Enigmas of the Great War: Thomas Kettle and Francis Ledwidge

Recent publications in the field of Irish Studies have begun to address the previously neglected issue of Irish involvement in the First World War, including some limited attention to Irish First World War literature. This article explores the poetry of two nationalist writers who joined the British army, namely Thomas Kettle and Francis Ledwidge. Kettle was a public figure who had served as a Westminster MP and his poetry expresses the political complexity of his responses to the outbreak of war and to the Easter Rising. Ledwidge was first and foremost a poet and the article explores and evaluates that aspect of his oeuvre which can be described as war poetry.     

Playful and multi-sensory fieldwork: seeing,hearing and touching New York

Geographical fieldwork is being reinvigorated through pedagogical and methodological innovations. Yet, while there are many good ideas in circulation, there is less evidence of where these ideas are taking us: what students are getting out of them, and what significance they may have for the discipline. These questions are explored through case studies involving playful and multi-sensory fieldwork: collecting sounds, urban climbing, finding “accidental art” and getting lost. Students tend enjoy this approach to fieldwork, which inspires them to learn actively and creatively, fosters the acquisition of new skills and explores the broader possibilities of playful and multi-sensory geographies.     

Spatial Analysis in Physical Geography and the Challenge of Deterministic Uncertainty

The application of complex and nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS) theory in physical geography and geosciences has proceeded through several stages, and has recently entered a phase where field-testable hypotheses and historical or mechanistic explanations are being generated. However, there are some fundamental challenges. It seems clear that chaos and dynamical self-organization are present, and may be common in earth surface systems, and that these phenomena have spatial manifestations in the landscape. However, NDS theory and methods have been formulated primarily in the temporal domain and are typically ill-suited to real-world spatial data. Spatial analytical methods are not generally capable of distinguishing deterministic complexity and uncertainty from noise. Thus, the detection of the signals of complex deterministic dynamics in real landscapes and spatial data is a major challenge. Entropy-based methods of spatial analysis can be directly linked to nonlinear dynamics, and are at present the best available method to approach this problem. However, there is evidence in the spatial analysis literature suggesting that development of techniques to detect deterministic uncertainty is possible. Pending such a break-through, three general approaches are described, based on spatial analysis of chronosequences, the characteriziation of changes in spatial structure over time, and the spatial-domain testing of specific hypotheses relevant to deterministic uncertainty. Current trends generally suggest a shift in mathematical modeling and spatial analysis in physical geography away from traditional determinism toward approaches that incorporate locational, historical, and scale contingency.     

Minor,Robert N., The Religious the Spiritual and the Secular: Auroville and Secular India

Indo-Iranian Journal -     

Developmentalities and Calculative Practices: The Millennium Development Goals

Abstract: This paper focuses on wide‐ranging governmental discourses that enable new ways of shaping social and economic affairs in the field of development. Directing particular attention to the Millennium Development Goals, we refer to these discourses as developmentalities. As a form of governmentality produced through these Goals, developmentalities draw on the turn of the century to recast certain development problems and offer reformulated solutions to these problems. We argue that they rely on three forms of neoliberal rationalities of government—information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks, and their calculative practices, to shape global spaces and new capacities for individuals and social groups. Our analysis is based on extensive policy documents, reports, and development initiatives affiliated with the United Nations and other organizations, as well as insights derived from in‐depth interviews and conversations with United Nations policy and research personnel from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).     

The camera goes down the streets. Dans les rues (Victor Trivas, 1933) and the Paris of the German émigrés

Marcel Carné's important clarion call to 1930s French cinema 'to take the camera down the streets' was uniquely troubled by the arrival of waves of German émigré filmmakers in the French capital. This article uses one émigré film set in Paris, Dans les rues (Victor Trivas, 1933), as a case study to discuss both the place of the city and the place of the outsider in cinematic cultural representation during this decade. It argues that despite right-wing critical discourse linking Jewish culture with the ill effects of city life, a film like Dans les rues can be seen as an important turning point in the on-screen depiction of Paris. Trivas's film may have looked backwards to 19th-century convention, but, at the same time, it responded uniquely to Carné's concerns to produce an important, though largely neglected, early example of poetic realism.     

Sulfur and iron analyses of marine archaeological wood in shipwrecks from the Baltic Sea and Scandinavian waters

Analyses of marine archaeological wood from shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea area, Kronan, Riksnyckeln, Tattran, the Puck Bay Boat and the Ghost wreck, and at the Scandinavian West coast, the Göta wreck, Stora Sofia and the Viking shipwrecks of Skuldelev, show accumulation of sulfur compounds. The penetration profiles of sulfur and iron into the wood and the speciation of characteristic sulfur groups were evaluated by combining X-ray spectroscopic analyses, in particular S K-edge XANES (X-ray absorption near edge structure) and X-ray fluorescence, with ESCA and elemental analyses. The combined analyses support the hypothesis that hydrogen sulfide produced by sulfate-reducing bacteria reacts and accumulates at low iron concentration mainly as organically bound sulfur, which as in previous studies was found by X-ray spectro-microscopy to accumulate in lignin-rich parts of the wood cell walls. The presence of iron(II) ions from corroding iron promotes formation of pyrite and other iron(II) sulfides, which easily oxidise in aerobic conditions with high humidity. No significant differences in sulfur and iron accumulation were found in wood from shipwrecks in the east coast brackish water and the west coast seawater. Sediments from three wreck sites, the Göta wreck, Stora Sofia and Kronan, were analyzed to a depth of a few decimeters and showed especially at the Stora Sofia high sulfur concentrations, exceeding 3 mass%. S K-edge XANES analyses of the sediments showed mainly reduced forms of sulfur, in particular pyrite and iron(II) sulfides together with elemental sulfur.     

Team Arab: al‐Jazeera and the flagging of everyday Arabism during the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The linking of living rooms across state borders by al‐Jazeera and other pan‐Arab satellite television channels has prompted claims that a ‘new Arabism’ that undermines state nationalism is emerging. Until now, analysts have mostly focused on the ‘hot’ Arabism in the news coverage of politicised events such as the Israel–Palestine conflict. This article offers a new dimension by suggesting that as important to satellite television's construction and reproduction of Arab identity is the everyday discourse found in less overtly political programmes such as sport. To demonstrate this, it offers an analysis of al‐Jazeera's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics showing how the broadcasts address viewers as a common Arab audience who are simultaneously encouraged to be nationalistic towards their separate nation‐states within a given ‘Arab arena’ of states with whom they should primarily compete. This suggests that new Arabism should in fact be considered a ‘supranationalism’, not a revived Arab nationalism as it simultaneously promotes Arab and state identities in tandem. Finally, it aims to expand our understanding of ‘everyday nationalism’ by adapting Michael Billig's theory and methodology of ‘banal nationalism’ in British newspapers to facilitate the study of sport on supranational Arab identity on satellite television.