religion in late medieval Europe

This article reassesses the value of a term that has proved very durable in late medieval historiography. It identifies three main research clusters using ‘civic religion’ (North American, Francophone and Germanic), and examines inherent problems with the term, particularly its association with ‘civil religion’ and its ambiguity of meaning, at once ‘urban’ (specific to towns) and ‘municipal’ (governmental). The term has been applied particularly to the city-states of northern Italy: the article also looks at three different cities outside this region, Zaragoza, Bruges and Salisbury, as case studies to consider the term's wider applicability. Despite their differences, this article argues that there were in all of them common religious practices associated with urban government; and that ‘civic religion’ does serve as a useful term to classify these practices as a basis for future research – not as aspects of advancing ‘civil religion’, but to describe the connections and elisions that city councils made in sacred terms between ‘municipal’ and ‘urban’ interests.     

Freemasonry as a playground for civic nationalism

This article explores correspondences between the ideals of ‘civic nationalism’ (hereafter CN) and the practices of Freemasonry, a worldwide male fraternity. Freemasons practice an elitist stance of civilizing the self, translated into a collective mission of society‐building. Though not a national movement, Freemasonry shares conceptual similarities with CN and was implicated in civic‐national revolutions in the Americas and the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israeli Freemasonry, the study explores Masonic sociability as a playgound for practicing civic friendship and negotiating the inherent tensions of CN. Freemasons straddle between particularist and universalist understandings of fraternity, virtue and charity, which carry over to questions of citizenship, patriotism and nationalism. This boundary work over collective attachments represents a pragmatic attempt, not to resolve universalist and particularist preferences, but to contain and incorporate both within exclusivist Masonic practices. Far from marking the failure of CN, Masonic sociability illustrates its political significance, envisioning the nation as a social club of chosen friends.     

‘Talking Itself Out of a Political Future’: Education and Australian Army Engagement with Papua New Guinean Independence, 1966–72

The Australian Army, while having a long association with Papua New Guinea after the Second World War and before independence in 1975, is often conceptualized as a small player in the decolonization process, of interest to scholars because of its cost and potential threat to democratic government. This article examines the Army’s education programme and associated policies in the decade before independence to argue that the institution was acutely aware of looming decolonization, and actively sought to create a national Papua New Guinean military by repurposing policies originally designed to serve Australia’s defence needs, in particular through ‘civic’ education. It embarked on this path without direction from the Department of Territories. While the results of ‘civic’ education are difficult to determine, this article shows that the Australian Army was engaged in the profound shifts occurring around it in Papua New Guinea.     

Janus and Gender: Women and the Nation's Backward Look

Abstract. This article considers how nations are imagined and characterised in relation to the national roles allocated to women, with particular reference to the early Irish state. It examines two related dichotomies, that between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms, and the concept of the nation itself as ‘Janus‐faced’, simultaneously looking ahead to the future and back to the past. It has been suggested that women bore the burden of the nation's ‘backward look’ towards a putative traditional rural past and an organic community, while men appropriated the nation's present and future. This thesis is examined with reference to Ireland and the representation of women in visual imagery and travel writing.     

20世纪20年代平教运动与现代国民教育——以平民千字课本为中心

从本质上讲,中国现代平民教育运动是一场国民教育运动。20世纪20年代公民教育运动兴起后,晏阳初等人虽然也曾致力于此,但无论从其思想认识还是从社会实践上看,均不出国民教育的范围。平民教育运动在塑造现代国民方面的主要贡献,是向底层社会播散现代国家观念和国民意识,这从当时编写的平民千字课本中可以看出来。平教运动期间通过平民千字课向底层社会播散现代国家观念与国民意识的做法,对我们今天完成民族复兴大业,仍有着重要的借鉴意义。     

‘We close towns for a living’: spatial transformation and the Tour de France

This paper explores the ways in which the passage of the Tour de France bicycle race through France produces a distinctive cultural cartography or social map of France. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991) conceptual triad of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces, the paper argues that the Tour de France both represents and is a space that is annually reordered and structured by very particular cultural practices. Through an analysis of the process (and politics) of route selection, the incorporation of iconic landscape and the transformation of civic space as the race moves across the country, the paper foregrounds the socially constructed nature of map making and the role of human intervention in producing and reproducing key cultural cartographies of France through the Tour de France.     

An Authoritative Voice: Jane Addams and the Oratorical Tradition

Oratory, the act of speaking in public on civic matters, remained a male prerogative in the United States until the 1830s, when increasing numbers of women began ignoring the taboo and established a female oratorical tradition. This essay outlines how American women claimed the authority to speak and then developed their tradition, which was a social reform in itself, over three generations. It then examines how the youthful Jane Addams, a member of the third generation who became a social reformer, gained her education as an orator and struggled in new ways with society’s continuing doubts about women's civic authority.     

Critical spatial learning: participatory mapping,spatial histories,and youth civic engagement

As digital technologies become ubiquitous in many places, scholars of civic engagement, youth and political life, and geographic education have explored the potential of teaching critical and spatial thinking through digital technologies. This paper examines interactive digital mapping as a technology environment for teaching and practicing critical spatial thinking, in relation to civic engagement. From this participatory and dialogic mapping project with teenage girls in Seattle, Washington, we develop a conceptualization of critical spatial thinking that emphasizes how social and spatial processes intertwine to generate societal inequalities and show how this learning informs students’ social and spatial civic responses. We show how interactive digital mapping pedagogies offer students an opportunity to develop awareness of what happens in their urban geographies, but also how and what they might do to intervene.     

On National Heritage,Grand Narratives,and ‘Making History Fun’: Founders’ Hall,Prince Edward Island and the Story of Canada

Cities in developed countries are increasingly challenged by the advent of a global economy that mandates generating creative images of their cities. Meanwhile, it is argued in this study that globalisation, and its Arabic version of Dubaisation, is affecting the sustainability of cities as distinguished destinations because urban representation is influenced not only by ‘standardised global cliché’ but also by ‘standardised local images’ that transforms local cultures into contested heritage as it intensifies an official and civic nexus. The paradox is examined in Jordan, specifically the famously branded ‘city of mosaic’ – Madaba, where the state government is currently competing for attracting international investments and tourism development to achieve neoliberal urban restructuring. Urban heritage representation has been subject to passive dominant official discourse that rests upon orthodox mosaic practices of remote past – a praxis that is not necessarily endorsed by civic Ahl elbalad. The local mosaic heritage has hitherto been transformed into a competing culture that fosters heritage dualities and challenges the internal implications of heritage representation with its elevated feelings of alienation, disempowerment, gentrification and socio-cultural exclusion. A theoretical framework has been suggested for an alternative civic-orientated heritage revival that allows reconciliation between the official/civic nexus yet meanwhile stimulates creative urban images and identities. Other insights are also considered in the study.     

Migrating heritage? Recreating ancestral and new homeland heritage in the practices of immigrant minorities

ABSTRACT

This paper problematises the engagement with heritage of immigrants and their new-homeland-born children, bringing together heritage and migration studies. It discusses the use of ancestral heritage in group identity maintenance strategies, and sheds light on minorities’ participation in the heritage of the dominant population. The paper investigates how the ancestral heritage of immigrant minorities has adjusted to the circumstances of the new homeland, and how the elements of heritage of the dominant population were fitted within the festivity routines of minority families. Therefore, it attempts to grasp the transformations of heritage occurring as a consequence of adjusting heritage practices to the new settings. To do so, it employs a notion of ‘heritage in becoming’ that refers to the situational and processual character of recreating inherited practices within the circumstances of the present. The paper proves that the boundary between minority and majority culture in the heritage practices of individuals is blurred, discussing the transformations the traditional heritages of nations undergo under the influence of migration. The author attempts to answer the question of whether these new qualities can be accepted as part of a so-called multicultural heritage of nations.     

Citizens and scientists: toward a gendered history of scientific practice in post-revolutionary France

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober and meritorious citizen-scientist.     

MONARCHICAL IMAGE-MAKING IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION

This article deals with the image-making of Swedish monarchs in the decades preceding and succeeding the Swedish Revolutionary Year of 1809, a year witnessing the dethronement of a king and the composition of a new constitution. In this era, the monarchies of Europe faced a great challenge in accommodating conflicting ideals of the Ancien Régime and of emergent bourgeois civic society. In dynastic ceremonies and court culture, the Swedish monarchy made use of various resources in its strive for legitimacy by representing continuity as well as discontinuity, attempting to reconcile the old and the new, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’. In addition to material culture and spatial practices, practices with an immediate relationship to bodies constituted an available resource. Ceremonial deportment and the regulation of bodies and embodied practices (such as manners of dress) thus became a major concern in the endeavoured reconciliation of contradictory themes surrounding kingship in an age of revolution.