Dissolution Of Boundaries Research Articles

Landscape homogenization threatens the genetic integrity of the endangered San Diego fairy shrimp Branchinecta sandiegonensis (Branchiopoda: Anostraca)

Genetic threats to the integrity and persistence of endangered species can be significant and develop rapidly. These threats include the breakdown of locally adapted gene pools, and more extreme phenomena such as the dissolution of species boundaries. Anthropogenic homogenization of the landscape is often the underlying cause, manifested as an increase in biotic connectivity, and a decrease in structural and spatial habitat heterogeneity. In southern California, the narrowly endemic San Diego fairy shrimp Branchinecta sandiegonensis is federally endangered due to high levels of vernal pool habitat loss. Human disturbance is associated with the increased presence of the widely distributed generalist B. lindahli in the native range of B. sandiegonensis. Regional sympatry for these closely related species has now become local co-occurrence in anthropogenically created basins and disturbed pools, with possible hybridization. To assess this threat, we developed a new morphological hybrid index that ranges from 1.0 for typical B. lindahli adult females to 3.0 for typical B. sandiegonensis. Index scores in undisturbed habitats that are typical for each “pure” species are 1.3 and 2.6 respectively. In disturbed areas, females have a wider range of intermediate scores. Using mitochondrial DNA markers that are diagnostic to each species, we also determined that putative hybrids at all mixed sites share their maternal lineage with the more common species at the site. We hypothesize that anthropogenic activities have increased genetic, taxonomic and functional homogenization in southern California’s vernal pools, and may constitute a significant threat to the species integrity and persistence of the San Diego fairy shrimp.

Regulation of the basement membrane by epithelia generated forces

Tumor metastasis involves a progressive loss of tissue architecture and dissolution of structural boundaries between the epithelium and connective tissue. The basement membrane (BM), a specialized network of extracellular matrix proteins forms a barrier that physically restricts pre-invasive lesions such that they remain as local insults. The BM is not a static structure, but one that is constantly regenerated and remodeled in the adult organism. Matrix organization also regulates cell function. Thus alterations in the balance of synthesis, remodeling and proteolytic degradation of the extracellular matrix proteins may contribute to a loss of structural integrity. However, the de novo assembly and maintenance of the complex structural properties of in vivo basement membranes remain elusive. Here, this paper highlights the current understanding on the structural properties and the establishment of the BM, and discusses the potential role of self-generated forces in adult tissue remodeling and the maintenance of the BM as a malignancy suppressor.

Microbialite formation in southern Sinai (Egypt)

Ongoing microbialite formation is described at two previously unreported sites in southern Sinai, Egypt. Samples were collected in the peritidal tropical environment of Nabq Bay and Hidden Bay (southern Sinai, Egypt). Field observations and sample analyses show evidence of both sediment trapping and biostabilization in bacterial mucilaginous sheaths and microbially induced mineralization, producing a suite of increasingly lithified material: from agglomerated, consolidated sand to lithified crusts and oncoids. Thin-sections show evidence of bacteria (cyanobacteria and sulphate-reducing bacteria) among the constituent grains in the form of gelatinous filaments (green and red sheaths), and microalgal colonies along the outer edge, accompanied by a very high grade of clast alteration. The alternation of planar to irregular dark, superposed layers, and clastic layers is visible at the surface and/or inside some crusts. Widespread filaments of Schizothrix among grains have been identified, as well as extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), sheaths stabilizing particles, and calcareous tubular encrustations around cyanobacteria filaments. Carbonate precipitates include diffuse micrite, microcrystals of high-Mg calcite precipitating in the EPS matrix, and acicular aragonite as isopachous rims around grains. Cementation is accompanied by partial dissolution and progressive alteration of original grain boundaries. We describe four microbialite categories on the basis of their macroscopic morphology combined with different texture and lithification grade. The occurrence of the southern Sinai microbialites is explained by the interplay of local sedimentary dynamics and accommodation space in a peritidal tropical environment undergoing large temperature and salinity variations.

Higher Education Students’ Reflections on Learning in Times of Academic Language Shift

This article deals with the current debate on the use of English as the only medium of instruction in contexts where it is a second or foreign language. More specifically, it investigates Rwandan students’ reflections on using English as the sole medium of instruction in their everyday higher education academic activities. The study is mainly based on individual interviews from students at a University in Rwanda, where the language in education policy has changed considerably over the last decade. The findings suggest that students face different challenges and difficulties in using the newly adopted language of learning and teaching. They are, however, aware of the globalisation process and dissolution of national boundaries and are willing to upgrade their English in order to cope with the new academic situation.

Pixels Perpetual Shine: The Mediation of Illness, Dying, and Death in the Digital Age

Pixels Perpetual Shine: The Mediation of Illness, Dying, and Death in the Digital Age Elizabeth Drescher(bio) “I like to think that something survives after you die,” [Jobs] said. “It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on‐off switch,” he said. “Click! And you're gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that's why I never liked to put on‐off switches on Apple devices.” Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs I received an email from my mother recently. My sister's birthday was coming up, and my mother had set up a reminder on her email account more than a decade ago that has faithfully let me know a month before each of my siblings’ birthdays, presumably so that I can plan in advance to feel guilty should I forget one or another of them anyway. The thing is, my mother died in 2005, so this automated guilt‐inducer now has an eerie beyond‐the‐grave quality that, on the one hand, vaguely creeps me out every time it happens and, on the other, prevents me from blocking “anna1121” from my account out of a sentimentality that I cannot quite sort out. I know the email is not really from my mother, and yet I can fully imagine her pecking away at a mystical keyboard in whatever sweet by‐and‐by she now inhabits. Such of course is life—and death—in the Digital Age, our identities extended from physical to digital space, from whence we can never fully retrieve or otherwise control them and where they live on long after our own departure. In Your Digital Afterlife, John Romano and Evan Carroll explore the practical implications of the massive quantities of digital information that remains after death. From family photographs to email to financial accounts, Romano and Carroll offer helpful advice about how to protect your “digital legacy.” As one might expect, there are now a full range of online sites—Romano and Carroll's http://thedigitalbeyond.com perhaps the best known of them—and a growing army of consultants to help secure sensitive personal and financial data, provide a digital trail for one's heirs, and, should it be necessary, delete a porn account. Putting one's digital affairs in order for the afterlife is certainly all to the good, but it is not the concern that comes to mind every time I get an email from my late mother's apparently eternal Yahoo account. The questions here are more pointedly spiritual, more robustly theological. I am not thinking specifically about mortality, immortality, and the chaos at their intersection that animated the short‐lived futuristic series “Caprica” and bedeviled the freakishly undead characters of the BBC's much more successful “Torchwood” science fiction drama. But these popular works, along with the proliferating number of vampire‐ and zombie‐themed television programs and movies, do seem to represent the extremes of a re‐mediation of end‐of‐life illness, dying, death, and bereavement that is increasingly influenced by our participation in social networking communities like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs. My own, less fantastic questions have been more focused on how new digital media, as they have begun to restructure day‐to‐day communication practices and, in turn, social relatedness, reform our understanding of modernity's dichotomized relationships between illness and wellness, living and dying, the living and the dead, and the now and the hereafter. If, as I argue in what follows, digital social media are inviting a dissolution of metaphorical and experiential boundaries between these states, what is the attendant effect on Christians’ understanding of God's presence in illness, dying, death, and bereavement and on concepts such as “eternity” and “salvation” that are subject to radical restructuring in postmodern, digitally integrated culture? As much of our everyday life unfolds in social networking sites (SNSs)—nearly 60% of adults in the United States belong to at least one SNS—what...

Performing Cannibalism: Werner Schwab’s ÜBERGEWICHT, unwichtig: UNFORM

This article focuses on the role of cannibalism, both within the context of Schwab’s 1991 play and as a reflection of modern Austrian society. Performativity, anthropological studies of cannibalism, and Artaud’s theater of cruelty provide the framework for my analysis. Language and corporeality, both intrinsically connected to performativity and cruelty, emerge as crucial elements of Schwab’s theatrical dissolution of boundaries.

"The Art of Radia " Pino Masnata's Unpublished Gloss to the Futurist Radio Manifesto Introduction

"The Art of Radia" Pino Masnata's Unpublished Gloss to the Futurist Radio Manifesto Introduction Margaret Fisher (bio) Pino Masnata, co-author of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, wrote a second work, "Il Nome Radia," to explain the first.1 Masnata's gloss securely places the Radio Manifesto within the context of "new" physics—what Kenneth Ford calls "the physics of the very small" and "the physics of the very fast."2 The intent, however, is nothing less than to conquer the infinite cosmos with the acoustic art of radio and the exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum by Futurism's "new man." Introduction From 1925 to 1930, the directors of the new Italian Radio service, a triumvirate of top engineers from Fiat, Western Electric and Radiofono (the Marconi Co. Italian subsidiary), devoted a small number of program hours to experimental content focused chiefly on international developments in radio technology and information sharing, education, and music (including electronic music). Futurist radio broadcast was of a different stripe, and rarer still. The Fascist Party (PNF) in 1930 sought to marginalize these interests as so much "dilettantism."3 Then, in May 1933, the Italian visit of Joseph Goebbels to align Italian cultural policy with the centralization doctrine of his Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had a chilling effect on all apolitical radio experimentation. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, [End Page 155] founder of Futurism and a member of the Royal Academy, was on a list of approved speakers vetted by the PNF, though his radio appearances were also limited. Against this background, Marinetti and Masnata published Manifesto futurista della radio in the Torino Gazzetta del Popolo on September 22, 1933, proposing a completely new radio sensibility resonant with a Futurist poetic on the one hand, and the latest quantum theories of matter and energy on the other. The Radio Manifesto appeared late in the chronology of Futurist manifestos; it was neither the first theoretical discussion of radio in Europe, nor in Italy. Before most countries had broadcast stations, Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov predicted that radio waves would transport color, image, taste and odors in addition to sound. A decade later, Enzo Ferrieri, Artistic Director of Italian Radio, published Italy's first radio manifesto, Radio as a Creative Force, which introduced the seminal idea that the source of radio's true, paradoxical power derives from silence.4 Marinetti and Masnata built upon both of these concepts in the quest to conquer time and space, their given mandate from the Second Futurist Congress (Milan, 1933). Futurist focus on the machine turned to the science behind the machine: wave motion and the behavior of sub-atomic particles. The Futurist agenda for the "new man," whose renewed spirit would manifest as an extension of Futurist willpower and the evolution of the senses, moved to a new stage, the electromagnetic spectrum. The Manifesto denigrates a radio culture spawned by both producer and public; it denounces radio's adherence to realism and dismisses the reliance on studio production and light musical entertainment. Its twenty bullet points prescribe an entirely new radio art, "la radia"—neither cinema nor theater, a radio art independent of government control while fiercely loyal to the Fascist cause. On the one hand, we must shed our expectations of recovering a Futurist radio tied to the broadcast station; on the other, we can only speculate as to what is intended when the Manifesto hints at the dissolution of boundaries between the spiritual and material realms, the transference of thought and matter through vibration, and communication with the past. Cognizant of the difficulties presented by the Manifesto's cryptic twists and turns, Masnata as the Manifesto's principal author penned a 44-page gloss to the Manifesto, alternating between naming the inspirational sources behind the art of radia, and explaining what was meant. The work remained in Marinetti's possession, unpublished. Masnata's comments adhere to two overarching themes: 1) atomic theory and the electromagnetic spectrum and 2) the free-word style (paroliberismo)—the Futurist literary style that dispenses with syntax to experiment with disjunctive words (parole in libertà), onomatopoeia, signs, symbols, numbers, colors and shapes. Both themes support Masnata's premise: radio...

Menos es más: Mies y la construcción paradójica de la arquitectura moderna

In the growing complexity of reality, "less is more" represents, not so much an ascetic reaction to life, but a sense of it from the paradox. Free floor, curtain wall, mobile partition, are echoes of these aporetic relations present in the modern project as a product of the conscious dissolution of the marked boundaries and their differences. However "less is more" also contains a radicality only possible from the confrontation of these two opposite terms. This balance of opposites is what crystallized in the work of Mies van der Rohe, going beyond his minimalist typecasting, which concealed an approach close to a paradoxical construction of modern architecture. Understanding this premise will help to broaden the focus of the supposed coherence that existed in the creative process of that key period in the history of architecture, unfinished until the present moment and will open the door to expand from hermeneutics to a more pluralistic approach the contemporary architectural production

Review of Janet Schmalfeldt:In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music(Oxford University Press, 2011)

[1] This has been banner season for the Tempest sonata. In 2009, Peeters published widely read volume of essays that explored the unique analytical and performative challenges of Beethoven's op. 31, no. 2.(1) In that same year, members of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) had occasion to see several leading lights of the new Formenlehre, William Caplin, James Hepokoski, and Janet Schmalfeldt, go head-to-head with competing interpretations of the sonata's notoriously ambiguous opening movement.(2) Now, the Tempest provides the point of departure for Schmalfeldt's much-anticipated essay collection, In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on in Early Nineteenth-Century Music.[2] Schmalfeldt has written about the opening of the Tempest before, of course. Her 1995 essay, Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the 'Tempest' Sonata, was landmark text of both Beethoven reception and contemporary formal analysis. In addition to lending its title to the current volume, that study appears here (with key additions) as Chapter Two, where it serves as the centerpiece of the book as whole.(3) For it is in her Tempest analysis that Schmalfeldt most convincingly makes her case for the processual conception of that is at the heart of her project.[3] As Schmalfeldt's readers know, this understanding of the Tempest's opening movement is an inheritance from Dahlhaus, who regarded the work as milestone of Beethoven's development and of nineteenth-century music in general. Spurred by its ostensible lack of clear-cut primary theme-the mercurial, caesura-riven introduction seems to elide directly into the sonata transition-Dahlhaus came to believe that the work announced fundamentally new formal impulse, one that thwart[ed] and negated the customary schematic-modular conception of sonata (Dahlhaus 1989, 14).(4) Rather than offering the listener series of discrete, easily-identifiable functional/thematic regions, this was music whose form was nothing less than the work's own unique of coming into through the continuous transformation of its materials (1991, 118).[4] In making Dahlhaus's processual idea her own, Schmalfeldt does much to clarify and demystify an elusive and sometimes jargon-clouded concept. Throughout her study, process-based approach to generally signifies one whose aim is to uncover and articulate the ambiguities that arise when composers knowingly manipulate familiar functional signifiers (introductions, continuations, conclusions, and so on) in order to frustrate any simplistically schematic understanding of form. Most often, this involves the strategic dissolution of sectional boundaries. In the Tempest and elsewhere, Schmalfeldt is especially interested in situations where the listener can claim retrospectively to have traveled from functional region x to functional region y, but without being able to determine the precise moment when one gave way to the other. Relationships of this sort are indicated throughout with the symbol: e.g., MT Transition refers to main theme that becomes transition at some indeterminate point.(5)[5] Schmalfeldt is quick to stress that these innovations necessarily imposed new participatory demands on auditors of all sorts.(6) Deprived of the usual Formenlehre roadmaps, listeners would need to assess and reassess their positions within the unfolding musical argument more or less continuously, leading to heightened state of engagement and the experience of as an emergent father than fixed feature of the work.(7) At the same time, performers-the most active of all listeners, by Schmalfeldt's reckoning (116)-would be entrusted more than ever to play a determinative role in our understanding of the formal process through the nuances of their interpretive choices (58). …

Shared is not yet Sharing, Or: What Makes Social Networking Services Public?

According to a libidinally charged slogan, Social Networking Services are meant to give “people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” But does the digital act of sharing personal information – invested in so many of the New Social Media – make such internet domains a public realm? What characterizes actually the public according to classical political theory, and what sort of performances become visible in digital fora under the banners of interactivity, friendship and an alleged dissolution of boundaries? Against the background of increasingly elastic borders between things considered private and spaces declared public as well as of a remarkable spectrum of modes of sharing – ranging from disclosing daily trivia to collectively expressing political dissent – our contribution will examine the ambivalence of sharing in Social Networking Services, not least in Facebook, in terms of a paradoxical nexus of passions and risks.

Transnational Care—The Dissolution of Care in the Second Modernity

AbstractBased on the theoretical concept of the “dissolution of boundaries” within a globalized world, Schroer and Tuider discuss recent challenges in transnational care debates. They argue that the current debates on migration have to focus not only on “brain circulation” but also on “care circulation”. In the second modernity, care work will also be characterized by the dissolution of boundaries. In this context, social science describes both the dissolution of and new limitations in the relationship between transnational and local care. The debates on migration policy have increasingly focused on economic resources and/or classical segments of gainful employment, and the conditions for obtaining citizenship have almost exclusively been defined by these criteria. Therefore the authors discuss transnational citizenship as a future concept that has to be influenced by gender studies.

Borders in tourism: the transformation of the Swedish–Finnish border landscape

Permeability in the European internal borders has increased, challenging state-centric tourism development in the border regions. The aim of this article is to examine the development of the Finnish–Swedish border, which has been one of the European Union's internal borders since 1995, as a tourist attraction. An examination of the path of tourism development in this border region shows that the differentiative meaning of the border that has been characteristic for state-centric tourism development has diminished and some of the excitement of crossing the old east–west border has vanished. At present the significance of the border for local tourism development can be seen in the new cross-border enterprise and commercialisation of tourist attractions. Such development can have a wide-ranging influence for the reorganisation of border landscape and dissolution of mental boundaries in the region. This study contributes to an understanding of the transition in the European Union's internal border regions from the perspective of tourism.

Going beyond the limits: Genetic modification of livestock and dissolution of ancient boundaries

The intensive pursuit of biological efficiency has dominated animal science over recent decades. This paradigm is driven largely by economic criteria for lower resource input, increased output of livestock products, faster turnover and reduced costs to the consumer. Science has broken many economic boundaries. But disturbing stability always exacts a price: hidden costs, health, environment, welfare, biodiversity, the rural poor and the carbon footprint. The scientific mission to enhance food production is now facing new horizons at the molecular level for radical change in the life processes of animals. This quest for the genetic modification of livestock is unchartered territory and will also have widespread negative consequences. Two types of boundaries are challenged: ancient Biological boundaries and ancient Man-Made boundaries. The key biological boundary is between species and is now violated by genetic modification; key Man-Made boundaries include recognition of moral autonomy, rule of law and the qualitative difference between humanity and other species. All these ancient boundaries are foundational to sustainable societies and have been tested over huge time spans. Dissolution of these boundaries needs more caution than currently being exercised. Why? Because the scientific models of the genome used for genetic modification are proving to be wrong and inadequate. Emerging genome research reveals that control of gene expression is far more complex than the models used so far. Food products from genetically modified livestock are now in preparation for the human food chain without adequate testing and regulation and against the expressed wishes of consumers. Can the species produced by millions of years of natural selection be redesigned safely with inadequate knowledge? Do scientists have to redesign the inner molecular universe simply because we have the tools? Are unsubstantiated short-term economic arguments sufficient to justify dissolution of ancient boundaries and stable genomes that have stood the test of time in sustaining life? There must be a deeper answer if only because we are no more likely than natural selection to achieve new adaptive stability without enormous cost. Breaching these biological boundaries goes beyond biology and economics by opening the door to transhumanism which already has a dark history. Genetic modification of animals presents issues of risk, accountability, authority, power, ownership, and morality, the nature of animals and the meaning and purpose of humanity — all of which are explored. Scientists are called to recognize and act upon their social responsibilities.

Psychedelics and holistic thinking: a tool for science

Psychedelic drugs have been miscategorised in the UK and the US as being among the most harmful and warranting no medical investigation. Likewise, users of psychedelic drugs are falsely stereotyped as disorganised and delusional. Conversely, psychedelics have been used by leaders in a number of fields to aid creative problem‐solving. This may be due to the psychedelic substances aiding dissolution of cognitive boundaries and temporarily allowing the individual to escape their reality tunnel. This aid to problem‐solving may be just what we need to solve the complex problems facing us today.

FICTION IN REVIEW

1 7 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A L E X N E M S E R Authors who master the short story often emerge as a result of finding themselves situated at an especially resonant intersection of tectonic plates in the process of shaking: Isaac Babel charted the transformation, made with frantic hope, of history-trapped Russian Jews into history-less Soviet revolutionaries; Grace Paley witnessed the dawn of mass political consciousness among those traditionally shut out of politics and consigned to whispered conversations at the kitchen table; and Edna O’Brien has tracked the liberating escape from rural towns to cities of a generation of Irish women. Peter Taylor, whose collected stories has just been reissued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, belongs in this company, creating individuals whose insights light up as their world faces flux, half holding their hands out to the past, half pressing, with their heads down, into the future. Taylor sets the individual insights, cataclysmic or comic, of his protagonists against the rich, complex backdrop of historical flux: the changing social and economic landscape of Tennessee approxiT h e C o l l e c t e d S t o r i e s o f P e t e r Ta y l o r, with an Introduction by Richcard Bausch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pp., $23 paper) 1 7 5 R mately between the two world wars, with memories often reaching back to the turn of the century and farther, and occasionally leaping forward to the political unrest of the 1960s. The central conflict is the transition from the ‘‘Old South’’ to the ‘‘New South,’’ which shows itself in the dissolution of boundaries, the lamented degradation of traditions, the free-floating loss of bearings, and, at its most severe, the eruption of despair. Everything is changing, and in the opinion of many of Taylor’s protagonists, whose souls are accustomed to constancy, for the worse. They lament the decline in manners, in oratory, in the matches made by the scions of the great old families, in bird hunting on the outskirts of Memphis, even in the eggs served in the dining car of the Southern rail line. Here there used to be a picturesque timber forest, now cut down to scrub (‘‘Two Pilgrims ’’); there a moat around an old windmill, filled in after a girl, expelled from the Thomasville Female Institute for stealing, drowned herself in it (‘‘Miss Leonora When Last Seen’’). The older generation cherishes its memories, and meets with frustration the incomprehension of its descendants, the impossibility of communicating the meaning and beauty that are being lost: o√ended at his young nephew’s slighting remark about a stretch of landscape, an older man snaps, ‘‘You would have to have seen that country thirty years ago to understand why it looks the way it does now. . . . I’ve heard it said that when the first white men came through that section it had the prettiest stand of timber on the continent!’’ Great histories and heroic acts have come to a paltry, but living, oblivion: in ‘‘Their Losses,’’ in which three elderly women, each from one of the old families, meet coincidentally on the train to Memphis, the narrator notes that a certain old lady’s family was kin to the Crocketts, and remarks, ‘‘Davy Crockett’s blood had come to this end: a whispering old maid in a Pullman car.’’ This Memphis, too, stands in the shadow of a Valley of Kings. Taylor’s stories assemble a series of perspectives on the overwhelming changes and register them in the experience of individuals . In ‘‘A Spinster’s Tale,’’ a young girl whose mother has recently died begins watching for a sloppy, shambling drunk, nicknamed Mr. Speed, who stumbles home past her window several times a week. She is both horrified and fascinated by him, his ‘‘face heavy, red, fierce like his body,’’ staggering awkwardly with his gray 1 7 6 N E M S E R Y topcoat over one arm. At the same time, her father regularly hosts his bachelor brothers to drinks and...

Bernard Shaw in Contemporary Irish Studies: “Passé and Contemptible”?

Bernard Shaw in Contemporary Irish Studies: “Passé and Contemptible”? Victor Merriman (bio) There will no doubt be abuses in Ireland under Home Rule that do not exist under English rule. —Bernard Shaw, “Preface for Politicians,” John Bull’s Other Island [Shaw understood] that Irish modernity was precisely a condition in which the “cultural” view of “tradition” and the “economic” view of capital development were joined in unequal combat. —Seamus Deane, “Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland,” in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll and Patricia King Bernard Shaw’s works are most productively understood as artifacts of a sustained, unrivaled, public intellectual engagement with Ireland and the world. In this, Shaw anticipates precisely the kind of critical and creative range demanded in our own day, and his outputs and practices should be studied for the insights and dilemmas to which they draw attention. Gerry Smith’s (1998) desideratum for Irish critical practice might have been formulated with Shaw in mind: “As a discrete, autonomous, intellectual practice, criticism’s function should be to understand and describe those particular local, national myths by the light of the larger, international, universal truth of social justice.”1 Shaw dealt with big questions, and returned constantly to them, refining his own position, as the revised and revisited prefaces to John Bull’s Other Island demonstrate. For anyone reflecting on the significance of his works, this creates opportunities and problems, and the structure of what follows reflects this. My essay is organized around an attempt to sketch answers to three principal questions: How does Shaw sit in Irish Studies? In what ways is Ireland—the object of study—changing, and how does Irish Studies engage with or ignore these [End Page 216] changes? In what ways might a new production of John Bull’s Other Island make the case for Shaw as a key presence in the field, and illuminate contemporary critical projects? Shaw and Irish Studies: “Willing to Do Public Work” Over the past thirty years or so, Irish Studies has been transformed by the publication of significant scholarly works, including J. J. Lee’s Ireland, 1912–1985 (1990), Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1996), Peadar Kirby et al.’s Re-Inventing Ireland (2002), Clare Carroll and Patricia King’s, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (2003), and a wide range of titles on Irish Drama.2 As the field has developed, it has provided forums for ideological struggle over historical revisionism, the validity of postcolonial perspectives, and, latterly, the role of intellectuals in public life. Even as a site of intellectual endeavor, a field implies a bounded territory, and the title of a recent survey of the state of Irish Studies, Beyond Boundaries (2007), is therefore instructive. It testifies to a set of apparently uncontainable tensions, around content, formal expression, and—crucially—changing political and economic conditions, which have altered Ireland beyond expectation, if not beyond recognition, in the past fifteen years or so.3 Terrain is everywhere evoked by contributors to Beyond Boundaries, with arguments for permeation or dissolution of intellectual borders, for reconfiguration of critical terrain, and for expansion of territory to include topics currently underrepresented in scholarship. Beyond Boundaries is a lively, comprehensive, and interesting collection of fourteen essays, in which—strikingly, for our purposes—there is not one reference to Shaw’s work. This raises the possibility that the critical act of centering Shaw’s body of work in contexts current in Irish Studies might be expected to deliver, to paraphrase Shaw himself, rather more than one has bargained for.4 Would Shaw’s “whole unupsettable applecart” bring about a dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, forcing critical attention on Ireland’s implication in modernity/imperialism alongside attention to or denial of the vicissitudes this nexus visited upon the people?5 Is his work that of a difficult figure for whom an obscure corner must be created, inconvenient and unpredictable, but family nonetheless? Or does the combination of dramatic work, criticism, political provocation, and undying affection for Ireland position Shaw, precarious and threatening, as “a huge stone [standing in] an impossible place”?6 Historically, land, and its ownership, has been of crucial importance to [End Page...

Youth Crime, Urban Spaces, and Security in Germany since the 19th Century

In West Germany during the 1960s and the 1970s, two important changes in delinquency, in its perception and fears could be discerned. First, a twofold spatial and social dissolution of boundaries (Entgrenzung) of youth crime developed. The establishment of the transnational networks of the youth cultural underground, in which drug consumption played an important role, was instrumental in these developments. Second, in the early 1970s, as the case of the Rockers shows, youth crime had become a potentially omnipresent phenomenon of everyday urban life evoking diffuse spatial fears. Every seemingly friendly boy from the neighborhood could all of sudden turn into a juvenile violent offender. Thus, crime could potentially lurk everywhere, in every niche of (urban) society. It was against this background that the age of security dawned as it promised a safe haven against all future urban threats.

Is There a Global Society?

The concept of globality is today commonly used to describe a condition characterized by the existence of a single sociopolitical space on a planetary scale. Such a global realm is believed to have resulted from the gradual dissolution of boundaries brought about by intensified exchange and increased interconnectedness between territorially bounded and distinct societies. But while there is a broad agreement to the effect that it is necessary to posit a distinct global level of analysis in order to be able to explain and understand a wide range of phenomena which transcend the boundaries of individual states, the social ontology of this purportedly new domain remains largely unexplored. Arguably, unless we are able to make sociological sense of what goes on in this domain, the very notion of globality and all that goes with it will be of little analytical value to the social sciences (see for example Rosenberg 2005). In this context, one important question has recently been raised by Mathias Albert (2007), who has asked “whether the tools of social theory―or, more specifically, theories of society―are applicable to the global realm.” Implicit in this question is that we need to be able to conceptualize the global in societal terms in order for other sociological concepts, like those of differentiation and rationalization, to become applicable in a theoretically fruitful way. Yet the concept of society has proven difficult to use with reference to the global realm. As I shall suggest, the theoretical difficulties we encounter when we try to apply modern theories of society to the global realm are indicative of the extent to which our conceptions of human association have been nationalized , rather than of any limitations intrinsic to the global realm itself. As I would like to argue, as a consequence of conceptual nationalization, we …

Students' interaction with web-based literature: towards dissolution of language boundaries

The aim of this study is to investigate how new knowledge can be developed in computer-mediated social practice. Its focus is on how language frames university students' interaction and action while studying web-based literature in small task-based groups. The empirical data were collected from a case study where 57 Rwandan student teachers were completing an examination task mediated by computer at the end of an academic course. The study draws on naturally occurring talk, observations and in-depth interviews. The data were analysed from a sociocultural perspective. The findings reveal that students coping with web-based literature face a twofold reality of classroom discourse rooted in their sociocultural and educational contexts: the one conveyed through foreign languages of instruction, the other whose vehicle is their native language. The study suggests an alternative way of constructing a substantial learning discourse based on dissolution of language boundaries.

Local dimensions of the dissolution of boundaries in labour – a geographical view of the cultural and media industries

This paper explores the geographical dimensions of changing work from a labour sociological per spective. Its diagnosis of transformation draws on two key debates: on the erosion of standard employment patterns and the dissolution of boundaries in labour (and life). The article first examines the concepts behind these debates, and then attempts to unravel two geographically informed dimensions inherent to them - labour mobility and the space-time organisation of everyday life - using empirical material from several studies of the cultural and media industries. It finally argues on a very general level that the emerging knowledge- and culture-based economy gives birth to a new rise of agglomeration economies, albeit in a socio-cultural rather than the classical sense. Agglomeration in this sense functions as both a compensation for and catalyst of changing work patterns.