A journey to Mars: John Dewey’s lectures and inquiry in China

ABSTRACT

Instead of the framework of influence–acceptance commonly used in previous studies, the author uses new sources to reexamine John Dewey’s visit to China from the perspective of interactive experience. This study presents Dewey’s lectures in China as the result of interrelationships among a variety of elements – Columbia University, different hosts and audiences, the media, all levels of the Chinese government, the domestic situation in the United States, the international situation, and Dewey’s expectations and work – against the general background of China’s New Culture Movement and new educational reforms. Dewey’s speeches on democracy, science, and new education were remarkably successful in the first year of his visit to China, but began to meet with resistance from some students beginning in June 1920. Because of the Red Scare in the United States, Dewey had to stay in China. In the second year of his visit, he gave warmly welcomed lectures on the same topics in Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces. With a deeper understanding of China, Dewey not only identified himself with reform plans but also began to pay more attention to China’s economic problems. His inquiry into the problems confronting China is a good example of what he advocated in his lectures: seeing democracy, science, and new education as a way of thinking and carrying out actions and making intellectual choices while moving forward.     

西夏文Инв.No.4926号文献残卷考

西夏文Инв.No.4926号文献的照片,在《俄藏黑水城文献》第9册和第13册中分别被定名为《亥年新法》与《法条》,通过解读,实为《孙子兵法》残篇及黑水地区军事文献,书写时间当在1215年八月之前。     

Politics and Eschatology: Reassessing the Appeal of the “Jewish Indian” Theory in England and New England in the 1650s

This article examines the “Jewish Indian” theory — which claimed that American Indians were the ten lost tribes of Israel — in 1650s England and New England. The theory found support in England while failing in New England. This difference in reception can be explained by considering its ecclesiological, political, and eschatological implications. Biblical commentators in both England and New England held to a form of “Judeo‐Centric” eschatology, which looked for a sudden, miraculous conversion of the Jews and their eventual superiority to Gentile believers. Such beliefs undermined crucial elements of New England ecclesiology when applied to Native Americans. Conversely, the New England Company used the theory in its publications as a fund‐raising tool in England. These publications impacted upon debates on Jewish readmission to England in the mid‐1650s, with New England missionary models suggested as a way of evangelising Jews. This article therefore argues for the importance of understanding eschatological beliefs in local contexts, while demonstrating the way in which such beliefs can be maintained and reoriented in the face of apparent disconfirmation.     

The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck,the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960

This paper is a study of the vision held at the beginning of the 1960s by Paul Hasluck, the minister for external territories, and his department of the path to decolonisation for Melanesia. Faced by the ongoing West New Guinea crisis, Hasluck and his officials proposed to keep the western part of New Guinea out of Indonesian hands by expanding Australia’s empire, step by step, to include most of Melanesia. This greater Melanesian empire would eventually be guided to self-government. The proposal stood in a long line of ideas by Pacific-minded Australians going back for 100 years for an expanded Australian empire in the southwest Pacific. Consequently the Menzies cabinet’s rejection of Hasluck’s proposal was not just an important step towards changing its policy towards WNG; it marked the end to a century of Australian dreams and designs of a greater formal empire in the southwest Pacific.     

The history of silver refining in New Spain, 16c to 18c: back to the basics

The refining of silver ores in New Spain was defined by the chemical nature of the silver ore. Argentiferous galena (lead sulphide) could only be refined by smelting (36% silver produced), irrespective of silver content, and amalgamation (64%) could only be applied to the silver sulphide ores. Both processes were transferred from Europe, but amalgamation was transformed by local expertise from a recipe of limited application to an industrial-scale solution for refining sulphidic silver ores. Its implementation shaped the environmental history of colonial silver refining in the New World. Mercury was consumed mainly through its chemical conversion into calomel, with minimal emissions of volatile mercury. Waste silt and liquid mercury in the soil and waterways were its main legacy. Smelting created a greater impact on the environment of New Spain, via lead in lead fumes as the main heavy metal issued to the air, and its depletion of woodlands. This article argues that a technical analysis of period refining practices in New Spain reorients our understanding of Spain’s imperial relations with its New World colonies, of the role of local knowledge in a global economy of silver production, and of environmental issues in colonial history. It thus speaks to the problem of unpacking the complex web of relations that composed early European imperialism, in which were enmeshed commodities such as silver, cotton and sugar.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

Policing mobilities through bio-spatial profiling in New York City

In 2003, the Bloomberg administration launched Operation Impact, a hot-spots policing program which identified high-crime areas in New York City and flooded them with high concentrations of new police officers. These hot-spots, labeled Impact Zones, are sites of mobility constrained and structured by biometric and spatial technologies borrowed from the military. This article analyzes the city's advanced police profiling technologies as they play out within Impact Zones. The profiling is racial, social, biometric, bio-political, and spatial, and works to demarcate dangerous people and places. Because this profiling technology is enacted spatially and governs residents' mobility, I argue for a new conceptual apparatus, which I call bio-spatial profiling. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in police hot-spots, policy analysis, and textual analysis of media articles, I argue that the lived experience of biospatial profiling is one of pervasive fear which governs mobilities in Impact Zones. Next, I trace the experiences of Northeast Brooklyn residents back to their sources, and find three bio-spatial practices: both biometric and spatial data collection, and police street-stops. These symbiotic practices inform and strengthen each other, congealing to produce fear and immobility for those they target. The article concludes with a discussion of the conflicting understandings of (in)security in Impact Zones that connects the practices with the experiences of bio-spatial profiling, to illuminate the human costs of militarized securitization of domestic urban life.     

Materials,skills and gender identities: men,women and home improvement practices in New Zealand

The article explores the interactions of materials, skills and gender identity through examining DIY practices in New Zealand. It traces the relationship between materials used for home repairs, the competences needed to use them and the (re)production of specific gendered identities. It argues that housing and building materials were an important part of the European settler history of the country and this history forms the context within which New Zealanders work on their houses today. Drawing on interviews with 30 Pākehā homeowners, it explores how both men and women respond to the materials of their homes, how skills are acquired in relation to the demands of the materials used and how these skills become part of the (re)production of specific white, heterosexual gender identities. The figure of the ‘Kiwi bloke’ is discussed as an important imaginary in the negotiation of gender identities for both men and women. Interviewees saw their DIY activities in the light of the creation and re-creation of this specific national and gendered identity. The article reveals the intertwining of history and materiality in the continual negotiation and contestation of gendered identities.     

Snail assemblages: interrogating an environmental controversy involving Powelliphanta augusta and the mining industry in Aotearoa New Zealand

In 2004, a controversy arose in Aotearoa New Zealand's coal mining sector that involved Powelliphanta augusta, a species of land snail. This paper considers that controversy in terms of emergent assemblages involving the snail, the mining industry, the Department of Conservation, political action by environmental non‐government organisations, and public expressions of environmental and other values. Three sets of relations embedded in those assemblages are examined—those related to positioning and organising nature; values, politics, and power relations; and human and non‐human materialities. Those relations illuminate how a protracted controversy and its objects form a “social test bed” for contested views in legislation and guidelines dealing with economy, conservation, and restoration. To assess the dynamics, complexities, and contingencies of such relations, attention is paid to the controversy's detailed time line and legal framing, as well as to ontological shifts of snail and habitat and snail metrics. This analytical focus highlights the shifting quality of ideas about how the snail and its habitat are understood as entangled in fraught and mutating strategies of translocation that are played out in a particular regulatory setting. It also provides insights into international geographical efforts to re‐shape environmental governance and management.     

The deliberative deficit of prior consultation mechanisms

This article discusses the right to prior consultation guaranteed to indigenous people by international documents such as Convention 169 of the International Labour Organisation and the United Nations Declaration on the rights of Indigenous people. Using New Zealand and Colombia as case studies, the article argues that this right currently offers very little tangible benefits to indigenous people and is usually reduced to a legal bureaucratic requirement that defeats the purpose and intent of the right to consultation. I use deliberative democratic theory to show that the consultation mechanisms currently taking place in the two case studies suffer from a deliberative deficit and argue that prior consultation initiatives would better help respecting the rights of indigenous people if they were consistent with the political ideals that inform deliberative democratic theory.