Making news and making space: Framing Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

How is inner city space represented and by whom? Drawing from an extensive framing analysis of print media portrayals of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside between 1996 and 2008, we offer a detailed assessment of the predominately negative portrayal of the neighbourhood, and the centrality of three frames: medicalization, criminalization, and socialization. Certain social actors are given a privileged position in the media in the representation of the inner city. Outsiders are privileged over insiders, with the neighbourhood constituted as a problematic space and its residents as passive victims. The effect is to further the stigmatization of an already marginalized neighbourhood, and to accentuate the disempowerment of its residents.     

Science and Sense

At the end of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Edinger completed the first comparative survey of the microscopic anatomy of vertebrate brains. He is regarded as the founder of the field of comparative neuroanatomy. Modern commentators have misunderstood him to have espoused an anti-Darwinian linear view of brain evolution, harkening to the metaphysics of the scala naturae. This understanding arises, in part, from an increasingly contested view of nineteenth-century morphology in Germany. Edinger did espouse a progressionist, though not strictly linear, view of forebrain evolution, but his work also provided carefully documented evidence that brain stem structures vary in complexity independently from one another and across species in a manner that is not compatible with linear progress. This led Edinger to reject progressionism for all brain structures other than the forebrain roof, based on reasoning not too dissimilar from those his successors used to dismiss it for the forebrain roof.     

The Neuroscience of Helmholtz and the Theories of Johannes Müller Part 1: Nerve Cell Structure,Vitalism, and the Nerve Impulse

Hermann Helmholtz made monumental contributions to the neural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among his earliest achievements were experiments that challenged vitalism, microscopic studies on the structure of the nerve cell and its processes, and the first reasonable estimates of the speed of nerve transmission based on physiological experiments. In this, the first of a two-part article, we review Helmholtz's early contributions in biographical context and with reference to Johannes Müller's own thoughts.We reveal how Johannes Müller, considered by many to be the greatest physiologist of the first half of the nineteenth century, helped to launch and shape Helmholtz's career. We also show that Helmholtz was only willing to accept some of his mentor's theories, even though he had great admiration for Müller. The point will be made that Helmholtz owed a great debt to Müller, but even from his student days in Berlin he was an independent thinker with his own agenda, and never his strict disciple.     

Introduction

The eolith debate mirrors the development and demise of evolutionist anthropology in Britain between 1880 and 1940. This paper traces the connections between some of the key protagonists in the controversy, especially those associated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The evolutionist pre-occupation of early Oxford anthropology with the continuity between archaeology and ethnology is shown to be linked to an interest in the Eolithic controversy, and these concerns persisted into a second generation as evolutionism was marginalized and prehistoric archaeology matured. Although the eolith debate finally floundered in the debris of the “epistemic rupture” between the world of Victorian evolutionism and late twentieth-century anthropology, some of its technical pre-occupations—particularly in relation to what we would now call ethnographic analogies and in terms of the techniques for distinguishing artefacts from geofacts—persist and are very much current issues.     

The Cripps mission of 1942: A reinterpretation

In 1926, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was established to foster empire trade without the use of tariffs. It was to simulate imperial preference by redirecting consumer choice away from ‘foreign’ goods and towards the produce of ‘home and empire’. Using newspapers, pamphlets, film, exhibitions and poster displays, the EMB aimed to ‘bring the empire alive’ to British consumers. This paper analyses the presentation of three settler dominions—Australia, New Zealand and Canada—in the EMB's advertising campaigns. The EMB's large visual archive has been the subject of only limited study, most of which has focused on a homogeneous reading of empire. This article argues that the work of the EMB reveals the presence of a separate discourse of empire—a ‘dominion discourse’—that has not been recognised in cultural histories of empire, which, with the recent exception of ‘British world’ studies, have been more interested in mapping and conceptualising the formation of identities in other colonial settings. The ‘dominion discourse’ emphasised the familiar, white and ‘British’ nature of the former colonies of settlement, attributes that are clearly displayed in the campaigns of the EMB, but can also be found in settler culture much more widely. In doing so, the white dominions stressed not only their difference from the dependent colonies, but their similarity to Britain. Though the inter-war period is often associated with the rise of distinctive national identities and the loosening of imperial bonds, the production of these attributes in an imperial and metropolitan context draws attention to both the transnational nature of identity formation and the continuing importance of Britain and empire in the construction of settler culture in this period.     

Walter the Chancellor on Ilghazi and Tughtakin: a prisoner’s perspective

This article concerns two leading Turkish rulers, active in the Near East during the crusading era: Tughtakin of Damascus and Ilghazi of Mardin. They were important commanders, but the surviving sources create difficulties when outlining the contours of characters and cultural perspectives. Muslim authors typically present them as idealised Islamic rulers and yet it is difficult to accept such stereotyped portraits. This article sheds new light on these men, seeking to understand how far they had transitioned from the steppe culture of their forefathers into a more distinctively Islamic mould. It focuses in particular on the Antiochene chronicle written by Walter the Chancellor. He witnessed both rulers at first hand when he was their prisoner in Aleppo in 1119, an experience which left him deeply scarred. This is tainted evidence, yet it will be shown that many of Walter’s observations also provide invaluable insights that deserve to be taken seriously.