Disability and the Family in South Wales Coalfield Society,c.1920–1939

This article utilises the south Wales coalfield in the interwar period as a case study to illustrate the applicability of two sociological theories – family systems theory and the social ecology of the family – to impairment in the past. It demonstrates that a theoretically-informed approach can help to situate impairment in its particular contexts, most especially the family and the community, and give a better sense of the lived experience of disability. It also demonstrates the complexity of the experience of disability as the family and economic circumstances of each impaired individual varied and led to different forms of care-giving or the utilisation of different sources of support. The article also sheds further light on the ubiquity of disability as many families included a number of individuals with different impairments and this too had consequences for experiences and coping strategies.     

A Review of the Environmental Policy Literature from 2014 to 2017 with a Closer Look at the Energy Justice Field

This review article documents and analyzes trends within the environmental policy literature published between 2014 and 2017. We find that environmental policy scholarship has recently shifted its focus from more traditional topics, such as watershed and ecosystem management, to other modern issues, such as climate change and energy. The environmental policy literature has increased in complexity and become more interdisciplinary in nature, which we illustrate with a discussion of the energy justice literature. The methodological approaches used by environmental policy scholars have also become increasingly diverse, with a notable uptick in statistical and modeling approaches. We find that some topics, such as policy failure, gender issues, and energy welfare policies are under‐explored, and certain regions within the world, such as developing countries, are less frequently studied. We encourage scholars to consider these gaps in the literature when developing future research.     

Landscapes for Neolithic People in Mainland,Orkney

Journal of World Prehistory - Neolithic occupation of the Orkney Islands, in the north of Scotland, probably began in the mid fourth millennium cal BC, culminating in a range of settlements,...     

Negotiating Human Rights in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia

This essay examines the interpretations of 16th-century and present-day human rights found within Icíar Bollaín’s 2010 film También la lluvia. I argue, firstly, that central to the film is the question as to whether human rights can foster justice and contest the cruelty of (neo)colonialism or if, conversely, they are designed and/or doomed to reinforce colonizing relationships and, secondly, that an interpretation of the film’s ambiguous response might contribute to recent criticism regarding the imperializing tendencies and emancipatory potential of human rights culture. By exploring the film’s self-reflexive and critical considerations of the violence human rights have caused as well as its treatment of spaces in which these rights bring about adaptations, inversions, and transformations of colonizing relationships, I propose that the film can be understood to reimagine human rights culture. In order to interpret the film’s representation of human rights, my article identifies and analyzes the processes of negotiation by which the relationship between rights and colonialism is revealed to be an unstable and malleable one, continually subject to change and in need of criticism that takes its adaptive character into account.     

New Middle Palaeolithic sites from the Mani Peninsula,Southern Greece

We here report the first results from a systematic research project in Mani (Southern Greece), which includes survey and test excavations. Forty-six caves, rockshelters and open-air sites in lowland settings were surveyed. Geomorphological data were collected in order to assess how geological processes affect the preservation of sites and bias site distribution patterns. Artifacts manufactured from non-local rock indicate potential raw material transfers and suggest links among the different regions of Mani, related to mobility patterns. Our research in the Mani has nearly doubled the number of known Middle Palaeolithic sites from the region and confirmed that the peninsula has the strongest ‘Neanderthal signal’ identified to date in Greece. Almost all sites are located at coastal areas. Despite the influence of Pleistocene landscape dynamics, this distribution emerges as a persistent pattern, perhaps indicating a preference for coastal locations. The Neanderthal occupation of Mani can illuminate important aspects of Middle Palaeolithic adaptation in one of the southernmost coastal regions of Europe.     

Tourism global production networks and uneven social upgrading in Kenya and Uganda

This paper addresses how the growth of tourism global production networks (GPNs) based in Kenya and Uganda created uneven social upgrading outcomes for workers and communities. A tourism GPN and social upgrading framework follows a global political economy approach to analyzing tourism development and labor in diverse tourism geographies. Two tourism GPNs are investigated: Mombasa, Kenya, and Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Four main findings emerge: (1) governance relationships between tour operator and accommodation firms directly impacted social upgrading outcomes for hotel workers and indirectly for excursion workers; (2) excursion workers and community members had precarious connections to tourism GPNs; (3) public governance and collective power were key components to social upgrading while supporting its unevenness; and (4) societal embeddedness constructions around gender and regional space influenced worker and community social upgrading potential. Social upgrading is shaped by a confluence of firm, institution, geography, and labor conditions that differentially materializes in specific tourism GPN arrangements.     

Killer Khilats,Part 2: Imperial Collecting of Poison Dress Legends in India

This article presents the English language collecting histories of seven legends of death by Poison Dress that were recorded in early modern India (set out in ''Killer Khilats, Part 1''). The tales express fears of contamination, either symbolic or real, aroused by the ancient Persian-influenced customs of presenting robes of honour ( khilats ). Rajputs, Mughals, British, and other groups in India participated in the development of tales of deadly clothing from 1600 to the early twentieth century. The tales and their variants share motifs and themes with Poison Dress legends in the Bible, Greek myth, Arthurian legends, and modern American versions, but all seven tales display distinctively Indian characteristics. The historical settings and the contexts of collection demonstrate the cultural assumptions of the various groups who performed poison khilat legends in India.