Rearguard Action Research Articles

Decay without mourning: future-thinking heritage practices

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to further heritage theory and practice by considering decay as a transformative process contributing to heritage formation and value. Informed by our expertise in a variety of fields bordering heritage studies, we highlight the interplay of generative and degenerative aspects in different modes of decay and suggest that partnering with decay epistemologically, artistically, academically, practically, and democratically would allow heritage to be understood not as a rearguard action against loss but rather as a creative and generative process. To explore these ideas, we draw on several cases in geographical locations with unique socio-political and socio-environmental conditions, namely South Africa, Japan, Brazil, and Antarctica. We investigate different domains including archives and museums, heritage practices, landscapes, indigenous knowledge, environmental history, and nature conservation. We argue that decay is tightly linked to the concept of authenticity and acts as a code that holds a key to both past, present and future values of heritage, depending on the positionality and institutionalisation of the interpreter.

Wildcat strikes, the Industrial Workers of the World, and dual unionism: labor insurgencies in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region, 1900–1939

ABSTRACT The anthracite mineworkers of Northeastern Pennsylvania fomented a series of insurgencies during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This study focuses on their activism in the northern-most of three ‘hard coal’ fields, located around the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Following several failed unionization attempts between 1848 and 1895, the United Mine Workers of America (UMAW) entered anthracite in the mid-1890s, organized the workforce, and called a successful strike in 1902. However, the discontent continued prompting the Industrial Workers of the World to enter the field in 1907. Drawing mainly on immigrant support, especially from the Italians, the ‘Wobblies’ suffered defeat in the Strikes of 1916 and left the area. The grassroots rebellions nevertheless persisted undere the Cmmunist-inspired National Miners Union between 1928 and 1931, the United Anthracite Miners of Pennsylvania between 1933 and 1934, and the Progressive Miners Association in 1939. The rear-guard actions ended during the post-World War II years and the decline of the industry. Through it all, the workers, who were originally British and German but by 1900 mainly Eastern and Southern Europeans, were motivated by grievances agaisnt the coal companies and the UMWA, and sustained by a deep well of family, community, and religous solidarity.

Moldova, the Latvian Purges and Khrushchev’s Generational Struggle, 1958–1962

Historians of the Soviet Union have increasingly turned their attention to the seemingly quiet years of 1958–1962. Turnover in top leadership within the republics has long been noted, but the causes of these changes and their extent are still not precisely known. This study examines turnover rates for each of the republic central committees, then uses Moldova and Latvia as case studies. We conclude that the root cause of the change was a desire to replace the older generation. The targeting of nationalists, the more usual explanation, was in fact a rearguard action by the old guard, which slowed but did not stop the shift.

MOTHERING AND WOMEN’S HEALTH: I LOVE BEING A MOTHER BUT… THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW TO WORRY ABOUT

Little about experiential aspects of motherhood and its consequences to the health of women appears in the nursing literature. Rather, the discourses on motherhood in the health literature tend to focus on bio-medical and scientific aspects, pregnancy and the perinatal period. Using a feminist story-telling approach, this paper draws on the experiences of 20 mothers of adolescent and adult children. Findings are grouped into the following themes: On being a mother: ‘unconditional love, and how love can really hurt’; adolescence: ‘a whole lot more to worry about’; ‘easy’ children and ‘hard’ children: ‘it’s been rear guard action the whole time’; mothers’ health: ‘just getting through each day’; and, seeking support: ‘does anyone really care?’. Findings provide new insights into the nature of mothering, and its perceived long term effects on women’s health and well being. Implications for women’s health and the provision of women’s health services are drawn from the findings.

TOURISM: FROM REARGUARD ACTION TO VANGUARD VISION?

Purpose. The aim of the study is to show the potentialities of travel and tourism on how to strengthen their impact, increase economic, environmental and social effects and demonstrate their industrial relevance in ordinary and extraordinary times.Method. This is an essay, based upon extended documentation, expert-talks, lectures given at technical universities and 40+ years of professional experience in management positions and on assignments in more than 20 countries.Findings. Leaving ones comfort zone is a must to explore new shores a useful idea in daily life and often a painful insight in times of crisis. We recall travel and tourism being highly affected by COVID-19, while its impact as a service industry was considered non-relevant. A nightmare and a wake-up call, too: more of the same is a no-go, rearguard action that will be useless. Instead, a strategic vanguard vision will include cross-cooperation, a change of paradigm and the enhancement of travel and tourism from a purely commercial viewpoint as a service industry to its higher purpose: Travel & Tourism (T&T) as an orchestrated cluster of multi-level communication tools, empowering T&T leaders to develop, promote and brand a country or region as a place to live, to work, to invest and to travel to. Furthermore, the self-proclaimed worlds Number One peace industry [see: International Handbook on Tourism and Peace 2013], is prone to play a far more important role as a recognised peace-maker on international forums.Research conclusions and limitations. The findings represent a personal expert opinion, they will require large-scale surveys and extensive interviews to be empirically verified.Practical implications. A more visionary leadership, cross-sector as well as key-stakeholder networking and structural amendments will be necessary; pilot projects are recommended.Originality. The Author is not aware of any similar endeavour.Type of paper. Discussion (polemical) article.

Between necessity and compulsion: opium poppy cultivation and the exigencies of survival in Badakhshan, Afghanistan

ABSTRACT Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Badakhshan, a borderland province in the northeast of Afghanistan, the paper explores the role that opium poppy cultivation has played in a marginal high-altitude economy. Framed by the analytic of ‘narco-frontiers’ and the puzzle of the persistence of small farmers in uneven agrarian transitions, the paper investigates the diversity of market and non-market institutions that operate across the means of production of opium. Rather than seeing opium poppy production as the vanguard of an agrarian transition, it is suggested that it is more of a rearguard action to ensure survival.

Geographies of COVID‐19

Geographies of COVID‐19

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

Teaching in Bad Times

[…] it seems a little timid, if not dangerously evasive, for people in and around education not to be entertaining dire thoughts about the challenges it may face and its future, given the specters that haunt capitalism today. I do not hear such thoughts among progressives, beyond worry and anger about continuing trends: privatization of this public good; casualizing of labor; severe funding cuts as states and localities struggle with big deficits; the relentless march of high-stakes tests. . . .I do expect more from educational workers on the left -- more than our usual plans to raise consciousness in individual classrooms and fight rear guard actions against deteriorating conditions of labor.

Shrinking the state 2.0: commentary on Ken Warren’s ‘A new model of collaboration’ and related IGPS working paper

This commentary is a response to two papers by Ken Warren: his article in this issue of Policy Quarterly (Warren, 2022) and the longer, more detailed IGPS working paper on which it is based (Warren, 2021). 
 Stripped of the distracting clutter of business school jargon, both papers read to me as a rearguard action in defence of the rapidly unravelling public sector ‘reforms’ that were promoted and driven through in the late 1980s, starting with the New Zealand Treasury’s 1987 briefing document Government Management, and embodied in the State Sector Act 1988.

Coming into One’s Light: Problematics of Study in an Age of Control. A Response to Special Issue: Answering the Question: What Is Studying? PTHE 3(3)

Much like terms such as “scholar” and “understanding,” and even “mind,” “humanities,” “philosophy,” and ‘theory,” the terms “study” and “studying” are falling into desuetude in the language of higher education, if they have not already done so. The present special issue1 may be seen, therefore, as a rearguard action, to defend not only the term “study” but the very set of ideas that it represents. But this special issue does much more than that, for it is a creative project, providing a collective attempt to proffer glimpses of ways in which the idea of study may be rehabilitated in new forms in and around higher education.

Primordial Haptics, 1925–1935: Hands, Tools and the Psychotechnics of Prehistory

‘Psychotechnics’, Weimar Germany’s science du jour, typically is framed as a symptom of ‘technological media’ – obscuring the persistent significance of ‘dexterity’, ‘skill’ and ‘manual labour’ at the time. More broadly, there is a tendency to construe ‘the haptic’ as predominantly a casualty of modernity: skilled hands replaced by conveyor belts; skilled hands defended by the rearguard actions of arts-and-crafts movements; skilled hands destroyed by industrialized warfare. Drawing on contemporary investigations into the ‘organ of touch’, this essay aims to complicate this picture by reconstructing the proto-ergonomic project of Friedrich Herig, a German engineer, amateur prehistorian and expert on craft labour who rose to distinction in the 1920s as a designer of ‘ideal’ hand tools. Herig’s eclectic sources of inspiration reveal that matters of ‘touch’, far from obsolete, were intimately bound up with matters of tools – their design, uses and putative origins – and thus, with matters of (manual) labour.

The Society of Astrologers (c.1647–1684): sermons, feasts and the resuscitation of astrology in seventeenth-century London

Before the Royal Society there was the Society of Astrologers (c.1647-1684), a group of around forty practitioners who met in London to enjoy lavish feasts, listen to sermons and exchange instruments and manuscripts. This article, drawing on untapped archival material, offers the first full account of this overlooked group. Convinced that astrology had been misunderstood by the professors who refused to teach it and the preachers who railed against it, the Society of Astrologers sought to democratize and legitimize their art. In contrast to the received view of seventeenth-century London astrologers, which emphasizes their bitter interrelationships, this article draws attention instead to their endeavours to mount a united front in defence of astrology. The article locates the society's attempts to promote astrological literacy within broader contemporary programmes to encourage mathematical education. Unlike other mathematical arts, however, astrology's religious credibility was an area of serious concern. The society therefore commissioned the delivery and publication of apologetic sermons that justified astrology on the basis of its sacred history. In this context, the legitimacy of astrology was more a religious than a scientific question. The society's public relations campaign ultimately failed, however, and its members disbanded in the mid-1680s. Not only were they mounting a rearguard action, but also they built their campaign on out-of-date historical arguments.

The 1920 Ukrainian-Polish Alliance and Its Implications

The article describes the internal political situation in the UPR and Poland before the conclusion of the Treaty of Warsaw in 1920. The authors argue that in the context of the end of World War I and the rebuilding of the world geopolitical order the UPR and the Republic of Poland were destined to establish allied relations with a view to strengthening their restored statehood and ensuring security in the Baltic-Black Sea region. However, the signature of the Treaty of Warsaw failed to preserve stable interstate cooperation between Ukraine and Poland due to a range of internal political and external factors. This situation cast a shadow over the preservation of the independence of the UPR and Ukrainian-Polish partnership. The military and political alliance of Ukraine and Poland broke apart due to inextricable external and internal aspects. It was a rearguard action and could not struggle against the strengthened Bolshevist Russia without the support of the Entente states. In the meantime, the 1920 Treaty of Warsaw was significant not only for Ukrainians who continued to fight for the independence of the UPR with the assistance of Poland until the end of 1921. The authors assume that the joint opposition of Ukraine and Poland in the summer of 1920 dashed the Kremlin’s marches on Poland, Romania, and Germany that could turn into a tragedy for those states and Europe as a whole. The authors stress that the Baltic states such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania gained their independence because of the military and political alliance of Ukraine and Poland and its struggle against the Bolshevist Russia. Poland got a chance to strengthen its statehood, as Moscow was significantly weakened by the war with the UPR and peasants’ insurrections in Ukraine. Keywords: UPR, Republic of Poland, Entente, Treaty of Warsaw, allied relations.

The Humanity of Humanless Systems

This work considers the future of human interaction with progressively more autonomous systems. I argue that the temporal dissonance between the human’s ‘cycle time’ and machine ‘cycle time,’ will become an overwhelming barrier to collaborative interaction. We may slow machines, we may buffer information exchange, we may default to meta-levels of strategic interchange but in the end all transparency of information interchange will dissolve under the driving influence of time. HF/E is thus already fighting rear-guard action. The question remains as to the sustenance of human quality of life in this evolving milieu.

The Old Guard and Rearguard Actions: Professionalization and the Church Historian’s Office

The Old Guard and Rearguard Actions: Professionalization and the Church Historian’s Office

A Gathering Storm

A Gathering Storm

Drug Pricing - The Next Compliance Waterloo

The current drug pricing war pits the pharmaceutical companies against doctors, hospitals, insurers, regulators, and consumers. The pharmaceutical industry has been fighting this war for more than two decades and is now engaged in a rearguard action. Their actions may delay the tidal wave of regulatory efforts, but, ultimately, the legislators, payers, and public will prevail. It is only a matter of time. While legislative efforts continue to evolve, some form of transparency or disclosure is at the heart of all these efforts. Thus, the discussion has shifted from whether there should be disclosure to what information is needed and who will have access to the information. While the current landscape is tumultuous and unsettled, drug pricing transparency is not a topic that is going to fade away. In the short term, for the pharmaceutical manufacturers facing an onslaught of pricing legislation, it comes down to trust, and trust is something that compliance professionals know a great deal about. Compliance professionals also have the tools and processes to help companies demonstrate responsibility and trustworthiness. In other words, tools that will allow drug companies to demonstrate that they understand the social contract. This radically new landscape, similar to physician payment transparency, is something compliance professionals have encountered before. This paper explores the drug pricing transparency landscape and the role the compliance professionals can play in helping pharmaceutical companies handle the uncertainty.

Royal Heirs in Imperial Germany: The Future of Monarchy in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg by Frank Lorenz Müller

Reviewed by: Royal Heirs in Imperial Germany: The Future of Monarchy in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg by Frank Lorenz Müller Gavin Wiens Müller, Frank Lorenz – Royal Heirs in Imperial Germany: The Future of Monarchy in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 257. In May 1789, the six hundred non-clerical and non-noble members of the Estates-General, after having been forced to wait for two hours, were coldly received by King Louis XVI of France at Versailles. Within a few months, the outbreak of revolution had created an existential threat to the Bourbon monarchy and, in January 1793, Louis himself ascended the scaffold in Paris. Historians have often interpreted these dramatic events as the beginning of Europe's "Age of Revolution." In the following decades, the continent's remaining hereditary rulers were forced onto the defensive, fighting an increasingly desperate rearguard action against the forces of constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, republicanism, and socialism. The collapse of the three great empires of Central and Eastern Europe in the final months of the First World War served as the coda to these largely hopeless efforts to safeguard monarchical privilege in an increasingly democratic age. This narrative [End Page 192] of inevitable decline, according to Frank Lorenz Müller, is misleading: when war broke out in 1914, monarchy had not been pushed irreversibly onto the back foot, but was still widely popular. Exploring the paths to the throne taken by the heirs to three of Germany's smaller kingdoms—Ludwig of Bavaria, Friedrich August of Saxony, and Wilhelm of Württemberg—and shifting his analytical focus to the "monarchical future" of these men, Müller seeks to uncover the reasons for the enduring relevance and surprising resilience of monarchy into the first decades of the twentieth century. After all, "notwithstanding the fact that they would end up as the last of their kind, the three princes predestined to ascend the thrones in Munich, Stuttgart and Dresden one day had every reason to expect that they and their families had a rich future ahead of them" (pp. 6–7). This confidence in the future did not mean that Ludwig, Friedrich August, and Wilhelm could approach their royal duties with complacency. Europe during the "long nineteenth century," a period stretching from the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War, witnessed far-reaching economic and social changes that fundamentally altered the relationship between rulers and subjects. The revolutionary concept of popular sovereignty and the gradual appearance of a highly educated and politically ambitious middle class increased the pressure on monarchs across the continent to share their decision-making authority with ministers and parliaments. The political mobilization of the working class as a result of industrialization and urbanization created still another threat to the principle of hereditary rule. No longer confident in the unconditional loyalty of their subjects, Europe's ruling houses therefore embarked on wide-ranging public relations campaigns that exploited new forms of mass communication in order to redefine the function of monarchs in a constantly changing society. Even before they ascended their thrones, the future Ludwig III of Bavaria, Friedrich August III of Saxony, and Wilhelm II of Württemberg played important roles in these transformative efforts. Not only were they expected to demonstrate their competence in the political sphere as members of parliamentary upper houses and uphold the image of the "heroic monarchy" as high-ranking officers in their armies, the three heirs had to portray themselves as guarantors of future political stability, impartial mediators of confessional conflict, and embodiments of prevailing domestic virtues. Failing to live up to public expectations could have serious consequences. It took several years and tireless effort for Friedrich August to rebuild his image as a loving and devoted father after his wife fled to Switzerland to join her Belgian lover in December 1902. As Friedrich August's dedication to overcoming his marital disaster reveals, the heirs to the thrones of Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg clearly understood that "princes in glass houses should not throw tantrums" (p. 64). They also had to coexist with one another. While Müller convincingly depicts the three German...