Chicago goes global: redevelopment,culture, and fear

Chicago's remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across Rust Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to build an internationally competitive city. This paper deepens our understanding of Chicago's recently changed growth machine. It focuses on its current redevelopment narrative as it is used on the South Side and chronicles two new features about it: its revamped use of fear and its re-fashioned notion of culture. I flesh out these two elements as they circulate through a now dominant redevelopment program: historic preservation. I chronicle three points in this paper. First, programs like historic preservation, like so many current city programs, have now fully shifted to being a neoliberal economic development tool to promote the “go-global Chicago” project. Second, two dominant fears recently nuanced anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroying globalization and fear of city-subverting poor African-Americans. Third, a revamped notion of culture is used that helps provide resonance and dark appeal to the two offered fears. The culture notion is put into play as two dominant things, as the idealized and timeless glue that unifies Chicago's mainstream and as problematic values and meanings carried by black bodies which renders them civic tainting “ocular trash”.     

The European policy of the Jospin government: A new twist to old French games

This article presents a constructivist-inspired analysis of the Jospin government's European policy, understanding most policy developments during this period as variations on well-established French preferences—rooted in a modified Gaullist paradigm—embedded in French state identity. The variations reflect external political and economic pressures. By June 1997, the potential contradiction between perceptions of European integration as an extension of French state identity and the actual constraints imposed by integration was never greater, due to the reinforced constraints imposed by the operation of the Single European Market (SEM) and Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), in additional to the rise of German unilateralism and the need for European Union (EU) institutional and policy reforms made necessary by the approaching enlargement of the EU eastwards and the increased pressure on the Jospin government to reconceptualise an end-goal to European integration.     

Henry I of Germany's 929 military campaign in archaeological perspective

In 929, King Henry I of Germany (919–36) launched an exceptionally successful offensive against the Slav polities along the length of his eastern frontier. This campaign, which is recorded in contemporary written accounts, has long been known to historians, and its importance in the political history of the German kingdom is undisputed. However, to date, there is no book‐length or article‐length study devoted to Henry's military successes in 929. This article fills that striking lacuna by drawing on the vast body of information provided through excavations, which sheds considerable new light on the scale and sophistication of Henry I's undertaking.     

An alternative approach to hab 1,2‐2,20

Abstract

In the first part the ideological nature of the OT historical narrative is stressed, which means that it is hardly usable as a historical source alone. Therefore, in the second part three demands are formulated should we decide to use an OT text in a historical analysis: 1) the event we want to investigate has to be mentioned in the OT, 2) must correlate with material from archaeological excavations, and 3) must be mentioned in at least one external written source. The final part is devoted to an overview over the Scandinavian excavations at Tel Fukhar, Jordan.     

Commentary. The Diseases of Alexander the Great

The accompanying articles that speculate that Alexander the Great had a traumatic carotid dissection or congenital cervical scoliosis demonstrate the difficulties in retrospective diagnosis as a historical enterprise. The extant primary sources were written centuries after Alexander’s death and are ambiguous in their original languages, and even more so in translation. Thus we cannot be certain what illness Alexander actually had. Furthermore, anachronistic diagnosis removes Alexander from the medical context of this time, telling us little of historical significance about him. Such investigations also illustrate the more general limits that the absence of context imposes on the study of ancient history.     

Neurognostics Answer

Although many individuals contributed to the development of the science of cerebral localization, its conceptual framework is the work of a single man—John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911), a Victorian physician practicing in London. Hughlings Jackson's formulation of a neurological science consisted of an axiomatic basis, an experimental methodology, and a clinical neurophysiology. His axiom—that the brain is an exclusively sensorimotor machine—separated neurology from psychiatry and established a rigorous and sophisticated structure for the brain and mind. Hughlings Jackson's experimental method utilized the focal lesion as a probe of brain function and created an evolutionary structure of somatotopic representation to explain clinical neurophysiology. His scientific theory of cerebral localization can be described as a weighted ordinal representation. Hughlings Jackson's theory of weighted ordinal representation forms the scientific basis for modern neurology. Though this science is utilized daily by every neurologist and forms the basis of neuroscience, the consequences of Hughlings Jackson's ideas are still not generally appreciated. For example, they imply the intrinsic inconsistency of some modern fields of neuroscience and neurology. Thus, “cognitive imaging” and the “neurology of art”—two topics of modern interest—are fundamentally oxymoronic according to the science of cerebral localization. Neuroscientists, therefore, still have much to learn from John Hughlings Jackson.     

Nested assemblages: migrants,war heritage,informal learning and national identities

ABSTRACT

This article examines relations between Anzac heritage and Australian national identity, among migrant visitors to the Australian War Memorial (AWM). What meaning could a story derived from Australian involvement in the First World War have to migrants who moved to Australia after the Second World War? Participants in qualitative interviews were eleven first-generation Australians, whose countries of birth were England, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Philippines, Scotland, South Africa and Sri Lanka, with parental countries of birth extending to Austria, Germany, India and Japan. Drawing on sociomaterial assemblage theory, the findings illustrate the concept of nested assemblages. At increasing scalar levels, the migrants form visitor-AWM assemblages, they may (or may not) feel part of a national Anzac heritage assemblage, and as migrants they are entangled in multiple national assemblages concurrently. Assemblages pertaining to family, faith, learning and memorialising were additional networks at play. Mapping interrelations amongst these assemblages showed migrants as actively gathering and interpreting heritage, sometimes as the enactment of national identity and at other times as the performance of informal, lifelong learning. The findings have importance to institutions seeking to be responsive to diverse and changing populations, particularly those wrestling with tensions around national identity.     

Ber Borokhov

The task of this article is to pose the question: Can there be a principled anti-Zionism? That is, can there be an anti-Zionism that escapes the scourge of anti-Semitism? After suggesting criteria by which this may be possible, the article excavates a tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (or Zionist agnosticism) in the past that can hardly be branded anti-Semitic. The first current of this tradition flows out of early-twentieth-century Germany, where Jewish thinkers, in conscious opposition to Zionists, envisaged a Judaism that did not submit to the contingencies of time or space. The second current, comprised of twentieth-century Orthodox Jews, similarly opposed Zionism for its attempt to return Jews to history and to their ancestral homeland. After following these overlapping currents, the article concludes by returning to the contemporary scene and inquiring whether a principled Jewish anti-Zionism is possible today.