Promoting multiculturalism and tolerance: Expanding the meaning of “unity through diversity” in the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has sought to establish a national identity among its nationals since its inception in 1971. Contrary to the pessimism in its first few years, the UAE was able to create a national identity among its nationals despite their initially differing loyalties. The UAE has now embarked on a phase of creating a new national identity that includes non-nationals, encompassing migrants and expats. This study argues that this new identity aims to include, at least discursively, non-nationals, presenting them as an integral part of society. It should be noted that this new identity does not seek to standardize or assimilate the whole population, in contrast to the first identity, which aimed to standardize the nationals. Its primary aim is rather to express its appreciation of the migrant population through the notions of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism, while also preventing complaints from the nationals. This study analyses the ways of including non-nationals in a new national identity through national gatherings (national days), institutional activities (heritage festivals, cultural gatherings, cultural center visits and activities), media analyses (state-sponsored media), and foreign policy initiatives that emerged (or presented) due to domestic diversity, such as Pope's visit.     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.     

Enacting Experimental Alternative Spaces

This paper analyses the experimental nature of alternative spaces and the affective, emotional and embodied experience their enactment generates. In so doing, it grounds the analysis on the intentional community of Damanhur (Italy), as an example of experimental spaces. Scholarship concerning intentional communities draws on utopian studies that consider them as utopian laboratories. More recently, non‐representational approaches have emphasised the processual nature of utopias, yet studies have overlooked the experimental nature of these alternative spaces. Drawing upon in‐depth ethnographic data, this paper engages with community experimentations that took place in Damanhur for residents and visitors. It illustrates how utopian enactment is experimental and thus, disordering, unsettling and creative. Moreover, I argue that experimentations are not limited to unsettling the social structure of the community and, when studying the enactment of alternative spaces, emphasis should also be on their capacity to affect the individual.     

Eine gelernte Lebensweise: Figurationen des Gelehrtenlebens zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit

A Learned Way of Life: Figurations of Scholarly Life between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. – With the erosion of professors' obligatory celibacy in northwestern European universities of the high Middle Ages, scholars found themselves facing the task of redefining their mode of life and establishing a new type of families, combining social reproduction and the transmission of academic knowledge, and adopting daily habits and dispositions which would allow them to lead the life of the mind within crowded family households without the collective discipline and material infrastructure provided by communal institutions, such as colleges. Building on the author's earlier work, the paper sketches a synthetic view of the major elements of the scholars' emerging way of life, arguing that this transformation provides a unique opportunity for studying how a way of life takes shape, being explicitly discussed and experimented with. Shaping a rational, or rather systematically rationalized way of life, it is argued, is a major contribution of the scientific tradition to making modern cultures.     

Toiling in the Vale of Tears: Everyday Life and Resistance in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, 1760-1860

Following the 1745 rebellion, agrarian capitalism rapidly transformed subsistence practices in the Outer Hebrides. Landowners increased rents, enclosed common lands, and replaced crofters and cattle with sheep-ranges. Population growth, the demise of the kelp industry, and crop failures compounded the problems of the peasantry. Widespread emigration commenced in the 1770s and peaked in the 1850s, when entire communities were exiled to British North America—the so-called Highland Clearances. This article traces the development of agrarian capitalism on the Isle of South Uist, explores the agricultural improvements undertaken by successive landlords, and considers modes of resistance adopted by the island's population.     

Beyond the everyday? Rethinking place meanings in tourism

ABSTRACT

Existing tourism scholarship on place meanings seems to retain an underlying assumption of a contradiction between tourist places and the mundane world. In contrast, this paper contends that the production of the meanings of tourist places is also closely related to everyday life. To make its case, it interrogates the creation of meanings of two scenic sites of Tianya Haijiao and Nanshan in Sanya, a famous coastal destination in southern China. Although both scenic sites have been recently developed, their significance stems from historical and cultural meanings in traditional Chinese culture, which are frequently communicated in people's daily conversations and practices. Besides, the meanings of the tourist sites are neither fixed by legitimate discourses nor dominated by tourism publicity; they are continuously shaped by wider socio-spatial events in mundane societies and re-interpreted through tourism mobilities in accordance with tourists’ everyday concerns. This paper echoes the ‘new mobilities turn’ in tourism studies and contributes to the discussions of the mundaneness of tourist places.     

An Analysis of Teacher Talk in Senior Middle School

教师话语是教师在课堂中使用的一种特殊语言。然而,很多年来,教师话语没有得到足够的重视,甚至已经被忽略很长时间了。尤其是在英语作为第二语言的环境下,教师话语并没有起到很好的作用。教师可以通过使用教师话语来使学生获得知识和使用目标语言。     

维摩经变所体现的中国艺术精神的嬗变

维摩诘经变是佛教美术中普遍而又独特的题材,对中国文化思想乃至艺术精神都产生了深刻影响。本文从审美的角度结合石窟、造像碑及壁画中有关考古材料,对我国维摩经变从西秦到宋代的嬗变过程进行系统的研究,反映出不同历史时期审美意识、审美理想对维摩诘经变的影响,充分挖掘该经变中所体现的中国艺术精神的丰厚内涵,从而揭示出中国古典美学的发展规律。     

在“南水北调中线工程考古发现与研究学术研讨会”上的讲话

本文为作者代表中国考古学会在"南水北调中线工程考古发现与研究学术研讨会"上的讲话:一、为什么要保护好文物;二、考古学在文物保护中的位置;三、考古学如何在文物保护中发挥作用;四、此次会议取得的成果。