Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880–1930) by Xiaolu Ma (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England Glenn Wright Saunders, Corinne , ed., Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England ( Studies in Medieval Romance, 2), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2005; cloth; pp. x, 193; RRP £45; ISBN 1843840324. One greets an edited collection with the expectation of uneven quality and cohesiveness in the contributions. Nor does the news that the project has been occasioned by a conference do much to improve the picture. This volume, comprising papers delivered at the 2002 Conference on Romance in Medieval England in Durham, is not wholly free of the liabilities of the genre but acquits itself quite well overall. Corinne Saunders' nimble introduction sets forth the theme of overlapping intersections of culture – French/English, Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Norman, Celtic/classical, courtly/popular, clerical/eremitic – with reference to Sir Orfeo, probably the best possible choice for this purpose. 'To begin to understand the nature of romance in medieval England', Saunders writes, 'is to imagine this kind of complex process of cultural encounter as occurring with regard to all aspects of romance: language, sources and story matter, literary form, conventions, motifs and thematic emphases' (p. 6). This has the double advantage of setting an ambitious agenda for the volume while providing a frame within which a great deal of otherwise dissimilar work on romance can be seen to fit. Still, the extent to which the essays take on board the 'cultural encounters' theme is decidedly a case-by-case affair. Ivana Djordjević's examination of the role of Bevis's mother in the opening section of the Middle English Beves of Hampton certainly does. Using the tools of [End Page 201] translation studies, Djordjević argues that temporal and cultural distance between adapter and source has the effect of reducing the mother to the conventional figure of the malmariée. There are some difficulties in the execution. The assumption that the dynastic consequences of a failure of succession represents a theme to which an early-fourteenth-century English translator would have been wholly 'oblivious' is unwarranted, and reflects the author's desire that her primary text should exemplify the virtues of her methodology. Likewise, Djordjević conceives Beves's literary environment in terms of an overly stark romance/fabliau dialectic, and becomes distracted by the inessential question of how best to characterize the text's resulting misogamy. Nonetheless, the essay admirably demonstrates the applicability of concepts like 'repertorization' – whereby 'the special (and specific) textual relations created in the source text are often replaced by conventional relations in the target text' (p. 18) – to Middle English romance, and indicates a mostly untapped seam of scholarly production for those with the requisite linguistic skills and socio-historical acumen. Two essays address England's encounter with its own pre-Conquest past. Tony Davenport has disinterred from Lincoln's Inn Library (MS Hale 185) a late-twelfth-century Latin ecclesiastical history of Somerset that relates in fabulous style the accession of the Wessex king Ine and the wooing of his wife Æthelburgh. Folkloric elements abound, and Davenport reasonably suggests that these resources are likely to be employed where the historical record presents some unexplained discontinuity. Davenport's edition and translation of the Ine story are rationale enough for the article, even if its suitability for the present volume seems to rest entirely with the observation that similar interpenetrations of folktale and narrative history (e.g., Havelok) have received romance treatments. Robert Rouse considers how the Matter of England romances construct English identity with reference to an idealized Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon law, pointedly juxtaposed with the 'legal vacuum' of Denmark, Wales, and other alien spaces. Useful insights emerge from reading the Matter of England in legal terms, though a fuller analysis would need both to take account of internal spaces of lawlessness, like the greenwood of Gamelyn, and to examine how the dynamics of home and abroad differ in other romance settings. A valuable step in the latter direction is provided by Rosalind Field, who disambiguates the relationship between mainstream chivalric quest and the exile-and-return narrative proper, then identifies a cluster of Anglo-Norman romances comprising a distinctly insular subspecies, 'set in kingdoms separated by water...

Background/Context How students develop a capacity to examine and imagine the past impacts how they think about the present and imagine the future. This study contributes to research about teachers’ beliefs and practices about teaching United States history through cultural encounters and nontraditional historical narratives. Although there is a small but growing body of research concerning teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding historical thinking and inquiry, little research exists on teachers’ beliefs and practices about history teaching from a cultural encounters perspective. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The study examined teachers’ perspectives of a professional development effort designed to promote their students’ historical thinking within a cultural encounters curriculum. This curriculum emphasized the role of perspective and historical narrative. The research questions were: (1) What were the K–12 participants’ specific examples of lessons and units related to historical cultural encounters? (2) How did they conceptualize their teaching for historical cultural encounters? (3) How did they begin to reconceptualize their views about a cultural encounters history curriculum? Research Design The study used a qualitative design to examine perceptions of 21 K–12 teachers. A conceptual framework about history teacher thinking and reconceptualization informed the design. Three forms of data— surveys, individual interviews, and lesson plans—were collected about teachers’ perceptions of practice and their applications of those perceptions in their classrooms. The surveys were administered throughout the 3-year program cycle and at the final evening colloquium. Interviews were conducted with the 21 teachers approximately 3 months after the end of the project. Lesson plans that teachers constructed at different points in the professional development project were analyzed after its conclusion. Conclusions/Recommendations The teachers in this study were each situated differently in their perceptions of a cultural encounters approach to teaching history. Their conceptual frameworks toward history, grounded in their own professional knowledge and teaching expertise, were an important factor in how they reconceptualized their views of curriculum. In addition, their discussions of both intended and enacted teaching provided a forum within which to experiment and try to solve emergent challenges and dilemmas that grew from their perceived changes in their views of practice. As they examined and in some cases began to teach history through often-excluded historical stories and voices, they confronted in differing ways their own stories and narratives in relation to traditional U.S. history.

Edukologijos doktorantėVilniaus universiteto Edukologijos katedraUniversiteto g. 1/9, LT-01513 VilniusTel. (8 5) 266 76 25El. paštas: sandra.kaire@fsf.vu.ltStraipsnyje analizuojama skirtingų kultūrų asmenų susidūrimo svarba tarpkultūrinio ugdymo srityje. Teigiama, kad teorinių žinių apie kitas kultūras suteikimas yra svarbus tarpkultūrinio ugdymo elementas, tačiau ugdytojas mokymo metu turėtų sudaryti sąlygas mokytis vykstant realiems kultūrų susidūrimams. Remiantis dviejų filosofų J. L. Nancy ir B. Waldenfelso darbais straipsnyje atskleidžiamas kultūrinio susidūrimo kompleksiškumas. Kultūrinis susidūrimas gali būti patiriamas ne tik kaip kitos kultūros asmens priėmimas ir pripažinimas, bet gali būti išgyvenamas ir kaip įsibrovimas (Nancy) ar svetimumas (Waldenfelsas). Be to, kultūrinio susidūrimo patirtys kiekvienoje mokymo(si) situacijoje gali prieštarauti viena kitai.

Expatriate stories about cultural encounters—A narrative approach to cultural learning processes in multinational companies

Book Review| July 01 2016 Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters, and Power Frode Helland. Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters, and Power. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. 272. Dean Krouk Dean Krouk University of Wisconsin–Madison Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scandinavian Studies (2016) 88 (2): 217–220. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.88.2.0217 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dean Krouk; Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters, and Power. Scandinavian Studies 1 January 2016; 88 (2): 217–220. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.88.2.0217 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressScandinavian Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim Ellen Nakamura Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan. By Hoi-Eun Kim. University of Toronto Press, 2014. 249 pages. Hardcover $55.00; softcover $29.95. Doctors of Empire begins with an evocative scene of the unveiling of two bronze busts on the campus of Tokyo Imperial University in 1907—a lively event, attended by members of the academic and diplomatic communities, that provides an excellent entry into Hoi-Eun Kim’s study of the medical and cultural encounters between Germany and Japan. In honor of the two German physicians whose contributions were being celebrated that day—Erwin Baelz and Julius Scriba—the dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Aoyama Tanemichi, rose to give a speech in fluent German that emphasized the strength of German medicine in Japan and suggested that the relationship between Japan and Germany was a colonial one, at least as far as medical science was concerned. While some attendees were reportedly displeased by Aoyama’s assessment of Japan’s status as “colonial,” historians in recent years have found colonial and postcolonial examinations to be a productive way of considering the history of Japanese medicine.1 In this book, Kim covers well-trodden ground but with a specialized focus on German-Japanese relations. His highly readable discussion of the significance of the German model for Japanese medicine provides a welcome new addition to scholarly literature in English while also taking into account the historiography in German. Kim tries to emphasize both sides of this reciprocal yet unequal relationship, writing with a fresh eye for the multifaceted cultural encounters that it engendered. According to Kim’s research, between 1,150 and 1,200 Japanese students (he cites different figures on pages 5 and 61 of the book) learned medicine in Germany and other German-speaking regions in Europe between the years 1868 and 1914. Even larger numbers of students came into contact with German medicine in Japan through the [End Page 169] German teachers who taught in the country or their German-trained students. These teachers and physicians, the “doctors of empire” referred to in the title, were at the core of the Germanization of Japanese medicine. As outlined in the introduction, Kim explores these doctors using three analytical tools. First, he is interested in transnational history, in the flow of ideas and peoples as they cut across national borders. While acknowledging that the German physicians who were invited to Japan were modernizers, Kim emphasizes not their technical transfer of knowledge but rather the reciprocal nature of their interactions with Japan and their place within larger global processes. Second, the postcolonial aspect of his analysis seeks to place the activities of German physicians in Japan within the broader context of Germany’s colonial ambitions in East Asia. Turning to the anthropological studies undertaken by many German physicians in Japan, Kim shows how they helped to foster a new scientific racism that became influential in Japan’s own colonial expansion. Even as he claims to reject the concept of colonialism as a way of explaining the Germanization of Japanese medicine, his use of “soft power” as an alternative has much in common with the idea of “self-colonization” put forward by others.2 Kim’s third analytical tool is “double prosopography,” the collective study of the lives of doctors in two different countries, with particular attention to “the kaleidoscopic lives of ordinary or less-heroic Japanese medical students in Germany” (p. 10). Finally, interwoven into his analysis is a concern with broader issues within German-Japanese historiography. Kim is at pains to dismiss exceptionalist narratives that try to see in the German-style modernization of Japanese medicine a “fatal affinity” leading inevitably to the medical atrocities committed at Auschwitz and Unit 731. Ultimately, Kim is unable to completely fulfill his ambitious agenda within the pages of this slim volume; indeed, any one of his analytical frameworks could have formed the basis for a more detailed and perhaps more satisfying study. Nevertheless, the book contributes to an understudied area of the field and raises interesting...

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, southern Europe became a key destination for global migration. Countries which had been important source countries for emigration, mainly to northern Europe, quickly became targets for international migrants coming from an extraordinary range of source countries. Today, the management of immigration is complex with countries torn between the need to satisfy the rules of Schengen and ‘fortress Europe’ on the one hand, and the economic benefits of cheap and flexible labour supplies on the other. This book brings together a variety of detailed studies recording the ‘cultural encounters’ of these migrants. Most of the chapters are based on detailed research in locations such as Lisbon, the Algarve, Barcelona, Turin, Bologna, Sicily and Athens, as well as in source countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Albania and the Philippines. What emerges is a scenario diverse and rapidly evolving, with cultural encounters which are both enriching and depressing, yet always fascinating.

Essays in Honour of Peter Burke Exploring Cultural History Imprint: Ashgate Illustrations: Includes 22 b&w illustrations Published: October 2010 Format: 234 x 156 mm Extent: 394 pages Binding: Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-6750-6 ISBN Short: 9780754667506 Price : £70.00 » Website price: £63.00 BL Reference: 909 LoC Control No: 2010008298 Print friendly information sheet Send to a friend Edited by Melissa Calaresu, University of Cambridge, UK, Filippo de Vivo, Birkbeck, University of London, UK and Joan-Pau Rubies, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Over the past 30 years, cultural history has moved from the periphery to the centre of historical studies, profoundly influencing the way we look at and analyze all aspects of the past. In this volume, a distinguished group of international historians has come together to consider the rise of cultural history in general, and to highlight the particular role played in this rise by Peter Burke, the first professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and one of the most prolific and influential authors in the field. Reflecting the many and varied interests of Peter Burke, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of topics, geographies and chronologies. Grouped into four sections, 'Historical Anthropology', 'Politics and Communication', 'Images' and 'Cultural Encounters', the collection explores the boundaries and possibilities of cultural history; each essay presenting an opportunity to engage with the wider issues of the methods and problems of cultural history, and with Peter Burke's contributions to each chosen theme. Taken as a whole the collection shows how cultural history has enriched the ways in which we understand the traditional fields of political, economic, literary and military history, and permeates much of what we now understand as social history. It also demonstrates how cultural history is now at the heart of the coming together of traditional disciplines, providing a meeting ground for a variety of interests and methodologies. Offering a wide international perspective, this volume complements another Ashgate publication, Popular Culture in Early Modern England, which focuses on Peter Burke's influence on the study of popular culture in English history.

Cultural competency of Nurses in a Multi-Cultural Healthcare System in Two Regions of Ghana

Reviewed by: Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World ed. by Mladen Popović, Myles Schoonover and Marijn Vandenberghe Scott Charlesworth mladen popović, myles schoonover, and marijn vandenberghe (eds.), Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World (JSJSup 178; Leiden: Brill, 2017). Pp. vi + 317. Paper €125/$138. The sixteen essays in this edited volume, which developed out of the Third Qumran Institute Symposium of 2013, examine the ways in which cultural encounters in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East shaped the literary traditions, religious and political systems, and historical development of people from Israel, Judea, and Palestine. In the introduction to the book ("Ancient Jewish Cultural Encounters and a Case Study on Ezekiel"), Popović discusses "cultural encounter" in relation to methodology, a prominent theme throughout the book. As regards "real or perceived transfers from a given literary corpus to another," if the only evidence for a cultural encounter is literary, "any hypothesis should be confronted with what we do know about the presumed context on the basis of other [i.e. archaeological and documentary] evidence" (p. 11). Similarly, he asserts that the inferences that might be drawn from archaeological remains may be limited by the absence of accompanying documentary sources. Thus, he rejects the argument that in the sixth century b.c.e. an elite Judean like Ezekiel would have had access to the Babylonian cuneiform learned tradition and borrowed from it in his description of the heavenly throne room. The next essay, "Taming Egypt: The Impact of Persian Imperial Ideology and Politics on the Biblical Exodus Account," by Konrad Schmid, illustrates the nature of the problem quite well. Schmid argues on purely literary-critical grounds that the Persian pax influenced [End Page 348] the Priestly account of the exodus from Egypt. Further, P probably comes from the early Persian period because it "does not yet presuppose Egypt's inclusion in the Persian Empire" (p. 26). In his last footnote, Schmid then takes issue with those who reject this commonly used method of speculatively dating a text by matching its ideas with a particular historical period. As might be expected, the majority of studies in the book deal with literary texts. Jonathan Stökl ("Netting Marduk? The Concept of Hidden Transcripts and the Transfer of Cultural Knowledge from Mesopotamian to Judean Texts") urges caution in noting that less evidence is usually required for shared streams of traditions as against contact between specific texts. Thus, he argues that a wider combat myth tradition influenced Yhwh's use of a net against Egypt (Ezek 32:3) rather than the text of the Enūma eliš. Caroline Waerzeggers ("The Prayer of Nabonidus in the Light of Hellenistic Babylonian Literature") strikes a similar note in using a range of evidence to locate the Prayer of Nabonidus, often invoked as a sixth-century parallel to the prayer of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4, in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods (two hundred to four hundred years later). In contrast, in arguing that there is a philological and methodological connection between the two exegetical traditions, Uri Gabbay ("Levels of Meaning and Textual Polysemy in Akkadian and Hebrew Exegetical Texts") asserts that Akkadian commentaries influenced early tannaitic midrash. In the absence of any other evidence for contact, he offers three "entirely hypothetical" historical scenarios in which the two exegetical traditions might have come into contact with each other. Other discussions of the literary evidence include Benjamin G. Wright, "What Does India Have to Do with Jerusalem? Ben Sira, Language, and Colonialism"; Judith H. Newman, "Hybridity, Hydrology, and Hidden Transcript: Sirach 24 and the Judean Encounter with Ptolemaic Isis Worship"; Hindy Najman, "Philo's Greek Scriptures and Cultural Symbiosis"; and J. Cornelius de Vos, "'I Wish Those Who Unsettle You Would Mutilate Themselves!' (Gal 5:12): Circumcision and Emasculation in the Letter to the Galatians." Lastly, in a discussion of both literary and documentary (funerary inscriptions) evidence, Sacha Stern ("Subversion and Subculture: Jewish Time-Keeping in the Roman Empire") elaborates on the unofficial subculture and/or political subversion evident in Jewish use of a lunar calendar in cultic contexts and the Julian solar calendar in everyday life. On the documentary side, Bob...

Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters and Power by Frode Helland Megan Stahl Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters and Power. By Frode Helland. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015. Cloth $108.00, Paper $29.95. 272 pages. Frode Helland begins Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters and Power with a confession. The "point of departure" for this study, he writes with a twinge of humility, "lies in quite a naïve wish to understand this conundrum: that the plays written by a nineteenth-century Norwegian with limited economic and cultural capital are still performed across the globe" (1). This seemingly simple inquiry is rooted in one of the basic tenets of research for any scholar of theatre history—the importance of context in the creation and [End Page 142] production of dramatic work—and does not, at its outset, seem poised to advance the conversation of cross-cultural Ibsen performances much beyond the comprehensive 2010 essay collection edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Barbara Gronau, and Christel Weiler, Global Ibsen: Performing Multiple Modernities (Routledge). Yet what initially appears to be another volume of case studies analyzing individual productions of a playwright's repertoire becomes, in Helland's hands, an intricately layered exploration of the complex relational connections that contribute to the construction of a global "Ibsen." The broad structure of Helland's study is effectively framed to interrogate the relationships among varying cultures, economies, and national politics as expressed in contemporary interpretations of Ibsen's work across four continents. With the exception of the book's first chapter, which concentrates solely on the work of German director Thomas Ostermeier, most of the sections are formed thematically, examining productions linked by circumstances (such as government censorship in chapter 3) or location (Chile in chapter 2 and China in chapter 4) to demonstrate the plurality of Ibsens in performance. Each production, presented with exacting detail, is dissected to illuminate the adaptation's allegorical significance and to "emphasise the social and political production of 'Ibsen' as an ongoing process" (3). In his convincing exploration of four Chilean productions of A Doll's House, for instance, Helland traces the far-reaching effects of the 1973 coup d'état and subsequent national trauma of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Discussions of A Doll's House often center on issues of gender, but Helland's primary focus is refreshing in its return to the larger issues of economic and class disparity that drive much of Ibsen's work. Helland charts the resonance of the plot's social and financial aspects through Pinochet's failed effort to restructure the Chilean economy, resulting in the same kind of crippling debt and "economic entrapment" faced by Nora and Krogstad in the 1980 production at Chile's Catholic University (53). The complications of the country's increasing inequality post-Pinochet are further explored in an analysis of Alfredo Castro's 2006 production, as Helland describes in striking detail the adaptation's aesthetic of consumption and waste designed to critique Chile's bourgeois middle class. The indelible connections among the work of Ibsen's adaptors across decades of political turmoil are clearly illuminated by Helland as he expertly ties the contemporary works to Ibsen's original concerns about the repercussions of global capitalism on individual freedoms. Helland's vivid and engaging prose is one of the volume's greatest attributes, as his explanations of each production's aesthetics are meticulously detailed, almost novelistic, in their style. His descriptions of the set and costume designs are wonderfully tactile, and the inclusion of lighting and sound elements for each example creates an immersive experience for the reader. The care with which Helland selects and explores seemingly small details serves to deepen the connections he makes between the production's creative choices, its intended message, and the intercultural impact of Ibsen in performance. Ostermeier's use of The Beach Boys song "God Only Knows" in his adaptation Hedda Gabler (2005) becomes through Helland's analysis an incisive meditation on the ways in which commitment is now considered kitsch and how society is accepting, even [End Page 143] welcoming, of existing in a world where alienation is the norm...

This paper is a report of a study to explore how students developed reflective nursing practice through cultural encounters between students from Tanzania and Norway. Nursing students need to develop cultural care competence to care for patients in a globalized world. One way to achieve this goal may be through international practice experience. Previous studies have shown that students visiting developing countries matured personally and intellectually more than those who experienced encounters between developed countries. The study was exploratory, using qualitative data about nursing practice and cultural encounters experienced by nursing students from Tanzania and Norway. Data were collected through participatory observation, students' logs and focus group interviews in 2006. The encounter was characterized with an open attitude facilitating a good context for co-learning between the students. Three main themes were identified. The Norwegian students emphasized nurse-patient relationships, individualized care, direct communication and emotional involvement. The Tanzanian nursing students demonstrated a collectivist approach in nursing characterized by nurse-relative-patient relationships, and they emphasized curing attributes with skillful performance of procedures. A cultural encounter between students from different culture proved to be a fruitful way of teaching nurses. The opportunity to share thoughts, reflect on value systems and personal practice through dialogue with students from a different culture offer possibility in terms of cultural competence, reflexivity and consciousness of various ways practising nursing. This may contribute to bringing the practice of nursing a step forward in both cultures.

The purpose of this study is to understand how holistic health is maintained in circumstances of cultural encounter. Although Canadian Government and Aboriginal definitions of health focus on holistic health, most of the research on health in cultural encounters focuses on ill-health. This study focuses on the social determinants of health rather than of ill-health. I interviewed three healthy Yukon First Nation women who had experienced a cultural encounter with non-Aboriginals in order to understand the unique nature of their experience and how they had maintained their health through that experience. I used a chain sampling method to find my interviewees. Since I was seeking a mutual understanding between myself and the Aboriginal participants who had experienced the cultural encounter, I situated the study in the Constructivism theoretical framework and used a qualitative methodology. I found certain common themes in the accounts of these women. They had all started from a position of physical, mental, emotional and cultural strength. They had all experienced diverse cultural lifestyles and languages in their homes and communities. Their parents' preparation and vision had built a bridge which lessened the impact of the cultural encounter. They employed certain skills which they had learned at home to cope with innovation, including modelling, balancing, actively integrating and focusing on the positive. They maintained contact with their homes or found ways to reconnect mentally and physically when separated. I hope this research will achieve my goal of deepening understanding of cultural encounter by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and how health may be maintained throughout it.

“Changing Feminist Paradigms and Cultural Encounters: Women’s Experiences in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” Elisa Camiscioli, Jean H. Quataert, and Benita Roth This issue is devoted to publishing a collection of articles drawn from an international conference held in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2013, jointly sponsored by the editors of this journal and an interdisciplinary cohort of colleagues at two prominent Turkish universities. The articles reflect the challenges of historicizing the multiethnic and diverse Ottoman society with reference to women’s work, activism, and understandings of feminisms throughout the region. They also capture the continuous but problematic encounters between Ottoman and subsequent Turkish women’s movements and the Western-based women’s internationals—notably, the International Council of Women and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. But encounter has another dimension as well: the productive but at times strained interaction among the participants, who came from Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Holland, Israel, and the United States. As presenters and audience members, we engaged and debated our scholarly practices and the operative conceptual tools shaped by different geographical and regional perspectives. We also set aside time to discuss differences in feminist publishing in Turkey and the United States. All of this interaction took place against the backdrop of serious political unrest and state repression of social protest over the fate of a public park in Istanbul, which the government wanted to turn into a commercial venture. By the time we had arrived in Turkey, protests like those in Istanbul’s Gezi Park had broken out throughout the country. During the conference, we had a heady sense of déjà vu—remembering many historical moments when women and men had come together to raise their voices against war, state patterns of violence, and other injustices as part of their activism in the public sphere. When we proposed to bring the Journal of Women’s History (JWH) to Binghamton University, we had to formulate our editorial vision. The heart of this vision is the consistent commitment to internationalize the field of inquiry, which we took over from our predecessors—drawing on more authors from outside North America and Europe and filling in the gaps in our international reach. After all, we welcome submissions from all regions of the globe and time periods. But with this conference, we had another more carefully targeted conception of internationalizing scholarship, which this special issue also reflects. As editors based in the United States, we did not want to predetermine the outcome or set the agenda for [End Page 7] the scholarly inquiry. We wanted the themes, concepts, questions, sources of theoretical inspiration, and research to come from scholars within the region—what in our title for this note we call Ottoman and post-Ottoman history but, geographically, is also referred to as eastern Mediterranean history. In this collection of articles, we bring to our readers innovative scholarship about—and much of it from—this region. If you look at the article titles, many themes seem familiar to those of us working in the wider field of women’s and gender history and the history of sexuality. Authors recognize women’s multiple identities and subject positions, feminism is pluralized, and agency plays a key role in the interpretative framework, set against the backdrop of gender analysis and discourses. Yet what do these terms and concepts mean in their historical, societal, and regional specificity? How do they translate in cultural encounters? This special issue raises many questions: for example, are there specific regional scholars and theorists whose work has shaped analyses in eastern Mediterranean history of which we in the U.S. academy are unaware? What are the big historiographical debates in the field and how and why do so many of these articles challenge nationalist historiographies? Should we as scholars incorporate not only the insights and findings of research framed elsewhere but their distinct historiographies as well? As you will see, we have included a separate introduction to this special issue written by a young scholar in the field of Ottoman women’s history to raise many comparative questions for you to consider as you take in and enjoy these articles. The...

Introduction:Encounters with children of foreign origin call for school nurses’ cultural competence during the health visits. This study aimed to investigate the statistical associations between the cultural constructs described by the Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services (PCCDHS) model and whether school nurses’ cultural encounters, cultural knowledge, and cultural skill could statistically predict their cultural awareness.Methodology:Spearman correlation and hierarchical regression analyses were conducted using cross-sectional secondary data from 816 Swedish school nurses. The cultural constructs in the theoretical description of the PCCDHS model guided the selection and sorting of the items on cultural competence.Results:The constructs of cultural knowledge, cultural skill, cultural encounters, and cultural awareness were positively correlated with each other. However, becoming culturally aware was not statistically predicted by included cultural constructs (R2 = 13.4, p = .06).Discussion:Despite the interrelations between the investigated cultural constructs of the PCCDHS model, understanding cultural awareness development requires further empirical testing.