A critical approach to discipline of human geography as an apparatus for state hegemony in Turkey

This study examines the hegemony of political power on the discipline of human geography in Turkey. Throughout the history of the country, human geography curricula have been aligned with the nationalist and hegemonic power politics of state authorities instead of being guided by universal norms, thus ignoring Turkey’s sociopolitical and cultural geography. This is reflected in the contents of human geography text books at the high school and college level. Similarly, the subjects of articles that have appeared in the 12 academic geography journals published in Turkey within the last 71 years also support this claim. The intervention of political power in the academic identity of human geography and the efforts to align human geography curricula with a certain ideological view have resulted in the emergence of apolitical geographers, who remain deaf and blind to social issues. This study analyzes the negative features of human geography education curricula and their political implications in Turkey, and proposes several recommendations.     

Investigating student use and value of e-learning resources to develop academic writing within the discipline of environmental science

The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in higher education to support student learning is expanding. However, student usage has been low and the value of e-learning resources has been under investigation. We reflect on best practices for pedagogical design of e-learning resources to support academic writing in environmental science. A case study demonstrates that where resources are embedded into the curriculum they are highly valued by students with on average 83% of the class accessing files. Students were confident at writing tasks indicating that the resources effectively met their needs and expectations and enabled them to further develop discipline-specific writing skills. Scaffolded e-learning resources, designed around the identified threshold concepts of writing within the discipline, incorporating a knowledge narrative of explicit instruction and a strong teacher presence, delivered in a sequential manner and embedded into the curriculum, are valued and highly used by students in academic writing tasks.     

兰州古建置初探

兰州自古以来就是丝路重镇,历史文化遗存丰富。本文从古代建置及政治治所、文化遗存、城堡遗址、寺庙建置入手,勾勒出兰州古代建置治所文化遗存的脉络。     

Service as a Subversive Activity: On the centrality of service to an academic career

In the normative view of academic life, service is presented as an unfortunate inconvenience, a dull distraction from the real work of the academy, which is taken to be teaching and research. Service is also presented to the novice academic as an activity that is completely unconnected with the real work of teaching and research. Jan Monk has made service central to her academic career. A brief overview of her service activities shows how closely intertwined they have been with her scholarship and teaching. Moreover, I believe that Jan's service work demonstrates not only how service is central to a vibrant, meaningful, and rich academic life; it is also an essential vehicle for creating change within, as well as outside of, the academy.     

History as Moral Reflection

Book reviewed in this article:
The Degradation of American History , by David Harlan.     

"当代中国史国际高级论坛"学术总结

为庆祝中华人民共和国成立55周年而举办的这届"当代中国史国际高级论坛",是一次高水平的国际学术交流,集中反映了世界各国和中国各地中华人民共和国史研究的最新进展.     

对编纂资料性国史书的几点思考——以《中华人民共和国日史》为例

中共十一届三中全会以来,随着中华人民共和国史研究的广泛开展,一批体例各异、详略不一的资料性国史书相继出版。四川人民出版社2003年8月推出的卷帙浩繁的《中华人民共和国日史》(以下简称《日史》),就是其中之一。该书以年分卷,逐日记事,上自1949年10月1日起,下至1999年12月31日止,共计50卷。编纂者称该书是国家断代性质历史,     

Early Socialism as Intellectual History

Summary

This article examines approaches to early socialism from an intellectual history viewpoint, focussing on British Owenite socialism. It assesses the author's own research in the field over the past thirty-five years in an effort to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches he initially adopted to the field. It attempts to balance insights associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” with those gained in particular from the standpoints of the history of religion and the history of emotions, and a theory of group identity which can in part be associated with the history of utopianism     

西藏次仁切阿雪山博物馆

藏文化中“自然与人”的关系密不可分是藏民族文化精髓的重要组成部分。“次仁切阿”就源自喜马拉雅山脉的什么传说。几千年来,在藏族先民与青藏高原的和谐相处中,形成了特有的生活方式和民族文化。藏文化中“自然与人”的关系密不可分,是藏民族文化精髓的重要组成部分。“次仁切阿”就源自喜马拉雅山脉的神秘传说。     

History of Political Thought as Detective-Work

This paper offers practical guidance for empirical interpretation in the history of political thought, especially uncovering what authors meant and why they wrote what they wrote. I thus seek to fill a small but significant hole in our rather abstract methodological literature. To counter this abstraction, I draw not only on methodological theorising but also on actual practice—and on detective-work, a fruitful analogy. The detective analogy seeks to capture the intuition that we can potentially find right answers but must handle fragmentary evidence that different people can plausibly read in different ways. Placing the focus on evidence, and on combining different types of evidence, suggests that orthodox categories like ‘contextualist’ and ‘Marxist’ too often accentuate differences between scholars. This paper instead highlights core principles that unite us—ideas that underpin good textual interpretation across all ‘schools of thought’.     

Establishing an Ideologically Coherent History

This article analyses the historical culture of the Swedish Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SAP) during its formation in the last decades of the 19th century. Utilizing the theoretical concepts of myth and conceptual metaphor, the sense-making aspects of historical narration are studied, especially the way coherent stories are told, in which the movement under formation is made part of a long history leading to a desirable future. The SAP utilized history both morally-defensively and tactically-offensively. The moral use of history depicts Jesus, Münster, and the French Revolution, establishing the righteousness of revolt. The revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune, during which the workers are seen as acting more independently, are depicted in a way that draws attention to tactical aspects; lessons are learned on how the workers should act in a revolutionary situation. As has been shown to be the case regarding national narratives, the sense-making mechanisms of historical narration also tend to appeal to issues of identity. The metaphorical conceptualization of ideas and movements as individuals and families further underlines these issues.