Neoliberalism,massification and teaching transformative politics and international relations

‘Massification’ describes the significant increase in the proportion of the global population seeking tertiary qualifications. It is a defining feature of the global international education sphere and is often seen as linked to negative outcomes such as declining academic standards and increasing managerialism in universities. Massification, however, is not wholly or even mostly a negative for the generations of new students who now have access to tertiary education. Education can still be a transformative experience for students exposed to a rich learning environment. The question this symposium raises is how the disciplines of politics and international relations can ensure they maintain quality teaching and learning for students from subject design to program design. The collection aims to initiate a disciplinary debate in Australia, which has hitherto been missing.     

Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen,A. E. Waite,and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.     

Do local needs matter?: the relevance of women’s NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa

This article focuses on the potential of women’s non-governmental organizations (WNGOs) for effectively addressing gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the mainstreaming of gender and women’s issues continues to pervade global governance, scholars, and practitioners have questioned whether local WNGOs are capable of formulating projects that are relevant to the communities in which they work. One important challenge is local WNGOs’ dependence on external funding and agendas. The extensive literature on women and development indicates that there is a critical need to develop a more radical, transformative feminist agenda for women’s empowerment. The objective of this quantitative study is to test the association between WNGOs’ emergence and measures of gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that while there is evidence that WNGOs’ formation represents a legitimate response to African countries’ challenges in terms of gender inequality, the institutionalization of gender within NGOs does not automatically translate into greater gender equality and women’s empowerment. This article identifies some of the gaps and limitations of gender mainstreaming initiatives within African WNGOs. Examining the heterogeneity of women’s organizing and WNGO formation in the region and gaps in development activities, this study highlights the importance of place and space in developing a progressive feminist agenda. The quantitative analysis used in this study, which highlights the uneven geographies and scales of WNGO intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa, contributes to, and calls for more geographic studies on development and gendered activism.     

Navigating the binaries of island independence and dependence in Greenland: Decolonisation,political culture,and strategic services

Over the past decades, islands and archipelagos undergoing decolonisation have opted not to pursue independence. Many have instead become autonomous subnational island jurisdictions (SNIJs), maintaining links with their former colonisers in order to gain economic, social, and political benefits. The age of island independence movements has largely ceased. One exception is Greenland, an SNIJ in which the public overwhelmingly favours independence from Denmark. This desire for independence is linked to a binary understanding of Greenlandic identity and Danish identity as well as a binary understanding of independence and dependence. Greenland's colonial experience has trapped it in a Denmark-oriented conceptualisation of Greenlandic identity, which prevents the pursuit of potential political and economic futures, for example gaining economic benefits through the provision of strategic services to a patron state. This study demonstrates how island status and centre-periphery relations can influence political culture and, by considering the exceptional case of a present-day island independence movement, sheds light on the dynamics of island-mainland relations more generally.     

Between resentment and aid: German and Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist refugees in Great Britain since 1933

ABSTRACT

This article is a historiographical exploration of the experiences that German and Austrian émigré psychiatrists and neurologists made in Great Britain since 1933, after the Nazi Governments in Central Europe had ousted them from their positions. When placing these occurrences in a wider historiographical perspective, the in-depth analysis provided here also describes the living and working conditions of the refugee neuroscientists on the British Isles. In particular, it looks at the very elements and issues that influenced the international forced migration of physicians and psychiatrists during the 1930s and 1940s. Only a fraction of refugee neuroscientists had however been admitted to Britain. Those lucky ones were assisted by a number of charitable, local, and academic organizations. This article investigates the rather lethargic attitude of the British government and medical circles towards German-speaking Jewish refugee neuroscientists who wished to escape Nazi Germany. It will also analyze the help that those refugees received from the academic establishment and British Jewish organizations, while likewise examining the level and extent of the relationship between social and scientific resentments in Great Britain. A special consideration will be given to the aid programs that had already began in the first year after the Nazis had seized power in Germany, with the foundation of the British Assistance Council by Sir William Henry Beveridge (1879–1963) in 1933.     

Arthur Simons (1877–1942) and Tonic Neck Reflexes With Hemiplegic “Mitbewegungen” (Associated Reactions): Cinematography From 1916–1919

Tonic neck reflexes were investigated by Rudolf Magnus and Adriaan de Kleijn in animals and men in 1912 and eventually by Arthur Simons, a neurologist in Berlin and coworker of Hermann Oppenheim. Simons studied these reflexes in hemiplegic patients, who were mainly victims of World War I. This work became his most important contribution and remained unsurpassed for many years. The film (Filmarchiv, Bundesarchiv [Film Archive, National Archive] Berlin) with Simons as an examiner shows 11 war casualties with brain lesions that occurred between 1916 and 1919. The injuries reveal asymmetric neck reflexes with “Mitbewegungen,” that is, flexion or extension on the hemiplegic side. Mitbewegungen is identical with Francis Walshe’s “associated reactions” caused by neck rotation and/or by cocontraction of the nonaffected extremities, for example, by closing of the fist (Walshe). The knowledge of the neck reflexes is important in acute neurology and in rehabilitation therapy of hemiplegics for antispastic positions. Simons’ investigations were conducted in the early era of increasing use of cinematography in medical studies. The film had been nearly forgotten until its rediscovery in 2010.     

Ivane Tarkhnishvili (Ivan Tarchanoff) and His Links With Poland

According to some sources, Professor Ivan Tarchanoff (Ivane Tarkhanishvili) died in Saint Petersburg in 1908. In fact, he died in Poland in his house in Nawojowa Góra, a suburb of Krzeszowice, not far from Kraków. A student and later assistant of Tarchanoff in Saint Petersburg, Napoleon Cybulski, was then professor of physiology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and its rector and deputy rector. It is hardly known that Tarchanoff spent the last three years of his life mainly in Galicia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, near Kraków, he built himself a house and it was in Galicia (in Kraków and Lemberg [Polish Lwów, today Lviv]) that he worked on some of his last papers. The strong link between Tarchanoff and Polish physiology is not sufficiently well known and deserves to be recognized.     

Interdisciplinary approach for reconstructing an alder-based historical agricultural practice of the Eastern Ligurian Apennines (NW Italy)

Data from four soil profiles studied through pollen and macroscopic charcoal analyses were used to identify specific palynological assemblages associated with a traditional land-use system documented in the Eastern Ligurian Apennines (NW Italy) between the 18th and early 20th century, concerning a cyclical use of grey alder plots for temporary cultivations involving to the use of controlled fire. This is the first attempt to verify on palynological evidence some hypotheses raised by previous historical ecology studies about the consequences of this agricultural practice (recently named alnocoltura) on past and present vegetation. Our investigations underline (1) high percentages of anthropogenic pollen indicators, (2) increase of Ericaceae percentages, (3) low pollen percentages of Alnus, (4) high macrocharcoal concentrations and (5) high values of palynological richness during periods affected by the alnocoltura cycle according to the historical sources. Similar patterns are also detectable in pollen diagrams from two adjacent peat bogs. The paper shows the strength of an interdisciplinary methodology (field observations, cartographical and archival historical data, palynological and archaeological investigations) for studies of past land-use systems. By demonstrating the necessity of a long-term prospective in environmental reconstructions for the preservation of the cultural landscape, one of the important elements of this research is its potential contribution to issues of habitat management and nature-conservation policy. Further analyses are needed to test the replicability and reliability of the hypotheses derived from this study.     

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.