Hedwig revisited

The mainstream success of the 2014 Broadway revival of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch is in stark contrast to the precarity of the central protagonist’s life and the communities out of which the original Hedwig production emerged. While these tensions reveal some of the complicities between homonormativity, gentrification, and neoliberalism, by tracing Hedwig’s other genealogies, a more complicated vision of queer possibility emerges.     

Systematic seasonal land use by late Pleistocene Tasmanian Aborigines

New research on the odontochronological (dental growth-increment) analysis of marsupial teeth provides opportunities to estimate with more certainty the time of the year Tasmanian Aborigines inhabited sites during the late Pleistocene. Here we focus on the Bennett's wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus) as a proxy for understanding seasonal human land use patterns and occupation of four southwest Tasmanian caves. The aim of the paper is to investigate whether caves at different altitudes were occupied in alternating seasons, and determine if the ‘Patch Model’ developed to explain the archaeological variability of late Pleistocene human behavior should be modified accordingly. The data presented here support the original observations that these sites, although reflecting extreme richness, were occupied in a punctuated seasonal manner with visits probably separated by a considerable time of unknown duration.     

Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.     

Teaching with Digital Archaeological Data: A Research Archive in the University Classroom

Digital tools and techniques have revolutionized archaeological research and allow analyses unimagined by previous generations of scholars. However, digital archaeological data appear to be an underappreciated resource for teaching. Here, the authors draw on their experiences as university instructors using digital data contained in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (http://www.daacs.org) to teach in a variety of higher education settings, from method-intensive thematic courses for graduate students to general education science courses for undergraduates. The authors provide concrete examples of how they use digital archaeological data to accomplish a range of pedagogical goals. These include teaching basic artifact identification and simple statistical methods as well as developing skills in critical thinking, inference from data, and problem solving and communication. The paper concludes with a discussion of how archaeologists can use digital data to address ethical and curricular issues, such as preservation, professional training, and public accountability that are crucial to the discipline and relevant to the academy at large.     

‘It’s supposed to be 1863, but it’s really not’: inside the representation and communication of heritage at a pioneer village

While much heritage studies research concerns dissonance and the use of history in contemporary spaces, nuances of the narrative construction process have only more recently begun to receive attention. This paper investigates the dynamics of heritage representation, in particular the contests among park staff, which have resulted in tremendous variation in heritage narrative communication at Spring Mill Pioneer Village. Contestation among the site’s administrators and interpretative staff regarding representations of time and place in the village has resulted in inconsistencies in both the material landscape and performative storytelling. As a result, the interpretative staff use a number of narrative tactics when engaging with tourists. While the village is located within a state park and therefore has a clear hierarchical power structure, this case illustrates how dissent manifests in the actual communication of the village’s narrative. Thus, this paper contributes to the ongoing study of spatio-historical context of heritage sites as revealed in the multifaceted construction, contestation and communication of narrative.     

Vertebrate microremains from the presumed earliest Carboniferous of the Mansfield Basin,Victoria

The Agnostida are the most important part of the fauna of the Abbey Shales, which is the best-known middle St David's (Middle Cambrian) sequence in Britain. Revision of Illing's (1916) collections allows a correlation of the Paradoxides hicksii fauna with Westergaard's (1946) Ptychagnostus atavus-Tomagnostus fissus Zone, and the Paradoxides davidis fauna with Westergaard's Hypagnostus parvifrons Zone and Ptychagnostus punctuosus Zone (based on the Swedish sequence). A Metadiscus sp. is described. Six species of Condylopygidae are discussed, of which three show a pygidial ‘fringe’. Eleven species of Quadragnostinae, three of Ptychagnostinae (one showing a hypostome), and four of Tomagnostinae (including young growth-stages) are illustrated or discussed. Two species of Diplagnostidae, one species of Phalacroma and two of Phalagnostus are illustrated.     

“Draw thy rapier,for we’ll have a bout”: duelling on the early modern stage

In Early Modern England, duelling was a serious business. Or so it would seem. Not so, I would suggest, for early modern playwrights, for whom the conventions of duelling and the newly established honour culture that underpinned it provided material for all kinds of comedy, from slapstick silliness to piercing satire and bitterly ironic scorn. Through close-readings in dramatic texts of the period, I suggest that dramatists laugh at and encourage their audiences to laugh at duelling and duellists throughout the period 1599–1630, and that they use duels which are inappropriately staged as a way of interrogating duelling practices and theories, and the values which lie behind them.     

Cultural sustainability as a strategy for the survival of museums and libraries

Cultural sustainability has become a growing priority within sustainable development agendas, and is now often depicted as a fourth pillar, equal to social, economic, and environmental concerns. Museums and libraries play a unique role within cultural sustainability by preserving their communities’ heritage. However, sustainability policy and research within these sectors still tends to focus on the social, economic, and environmental pillars. This article provides a critique of sustainability policy and research for museums and libraries. It argues that more explicit coverage of cultural sustainability is required to not only improve the contributions of museums and libraries to cultural sustainability, but also to provide an increased understanding and appreciation of the value of these institutions necessary for their continued survival.     

Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig's body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative legible, it becomes apparent that the film's popular reception frequently erases the transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is transnationality.