The Problems of Utilizing ‘Direct Experience’ in Geography Education

In response to the various calls for sustainable development, a range of activities has been initiated by central and local government, business, NGOs and other institutions. In this paper, the authors focus on the important learning context of higher education. They review the agenda established at Rio and, through a critical examination of developments within the UK, comment on issues and challenges facing the sector.     

Preservation Status and Priorities for In Situ Monitoring of the Weapon Sacrifice in Illerup Ådal,Denmark

Abstract

Excavations of the southern part of a very rich sacri?cial bog in Illerup Ådal, Denmark between 1950 and 1985 recovered approximately 15,000 Iron Age artefacts. At the time, 60 per cent of the area was left unexcavated and thousands of objects are now preserved in situ, but the present preservation status has not been investigated for approximately twenty-?ve years. Extensive in situ monitoring was carried out for one year in order to present a prioritized plan for further monitoring of the unexcavated areas, producing documentation of groundwater table variations, water quality and vegetation in the area. Results show that the remaining artefacts are generally well preserved in a waterlogged and anaerobic environment. However, in the north-eastern part of the bog, the groundwater table is too low even in a year when net precipitation and hydrological conditions were near normal. In the centre of the bog elevated salt concentrations have been measured in the groundwater.     

The Enduring Fear and Allure of Miscegenation: In Response to John Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics

This brief intervention challenges John Hobson's view in The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics that anti-miscegenation sentiments are a thing of the past in international relations theory. Rather, it is argued, anti-miscegenation continues to live in international practices, such as consociational peace agreements and “two-state solutions,” as well as in the persistent unwillingness of international relations scholars to actively embrace trespassing of borders, particularly of racial and cultural ones. Thus Hobson's erudite, epic work is both hopeful and not – built upon binaries and distinctions, devoid of grey zones, blind to gender and sex and their relations to racial difference and international hierarchies it provides few openings, few possibilities for alternative politics or even for serious contestation of the racialized status quo that we inhabit at the moment.     

The In Situ Preservation in the Unsaturated Zone: Results from Environmental Investigations at the ‘Schultz Gate’ Case Study in the Medieval Town of Trondheim,Norway

Medieval Trondheim is located on the eastern part of Nidarneset, a small peninsula formed by the river plain at the mouth of the River Nid on the southern shore of Trondheimsfjord. The topographic conditions for medieval Trondheim differ from those of the other Norwegian medieval towns (notably Bergen, Oslo, and Tønsberg), and the protected, historic part of Trondheim contains anthropogenic sediments which lie entirely within an unsaturated environment. A large proportion of these sediments contain wood and other types of organic material. The thickness of the anthropogenic sediments varies greatly from more than 4 m to less than 0.5 m, and they overlie well-drained alluvial sands and gravels. The Directorate for Cultural Heritage (Riksantikvaren) and the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) have different roles in the management of cultural heritage sites. However, they cooperate in developing sustainable management and a scientific approach to research, as well as finding practical solutions aimed at securing stable preservation conditions for anthropogenic sediments that are vulnerable and sensitive to environmental changes, both chemical and mechanical. In this paper we present results from environmental investigations conducted in 2007 and 2012 at a location in the central part of medieval Trondheim where an in situ preservation project has been established on the site of new construction work. The project is cross-interdisciplinary, combining archaeological retrieval methods with the sampling and analysis of soil chemical parameters and the monitoring of present basic parameters such as temperature, moisture and redox potential. The monitoring has been ongoing since the beginning of 2013 and will continue until 2017.     

The Elephant In and Out of the Room: Remigio dei Girolami’s Responses to Charles de Valois

In November 1301, Charles de Valois, brother of French King Philip IV, entered Florence at the request of Pope Boniface VIII and his Florentine allies. While Charles’ mission was ostensibly peacemaking between Florence’s Black and White factions, in reality his visit led to violence and exile of leading Whites, including Dante. Much of what we know about these events was written in retrospect, from the chronicles of Compagni and Villani to Dante’s Commedia. The Florentine Dominican Remigio dei Girolami, however, preached two sermons that week that provide a more immediate impression. One was given at the official communal welcome ceremony for Charles. The other, one of his sermons De pace, was probably given at a semi-secret peace procession mentioned by Compagni. Rhetorical analysis of these two sermons shows that Remigio tailored his message to his audience. When Charles was present, Remigio diplomatically avoided the subject of factional division, instead advising Charles on his upcoming mission to Sicily (perhaps subtly encouraging him to get on with it and leave Florentine politics alone). In Charles’ absence, however, Remigio obliquely criticized Charles and stressed to his fellow-citizens that, as the sermon’s thema stated, peace was in their power.     

The Absence of Macpherson and Strauss in Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment

SUMMARY

Pocock's Machiavellian Moment is monumental in its erudition, and thus one may be surprised that Pocock virtually ignored Macpherson's Political Theory of Possessive Individualism in his assessment of seventeenth-century political thought, and ignored Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli. Pocock noted that ‘the schools of Marx, Strauss and Voegelin concur’ in holding Locke to be a bourgeois or possessive individualist. Pocock elaborated a paradigm of republicanism as civic humanism as a contrast to liberalism as possessive individualism. Pocock seemed to accept tacitly Macpherson's and Strauss's view that Locke inverted the Aristotelian view of property as a means to political participation, whereby politics became a means to the protection and accumulation of property. Macphersonian scholars have criticised Pocock for misinterpreting the function of property in the Atlantic republican tradition and Straussian scholars have criticised The Machiavellian Moment for its failure to distinguish ancient from modern republics, and for Pocock's failure to appreciate the epochal significance of Machiavelli's call to master fortune or dominate nature through technique. But it is questionable whether or not it is incumbent on an intellectual historian to address present preoccupations about capitalism or global technique.     

In Search of an Invisible Culture in David Plante’s American Ghosts and Robert Cormier’s Fade

David Plante’s American Ghosts (2005) and Robert Cormier’s Fade (1988), autobiographical narratives about growing up in southern New England in French Catholic neighborhoods called Little Canadas, both employ the trope of invisibility to convey the ethnic community’s lack of presence, agency, or permanence within an englobing American culture that progressively erodes the foundations of its cultural otherness. Both texts hinge upon cultural erasure. In Plante’s memoir, in which he seeks to gain access to his cultural past, his childhood self is haunted by the ghosts of his Indian forebears and his adult self, by the ghosts of his parish. These supernatural beings who shuttle between absence and presence signal the loss of cultural memory and identity that assimilation engenders. Cormier’s novel chronicles the effects of invisibility on three “faders” representing first-, second-, and third-generation French Canadians in New England. A metaphor for the progressive loss of ancestral heritage in the adopted land, Fade offers a portrait of the gradual disintegration of Frenchtown from its heyday in the 1930s to its dissolution in the 1960s.     

A Ticking Clock? Preservation and Management of Greenland’s Archaeological Heritage in the Twenty-First Century

ABSTRACT

Evaluating the rate of deterioration at archaeological sites in the Arctic presents several challenges. In West Greenland, for example, increasing soil temperatures, perennial thaws, coastal erosion, storm surges, changing microbial communities, and pioneer plant species are observed as increasingly detrimental to the survival of organic archaeological deposits found scattered along the country’s littoral zones and extensive inner fjord systems. This article discusses recent efforts by the REMAINS of Greenland project for developing a standardised protocol that defines the archaeological state of preservation, the preservation conditions, and asset value of organic deposits. Special emphasis is given to the degradation of materials such as bone and wood that are historically observed to be well-preserved in Greenland but now currently at risk. The protocol provides a baseline for monitoring future changes and will assist archaeologists in Greenland with a procedure for documenting and predicting areas of increasing vulnerability due to a warming climate.     

‘I Felt Connected to a Past World’: A Survey of Visitors to Colonial Archaeological Sites Conserved In Situ in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

While there is extensive international literature on the technology and techniques of archaeological conservation and preservation in situ, there has been only limited discussion of the meanings of the places created and the responses they evoke in visitors. Experience in Australia and New Zealand over the past decade suggests that the conservation of colonial archaeological remains is today seen as a far more desirable option, whereas previously many would have suggested that this kind of conservation was only appropriate in ‘old world’ places like Greece and Italy; and that the archaeology of the colonial period was not old enough to be of value. This paper discusses a recent survey of visitors to colonial archaeological sites which reveals some of the ways in which these archaeological remains are experienced, valued, and understood, and gives some clues as to why conservation in situ is an expanding genre of heritage in this region. The visitors surveyed value colonial archaeological sites conserved in situ for the link they provide to place, locality, and memory; for the feeling of connection with the past they evoke; and for the experience they provide of intimacy with material relics from the past. This emphasis on the affective qualities of archaeological remains raises some issues in the post-colonial context, as it tends to reinforce received narratives of identity and history, and relies on the ‘European’ antiquarian appreciation of ruins — making the urban environment more like Europe by creating evidence of similar historical layering.     

Routes of Resistance: Mobilizing Discourses of Opportunity in Ann Petry’s The Street and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point

Ann Petry’s The Street and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point provide important representations and affirmations of black people’s use of movements such as educational attainment and economic advancement to create routes to resist inequitable treatment and demand equal access to the benefits of belonging to American and Canadian national communities. In The Street, Lutie employs intellectual and economic movements to achieve her American dream but learns that systematic inhibitions block her intended ascension. In The Meeting Point, Bernice also tries to attain education and make financial strides to achieve her Canadian dream but finds herself barred from fully materializing that dream. Lutie and Bernice continue their quests to fulfill their mobility ideals, despite obstructions they face. Through that movement, which is driven by their knowledge of the implications of their exclusions from promises of the nations they call home, they counter boundaries intended to restrict them. While they do not accomplish fully their upward mobility ideals, their resistance demonstrates their refusal to be denied the benefits of American and Canadian discourses of opportunity. Petry’s and Clarke’s representations of this persistent resistance help inform and give voice to struggles against exclusionary practices blacks in the United States and Canada continually experience.     

The Saxon and Medieval Palaces at Cheddar,Somerset—an Interim Report of Excavations in 1960–62

A RUNE-INSCRIBED STONE was found built into the partition wall of a substantial ‘hall-like’ structure. It is translated ‘Porsteinn Einarsson cawed these runes’.     

“The churchwardens have not used to meddle with anie seate”: seating plans and parochial resistance to Laudianism in 1630s Somerset

This article considers the impact of the Laudian Reformation upon the spatial organisation of early modern English parish churches, drawing upon the Somerset churchwardens’ accounts and court depositions of the 1620s and 1630s. An explosion of scholarly literature on early modern church seating plans and pew disputes has increased our understanding of how early moderns used the parish floor space to represent and reinforce social hierarchies and relationships. This paper investigates the significance of pewing practices to understanding parochial receptions of Laudianism, which required an overhaul of church interiors and which impacted seating arrangements in turn. It proposes that Laudian attempts to enforce a radical restructuring of churches, and to co-opt the churchwardens in pursuit of their policies, ran against established and hotly defended practices for the organisation of the parochial space.     

The Summary of The Thesis For The International Deliberalive Assembly of Gong Xian’s Technique In Art:Discussion About Gong Xian’s Skills In Chinese Ink And Water

Profcssor In the Fine Art Academy In ZheJang)Shi Tao said,"The black design is painted with black Chinese ink, and the black Chinese ink shows anopen sky and abroad earth."These words marked that the usaga ofink and water had been notably improvedand it had achieved remarkable success in Ming and Qing Dynasties. Gong Xian’s(1618-1689)skills in inkwere considered to take the head in Southern China.     

The Politics of Archaeology in North Korea: Construction and Deterioration of Toh’s Knowledge

This paper considers how North Korean archaeology developed during the 1950-60s. Archaeological implementation, under the law of historical process in North Korea, was not perfectly compatible with true Marxist ideology; the actual archaeological movement went in a different direction. Archaeological activity in the North was not free from political constraints. Thus, it is more appropriate to say that the regime and archaeologists shared the same goal: to build a national identity. Emulating Marxist archaeology was the ostensible goal, whereas adopting the culture-historical approach was the more practical goal.     

‘What say you to free trade in literature?’ The Thief and the Politics of Piracy in the 1830s

Between 1832 and 1834, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett produced a weekly twopenny paper called The Thief. As its title suggested, this publication consisted of articles, stories and illustrations extracted, condensed and brazenly stolen from other periodicals, magazines, newspapers and books. Modelled on the format of Le Voleur, an early paper of Émile de Girardin, the great innovator of French popular journalism, scholars of Mayhew have generally treated The Thief as inconsequential hack work, if they even mention it at all. This essay, the first analysis of the paper itself, argues that The Thief is less ‘throwaway’ than it first appears. In satirical fashion, the paper used the methods of the radical press to critique the ‘liberal values’ of useful knowledge and free trade. Mayhew's involvement with The Thief connected him with a vibrant radical underground print culture. Moreover, in its suspicion of middle-class liberalism and of the rhetoric of free trade, The Thief set the thematic tone for much of Mayhew's later work.     

‘The True Love of the People and the Motherland’: The concept of socialist patriotism,socialist nation and anti-nationalism in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter-concept to set against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra-nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid-1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.     

The complexity of aspiration: the role of hope and habitus in shaping working-class young people’s aspirations to higher education

In this paper, I explore how working-class young people in Leicester hope and plan for their futures as they consider the possibility of attending university. I respond to Pimlott-Wilson’s [2011. “The Role of Familial Habitus in Shaping Children’s Views of Their Future Employment.” Children’s Geographies 9 (1): 111–118] call for further research to investigate how individual dispositions and habitus affect how young people hope and aspire towards the future. I do this in three ways. First, I empirically test Webb’s [2007. “Modes of Hoping.” History of the Human Sciences 20 (3): 65–83] hope theory to understand how aspirations are formed on an individual and societal level. In doing so, I critically question what is understood by the term ‘aspiration’. This allows me to question what it means for young people to ‘raise aspirations’ towards university. Second, I explore how a spatial analysis can contribute towards an understanding of how habitus, hope and aspirations interlock to shape young people’s futures. Third, I argue that hope can be regarded as a form of capital which in turn influences habitus.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.     

The famished soul: resonance and relevance of the Irish famine to Irish men’s accounts of hunger following immigration to England during the 1950s and 1960s

This paper uses a hermeneutically informed analysis to reveal how Irish men’s accounts of acute hunger on arrival in England during the 1950s and 1960s resonate with archival oral accounts of the Great Hunger in Ireland during the 1840s. The paper makes the case for a new continuum of memory which foregrounds the corporeal and spiritual dimensions of acute food deprivation and its significance over space, place and time. I argue that a corporeal-spiritual medium of memory represents a two-sided reality, a pivotal yet nebulous point of contact which exemplifies our understanding of how discourses of hunger recounted over the course of a century help shape reconstructions of Irish sociocultural identity. The symbolic potency of hunger and particular foods to expose a distinct moral and social order during both time periods is examined. I also show how this more burnished and fluid medium of corporeal and spiritual memory highlights the importance of intracultural diglossia in respect of Irish sociocultural identity and with it, the interface between individual, collective and folk memory.