《滕学义建祠碑》考释

光绪年间所立的《滕学义建祠碑》，所记史实是研究淮军及捻军起义的宝贵资料。     

Defining invasive alien species from the roots up: Lessons from the ‘De-eucalyptising Brigades’ in Galicia,Spain

Social and cultural perspectives are increasingly considered in the literature on invasive alien species (IAS), after decades of being underexplored. However, within this growing body of research, there is little investigation into the role and knowledge of everyday rural and environmentalist networks in defining and engaging with or against the expansion of IAS. This paper contributes to debates on the political and spatial implications of this concept, through a critical examination of the bottom-up initiative of the ‘De-eucalyptising Brigades' (Galicia, Spain), which aims to remove eucalyptus trees from community-based property lands. A survey of participants of this movement paired with semi-structured interviews show the relevance of social-cultural dynamics in defining IAS. Our results also show how investigating activism against forestry involving a potential IAS sheds light on the everyday conflicts around who defines IAS and how they are defined.     

Are cities ever more cosmopolitan? Studying trends in urban-rural divergence of cultural attitudes

Many scholars and pundits have argued that there is a growing urban-rural divide in political attitudes in the US and Europe. However, it is an empirical question whether and how differences in political attitudes between urban and rural areas have changed over time. In this study, we investigate the urban-rural divergence in cosmopolitan-nationalist attitudes in the Netherlands over the last four decades. We focus on attitudes towards issues of immigration, multiculturalism and European integration. We use individual-level survey data from the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (1994–2017) and the Cultural Changes Study (1979–2016). We find consistent support for divergence on cosmopolitan-nationalist issues between inhabitants of more- and less-urbanised municipalities over the last decades in the Netherlands, also when controlling for sociodemographic composition. This divergence is mostly due to the fact that the attitudes of people in the larger cities differ increasingly from people living in other parts of the country. Trends in smaller towns and villages are very similar to those in the most rural areas.     

Understanding megacities. An argument on the role of democratic ideals

According to the popular view, megacities are troubled polities and unlikely places for the realisation of democratic ideals. This article challenges the popular view and points out the relevance of the democratic ideals employed in such an assessment. It argues that concerns regarding the undemocratic character of megacities are rooted in either constitutional or radical democratic ideals, but that neither of these ideals is suitable for the assessment of megacities. As a result, this article offers a conceptual adjustment. It argues that to identify the challenges to and opportunities for democratic governance in megacities, we should investigate whether megacities promote their inhabitants' political agency, with respect to their equality. This perspective provides a more comprehensive view of megacities’ political organisation, clarifies the nature of existing obstacles, and offers a feasible path for democratic reforms in this context.     

Prophetic Criticism and the Rhetoric of Temporality: Paul Tillich’s Kairos Texts and Weimar Intellectual Politics

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses Paul Tillich’s changing conception of a “prophetic critique” of contemporary culture and society through the notion of a “kairos”, the moment of fullfilled time. It shows how Tillich refers both to a specific notion of prophecy (developed in Max Weber’s reflections on charisma) and to a concept of eschatological time (developed in Karl Barth’s dialectical theology). In different texts from the 1920ies and the 1950ies, Tillich uses the idea of “kairos” for a critique of the “idols” of bourgeois culture that is both radical and urgent. However, read in their historic sequence, these texts also reveal the difficulty of upholding the urgency of such a critique over time – as a result, Tillich’s notion of “kairos” becomes more and more reflexive and self critical as the possibility of prophetic critique is concerned.     

The (Re)socialization of participatory political culture: Immigrants’ political participation between their contemporary country and their ancestral country

We study the reproduction and change of participatory political culture by examining how immigrants' political engagement develops in the cross-pressure between their country of residence and their ancestral country. To explain patterns of political (re)socialization, we suggest a mechanism of proximity-conditioned social diffusion, which stipulates that immigrants' retention and adoption of a given participatory culture is a function of spatial and temporal proximity to native bearers of this culture, from which diffusion occurs. Analyzing the political participation of thousands of first and second generation immigrants in the European Social Survey (2002–2018), we find that immigrants come to adopt the participatory culture of their new country and lose that of their ancestral country through a symmetrical temporal process: having stayed longer in the destination country—either being a second generation immigrant or a first generation immigrant, who lived there longer—they adopt this participatory culture more strongly, while at the same time loosening their connection to the culture of the ancestral country. Spatial proximity to natives also conditions immigrants' adoption of the prevailing culture of the destination country as immigrants’ participatory inclinations resemble that of natives in their residential regions within the destination country.     

Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: Contextualizing Austria's Gedenkjahr 2005

This essay explores the politics of memory in post-1945 Austrianpolitical culture, focusing on the shift between the fiftiethanniversary of the Anschluss and the sixtieth anniversary ofthe end of the Second World War. Postwar Austrian society experienceda particular tension associated with the Nazi past, manifestedin communicative and cultural forms of memory. On the one hand,the support of many for the Third Reich—expressed throughactive or passive complicity—threatened to link Austriawith the perpetrator status reserved for German society. Onthe other, the Allies' Moscow Declaration (1943) created a mythof victimization by Germany that allowed Austrians to avoidconfronting difficult questions concerning the Nazi era. Consequently,discussion of Austrian involvement in National Socialism becamea taboo subject during the initial decades of the Second Republic.The 2005 commemoration is notable insofar as it marked a significantbreak with this taboo. New forms of cultural memory expressedin 2005 are examined here as the culmination of two things:first, criticism from the centre and left of the Austrian politicalspectrum that began during the Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980sand the 1988 commemoration; second, efforts by successive SocialDemocratic chancellors and certain federal party leaders, beginningin the early 1990s, to break the pervasive silence that madeVergangenheitsbewältigung difficult, and to challenge theAustrian right wing's glorification of elements of the Nazipast. This process included the novel step of acknowledgingthe Nazi skeletons in the Social Democratic Party's own cupboard.     

The Southern Conservative Thought of John C. Calhoun and the Cultural Foundations of the Canadian Identity

Besides the largely ignored fact of general Canadian support for the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War, the consociational dimensions of Canadian Confederation, as something opposed to American unionism in cultural terms, finds its historical roots legitimized in the Southern conservative writings of John C. Calhoun. It is the tension between an institutionally entrenched foundation of consociational pluralism and growing urban cosmopolitanism within Canadian history that has defined the debates and divides over the meaning of the Canadian identity, just as it is. Alternatively it is the tension between enforced constitutionalist unionism and consociational cultural tradition within the American South that has largely defined their historical experience. Both Canada and the American South find the tensions of their cultural identities rooted in the consociational values originally laid out by nineteenth century Southern conservative political thought.     

Operationalising memory and identity politics to influence public opinion of refugees: A snapshot from Poland

Using a politics of identity and memory approach, herein, we explore how political discourse plays out in practice and ‘in place’ when Poles were compelled to consider the introduction of visibly different persons, with different cultural characteristics, to their society. In 2017, and at the height of the "migrant/refugee crisis", we conducted 200 short interviews in Wrocław, Poland, to gauge and interpolate attitudes and opinions to refugees, in a context where the refugees had been strategically Othered, and constructed as a threat to Polish society. Our discussion focuses on how the strategic use and dissemination of threat and fear, in public discourse, was operationalised to disrupt steadfast notions of belonging to the Polish nation. By exploring belonging to the nation through a politics of identity and memory framework, we can better understand and provide contextual nuance to the import of maintaining ‘a [Polish] cultural sense of belonging’ (Brockmeier, 2002, p. 18). While in a Polish context, place-based and culturally historical narratives of conflict, territorial incursion, and occupation have framed threats to belonging in the past, the contemporary political exploitation of threat and its (re)production in public discourse is not only strongly exclusionary, but also denies the opportunity for Poles to know diversity as a felt experience reinforcing ideas of a ‘closed’ Poland. The contribution of this paper, then, is to demonstrate both the effectiveness of control of public discourse in a specific place and time, but to also elucidate the less often heard Eastern European states responses to the refugee crises.