The Erasmus undergraduate exchange programme: a highly qualified success story?

Erasmus is regarded as a European success story: an example of cross-border cooperation and an opportunity for students to improve their inter-cultural skills and work capacities. This article takes an in-depth look at this success, examining recent trends in Erasmus mobility. Analysis shows that while certain countries have greater numbers of students outgoing than incoming, the converse situation is found in countries such as Portugal. To explain this imbalance, evidence is drawn from a study of Erasmus in Portugal conducted during 2016. While the popularity of the country as a destination is related to low cost of living, friendliness and educational quality, interviews with managers of the Erasmus programme reveal other factors that limit the participation of local students. This includes the low level of Erasmus scholarships for undergraduates from families affected by the economic crisis, with exchange students also increasingly viewed as tourists and consumers as well as learners.     

Organized Materiality

In the late medieval period the religious guilds along with trade guilds grew in importance, as did the role of material culture related to the guilds. This history has seen little examination from a Fenno-Scandinavian and particularly a Swedish vantage point. In order to analyse the role of material culture in the formation of this way of organizing people, the article investigates the existence of late medieval guildhalls, especially rural ones, and discusses remains of other material culture that can be connected to the guilds. The halls, drinking vessels and other material things were activated in the growth of a new more substantial way of organizing society outside the boundaries of feudal society and family control. It is argued that material culture had a significant role in the recurrent activities of the guilds of the Middle Ages and in the shaping of new ways of organizing people.     

One for all,or all for oneself? Governance cultures in regional public transport planning

Due to the fragmented organizational landscape characterizing public transport, it is important to study and explore how regional governance of public transport adapts to national institutional reforms. By employing the term ‘governance cultures’ to a comparative case study of regional public transport planning in Sweden, we contribute to theories of governance by cultural sensitization. Combining governance theory with cultural analysis, we apply a cultural perspective to understand the two cases. We conclude that public transport planning in the Stockholm region is defined by ‘negotiations’ between stakeholders, whereas in the Västra Götaland region it is characterized by a governance culture of ‘collaboration’. The evidence from our case studies emphasizes the importance of understanding local governance practices as situated in cultural contexts as well as of viewing governance cultures as an important factor affecting the purpose, degree and outcomes of collaboration in planning practices.     

From folk history to empathy: contesting heritage values in Chinchero,Peru

In the small Peruvian, Quechua-speaking town of Chinchero, processes of heritagization of the Pre-Hispanic legacy encouraged by the State and supported by the tourist industry have been trying to create among the population an obligation of historical and emotional identification with their Inca ancestors. This operation has been mainly effected through the territorial transformation of the vernacular space of the Inca ruins into an archaeological site for tourism consumption. The operation has left out other histories grounded in grassroots events, like the struggle for the land against the abusive landowners that took place during colonial times. More than the distant history of the Incas, it is this kind of more recognisable and meaningful folk history what people remember the most and what largely constitutes the fabric of social memory in Chinchero. It is precisely folk history what forms the basis for local heritage values that, unlike what happens with the Inca remains, express intense affective ties with the physicality of other non-archaeological spaces. In light of these developments, the author explores how the people of Chinchero are contesting official versions of heritage and history by foregrounding the emotional power of their own heritage values.     

Commemorative events at destination memorials – a dark (heritage) tourism context

In the past, sites and events related to war and atrocities were viewed in the wider context of heritage tourism. The term ‘dark’ was added with the aim of recognising heritage sites closely related to death and suffering. Given that commemorative events as part of dark heritage are not prevalent in heritage and tourism literature, there is a need to understand the behaviour of visitors involved in visiting these sites or attending this type of event, which presents a special challenge. Public commemorations, especially those that mark particularly disturbing occurrences, such as ‘The Great School Hour’ – an event which is presented in the artistic form of a ‘school class’ – are unique form of tourist activity that has not been thoroughly investigated previously. Thus, the aim of the study is to explore the influence of the main motivators on revisit intention and willingness to recommend for those who attended the commemorative event ‘The Great School Hour’ in Kragujevac, Serbia, with a particular focus on younger people. The results suggest that learning, emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on revisit intention, while emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on willingness to recommend.     

Ethics of heritage: locating the punitive state in the historical penal landscape of Taipei

Research into prison tourism and prison heritage has not taken enough time to understand how historical change has left impacts in urban contexts, which sometimes continues even after the prisons are decommissioned. This paper discusses the punitive state in the context of the historical penal landscape of Taipei through an exploration of how an historical prison was designed, built, partially demolished, preserved and redeveloped under three political regimes. It draws attention to the neglected relationships between punishment, colonial modernity and heritage. Drawing on the literature of dissonant heritage and dark tourism it argues that the way in which the government erased the heritage and evicted squatters without regard for colonial histories and large-scale, post-war migration is yet another way of writing imprisonment into the landscape and ‘othering’ the punished. Furthermore, in tracing the place memories, both within and outside of the high prison walls, it demonstrates the possibilities offered by ethics of heritage, with which we may counter the culture of punishment in the remaking of cities.     

Marketing health education: advertising margarine and visualising health in Britain from 1964–c.2000

During the post-war period, margarine was re-conceptualised as a value-added product with distinct health benefits. This article contextualises the advertising of margarine as a healthy food, focusing on Unilever’s Flora brand as an important case study in legitimising the emergent role of disease prevention as a marketing tool. It uses the methodology of visual culture to examine how advertising employed chronic disease prevention as a selling tool. This article assesses how the post-war environment gave rise to new ways of visually advertising food, and how these promoted innovative visualisations of food, the body and their interactions with health.     

Computer dating in the 1970s: Dateline and the making of the modern British single

The British matchmaking industry expanded sharply after 1970. This article focuses on the formative years of its most successful representative, the computer dating agency Dateline. Through attention to Dateline’s marketing in the late 1970s, I explore the ways in which new vocabularies of ‘scientific’ expertise were used to forge a ‘modern’ romantic sensibility. After setting Dateline’s success in the context social–sexual change, I explore its two main claims to authority—the computer and the empirical insights of psychology—suggesting that the invitation to embrace but also to control fate foreshadowed the pressures facing singles into the twenty-first century.     

Trans youth and social media: moving between counterpublics and the wider web

Today’s trans youth grew up with the internet and online LGBTQ resources and spaces are important to these communities. This article focuses on conceptualising the digital cultural strategies that trans and gender questioning youth adopt both as social media users and producers in order to cope and thrive. Drawing on ethnographic data detailing a group of trans youth’s engagements with LGBTQ social media counterpublics and the wider web, and their movement between these spheres, in combination with close readings of online material identified as salient by the participants, this article argues that in the face of rampant transphobia and cis coded online paradigms, trans youth respond both critically and creatively. More specifically, I highlight how they resist prescribed user protocols of mainstream social networking sites as well as employ pragmatic strategies for navigating a binary gendered online world, staking out their own methods and aesthetics for self expression and community formation. Having examined the content and style of social media examples highlighted by the participants, the article contends that trans youth’s consumption and production of types of online and social media is significantly more diverse than research to date has recognised.     

A power elite in the cultural field. A story of Norwegian neo-corporatism

The organizational culture elite is studied as a new elite group emerging within a stable neo-corporatist state. Does this new elite adopt existing modes of operation or place itself at bay from the more established elite groups? The emergence of and changes in the culture elite are discussed from a historical perspective in terms of social background, recruitment processes, occupational careers, gender composition, political outlooks, lobbying, and media strategies. The culture elite is systematically compared to two other elites: the university elite, the most similar among the elites, and the economic elite, assumedly representing the greatest contrast. Despite special characteristics in the social situations and political views of the culture elite, it is concluded that the mode of operation of this group indicates a high degree of adaptability to the general system of elites. A main reason is assumed to be the integrative power and liberal quality of the state in a neo-corporatist regime.