A variation on forced migration: Wilhelm Peters (Prussia via Britain to Turkey) and Muzafer Sherif (Turkey to the United States)

ABSTRACT

In 1933 the Turkish Republic formally offered university positions to 30 German-speaking academics who were dismissed with the coming to power of the National Socialist Government. That initial number went up to 56 with the inclusion of the technical assistants. By 1948 the estimated total had increased to 199. Given renewable five-year contracts with salaries substantially higher than their Turkish counterparts, the foreign émigrés were to implement the westernization program of higher education. The ten year-old secular Turkish Republic’s extensive social reforms had encompassed the adoption of the Latin alphabet, and equal rights for women, removing gender bias in hiring. Such a high concentration of émigré academics in one institution, “the highest anywhere in the world,” provides a unique opportunity to study a subject which has been neglected. In this article two cases in psychology will be examined: Wilhelm Peters (1880–1963), who came, via Britain, to Istanbul in 1936 from the University of Jena in Germany, and Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988) who went to the United States from Ankara University in 1945. The purpose of the comparative analysis is to identify the features that are specific to the German experience, and those that are shared and underlie translocation in science within the multifaceted complexity of the process of forced migration.     

Bounded political contestation: the domestic translation of international health and housing rights in Australia

Political contestation within liberal democratic states is an important, albeit limited, guide in defining how these states domestically implement their international human rights obligations. While often ritualistically endorsing human rights standards, political actors allow themselves a limited policy space with their domestic political contest circumscribed by more pervasive influences, often at odds with the state's international commitments. This article examines recent health and housing policy initiatives by Australia's two major political parties and assesses them against its international commitments. Applying a social constructivist approach, this article argues that the dominant neoliberal political discourse and the state's institutional structure set contextual boundaries to the parties’ policy contestation and reveal the limited influence of domestic political contestation in determining Australia's rights implementation.     

“A man knows a man”: illustrating disability in Harper’s Weekly after the Civil War

Images in the post-Civil War illustrated press regularly featured disability, manipulating it to make arguments which went beyond the obvious attempts to excoriate the South for attempting to dismember the Union and to acknowledge the sacrifices of the men who preserved it. These illustrations, however, have not received the attention they deserve, either in histories of the war’s effects or in disability studies scholarship. To call attention to these over-looked sources, this essay explores the uses of disability in Harper’s Weekly illustrations, focusing on depictions of Union army veterans with missing legs in the first two years after the war. These illustrations reflect complex attitudes towards disabled veterans after the war and offer a clear lesson in the ways disability is socially and culturally constructed as well as historically contingent.     

Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project

Most conventional oral history takes a bottom-up approach tothe past, focusing on settings where there is little in theway of a functional written record. This essay discusses thevalue of oral history in the opposite case of the American presidency.The written archive and journalistic record on each presidentis immense. Yet oral history is a valuable resource in thiselite environment, too. There are routine silences in even thebest of presidential papers, which oral history interviews canhelp fill. Moreover, the White House has become a workplacewhere recorded details can be hazardous to one's political health.Accordingly, few presidential aides today keep diaries or notesof key meetings—impoverishing the archive future historianswill use to study the presidency of our times. Oral historythus fortifies a weakening documentary record. This essay exploresthese broad issues and how they are being dealt with in theconduct of the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project.     

Upper House Reform in the United Kingdom and Australia

Discussion of upper house reform in the United Kingdom has been relatively muted in recent years, given the House of Lords' status as the world's last hereditary second chamber. However, a reform in 1999 removed the bulk of hereditary peers from the chamber and started a process of reflection about the appropriate role, functions and composition of the upper house. Fundamental questions arise about the power of the respective chambers at Westminster, the power of the government's mandate, and the possible territorial role of the upper house given the new devolution settlement. This paper describes recent developments, and contrasts the recent reform debate in the United Kingdom with the ongoing Senate reform debate in Australia. It discusses the extent to which views are converging and the likely outcomes of reform.     

Global supply chains and networking: A critical perspective on learning challenges in the New Zealand dairy and sheepmeat commodity chains

Vertical and horizontal networks in food chains and rural areasinteract on rural development through a potentially global reach.This paper adopts a knowledge systems framework incorporatingnetworking dimensions to explore problems of supply chain reorganisation.In New Zealand this framework is being applied in agri-industriesthrough the input of research institutes, partly in responseto buyer-driven pressures for supply chain realignment and productionto more precise specification. The paper reports on networkinginterventions by AgResearch in the farmer-processor relationin two New Zealand export food chains (dairy and meat). Findingsfrom the Learning Challenges Project where focus groups areused to conceptualise and define aspects of the chains and toascertain knowledge networking dimensions point to the potentialof networking methodologies as policy tools.