‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.     

UNDISCIPLINED AND PUNISHED

The title of Robert Doran's collection of essays on Hayden White proves provocative and evocative. Provocative because it claims to mark a move within philosophy that pivots on the work of Hayden White, and this despite the fact that White himself explicitly resists inclusion within such a classification, that is, as a philosopher of history. Indeed, another contributor, Arthur Danto, had as of 1995 declared passé the whole subfield of philosophy of history. Doran situates White, then, in a niche White rejects and in any case one largely abandoned by those who do academic philosophy. Thus a question that this title evokes concerns why—whatever philosophy of history happens to be before Hayden White—after him it becomes a topic of philosophical lack of interest, one pursued almost exclusively by those not associated with departments of philosophy. Given White's professional travails, his acquaintance with another undisciplined academic, Richard Rorty, and his long‐standing friendship with preeminent philosophers of history such as Louis Mink, one might well assume that White eschews Doran's disciplinary labeling for a reason. In this regard, reframing him as this book's title does invites a worry that, if only unwittingly, the book elides discussion of why certain positions excite not merely disagreement but prompt rather a type of professional shunning. In failing to confront White's reception (or rather lack thereof) by historians and his position (or rather lack thereof) within philosophy, Doran passes over in silence a highly salient aspect of White's work.     

Studying Immigrant Policy One Law at a Time

This article shows that, in the study of immigrant integration policy in the U.S. states, it is critical to report data and coding decisions for individual laws. This analysis uses an updated and public database of law‐level decisions, which includes 2,703 legislative actions recorded by the National Conference of State Legislatures from 2005 to 2016. These data are used to estimate models of aggregate state policy activity in a variety of ways: as a single continuum of policy balance versus separate models of welcoming and hostile, lumping all policy subareas together versus analyzing a specific subarea, and lumping all years together in one cross section versus panel analysis. The results in these models differ enough to indicate that reporting codes for individual‐level laws is absolutely essential so that each researcher easily can construct the measure that fits his or her theoretical framework best.     

Pharmacy as a means of propagating the Lutherian doctrine of justification

Pharmacy serving to propagate the Lutherian doctrine of justification: "Christus as a pharmacist" is an interconfessional, but confessionally differentiated symbolic motif (Sinnbildmotiv) of Christian folklore art in German-speaking countries. The article investigates the sociocultural conditions and prerequisites (German bible translation, religion and confession, piety, pharmacy, chymiatry, chemistry, apothecary training and status) for transfering the old metaphor and idea of Christ as a physician to the new vision of Christ as a apothecary who prepares and dispenses his heavenly medicine all by himself. In the early 17th century (especially in the 1610's) these requirements were fulfilled, so that the oldest known witness to this motif transfer (picturing the so-called Heilandsruf of Matthew 11, 28), a genre picture of 1619, will be the first pictural version of this motif in general. It was created by the protestant Painter Mich(a)el Herr of Nuremberg. In the abstract and reduced form of a devotional picture this motif then became widespread in churches and vicarages, in monasteries and their apothecaries as well as in private houses (with small altars: Herrgottswinkel). The oldest yet known examples are works from around 1630. For the first time during the Thirty Year's War, it served in this form for propagating the Lutherian justification doctrine (now referring to Jesaja 55, 1), saying that the belief in Christ is enough to be released from all sins (sola fide). Around 1650, as a reaction to that, a catholic version of the devotional picture was created, claiming and picturing that in contrast eucharist is the highest and real, healing medium' of Christ to redemption. All pictures of this version avoid quoting Jesaja 55, 1, whereas all protestant pictures quote this verse from the Bible word-for-word.     

7. TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF THE RESEARCHER AS SUBJECT IN POST/DECOLONIAL PACIFIC HISTORIES

Recent discussion has drawn out some important differences between postcolonial and decolonial theories. The former are associated primarily with the work of South Asian scholars working in cultural, literary, or historical studies; decolonial scholarship, by contrast, is located in Latin America and has emerged from sociological critiques of dependency theory. Shifting the locus of debate to the Pacific centers another subject in globalizing critiques of colonialism: the historian in indigenous communities. In this article, I examine how the role of the researcher is conceptualized in Linda Tuhiwai Smith's landmark work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Revealing tensions between objectivity and intersubjectivity, on the one hand, and between essentialist identity and hybridity, on the other, I ask why Smith's book hinges on dichotomizing nonindigenous and indigenous researchers, who are by turn enabled or constrained in a colonial present. I situate this late twentieth-century subject in a genealogy of indigenous engagement with history and anthropology in New Zealand and contemporary problems of historical justice.     

Drawing the line with Google Earth: the place of digital mapping outside of geography

The Te Kawa a Māui Atlas project explores how mapping activities support undergraduate student engagement and learning in Māori studies. This article describes two specific assignments, which used online mapping allowing students to engage with the work of their peers. By analysing student evaluations of these activities, we identify four aspects that benefit student engagement: mapping diversifies the learning experience; mapping promotes acquisition of a different skill set; online mapping allowed more open sharing of work and; mapping promotes place-based learning. Some students were ambivalent about the assignments, so mapping should only be used to support other learning objectives.     

Indigenous Exceptionalism under Fire: Assessing Indigenous Soldiers in Combat with the Australian,Canadian, New Zealand and American Armies during the Second World War

The literature on Indigenous participation in the Second World War from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand has tended to portray Indigenous soldiers as exceptionally able and courageous in battle. While heart-warmingly laudatory and an understandable product of genuine evidentiary challenges in researching this subject, the image constructed is partial and unrealistic. At best it is misleading; at worst it conflates indigeneity and combat proficiency in ways that reinforce racial stereotypes of Indigenous people as ‘natural’ warriors prevalent during the war. This article argues that we discard the exceptionalism enshrouding Indigenous combat performance in favour of a more culturally nuanced approach.     

Sovereign Power,Biopower, and the Reach of the West in an Age of Diaspora‐Centred Development

Why at this particular historical moment has there emerged a rousing interest in the potential contribution of diasporas to the development of migrant sending states and why is this diaspora turn so pervasive throughout the global South? The central premise of this paper is that the rapid ascent of diaspora‐centred development cannot be understood apart from historical developments in the West's approach to governing international spaces. Once predicated upon sovereign power, rule over distant others is increasingly coming to depend upon biopolitical projects which conspire to discipline and normalize the conduct of others at a distance so as to create self‐reliant and resilient market actors. We argue that an age of diaspora‐centred development has emerged as a consequence of this shift and is partly constitutive of it. We develop our argument with reference to Giorgio Agamben's “Homo Sacer” project and in particular the theological genealogy of Western political constructs he presents in his book The Kingdom and the Glory (2011). We provide for illustration profiles of three projects which have played a significant role in birthing and conditioning the current diaspora option: the World Bank's Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D); the US‐based International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA); and the EU/UN Joint Migration and Development Initiative Migration4Development project (JMDI‐M4D). Drawing upon economic theology, we make a case for construing these projects as elements of the West's emerging Oikonomia after the age of empire.     

The 5th‐Century BC Shipwreck at Tektaş Burnu,Turkey: evidence for the ship's hull from nail concretions

The Tekta? Burnu ship (440–425 BC) sank along a rough and desolate stretch of the Turkish Aegean coast. Archaeological excavation of the shipwreck site by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University resulted in the retrieval of hundreds of small fragments from the ship's wooden hull and its metal fasteners. Recent study of this artefact assemblage suggests that the coastal trader was built with pine planks and made‐frames, and assembled by a shell‐based construction method. Fasteners include pegged mortise‐and‐tenon joints and double‐clenched copper nails, and the ship may have had laced extremities consistent with other contemporaneous shipwrecks.     

The Impact of Global Financial Crisis on the Mechanism of Economic Growth in Russia

A noted specialist on the Russian economy presents an assessment of the impact of the global financial crisis on the mechanism of the country's economic growth. Focusing on the demand side of the economic ledger, the author explores the question of whether Russia will be able to re-attain the high economic growth rates of the period from 2000 to 2007 after recovering from the crisis. The paper analyzes the sharp drop in production in 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, attributing most of the damage to liquidity problems and declines in the price of oil. Empirical evidence is based primarily on data collected by the author from the Central Bank of Russia and the country's federal bureau of statistics (Rosstat). Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: E010, E200, E660, F210, G010. 11 figures, 3 tables, 29 references.