The Ultimate "Other": Post-Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt's Ecological Relationship with Nature

This article is a meditation on the overlaps between environmentalism, post‐colonial theory, and the practice of history. It takes as a case study the writings of the explorer‐scientist‐abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the founder of a humane, socially conscious ecology. The post‐colonial critique has provided a necessary corrective to the global environmental movement, by focusing it on enduring colonialist power dynamics, but at the same time it has crippled the field of environmental history, by dooming us to a model of the past in which all Euro‐American elites, devoid of personal agency, are always already in an exploitative relationship with the people and natural resources of the developing world. A close reading of Humboldt's work, however, suggests that it could provide the basis for a healthy post‐colonial environmentalism, if only post‐colonial critics were willing to see beyond Humboldt's complicity in colonial structures. In particular, this article attempts to rehabilitate Humboldt's reputation in the face of Mary Louise Pratt's canonical post‐colonial study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Humboldt's efforts to inspire communion with Nature while simultaneously recognizing Nature's “otherness” can be seen as radical both in his day and in ours. In addition his analysis of the link between the exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of certain social groups anticipates the global environmental justice movement.     

Re-thinking festivals: a comparative study of the integration/marginalization of arts festivals in the urban regimes of Manchester,Copenhagen and Vienna

Arts festivals have been on the ascendant since the 1980s. However, while these are proliferating, it remains unclear as to whether they are also flourishing. The present narrow construction of festivals for marketing and economic purposes tends to disregard the festivals’ social and cultural potential, i.e. in terms of functioning as urban laboratories where new and alternative urban and cultural strategies can be tested and developed. In order to address these imbalanced conceptualizations of arts festivals within urban policy frameworks, the article is based on a comparative case study of festivals that try to function as urban laboratories. By examining how these festivals are integrated in or marginalized by the urban regime, and how this influences their operational conditions, the research elucidates the need to create new and more holistic policy frameworks to chart an equitable path for the future development of arts festivals.     

THE GROWTH OF LITERACY IN FRANCE DURING THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

ABSTRACT

The Ottoman Empire faced catastrophic events during its period of dissolution which started with the First World War. At the end of this war, the Ottoman lands were shared by the Allied forces. As a reaction to this occupation, the Turkish War of Independence started in 1919 and finished in 1923. The authors aim to examine how these events were reflected in the ?stanbul bourse, using Ottoman government bond prices data between 1918 and 1925. Econometric methodology of Carla Inclan and George Tiao (1994 Inclan, C., and G. Tiao. 1994. Use of the cumulative sums of squares for retrospective detection of changes of variance. Journal of the American Statistical Association 89:913–23.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) identifies several break points, which imply a lower risk for the repayment of the bonds during the end of the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence.     

Placing Transport Workers on the Agenda: The Conflicting Logics of Governing Mobility on Bishkek's Marshrutkas

Transport workers are conspicuously absent from both mobilities and urban studies literature. This paper therefore starts out with a double critique. First, transport workers, primarily drivers, are largely disregarded in mobilities and urban transport research. Second, the literature we find on transport workers—mostly based in empirical settings in the global South—remains outside recent and ongoing debates in critical urban transport studies. Providing empirical insights from post‐Soviet Central Asia, this paper strives to close these gaps and delve into the struggles and cleavages that structure informal transport workers’ positions and livelihoods. We argue that the diverse and contradictory logics that govern urban mobility affect the livelihoods and working conditions of informal transport workers, as well as their choices and motivations. These, in turn, significantly shape mobility provision, in terms of urban transport's (lack of) affordability, accessibility, convenience and safety.