THE EURASIAN ORIGINS OF EMPTY TIME AND SPACE: MODERNITY AS TEMPORALITY RECONSIDERED

Understood as a form of temporality, modernity is seen as consisting of empty time and space. However, careful examination of the origins of modern notions of empty time and space suggest they arose from background assumptions in wide use across Eurasia in the early modern period, and also that they arose prior to, and independent of, the emergence of the modern nation‐state. Here, various Eurasian versions of astronomy and philology are examined to show that they relied on such background assumptions and could therefore be readily translated and shared across the boundaries separating quite different cosmologies.     

Normalizing US–Cuba relations: escaping the shackles of the past

President Barack Obama explained his historic reversal of half a century of US antagonism towards Cuba as necessary because of the failure of the policy of hostility pursued by his ten predecessors. But the old policy's failure was not new, and thus was not, in itself, an adequate explanation for the dramatic shift. This article uses theories of agenda‐setting, policy failure and policy change to explain the persistence of the US policy of hostility from 1959 to 2014 and the policy change announced by President Barack Obama in December 2014. Four structural factors account for the continuity in policy and, as a result of gradual changes in those factors, the eventual policy shift. They are: the security threat Cuba posed to the United States during the Cold War; the political influence of the Cuban American community; the diplomatic cost to Washington, especially in Latin America, of maintaining the status quo; and domestic changes under way in Cuba.     

Resurrection: who is it good for? The price of achievement at the London Hospital

The London Hospital, located in the heart of the East End, grew in tandem with the industrialization and increasing population of an impoverished area of the capital. It provided care and emergency facilities to employees of local industries amongst others. Archaeological excavations uncovered a forgotten burial ground for poor patients. Osteological and documentary evidence combined to reveal that many of the dead were first given to the hospital medical school for anatomical study. Human dissection no doubt contributed to scientific development within the medical profession, but the practice came with consequences that many at the time found unpalatable.     

Fishing Livelihoods,Seashore Tourism,and Industrial Development in Coastal Rio de Janeiro: Conflict,Multi‐Functionality,and Juxtaposition

Critical global political ecology and critical cultural political economy approaches are used in a study involving decades of research to evaluate the changing relationship between fisher livelihoods, seashore tourism, and urban industrial development in an economically dynamic region of coastal Brazil. As the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro expanded and encompassed fishing communities, socio‐environmental transformations created threats to fisher ways of life, opened new multi‐functional opportunities, and also introduced unrelated juxtaposed activities. As stocks fell due to overfishing and urban industrial pollution over the last two decades, small‐scale inshore fishing declined in the bay–lagoon systems located to the east and south‐west of Rio de Janeiro. Tourism increased but proved to be a poor substitute for declining fishing activities because it and other new multi‐functional activities rarely aggregated significant value to local livelihoods. Consequently, only a small minority of fishers benefited and remained on the islands and sand spits, while the great majority left for the mainland. New cultural and environmental functions were also absent, so that of the types of multi‐functionality identified by Wilson and Holmes, those present in the study area are weak and basically serve outside urban production and consumption interests.     

HOW DO BUILDINGS MEAN? SOME ISSUES OF INTERPRETATION IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE1

2 Juan Pablo Bonta, Architecture and Its Interpretation: A Study of Expressive Systems in Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 1979), 232.
—Juan Pablo Bonta

3 Quoted in Andrew Ballantyne, “The Pillar and the Fire,” in What is Architecture?, ed. Andrew Ballantyne (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 7.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein