History Of Engagement Research Articles

Re-animating the works of Thomas Mofolo by engaging with the original Sesotho texts

A project around translation was established in 2014 at the University of the Western Cape's Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) to engage with literary texts written in indigenous South African languages. The project, entitled Re-animating and re-imagining African futures: a project for translating African language texts, ethical discourses and critical aesthetics in South Africa, focuses specifically on texts in their original languages in order to introduce new debates around translation, translating from and between indigenous languages, and interpretation and its effect on current new and relevant knowledge creation. Through sustained analysis, older texts (whether translated from the original or not) forged in earlier moments of historical engagement with intruding structures and ideological formations such as colonialism and apartheid, could open up new ideas and incubate an informed debate around current topics such as decolonisation, the Africanisation of the curriculum and institutions, and so forth. Homi Bhabha uses the words of Salman Rushdie to underline the fact that new ways of thinking can begin to take place when the self is decentred. For this, Bhabha (227) foregrounds the interstitial, the in-between, which will “create the conditions through which comes into the The place where he sees this happening most acutely is during translation. The moment one has a word in the source text for which one has no clear equivalent in the target text, then one should recognise newness: this is how newness enters the world. Why then the choice of Mofolo's work? Antjie Krog became aware that in the list of the top hundred books written by Africans, a smaller list of twelve exceptional books was compiled. The only text by a Southern African writer on that list was not one by this area's Nobel Prize winners, but Thomas Mofolo's Chaka.

Modelling small-arms projectile distribution on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battlefield sites

The application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies to archaeological investigations continues to provide new perspectives on historical events. Applied to battlefield archaeology, GIS analysis offers an efficient means of predicting potential artefact distribution across a conflict landscape. The approach proposed in this piece allows a user to test historical engagement scenarios within a desktop computing environment utilizing a customized GIS application. The study was intended to develop a framework that allowed for the input of quantifiable parameters in order to illustrate potential artefact patterning. The framework consists of two components, the trajectory model and the methodology for implementing it. Using this coarse-grained approach, it is our contention that small-arms projectile distribution can be estimated for a single engagement, and in doing so provide a more comprehensive view of potential artefact patterning than using KOCOA (Key Terrain, Observation and Fields of Fire, Concealment and Cover, Obstacles, Avenues of Approach/Withdrawal) terrain analysis or historic research alone. As an initial example to illustrate the efficacy of our model, this study uses data and parameters from the 1777 Battle of Ridgefield, Connecticut landscape as a test case.

Walking Histories, Un/making Places

This article is a methodological examination situated within a larger multisited project on the formation and regulation of communities of sex workers in Yokohama, Japan, and Vancouver, Canada, in historical and social discourse. Tracing the fragmented and elliptical histories of these communities, we are attentive to the potential for walking, and specifically walking tours, as an ethnographic method, a mode of historical engagement, and a means to reflect on our unfolding and shifting space–body relationships as we move across spaces of inquiry with varying levels of ease/tension. We seek to understand walking tours as a means and method to critically engage the histories that we seek to uncover and the absences we face in our attempts to uncover them—not only the social relations that constitute and are constituted by the space but also our own relationship to current communities that exist in the space—and the ways our lifeworld entanglements interfere with and give shape to our research endeavors. We problematize academic tendecies to situate lifeworld entanglements as secondary or superfluous to the research process. By tactically spatializing our personal experiences in a series of endnoted digressions, we make strange academic writing conventions of appropriate form and content.

Viewpoint Re-evaluating the place of urban planning history

This commentary seeks to prompt new discussion about the place of urban planning history in the era of contemporary globalisation. Given the deep historic engagement of urban planning thought and practice with ‘place’ shaping and thus with the constitution of society, culture and politics, we ask how relevant is planning's legacy to the shaping of present day cities. Late twentieth century urban sociology, cultural and economic geography have demonstrated the increasing significance of intercity relations and the functional porosity of metropolitan boundaries in the network society, however statutory urban planning systems remain tied to the administrative geographies of states. This ‘territorial fixing’ of practice constrains the operational space of planning and, we argue, also limits its vision to geopolitical scales and agendas that have receding relevance for emerging urban relations. We propose that a re-evaluation of planning history could have an important part to play in addressing this spatial conundrum.

Public education in neoliberal times: memory and desire

This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education institutions of the post-war welfare state are often characterised as being lost, attacked, encroached upon and dismantled. In this paper, I contend it is important to avoid mobilising a memory of public educational pasts that do not account for their failings and inequalities. Turning to a historical engagement with the emergence of neoliberal politics, the paper explores how challenges and contestations surrounding ‘the public’ from multiple standpoints converged in the rise of neoliberalism. Recognition of these convergences and contestations, I suggest, assists to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between neoliberal reform and the welfare state, and thus of the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a just and equitable public education.

Western Europe and its Historical Engagement in the Balkans

The European continent and in particular the Western Europe have always been involved in a range of events and developments. History has always shown and made us aware that the Western Europe in particular has been the cradle and the instigator of many positive developments, as well as many destructive conflicts and wars in the past. Geographically, this region has undergone the great challenges long time ago and it now cherishes the benefits of the mutual organization and cooperation, whereas other regions tend to approach and join the European values, namely the united democratic Europe and its organization as foreseen within the European Union. If we would only take a look at the Balkans, we would see that besides geographically, it is also closely related to Europe politically and economically. The historical period to be considered in this paper is that after World War II, namely the post-Cold War period, after the big changes in central Europe, and the eastern and southern Europe, i.e. the Balkans. The Western Europe, after the declaration of the end of Cold War in particular, will be actively involved in all major events and developments in the Balkans. The turbulences that fell upon this region will present a challenge and often put on the state of alert the western world and the organizations and institutions which emerged as a result of their consistent cooperation. There is no doubt that the Western Europe will have a key role in the ending of hostilities and conflicts, a key role in the development and the realization of strategic aspirations of the Balkan countries in their endeavors to join the NATO Alliance, the EU and other international organizations. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s5p238

“Rise up and walk”: Tracing the trajectory of the Carnegie discourse and plotting a way forward

This article will provide a comparative analysis of the findings of the first Carnegie Commission on the Poor White Problem, 1932, and the second Carnegie second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa, 1982, with regards to the role of the church as an agent of change. It also seeks to navigate the tension inherent in the “double legacy” of the church’s historical engagement with issues of poverty and inequality in order to reflect on its current praxis. The article, therefore, highlights both the challenges and opportunities for the church’s role as we celebrate 20 years of democracy.

The hydropolitical Cold War: The Indus Waters Treaty and state formation in Pakistan

This paper develops the framework of the “developmentalist passive revolution” to analyze the politics of water development during the Cold War. This framework is developed by drawing on Marxist geopolitics and critical water geography, and is offered as a way to facilitate comparative analysis of engineering and nationalism in the context of Cold War hydropolitics. The concrete historical engagements of the paper relate to the signing of The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 between Pakistan and India and the associated Indus Basin Plan to transform the Pakistani waterscape. What historical and geopolitical-economic conditions enabled the signing of the IWT? What legacies did the IWT have for state formation in Pakistan? Drawing on the negotiation records of the IWT, archival materials relating to Pakistani river development during the 1960s, and fieldwork conducted in Pakistan in 2012, this paper argues that Cold War hydropolitics are best analyzed through the cultural and economic interactions of asymmetrically empowered developmentalist state elites at multiple scales.

Critical Approaches to the Narrative of Sinicization

Critical Approaches to the Narrative of Sinicization Erica Fox Brindley (bio) Hugh R. Clark. The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China Through the First Millennium CE. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. xv, 266 pp. Hardcover $99.00, isbn 978-0-8248-5160-6. This book arrives on the cusp of a new wave of publications and surging scholarly interest in premodern developments in southern China and maritime Southeast Asian regions around the South China Sea. While the geographic focus of Clark's expansive monograph is Southeast China–mostly areas historically associated with the Min (閩) cultures in what are now modern-day Fujian Province–Clark takes the much broader and more elusive sphere of wen (文), or "civilization" as his overarching thematic interest in the book. The result is an intriguing, vast, and often enlightening retelling of the history of premodern "South China" in the first millennium C.E., one that criticizes the overly "Sinitic" emphasis of acculturation narratives that have dominated Chinese and Western historiographies in past centuries. Clark's lifelong historical engagement with Middle Period (i.e., Later Han through Song) Fujian and South China has enriched this book, pollinating it throughout with specific examples and longue durée perspectives that only extensive expertise could make possible. It is chock-full of delightful stories about figures, events, and themes or motifs related to premodern Fujian and the southern regions, all of which provide anecdotal evidence of a very rich and complicated history of cross-cultural interactions in premodern times. Whether these stories support Clark's main claim that through them we witness the eventual adoption of wen values, and whether such a process is appropriately labeled as a "Sinitic" encounter is another matter, which we will examine in this review. Sinitic Encounter is of great interest because of what it sets out to accomplish: a critique of standard sinicization narratives. A clear bias persists in Chinese historiography–written by members of the elite and often sponsored by dynastic houses–one that assumes the dominance and victory of civilized (wen) culture vis-à-vis the so-called non-Chinese indigenes and cultures. As Clark aptly shows, such a bias ignores the voices of the illiterate, non-Sinitic others who were widespread throughout the South in the first millennium C.E. It whitewashes the multicultural, multi-ethnic, and extremely complicated histories of southern peoples, replacing such complexities with the monotonous narrative of Sinitic cultural predominance and easy absorption of backward people and their cultures. As a corrective to this, Clark tries to "offer a plausible model of accommodation between disparate cultures rather than simple displacement" (p. xiv) and to "challenge the teleological hegemony of the northern discourse," which assumes that the northern, Sinitic cultures overwhelmingly took over the southlands, [End Page 160] essentially and effectively wiping out the inferior cultures of the non-Sinitic peoples (p. 18). Clark is right; this kind of corrective is precisely what is needed in the study of the history of the southern regions of China, and his book makes an important contribution to the literature that aims to unravel this view. The book is organized into two main sections. The first section, "Part I: Transitions," provides an overview of important historical transitions involving the encounter of so-called northern, hegemonic cultures with southern, indigenous ones. It examines in chapter 1 the concept of "the civilizing mission," defining it in terms of a prevailing, hermeneutical concept of wen ("the values of civilization") (p. 12). Chapter 2 discusses the overarching Sinocentric visions and perceptions of the South; chapter 3, key transformations involving changing demographics and adoption of northern, administrative techniques such as the civil service examinations during the Song and pre-Song times, and chapter 4, the development of an actual discourse on wen as a measure of civilization during the Song period. The first section is dispersed in theme, approach, geography, time period, and content, but it is nonetheless a helpful introduction to some main themes in the study of the history of South China/North China relations. The second section, "Part Two: A Local Model of Cultural Accommodation," provides an extensive discussion of stories, many of which are religious in nature, involving local cults and cultures...

Conservation Meets Militarisation in Kruger National Park: Historical Encounters and Complex Legacies

Drawing on environmental history and political ecology, this paper contributes to growing debates concerning military-environment encounters and conservation militarisation/securitisation by investigating the complex histories and legacies of these relations. Grounding my insights in South Africa's iconic Kruger National Park, I chart how encounters between environment and military/security activity over the last century offer a repeatedly contradictory picture: military activity, skills, and weapons have harmed wildlife and hence reinforced the need for its protection, and they have simultaneously been deployed in the name of such protection. Furthermore, some of these historical engagements failed to materialise as planned and, as such, provide insight into military-environment frictions as well as nature's ability to thwart militarised interventions. Yet other engagements thrived and resulted in the multi-layered militarisation of Kruger, as both protected area and strategic borderland. Several of these encounters have lived on to shape Kruger's current intensive militarisation tied to rhino poaching, both the state response and poaching itself. Past military activity, in fact, provides an arsenal of enabling factors for current poaching- and conservation-related militarised violence that ultimately proves harmful to conservation efforts.

Imagining Counter-Dispositif: The Case of Money Through Servitude, Slavery, Abolition and Free Labour

The paper explains how money as a master dispositif had guided history through institutions of servitude, slavery, its abolition and free labour through networks of human relations. The first section of the paper deals with the idea of money as dispositif. Second section explains how the motive of accumulation of wealth had driven the early modern Europeans into slave traders. Third section explains the abolition of slavery is in continuity with the motive of accumulation. It is explained, the free market for labour is a further extension of the logic of wealth accumulation through control and domination. The fourth section opens the discussion towards imagining counter-dispositif.Dispositif is naturalised power, the second nature that works from within as our mentality organising our thought patterns, attitudes, behavior and actions. It is an internal singularity, habitus, functioning as strange attractor in enabling us to abstract sense from the chaos of experiences. The internal singularity is an affect of historical and biographical engagement with the network of the socius that empowers us to be culturally conditioned sense making beings. Master dispositif is the deep singularity that draws other cleavages of mentalities towards it ‘naturally’ figuratively comparable to a deep valley drawing streams towards it. In this paper, I argue, money beyond its multiple appearances and usages such as, means of exchange, currency, cash apparatus, or financial statement is a master dispositive, primarily an internal psychic apparatus, drawn from our collective historical ontology, that rules our subjective perceptions.The central argument here is that, qua the master dispositif, money has an agential role in guiding history. For instance, though the institutions of servitude, slavery, slavery-abolition, and free-labour appear to us a progress from servitude to freedom I argue, they are just various manifestations in historical junctures since money as a master dispositif has possessed our internal cartography of pathways and ‘progress’. Said in Heideggerian terminology thrown into money’s dispositif is the state of das-man. Human subject moments, as truth moments and authentic freedom, if have to have liberative expressions, that should be through overcoming the eclipse of the Self and not in that being subjected to the dispositif that overwhelms.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest: The Role of Community Formation and the Power of the Individual in Zine Making Participation

Zine making is a complex practice, rich in parallel traditions and historical engagement in a number of vocal creative and social communities. Drawing on data from thirty-two depth interviews conducted in Australia, Europe and the United States, this study was concerned with the question of whether the processes of identification and articulation into a community were critical to the decision by an individual to make zines and to what extent does the community influence these individuals as they engage in zine making practice? We found that although personal reasons for zine making were explicitly described by a number of respondents, there were few examples where altruistic community engagement was explicitly cited. There was also significant porosity between any discussion of community and the role that person played or sought from it.

Changing perception into reality: Canada in Africa

Canadians tend to perceive Canada’s historic engagement and influence in Africa in ways very much disconnected from reality. Canada’s self-image as a humane internationalist country deeply engaged with Africa relies on an idealized version of history. Nevertheless, there have been times when the reality of Canadian foreign policy engagement with Africa has been much closer to that ideal than it is now. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate on Canada–Africa relations by building greater understanding of Canada’s position in Africa. It tackles the question of Canada’s engagement with Africa by analyzing three broad aspects of a possible relationship between a developed country and developing region: the economic, developmental, and trans-societal. Analysis of these three areas of interaction provides insight into what could be done to renew or reinvigorate Canada’s engagement with Africa.

Invitation to historians

This introduction to my work seeks to account for the kind of history that I practice, and outline exactly why I think particular modes of investigation, types of historiographical practice and iterations of historical engagement will provide us with new insight into the way in which history works in popular culture. I discuss the formation of what I term ‘historical sensibility’ and look at several key issues: anachronism; desire; commodity; authenticity.

The Athletic Profile of Fast Bowling in Cricket

Cricket is a global sport played in over 100 countries with elite performers attracting multimillion dollar contracts. Therefore, performers maintaining optimum physical fitness and remaining injury free is important. Fast bowlers have a vital position in a cricket team, and there is an increasing body of scientific literature that has reviewed this role over the past decade. Previous research on fast bowlers has tended to focus on biomechanical analysis and injury prevention in performers. However, this review aims to critically analyze the emerging contribution of physiological-based literature linked to fast bowling in cricket, highlight the current evidence related to simulated and competitive in-match performance, and relate this practically to the conditioning coach. Furthermore, the review considers limitations with past research and possible avenues for future investigation. It is clear with the advent of new applied mobile monitoring technology that there is scope for more ecologically valid and longitudinal exploration capturing in-match data, providing quantification of physiological workloads, and analysis of the physical demands across the differing formats of the game. Currently, strength and conditioning specialists do not have a critical academic resource with which to shape professional practice, and this review aims to provide a starting point for evidence in the specific area.

History, field definition and management studies: the case of the New Deal

Purpose– The aim of this paper is threefold. First, to argue for a more historically engaged understanding of the development of management and organization studies (MOS). Second, to reveal the paradoxical character of the recent “historical turn,” through exploration of how it both questions and reinforces extant notions of the field. Third, to explore the neglect of the New Deal in MOS to illustrate not only the problem of historical engagement, but also to encourage a rethink of the paradigmatic limitations of the field and its history.Design/methodology/approach– Adopting the theory of ANTi-history, the paper conducts an analysis of historical management textbooks and formative management journals to explore how and why the New Deal has been neglected in management theory.Findings– Focussing on the New Deal raises a number of questions about the relationship between history and MOS, in particular, the definition of the field itself. Questions include the ontological character of history, context and relationalism, and the link between history and MOS, ethics, Anglo-American centredness, and the case for historical engagement.Originality/value– The paper argues for a new approach to historical understanding that encourages a revisiting of what constitutes the field of MOS; a greater awareness of and opening up to alternative (hi)stories and, thus, approaches to MOS; and a re-evaluation of phenomena such as the New Deal and other more radical ways of organizing.

Swedish and British Public Opinion of the Armed Forces after a Decade of War

This article analyzes public opinion of the armed forces, focusing on Sweden and the United Kingdom. The cases offer interesting similarities, such as their institutions of parliamentary monarchies and, most recently, their reliance on all-volunteer force, as well as differences especially with regard to their experience of international defence missions. The discussion considers the extent to which the public has been supportive of recent missions conducted by Swedish and UK armed forces, and whether such support is also accompanied by support for the armed forces as an institution. Levels of opinion and trust in the military are quite different in both cases, and public opinion of international missions reflects the contrasting historical engagements of both states. In both cases, we also find a divergence between what publics are willing to support and what national governments wish to pursue as missions for their armed forces.

Spies in the Shadows: Intelligence and Secret Agents in the Novels of Christopher Koch

FROM THE DAYS OF THE COLD WAR, THE WORLD OF THE SPY HAS GENERATED AN EXTRAordinary level of imaginative interest as evidenced in literature and film. Widely various, examples range the sophisticated glamor and simplistic heroism of James Bond to the unresolved ethical intricacies of Graham Greene to the unrelenting negative realism of John Le Carre. Bruce Bennett, who has made invaluable contributions to this area of study, notes that Australian writers of spy fiction are comparatively few, despite the country's lengthy historical engagement in espionage (The Spying Game 4). Within this canon however, novelists strive to establish a genre that is distinct the spy thrillers over which, as Bennett notes, Britain effectively exerts the rights of ownership (4). Australian authors write from the outside (147). Christopher Koch has made significant contributions to Australian spy fiction. In The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), Highways to a War (1995), Out of Ireland (1999), and The Memory Room (2007) Koch extends the paradigms of doubleness and the twining of dualities that are recurrent across other aspects of his work. Where before this doubleness was revealed through the presence of Faery or what critics refer to as Otherland (Henricksen 62) within the mundane or in the double vision induced by postcolonialism, in spy fiction perpetual conflicts rage that are quite distinct those wrought by international politics. Not only are the identities of the spies doubled, realist perspectives are placed in contestation with the fantastical and heroic elements often associated with spy fiction. Similarly, espionage is a clandestine but routine and often monotonous activity that simultaneously evokes something primal in the human psyche. Most often, these instincts are precisely the opposite of what is required. They take the form of a desire for power, a longing for the truth or for various forms of secret knowledge, irate paranoia, or simply an over-stimulation of the imagination. Koch uses these conjunctions of opposites to examine the allure wielded by espionage and its premises and to counterbalance its manifestations. This paper tracks the progress of this examination through various characterizations and plot events. In nearly all cases, the allure generated by espionage, which often rises from, but is not limited to, images of the kind associated with popular culture, is more destructive than the machinations of actual espionage. Yet the two worlds remain simultaneously mutually exclusive and inextricably twined. Koch's work, it is continually emphasized that the examination of espionage is the examination of doubleness. Koch thereby offers a layered approach largely unexamined by many British writers in this field and one that is fitting for an Australian author not displacing the writing of an ancestral country but crisscrossing and doubling the spy genres of Britain with alternate perspectives. TheThe Year of Living Dangerously explores the ethics of various forms of information gathering including the various forays of professional journalists and the efforts of one idiosyncratic individual to keep detailed, ever-expanding files on the personal lives of others. However, only one professional spy is prominent in the novel. The novel is set in Indonesia during one of the most turbulent periods in the country's history. The coup in 1965 was mounted by the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), who at the time controlled the largest communist organization in any non-communist state (Hindley 237), in order to displace President Sukarno. However, the future president, Suharto, led the military to rout the coup. The coup was then transformed into a conservative counter-coup and, in the following six months, half a million leftists, real or imagined, were slaughtered by the military and local gangs (Gee). In historical circles, speculation swirls around a secret consignment of arms that was allegedly dispatched China to the PKI in Jakarta. …

Kamasan Art in Museum Collections

Museum collections of art from Kamasan village attest to historical engagements between Balinese subjects and colonizers in the context of colonial state formation. Paintings circulated as war booty, acts of prestation and gift giving, souvenirs, and as the subjects of academic study, motivated by colonial concerns to preserve authentic, traditional Bali. Although slanted towards the perspectives of colonial collectors, this survey allows the muted voices of colonized subjects to emerge. Exchanges of people and goods reconfigure linear views of Balinese art history by challenging presuppositions about the cultural value of art being corrupted by exchange in a market economy.

Islamic education and colonial secularism: the Amroha experiment of 1895–96

In September 1895, a boldly innovative trial was begun with the teaching of Islam in a British government school in the town of Amroha, near Delhi. This article returns to the Amroha experiment to consider what it reveals about Indian Muslim exchanges with European administrators on the subject of secular colonial education and, more broadly, to bring under scrutiny the historical engagement of Muslim parties with colonial secularism. By the final decade of the nineteenth century, European officials had joined a number of their Muslim subjects in rejecting the imparting of exclusively secular education in schools and colleges under the management of the colonial state. Arguing for the reconciliation of religious and secular instruction, Viqar-ul-Mulk and his contemporaries capitalized upon growing British anxieties about the moral deficiency of Indian students taught in state educational institutions, exposing colonial concerns over the likelihood of inculcating moral improvement in the absence of religious teaching. Challenging the official separation of religion and pedagogy, they raised the possibility of the accommodation of multiple faiths within the modern Indian nation and state. The Amroha experiment served as a precedent for elite Muslim attempts to found an Indian Muslim university in which Islamic instruction would be imparted. Viqar-ul-Mulk’s successful negotiations with the government inspired further efforts for the revitalization of religious education on the part of Muslim leaders concerned about the survival and strengthening of Islam under colonial rule.