Criticism of Henry II's expedition to Ireland in William of Canterbury's miracles of St Thomas Becket

The long collection of miracles of St Thomas Becket written by William, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, between 1172 and c.1179 is, like many other examples of the genre, a rich source for attitudes towards sanctity, relics, and pilgrimage. A far more unusual feature of William's text is the author's criticism of the recent English presence in Ireland. William's comments on this score amount to a loaded stretching of the normal parameters of his textual medium, resulting in an evaluative engagement with current affairs of the sort that we would more normally associate with reflective forms of history-writing. William's criticism focused in particular upon the expedition to Ireland undertaken by King Henry II (October 1171–April 1172), inverting the very rhetoric that Henry had used to justify his Irish adventure. William was not himself Irish, as has sometimes been supposed, nor was he registering his institution's frustrations about its exclusion from the new ecclesiastical order in Ireland, as might be implied by the traditional but questionable ‘Canterbury plot’ interpretation of the much-debated papal bull Laudabiliter. Instead, William was skilfully engaging with current debates about the rectitude of Henry II's Irish expedition, and more broadly contesting emerging prejudices about England's ‘uncultivated’ neighbours, in order to effect a subtle critique of the king's involvement in Becket's murder.     

跨国公司地方嵌入新视角:基于地方劳工市场的研究进展与理论思考

20世纪90年代以来,跨国公司地方嵌入研究相对聚焦于资本密集型或技术密集型企业,而需要大量非熟练工人的劳动密集型跨国企业并未引起足够关注,建立在产业联系、技术外溢、社会网络等核心概念基础上的跨国公司地方嵌入分析框架很显然不能很好地解释劳动密集型跨国公司地方嵌入的理论与实践问题。在劳工地理学、新经济地理学等学科背景下,基于全球生产网络、关系嵌入、空间修复等核心概念,研究分别从劳工能动性的空间尺度、跨国公司地方嵌入的劳工要素、劳工管控对跨国公司的地方嵌入、区域劳工景观的空间修复等视角出发,系统梳理相关研究进展并提出未来主要研究议题,包括如何识别劳工供需因素对跨国公司地方嵌入的影响机制,如何剖析特殊劳工管控体制下劳工空间实践与能动性的关系,如何刻画跨国公司地方嵌入对区域劳工经济地理景观的影响,如何总结跨国公司地方嵌入与区域发展的战略耦合模式等。     

Collectanea

In emphasizing equivalences with conceptions of evil eye, accounts of Ethiopian buda understate the capacity of these beings to transform into hyenas. The case study presented here highlights how this element of the buda belief reveals a social realm that extends beyond the strictly human.     

Angola 2025: The Future of the “World's Richest Poor Country” as Seen through a Chinese Rear‐View Mirror

Abstract: As Africa's foremost “emerging market” Angola is receiving increasing recognition for its oil wealth, leading to attempts to engage it as a strategic partner, especially amongst the “rising powers”. In particular, there has been considerable escalation in development cooperation between Angola and China recently, though relatively little is known about the precise terms of this “partnership” despite China's key role in Angola's post‐conflict reconstruction. The growing importance of Chinese credit lines and increasing presence of Chinese corporate agencies across Angolan territory raise important questions about development, poverty reduction and inequality; governance and labour relations; and Angola's institutional capacity and the social structure of its cities. This paper critically examines the specific outcomes of Angola's “partnership” with China along with the hybrid conceptions and tangled geographies of “development” produced as a result. In particular, it seeks to interrogate the visions of Angola's future articulated by the Angolan state and the reference points and “models” of development that they draw upon.     

Deconstructing twinned towers: Lisbon's Expo '98 and the occluded geographies of discovery

This paper develops a critique of Western representations of discovery, centrality and self-identity via a focus on Portugal's Expo '98. Two of the towers of the title were incorporated into the site of Expo '98 (the last universal exposition of the twentieth century), which offered the chance to reiterate the importance of Portugal's imperial discoveries on a global stage and to reaffirm Portuguese national identity in the process. The paper examines how historical and geographical narratives of imperialism and the ‘Portuguese voyages of discovery’ were reworked in Expo '98 to resurrect a national sense of pride in belonging to and pioneering Europe. Critical postcolonial perspectives which break with Eurocentrism are required if the role of other cultures and histories in the Portuguese contribution to the making of modernity is to be appreciated. Such perspectives enable wider reflections about the constitution of the West and the non-West in the making of a multifaceted modernity of which expositions (and monumental towers) are concentrated expressions.

Portugal's was the pioneer empire in more ways than one, and it exhibited all the defects as well as all the glories of the age it inaugurated. No Nation of the fifteenth or sixteenth century ever saw more, reported a greater variety of things, or left more of its imprint on the modern world, whose chief characteristic, after all, is mobility. (Diffie and Winius 1996 Diffie, B.W. and Winius, G.D. 1996. Foundations of the Portuguese Empire 1415–1580, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  [Google Scholar]: 434)     

城市回族社区的地方性——基于开封东大寺回族社区地方依恋研究

作为中国城市化水平最高的少数民族,回族社区的地方性在城市化过程中受到严重挑战。论文以"地方依恋"为理论模型,以开封东大寺回族社区为典型案例,对城市回族社区的"地方性"进行深入解读。研究发现,由于围寺而居和强烈的回族认同感,城市回族社区的地方性特征主要受居住时间、文化程度、年龄大小和宗教信仰的深刻影响,地方依恋较深的地方主要在"寺市并存"或距离寺市都近的街道,内部空间上存在不同的宗教知识传承模式。这为丰富社区地理尺度的地方依恋理论和揭示回族社区人地关系机制提供了重要实证依据。