Reproductive cancer: female autonomy and border crossing in medical discourse and fiction

Using three contemporary Irish novels: Down By the River and The Light of Evening by Edna O'Brien and My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain as well as Irish Medical Journal, I suggest that representations of female cancers are images of female pathology that reify and question disease as limitation of autonomy. Tracing the image of reproductive cancers through parts of the Irish cultural artifacts displays how both the fiction and Irish medical discourse attend disproportionately to female reproductive cancers. The texts construct female bodies as sites of pathology through textual representations of reproductive cancer and build upon Irish metaphors of landscape as female, which conceptualize women's (immobile, permeable) bodies as the site of invasion. Thus, fiction and health genres construct (and restrict) gender autonomy through two versions of border control: movement across body borders and movement across spatial, especially geopolitical, borders.     

Visible Archaeological Remains in Towns and Parks

This paper relates a specific and professional understanding of the nature of archaeological sites to management needs and approaches. It focuses on how the nature of the resource itself relates to a system of valuation, conservation and preservation. The perspective taken is that of the contribution of landscape planning to the development of tourism and heritage management. One of the central aims is to explain the visual values of archaeological remains in the landscape, relating them to the different measures of preservation available for archaeological sites. Examples are included from Latvia and other European countries.     

The left hand of the Enlightenment: truth,error, and integrity in Bayle and Kant*

Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s comment that ‘truth gets lost in the Enlightenment’ and Lessing’s parable of God’s ‘left hand’, this paper traces a historical shift in moral and religious thought: roughly from truth to sincerity. From traditional conceptions of conscience as conditional on the objective truth of its content, the paper moves on, via the Reformation and seventeenth-century Augustinian turn, to early modern debates on toleration and the ‘erring conscience’. It is argued that Pierre Bayle’s Commentaire Philosophique of 1686 can be read as a crucial catalogue for understanding the substitution of truth with sincerity (and error): so that not truth but truthfulness is considered to be essential for moral and religious justification. Moving from Bayle to Immanuel Kant, the paper then shows how many of the same questions rise in Kant’s late essay on theodicy, which is also an essay on sincerity or integrity, via the Book of Job. Through these two thinkers, various themes are connected: from conscience and sincerity to the problem of the conscientious persecutor. Finally, these themes of truth, error and integrity are linked to the modern debate on authenticity, and a framework is proposed for conceptualising these various shifts.     

Care‐full Justice in the City

Feminist theorists in geography and beyond have long been calling for an ethic of care to be considered alongside justice as a normative ideal that can assist us in repairing our world. In urban theory this call has largely remained unheard as an ethic of care remains absent from theorisations of what comprises a just city. In this paper I argue for care to be considered alongside justice as an equally important ethic in our search for justice in the city. I develop the concept of care‐full justice, which assists us in negotiating the inherent tension between the normative and situated in the search for the ideals, and actually existing expressions, of justice and care in the city. I demonstrate the generative potential of this concept and argue that it enables us to re‐think what cities can be and to reveal times and places where this is the case.     

A multiple myeloma of the late middle ages from unterregenbach,southwestern Germany

In the early 1960s the grave of a probable donor was discovered in the St Veit church in Unterregenbach, Stadt Langenburg, Kreis Crailsheim, southwestern Germany. After a re-examination, the skeleton may be regarded as clearly corresponding to the typical clinical picture of a multiple myeloma/plasma cell myeloma. The 45–55-year-old female individual shows all the characteristics of a malignant plasma cell tumour, with specific osteolytic lesions of the skull, vertebrae, ribs, pelvis, scapulae and long bones, and even-sized single defects without reactive zones on the edges. Several pathological fractures of the ribs and a vertebral compression fracture can be observed. The gnawing-mark-like features on the inner surface of the compact bone and the ‘punched-out’ lesions on the outer are distinguishing marks of a multiple myeloma.     

Tahiti: the ripples of a myth on the shores of the imagination

Influenced by Henri Lefebvre's ideas about the production of space as a continually evolving dialogic process, I trace the long post‐contact history of “Tahiti” as an entangled place where the production and product are continually intertwined. I examine more than two hundred years of historical twists and turns that result in a dialogic process of place making. Tahiti is generated when the imaginary place collides with the material existence, each reflecting and recasting the other. This intertwined history includes 18th‐century French imperialist philosophies and voyages of exploration; 19th‐century colonial intervention, romantic novels and Gauguin's colourful canvases; and 20th‐century French chocolates, Hollywood movies, French nuclear testing, postcards and more.