The Role of the Student Researcher: Notes from Hadrian’s Wall

Fieldwork carried out for a Masters dissertation examined, through interviews, how well a consultation on the future management of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site had been carried out. Unexpected access was granted during a tense and uncertain period for those involved in managing the Site, at least partly because as a student, the author was not affiliated with any of the organisations concerned. This paper will examine the roles and relationships that the student may find him/herself in, in such a situation, and the possible benefits and dangers these bring. It will also look at the student’s privilege of a sustained period to focus on a single topic, often denied to academics. In the case of an MA, this produces relatively quick results and the possibility of contributing to urgent current issues, if students can be persuaded to publish.     

‘A Still Ecstasy of Freedom and Enjoyment’: Walking the City in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This article situates Charlotte Brontë’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth-century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Brontë contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobility theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Brontë foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Brontë offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Brontë to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Brontë as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Brontë studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.     

Heritage and scent: research and exhibition of Istanbul’s changing smellscapes

This paper examines heritage, and particularly intangible heritage, by concentrating on the experience of smell to explore a heritage site in Istanbul, Turkey: the Spice Market. Due to a restoration project, the site became the focus of the 2012 international workshop ‘Urban Cultural Heritage and Creative Practice,’ which aimed at documenting the existing and threatened scents of the marketplace. In 2016 a gallery exhibition, ‘Scent and the City,’ was created as part of an effort to raise awareness about how scent constitutes an important component of the heritage of place. After providing a brief overview of the marketplace’s transformations since its construction in the seventeenth century, this paper covers various methods of scent research, including scent walks, mapping, oral history interviews, and artistic performances, and illustrates how the smellscapes of this historic, and now touristic, quarter of Istanbul are changing. By bringing a sensory approach to this important heritage site in Istanbul we demonstrate how an embodied approach, which forefronts scent as intangible heritage and a primary modality, can serve as a catalyst for individuals and communities to access their memories, emotions, and values and increase awareness of the role scent plays in defining locality.     

Dream City, Plaster City: Worlds’ Fairs and the Gilding of American Material Culture

This article focuses on the “gilding” in the Gilded Age: the imitative finishes and faux fa?ades that made the artifice of the Gilded Age possible. By drawing from the history of international world’s fairs and results from the 2008 archaeological excavation of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, these imitative forms can be seen to have provided an authentically transformative experience to those who consumed them by virtue of their cheap and temporary materials. Finally, looking at the twenty-first-century “McMansions” of the Second Gilded Age shows a similar drive to sustain illusions of affluence and status through imitative material forms.     

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the “Big Book” of His Generation: Man Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels starting with The Englishman’s Boy (1996) have been widely discussed and celebrated in academic books and journals, but his first collection of stories, Man Descending (1982), has been largely neglected by the academic critics. An examination of sociopolitical references, with a special focus on gender and masculinity, in a coherent group of these stories (“The Watcher,” “Drummer,” Cages,” “Man Descending,” and “Sam, Soren and Ed”), reveals a writerly personality that, while acutely sensitive to contemporary social and political developments, and itself deeply implicated in these trends, nevertheless stands uncomfortably apart from and assumes a critical attitude toward the prevailing, generally progressive, sociopolitical trends of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last story of Man Descending, the protagonist-narrator Ed emerges as an aspiring thirty-year-old author who has attempted, but could not finish, two novels of his society and times, and these early stories constitute Vanderhaeghe’s own notes toward a never fully realized “Big Book” of his generation of Saskatchewan men, born in the early 1950s, coming to young adulthood in the socially and politically transformative 1960s and 1970s, and surviving into an embattled early manhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, as it is depicted in these stories, in which the aspirations of 1960s progressivism were hardening into a conformist sociopolitical orthodoxy.     

Turkey and the European Union: A Review of Turkey’s Readmission Agreement

Our aim in this article is to analyze Turkey’s Readmission Agreement with the EU in light of Turkey’s membership goal. More specifically, our aim is to propose the most rational political decision for concluding this process. Our study addresses three questions: (1) the impact of the Readmission Agreement on Turkey’s accession negotiations; (2) the outcomes of the implementation of the Readmission Agreement for Turkey; and (3) Turkey’s aim of becoming a full member of the EU by concluding the Agreement. By assessing the three potential scenarios of the Readmission Agreement process—minimum, optimum, and maximum benefit—we conclude that, whereas the first scenario does not coincide with our analysis, the other two, especially the third scenario, do coincide with it. Because the optimum benefit scenario does not disrupt the Readmission Agreement process it appears to be the most rational, balanced and beneficial agreement for both Turkey and the EU.     

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground

The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments “from the ground”. Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.     

‘Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT

‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.     

A SURVEY of the Ancient City of Zhangzhung——Notes on Archaeological Work in Ngari

The ruins of GugeKingdom arefound in Ngari,atthe westernmostpoint of the Tibet Plateau. Itabuts India in the west andsouth,Kashmir in the north-west and Xinjiang in the north.Screened by mountains onthree sides,it is tucked awayat an elevation of 4,000meters. This is a part of theworld which is very dry.TheZhangzhung Culture existedbefore the kingdom wasfounded.     

“A Most Revolting State of Affairs”: Theodore Roosevelt’s Aldermanic Bill and the New York Assembly City Investigating Committee of 1884

In 1884 Theodore Roosevelt chaired a special committee of the New York Assembly, charged with investigating corruption in New York City departments. Roosevelt had also presented to the Assembly a bill to strip the city’s Board of Aldermen of their power to confirm mayoral appointments. The “Roosevelt bill” sought to break the power of Tammany over these appointments, and reduce waste and corruption. While the committee’s investigation provided the press lurid examples of corruption and incompetence, in the end it did little to diminish Tammany’s power. For Roosevelt, however, the committee hearings served as a perfect backdrop to his Aldermanic bill which was eventually signed into law by Governor Grover Cleveland. The parallel paths of the bill and the committee revealed Roosevelt as a shrewd politico building his reputation as an urban reformer.     

Dressing a City’s Demeanour: Ottoman Costume Albums and the Portrayal of Urban Identity in the Early Seventeenth Century

The costume album remains an invaluable tool in revealing how patrons organised and catalogued their constantly expanding world through dress. Considering the success of the costume book as a booming market product in early modern Europe and its response in the bazaars of Ottoman Istanbul in the early seventeenth century, the topic warrants further examination of how these books shaped literate society’s perceptions of other cultures. Two early costume albums illustrate a compelling dialogue concerning the population of Ottoman Istanbul, both commissioned in bazaars by foreign travellers: the Warsaw Album of the Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (BOZ 165), and the Peter Mundy Album currently residing at the British Museum (Add. 23880/1974-6-7-013). My paper assesses how these books create contrasting portrayals of power and social diversity in the Ottoman Empire by using depictions of dress as windows into cultural mores. I explore how each book attempts to form a city portrait through its compilation of characters and dress in the albums. With these sources, I highlight how the joint efforts of Ottoman artists and foreign patrons offer a surprising range of interpretation, despite their mass-produced reputation in scholarship. This study highlights the considerable role of the European compiler as a curatorial agent in this process.     

A gendered media analysis of the prime ministerial ascension of Gillard and Turnbull: he’s ‘taken back the reins’ and she’s ‘a backstabbing’ murderer

In contemporary Australian politics, challenges to the Prime Ministerial role have become more common. Australia saw five Prime Ministers from 2010 to 2015 including Australia’s first ever woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. A stark contrast is evident in media portrayals of Gillard and her male counterparts, apparent most recently in the response to Malcolm Turnbull’s ascension to the Prime Ministership. A range of evidence has been produced, in disciplines including political science and media studies, suggesting the existence of systemic gender bias in the mainstream media in English-speaking democracies. This article is the first to compare the media portrayals of Gillard and Turnbull’s respective ascensions to leadership, which it does drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and using a content and discourse analysis. It contributes further evidence of gender bias in the coverage of political leaders.