The Future of Utopia

The widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions.     

Learning to teach geography for primary education: results of an experimental programme

Students training to become primary school teachers appear to have little awareness of the core concepts of geography (teaching). To ensure that future primary school teachers are able to develop their pupils’ geographical awareness, a six weeks programme was developed. The characteristics of this programme – named Consciously Teaching Geography (CTG) – are: principles of good geography teaching, conjunction and a recurrent structure during training, modelling and reflection. In a quasi-experimental research design the question is answered what the effects are of CTG on the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for the subject of geography of first year primary student teachers. The results indicated that the programme has a positive effect on the domain-specific PCK development in the short term.     

Begging Letters: Tin Trunk Literacy and the Empathy Economy of Tristan da Cunha,c. 1909–39

European colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic shipping at the turn of the twentieth century the male exchange economy vanished and female literacy acquired a vital new importance in the creation and maintenance of an empathy economy with the Atlantic mainlands generating the manufactured imports essential to the colony’s survival. The low literacy level and new dependence for subsistence on writing undermined the patriarchal authority of ‘headmen’ and gave a small group of female amanuenses effective political power on the island. The latter worked hard to maintain their newfound power by thwarting repeated metropolitan attempts to spread literacy or socialise the island economy and fostering fear and ignorance of the outside world among the islanders. The profoundly conservative and even oppressive nature of ‘functional literacy’ on Tristan da Cunha in the first half of the twentieth century provides a corrective to the emancipatory claims made for ‘tin trunk literacy’ elsewhere in the global south.     

Who we are at work: millennial women,everyday inequalities and insecure work

Based on research with millennial women in Canada, this article examines the process of workplace identity, or (un)conscious strategies of identity management that young women employ at work. First, despite increasing labour market participation from women, young women’s experience of the workplace can be one of precarity and insecurity. Many millennial women have responded with a ‘positive front’ – saying yes to all work tasks while highlighting their likability and acceptance of the status quo. This is not seen as a permanent strategy, but rather one that gets you into the workplace and ‘liked’ until your work speaks for itself. Second, and operating at the same time, young women also use tactics to confront intersections of ageism/sexism in the workplace. While some employ conscious strategies to be ‘taken seriously’ through dress, small talk, even taking on stereotypical traits of masculinity to be recognized as competent, others explicitly confront inequality through ‘girlie feminism’ with a pro-femininity work identity that challenges the masculine-coded norms of how a successful workplace operates and what it looks like. In jobs of all types, who we are at work is a constantly shifting negotiation between how we are treated and seen by others, the workplace as a social space, our past experiences and our own expectations. Considering young women’s work identities reveals how power and privilege operate in the workplace, and the possibilities of young women’s agential challenges to inequitable workplace norms and a precarious labour market.     

Maritime Culture in the Netherlands: accessing the late medieval maritime cultural landscapes of the north‐eastern Zuiderzee

This paper examines the theory and practice of the maritime cultural landscape in general, and projects the theoretical concepts and aspects involved on the highly dynamic late medieval north‐eastern Zuiderzee region in the Netherlands. The cultivation of land and marine erosion (floods and rising sea level) are considered as the main factors that caused the transformation of the physical landscape of this region from peatlands with freshwater basins into a tidal lagoon. As a consequence, multiple settlements drowned, large areas of land submerged, and culture and the landscape gradually became more maritime, giving the research area a cultural identity and dimension.     

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.     

The survival of PCR-amplifiable DNA in cow leather

We have investigated the survival of PCR-amplifiable mitochondrial and nuclear DNA in a small number of modern and medieval bovine leather samples. The results of this preliminary investigation demonstrate that, while no nuclear DNA can be PCR-amplified from any of the specimens, mitochondrial DNA can be amplified from all samples. To investigate this contrasting pattern of DNA survival further, we have vegetable-tanned cow skin in our own laboratory, and directly assayed the survival of PCR-amplifiable mitochondrial and nuclear DNA at each step of the process. The results indicate that nuclear DNA is reduced to sub-amplifiable levels as a result of the tanning baths, whereas amplifiable mitochondrial DNA survives the complete process. Our results suggest that old and archaeological bovine leather may represent a useful source of genetic information, although this information will most likely be limited to that which can be gained from mitochondrial DNA.