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Biodiversity education is widely considered a necessary component of protecting global biodiversity by helping to change harmful attitudes and actions. BioBlitz events, rapid surveys of all living ...

This article approaches the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an exotic, wandering, homeless ‘ghost of no place’ (Nabae 2014), born in Greece, raised in Ireland, who became a fiction writer famous for tu...

The article will present two strategic cases of financial fraud that demonstrate the recurring reference points that conmen use to facilitate their white-collar crimes. The cases are constructed fr...

This paper draws upon archive material to explore the reasons for the absence of any drugs education films, or ‘mass-mediated drugs education’, during the immediate post-war period in Britain. The term ‘mass-mediated drugs education’ is used to refer to any drugs education messages communicated via the mass communication technologies of the twentieth century—the ‘high modern age’. While this might appear a rather narrowly defined interest in media history, the evidence offered in explanation provides some important insights into the assumptions made about mass media by British policy-makers and political elites during the ‘high modern age’ of mass communication. In contrast to Britain, during the same period in the United States, a plentiful supply of drugs education films was generated through the energies and interests of state agencies and moral entrepreneurs. Many of the US films of the ‘reefer madness’ era of the 1930s and the short ‘social guidance’ films of the fifties and sixties still remain in c...

Aims: This article reports on findings to emerge from a project examining YouTube ‘drug videos’ in the light of an emerging literature on the relationship between YouTube and health education. The aim of this article is to describe the variety of discourses circulated by the ‘drug videos’ available on YouTube and to consider the implications of these for mediated drugs education. Method: The method used is a content analysis of a sample of 750 ‘drug videos’ in which both video text and loader comments are used to code ‘drug discourses’. Findings: The findings point to the circulation of a variety of ‘drug videos’ of which official drugs education materials represent only a small proportion. The ‘drug videos’ created by YouTube users circulate a variety of ‘drug discourses’ including the ‘celebratory’ or hedonistic but also ‘cautionary’ videos intended to ‘warn’ or ‘discipline’ but others offer an ‘amateur’ or ‘vernacular drugs education’ while still others develop ‘consumer discourses’ which evaluate substances and technologies of intoxication as commodities. Conclusions: The findings suggest that in the symbolic environment of YouTube drugs education

In the Republic of Georgia, official Georgian Orthodox rituals blend into a series of lay practices that are sometimes ignored, sometimes tolerated, and sometimes incorporated into church rituals, often at the whim of the individual local priest. One such practice is animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifice is never allowed within the church proper, but within a church’s courtyard it is sometimes accepted. To the extent that the priest participates in such lay rituals, it is usually a simple ritual involving blessing the sacrificial ani mal with a candle; the priest will not actually perform the sacrifice. But a priest who does choose to participate in this way may well be motivated by desire for material gain: in return for this religious service of rather dubious orthodoxy, the priest may expect or demand some of the meat, and perhaps some wine, too. Once, apparently, some Georgians brought a sheep to a church for sacrifice, along a rough road in the trunk of their car, where, importantly, they also had a couple of loosely sealed cans of gasoline. In the church’s courtyard, the priest offered to bless the sheep prior to sacrifice in the usual way. The priest began to make the sign of the cross with a lit candle over the sheep which had been soaked with gasoline while traversing the bumpy road. The sheep explodes. The story is popular with Georgians for several reasons, especially because the seemingly opposed categories of high-minded religious ritual and grotesque materiality are brought into conjuncture in a bit of folk anti-clericism.

Discourses about Georgian churches have since the nineteenth century treated the material quality of'ancientness’ associated with existing churches as being among their essential defining properties. This paper first explores how different material qualisigns of churches, including oldness and qualisigns attendant on oldness, allow churches to be interpreted as secular objects, by ordering them with theatres (as expressive of'civilization'), the natural landscape (expressive of an aesthetics of the sublime) or other monuments, including texts (expressive of culture). One result of such discourses is that the contemporary Orthodox Church finds it difficult to have ‘new’ churches accepted as being churches at all. These nineteenth‐century discourses thus provide a context for the complex and contested reception of old and new Orthodox churches, as well as other religious structures, such as mountain shrines, which have a more ambiguous relation with Orthodoxy.