Vision Of State Research Articles

New cities for a ‘new Kuwait’: planning for national continuity and stability

ABSTRACT An unprecedented new city-building boom is unfolding in Kuwait, with 12 new cities currently underway. As an oil-rich country, Kuwait faces imminent challenges, including peak oil and climate change, which threaten national wellbeing, continuity, stability, and even survival. As a welfare state guaranteeing housing to citizens, Kuwait shares oil wealth, fundamentally shaping urban planning and spatial development. The current national city-building strategy aims to address housing shortages while reducing reliance on oil. Despite the resources allocated to these projects, Kuwait's city building and its relationship to national economic development strategies has received little scholarly attention. This article introduces the 12 new city projects underway, and examines the main actors driving this trend, how new cities connect to the state's development logic for future-proofing the country, and how national sustainability goals and the state's Vision 2035 for a ‘new Kuwait’ shape these projects. Finally, we reflect on the challenges these projects face.

Paternalistic state care and the dynamic of COVID-19 pandemic governance in Jakarta's rented social housing

The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited debates on care, exposing the vital role of social reproduction despite its ongoing devaluation. Recent studies underscore the urban marginal's multidimensional vulnerabilities during the pandemic, coupled with inadequate state support and excessive policing amid their disproportionate engagements in low-paying care work essential to the city.This study extends the literature by exploring the discourse of care amid the pandemic in Jakarta's rented social housing (rusunawa), Indonesia. As a state-owned settlement hosting displaced residents from informal settlements, rusunawa represents a new form of urban marginality. Based on an ethnography of three rusunawa between 2019 and 2021, I argue that paternalism defines the state's vision and operation of rusunawa. By portraying the residents as vulnerable yet ignorant, the state justifies the combination of disciplines and supports in ‘caring’ for them.The continued paternalistic care during the pandemic, with an intensification of disciplines and assistance, ameliorated the residents' antagonism against the state. Yet, access to state relief programs still hinged upon the residents' invocation of vulnerabilities and personal connection with rusunawa management. Lastly, I demonstrate the residents' intractable desire for a state that embodies a powerful yet nurturing parent, shaping their assessment of the quality of state care.

Textbooks and Nationalist Values: Revitalizing Civic Learning in Nepali Schools

This study investigates the learning content of government school textbooks in Nepal, analyzing their political implications and their role in cultivating a national character. By considering the textbooks as cultural products, the research examines the learning content to explore how they contribute to the formation of national character. The content of the textbooks was purposefully selected and subjected to analysis using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The findings of the study reveal that the prescribed textbooks were crafted to promote the state's vision of national character by either emphasizing or downplaying specific values, ideologies, and belief systems, rather than fostering critical thinking and cognitive skills among learners. Three main trajectories were identified: the notion of being Gorkhali (synonymous with “Nepali”), reverence for the past, and the concept of national indivisibility. It is argued that the development of the learning content is not merely a pedagogical endeavor but also a political one, reflecting the state's adherence to dominant narratives. The study focused on analyzing the themes of civic learning and national character, without considering the perspectives of teachers and students regarding the content.

Government Communication Strategies Through Social Media During 'COVID-19' Pandemic

The emerging Coronavirus 'COVID-19' pandemic impact the performance and communication practices of governments around the world. The pandemic imposed a new reality, as all government sectors witnessed a complete transformation in the work systems and practices in a way that the world had never seen before. Because of social distancing, changing lifestyle and quality of life, and adopting a remote work system, the importance of using communication and information technology (ICT), especially social networks and smart applications, has increased in communicating with different stakeholders and accomplishing various tasks and goals. Therefore, governments shift towards the digital era with all their tools and apply them effectively to achieve the strategic goals and serve the state's vision through its governmental institutions in various fields. In this context, various government institutions in the UAE, including police institutions, have relied on social media and digital communication platforms, in their response to this pandemic. Recently, the police institutions rely on social media networks as a basic communication tool due to its effectiveness in disseminating information quickly and easily, its interactivity with the target audience, its role in awareness during pandemic, its role in stop rumors, spreading the security culture, spreading the spirit of citizenship and belonging, and other goals of Government communication. From this standpoint, this study mainly aimed at analyzing government communication practices of the Ajman Police during the pandemic in its various stages, through its official account on Instagram. The study relied on the survey method, and uses a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the content of the official account during the period from (mid-February to mid-June 2020), as that period witnessed the initial wave of the pandemic. The results of the analytical study showed the effectiveness of the digital practices of the Ajman Police official account on "Instagram" through a diversity of goals, which were appropriate to the circumstances under the 'COVID–19' pandemic. The "Ajman Police" was keen to apply the social responsibility role towards the whole society through informative and advisory practices to raise public awareness to stop the dissemination of the pandemic. The posts also motivated its followers to use digital services through the smart application, by explaining how to use it with pictures and videos, additionally, the posts focused on reassuring the public by highlighting the Ajman Police capabilities and its excellent readiness in dealing with this pandemic. The researchers summarized many recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of government communication practices, especially in the security sector, including the following: Paying attention to studies and periodic reports on followers’ interaction through social media to take the appropriate communication decisions and to design appropriate policy and plan for publications on official account through social media. Finally, the researchers suggested six effective government communication concepts in their model, to enhance the government communication practices through social media networks, which consists of: (corporate identity, content management team, content management, interactivity, integration, continuous development).

A Comparative Study of Two Photoscreening Devices With Manual Vision Screening Involving Preschool Children.

To compare referral results from two photoscreening devices that are in wide use relative to a manual screening test protocol in preschool children. Children aged 3 to 5 years who attended preschools in two counties within the State of Michigan (N = 1,085) took part in the State's vision screening program, which included the Lea Symbols and Stereo Butterfly tests, during a 3-month period. All who failed this screening or were unable to be tested, and 20% of those who passed, were then invited to undergo testing with the Plusoptix Vision Screener Model S-12C (Plusoptix, Inc) and Welch Allyn SPOT Vision Screener Model VS-100 (Hill-Rom, Inc) photoscreening devices. Screening was conducted by State-trained technicians. With the State's test results considered the gold standard for screening, sensitivity and specificity of the two photo-screening devices were calculated. McNemar's test and logistic regression were used to evaluate the findings. A total of 1,085 children took part in the State's screening program. Their mean ± standard deviation age was 48.8 ± 7.2 months, with a 51:49 female-to-male ratio, and a similar percentage were Black (34.1%) or White (33.3%). The sensitivity of the SPOT and Plusoptix screening was 61.0% and 65.2%, respectively. The specificity of the SPOT and Plusoptix screening was 92.9% and 82.4%, respectively. For 84 children who were unable to be tested by the State's screening, the SPOT and Plusoptix devices completed the screening on the majority (86.9% and 73.8%, respectively). The photoscreening devices yielded numerous false-negative results and fewer false-positive results. Their ability to screen many children who could not be screened by manual testing indicates a useful application. [J Pediatr Ophthalmol Strabismus. 2022;59(1):46-52.].

Kenya and China's labour relations: infrastructural development for whom, by whom?

AbstractThe Kenyan government's long-term development strategy, Vision 2030, has emphasized infrastructural investments, which it believes will lead to sustained economic growth. The government has appealed to China to fund large-scale projects in the transport sector, and as a consequence of this, construction firms from China have emerged as significant employers in the country. While the Kenyan government contends with the ongoing burden of youth unemployment, it must also reconcile the ambiguities of China's role in Africa and its implications for the labour market. This article examines two Chinese-built infrastructure projects in Kenya and their intersection with several issues involving migrant labour and local rumours of Chinese prisoners, as well as the state's vision for industrialization and youth employment. Kenyans utilize both online and interpersonal channels of discourse to critique present-day employment practices in the transport sector, and it is argued that these counter-channels of discourse represent a particular articulation of knowledge used by Kenyans to construct meaning and interpret ambiguous situations. Through a theoretical analysis of rumour, this article illustrates how ordinary Kenyans are pooling their intellectual resources to understand Sino-Kenyan labour relations in the absence of transparency and participatory government processes in the infrastructure sector.

The Right to Dream: Gender, Modernity, and the Problem of Class in Kate O'Brien's Bourgeois Bildungsromane

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

Ordering the exemplary urban spaces: A critical analysis of Hanoi's embellishment projects

Vietnam has a long tradition of social engineering through which the ordering of urban space has effectively been used to enforce the state's vision of political and social order. With the country currently in transition from a centrally planned to a market‐oriented economy, the ordering of urban spaces is currently all the more important. This is prominently manifested in the numerous beautification projects that are being implemented in Vietnamese cities. This article explores recent ordering endeavours and considers the way they are legitimated and contested in Vietnam's new socio‐political context. Three beautification projects in Hanoi are examined using materials from policy documents, professional journals and media coverage. The article argues that state ordering actions and the ‘exemplary’ urban spaces they seek to create are embodiments of a complex system of orders of powers in transitional Vietnam, in which political visions of modernist socialism and the new market‐oriented agenda are sometimes in alignment and sometimes clash. Overall, the state's failure in sustaining these ‘exemplary’ urban spaces is emblematic of this hybrid system.

Managing belief and speech as incipient violence: ‘I’m giving you the opportunity to say that you aren't’

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the spectre of ‘radicalised’ Muslim youth rejecting and threatening the ‘Australian way of life’ drives policy responses targeting young people in a biopolitical regime that is fundamentally about containing the political agency of Muslims and people of colour on the one hand, and containing political activism more broadly, on the other. In this article I offer a close reading of three key policy documents used in schools to make the argument that one of the fundamental goals of Australia's countering violent extremism (CVE) regime is the production of self-governing Muslim subjects who tailor their thoughts, beliefs and ideologies to the state's vision of religiosity, political agency, society and nation. I argue that despite policy-makers’ insistence that the war on terror criminalises violence not radical beliefs or speech, CVE's preventative, presumptive, disruptive mandate looks for potential danger, not actual danger. This ‘potentiality’ is located in suspected or actual disassociation from so-called normative Australian values and identity and renders problametic action and speech and belief.

El Ingreso de las Músicas Colombianas a la Educación Superior del Conservatorio del Tolima

La Educación musical en el Conservatorio del Tolima se ha enfocado en la Música Clásica o Culta Europea, fenómeno que no es aislado sino común en un país que tradicionalmente ha dejado por fuera de la academia a las Músicas Colombianas. No obstante, en el año 2011 estas músicas ingresaron de forma decidida al Currículo del programa Licenciatura en Música. El presente trabajo es un análisis curricular que parte de la Investigación Documental y establece las razones por las cuales las Músicas Colombianas ingresan a la Formación profesional de esta institución, entre las que se destaca la visión del Estado Colombiano sobre la Música como herramienta de pacificación en medio del Conflicto Armado, la creación de un Plan Nacional de Música guiado hacia la Convivencia y apoyado en sus orígenes por la política de intervención militar de Estados Unidos llamada Plan Colombia. Así mismo se discute la adaptación casi a ciegas que hizo la Institución a su programa académico de la política Nacional de Guerra.

Making the city of nations and nationalities: the politics of ethnicity and roads in Hawassa, Ethiopia

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between the politics of ethnicity and road construction in Hawassa, Ethiopia. The Ethiopian state has recently invested unprecedented amounts of money in the construction of urban roads. These roads both undermine and reinforce longstanding ethnic hierarchies within Ethiopian cities. Contrary to the image promoted by the state of harmony among residents of different ethnic backgrounds, our research revealed a great deal of tension, particularly concerning the distribution of benefits from state-led infrastructural development. The experiences of residents in rapidly changing neighbourhoods, demonstrate that the benefits of recent road construction are not necessarily distributed according to the policies of the current regime. Instead, historical inequalities interact with contemporary urban development in ways that may actually disrupt the state's vision of unity through diversity. Stratification is built into the city and attempts to reshape the city necessarily interact with recent and long-standing inequalities.

Between Heimat and Schubsystem: Walking the Homeless to Death in Early Modern Austria

AbstractBeginning with Ferdinand I's Polizeyordnung of 1552, the Habsburgs’ state inserted itself into the regulation of welfare for the poor. To manage the homeless, there emerged after the 1720s a state-driven but locally administered system (Schubsystem) of police surveillance to discover, arrest, and physically remove those without a provable birth place (or a ten-year residence in one place) to a to-be-determined Heimat, a “home” community declared responsible for their welfare. In practice, the system's specific self-contradictions and conflicted agendas, its brutalization of those who served it, its several social-relational and language figures that emerged as the actualizations of the state's vision, together placed a significant number of the homeless on forced marches toward indeterminate destinations until they collapsed and could be removed from the road to die “in the straw.” The essay suggests that the interplay between Heimat and Schubsystem serves as a foreshadowing dimension in modern Austro-German history.

Lost dreams? Tales of the South African city twenty years after apartheid

When Phindile (this is not her real name) left rural Kwa Zulu in 1989 for Johannesburg, she had every hope of building a better life in the city. She dreamed of a place where she was free from the trauma of virginity testing, where she could move freely as a black woman, and where she could own her own home and have children that she could bequeath a better life than the one she had had. A few years later, the incoming government of the African National Congress (ANC) had a similar dream for its citizens – the right of all South Africans, regardless of race, creed or gender, to dream of a better future. In its Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the new ANC government promised to create ‘an integrated programme, based on the people, that provides peace and security for all and builds the nation, links reconstruction and development and deepens democracy’ (ANC, 1994, p. 7, emphasis in original). What has happened to both the state's and Phindile's dream 20 years later? Through Phindile's life, a single mother of two, this article explores the extent to which 20 years of democracy has changed the urban landscape and realized the state's vision for a non-racial, integrated and prosperous city for all. We follow Phindile through Gauteng, the country's most urbanized province, as she migrates to the city, looks for work, rents a shack in an informal settlement and eventually gets her own state-provided RDP home in the province's East Rand. Phindile's life becomes a window through which we examine how public policies, policy statements and programmes affect individual lives. We follow the evolution of key policies on local government housing policies, the constitution, integrated development plans, the National Development Plan and other official statements and legal statutes that relate to cities. Through Phindile's experience we move beyond discourses of policy ‘failure’ or ‘success’, allowing us to understand how policy deeply impacts personal lives – for better or worse. By juxtaposing Phindile's everyday life with official declarations, visions and statements, we see the progress, setbacks and stagnation of South Africa's dream to create a rainbow nation with cities that are racially, economically and socially integrated.

State-Supported Science and Imaginary Lock-in: The Case of Regenerative Medicine in Japan

Regenerative medicine (RM) in Japan lays strong emphasis on a specific trajectory of its development, which deploys human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells as the primary sources for the technology. The technique to create these stem cells was developed in 2006 by a Japanese stem cell scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, and since its applicability to human cells was established about a year later, this new type of cells has become to be considered as a potential substitute for human embryonic stem cells. While the clinical value of these cells are yet to be confirmed, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology decided to concentrate its support on iPS cells research and turned it into a national project. This decision reflected the state's vision of initiating the transition to a knowledge-based society, which was adopted in the 1990s to tackle the prolonged deflation in the country. As the research became intertwined with this policy vision, however, the Ministry came to see bringing its success as more important than ever, while other trajectories of RM were left underrated and largely unsupported. Industrial actors counteracted this situation and developed an initiative to recognize existing technical capability in the country, but its impact has been so far negligible. This indicates that the nation is locked in the particular trajectory of RM. Hence, this Japanese RM research enterprise presents an interesting case to understand how states' commitment may not only shape the course of scientific research but also reduce flexibility in technological development.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, ed. An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia: The Illegal Trade in Arms, Drugs, People, Counterfeit Goods and Natural Resources in Mainland Southeast Asia. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013, x+214p.

An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia: The Illegal Trade in Arms, Drugs, People, Counterfeit Goods and Natural Resources in Mainland Southeast Asia Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, ed. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013, x+214p.In the context of regional integration, Mainland Southeast Asia is subject to considerable economic activity and cross border trade. An intimately related question concerns extra-legal cross-border activities, such as the trade in drugs, wildlife, contraband, and people. The scholarly attention to these topics is rather large both within Southeast Asia and beyond. However, few attempts have been made in bringing together these different forms of both conceptually and empiri- cally. This is what An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia attempts to do. As editor Pierre- Arnaud Chouvy makes clear in the introduction, the aim is not merely to juxtapose these different forms of trade, but to provide a regional and systemic understanding of the variety of smuggling and trafficking activities (p. 3) as well as illuminating synergies between them.The book brings together several authors with considerable expertise within the region. The various chapters cover diverse topics such as the trafficking in drugs, arms, logging, wildlife, counterfeit goods, and humans. These different forms of trade are supplemented by several color- ful maps which visualize trafficking routes and patterns in Mainland Southeast Asia. One of the key claims the book is making is that there is considerable overlap between these trade routes and that they have significant historical trajectories. For example, as argued by David Capie, one cannot appreciate the arms trade in Mainland Southeast Asia without considering the post-conflict situation in several of the countries. Similarly, the contemporaneous drugs trade can only be understood in light of previous drug economies which were often blessed and even actively encouraged by West- ern powers.The book is rich in detail and one of its main strengths is its illumination of the various con- nections between these different economies. In Burma, a country which is subject to considerable inter-ethnic tension, semiautonomous armed groups depend on drug production; similarly drug reduction policies in Thailand are directly related to out-migration, prostitution, and human traf- ficking in Northern Thailand.All the chapters consider policy implications. It would have been interesting if the policy implications of regulation and prohibition had been analyzed more explicitly in a comparative frame- work. For example, Vanda Felbab-Brown's discussion of the certification of logging (p. 134) raises extremely interesting questions in terms of how this relates to its labor-equivalent (i.e. current certification of labor recruitment firms in the context of legalizing labor migration between Thailand and several of its neighbors).The conceptual framework, which is outlined in the introduction, relies on Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham's influential book Illicit Flows and Criminal Things (2005), where a key conceptual heuristic is the interrelation between the (il)legal and (il)licit. A key concern of Schendel and Abraham's work is to critically interrogate the inherent state-ism which is common- place in much analysis of trafficking and smuggling. For this reason one must avoid treating con- cepts, such as illegality, as self-evident. Although An Atlas of Trafficking is often similarly critical of such concepts, it commonly slips precisely into seeing like a state (Scott 1998) in the way it maps trafficking practices in Mainland Southeast Asia. For example in the context of human trafficking, it argues that it is necessary to examine trafficking routes and key border sites. But this is to echo the state's vision of trafficking which privileges state-borders over the work condi- tions of migrant laborers. The danger here is ironically (yet fortunately) illuminated by David Feingold in his chapter on human trafficking. …

Munisipal Darpan: imagining the embodied state and subaltern citizenship in 1890s Calcutta

This article interrogates the way in which the ‘state’ was imagined in Calcutta of the 1890s. Using a rare pamphlet of municipal sanitary propaganda written in the form of a drama, the article reveals a radically different vision of the state than the one available in the extant historiography. In this vernacular imagination of the state, the abstract institutional realities are recast as specific embodied hierarchies and exclusions. Since the text concerned was one intended for public propaganda, such a vision could neither be an idiosyncratic vision of an individual, nor could it be described as the ‘popular understanding’ of the state. Instead, as a piece of governmental propaganda that was presented as a drama, it had to be both the state's vision of itself and what it thought people usually thought it to be. The text thus becomes a window into what might be called a ‘vernacular state’, i.e. the state as it exists and sees itself existing in everyday contexts. The stark lines between ‘state’ and ‘society’ become blurred and reorganized in this vision of a vernacular state. The two key features that define the vernacular state are a simplified hierarchy of levels and its embodiment in bhadralok officials. The latter in turn signals a convergence between bhadralok authority and state interests and a consequent marginalization of subaltern citizens. Scholarly interest in the everydayness of the state is growing, but where this article seeks to add to that interest is by highlighting the issue of embodiment of the state's authority.

Midwives and the Medical Marketplace in Modern Japan

This article deals with the commercial aspect of midwifery in Japan since the Meiji period. In focusing on the important yet often neglected aspect of the history of medically trained midwives, it aims to complement existing scholarship that tends to emphasize the role of midwives in the construction of the modern Japanese state. The article analyzes and contextualizes health-related advertisements published in San'iku shimbun, a newspaper aimed at medically trained midwives. These advertisements encouraged midwives to participate in commercial activities involving the sale and promotion of health commodities. Representations of midwives in the advertisements point towards an important aspect in the professional reality of midwifery: making a living. But the advertisers also implicitly exploited the role ascribed to midwives, as agents of health and hygiene in the context of the modernizing state. Thus the social function of medically trained midwives was informed both by their officially endorsed role in the state's vision of creating healthy citizens and the reality of their position in the medical marketplace.

Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation

Indigenous storytelling is connected to our homelands and is crucial to the cultural and political resurgence of Indigenous nations. According to Maori scholar Linda Smith, talk' about the colonial past is embedded in our political discourses, our humour, poetry, music, storytelling, and other common sense ways of passing on both a narrative of and an attitude about history (19). For example, when conveying community narratives of to future generations, Nuu-chah-nulth peoples have relied on haa-huu-pah as teaching stories or sacred living histories that solidify ancestral and contemporary connections to place. (1) As Nuu-chah-nulth Elder Cha-chin-sun-up states, haa-huu-pah are What we do when we get up every day to make the world good. Haa-huu-pah are not fairy tales or entertaining stories for children--they are lived values that form the basis for Indigenous governance and regeneration. The experiential knowledge and living histories of haa-huu-pah comprise part of the core teachings that Indigenous families transmit to future generations. The nation-state of Canada offers a very different version of than those of Indigenous nations--one that glosses over the colonial legacies of removing Indigenous peoples from their families and homelands when enforcing assimilationist policies, all of which were intended to eradicate Indigenous nations. The residential school era, which can be said to begin in 1874, is one example of the racist policies that were imposed on Indigenous people. (2) Designed to strip Indigenous people of their languages and cultures, the residential schools were administered by the government of Canada and run by four well-known denominations or churches. By the time the last residential school closed in 1996, over one-hundred-thousand Indigenous children had been forcibly removed from their homes. (3) According to Paulette Regan, Euro-Canadian scholar and academic liaison to Truth and Reconciliation Canada (TRC), settler Canadians have much to account for: Settler violence against Indigenous peoples is woven into the fabric of Canadian in an unbroken thread from past to present that we must now unravel, unsettling our comfortable assumptions about the past. At the same time, we must work as Indigenous allies to the dominant culture version of history; that is, we must make decolonizing space for Indigenous history--counter-narratives of diplomacy, law, and peacemaking practices--as told by Indigenous peoples themselves. (2) Given the monumental task ahead to restory the settler version of history, this paper explores the structure of Truth and Reconciliation Canada along with some of the criticisms that have emerged recently from residential school survivors regarding the shortcomings of Canada's attempts at reparations for residential school survivors in the form of Common Experience Payments (CEP). We anchor our discussion in haa-huu-pah as a form of truth-telling in order to demonstrate how Indigenous stories of resilience are critical to the resurgence of our communities. Moreover, haa-huu-pah are fundamental to teaching our families and communities who we are and how to govern ourselves on this land, intending to lead us toward action. After all, Awareness of truth [...] compels some kind of action (Waziyatawin 11). Processes of restorying and truth-telling are not effective without some larger community-centred, decolonizing actions behind them. Thus, haa-huu-pah signify a starting point for renewing Indigenous family and community responsibilities in the ongoing struggle for Indigenous justice and freedom. Haa-huu-pah also represent an alternative to the Canadian state's vision for reconciliation, which seeks to legitimize the status quo rather than to rectify injustice for Indigenous communities. As Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel point out, [T]here is a danger in allowing colonization to be the only story of Indigenous lives. …

Architecture of low-income widow housing: 'spatial opportunities' in Madipur, West Delhi

This article is based on a study of Madipur widow colony in west Delhi, built as part of the UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless in 1987. Designed to accommodate widows from squatter settlements in Delhi, very few of the original houses now survive and very few of the original owners remain. The spatial stories of the participants suggest how and why and under what circumstances a State's visions of empowerment as translated into utopian architectural projects are transformed by the people who inhabit them. They illustrate how a particular set of `spatial opportunities' built into the widow colony are manipulated and seized upon by the participants to produce an uneven geography of architecture and empowerment. This article thus extends the important work on critical geographies of architecture to the architecture of low-income housing in the global South.

The Quarter Note Tales (review)

MUSICAL MYSTERIES Quarter Note Tales. By Arthur Wenk. Ontario, Canada: Wingate Press, 2006. [350 p. ISBN-10: 0973856513; ISBN-13 9780973856514. $23.95 CDN] Arthur Wenk, probably best known to the music community for his work on Debussy and for his indexes to the analytical literature, published in MLA's Index and Bibliography Series, has turned his attention to fiction, particularly the genre of mystery. Quarter Note Tales, consisting of three novellas that progress chronologically, introduce us to protagonist Axel Crochet, a musicologist and organist. In his author's notes, Wenk suggests that Axel Crochet represents a nod to Debussy's Monsieur Crochet [sic]. first two novellas are set in academia, while the third is set in a church. root causes behind the crimes-plagiarism in the first two, and financial fraud in the third-could be considered unforgivable in their settings. first novella, Unfaltering Trust, finds Axel in his first year of a tenure-track appointment at Chihuahua State University, part of the California State University system. Chihuahua State's vision of itself, however, differed from that of a regional campus. The 'Founding Fathers,' as they like to call themselves, had quite a different vision. Inspired by their own education at the University of Chicago and dissatisfied with the run-of-the-mill offerings at neighboring state colleges, they came to Chihuahua with the intention of creating the Swarthmore of the West (alternately, the Dartmouth of the West, p. 2). An English professor, Grant Jarman, has died as the result of what appears to be suicide, soon discovered to be murder. Jarman had been having an affair with a student, Deirdre O'Donahue, who goes to great length to keep Jarman's memory fresh in the minds of the campus. editor of the student newspaper, Jerome Chowning, also aids in this effort. As Axel finds himself involved in investigating the murder he enters into a relationship with Jarman's widow, Melissa. Throughout the novella, we find vignettes of department and college life. chair of the three-member music department is a composer who talks of spending six months writing a quartet. We learn that the dean is insisting that the department appoint an official committee to nominate a new chair, even though they all agree that the current chair should continue. We read about Axel's near alienation of the choir when he insists on intense, two-hour rehearsals and that when he tries shorter rehearsals with less intensity, the group responds. We also hear pointed comments on the California Legislature's interference in campus funding, teaching loads, and enrollment. As Axel comes closer to uncovering the murderer, we learn of professional jealousy and plagiarism. Axel's reputation, both on and off campus, has been tarnished by a series of anonymous notes, and he learns that his contract will not be renewed for the following year. Axel puts himself in physical danger to expose the murderer, and although his reputation has been cleared, decides to leave California and return to the Boston area, where he did his graduate work. second novella, Murder in the Music Department, finds Axel in an eastcoast music department, Brooks University. department chair, Edgar Frost, has been murdered by being hit on the head with a bust of Brahms that he kept in his of- fice, and the voice teacher, Viola Mordent, is accused of the crime. Mordent does not want to hire a detective to clear her, and the university president's wife and longtime friend of Mordent's, Maureen Chesterton, asks Axel to investigate for a week. Although Axel does not feel up to the task, untenured assistant professor would be crazy to claim that a murder investigation wasn't in his job description (p. …