Girls’ Carnival Morris Dancing and Contemporary Folk Dance Scholarship

Competitive, urban-centred and female-led, girls’ carnival morris dancing functions at a remove from the ‘traditional’ spaces of the English folk movement. However, it has a comparable history in north-western England where it retains great popularity. Perhaps this overlooked practice has the potential to unsettle dominant assumptions about contemporary folk performance in the United Kingdom.     

Managing gendered expectations upon resettlement: the experiences of Iraqi Kurdish Muslim women in the UK

This article discusses research surrounding the migration experiences of Iraqi Kurdish Muslim women migrants who have settled in the UK. Looking at some of the important and influential works by post-colonial feminist writers, what is revealed are arguments that provide some false senses of separation between different women. These writers' concepts provide for a stagnation of extreme oppositionally based models of power that fail to recognise the existence of current and future transgressive, positive and empowering relationships of power which exist between women; and that happen in ways that remake the process, whereby transnational feminisms reach out, speak to, touch and reject each other – often all at the same time – and yet, in fresh and reconstituted forms. Considering both oppressive and transgressive relationships of power revealed complex combinations of often contradictory and simultaneously negative and empowering experiences. The Kurdish women practise strategies of Othering, of distance and of proximity corresponding to a variety of different concepts held within several different forms of feminism; they demonstrate an eclectic approach to their self-determination and to the development of rethinking forms of transnational feminism.     

‘Pillagers’ and ‘brigands’ in the hundred years war

The sufferings of French non-combatants, particularly peasants, during the Hundred Years War have been described and deplored from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. A concern for the victims has often left little room for a careful study of the aggressors, thepillars andbrigands of the contemporary records. This article seeks to identify these latter, to distinguish them from each other and from the noble warriors, often called ‘men-at-arms’. It will be shown that the first, brutal, contact between armed men and unarmed ‘civilians’ was not, as the contemporary moralists suggested, between noble and non-noble, but between non-noble and non-noble: between common soldiers and bandits, on the one hand, and peasant victims, on the other. The chivalrous and adventurous war of knights and squires was sustained on the day-to-day level, by the activity of foraging pillagers. Brigandage was a consequence of their activity, not another name for it.     

Development of a systems model to visualise the complexity of children's independent mobility

Substantial changes to the built environment, urbanisation patterns, and societal norms have contributed to limiting children's opportunities for being independently mobile. Several linear causal pathway models have been developed to understand the influences on children's independent mobility; however feedback loops between and within the various levels of influence cannot be modelled using such an approach. The purpose of this paper is to refine the interrelationships of factors related to children's independent mobility, taking into account earlier models, broader contextual factors, recent children's geographies literature, and feedback loops. Systems model components were informed by attributes known to influence children's independent mobility, related qualitative findings, and the development of a framework that could lend itself to multilevel modelling approaches. This systems model may provide a useful structure for identifying how best to develop and monitor interventions to halt the declining rates of children's independent mobility.     

Iron Age Landscapes of the Benue River Valley,Cameroon

The Iron Age settlements of northern Cameroon were dispersed across the landscape, taking advantage of different eco-climatic zones to exploit a variety of natural resources. Situated at the interface of the upper and lower terraces of the Benue River, mound sites in the area around Garoua have occupation histories spanning multiple centuries. The site of Langui-Tchéboua displays evidence for rapid accumulation of sediments approximately 700 years ago, which may have been a deliberate construction strategy that would have allowed the site’s inhabitants to exploit resources in both floodplain and dryland contexts. The combined use of multiple dating methods and micromorphology provide novel insights into both the mechanisms of anthropogenic landscape change and possible motivations governing those choices.