Regional Development Agencies and Local Economic Development: Scale and Competitiveness in High-technology Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire

Regional Development Agencies have been given the fundamental aim of improving their regions' economic performance and competitiveness. Supporting innovation is a cornerstone of this policy. This paper explores the limitations of region-based strategies arguing that this neglects the importance of policy intervention at the local level, using case studies of Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire.     

Economic policy and development in Austrian Lombardy, 1815-1859

The question of economic integration is not new in Europe. Historically, the birth and construction of nation-states was important in stimulating interest in the systematic relationships between political and economic integration. In the case of the multinational structure of the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century, the result was an economic policy that, for political reasons, aimed to unite the material interests of a state that was completely heterogeneous in other respects. Lombardy was a case in point. Traditionally the region had been in the economic vanguard in central Europe. When it again became part of Austria in 1815 it also became subject to the imperial policy of political integration. As a result its economic priorities were partially reformulated. On the one hand, Austria had a protectionist system aimed at autarky which made incentives to industrial production a priority. Lombardy's purely mercantilist outlook, on the other hand, was based around the production of a few highly specialized goods, most notably silk, for export. Conflict between economic interests in Lombardy was the inevitable result. Nevertheless, the imperial government had to take account of the fact that it was impossible to restrict Lombardy's international trade relations exclusively to the Austrian market. And the problems that beset any effort to tie the Lombard economy into a denser network of relationships with the Austrian market were not due to the political formation of the Italian nation because Northern Italy, and Lombardy in particular, continued to occupy an anomalous position within the context of the Italian economy.     

Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)

This paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co‐constitutive.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

Toxic torts as compensation: Legal geographies of environmental contamination litigation

Residents living in close proximity to contaminated sites may experience adverse effects from financial losses and property devaluation, leading to poor mental health and physical illnesses—effects that may require compensation. The most common legal process of seeking compensation is the toxic tort—litigation pressed on the basis that contamination has harmed the victims. Several recent toxic tort class actions in Australia brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exemplify that process. Two such actions, those at Williamtown and Richmond, provide an opportunity to explore how toxic torts currently function as a means to secure compensation, whether they mitigate the harms of the contamination and considering how spatio-legal manoeuvres may shape the litigation. In this article, we use a legal geography approach to analyse how plaintiffs’ bodies, litigants’ properties, and the state are constructed and represented by parties involved in these toxic torts. Legal geographers contend that examining the spatio-legal manoeuvres made via litigation can make visible the effects of legal action on those involved and draw out how the law and its instruments may shape places and communities. Toxic tort class actions have allowed those affected by the contamination to be heard and receive some compensation. However, we argue that they do little to alleviate plaintiffs’ concerns about the effects of contamination on their health, properties, and the environment. The findings have significance given that torts will likely play an increasingly prominent role in dealing with such challenges.     

„[…︁] mein Recht muss mir werden!“ Hermann Bahrs Tragikomödie Der Querulant (1914)

“[…︁] mein Recht muss mir werden!” Hermann Bahr’s Tragicomedy ­ Der Querulant ­ (1914). At the end of the eighteenth century, people who became notorious for their excessive engagement in legal proceedings started being labeled as “querulents” or “paranoid litigants”. The term “querulents” first appeared in the General Order of the Court for the Prussian States (Allgemeine Gerichtsordnung für die Preußischen Staaten) from July 6, 1793. From there on, the spectrum of juridical measures undertaken against the so-labeled litigators included classifying these persons as ineligible for legal action and psychiatric hospitalization. The paper discusses to what extent Hermann Bahr rearranges psychiatric and legal knowledge about this special type of the complainer in his tragicomedy Der Querulant, premiered in 1914. This concerns, first, the theatricality of the body and speech, secondly, the use of cultural techniques of writing and, thirdly, conflicting notions of justice. Therefore, the paper analyzes the aesthetic function of querulous behavior in the dramatic structure of the play from the point of view of both media theory and literary theory.