Evaluative Constructions Of Domestic Tourist Places

Personal construct theory was used to study potential tourists' appraisive images of the major Australian domestic tourist destinations. Seven main evaluative constructs (bipolar discriminations) were identified as being commonly used to appraise destinations. The second stage of the research involved the scoring of places on those seven constructs by potential tourists. Principal components analysis of the resultant matrices showed that construct space generally comprised one main dimension which was labelled favourable - unfavourable. An exception was that older women used two dimensions when appraising destinations. These dimensions were labelled frenetic - relaxing and dull -exciting. Respondents distinguished clearly between destinations and the distinctions made were remarkably consistent over different groups of respondents defined on the basis of age, sex, and location.     

The 'folded flan' coinage of eastern Arabia: Some preliminary comments

In recent years a small number of peculiar coins has emerged from the southern shores of the Persian/Arabian Gulf imitating Athenian tetradrachms of the old style and sharing the oddity of being struck on a flan that had been folded before striking. This paper contains an overview of the pieces known so far and attempts to present some preliminary conclusions, while still awaiting a comprehensive study of this and related ancient coinages of the Arabian peninsula.     

London-Bahrain Archaeological Expedition: 1994 and 1995 excavations at Saar, Bahrain

The long-term aim of the project is to excavate the entire central area of the Dilmun settlement. During the 1994 and 1995 seasons a further twelve buildings were excavated, most of them located along the main arteries of the settlement. A resistivity survey, followed by selective excavation, determined the size and extent of the site. A well excavated on the eastern flank provided valuable information about the level of Bahrain's aquifers in the Early Dilmun period.     

The Practice of Identity and an Irish Sense of Place

Following in the wake of Benedict Anderson's work in particular, cultural geographers and cultural studies scholars have analyzed the nation and nationalism as primarily 'imagined' or abstract entities. Coincidentally, the greatest analytic attention has been given to nationalist representations of place, rather than to the everyday discursive practices constitutive of the nation as lived. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory, in this paper I develop the beginnings of a corporeal approach to the nation. Here the relationship between the practice of identity (the embodiment of gendered and sexualized subjectivities via discursive practice within culturally defined spaces) and an Irish nationalist sense of place is explored. In this approach, analytic considerations of identity and space are collapsed within the shared material and metaphoric medium of the body. Irish nationalism and the nation are analyzed as corporeal materialities via an ethnohistorical focus on late nineteenth-century changes in the political economy of 'peasant' and nationalist bodies. The analysis suggests that a particular matrix of constructions of femininity and masculinity was extended paradigmatically throughout the society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These paradigmatic changes are characterized as a 'heterosexing' of bodies and places linked to economic change and the rise of the confessional state.     

Return to reason: reviving political realism in western foreign policy

Twenty‐first‐century political crises stretching from Europe to the Middle East and the Asia–Pacific have undermined the worldview that governed post‐Cold War western thinking about a liberal end of history. This worldview assumed that shared norms and transnational institutions would transform the state based‐order. In this context, the use of force is considered appropriate only for humanitarian ends meeting a set of predetermined axioms laid down in chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Yet for any strategy to be effective—in an international order subject to change—a clear political aim is required, which might deviate from the general rule. Preoccupied with universal postulates, legal normativism has lost sight of the particular. The argument put forth in this article is that the failure of contemporary western foreign policy in the twenty‐first century to address this limitation or to prioritize political ends has led to strategic confusion from Afghanistan to Syria and Ukraine. In this context, it might be useful to reappraise the utility of abstract rationalist approaches to global governance and return instead to an earlier understanding of statecraft that avoided premature generalizations and treated norms as maxims of prudence rather than axioms requiring universal application.     

A spatial analysis of crime in Vancouver, British Columbia: a synthesis of social disorganization and routine activity theory

This article investigates the spatial dimension of automotive theft, break and enter, and violent crime in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1996. The article uses and synthesizes social disorganization theory and routine activity theory as a theoretical backcloth and employs a spatial autoregressive regression procedure that accounts for spatial autocorrelation between crime rates and socio-economic characteristics at the census tract level. Strong support is found for synthesizing these two most common spatial theories of crime. In particular, high unemployment (social disorganization theory) and the presence of young populations (routine activity theory) are the strongest predictors of criminal activity.