Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy

In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to new and ever changing economic circumstances. In these pedagogies, gender is a key instrument. Rather than a straightforward feminization of the economy, what is at stake is a performance of openness towards becoming adaptable to future labour market demands. Asking men to depart their attachments to Fordist working class masculinities and its material translations is an exercise toward becoming pliable enough for post-Fordist precarious labour markets.     

Godot’s Shakespeare

While the connection between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and King Lear has become something of a critical commonplace, references to other Shakespeare plays can also be found throughout. This essay traces Godot’s debt to two plays in particular. First it argues how Godot not only draws on Hamlet’s graveyard scene for macabre imagery, but how it also construes an extended meta-theatrical parody of Hamlet’s soliloquies about the contrast between acting and talking/thinking. The second half of the essay proposes a number of connections with The Tempest, and specifically with its “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban. It argues how the figure of Caliban not merely functions as a model for a colonial power-dynamic that can be seen to operate here and elsewhere in Beckett, but how Caliban is equally significant as a lyrical figure whose great speech about sleeping, waking, and dreaming informs Beckett’s play in a number of ways.     

New light on early caprine herding strategies from isotope analysis: a case study from Neolithic Anatolia

The measurement of stable carbon (δ¹³C) and nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) isotopes of caprine bone collagen from the Neolithic sites of Çatalhöyük and Aşıklı Höyük in south-central Anatolia have allowed examination of exploitation and herding practices of sheep and goats. The isotope values from protodomestic caprines at Aşıklı Höyük suggests that these animals were consuming very similar foods to each other and were all confined to the same or similar environments with no access to C₄ plants. At Çatalhöyük, the results show how the caprine management strategy develops from the strategy seen at Aşıklı Höyük into a more varied practice at an early stage as the site grows with an increasing dietary contribution obtained from C₄ plants. No change in diet is isotopically discernible at Aşıklı Höyük. Interestingly, no distinction could be made between the diets of sheep and goats at either site. Therefore, such studies are a useful method of examining the development of early herding or management strategies of caprines in the Near East.     

An Insider's Look into Policy Transfer in Transnational Expert Networks

Much of the recent academic literature on spatial planning in Europe focuses on either cross-national comparison of planning frameworks and planning practices or on transnational and transregional initiatives and their impact on planning in European countries. From those publications, it can be gleaned how similar themes are translated differentially in different national contexts. Although it is also a great source of European integration and harmonization, the phenomenon of the knowledge exchange within transnational expert networks of European planners at the level of cities has received less attention. In this paper, the knowledge exchange among planners in such a network is studied, highlighting the role of “transfer agents” (academic and/or policy experts operating in communities in different policy arenas) in the exchange process. It builds on the insights from existing literature on policy transfer and policy learning, and tries to add a new perspective on this body of literature from an insiders' perspective, i.e. participatory observation. The idea is that policy transfer can be fruitfully approached as a process of knowledge and information transfer between producers, senders, facilitators and recipients. Often this exchange is to a very large extent a process of absorbing appealing labels for policy solutions from the international or national policy levels, and then adopting an interpretation of it suitable to one's own context. The authors try to give meaning to this exchange process by using two mechanisms, i.e. social interaction and conceptual replication. By combining these two mechanisms the authors try to uncover which policy lessons are being transferred among seven European cities that joined the expert network on European sustainable urban development (Pegasus).     

Evidence of Stress Fracture in a Homo antecessor Metatarsal from Gran Dolina Site (Atapuerca,Spain)

We present the palaeopathological analysis of a right fourth metatarsal (ATD6‐124) recovered from the Atapuerca–Gran Dolina site (Spain). This fossil, ca. 1 Ma, belongs to Homo antecessor, the earliest known European hominin species. The metatarsal exhibits a proliferative lesion on its medial periosteal surface. Periosteal reaction can be the bone response to a wide number of injurious processes. We describe a lesion on the basis of macroscopic and microscopic analyses, including microtomography and scanning electron microscopy. Externally, the osteoblastic lesion presents a highly porotic and disorganised morphology. Internally, we observe a series of micro‐fractures on the compact bone that do not affect the medullary canal. We provide a differential diagnosis and suggest that the ATD6‐124 lesion could correspond to a pedal stress fracture, also known as fatigue or march fracture. Stress fractures have been related to a load increase and muscular fatigue. This type of fracture has been widely reported in the foot of soldiers and athletes, which are usually engaged in strenuous, excessive or prolonged locomotive activities. Despite its high frequency in these groups, stress fractures have not been reported as such in fossil collections, with the exception of a metatarsal belonging to the Sima de los Huesos site (Atapuerca). Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.