Ireland and the Grail

Betty Potter's Dip, an unmarked roadside location at Boxted in Essex, is named after Elizabeth Potter, an eighteenth-century suicide who was buried there. Folklore has since assumed that she was a witch. This paper examines the events surrounding Elizabeth Potter's death and burial in relation to the practice of burying suicides by the roadside, and discusses why some roadside burials may have been associated with witches.     

Negotiating Particularity in Neoliberalism Studies: Tracing Development Strategies Across Neoliberal Urban Governance Projects

A reading of critical perspectives on neoliberalism would suggest that it is dead but dominant, a revanchist zombie that appears paradoxically ubiquitous despite its inherent idiosyncrasy. We argue that neoliberalism's paradoxical death, dominance, and retrenchment can be interpreted by analyzing the dialectic of universalizing processes and particular forms within capitalism. Neoliberal projects draw political import from systemic, universalizing tendencies in capitalism, particularly those ideological processes by which contradictions and crises come to be discursively, institutionally, and politically conceptualized within the same paradigm from which they emerged. Building on well developed research frameworks in neoliberalism studies, we propose a set of analytical tools to interpret links between particular projects and homogenizing practices. We illustrate this with a case study of urban “megaevents” (eg Olympic Games or football World Cup), demonstrating how ideological commitments to event‐based development strategies allow both the homogenizing imposition of entrepreneurial urban policy, and localized innovations in urban governance.     

Food and social complexity at Çayönü Tepesi,southeastern Anatolia: Stable isotope evidence of differentiation in diet according to burial practice and sex in the early Neolithic

The identification of early social complexity and differentiation in early village societies has been approached in the past most notably through the evaluation of rituals and architectural layouts. Such studies could be complemented by an approach that provides data about everyday behaviours of individuals. We took 540 human and animal bone samples for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis from the Neolithic site of Çayönü Tepesi in southeastern Anatolia. The inhabitants at this site chose to bury their dead in two different ways at different times during its occupation: beneath the floors of their houses, but also inside a public mortuary building known as the Skull Building. This variation provides an opportunity using isotope methods to test whether there was evidence for structuring of daily activities (diet in this case) that might serve to reinforce this change in burial practice. We show that when the inhabitants of Çayönü Tepesi changed their architecture and operated different burial practices in conjunction, this coincided with other aspects of behaviour including socially-constituted food consumption practices, which served to reinforce social identities.     

Redescription of Parexus recurvus,an Early Devonian acanthodian from the Midland Valley of Scotland

Parexus Agassiz was one of the first Early Devonian ‘spiny sharks’ to be described. The genus is readily recognized by the large size and ornament of its anterior dorsal fin spine. Although two species were erected, reappraisal of all known specimens indicate they should be synonymized in the type species Parexus recurvus. Farnellia tuberculata Traquair, originally described as a vertebral column, is actually tooth rows of jaw dentition, and is also now considered to be a junior synonym of P. recurvus. Parexus has a perichondrally ossified scapulocoracoid of typical acanthodian shape, and diagnostic features of the family Climatiidae, but has distinctive scales comprising appositional growth zones that closely resemble those of the putative stem chondrichthyan Seretolepis elegans Karatajute-Talimaa.     

Offspring sex preference in frontier America

Analysis of the fertility histories of women born between 1850 and 1900, as given in the Utah Population Database (UPDB), reveals the effect of the number, as well as the sex composition, of previous children on birth-stopping and birth-spacing decisions. Specifically, agricultural and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) households—two sub-populations that might have placed different values on male and female children for economic, social, and/or cultural reasons—showed a distinct preference for male children, as expressed by birth stopping after the birth of a male child and shorter birth intervals in higher-parity births when most previous children were female. Remarkably, women in both the early "natural fertility" and the later contraceptive eras used spacing behavior to achieve a desired sex mix. Although the LDS population had relatively high fertility rates, it had the same preferences for male children as the non-LDS population did. Farmers, who presumably had a need for family labor, were more interested in the quantity than in the sex mix of their children.     

Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum

In this article, I examine cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness in the commercial Hollywood film: Girl Interrupted (1999). In contrast to most of the disability studies literature concerned with cultural representation, this article explicitly examines how the spatiality of ‘mad women's’ lives is constructed through film. Drawing on post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives on disability, and on conceptual ideas from the limited social geographic literature concerned with the lives of persons with mental illness, I explore the contradictory cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness constructed through this film. This approach recognizes that representations of ‘mad women’ and their places in society and space involve contradictory, tension-laden relationships between spectator and cultural product, complex discursive negotiations of meaning, and gendered processes of meaning-making, in some ways affirming mad women's lives and in others perpetuating negative stereotypes about women with mental illness and where they belong.     

The Politics of Ego: Senatorial Front Office Presentation of Self

Many scholars have studied elected officials’ presentation of self, typically through examination of behavior in their districts, speeches, and Web sites. In this article, the authors examine a little-studied but telling element of U.S. senators’ presentation of self—the images they display to constituents and others visiting their offices in Washington, DC. Drawing on original data, we analyze both the total amount of items displayed as well as the number that focus on the senators themselves, and find that having run for president, being a Republican, and representing a state closer to Washington, DC, all predict a senator having more self-centered front-office décor, while having served more years in the chamber and hailing from a state closer to the nation's capital are associated with greater sheer number of items displayed in a senator's front office. This research demonstrates that political ambition, geography, and partisan affiliation are all related to senatorial ego. Studying senators’ presentation of self via their office walls offers important insight into the ways that elected officials view themselves and present themselves to a variety of audiences, thereby offering a glimpse of the ever-elusive link between the represented and the representative.