Complex Affairs Research Articles

Seeking to Understand the Opposition to the Relief Society Activities of the Sesquicentennial Year

Seeking to Understand the Opposition to the Relief Society Activities of the Sesquicentennial Year

Collected Writings of Charles Brocken Brown, vol. 4: Political Pamphlets ed. by Mark L. Kamrath et al.

Reviewed by: Collected Writings of Charles Brocken Brown, vol. 4: Political Pamphlets ed. by Mark L. Kamrath et al. Daniel Diez Couch (bio) Collected Writings of Charles Brocken Brown, vol. 4: Political Pamphlets mark l. kamrath, stephen shapiro and maureen tuthill, editors Bucknell University Press, 2020 429 pp. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, vol. 4: Political Pamphlets offers teachers and scholars a set of long-neglected resources. This volume provides insight into Brown's career after the publication of his four most famous novels: it is comprised of a series of pamphlets that he wrote in response to American trade, military, and geopolitical negotiations with European powers in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Both the pamphlets and the accompanying historical and textual essays written by the editors paint a picture of the author that places him in direct dialogue with some of the most significant international issues of his day. Brown's pamphlets explicitly treat the Louisiana Purchase, the 1807 Embargo Act, and surrounding historical events, yet they are not limited to the narrow scope of policy. Scholars have typically read these texts as evidence of Brown's Federalist critique of decisions made by Thomas Jefferson [End Page 307] and his administration. However, as the editors rightly point out, these works should be read in continuity with his romances: "Readers of Brown's fiction will recognize his use of formal strategies" that "charm or create magnetic affect and enthusiastic sympathy that obstruct the reader's balanced or analytical consideration of the text" in a clear fashion (325). Brown's pamphlets thus continue in the vein of his earlier stylistics, and they show him ventriloquizing different voices, perspectives, and arguments regarding America's position vis-à-vis England, Napoleonic France, Spain, and Haiti. And, much like his earlier novels in which issues of immigration, colonialism, and international conflict are treated, the works in this volume address the Jeffersonian government's entanglement with the complex affairs of other countries. The unnamed narrator of Brown's 1803 An Address to the Government of the United States, on the Cession of Louisiana to the French presents a fictional report from an French diplomat and argues that the United States should take Louisiana by force if necessary, a position Brown seconds in Monroe's Embassy, or, the Conduct of the Government in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Missisippi [sic] (1803). Yet the editors note that Brown's narrator in An Address contradicts himself and does not present a clear line of argumentation, facts that trouble any clear Federalist reading of the work. Furthermore, Brown's Address to the Congress of the United States on the Utility and Justice of Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce (1809) critiques Jefferson's embargo by taking the side of small-scale farmers and merchants in outlying areas of the United States, a typically Democratic-Republican concern. The view of Brown that emerges from these documents is thus less beholden to political alliances than to his concerns for the incipient nation's management of state power and international relationships. Equally important, the composition of the pamphlets occurs at a moment of transition in the turn of the century: from Enlightenment ideals to Romantic ones, from sovereignty to liberalism, and from Brown's own interest in the individual to his focus on the nation. These wide-ranging shifts afford him the opportunity to develop new theories of governance: "While the 1803 Address develops a new general theory of power, the 1809 Address develops a new general theory of international statecraft" (349). More than just providing policy-based discussions of state power and international relations, the pamphlets reveal Brown as a political thinker in his own right, one who recognizes emerging formations of nationalistic [End Page 308] power. The editorial team does an excellent job of situating Brown as a theorist—a writer who moves from the pages of the romance to those of the pamphlet in order to disseminate ideas about the nature of national and international politics. This volume makes writing available that should be of interest to teachers and scholars of the nineteenth century. These texts are especially illuminating for those formative years in...

Coping with ambiguity: An urban megaproject ethnography

Integrated urban megaprojects that attempt to (re-)develop parts of cities are complex affairs. The planners employed in them decide on large real estate, infrastructure and public space investments. The lengthy delivery trajectories of these projects undoubtedly result in emerging properties and changes in the social, political and spatial settings in which they are implemented. This ethnographic study focuses on the question how planners cope with this ambiguity in such non canonical practices. By immersion in the Amsterdam Zuidas urban megaproject for half a year, planners were observed in action. The ethnography reconstructs three episodes that represent typical interaction activities that they undertook to discuss progress of the project. The study shows how planners handle diverse types of ambiguity via different coping mechanism and reflects on the implications of these tactics for the project. It also discusses methods, potentials and pitfalls of ethnographic research in urban megaproject scholarship.

Il Master Plan per le aree militari di Piacenza. Processo, attori e forme di conoscenza

The engagement to produce a Master Plan for the redevelopment of military areas (barracks and service areas) constitutes an interesting example of the problems connected with the reuse of land and property assets used by the Ministry of Defence. The essay describes the context in which the planning process was introduced, the characteristics of the military areas to be redeveloped and the complex affairs which led to the suspension of the Master Plan after the conclusion of the first exploratory stage. The story told enables some general considerations to be made on four subjects: the more or less particular nature of military areas compared to other types of underused areas; the great uncertainty over the rules and strategies of the actors; the potential role of municipal administrations in the management of these processes; the forms of knowledge in use and the skills needed to manage them effectively.

Angst und Panik als „Katastrophenreaktion” des Organismus - Die Aktualität Kurt Goldsteins (1878-1965) für die moderne Psychosomatik im Spannungsfeld von Neurobiologie, Tiefenpsychologie und Psychotraumatologie

Bei Angst und Panik handelt es sich um ein psychophysisches Gesamtgeschehen, bei dem einmal mehr psychische, einmal mehr körperliche, vegetative Symptomatik im Vordergrund steht. Insbesondere bei Komorbidität mit chronischen Schmerzen sollte bei Schmerzkrisen oder depressiven Dekompensationen an catastrophic reactions gedacht werden. Der menschliche Organismus ist mit der konkreten existenziellen Situation untrennbar verknüpft, seinen Handlungsmöglichkeiten und Selbstaktualisierungen. Bei 10-20 % aller chronischen Schmerzpatienten mit Angstzuständen und schweren Depressionen mit Anpassungsstörungen (vor allem von Frauen) finden sich erhebliche psychophysische Traumatisierungen in der frühen Lebensgeschichte wie sexueller Missbrauch, Psychoterror und Gewalt oder in der späteren wie zum Beispiel Mobbing. Der Zusammenbruch gerade angesichts alltäglicher Belastungen ist im Sinne eines neurobiologischen und neuropsychologischen Geschehens als Katastrophereaktion einzuordnen. Damit ist ein Hinweis auf Verlust der Fähigkeiten zum „Kategorialen” gegeben mit der Folge konkretistischer Fixierung. Die Somatisierung ist ein Phänomen einer solchen existenziellen Einengung auf Konkretistisches. Das hat Konsequenzen für die Therapie, die den Patienten langsam an die Bewältigung erfüllbarer Aufgaben heranführen muss und ihn für komplexere Weltbezüge, wie Arbeitssituation, Konflikte durchzuhalten, neue Beziehungen aufzunehmen, vorzubereiten hat. Wie in der psychotraumatologischen Behandlung sind der Umgang mit einem neurobiologisch zu verstehenden Geschehen, wie zum Beispiel der Intrusion, und das sich zurechtfinden in hermeneutisch und ideografisch zu erschließenden Phänomenen der Existenz mit psychodynamischem Geschehen, untrennbar miteinander verknüpft. In dieser Lernphase können auch auf dem Boden einer tragfähigen Arzt-Patient-Beziehung Psychopharmaka hilfreich sein. Damit erlernt der Patient, sein eigener Arzt zu werden und Dekompensationen, wie der Katastrophenreaktion, vorzubeugen. Die Katastrophenreaktion geht einher mit vegetativer Krise, Affektdurchbrüchen, Panik und Angstüberflutung. - Das Organismische Verstehen bietet die Chance, phänomenologisch vielfältige Krankheitsbilder vom hirnorganisch begründbaren Leiden, über PTBS, Somatisierungsstörungen bis hin zu vordergründig „rein psychischen” eine anthropologische Basis für Handlungssicherheit und grundlegende therapeutische Prinzipien zu geben. Die von Kurt Goldstein in der Behandlung von Hirnverletzten beider Weltkriege in vorbildlicher interdisziplinärer Zusammenarbeit von Neurologen, Biologen und Psychologen erarbeiteten Konzepte zum Organismischen beinhalten nicht nur ein für Klinik und Forschung wegweisendes erweitertes Verständnis von Biologie, sondern auch kritisches Potenzial für eine auf psychogene Konzepte eingeengte Psychosomatik, mit wichtigen Perspektiven für die Beziehung zur Psychiatrie.

Rebellions or factionalism? Timorese forms of resistance in an early colonial context, 1650-1769

The history of Timor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is interspersed with conflicts where indigenous groups opposed polities with a partly European background. In Western historiography such conflicts are usually portrayed as rebellions against a given European colonial apparatus (Morais 1934; Leitão 1952; Boxer 1968). A closer look, however, reveals these events to be quite complex affairs, which raises questions about the nature of acts of rebellion and colonial rule. Are we dealing with a one-sided anticolonial resistance, or is there more to the picture?

病院業務研修に対する本学学生の意識調査

All senior students at our university experienced 2 weeks of practical training at one of 22 hospitals in three prefectures in the Tokai district. We investigated the students' awareness regarding this practical training at a hospital before and after the training.After practical hospital training, many of the students became aware of the importance of seeing and experiencing the pharmacist's daily practice.The students often expressed that they wanted to know how to talk to patients, how to teach patients about taking medicine and how to express concerm or associate with other hospital staffs (doctors and nurses), none of which are addressed in the university. Other comments indicated that students wanted to think about the future of pharmacists based on their role and function, or that students wanted to refer to these experiences in deciding which course to follow.Through questionnaires sent to the students asking if they were interested in becoming pharmacists, we obtained similar distribution of responses before and after the practical hospital training with answers being “Yes”, “No” or “Does not apply”, when the data of all students were collected together. However, their attitudes changed considerably after training when each students was considered individually.The answer to another question regarding the image of a hospital pharmacist (or the work performance) indicated that students who felt that pharmacists were positively tackling complex affairs were more interested in actual training in the hospital.Based on these findings we need to further consider ways of improving the content of training over a longer period.

From one decade to another: A positive view of early childhood programs

The promise of the '60s, when federal support for children's programs mushroomed as an offshoot of the War on Poverty and in response to the research insights of Jean Piaget, Benjamin Bloom, and James McVicar Hunt, had dimmed by 1969 in response to the disappointing findings of the Westinghouse evaluation of Project Head Start.1 Serious analysts of social policy were prone to cite early childhood education as the classic instance of the government's tendency to overestimate its potential for intervening to accomplish good ends in complex human affairs. Arthur Jensen made headlines with the charge that compensatory education had failed, leaving the clear implication thatthe poor and minorities may be genetically incapable of learning. Volumes of learned critiques of the Westinghouse study and equally learned rebuttals filled library shelves. Decision makers in Washington got the message, effectively forestalling any significant expansion of child development services through the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. Since 1969, the research and evaluation evidence has been building up. Half a score of major

Legislators, Bureaucrats, and Canadian Democracy: The Long and the Short of It

The bureaucratization of the political process that characterizes twentieth century politics in many countries has not bypassed Canada—as evidenced by skyrocketing rates of government employment and expenditure and, even more dramatically, by the ever-expanding policy-making power of Canadian bureaucracy. One observer sees the civil service as occupying an increasingly strategic role in Canadian politics, a condition thatreflects in part the expanding role of modern government into highly technical areas, which tends to augment the discretion of permanent officials because legislators are obliged to delegate to them the administration of complex affairs, including the responsibility for drafting and adjudicating great amounts of sub-legislation required to “fill in the details” of the necessarily broad, organic statutes passed by Parliament. Some indication of the scale of such discretion is found in the fact that, during the period 1963–8, an annual average of 4,130 Orders-in-Council were passed in Ottawa, a substantial proportion of which provided for delegating authority to prescribe rules and regulations to ministers and their permanent advisers. By contrast, the number of laws passed annually by Canadian federal parliaments is rarely over one hundred.

Comments

As Richard L. Rudolph correctly observes at the beginning of his article, Austrian economic history has not been adequately examined in international, comparative studies of the problems of economic growth. Undoubtedly this is attributable both to the traditional orientation of Austrian historians toward national and regional studies and to the interest of so many historians in various aspects of the preindustrial age. Macroeconomic approaches have, therefore, been deemphasized, even though they have led to significant new conclusions in regard to the nature of preindustrial economy and society, partly because of the difficulty in applying this methodology to an analysis of the increasingly complex affairs of a modern industrial society.

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

IT IS Academy tradition that your outgoing President be afforded this opportunity to render to the Fellows his evaluation of present Academy activities and his recommendations as to the future. It is a healthy experience for any organization to pause for a moment to reflect on the path it has come and take fresh bearings on the course to be charted toward the Academy's goal of improving the total health and welfare of all children. The routine business of the Academy is being efficiently carried out by the central office staff at the Academy headquarters in Evanston under the able leadership of our Executive Secretary, E. H. Christopherson. We have been very fortunate in having the loyal services of our Business Manager, W. J. Becker, whose department is the increasingly complex business and financial affairs of the Academy as well as attention to many of the details of our Annual and Spring Meetings. The Executive Board is the authoritative group having control over all Academy activities. Every effort is made to keep their load of routine business as light as possible that full attention can be directed toward committee activities and to decision on Academy policy. Between Board meetings, the Executive Secretary represents the Board on matters of established Academy business. An Executive Committee has been created to act jointly for the Board in areas where no established policy exists and where prompt action is required. The productive activities of the Academy having to do with children originate in the Board and in the various special and standing committees. The standing committees are in general of two types—one is concerned with functions and conditions that may affect all age groups; the other is concerned with the broad problems that may occur in specific age groups. The problems encountered in any age group may involve the applied activities and thinking of many disease or function oriented committees.