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Using an analysis of two independent, qualitative interview data sets: the first containing semi-structured interviews with mid-senior academics from across a range of disciplines at two research-intensive universities in Australia and the UK, collected between 2011 and 2013 (n = 51); and the second including pre- (n = 62), and post-evaluation (n = 57) interviews with UK REF2014 Main Panel A evaluators, this paper provides some of the first empirical work and the grounded uncovering of implicit (and in some cases explicit) gendered associations around impact generation and, by extension, its evaluation. In this paper, we explore the nature of gendered associations towards non-academic impact (Impact) generation and evaluation. The results suggest an underlying yet emergent gendered perception of Impact and its activities that is worthy of further research and exploration as the importance of valuing the ways in which research has an influence ‘beyond academia’ increases globally. In particular, it identifies how researchers perceive that there are some personality traits that are better orientated towards achieving Impact; how these may in fact be gendered. It also identifies how gender may play a role in the prioritisation of ‘hard’ Impacts (and research) that can be counted, in contrast to ‘soft’ Impacts (and research) that are far less quantifiable, reminiscent of deeper entrenched views about the value of different ‘modes’ of research. These orientations also translate to the evaluation of Impact, where panellists exhibit these tendencies prior to its evaluation and describe the organisation of panel work with respect to gender diversity.

Monsters within British pantomime are ubiquitous creatures, from the ogre in the castle of Puss in Boots to the Giant at the top of the beanstalk, and as personified in the monstrous acts of Wicked Stepmothers, frightening Barons and diabolical henchmen. The popularity of pantomime means that it is often the first encounter that a child has with a monster in material form, sharing the same physical space: a theatre. Bruno Bettelheim (1991) argues that fairytales, from where many pantomimes are drawn, are our first negotiations with the monstrous. In pantomime, the audience are complicit in the act of finding, chasing and dealing with the monster, and the ethical positioning of this by writers and directors is paramount in guiding us to understand how we may deal with the ‘other’ in our own lives. This paper critically interrogates the threat posed by these monsters when invested with a materiality in performance. In the first instance, I explore the interplay between stage space and the representation of the monster and how this relates to my professional experience of directing over twenty-five professional pantomimes in the United Kingdom since 1999. Tracing this spatial dynamic between monster and audience to the medieval stage and the ludic dimension to the staging of the devils in the mystery play, the paper argues that there is a long-reaching historical antecedent to the staging of evil that informs and inspires spatial practices in modern-day pantomime. Key questions are: to what extent have pantomimes historically presented and rehearsed the threat posed by the monster in order to contain that threat?; What ethical considerations do producers, writers and directors now face in the contemporary pantomime? Finally, to what extent does the popular form of pantomime itself matter as a vehicle for enabling audiences both young and old to confront the monstrous Other?

Combining philosophical and literary perspectives, this paper argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is informed by a skeptical problematic that may be traced back to the work of the young David Hume. As the foundational text on romantic monstrosity, Frankenstein has been studied from various critical angles, including that of Humean skepticism by Sarah Tindal Kareem (Eighteenth-century fiction and the reinvention of wonder. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) and Monique Morgan (Romant Net 44, doi:10.7202/013998ar, 2006). However, the striking connections with Hume’s Treatise have not been fully explored. The paper begins by comparing the three narrators of Frankenstein with three figures appearing in Hume’s Conclusion to Book I: the anatomist, the explorer, and the monster. It proceeds by looking at the hybrid “anatomies” offered by Hume and Shelley, suggesting that Frankenstein might be regarded as a tragic re-enactment and radicalization of Hume’s skeptical impasse. Whereas Hume alerted his readers to the dangers of a thoroughgoing skepticism only to steer his argument in a new direction, Shelley shows those dangers realized in the “catastrophe” of the Monster’s birth. While Hume had called attention to the impossibility of conducting strictly scientific experiments on “moral subjects”, Shelley devises a counterfactual plot and a multi-layered narrative structure in order to explore that very impossibility. Interpreting Frankenstein as an instance of the “skeptical gothic”, I suggest that both the monster and the scientist (Victor) share some traits with Hume’s radically skeptical philosopher, including a tendency to give up responsibility for what Stanley Cavell (The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979) called “the maintenance of shared forms of life”. Relying on the work of Cavell, this paper argues that skepticism in Frankenstein is manifested as tragedy, traceable in Shelley’s reliance on tragic tropes throughout the novel.

This paper reports on two studies that used qualitative thematic and quantitative linguistic analysis, respectively, to assess the content and language of the largest ever sample of graded research impact case studies, from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF). The paper provides the first empirical evidence across disciplinary main panels of statistically significant linguistic differences between high- versus low-scoring case studies, suggesting that implicit rules linked to written style may have contributed to scores alongside the published criteria on the significance, reach and attribution of impact. High-scoring case studies were more likely to provide specific and high-magnitude articulations of significance and reach than low-scoring cases. High-scoring case studies contained attributional phrases which were more likely to attribute research and/or pathways to impact, and they were written more coherently (containing more explicit causal connections between ideas and more logical connectives) than low-scoring cases. High-scoring case studies appear to have conformed to a distinctive new genre of writing, which was clear and direct, and often simplified in its representation of causality between research and impact, and less likely to contain expressions of uncertainty than typically associated with academic writing. High-scoring case studies in two Main Panels were significantly easier to read than low-scoring cases on the Flesch Reading Ease measure, although both high-scoring and low-scoring cases tended to be of “graduate” reading difficulty. The findings of our work enable impact case study authors to better understand the genre and make content and language choices that communicate their impact as effectively as possible. While directly relevant to the assessment of impact in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, the work also provides insights of relevance to institutions internationally who are designing evaluation frameworks for research impact.

In tracing a specific trajectory of cultural evolution, this paper builds upon Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘simulacrum’, arguing that the use of guns in Bangla cinema from Bangladesh and West Bengal (India) is connected with ‘hyper-reality’ and ‘simulation’. The authors hold that both are symptomatic of the unreal nature of contemporary Bengali culture in an age of mass consumption. A perusal of Bangla cinema following the Partition of India (consequently, of Bengal too) in 1947, and the Liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971 shows a tradition of ample use of guns and ammunition. The authors perceive three distinct phases of such representation—films from West Bengal highlighting Partition violence around 1947; exponents from Bangladesh upholding the independence of former East Pakistan in 1971 and the brutality of the West Pakistan armed forces; and hyper action in contemporary commercial cinema. The last category is perceived by and large as hyperrealist, for it substitutes ‘the signs of the real for the real itself’. Basing upon Baudrillard’s contention that we have lost our capacity to grasp reality as it is, and need to depend on set-up realities in a virtual world, this paper claims that the initial patriotic zeal (its remnants notwithstanding) of Bangla cinema has taken a retrogressive turn, so as to seek recourse in representations of violence as channels of personalised/disorganised pseudo-real entertainment like video games. This undoubtedly signifies the confusion of cultural values. The paper hypothesises that the first two categories qualify as cultural texts attempting to approximate historical realities, wherein guns function as vital symbols of power and unity, resistance and liberation. The third category, conversely, is another façade of culture—one that symbolises the present time as an ‘age of simulations’ that hardly has any organic connection with ground realties that the films claim to contextualise. The authors from either side of the India-Bangladesh border intend to focus on the use of guns in Bangla cinema of these three evolving phases, applying film analysis to select productions from Bangladesh and West Bengal in India. The paper is conceptualised as a substantial contribution to film and cultural studies, as this area has hitherto remained uncharted in academic discussion.

The competition in space between rail and sea transport is of great significance to the integration of Eurasia. This paper proposes a land and sea transport spatial balance model for container transport, which can extract a partition line on which transport costs by rail and sea are equal given a destination. Four scenarios are discussed to analyse the effects of different factors on the model. Then the model is empirically tested on current rail and sea transport networks to identify the transport competition pattern in Eurasia. The location of destinations, the freight costs, and time costs are the three main factors affecting the model. Among them, time costs are determined by the value of a container and its contents, the interest rate, and by time differences between land and sea transport. The case study shows that Eurasia forms a transport competition pattern with a land area to sea area ratio of about 1:2; this ratio, however, changes to 1:1 when time costs are considered. Further, the land and sea transport balance lines are consistent with the theories of geopolitics, which indicate that the same processes may exist in the spatial pattern of geo-economics and geopolitics in Eurasia. According to the balance lines, we get a spatial partition, dividing Eurasia into the land transport preferred area, the land–sea transport indifference area, and the sea transport preferred area. The paper brings a new perspective to the exploration of geopolitical economic spatial patterns of Eurasia and provides a practical geographic theory as an analytic basis for the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Little research has yet explored the impact of (re)translation on narrative characterization, that is, on the process through which the various actors depicted in a narrative are attributed particular traits and qualities. Moreover, the few studies that have been published on this topic are either rather more anecdotal than systematic, or their focus is primarily on the losses in character information that inevitably occur when a narrative is retold for a new audience in a new linguistic context. They do not explore how the translator’s own background knowledge and ideological beliefs might affect the characterization process for readers of their target-language text. Consequently, this paper seeks to make two contributions to the field: first, it presents a corpus-based methodology developed as part of the Genealogies of Knowledge project for the comparative analysis of characterization patterns in multiple retranslations of a single source text. Such an approach is valuable, it is argued, because it can enhance our ability to engage in a more systematic manner with the accumulation of characterization cues spread throughout a narrative. Second, the paper seeks to move discussions of the effects of translation on narrative characterization away from a paradigm of loss, deficiency and failure, promoting instead a perspective which embraces the productive role translators often play in reconfiguring the countless narratives through which we come to know, imagine and make sense of the past, our present and imagined futures. The potential of this methodology and theoretical standpoint is illustrated through a case study exploring changes in the characterization of ‘the common people’ in two English-language versions of classical Greek historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the first produced by Samuel Bloomfield in 1829 and the second by Steven Lattimore in 1998. Particular attention is paid to the referring expressions used by each translator—such as the multitude vs. the common people—as well as the specific attributes assigned to this narrative actor. In this way, the study attempts to gain deeper insight into the ways in which these translations reflect important shifts in attitudes within key political debates concerning the benefits and dangers of democracy.

This paper aims to improve understanding of the concept of practical wisdom. The theoretical lens used is Aristotle’s practical rationality or ‘phronesis’. Researchers argue that practical wisdom should be used as an organising framework for professional knowledge. Aristotle believed that practical wisdom as the highest intellectual virtue. Phronesis is the complicated interactions between general (theory) and practical (judgement). The contribution of this paper is to discuss the properties of practical wisdom and how they interact based on an interpretation of retirees’ knowledge. The paper summarises in-depth face-to-face interviews with nine retirees, i.e., nine separate case studies. A structured interview guideline based on a conceptual framework derived from literature was used to examine the nature of retirees’ practical wisdom. People with wisdom make better decisions. Whereas episteme’s technical knowledge may address complicated tasks, techne’s wisdom enables people to resolve truly complex tasks. Techne provides personal judgement which enables the professional to judge their actions from an external and internal perspective. Knowing that others and the individual themselves are happy with the quality of their work creates a morality that enables an inner calm and personal satisfaction leading to eudaimonia (feeling happy about life). People with wisdom behave differently. Phronesis’s cognitive properties create awareness of the knowledge that may be trusted to be seen to be behaving normally or appropriately in the organisation. The global population is ageing. This has implications for future workforce planning as experience is lost and capability gaps emerge. Retires may represent a valuable source of knowledge to help address this gap. The results are limited to nine individual case studies and four disciplines. The findings provide exciting opportunities for further research. The conceptual models may be further investigated with retirees in other disciplines.

The impact of the global financial crisis and the economic recession on Southern European countries has threatened the rural welfare of many regions. The loss by emigration of the young population, austerity policies, and the territorial concentration of essential services have led many of rural areas into a spiral of decline. The growth of regional disparities, even among rural areas, is confirmed by the European official reports. Depopulation and rural decline are highly associated with remoteness. Accessibility is one key issue to mitigating this erosion of socio-territorial cohesion; another is mobility, which is the usual way to confront the scarce opportunities and limited services in deeply rural territories. This paper pays attention to socio-territorial inequalities and considers as working hypothesis that social rights are differentiated by the habitat structure; as a result, territory determines different degrees of citizenship. Traditional perspectives focused on the access to productive resources and material opportunities as the source of disadvantages, but we suggest that a more comprehensive approach is needed to address the rural gap: the difference between living conditions and living expectations in rural areas in contrast with urban ones. We address two main processes involved on it. On the one hand, there are strong interconnections between physical and social mobility, such as commuting to distant labor markets and educative centers, which could increase the social mobility of rural youth. On the other hand, the maps of the provision of services, infrastructures networks and investments not only reshape the territories but also their sociological morphologies. Accessibility and mobility are strongly linked with rural well-being and social sustainability. We explore and illustrate these questions with examples from the Spanish case. The text is structured into four issues regarding the rural gap: the territorial imbalance and social cohesion, the demographic imbalance and rural welfare as the product of the inter-generational equilibrium, the rural disparities in accessibility and the challenges of mobility transition. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the rural policies and governance required for achieving social and territorial balance. This paper has been funded by the Spanish Plan for Scientific Research through the research projects: 'Mobilities, Social Diversity and Sustainability-CSO2012-52862' (2012-2016) and 'Socio-spatial Research and Rural Development Network. Iso-Rural-CSO2016-81728-REDT'(2016-2019).

This study conducts an epigraphic analysis of the yet undeciphered inscriptions of the ancient Indus Valley civilization and seeks to prove that just like proto-cuneiform administrative tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, or modern fiscal stamps and ration tokens, Indus seals and tablets too were formalized data-carriers that used both document-specific and linguistic syntaxes to convey messages. Analyzing various combinatorial patterns of Indus signs (e.g., typical co-occurrence restrictions present between some signs; tendency of some signs to form collocations; syntactic order(s) maintained between certain signs; strong positional preferences demonstrated by some signs; and the capability of certain signs to occur alone in inscriptions), this paper argues that Indus signs represented different content-morphemes and functional-morphemes—not phonograms used for spelling words—the majority of the inscriptions were logographic. Categorizing several Indus logograms into nine functional classes, it explores the way each sign-class has played unique functional roles for conveying complete messages through the brief inscriptions. By glossing the signs of the inscriptions using the names of their respective functional classes the study unravels the formulaic phrase-structures maintained by the majority of the inscriptions, where signs identified as phrase-final signs typically occur at the terminal positions of the semantic phrases, while signs used as connective-morphemes join semantically autonomous constituents in certain subordinating and coordinating ways, to form longer composite inscriptions. The study identifies certain Indus signs as numerical and metrological signs, which frequently collocate with specific lexemes, and clearly quantifying them in certain ways. This article also analyses the underlying relationships between certain metrological and phrase-final signs; examines the compositional nature of Indus collocations; and argues that some of the repeated sign-sequences were probable examples of linguistic reduplication. Analyzing the occasional occurrences of certain attributive quantifier signs as substantive lexemes, this paper suggests that in some inscriptional contexts those quantifier signs possibly represented certain commonly used metonyms of Indus civilization. Finally, this study explores the compositional semantics of Indus inscriptions without assigning any sound value to the signs and without speculating about whether the script encoded the speech of any specific ancient language.

Management and research represent a binomial almost unknown, whose potentialities and requirements have not yet been fully exploited even if, recently, the scientific and social communities have felt the burden of producing results and data requiring at the same time reproducibility, reliability, safety and efficacy of the discoveries, as well as a profitable use of resources. A Quality Management System (QMS) could represent a valid tool for these purposes, improving the quality of the research. The research community could ask whether and how it is possible to apply this approach in a research laboratory without hindering their creativity, and what the possible benefits might be. On the other hand, an international standard for a quality management system appropriate for a research laboratory is yet to come. The choice, the design and the application of a QMS, inspired by the Good Laboratory Practices, in a research laboratory specialized on “omics” sciences, is fully described in this paper. Its application has already shown good outcomes as testified by specific metric of efficiency and effectiveness. The approach is innovative as there is no obvious requirement for research laboratories to develop and define quality objectives. The paper highlights how the QMS approach enhances the relationship with public and private sectors by increasing customer confidence and loyalty, as well as improving the overall performance of the laboratory in terms of throughput and value of research. These results encourage proposing it as a QMS model providing a new and scalable operational strategy to be applied in a research environment with the same target and even in a generic research laboratory.

Powerful new feminisms are challenging the rise of the Global Right through mass mobilization, demands for accountability, and innovative opposition, such as #MeToo, the Global Women’s Marches, and #Feminism4the99. The international forum Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture has urged feminist scholars to meet the moment by bridging academic and larger feminist publics and attending to creative, new feminist movements. This paper showcases one such example, surfeminism, a theory and action project working between publics of academia and global surfing. Surfeminism is a worldwide network connecting people, ideas, particular coastal geographies, online and real-time communities and microeconomies in surf industry, with activisms focused on protests of sexism in surf media, access to ocean spaces, environmental health, and women’s racial, economic, and reproductive justice. The paper lays out surfeminist publics through discussion of the Institute for Women Surfers (IWS), a public humanities project in grassroots political education emphasizing relationships, cross-geography alliances, and critical thought. One of the more important and complex claims of surfeminism is for women and girls’ leisure as a feminist political need. A discussion of leisure and its relation to authoritarianisms, as well as ideologies of so-called postfeminism closes the paper.

This paper interrogates the claim that antimicrobial-resistant infections are rarely encountered in animal agriculture. This has been widely reiterated by a range of academic, policy and industry stakeholders in the UK. Further support comes from the UK's Animal and Plant Health Agency’s (APHA) passive clinical surveillance regime, which relies on veterinarians to submit samples for analysis and similarly reports low levels of resistance amongst key animal pathogens. Building on social science work on knowledge-practices of animal health and disease, and insights from emerging literature on non-knowledge or ‘agnotology’, we investigate the conditions shaping what is known about antimicrobial-resistant infections on farms. In so doing, we find that how on-farm knowledge is produced about resistant infection is concurrently related to domains of imperceptibility or what cannot be known in the context of current practices. The paper discusses the findings of ethnographic research undertaken on an East Midlands dairy farm that highlight the following specific findings. First, farmers and veterinarians, when observing instances of treatment failure, draw on an experiential repertoire that effaces resistances and instead foregrounds the complexities of host-pathogen interaction, or failings in human behaviour, over pathogen-antibiotic interactions. Second, the knowledge-practices of both farmers and veterinarians, although adept at identifying and diagnosing infectious disease are not equipped to make resistance perceptible. Third, this imperceptibility has implications for antibiotic use practices. Most notably, veterinarians anticipate resistance when making antibiotic choices. However, because of the absence of farm level knowledge of resistance this anticipatory logic is informed through the prevalence of resistance ‘at large’. The analysis has implications for the existing passive resistance surveillance regime operating in the dairy sector, which relies on veterinarians and farmers voluntarily submitting samples for diagnostic and susceptibility testing. In effect this entrenches farm level imperceptibility and effacement by farmers and veterinarians within the national dairy surveillance regime. However, we also highlight opportunities for providing farm specific knowledge of resistance through the anticipatory logic of veterinarians and a more active regime of surveillance.

Rather than speculating about the relationship between poverty and religion or making use of anecdotal knowledge, it seems to be a more transparent way to make use of empirical evidence and the empirically obtained insights into the relationship between religion and poverty. Of particular interest is the role of religious institutions and religious beliefs in poverty reduction efforts. One systematic way to explore empirical findings is the use of a specific database, namely the database of the Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab—this is the premier institution for empirical and policy-oriented poverty research, committed to the “gold standard” of recent poverty research, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). The database of the Jameel PAL rendered 14 studies (with a total of 18 research papers). Some of them were not sufficiently relevant for the topic; as such, in this study 11 of these studies are considered and the key findings of them are reconstructed insofar as they relate to the link between religion and poverty. This will be my first step. In a second step this paper offers some comments based on these studies and look at the relationship between religion and poverty more broadly; finally, some conclusions for poverty alleviation are presented.

Adding a woman’s voice to an edited volume, or a person of color on an academic panel, or an ecumenical, universalist message of welcome under a church flag—these may be well intentioned gestures of inclusion, but, even as an unintended result, minority discourses either stand on the margins, as the ‘other,’ or they morph and disappear into the dominant discourse. What is needed instead is a change of ‘being.’ Whatever we call the philosophy of religion, it owes its conception to the European Enlightenment, and the latter, its understanding of the modern subject to Christian imperialism and the colonial enterprise. How can it ever become an inclusive field? This paper reflects on the promise of inclusion of postsecular theological discourses within the Continental philosophy of religion. Can such discourses, coming on the heels of the death of God and the postmodern death of universals, overcome their patriarchal, colonial, and racist cultural archive? Such a possibility glimpses a future worth pursuing. To answer the question, this paper plays on the intersectionality of the human being as such—an imagined abstract condition of possibility of our existence—and human facticity, the embodied lived experience that is historically conditioned, culturally determined, gendered and racialized as we know it today—identities expressing or underwriting white privilege, the economic exploitation of the global south, or hegemonic Western institutions of knowledge and power. The paper analyzes key aspects of well-known postsecular theological discourses (Caputo, Vattimo, Taylor, Levinas) through the intersectional lens of feminist, race, postcolonial, and decolonial critiques (Schutte, Du Bois, Carter, Dussel, Mignolo). Error is human, but today’s sexism, racism, or economic oppression suggest it isn’t human errors we ought to correct so much as our erroneous understanding of what we call a human being. A materialist conception of being (Malabou) and a theology whose God is in and of language open the way to engage the complicity of the philosophy of religion with the dominant and hegemonic ideologies that underwrite, besides the field, today’s world order.

This paper seeks to report on the way economic principles, formulae and discourse infiltrate biological research on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the life sciences. AMR, it can be argued, has become the basis for performing certain forms of ‘economic imaginary’. Economic imaginaries are ways of projecting and materially restructuring economic and political orders through motifs, metaphors, images and practices. The paper contributes to critical social science and humanities research on the socio-economic underpinning of biological discourse. The performance of economy in this context can be seen to follow two key trajectories. The first trajectory, discussed at length in this paper, might be described as ‘economies of resistance’. Here the language of market economics structures and frames microbiological explanations of bacterial resistance. This can be illustrated through, for example, biological theories of ‘genetic capitalism’ where capitalism itself is seen to furnish microbial life with modes of economic behaviour and conduct. ‘Economies of resistance’ are evidence of the naturalisation of socio-economic structures in expert understandings of AMR. The methodological basis of this paper lies in a historical genealogical investigation into the use of economic and market principles in contemporary microbiology. The paper reports on a corpus of published academic sources identified through the use of keywords, terms, expressions and metaphors linked to market economics. Search terms included, but were not limited to: ‘trade-off’, ‘investment’, ‘market/s’, ‘competition’, ‘cooperation’, ‘economy’, ‘capital/ism’ and ‘socialist/ism’, etc. ‘Economies of resistance’ complements a second distinct trajectory that can be seen to flow in the opposite direction from biology to economic politics (the ‘resistance of economies’). Here, economic imaginaries of microbial life are redeployed in large-scale debates about the nature of economic life, about the future of the welfare state, industrial strategy, and about the politics of migration and race. ‘Economies of resistance’ and the ‘resistance of economies’ are not unrelated but, instead, they are mutually constituting dynamics in the co-production of AMR. In attempting to better understand this co-production, the paper draws upon literatures on the biopolitics of immunity in political philosophy and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

This comment deals with the question of how current political regimes could effectively contribute to the mitigation of climate change—and why this might happen. Against the backdrop of the US government’s announcement to withdraw from the Paris agreement, the rise of populist governments across the globe, and the slow progress of energy transformation projects in pluralistic countries, this paper focuses on China’s potential role in climate change mitigation. Since 2008, the Chinese government has switched to a proactive stance on climate governance and low-carbon development. Due to significant improvements in CO2 efficiency and a clear slow-down in the rise of its annual total CO2 emissions, China is increasingly perceived as a new low-carbon champion and appears to be in a position to take over global climate mitigation leadership. This comment examines the drivers behind current low-carbon developments in China and tests the assumption that China’s state-led non-participatory authoritarianism will effectively offer a solution to the global climate problem. Any switch to low-carbon development rests on complex societal preconditions and requirements. This paper discusses the reasons why the likelihood that the Chinese authoritarian regime will be effective over the long-term in lowering greenhouse gas emissions is uncertain at best—because of internal contestations, low public and private-business participation, and countervailing strategies to secure China’s global market positions. Understanding the foundations and nature of China’s climate change mitigation championship has important implications for fostering low-carbon developments in all political regimes.

For much of the past two decades, expensive and often imported evidence-based programmes (EBPs) developed by clinician-researchers have been much in vogue in the family and parenting support field, as in many other areas of social provision. With their elaborate infrastructures, voluminous research bases and strict licensing criteria, they have seemed to offer certainty of success over less packaged, less well-evidenced locally developed approaches. Yet recently, evaluation research is showing that success is not assured. EBPs can and regularly do fail, at substantial cost to the public purse. In times of severe resource pressure, a pressing question is, therefore, whether lower cost, home-grown, practitioner-developed programmes—the sort often overlooked by policy-makers —can deliver socially significant and scientifically convincing outcomes at lower cost and at least on a par with their better resourced cousins. This paper shows how the application of techniques increasingly used in implementation science (the science of effective delivery) could help level the playing field. Processes for doing this including co-produced theory of change development and validation are illustrated with reference to the Family Links Ten Week Nurturing Programme (FLNP-10), a popular manualised group-based parenting support programme, designed and disseminated since the 1990s by a UK-based purveyor organisation. The paper draws out general principles for formulating and structuring strong theories of change for practice improvement projects. The work shows that novel application of implementation science-informed techniques can help home-grown programmes to compete scientifically by strengthening their design and delivery, and preparing the ground for better and fairer evaluation.

This paper reads the future of the Philosophy of Religion via a critical engagement with the thought of Paul Tillich and diversions into other thinkers to support the main thrust of the argument. It takes as a starting point Tillich’s discussion of the relationship between religion and culture in On the Boundary (1967), in particular his statement “As religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (69–70). With (unlikely) diversions via TS Eliot and Karl Barth, the argument is developed through a re-reading of Tillich’s work on a theology of culture and in particular the statement from Systematic Theology III (1964b) that “…religion cannot express itself even in a meaningful silence without culture, from which it takes all forms of meaningful expression. And we must restate that culture loses its depth and inexhaustibility without the ultimacy of the ultimate” (264). Central to the rethinking of this paper is then the reworking of Tillich’s statement in On the Boundary that “My philosophy of religion …consciously remains on the boundary between theology and philosophy, taking care not to lose the one in the other. It attempts to express the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (52). While this can be seen as expressing the basis of continental philosophy and its creative tension between theology and philosophy, this paper inserts culture as the meeting point that holds theology and philosophy in tension and not opposition. That is, a theology of culture also engages with a philosophy of culture; just as a philosophy of religion must engage with a philosophy of culture; for it is culture that gives rise to both theology and philosophy, being the place where they both meet and distinguish themselves. The final part of this paper articulates a rethought Philosophy of Culture as the boundary space from which the future of the Philosophy of Religion can be thought, in creative tension with a Tillich-derived radical theology.

For both contemporaneous commentators and historians, psychiatry within what was Communist Europe has largely been discussed through the prism of politics and ideology. Recently, scholars have begun to debate the extent to which psychiatric practices within post-WWII Eastern Europe were beholden to the ideological aspirations of the political elite. This paper enters into these debates by suggesting the need for more nuance in how historians analyse the relationship between ideology and psychiatry in this context. Specifically, it argues that there is a need to differentiate between psychiatric practices that were socialist by design—where professional knowledge was theoretically guided by ideological considerations—and those that were socialist by default—where practices were shaped by the socialist context without being meaningfully inspired by ideology. In order to demonstrate these distinctions, this paper reflects upon psychiatric developments within Communist Yugoslavia (1945–1991). By drawing a clearer distinction between “socialist by design” and “socialism by default”, it becomes easier to reconnect Eastern Europe to the broader historiography of twentieth century psychiatry, while simultaneously providing new insights into the experience of state-sponsored Communism.

Abstract In contrast with most social theories, which are inclined to see the world and its problems as a matter of scarcity, this paper discusses poverty and religious organizations as actors in the field of poverty alleviation from the viewpoint of excess and abundance. The analysis draws from two essays that deal with the question of excess and excessiveness from the perspectives of social theory and moral philosophy, and applies their ideas in order to understand and reconsider the social practice of food assistance and the role of religious organizations as food assistance providers. This paper suggests that charitable food assistance is an excess rescaling strategy, which brings together food insecurity and food waste and thus makes food excess more desirable and less disturbing. Via the processes of rescaling and decriminalizing food excess, excess becomes a utility and a resource for helping people who suffer from poverty. Religious organizations, in turn, become middlemen in rescaling and decriminalizing excess and transforming it into a virtue.

This paper outlines how the digital currency and network technology of bitcoin functions and explores the context from which it emerged. Bitcoin was conceived in 2008 as an attempt to alleviate trust in government and banks which was at a low during this period of financial crisis. However, with bitcoin trust does not dissipate, rather it shifts. Trust moves from trust in banks or states to trust in algorithms and encryption software. There is a move from conventional trust in the gold standard—“In Gold We Trust”—to the trust announced on U.S. currency—“In God We Trust”—to trust in software and networks—“In Digital We Trust”. The hyperbole of bitcoin discourse is deemed to be an expression of the Californian Ideology, which itself often conceals a right-wing agenda. The paper analyses the hype behind the celebration of decentralised digital networks. It proposes that a form of network fetishism operates here. The failure of bitcoin as a currency (rather than as a hoarded commodity in an emergent bubble) and as an idea might be attributed to the failure to see how ultra-modern digital networks conceal very traditional consolidation of power and capital. The rise and fall of bitcoin, in terms of its original ambition, serves as a cautionary tale in the digital age—it reveals how ingenious innovations that might challenge power and the consolidation of capital become co-opted and colonised by capital. Finally, the paper offers a discussion of the possible progressive uses of the digital technology bitcoin has facilitated.

Recently physician overconfidence has been considered as a major factor contributing to diagnostic error. A philosophical inquiry into overconfidence as a character vice has the promise of shedding light on how we can overcome this vice and potentially reduce diagnostic errors. In his recent work, Quassim Cassam conducts such an inquiry. This paper puts Cassam’s work on physician overconfidence in the context of his theoretical work on self-knowledge and epistemic vices. It shows that physician overconfidence, considered as a major factor in diagnostic error, provides a significant real-life application of Cassam’s accounts of self-knowledge and epistemic vices. It focuses on the features of these accounts that lead to the following result: self-knowledge is rarely, if ever, a remedy for physicians’ overconfidence and the resulting diagnostic errors. By appealing to the same data Cassam cites regarding diagnostic error and physicians’ overconfidence, it is shown that the more substantial—in the sense Cassam specifies—one’s third-personal knowledge of oneself is, the less likely it is to be of any practical value qua self-knowledge. This paper defends the view that what Cassam calls ‘trivial self-knowledge’—first-personal knowledge that has been the primary concern for philosophers—is crucial for any kind of self-knowledge to be instrumental for self-improvement. Since an agent acts from the standpoint that she is aware of herself trivially, it is argued that what Cassam calls ‘substantial self-knowledge’ has no practical value unless it is integrated with what he calls ‘trivial self-knowledge’. In this way the paper explains why if what one learns about oneself from the third-person perspective is drastically different from what one takes to be true from the first-person perspective, one cannot act on this knowledge. Since the standpoint from which one experiences and acts intentionally are one and the same, the paper also explains why traumatic experiences (such as the death of a patient or of a loved one) can sometimes lead to fundamental change and self-improvement.

Horror film scholarship has generally suggested that the supernatural vampire either did not appear onscreen during the early cinema period, or that it appeared only once, in Georges Méliès’ Le manoir du diable/The Devil’s Castle (1896). By making rigorous use of archival materials, this essay tests those assumptions and determines them to be incorrect, while at the same time acknowledging the ambiguity of vampires and early cinema, both being prone to misreadings and misunderstandings. Between 1895 and 1915, moving pictures underwent major evolutions that transformed their narrative codes of intelligibility. During the same years, the subject of vampirism also experienced great change, with the supernatural characters of folklore largely dislocated by the non-supernatural “vamps” of popular culture. In an effort to reconcile the onscreen ambiguities, this paper adopts a New Film History methodology to examine four early films distributed in America, showing how characters in two of them—Le manoir du diable and La légende du fantôme/Legend of a Ghost (Pathé Frères, 1908) have in different eras been mistakenly read as supernatural vampires, as well as how a third—The Vampire, a little-known chapter of the serial The Exploits of Elaine (Pathé, 1915)—invoked supernatural vampirism, but only as a metaphor. The paper concludes by analyzing Loïe Fuller (Pathé Frères, 1905), the only film of the era that seems to have depicted a supernatural vampire. Revising the early history of vampires onscreen brings renewed focus to the intrinsic similarities between the supernatural creatures and the cinema.

This paper is the first to consider the role of late-nineteenth century British beauty culturists in establishing the respectability of anti-aging goods and services. It surveys self-published beauty texts, periodical press coverage, and advertisements to ask how female beauty providers positioned their businesses so as to enhance the reputation of their wares. These texts reveal that, by foregrounding the respectability, modernity, and novelty of regenerative techniques, British beauty culturists challenged existing narratives of commercial beautification, shifting feminine regeneration from the realm of vanity to necessity, from a question of moral character to commercial endeavor. However, these discursive strategies, not to mention the use of technology for the purpose of female bodily enhancement, were not welcomed by all. The paper subsequently turns to police court coverage and medical journals that criticized beauty “quacks” for reportedly duping unsuspecting female customers. The pursuit of duplicitous “beauty doctors” by unsatisfied customers and medical publications comes to the fore in a concluding profile of Anna Ruppert, a popular London-based beauty culturist who found herself charged under Ireland’s Pharmaceutical Act in 1893 for selling arsenical compounds. And yet, despite public scrutiny, the British press, consumers, and commercial providers increasingly embraced a more overt beauty culture that would prevail through the interwar period. This paper argues that this was due, in part, to discursive shifts advanced by fin de siècle beauty culturists, who paid the price for these interventions, existing as a liminal group straddling respectability and quackery.

What drives Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI)? While the literature in organizational and business studies has established a strong positive association between Chinese foreign direct investments (FDI) and weak institutions in the developing world, these works have generally underexamined how inter-state relations between China and the host country impact Chinese FDI. This paper examines Chinese FDI in the Philippines during the Arroyo (2001–2010), Aquino (2010–2016), and Duterte (2016-) presidencies. Since sufficient variation across these administrations can be found in the volatility of Chinese FDI, the different levels of state capacity, and the vacillation of inter-state relations with China, the Philippine case sets up an ideal within-case comparison to analyze how inter-state relations figure in the relationship of Chinese FDI and weak institutions while holding other potentially confounding factors constant. This article argues that the rise and fall of Chinese FDI depend not only on the conflictual or cooperative relations between China and the host country, but also on the strength or weakness of various types of state capacity. State capacity mediates the impact of inter-state relations on the three kinds of Chinese FDI: (1) state investments; (2) private investments; and (3) illicit capital. Specifically, conflictual relations can constrain state investments and encourage the flow of illicit capital. Conversely, cooperative relations can encourage state investments and hinder the flow of illicit capital. Private investments depend on the legal-administrative and fiscal capacity of the state while illicit capital can be constrained by the host country’s coercive capacity. Infrastructural power can affect the realization of state and private investments. In showing the responses of these three kinds of Chinese FDI to inter-state relations as well as the strength or weakness of various types of state capacity in the host country, the paper modifies the assumption in the literature that weak institutions draw in high-levels of Chinese FDI. Supported by in-depth key-informant interviews with Philippine government officials, politicians, and Chinese investors, this finding demonstrates the protean nature of Chinese FDI: it is able to adapt to different political conditions and historical circumstances.

Recent political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic have led some to argue that we live in the age of ‘post-factual’ or ‘post-truth’ politics, suggesting evidence has a limited role in debate and public policy. How can we demonstrate the public value of evidence-informed debate under those circumstances? Survey evidence on public attitudes to expertise offers some hope that the tone of much of this debate is unduly pessimistic. While policy-making always develops in an environment where evidence is contested, this paper will argue that understanding of the routines through which Ministers work and assimilate evidence is actually under-researched. Not only are Ministers open to evidence, but there is an institutional grounding for evidence-based policy in government. Meanwhile, the creation of devolved institutions has created new sites in the UK for evidence-based policy-making, despite the political tensions between UK and devolved governments. Drawing on academic and think tank insights, and experience as a Welsh Government Minister between 2007 and 2016, this paper argues for three key approaches for the academic community to adopt: understanding the temporal focus of ministers, building trust amongst ministers and those who advise them in the evidence-promoting capacity of the academic policy community, and shaping the wider authorising environment, including the media that contributes to the framing of key policy debates.

Hiring is a critical determinant of organizational performance and has received considerable attention in economics where the focus is on identifying who is the best person for the job (an adverse selection problem) and ensuring that the person hired has incentives to behave in a desirable manner (a moral hazard problem). The implicit assumption in this literature is that everyone agrees on what constitutes the “best candidate.” In this paper we show that the economics literature fails to recognize that people will generally disagree over “what is best?” Answering this question requires people to make inferences about the environment the organization expects to experience in the future and to match this environment with leader characteristics. Given the idiosyncratic nature of inference, there will be disagreement on the “best person for the job,” even when everyone shares the same goals. The purpose of this paper is to outline why conflict regarding the most desirable person for the job emerges in rapidly changing environments and how this conflict is different from conflict that arises from self-interest and the presence of decision-making biases. The paper shows that conflict from inference, if properly dealt with, can actually improve decision-making, and what can be done to create the right conditions for this to occur. The paper also shows why hiring always involves an element of luck.

This paper employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse the representation of political social actors in media coverage of the Gaza war of 2008–2009. The paper examines texts of systematically chosen news stories from four international newspapers: ‘The Guardian, The Times London, The New York Times and The Washington Post’. The findings show substantial similarities in representation patterns among the four newspapers. More specifically, the selected newspapers foreground Israeli agency in achieving a ceasefire, whereby Israeli actors are predominantly assigned activated roles. By contrast, the four newspapers foreground Palestinian agency in refusing ceasefire through assigning activated roles. The findings of this study suggest that news reports on the Gaza war of 2008–2009 are influenced by the political orientations of the newspapers and also their liberal and conservative ideological stances. Overall, the most represented actors are Israeli governmental officials, whereas Palestinian actors are Hamas members. This representation draws an overall image that the war is being directed against Hamas.

This article addresses the future of research assessment within higher education in the UK from a humanities perspective. Recent changes to policy (such as The Browne Report 2010 and the 2014 REF) indicates that humanities research is increasingly required to provide quantifiable or commercial results in order to attain value. Although research assessment exercises have been a formal part of UK higher education since the first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1986, the last 6 years have seen a significant change in how research is valued within the academy. Specifically, this paper responds to the increasing prioritisation of 'impact' measurement in research assessment criteria. The article situates recent changes in higher education within a historical context of cultural policymaking in the UK from the 1980s to the present day. Such an undertaking highlights the specific challenges and nuances within the shift towards 'impact'. Firstly, this paper details how public cultural institutions (such as museums and art galleries) became subject to practises of economisation and social accountability as a result of 1980s cultural policy. A rich field of literature from museology and arts management provides valuable sources and testimonies that should be considered in the future of the academic humanities. Secondly, this paper considers the implications of the creative industries upon the perception of knowledge production since the 1990s. Following this specific history of cultural assessment mechanisms in the UK, this article concludes by demonstrating that neither the adoption of a purely economic approach nor a refusal of accountability will serve the humanities. Whilst there is a wealth of social science research that explores valuation methods and assessment culture there is a lack of humanities research within this vital debate. This article presents a response from a humanities perspective. As a result, this contribution raises awareness of the urgent need for humanities scholars to engage in these emerging and significant debates concerning the future of research assessment in the UK.

In the contemporary Western climate, counter-terrorism discourse dealing with so-called Islamic extremism appears to be obsessed with trying to understand the motives behind what prompts somebody to turn to terrorism. This paper will argue that attempts to locate extremist motives in such a way can be seen to reinforce earlier iterations of positivist criminology and race-thinking. Through a critical examination of the works of criminologist Cesare Lombroso, this paper will tease out the interconnections between his ‘criminal types’ thesis, and the British government’s current Prevent policy that seeks to identify ‘extremist types.’ By developing a rich critique of these positivist approaches, the paper will go on to question how we might think beyond the essentialism, reductivism, and racism/Islamophobia inherent within such frameworks. In this way, the paper raises a series of conceptual implications for criminology and terrorism studies, while at the same time, develops a contribution to critical race and ethnicity studies.

This paper seeks to draw on the tools of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse, hegemony and populism as well as recent Essex School work on populism to examine the discourse of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and, in the process, come closer to a more systematic understanding of nature and limits of right-wing populism as well as the interplay and distinction between populist and non-populist discursive logics more generally. The paper situates itself in the context of existing Essex School work that has distinguished populism from institutionalism—and, more recently, from nationalism —in terms of either the length of the equivalential chain or the centrality of “the people” as nodal point in addition to the degree of antagonistic division between “people” and “power.” Building on this latter strand in the recent work of Yannis Stavrakakis and others, this paper proposes a formal distinction between populism and reductionism as internal to Laclau’s theory of populism. Reductionism, it is argued, tends to reduce “the people” onto a differential particularity that sets a priori limits on the equivalential chain as opposed to constructing it as a tendentially empty signifier attached to an open-ended chain—producing a tendential closure of the equivalential chain and thus undercutting the primacy of the logic of equivalence that is fundamental to Laclau’s understanding of populism and subsequent Essex School applications of it. It is argued that predominantly ethno-, cultural- or nativist-reductionist discourses may nonetheless deploy a populist logic of partial openings in the equivalential chain, especially through the selective equivalential incorporation of sexual or ethno-linguistic minorities against a common (often “Islamic”) constitutive outside. This is demonstrated empirically in a discourse analysis of the AfD and its development from a “competition populism” into an ethno-culturally reductionist conception of “the people” coexisting with partial openings in relation to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and Russian-Germans in the Berlin context in particular.

This comment seeks to identify some key concerns in the study of mediated populism. The paper highlights the relationship between populism and political conditions, noting that the weak party structures and non-conventional party-media relations that characterise populist actors applies across the political left and right, who engage strategically according to media conditions. In setting out the terms in which mediated populism operates, the paper stresses the turn to emotionality in media, with a particular prominence on the expression of aggressiveness. It links with the rise of participatory media, with an attendant shift in the style and form of language to characterise political discussion and influences on legitimate political speech. The paper then looks at the use of “fake news” as a means of positioning media within the discredited elite, warranting the easy dismissal of hostile content. While showing how the political and media environment provides fertile grounds for populism, and the extent to which populism is encouraged by media affordances, the article concludes by recommending the purposeful cultivation by media of alternative and proactive forms of inclusion and emotional engagement.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The academic literature on financial reporting and accounting is limited in the football industry compared with other sectors of the economy. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the financial communications of football clubs with reference to the impairment test for football players. According to the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), an impairment test measures whether a balance sheet item is actually worth the amount stated on the balance sheet. The balance sheet amount should be reduced if the impairment test indicates a lower value. At the end of each reporting period, a football club is required to assess whether there is any indication that a footballer may be impaired. The paper aims to show that the financial communications and reporting disclosed by football clubs about the impairment test procedure is poor and inadequate. It is argued that the UEFA regulations have gaps that ought to be filled and that IFRS are not perfectly suitable for companies operating in specific business sectors such as the football industry. The study is based on an extensive literature review and an analysis of previous academic studies. In addition, this study investigates the best practices reported in the footnotes of the financial statements of several football clubs in Italy, England and Scotland. These clubs operate and play in different jurisdictions and so also adopt different accounting standards. The research study reveals that only a few of the clubs studied give information about the impairment test in the footnotes to financial statements. This confirms that the financial communications of football clubs are limited. Secondly, only one club studied (Rangers F.C.) acknowledges that a possible external indication for performing an impairment test might be the failure to achieve the sporting goals fixed at the beginning of the sporting season. Our findings suggest that UEFA, FIFA and local football associations should promote new regulations aimed to improve the accuracy of the financial disclosure of football clubs. They should also introduce as an important external indicator to perform the impairment. This kind of failure has a negative impact on football clubs’ revenues. These findings may also have interesting implications for other sporting organisations. This article is published as part of a collection on corporate governance, the sports industry and intellectual capital.

This article attempts to read Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as a film that belongs to the genre of the corporeal Gothic. It attempts to study the fluidity of human anatomy, as shown in Psycho, through the lens of taxidermy. In Psycho, Norman Bates practises taxidermy to “fill” his “empty” time. But taxidermy is not used in the film merely as a marginal art practised by a marginalized character. It is a major motif that contributes significantly in adding to the Gothic atmosphere of the film. Highlighting the materiality of the human body through “grotesque preservation” and thereby creating a discourse on the preservation/destruction duality, that is central to taxidermy, is the point through which the paper seeks entry into the zone of the Gothic and into the world of Psycho. The decaying body of Mrs Bates, the deranged body of Norman Bates, and the tortured body of Marion Crane are studied as “taxidermic recreations” that not only reflect a taxidermist’s urge to construct compliant bodies but become sites of the creator’s and the viewer’s desire, much in the vein of a Gothic creation. The paper thus tries to understand whether the art of taxidermy, in general, and, its use in Psycho in particular, contributes to the genre of the Gothic. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

In recent years, in the field of philosophy of religion, François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” has opened up a path out of the battles between secularist philosophies and resurging Christian theologies. It has done so by theorizing the radical immanence of the Human (or, as he writes, Man-in-person) separated from and foreclosed to simultaneously the (philosophical) enclosure of the World and the (theological) transcendence of God. This paper explores the way Laruelle’s 2007 work Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains further articulates radical immanence by engaging with materials from the traditions of mysticism and mystical theology. Mystique non-philosophique diagnoses the ways traditional mysticism remains complicit with philosophical operations by enchaining the radical immanence of Man-in-person or the One, making it desire, need and work for divine transcendence. In contrast, it proposes the practice of “future mysticism”, which seeks to subvert all conceptual mechanisms that subjugate the Human and render it servile to operations such as dialectical synthesis, conversion or desire for the Other. This approach underwrites Laruelle’s critique of Meister Eckhart’s thought for its enclosure of the Human within the Neo-platonic grammar of procession, conversion and return, and for the way it retains an emphasis on transcendent super-essentiality in its discourse of the God(head) beyond God. The paper suggests, however, that Eckhart’s sermons, despite deploying such inherited philosophical vocabularies, already articulate radical immanence that undermines the necessity of mediation and work, through mystical topoi such as poverty, humility and “without a why”. In so doing, the paper not only proposes the necessity of a more generous hermeneutic framework for non-philosophy, but also offers the possibility of de-emphasizing the name of “Man” in the theorization of radical immanence. As the paper shows, Eckhart’s conceptuality of poverty, humility and “without a why” points not only to the capacity to subvert transcendence, but additionally to articulate radical immanence decoupled from any Human figure. The radical immanence of the One, however, is not just foreclosed to the World, but, as Mystique non-philosophique makes clear, also entails a messianic dimension: the text repeatedly proposes cloning “Christ-subjects” or “Future Christs” who are not of the World but “for the World”. The final part of this paper argues that it is necessary to read such messianic concepts or “first names” without reverting to economic thinking, without, that is, re-introducing the mechanism of transcendence and specular enclosure. The real subversion of the World lies not in the affirmation of divine transcendence, nor in the nihilism of the desert, but in an immanent One, which is foreclosed to the World but nevertheless messianically displays its insufficiency. Finally, the paper suggests interpreting the radical immanence of the One as an undercommons of the World and (eschatological or divine) transcendence taken together, an undercommons that indexes the mobile lives, generic uncountable forms of living and anonymous forces that pose a perpetual danger to the order enforced by the World and its Gods. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

The discipline of philosophical hermeneutics, which has played a crucial role in the discipline of New Testament studies, is haunted by the Holocaust. While there has been a great deal of Heidegger scholarship on the interface of Heidegger’s Nazi engagement and his thought, such scholarly focus has been lacking in the larger field of hermeneutics. Current hermeneutical theorists have not explored the various ways that hermeneutical theorists may be responding to the Holocaust. This paper seeks to rectify this scholarly lacuna by drawing attention to what is largely unspoken in hermeneutical theory. My argument examines one particularly important strain of hermeneutical thinking should be seen as a response to fascism and genocide: the critique of instrumental rationality. I look at three seminal sets of scholars: Heidegger, Gadamer and the Frankfurt School. The three sets of thinkers share remarkably similar views about the ills of modernity and a remarkably similar philosophical narrative on how these ills came about. In this grand narrative, current political or social problems are surface symptoms of a deeper spiritual crisis produced by the Enlightenment. The bulk of the paper consists of a reading of central elements of the thought of Heidegger, Gadamer and the Frankfurt School. This reading demonstrates that, for each, the critique of instrumental rationality represents their fundamental approach to confronting fascism and genocide. In the course of the analysis, I identify the limitations of this approach as both a ground for an ontological approach to interpretation and a theoretical response to the problems of fascism and genocide. If hermeneutics wishes to confront the Holocaust, then it needs to allow the Holocaust to become the explicit rather than implicit horizon and, thereby, to allow the emergence of a new set of questions that will produce a new turn in the hermeneutical dialogue. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

Biomedical literature and policy are highly concerned with encouraging and improving the clinical application and clinical benefit of new scientific knowledge. Debates, theorizing, and policy initiatives aiming to close the “bench-to-bedside gap” have led to the development of “Translational Research” (TR), an emerging set of research-related discourses and practices within biomedicine. Studies in social science and the humanities have explored and challenged the assumptions underpinning specific TR models and policy initiatives, as well as the socio-material transformations involved. However, only few studies have explored TR as a productive ongoing process of meaning-making taking place as part of the everyday practices of the actual researchers located at the very nexus of science and clinic. This article therefore asks the question of how the discourse and promise of translation is embedded and performed within the practices and perspective of the specific actors involved. The findings are based on material from ethnographic fieldwork among translational researchers situated in a Danish hospital research setting. The analysis draws on the analytical notion of performativity in order to approach statements and models of TR in the light of their performative dimension. This analytical approach thus helps to highlight how the characterizations of TR also contain prescriptions for how the world must change for these characterizations to become true. The analysis provides insights into four different characterizations of TR and reflects on the associated practices where performative success is achieved in practice. With the presentation of these four characterizations, this paper illustrates different uses of the term TR among the actual actors engaged in research-clinic activities and contributes insight into the complex processes of conceptual and material reorganization that form part of the emergence of TR in biomedicine.

This paper deals with the fundamental issue of quantifying the degree of competitiveness underlying an election in a society. That is, given the vote shares of competing political parties in the election one needs to arrive at a representative metric of electoral competition. The vote share of a party represents its influence on the outcome of the election. A summary measure of differences of such influences across parties, aggregated in an unambiguous way, is an index of electoral competitiveness. The literature contains several such indices. Implicit under the choice of an index is a set of properties that the index satisfies. A highly attractive feature of the probability ratio index we suggest in this article, as a summary measure of electoral competition, is its suitability for making comparisons of competitiveness across elections with different number of parties. The probability ratio index is simply the ratio between the probabilities that the two voters drawn at random with (without) replacement have voted for different parties under actual vote shares across the competing parties and under equal vote shares across them. The comparability feature of the probability ratio index can be maintained without sacrificing any nice characteristic expected from an electoral competition measure. The probability ratio index is inversely related to the well-known Herfindahl–Hirschman concentration index that indicates dominance of large parties, directly related to the fractionalization index, which indicates how vote shares are split among the parties, and also inversely related to the squared coefficient of variation, a highly popular measure of inequality. It is argued explicitly how the new index can be applied to measure competitiveness for true data. Simple examples are used to demonstrate why probability ratio index has a comparative advantage over some other well-known indices, particularly, in terms of cross-election comparability.

In the last decade, a global interest in impact investing—whose goal is to generate social and environmental benefits alongside economic returns—has rapidly grown. In this context, this paper explores the socio-demographic characteristics of investors who choose impact investment options over traditional investments, and on the drivers promoting such choices. More specifically, the study consists of an experiment-based research in which 602 participants (non-experts and experts in the financial sector) took part in a multiple-choice game involving different investment scenarios and incentive conditions. The findings show that both expert investors and female participants are more likely to choose impact investment options and that the tendency to invest in social funds increases with age. Neither external and centrally planned incentives, such as fiscal incentives, nor the educational level of participants show a significant influence on investment choices. By contrast, information about the actual social impact achieved by funds plays a role in promoting socially oriented decisions. In this regard, visual aids appear to be an effective means of promoting impact investment. These findings may be of interest to policymakers, social campaigners and investment practitioners themselves when designing strategies for raising interest in impact investing or norms to strengthen a conducive and enabling environment for social entrepreneurship more broadly.

Poverty is an important issue for third world Sub-Saharan African countries such as Ethiopia. To assist with poverty alleviation, a great number of nongovernmental organizations have moved resources into the region, but the problem has not significantly improved. This paper studies the Jerusalem Children and Community Development Organization (JeCCDO), an NGO that has engaged in poverty alleviation programs in Ethiopia for more than 35 years. The study examines communication practices used by JeCCDO as part of its poverty alleviation programs in Negede Woito community (Bahir Dar, Ethiopia). We use a qualitative research methodology to assess the organization’s communication practices, as well as the challenges it and the Negede Woito community face. Poverty is perceived as lack of resources by JeCCDO, but the community also prioritizes other forms of poverty such as psychological and cultural. Our findings reveal that JeCCDO is renowned for using a social enterprise development model and a participatory communication approach. However, in practice we find these are not used. In the models, endogenous knowledge and grassroots communication were vital to community development, but JeCCDO did not implement them during planning, implementing, and evaluating community-based programs. Community workers who coordinated the organization and the community were Negede Woito community members. Besides grassroots communication, knowing the context and living situation of the community is mandatory for development agents. JeCCDO did not contextualize development efforts, such as sheep fattening and poultry for people who did not have shelter. In conclusion, we propose that nongovernmental organizations and development workers should reconsider their communication contexts and practices while launching new poverty alleviation programs.

Based on the background of Chinese education reform and Chinese cultural values, the paper aims to develop a good reliable and valid scale to measure the job embeddedness of Chinese primary school teachers. To achieve the above purpose, first, we created these domains and items through an analysis of previous literature and an opened questionnaire survey of Chinese primary school teachers. Second, three experts and scholars from education and psychology evaluated the content validity of the scale. Finally, we randomly selected 534 Chinese primary school teachers to form a sample, and then tested the reliability and validity of the scale by SPSS and Amos software. We found that the scale of Chinese primary school teachers’ job embeddedness consists of five domains, including 28 items. The reliability and validity of the scale is acceptable. The five domains were named “fit to organization”, “fit to community”, “organization-related sacrifice”, “links to community” and “fit to family”. Therefore, we come to the following conclusions: first, the structural model of job embeddedness of Chinese primary school teachers consists of five dimensions. Second, the scale gets a good reliability and validity.

This paper explores the status of relations in object-oriented ontology (OOO). On the one hand, objects often seem to get the upper hand, since what an object is cannot be reduced to the sum total of its (external) relations. On the other hand, there cannot be a hierarchy between object and relations, since we would then be talking about a vertical ontology, and what OOO advocates is a flat ontology. Relations must have the same ontological status as objects, due to the flatness of reality. Furthermore, relations already play a role in the things themselves in terms of an internal relationality. What an object is cannot be separated from where it is. In other words, the object is its where. While internal relations seem to work at the central core of objects, external relations pose the greatest problem. If objects are destructible, we have to re-evaluate the status of external relations. While OOO is still to develop a fully-fledged theory of destructibility or death, I suggest that Kierkegaard’s notion of finitude can provide a fruitful trajectory. With Kierkegaard, I argue that death cannot merely be located within an object but concerns the radical outside which brings the status of external relationality to the fore.

Today’s societies increasingly consist of members who migrated from other countries and regions, and their functioning depends heavily on integrating their diverse members. Interactions with the local population through social activities enhance integration. Despite its relevance, however, previous research has largely overlooked the role of the local population in social integration. This paper introduces an objective method for analyzing access to social activities. Switzerland includes diverse native groups, who differ in culture and language, and a high percentage of foreigners. Applications were sent by email to amateur Swiss football clubs, asking if it is possible to join a training session. The applications differed only in the contact name. Individuals with foreign names, as well as individuals with Swiss names from some other native groups, received significantly fewer responses. The findings are relevant for governing institutions and policy-makers. Researchers who study social integration may find the novel method used here of considerable interest. © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Monster stories, however old they may be, still prove to be very fruitful when read in an ecocritical context. Monsters can be saviours, too: they have not yet lost their warning powers, and they still sneak around in modern retellings of the myths that prove how dire the consequences of wasting resources have long been in our story-telling traditions. Thus, the monstrous clearly offers powerful, anxiety-inducing images that must be of interest in contemporary attempts to revise our story-telling to a more eco-friendly mode. Indeed, Frankenstein’s monster, a vegetarian proud to be able to live without consuming animal food, a being torn between wanting to do good but committing evil instead, may be said to embody contemporary environmental concerns. If we read the monster as a natural “Being” (to use Percy Shelley’s term), however unnaturally created, he takes on a different role, one that ties him to the myth of Prometheus in ways that have not yet been explored. Moreover, he does have overtones of the Green Man, too, and in that shape, he can be connected to a more recent monster, that employed by Patrick Ness in A Monster Calls. Monsters, no doubt about it, are scary creatures when they make us face the truth about who we are, and what we do to the earth. This paper considers some of the tensions raised by the paradox of the monstrous ‘saviour’ from an ecocritical perspective.

Approximately 40% of elementary school girls have some type of arts experience, such as dancing and playing instruments, as out-of-school activities. However, its effect has not been clearly revealed. This is mainly because the effects of the arts were not a major topic of discussion in Japan so there has been little data about the arts. With the precise knowledge, we could start considering how to take the benefits of the arts. Thus, this paper empirically analyzed the effects of the arts on quality of life in the case of Japan. The aim was to reveal the impacts of arts experiences in order to consider how to support or make use of the arts. It utilized structural equation modeling to reveal the relationships between the number of the arts experience types in elementary school and life satisfaction. The nationwide data from the Preference Parameters Study in 2013 was primarily utilized. The sample size was 1532, including 823 females and 709 males. The results showed significant positive relationships between the number of the arts experience types and life satisfaction through attitudes, present behaviors related to the arts, and leisure satisfaction. The results suggested two issues; arts experience in elementary school years helped to cultivate the mind to enjoy the arts and also the arts played the role to increase one’s quality of life.