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British mandated Palestine has attracted scholarly attention for its role in the development of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Some aspects of the time period, however, remain somewhat overlooked, and one prominent example is the reversal of the Passfield White Paper in 1931. Following extremely violent anti-Jewish riots in Palestine in 1929, the British Government in Westminster utilized two commissions of enquiry – the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Commission – to justify a change in policy. Rather than adhere to Britain’s original Zionist commitments, articulated in the Balfour Declaration and official mandate, the government decided to limit Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine, articulated in the Passfield White Paper, before reversing the policy months later. Subsequent explanations of this decision have been sparse and focused almost solely on the efficacy of Zionist lobbying. Why the British Government was susceptible to pressure and how this process took place has remained largely unexplored. In order to provide a more thorough analysis of why the Passfield White Paper was reversed, this article reassesses several assumptions within the literature and places the decision within the context of a Labour Government’s need to maintain internal unity, as well as cross-party support, on foreign and particularly India policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's (HOLC) so-called 'redlining' maps have gone from a niche corner of urban historical scholarship to the centre of mainstream narratives about racism in the United States. In this paper, I map this journey and trace the contours of the ongoing debates that have emerged, identifying two competing camps I call 'HOLC Culpablism' and 'HOLC Scepticism'. Finding these perspectives to have run up against their self-imposed limitations, I outline a research agenda that breaks from the debate's narrow confines by envisioning HOLC's mapping materials anew. My proposed approach recasts the maps and their accompanying field notes as windows into the governing racial–spatial ideology of 20th-century US real estate capital. In doing so, it invites researchers to reimagine the map grades as dynamic categories reflecting a particular spatiotemporal conception of value that is highly contingent on an area's estimated racial trajectory. This reformulation, I argue, not only opens new possibilities for studying the HOLC mapping programme but suggests that the power of these maps has almost certainly been underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract / The Chinese used paper for two or three centuries before CE 105, when Cai Lun, director of imperial arsenals under Emperor He of the later Han dynasty (25-220), officially reported the 'invention' of paper. The Chinese began the first printed newspaper, Jing Bao (originally Di Bao), in 713 under the Tang dynasty (618-907); and it continued until the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911. In 868, Wang Jie printed the famous Diamond Sutra (Kumarajiva's Vajracchedika Prajna Paramita), the earliest printed book in existence. Xylography (block printing) was known in China for at least four centuries before 932, when Prime Minister Feng Dao supposedly 'invented' it by directing the printing of the 11 Confucian classics filling 130 volumes - a task that took 20 years. Alchemist Bi Sheng experimented with movable type for eight years from1041, four cen-turies before Gutenberg. In 1313, Wang Zheng traced the development of movable type in his Nong shu, a treatise on agriculture. Chinese also made typography a fine art and produced numerous books. Printing from movable type reached its highest development in Korea from 1403 onwards. If the invention of printing ushered in the second communication revolution, then the celebration of Gutenberg as the inventor of printing represents a distortion of human history by those trying to document a so-called European 'exceptionalism' of the 15th century. The horizontally integra-tive macrohistory approach should set the record straight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I recount my experiences with western media theory. Working on my PhD thesis marked my turn to decolonial theory. I used the creolisation strategy of putting critical western Marxist theories in conversation with African, black and Latin American decolonial theories. I worked on my PhD thesis under conditions informed by the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), the Fees Must Fall (FMF) and other broader protests in South Africa whose connecting thread was the demand for the decolonisation of both the academy and public life. It is my conviction that, although work has already begun, there is still a lot of work to be done in decolonising the disciplines of journalism, media and cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of National Socialism in the late 1920s and 1930s happened within democratic societies with well-developed media systems. This gives rise to whether an increasingly right-wing press climate aided the emergence of National Socialism. Based on a comparative analysis of post-election reporting in German and Austrian newspapers, this paper argues that changes in the spectrum of opinion-leading media and in the relations both between them and with the opinion-following media can serve as indicators of a democracy at risk. Utilizing sociometric theory, it is hypothesized that in times of severe democratic crisis, the gap between elite-dominated, opinion-leading media and mass newspapers widens; reciprocal orientation among the opinion-leading media is lessened; and, finally, the composition of this group changes in favour of radical political forces. There is empirical evidence for all assumptions, reflecting a growing significance of extreme right-wing positions in the political information environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the study of penal changes throughout history is central to punishment studies, the field has taken little from historical institutionalists' theories of institutional change. One of the most relevant such theories is path dependence. This article outlines path dependence frameworks' most fruitful elements for studying penal change. Drawing on foundational political science and historical sociology texts, as well as several punishment scholars' works, this article highlights the advantages of thinking through stasis and change, mechanisms of inertia such as feedback effects, and exogenous shocks. While path dependence offers a powerful framework, it can also be an unsatisfying explanation at times, particularly when path dependence is itself a seemingly uphill battle, when apparent stasis hides ongoing change, or when institutions survive hypothesized mechanisms of change. This paper closes by discussing some ways in which punishment scholars can strengthen the path dependence framework by blending it with recent theoretical developments in the punishment studies field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what degree are historical animosities regarding another country relevant for foreign policy in the face of changes in the security environment? This paper seeks to answer this question in the context of Korea–Japan relations. While pundits have pointed to the Korean public's negative views of Japan—rooted in the colonial experience—as the explanation for the lack of cooperation between Japan and Korea in the security field, this paper argues changes in the level of common external threat can shift the public's priorities from perceived historical injustices toward the needs of security. Surveys from the period when the security environment was shifting markedly—the final years of the Cold War (1986–1990)—reveal that public opinion regarding Japan relative to other powers in the region began to deteriorate only after the security environment improved, pointing to a limit to the extent that "history" trumps security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents three extreme examples of the potential consequences of human settlement on the vegetation of oceanic and continental islands. The Neotropical Pantepui continental archipelago of sky islands is an example of pristinity, due to the almost nonexistent human impact that results from the remoteness and inaccessibility of these islands as well as the lack of natural resources to exploit. Easter Island is used to illustrate total vegetation degradation by deforestation and the exhaustion of natural resources, which has transformed the island into badlands with no signs of recovery. The Azores Islands have been chosen to illustrate replacement as, after initial postsettlement deforestation and extractive practices, a further transformative phase consisting of creating an almost totally anthropogenic vegetation with mostly exotic species occurred. The paper describes in some detail the developments of each case and the historical context in which they took place using historical, archeological and paleoecological evidence. Many intermediate states are possible among these three extremes, which can be represented with a ternary diagram (the PDR diagram), which is useful for characterizing the state of each island or archipelago in terms of human impact on terrestrial ecosystems and informing conservation and restoration practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a model for a dynamic and constructivist perspective on generations. To study synchronous, contemporary interrelations between technology, media and generations, many different methodologies are available. Yet many historical, diachronic studies are marred by flaws and ambiguities in their use of 'generation' as a concept. To counter those problems, this paper argues for a process-oriented approach of generations – one which is modelled after Bolter and Grusin's remediation. By distinguishing three mechanisms – immediate generation, immediate regeneration and hypermediate regeneration – the model of regeneration is linked to three theoretical concerns: the long-standing dilemmas in the sociological study of generations, the controversy around technological determinism in technology studies and contemporary challenges in research of ageing and youth cultures. The feasibility of the regeneration approach is elucidated by applying it to toys, especially educational toys. This paper also provides a methodology for the historical study of generations interacting with media and technology by recommending the combined use of three types of biographies as source materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence of China’s ‘university cities’ (daxuecheng) as a governmental strategy to modernise higher education and to promote its socio-economic integration. To the disappointment of policy makers, the model of university cities has largely failed to yield satisfactory educational outcomes and economic productivity. Drawing from ethnographic research at the Higher Education Mega Center (HEMC) in the suburb of Guangzhou City, this paper analyses the characteristics and problems of China’s university cities. It discusses how various disjunctures between planners’ visions and students’ everyday experiences undermine the missions of university cities: Universities intended to reinforce the reputation and growth potential of cities overestimated the need for such facilities; students rejected the vision of isolated education enclaves as a style of living; and productive connections with research and development sectors were not realised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differing definitions of ‘urban’ settlements can make comparative analysis of trends in urbanisation difficult. Definitions used by many African countries include small settlements which may not exhibit the degree of labour specialisation away from agriculture that economic theories about urbanisation presume. This may mean there is a mismatch if urban data are presumed by decision-makers to be proxies for structural economic transformation. After examining these definitional issues this paper provides five illustrative African case studies based on detailed analysis of census and agricultural employment data. It finds that for Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Mali in situ urbanisation of settlements at the bottom of the urban hierarchy has played a significant part in recent urbanisation processes. In Rwanda complex boundary changes have also contributed to a very significant redefinition of previously rural people as ‘urban’ yet overall the urbanisation level did not increase between 2002 and 2012. Significant employment in agriculture is found within small, and some larger, urban centres in all these countries. It is shown that these issues tend to be disregarded in analyses of urban trends for these countries which often present a more positive narrative of urban economic change than the census data support. These examples are contrasted with Botswana, where in situ urbanisation has also occurred but in this case driven by real occupational change. The paper concludes that the impact of definitions on apparent trends in urbanisation in Africa needs to be understood given the significance attached to these trends by policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New penal technologies, however innovative, rarely emerge fully formed, but we currently lack a theoretical appreciation of the lengthy, messy process by which penal innovations develop. Indeed, most studies of penal change focus on the conditions surrounding the emergence of a particularly successful innovation, a model of punishment whose widespread diffusion is indicative of significant change. This paper extends our analytical focus by examining the legacy of an innovation’s prehistory, the ideational period in which an idea is created at the margins of criminal justice before manifesting on a wider scale. This paper traces the history, and influence, of American uses of penal incarceration before Pennsylvania’s famous Walnut Street Prison, often referred to as the country’s first prison. This prehistory complicates the notion of innovation by identifying significant precursors. Ultimately, recognizing penal innovations’ prehistory challenges macro-level theories of penal change, which largely overlook those causes that significantly predate the “moment” of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses two distinct political mobilisations of October 2015 in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Student protests against racial, class-based, and gender-based oppression coincided with xenophobic violence in the city. These events demonstrated both challenges to and continuity with the long history of politics in Grahamstown, a history marked by the contestation and control of space, race, and citizenship. The paper argues for the continued relevance of these themes to thinking about contemporary South African politics. By considering together the two events of October 2015, we can interrogate aspects of colonial political continuities in post-1994 South Africa which variously influence mass protest action for democratic opening, anti-democratic violence, and state responses to both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do caravans matter? Australians, like others, holiday in them, travel in them, cook, eat, drink, play, sleep and have sex in them. They also live in them, often involuntarily. Caravans have a longer history than this, however caravan life has almost no presence in existing historical or cultural sociology scholarship. Our immediate interest is in caravans in Australia, modernity and mobility. Some broader interest is apparent. Theoretical arguments about mobility on a global scale have been developed by Bauman and Urry. Sociologists like Jasper have connected mobility, masculinity and automobility in Restless Nation. The sociologist and writer Marina Lewycka has used caravans as the locus of everyday life study in her novel Two Caravans. In this paper we background some of these broader issues, and offer a case study of postwar caravan manufacturing. This paper anticipates a larger possible research project in these fields. We anticipate this project raising themes like freedom, mobility, escape, utopia; images of domesticity on wheels, décor and design, materials, technology, DIY production and Fordism; caravan parks as homes and as itinerant and long-term accommodation. These themes and images are also necessarily interwoven with class, gender, sex and age. We are interested in the possibilities of using the caravan as a carrier for making sense of postwar Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban sustainability transitions are journeys of transformative socio-technical change to set course for an envisioned future city. These journeys start out in the minds of change agents as vague conceptual images inspired by far-flung ideals, which are then further substantiated and articulated as ‘urban imaginaries’ – shared understandings of what constitutes a desirable future city. The conceptual contribution of this paper lies in demonstrating the power of the urban imaginaries notion to studying the process of envisioning in the context of sustainability transitions. By following a number of prolific Thai cycling campaigners through the streets of several cities in Thailand – focusing on the urban imaginaries they articulate – this paper shows how urban sustainability transitions are envisioned from the bike saddle, how these imaginaries are mobilised to empower cycling and how a seemingly disparate set of urban development pathways converge around technological artefacts and material infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the population transition model for Vietnam, based on Grover's five stages of population transition. Compatible with the transitional model of Western Europe and other advanced Asian countries, this process in Vietnam has some significant differences: (a) the initial shift or transition of fertility of the population in Vietnam is later than in Asian countries by about 13 years while compared to Europe it is nearly 108 years later; and (b) while the period of initial transition of mortality in Vietnam may not be very different from other Asian countries, it is more than 100 years later than in European countries, especially those in Western Europe. One of the main factors influencing the late transition of Vietnam's population process is, of course, colonialism and the consecutive wars (1945–1954 and 1955–1975). After 1975, Vietnam's population was stable as industrialisation and urbanisation led to the development of health services, education and an urban lifestyle, as well as effective population policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban-geomorphology studies in historical cities provide a significant contribution towards the broad definition of the Anthropocene, perhaps even including its consideration as a new unit of geological time. Specific methodological approaches to recognize and map landforms in urban environments, where human-induced geomorphic processes have often overcome the natural ones, are proposed. This paper reports the results from, and comparison of, studies conducted in coastal historical cities facing the core of the Mediterranean Sea – that is, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Palermo (Italy) and Patras (Greece). Their settlements were facilitated by similar climatic and geographical contexts, with high grounds functional for defence, as well as by the availability of rocks useful as construction materials, which were excavated both in opencast and underground quarries. Over centuries, urbanization has also required the levelling of relief, which was performed by the excavation of heights, filling of depressions and by slope terracing. Consequently, highly modified hydrographic networks, whose streams were dammed, diverted, modified in a culvert or simply buried, characterize the selected cities. Their urban growth, which has been driven by maritime commercial activities, has determined anthropogenic coastal progradation through port and defence or waterfront works. Aggradation of artificial ground has also occurred as a consequence of repeated destruction because of both human and natural events, and subsequent reconstruction even over ruins, buried depressions and shallow cavities. As a result, the selected cities represent anthropogenic landscapes that have been predominately shaped by several human-driven processes, sometimes over centuries. Each landform represents the current result, often from multiple activities with opposing geomorphic effects. Beyond academic progress, we believe that detecting and mapping these landforms and processes should be compulsory, even in risk-assessment urban planning, because of the increase of both hazards and vulnerability as a result of climate-change-induced extreme events and extensive urbanization, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the Google Scholar produces about 78,000 hits on the term "Timoshenko beam." The question of priority is of great importance for this celebrated theory. For the first time in the world literature, this study is devoted to the question of priority. It is that Stephen Prokofievich Timoshenko had a co-author, Paul Ehrenfest. It so happened that the scientific work of Timoshenko dealing with the effect of rotary inertia and shear deformation does not carry the name of Ehrenfest as the co-author. In his 2002 book, Grigolyuk concluded that the theory belonged to both Timoshenko and Ehrenfest. This work confirms Grigolyuk's discovery, in his little known biographic book about Timoshenko, and provides details, including the newly discovered letter of Timoshenko to Ehrenfest, which is published here for the first time over a century after it was sent. This paper establishes that the beam theory that incorporates both the rotary inertia and shear deformation as is known presently, with shear correction factor included, should be referred to as the Timoshenko-Ehrenfest beam theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book chapters and journal articles dealing with spinal cord vascular malformations often reference Otto Hebold and Julius Gaupp, but frequently misrepresent the observations published by the two German authors in the late 19th century. The purpose of this paper is to provide a better appreciation of these important contributions based on abridged translations of original documents set in their historical context, notably regarding the landmark works of Brasch, Raymond and Cestan, and Lindenmann. It is concluded that Gaupp offered the first reliable description of a perimedullary arteriovenous fistula while the lesion reported by Hebold was not a spinal vascular malformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to engage in a new conceptualisation of liminality, as it applies to space and place in societies emerging from conflict but not yet at peace. We adopt a case study approach of two urban environments: Derry/Londonderry, a city that experienced acute levels of violence during the Northern Ireland conflict, and Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country, which has been at the crux of the cultural and economic struggle for Basque independence. The visual, built environment has been significantly reconfigured in both cities to communicate the transition from conflict. Yet the optics of peacebuilding does not necessarily reflect the experiences of communities as they move through complex processes. A more nuanced and critical reading of the urban environment often reveals stagnation within peace processes and the existence of liminal, inbetween spaces. This paper suggests that 'transitional optics' in societies moving out of conflict can physically illuminate the complex nature of building peace, and argues that the idea of permanent liminality can offer new ways of understanding the ways in which transitional processes can become trapped. An 'end-point' is not always achievable, or perhaps, for some, desirable. The characteristics of permanent liminality can be identified in three main areas: political imagery, physical regeneration and public space as a conflict arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of whether Paul objecting to works righteousness, or Jewish religious pride continues to dominate discussion of Romans 1-5. This paper takes a different approach. Drawing on Allport's and Ross's theory of Extrinsic and Intrinsic Religion, it suggests that, when Paul speaks of faith, he is thinking of a deeply-held spirituality which seeks God for himself ('circumcision of the heart'). He sets this over and above self-serving religiosity, a tendency which is found in all religious communities and which he fears is threatening the church at Rome. The paper explores the implications of this interpretation for some recent exegetical debates and for contemporary pastoral practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first installment of this two-part paper made a case for a conjunctural approach to urban studies, reserving a special place for the provisional formulation and ongoing revision of midlevel theories – from the entrepreneurial city to austerity urbanism and financialised urban governance – while positioning abstraction and contextualisation as simultaneous, dialogic practices. It follows that such arguments can be developed only so far in the absence of concrete cases, where conjunctural accounts actually gain traction, direction and purpose. Seeking to operationalise some of these methodological principles by way of a situated, single-city case study, this part of the paper returns to the financially challenged casino capital of Atlantic City, tracing its long (and notorious) history of entrepreneurial dealings, from Republican machine control to the ‘experiment’ with legalised gambling that was launched in the mid-1970s, and positioning the structural crisis that preceded the casino pact with the existential crisis that has been generated in the wake of the failure of this distinctive local growth machine. Atlantic City made a very large wager that did not pay off, the unravelling of its much-emulated model of entrepreneurial urbanism dramatising a distinctly ‘late-entrepreneurial’ moment of fiscally mandated governance and political crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colombian metropolises face a rapid transformation of public and private death spaces because of land scarcity, a demographic transition and a changing market for dead-disposal services. Based on case studies conducted in Bogotá and Medellín, within a Latin American context, this paper analyses the interplay between local governments and enterprises in the deathscape transformation process. The aim is to assess the effects on cemetery users, particularly the bereaved. Analytically, the paper differentiates between publicly and privately governed cemeteries and between older, inner-city graveyards and newer, suburban park cemeteries. The paper sustains that the old dichotomy of elite versus pauper cemeteries is replaced by a contrast between monumental cemeteries that are used for cultural events and suburban cemeteries that function as efficient repositories. In both cases, efficient management of the physical structures, whether as heritage or as recyclable repositories, seems to prevail over the demand for sensory connections between the dead and the living. ‘Time’ might still distinguish those illustrious dead – who are not allowed to be removed – from those who are removed or recycled. Even their relatives are gradually relegated to ephemeral space as tourist events take over. Hence, regardless of the differences between public and private cemeteries and between inner-city and suburban typologies, the rationalisation process affects the bereaved. They become bystanders in the new temporal-spatial patterns that govern Colombian metropolitan deathscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innis’ and Brinkmann’s papers tackle two key aspects in cultural psychology: the mediating role played by the different systems of meanings throughout history in making sense of the world, and the normative role of those systems, including psychology itself. This paper offers a reflection on these two issues. It begins by highlighting the contribution of psychology and history, as emerging disciplines in the 19th century, to the creation of a normative framework for the subject of modernity according to the needs of modern nation states. It also alludes to both disciplines’ common pursuit of a reference point in natural science in order to achieve a status that is on a par with the latter’s. It is argued that this resulted in an objectivist stance that equates the study of memory and history with an accurate reproduction of the past, thus concealing the mediated nature of past accounts. Drawing on this assumption, it is discussed how past events are constructed, thus bringing mediation and meaning-making to the fore. Special attention is paid to narratives as symbolic meaning-making tools. We will conclude by discussing usage of the past and the role that cultural psychology can play in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the deep historical contexts for imagining natural disasters. By focusing on a foundational event in the Western disaster imaginary – the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 – and its remediation across centuries, the paper suggests that the real-time aesthetic of the mediation of extreme nature events that now abounds in contemporary culture is profoundly embedded in processes of historical intermediality. The term remediation is used to denote a genuinely historical mechanism by which past and present (process and event) are simultaneously made visible. Empirically, the paper investigates the superimposition of temporal dimensions in recreations of the ancient disaster from the late 18th century to the present. Using the insights gained from this spectacular case study, the paper ends by arguing that a re-temporalization of historical analysis itself is needed for history to contribute to contemporary concerns with the present as a conjuncture of multiple and conflicting time scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nostalgia has historically been negatively characterised by desire to reconnect with an idealised past lost to the ‘destructive’ forces of modernity, but studies across the social sciences have recently sought to re-appraise the creative and embodied significance of individuals’ recollections. This paper contributes to this developing debate by empirically exploring the value of individual remembering in relation to the urban material landscape. First, drawing on recently collected go-along data from long-term residents of two UK cities, Birmingham and Coventry, it is argued that nostalgia could be considered a more progressive force in urban life, especially amongst residents in cities that have undergone and are undergoing physical change as a consequence of ‘official’ attempts to reconstruct, regenerate and/or repackage particular urban spaces; developing a richer understanding of the interplay between official and unofficial nostalgias can better inform planning decisions that are more likely to be socially acceptable and supported by local communities. Second, though there are clear advantages of developing a fuller theoretical and methodological consideration of urban nostalgia, this paper then uses go-along data to demonstrate that much remains to be learnt from exploring how the material urban environment can encourage and/or limit individual efforts to keep potentially distressing aspects of their past concealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why should anyone care about long-dead 19th-century scientists’ thoughts about the differences between women and men? And what does such a paper have to say to our contemporary concerns? I believe that knowledge of this history is invaluable to the health and progress of feminist psychology. This history, when viewed through an intersectional lens, can give us insight into the complex way in which values can constrict research questions and methods, can narrow and oversimplify what counts as “data,” and can be used as a regressive instrument to shore up the sociocultural status quo. In this paper I first briefly review the context in which “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women” (hereinafter Functionalism/Darwinism) was written. Then I examine what the addition of an intersectionality perspective to that work adds to our understanding of the history of the psychology of women and gender. I focus on the intersection of gender and race (and briefly touch on social class) because these were critical to 19th-century scientific justifications for existing status and power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human societies have been reshaping the geomorphology of landscapes for thousands of years, producing anthropogenic geomorphic features ranging from earthworks and reservoirs to settlements, roads, canals, ditches and plough furrows that have distinct characteristics compared with landforms produced by natural processes. Physical geographers have long recognized the widespread importance of these features in altering landforms and geomorphic processes, including hydrologic flows and stores, to processes of soil erosion and deposition. In many of the same landscapes, archaeologists have also utilized anthropogenic geomorphic features to detect and analyse human societal activities, including symbolic formations, agricultural systems, settlement patterns and trade networks. This paper provides a general framework aimed at integrating geophysical and archaeological approaches to observing, identifying and interpreting the full range of anthropogenic geomorphic features based on their structure and functioning, both individually and as components of landscape-scale management strategies by different societies, or "sociocultural fingerprints". We then couple this framework with new algorithms developed to detect anthropogenic geomorphic features using precisely detailed three-dimensional reconstructions of landscape surface structure derived from LiDAR and computer vision photogrammetry. Human societies are now transforming the geomorphology of landscapes at increasing rates and scales across the globe. To understand the causes and consequences of these transformations and contribute to building sustainable futures, the science of physical geography must advance towards empirical and theoretical frameworks that integrate the natural and sociocultural forces that are now the main shapers of Earth's surface processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many ways of moving through a city. Cycling is one which has received considerable attention from urban scholars. Yet it has remained largely neglected within the burgeoning literature on the post-socialist urbanisms of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper uses a case study from Sofia, Bulgaria to address this gap in urban research. By exploring the practices and affordances of cycling, we offer a discussion of everyday mobility, public life and urban space in post-socialist Sofia. This case study incorporates ethnography and in-depth interviews with regular cyclists. Through a discussion of bicycling spaces and practices, this paper complicates the notion of post-socialist cities as places defined by the decline of public sensibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent cultural history of the Italian Risorgimento has claimed that it was a ‘mass movement’ which affected the lives of a far greater number of soon-to-be Italians than traditional revisionist and Marxist narratives have assumed. This new history has, however, left certain questions unanswered. There has still been little attempt to explore popular receptions of national discourses, and what Risorgimento politics meant to the mass of ‘ordinary' people who lived through these seismic changes. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which one particular Risorgimento audience – the rural and urban illiterate of the province of Palermo – responded to, and attempted to make sense of, national-patriotic discourses which were articulated through ephemeral street literature and the oratory of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Palermo. This research makes use of the textual transcriptions of popular oral balladry, collected and published by Sicilian folk-scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, to investigate how the people of Palermo received and internalized discourses on Italian nationhood. An analysis of the language of these song-texts reveals that much of the imagery and symbolism of Italian nationhood, elaborated through various discursive practices, was rebuffed and the traditional, familiar idiom of popular culture was employed in the representation of the events of 1860. This paper will propose that oral culture possessed its own internal and autonomous set of images and narrative features, and that people’s receptions of official-patriotic discourses were shaped by the familiar descriptive norms of popular balladry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to situate Nigeria’s capitulation to Cameroun in the Bakassi boundary conflict between the two nations within the context and logic of global politics driven by global states such as the United States of America, Great Britain, France and Germany. It makes a case for why and how a sub-regional war was averted within the Gulf of Guinea. The paper argued that although the crisis was a sub-regional inter-state boundary dispute which threatened to escalate into a sub-regional war within the Gulf of Guinea, it acquired a global stature within the context of the operational security architecture of AFRICOM that seeks to globalize security in the incipient second wave of neo-global governance. The crisis provided ample opportunity for the operationalization of the new geography of power in global politics, founded and driven by the mirror image of ‘cognitive existentialism’. The paper concludes that Obasanjo’s lowering of the Nigerian flag in Bakassi in the context of the new security architecture was fuelled more by the fears of an escalated anti-federal militant upsurge in the Niger Delta; the official records showing Bakassi as an oil axis; America’s incorporation of Bakassi into the Gulf of Guinea; the painful remembrance of the ugly Nigerian civil war experience; and America’s refusal to supply Nigeria arms in the event of a war with Cameroun, than by a global environment characterized by the low politics of environmental recreation, humanitarian intervention and the politics of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have attributed the proliferation of rural migrant enclaves in China’s large cities primarily to the constraints limiting migrants’ residential options. Through an ethnographic exploration of Xiaohubei, a migrant enclave with a high concentration of Hubei rural migrants and small-scale garment producers in Guangzhou, this paper sheds new light on the dynamics and implications of the migrant enclaves. It argues that rural migrants are actually active agents who develop a vibrant garment manufacturing cluster by establishing a flexible garment production system, embedding their business within the enclave and maintaining a nationwide translocal network. It also contends that the enclave provides a feasible path through which migrants can achieve social mobility and adapt themselves to the urban environment. This paper concludes with a plea to take into account the agency and everyday practice of rural migrants when understanding the migrant enclaves and a reflection on the existing large-scale and indiscriminate demolition of the enclaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the hypothesis that human landscape modifications involving early agriculture contributed to greenhouse gas emissions in preindustrial times, a proposal that has significant implications for the timing of the Anthropocene era. In synthesizing recent papers that both advocate and challenge this hypothesis, we identify a major bias in the ongoing debate, which focuses on the land clearance practices of agrarian people, with insufficient consideration of a diverse range of hunter-gatherer societies who regularly utilized landscape-scale burning for various purposes. Employing California as a case study, we examine how the exclusion of hunter-gatherers from this debate may have shortchanged estimates of human biomass burning in preindustrial times. We also suggest that human population size may be a poor proxy for the degree of land clearance and anthropogenic burning, and we describe how previous approaches to these questions may have underplayed the importance of variation in the timing and magnitude of depopulation in different regions of the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voluminous literature on intergenerational transmission often engages with the transmission of poverty and poor educational attainment. This article reviews and questions the assumptions made within this literature. In particular, the paper seeks to engage with the central importance of the embodied experience of lived history and its transmission through generations. In understanding this, the article uses the work of psychoanalysts Davoine and Gaudilliere, Bracha Ettinger, and Felix Guattari, all of whom deal, in different ways, with affective transmission through bodies, in locations, and in history. In using this work to understand classed transmission, the paper suggests a number of possible routes to understanding from the past and from the embodied present of the current generation. In order to produce a complex account which does not pathologise the experience of the previous generation (usually the mother), this experience needs to be both re-theorised and placed in history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with the political and military use of confidential information gathered on behalf of the Roman Republic and the kingdom of Pontus during the reign of King Mithradates VI (c.120–63 bc). Unlike the Roman Empire, when spies worked for well-organized intelligence agencies, in this period the available sources mention several other methods of gathering sensitive information which served such secretive purposes as well. This paper explores non-professional intelligence strategies employed in ancient politics and war at a time of extreme political and military turmoil. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes the change in the composition of the North Korean elite from 1997–2010. It examines 256 public appearances by Kim Jong Il that were reported as an ‘inspection,’ ‘field guidance’ or ‘on-the-spot guidance’ visits. In particular, the paper examines 30 mentioned individuals who accompanied Kim Jong Il at least five times from 1997 to 2010 on these inspection tours. It finds that there was a great deal of volatility and change from 1999–2004 followed by a period of stability. Further, there was a shift away from a conservative perspective to a more moderate and pragmatic perspective surrounding the ‘Dear Leader.’ This has continued under the current leader, Kim Jong Un. The implications of this shift are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines a progressive moment under apartheid referred to retrospectively as ‘the Durban moment’ by activists. By exploring the friendship of assassinated activists Stephen Bantu Biko and Richard Turner, the paper calls for a nuanced assessment of the rich context of the emergence of Black Consciousness under apartheid, and shows how the rigid racial and ethnic categories imposed by the state could be challenged by creative and resourceful intellectuals. The paper draws on interviews, writings produced at the time, court transcripts and the secondary literature to argue that Black Consciousness was intimately linked on many levels to this progressive ‘moment’ in South Africa under apartheid, which has resonances for activists still today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More women are currently incarcerated than at any other time in US history. Though the United States has begun to acknowledge mass incarceration as an international embarrassment, the discourse has centered on men of color, and the experiences and consequences of US mass incarceration for women of color have been largely ignored. This is the case in spite of a now strong mainstream, institutionalized movement to end violence against women, and a growing prison reform movement ostensibly meant to help vulnerable women. This paper uses the method of immanent critique to explain why women of color have been left behind by reform strategies, and to make a normative argument for abolitionist strategies. I use Beth E. Richie’s analysis of the failure of the feminist anti-violence movement to protect poor women of color, to expose the contradictory circumstance that turns “public safety” and “anti-violence” against the women they claim to protect, and to argue that reform is not enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resettled rural communities are a product of China’s rapid urbanisation and associated top-down planning. For local governments, relocating farmers from natural villages into new, concentrated residential neighbourhoods serves the dual purpose of implementing national directives on farmland conservation and integrated urban–rural planning. For resettled residents, however, the transition process is fraught with livelihood, social and cultural contest. This paper explores how such residents in a Chinese city, Zhenjiang, exercise agency to reconstruct community and public space in their new neighbourhood. Keeping alive patterns and practice of thoughts acquired during their rural lives, habitus, resettled residents have deployed their new spatial situation in creative ways. Pre-existing social fabric and mutual benefit-sharing provide the foundation for spatial adaptation and transformation, allowing residents to achieve a sense of normalcy or even to recreate village life. Theoretically, our analysis highlights the importance of situating spatial agency within the context of shifting regime of property rights and its effect on the maintenance of habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of hukou and college education on job placement and wage attainment for Chinese rural migrant workers in the cities. The analysis of the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey shows that when rural-born individuals gain both urban hukou and college education, they enjoy equal job-sector placement and they earn significantly higher wages than the college-educated locals. But in the absence of a rural-to-urban hukou transfer, migrants have fewer opportunities to go to college than local peers, and even college education does not gain a migrant an equal chance of working in the state sector or receiving equal earnings. A major contribution of this study is to suggest a nine-category analytic scheme, which takes into account how education, hukou and type of workplace affect one another in jointly influencing labour market inequality between rural migrants and urbanite workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, a large part of the Chinese countryside has experienced a ‘hollowing out’ process in economy and state administration, as rapid urbanisation and development have concentrated in urban areas. To deal with this challenge, the Chinese government has launched rural programmes, resulting in significant transformation in the countryside. Applying the state rescaling theory as an analytical lens, this paper argues that these state-led rural programmes have strengthened the state role in governing the countryside significantly based on the case study of Jiangning. These programmes are not fixed yet developed and expanded through the interaction of multi-level governments. While local governments follow the discourse of the higher-level governments in this process, they also restructure the state apparatus for programme implementation. Local governments have some autonomy by echoing and responding to the initiative of the higher-level governments actively. Thus the programme evolution is not simply a top-down process as it encompasses interesting dynamics of state rescaling. Generally speaking, the state plays an important role in moving toward ‘good governance’ in rural China at the initial stage. The state-led rural programmes enable the state to regain its leading role in the countryside and restore the rural public administation to some extent. There is still a long way to go for the civil society to achieve self-governance in the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the urban redevelopment process under the ‘three old redevelopment’ policy in Guangzhou, China from 2009 to 2014. It highlights strongly shared interests between stakeholders’ institutions that match the core mechanism of the urban regime approach. The fragmented authoritarianism model is used to explain the origins of such regimes, using concepts such as institutional obstacles and small opportunities. In addition, comparisons are made between three types of places (the ‘three olds’ of towns, factories and village) that experience specific institutional difficulties. Through the ‘three old redevelopment’ policy, selective regimes are emerging in diverse ways to form new informal coalitions and realise potential land values, depending on the place and context in which it is applied. These selectivities can be explained by the analysis of a bias institutional ensemble which privileges some projects and some actors more than others in the ‘three old redevelopment’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With ongoing urban revolution, Chinese cities are experiencing an influx of migrants, whose integration into urban society becomes an unprecedented challenge. Using a recent survey in Shanghai and adopting a multilevel multinomial logistic model, this paper studies perceptions of social integration, comparing local residents with migrants. While migrants and local residents have very different perceptions of social integration, both individual-level factors and community-level factors such as residential segregation shape perceptions of social integration, and they shape migrants and local residents differently. In particular, residential segregation, especially migrant population size, tends to reinforce perceptions of social exclusion, which imposes challenges on social integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research during 2013–2015, this study describes an alternative form of gentrification in a traditional urban neighbourhood in Shanghai, unpacking how the notion architectural uniqueness of an urban heritage neighbourhood has imbued itself with cultural capital in the eyes of the new residents. By understanding how the original residents mobilise their knowledge of this particular selling point to benefit themselves economically by becoming renters, this study presents a case exemplifying a process of social change in which the ‘original residents’ themselves are active actors. The results of this process are the socioeconomic and ethic diversification of the neighbourhood as well as upward social mobility without any intervention by the local government or real estate developers. By suggesting an alternative process of gentrification in which not all residents are displaced unwillingly, this paper shows that the idea of gentrification demands more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore how the culture of land-use planning in Scotland has been targeted as an object of modernising reform, exploring how ‘culture change’ initiatives played a prominent role in stabilising a new settlement around ‘open for business’ planning between 2006 and 2012, containing potential tensions between diverse goals to make planning more efficient, inclusive and integrative. This highlights the potentially significant role of governance cultures in containing tensions and securing consent to processes of state restructuring. I therefore argue that greater empirical attentiveness to the cultural micro-politics of state restructuring can improve understanding of complex, contemporary dynamics of change, and the contested role of the neoliberal hegemonic project in reshaping urban governance. I conclude by arguing that the continued power of neoliberal critiques of the inefficiency of land-use planning indicate a need to acknowledge and engage contemporary cultural battles over the purposes of planning and urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the contribution that historical property records can make to our understanding of long run urban change. We use a case study of two streets from the suburb of Carlton in Melbourne, Australia between 1870 and 1970. The property records form a panel database that can be interrogated using standard modelling techniques. These data are used to analyse change in the built environment over time, and identify the factors that may be influencing such change. With the assembled data we track built form, land value, ownership and land use over 100 years. We find that stability characterises the built environment over lengthy periods, but when change occurs it does so in bursts, rather than incrementally. Furthermore, these bursts of change are unevenly spread across our two case study streets, despite their proximity. The streetscape’s primary built material is the key factor shaping geographical patterns of land use change in the case study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]