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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]

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]

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]

Despite the apparent finality of Heschel's pronouncement, in 1951, that Judaism is a 'religion of time', the past two decades have seen renewed scholarly interest in the relationship between time, time-keeping, and forms of temporality in Jewish culture. This vibrant engagement with time and temporality in Jewish studies is not an isolated phenomenon. It participates in a broader interdisciplinary examination of time across the arts, humanities and sciences, both in the academy and beyond it. The current article outlines the innovative approaches of this 'temporal turn' within ancient Judaism and Jewish studies and reflects on why time has become such an important topic of research in recent years. We address a number of questions: What are the trends in recent work on time and temporality in the fields of ancient Judaism and Jewish studies? What new insights into the study of Judaism have emerged as a result of this focus on time? What reasons (academic, historiographical, technological and geopolitical) underpin this interest in time in such a wide variety of disciplines? And finally, what are some new avenues for exploration in this growing field at the intersection of time and Jewish studies? The article identifies trends and discusses key works in the broad field of Jewish studies, while providing more specific surveys of particular developments in the fields of Second Temple Judaism, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature, and some medieval Jewish sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As I have been exploring this topic for this event, I have become more and more resistant to it as I keep returning to the trauma of memory and the social/personal pressures to forget. To help myself I began reading poetry that invited me to stay with the pleasurable memories of first love or being lost in the beauty of nature or remembering coming home to a kitchen filled with the smell of baking and the pleasure of eating food that I loved. It worked for a moment but the word Memorial invaded and so did the question, do we ever learn from history? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Caribbean has been characterized as paradise, yet the region’s story is a more complicated one. A means of accessing stories that move beyond the tourist brochure representations is to engage with regional fiction. This essay employs the idea of palimpsestic belonging, which highlights the layers of each generation’s negotiation with colonial legacies, as a tool to explore familial and community attachment in the novels The True History of Paradise (1999) and Crossing the Mangrove (1995). Burial rituals and haunting are mechanisms to engage with the multiple disruptions of an imaginary and unified postcolonial nation. By highlighting the collisions of history, gender, sexuality, and class, these novels navigate national (un)belonging in two distinct Caribbean spaces—Jamaica and Guadeloupe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levy and Sznaider’s positing of a global cosmopolitan memory has negated the reductionism inherent in classifying national memory cultures as homogeneous, globalized phenomena by redefining the interaction between the two as a coalescence of the two elements rather than a superimposition of the global on the national with the attendant eradication of the latter. A survey of countries that have adopted the edicts of cosmopolitan memory, however, indicates that this coalescence can take the form of either a strained dialectic or a relatively easy symbiosis. By examining primarily the interaction between cosmopolitan memory and national memory conflicts in Ireland and Austria, this article aims to ascertain the constituent elements of the national memory conflict which serve to increase or diminish the strength of the influence of global cosmopolitan memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]