Picking Up The Pieces of A Shattered Dream: Quebec and French America

Contrary to the commonly held belief that following the British conquest, French Canadian society limited itself to a clearly defined geopolitical realm conceived as a stronghold into which a defeated people withdrew to build its future, Québécois civilization has been doggedly continental in scale. Events of recent years, including the successes and failures of the Quiet Revolution and the results of the 1980 referendum, lend credence to this view. Today Quebec remains both of and apart from the North American continent, hometoa web of kin that has been spun to even the most distant corners.     

The sound of yesteryear on display: a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for exhibiting pop/rock heritage

The increasing presentation of popular music culture as heritage is manifested in the recent proliferation of museums of pop/rock culture. This calls for an examination of the current practices of disseminating pop/rock heritage through exhibitions. Two trends have been identified and criticised by previous commentators: first, the prominence of nostalgia in exhibition narratives and second, that exhibitions of popular music tend to display ancillary objects rather than music itself. This article offers a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for disseminating pop/rock heritage and explores the potential of music as a trigger for nostalgic experiences in exhibitions. While agreeing with much of the critique levelled at the nostalgic approach to pop/rock culture, we suggest that with a more nuanced conception of reflective nostalgia, the affective appeal of the nostalgic approach can be harnessed without giving in to glamourised oversimplifications of the past. Further, we suggest that mediated memories can form the basis of nostalgic feelings and thus enable the nostalgic approach to span the generational gap and engage visitors who do not have a lived experience of pop/rock heritage. We will illustrate this by contrasting our approach to that taken at ABBA The Museum.     

The SAFE Experimental Research on the Frequency Dependence of Shear Wall Seismic Design Margins

The SAFE experimental programme consists of a series of 10 specimens of shear walls, with different reinforcement ratios, tested until their ultimate capacity under seismic input motion by the pseudo dynamic method. A unique input signal is used, calibrated for controlling the seismic demand. Its input central frequency is selected so that for some specimens it is lower than their eignenfrequency, while for other ones it is the opposite. In conclusion there is clear experimental evidence that design margins are much larger in the second case (input central frequency larger than structure eignenfrequency) than in the first one.     

Ethnic Minorities and the Politics of Identity in Iran

The present review essay is of a novel format: two authors working in the same field introduce each other's works, and then pose a number of questions to each other. The aim is to facilitate dialogue between scholars occupied with similar issues, theories, methods or problems, and to share their discussions with others. Here, Alam Saleh, Lecturer in Middle Eastern Politics, University of Exeter, and Rasmus Christian Elling, Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies, University of Copenhagen, introduce each other's recent books on ethnic minorities, identity and nationalism in post-revolution Iran. These introductions are then followed by questions and answers in relation to the topics covered by the books.     

Using the Capability Approach to Conceptualise Inequality in Archaeology: the Case of the Late Neolithic Bosnian Site Okolište c. 5200–4600 <Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">bce</Emphasis>

The past few decades have witnessed a growing realisation that market-based measures of human well-being—measures that centre on income and consumption distributions—miss some other perhaps even more essential elements of human well-being. This insight has found a prominent expression in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s so-called capability approach. At the same time, the market-based measure of inequality as a function of the distribution of material remains in graves and other locations remain dominant in archaeology. In this paper, we explore the significance of the capability approach, and the associated concept of human well-being based on the idea of capabilities, to the archaeology of social inequality and social malintegration. We discuss these notions using the case study of the Late Neolithic Bosnian tell site Okoli?te and argue that there, in c. 5200–4600 bce, the monopolisation of certain critical goods led to a critical capability inequality, malintegration and to a prolonged period of social unrest and decline.     

DESTRUCTION AND REALLOCATION OF SKILLS FOLLOWING LARGE COMPANY CLOSURES

This paper analyzes what happens to redundant skills and workers when large companies close down and whether their skills are destroyed or reallocated. The analysis is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data of the closure of four companies. Getting a job in a skill‐related industry or moving to a spinoff firm leads to skill reallocation. Thus, the result depends on regional idiosyncrasies such as industry structure and urbanization. If local policy makers and the owners exert a coordinated effort, it is possible to create success stories of less skill destruction in urban as well as peripheral regions.     

Network Dynamics in Natural Resource Governance: A Case Study of Swiss Landscape Management

Structural characteristics of social networks have been recognized as important factors of effective natural resource governance. However, network analyses of natural resource governance most often remain static, even though governance is an inherently dynamic process. In this article, we investigate the evolution of a social network of organizational actors involved in the governance of natural resources in a regional nature park project in Switzerland. We ask how the maturation of a governance network affects bonding social capital and centralization in the network. Applying separable temporal exponential random graph modeling (STERGM), we test two hypotheses based on the risk hypothesis by Berardo and Scholz (2010) in a longitudinal setting. Results show that network dynamics clearly follow the expected trend toward generating bonding social capital but do not imply a shift toward less hierarchical and more decentralized structures over time. We investigate how these structural processes may contribute to network effectiveness over time.