Volte Face Research Articles

A university in Buxton - a place of extinguished chances or a promise delayed?

The University of Derby opened a new university campus in Buxton in 2000. The aim was to produce a socially desirable outcome - better prospects for jobs and lives, and more freedom through learning. The university would help people overcome limits on their lives by openly examining them: the true purpose of education. It represented a challenge to the neoliberal idea that the vitally important social and economic function of learning could be left to market forces. Like many former industrial centres, the town needed to re-invent itself and find creative ways to adapt to the new economic realities. Buxton was different from almost anywhere else in the UK because it offered further and higher education on a single campus, with a unified staffing structure and a single academic management. It offered vocational degrees such as Tourism and Hospitality, Outdoor Pursuits and further education teacher training. In November 2019, however, it was announced that all HE courses at the campus would be closed. The story of this abrupt volte face raises many questions about the way higher education is run in the UK today. The decision was made as if the central university was a business with different cost centres. The article explores the background to this story: it covers wider issues such the chaotic marketisation of higher education, which appeared to offer choice but in fact was managed in such a way as to privileged existing elite institutions; the rules of a numbers game that favoured approaches based on conservatism and corporate uniformity, so that campuses are no longer able to reflect the diversity of our communities; the running of universities as businesses, so that educational concerns are excluded from decision–making; the centralisation of control by those who restrict to themselves the ability to collect and analyse the metrics which are used to legitimise and justify decisions; and the arbitrary power of Vice Chancellors. Ultimately, the closure was the result of a management system that was no longer commensurate with the university's stated commitment to the opening up of higher education to a wider range of people.

Semantic Volte Face of English Words in Nepal

With the spread of English globally and its contact with the local languages, English words have undergone some changes in their pronunciation, forms, meanings, and functions. This paper attempted to explore the changes in the meaning of English words in Nepal. From different literary texts, I purposively selected thirty English words that I found unique in their meanings, four English language teachers who could provide information about the semantic changes of some English words, and my own experiences. The selected words were categorized into five themes: semantic broadening, semantic narrowing, amelioration, pejoration, and semantic shifts, which were then analyzed and interpreted. The study reveals that English words in Nepal have changed their meanings from narrow to broad, from positive to negative and vice versa, and to something different or new in meanings, which are the variety markers of Nepali English (NE). The results of the study are useful for teaching profession, World Englishes, corpus linguistics, contact linguistics, contact literature, semantics, and pragmatics.

The overlooked building blocks of secured transactions law reforms: policing and the role of organized industries

Abstract Two interlinked building blocks of secured transactions law have often been overlooked during the most recent round of secured transactions law reforms: the role of policing (monitoring) of the debtor and its affairs, and the role of institutionalized industries in the efficient working of secured transactions systems. Policing is often ignored because Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC)—the top global benchmark—made policing optional by discarding the ‘Benedict rule’, which had conditioned the validity of liens upon the secured creditor’s strict monitoring the debtor’s affairs. This shift was perceived as a positive development because it made the recognition of the most comprehensive security device—the floating (blanket) lien—possible. However, what many sources overlook is that parallel with this volte face, the risks corollary to the failure to monitor were transferred entirely onto secured creditors (banks and other financiers). In the USA, professional industries offering policing services were developed prior to the promulgation of the UCC, thanks precisely to the 1925 Benedict v Ratner case from whence the Benedict rule was derived. Moreover, these policing practices—the so-called ‘Benedict ritual’—had already become customary in the industries that were reliant on secure transactions law. This ‘know-how’ and the act of professional industries implementing it simply do not exist in many recipient reform countries. Similar to policing, equally disregarded is that the success of US secured transaction law is fundamentally attributable to the existence of ‘non-banking financial organizations’ specialized in various financing practices that exploit this branch of law, from the industries specializing in independent equipment leasing to those engaged in receivables financing. In contrast, the financial systems of countries interested in implementing major reforms tend to be dominated by conservative universal banks with limited capabilities. This article aims to cast a closer light on these neglected yet pivotal corollaries of secured transactions law.

Before the Gig Economy: UK Employment Policy and the Casual Labour Question

Abstract Focussing on the UK, this paper considers how employment has been understood and identifies the policies pursued to promote specific models of working life over the course of the twentieth century. In recent decades, jobs on offer in Britain have become increasingly precarious, a trend actively promoted by governments of all political complexions. Labour markets have been deregulated, flexibility of employment promoted. As work is consistently identified as the sole route out of poverty, a category of ‘working poor’ has emerged. Such government strategies present as a volte face to the politics of the early twentieth century, when social investigation exposed irregular work as a cause of poverty, not its cure, and as the main factor causing a rising incidence of social dependency. The UK’s earliest labour market policies sought to eradicate casual work and to encourage permanent employment—policies promoted assiduously for most of the twentieth century. Using convention theory, this paper examines these historical dimensions, to explain why and how governments sought to structure labour market operations—and the legacies bequeathed to us as a result. The principal object of the paper is the analysis of public policy—its rationale and its shortcomings—on which current employment law is founded. The paper exposes how our current understanding of ‘traditional’ or ‘regular’ job contracts came to be constructed and why ‘work on demand’ is understood as ‘irregular’, that is, as a deviant form of established employment norms.

ECOWAS and the 2016 Post-Election Crisis in the Gambia: Pax Africana or What?

Abstract President Yahya Jammeh’s volte face, following his earlier acceptance of the verdicts of the Gambians during the 1 December 2016 presidential poll, did not only jolt the international community but, if not for the intervention of external actors, would have set the Gambia on the path of implosion. This article, based on desk analysis, examines the mediatory role of ECOWAS in the resolution of the 2016 post-election crisis in the Gambia. It notes that unlike the previous similar case in Cote d’Ivoire, ECOWAS took the lead in resolving the political crisis and thus demonstrated that Pax Africana is at work in the sub-region. It argues and concludes that ECOWAS with or without the support from outsiders has the capacity to take charge of threats to democracy and peace in member states, by deploying mediatory diplomacy backed with threat of coercion.

Australian Foreign Politics on Indonesia: A Case Study of West Irian 1949-1962

This paper examines Australian foreign policy among Indonesian, especially on the West Irian case in 1949-1962. The bilateral relationship between Indonesia-Australia from 1949-1962 always goes through up and down “Roller Coaster.” The relationship between both countries is not structured. No mechanism is arranged, so it depends on the political development and the situations, especially defense and political problems. Indonesia claimed that West Irian is supposed to be a menace for Australian security. Australia put West Irian as a Vital Interest concept. In the cabinet session on January 11, 1962, Australia do “Volte Face” and confess that the vital interest concept is not invalid anymore because there is no menace evidence for Australia or region Australia interest.

Conservação de medalhas contemporâneas: soluções de acondicionamento

The present article has two objectives: the first one is to present the collection of medals of the extinct Research and Studies Section Volte Face – Medalha Contemporânea, of the Research Unit of the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, CIEBA, constituted by medals of various sizes, formats and materials (organic, inorganic and synthetic), whose characteristics influence the way they degrade and how they are conditioned; the second objective is to present the packaging proposals for the packing of the medals, for which we used 3D modelling, vector drawing and 3D printing. In the first case, we present the inventory of objects, their documentation, identification of constituent materials and degradation factors. For the second case, criteria were defined for the selection of the packaging format and for the choice of construction materials. The alveolar polypropylene for the box and the low-density polyethylene were selected for the filler material.

Book Review of "Permanent Record" by Edward Snowden

Sleeping through his school lectures and facing a broken home, this computer prodigy first joined the US army’s Special Forces. An accident while training broke his legs. The incident marked a volte face in Edward Snowden’s career.

StuartGietel‐BastenThe “Population Problem” in Pacific AsiaOxford University Press, 2019. 222 p. $55.00.

StuartGietel‐BastenThe “Population Problem” in Pacific AsiaOxford University Press, 2019. 222 p. $55.00.

Insinuatio in Lucrezia Marinella’s Essortationi alle donne (1645): Exhorting Marital Harmony And Insinuating Feminist Critique

AbstractLucrezia Marinella (c.1579–1653) is a pivotal figure in the history of early modern women’s writing. Yet her final non‐fiction contribution to the querelle des femmes, a book of exhortations for women entitled Essortationi alle donne (1645), has received little critical attention. The Essortationi’s ostensibly conservative volte face on the feminist principles that characterise the author’s earlier works has perplexed and divided modern scholars. This article provides a new reading of the Essortationi drawing on the classical rhetorical technique of insinuatio. Through close textual analysis of Marinella’s exhortation to marital harmony as an example, I trace the author’s rhetorical posture of deference to traditional authorities and ideas about marriage and the wife’s role. I show how, as an exercise in insinuatio, this works to ingratiate her audience and mitigate resistance before exposing those authorities and precepts to critical scrutiny. Contextualising the Essortationi within mid‐Seicento Venice reveals how this strategy responded to a cultural climate defined by antifeminism and literary dissimulation. This article both sheds new light on Marinella’s complex, ground‐breaking contribution to the male‐authored Renaissance conduct literature tradition and reveals the sophistication of her rhetoric as she challenges women’s subordination to male authority.

Augustine’s Ostia Revisited: a Plotinian or Christian Ascent in Confessiones 9?

ABSTRACTAugustine converted to Christianity in 386 and described his conversion in his Confessiones a decade later. Much ink has been spilled concerning the question of the specific nature of Augustine’s conversion and the ‘historical accuracy’ of his description thereof 10 years later. The Confessiones seem to describe a volte face: he radically embraced Christianity. But to what kind of Christianity did he convert? We will readdress this question, not by investigating his conversion, but by a close exegesis of Confessiones 9, in which he describes the so-called Ostia-ecstasy (Ostia in 387). In the first part of our article, we discuss the description of the latter experience in Confessiones 9 and situate it within his conversion narrative, with attention to the symbolical language he used. The second part compares the Ostia-experience with the ascent of the soul as described in Plotinus’ Enneads, and with similar ‘Neoplatonic ascents’ present in the Confessiones (7, 16; 7, 23; 10, 10–12) and in writings penned by Augustine prior to or simultaneous with the Confessiones (de animae quantitate 33, 70–76; de doctrina Christiana 2, 9–11) in order to elucidate the relationship between Augustine’s ‘Christian’ conversion and ‘Ostia-ecstasy’ with the Neoplatonic anabasis.

The evolution of the political criteria for accession to the European Community, 1957–1973

AbstractThis article describes the evolution of political conditions for accession to the European Community from 1957 to 1973 on the basis of the responses of the Community and national parliaments to applications for association (Article 238 EC Treaty) and membership (Article 237 EC Treaty) and to a US foreign policy initiative. It challenges the thesis that the European Community was originally uninterested in the political nature of its members as long as they were non‐communist and that the Community made a volte face in 1962 in reaction to a request for an association agreement by Franco's Spain. It argues that the Copenhagen political criteria, except minority protection, were firmly established by 1973 after a series of pronouncements and decisions by the European Parliament, national parliaments (both 1962), the Commission (1967) and the Council (1973). The article aims to contribute to the early history of the constitutionalization of the Union and discusses how demands from outsiders prompted the Six to define the constitutional requirements for (candidate) members. It is partly based on new archival research.

Allawah Grove Native Settlement: Housing and assimilation

It is well known that the rationale for state intervention in the lives of Indigenous Australians performed a volte face when 'assimilation' was adopted in 1937. By the 1960s, 'integration' had emerged as a preferred guiding principle, but the goal remained the same: to incorporate Aborigines within the broader community as self-directed social and economic equals. However, a fundamental lack of respect for Aboriginal culture, combined with the idea that 'part‑Aborigines' had no cultural heritage, ensured that Aboriginal identity, agency and autonomy were largely ignored. Since then, we have witnessed shifts to 'self-determination', 'reconciliation' and to 'closing the [health and well-being] gap', but there is still a long way to go before any of these principles are fully achieved.

‘MARXISTS OF STRICT OBSERVANCE’? THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL, NATIONAL DEFENCE, AND THE QUESTION OF WAR

AbstractIn August 1914, as war broke out, socialist parties across Europe offered support to their own governments. The Socialist International was shattered. This rush to defencism has traditionally been seen as a volte face in which the International's frequent protestations in favour of peace and international working-class solidarity were suddenly abandoned. The collapse has been variously ascribed to socialist helplessness, betrayal, or ideological incoherence. This article examines the International's attitudes to war and peace as developed and espoused in the decades before 1914, and finds that the decisions of the constituent socialist parties in 1914 were understandable within this context. Socialists were not abandoning past ideals, but attempting to put them into practice. The circumstances of modern war, however, made traditional distinctions – between aggressor and defensive belligerents, and between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ nations – difficult to maintain. For some socialists, this meant that socialists of every country had a certain justification in rallying to their nation's defence. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, if no capitalist country could be considered innocent, then all must be guilty.

On Oenological Authenticity: Making Wine Real and Making Real Wine

On Oenological Authenticity: Making Wine Real and Making Real Wine

L’Inquisition médiévale chez les historiographes méridionaux de la Renaissance

The medieval Inquisition according to the southern historiographers of the Renaissance . Accounts by southern French historiographers of the modem period, in respect of the medieval Inquisition, demonstrate a good example of volte face. Praised during the Renaissance as a unique institution dedicated to a noble mission, the Inquisition is vilified in the Enlightenment as the worst creation of a cruel and obscurantist Church, regimented by popes puffed up with ambition. The historiographical corpus of the Renaissance is characterised firstly by a significant medieval legacy, then by a quasi¬ exclusive monopoly of authors from Toulouse in the service of urban magistrates, and finally by a clear moral dimension in the writing of history. The Inquisition practically never appears, but leaving aside the gaps and errors related to the sources used, it finds itself at the heart of complex historiographical issues. Indeed, the Inquisition highlights both the portrait of religious dissension and the delicate relations between the French monarchy and the Holy See, at a period when Christendom was weakened by the memory of the Great Schism, the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, and the appearance of Marranism and then Protestantism.

Nicolas Sarkozy's Africa policy: Change, continuity or confusion?

Three years after inviting Colonel Ghadafi on a state visit, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was spearheading NATO's campaign against the Libyan regime. This dramatic volte face pointed to a new approach to North Africa, while also highlighting the immobility of French policy towards black Africa. Before being elected, Sarkozy had promised to break with Francafrique. But did he deliver? This article does not confine itself to the usual debate about rupture/continuity but also assesses the extent to which Sarkozy's Africa policy was marked by uncertainty, inconsistency and confusion. It looks for evidence of rupture, continuity and confusion during the Sarkozy era. It then identifies the factors driving and constraining change, as well as the causes of policy incoherence. It ends by exploring the wider implications of this case and identifying future policy directions.

Environmental Care Ethics

Environmental Care Ethics:Notes Toward a New Materialist Critique Adeline Johns-Putra (bio) Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. —The World Commission on Environment and Development (1987, 43) To scan the now ubiquitous definition put forward by the Brundtland Commission is to realize that our construction of “sustainability” is driven by a notion of care—care for the nonhuman environment enfolded with a concern for our human descendants. The rhetoric around our ideal response to climate change structures it as an ethical response. This essay proposes that, while so much of the ontology of the global ecological crisis called climate change has been closely interrogated, the ethics of care demanded in the name of that crisis has not been scrutinized in the same way. By “care,” I mean a feeling of concern for the wellbeing and needs of others; by “care ethics,” I mean an ethical position that takes this affective concern as its basis for action.1 Given that environmental ethics—the question of human conduct and its effect on the human and nonhuman environment—is a profoundly ontological project, accounting as it must for the perceived ontological difference between the human and nonhuman, this lack of ontological scrutiny is conspicuous, to say the least. This essay thus offers a theorization of the care ethics of climate change and sustainability. It considers this through the ontological project of new materialism, paying attention to the new materialist tendency to discuss ontology as agency, and being in terms of becoming. I propose that care [End Page 125] too has to be discerned as always becoming, that it is to be considered—to invoke Heidegger—not as ontic but as ontological. And yet, pace Heidegger, I suggest that, in an environmental ethics of care, care is more fruitfully thought of not as a condition for ontology (as in Heidegger’s Sorge) but as itself deserving of ontological query. Care is not the means by which agency occurs; it is itself agential. New Materialism The new materialism that has invigorated environmental criticism, and that has been particularly important for the project of critical climate change, is a reconsideration and re-acknowledgement of the material properties of human co-existence with the human and nonhuman. In other words, new materialists accept the fact (or what Heidegger would call the facticity) of being in order to interrogate it.2 Formulations such as the “agential realism” of Karen Barad and the “speculative materialism” of Quentin Meillassoux, both now identifiable with a “new materialism” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012) or “new ontology” (Hekman 2008, 109), have challenged the linguistic or social constructivism that tended to dominate critical theory after post-structuralism. New materialists have borrowed much from Bruno Latour’s description (1993) of our modern habit of dividing the world into the realms of subjects, objects, language and history—when, really, we should be thinking of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, and even discourses—and his identification of such units as actants, agents that constantly translate, mediate, and play roles. One should also note that new materialism’s re-considerations of human and nonhuman ontology as a question of agency are recognizably indebted to the theories of identity performativity of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler. But what has really invigorated new materialism is Latour’s famous pronouncement, a kind of volte face, in 2004, that his actor-network theory and the Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) inspired in large part by it had mistakenly rejected “matters of fact” outright, in its valiant attempt at simply redefining them. Latour called instead for a “second empiricism, [a] return to the realist attitude” (2004, 246). A need for a new empiricism is the emerging context for new materialism, a new concern with the fact or facticity of materiality and of being. The key thinker in this regard is Barad, whose interest in ontological questions of agency stems from a refusal to accept entities as either static or ontic. She stringently critiques what she calls representationalism, the deeply entrenched assumption that there are “two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations, and entities...

The Triumph of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism Over Comte’s Positivism in George Gissing’s Early Writing

AbstractGeorge Gissing (1857–1903) is one of the most rewarding and unsettling of the English writers of fiction associated with literary realism in the late nineteenth century. His early novels – beginning with Workers in the Dawn (1880) and culminating with The Nether World (1889) – dramatize the life of the suffering poor but also the anguished intellectual outcast, with whom he identified and saw as a victim of the deep‐rooted Victorian class system and its equally entrenched hypocrisy. During his stormy early life Gissing engaged enthusiastically with socialism and at the same time he was drawn to the Positivist creed espoused by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Almost immediately, however, he became disenchanted with Comte’s “religion of humanity” and developed a much darker disposition, strongly inflected by the aestheticism and ascetic detachment from the world and the “Will,” as advocated by the Pessimism of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In this essay I argue that this apparently paradoxical philosophical volte face was inevitable from the outset and that Pessimism was always the dominant force in Gissing’s life. However, although Gissing embraced Schopenhauer’s aesthetic vision for artistic genius, he rarely achieved the asceticism on which Pessimism was founded; his anger and bitterness towards the hypocrisy of late‐Victorian society stayed with him to the very end. Nevertheless, among contemporary, like‐minded writers of fiction, including Thomas Hardy,George Meredith, George Moore, and Arthur Morrison, Gissing stands out as the Apostle of Pessimism.

‘I abhorr what I Soe long lov'd’: An Exploration of Rochester's ‘death bed repentance’

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)On 25 June 1680, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, aged only thirty-three years but the most dissolute member of the dissolute court of Charles II, lay dying at his country retreat in Oxfordshire. Two years earlier, his fellow poet Samuel Butler had penned a not unaffectionate portrait of him in his satire The Court Burlesqued:This Noble Peer, so fam'd for writingSatyrs, so Bawdy and so Biting,Who for lampooning Church and Crown,Usurps the Bays from all the Town,May boast himself, we must allow it,Lord, Atheist, Mountebank and Poet,Rake, Coward, Libertine, but yetA Man of Learning and of Wit.1Satirist, atheist, rake, libertine, and poet with a reputation for ridiculing Church and State: Rochester's life and writings fully justify all these attributes. Yet on that day in late June, apparently without any warning, and too weak to write himself, he dictated 'at Twelve at Night' a remarkable letter to a former chaplain to the King, Gilbert Burnet:I beginn To value Churchmen above all men in the World: & you above all the Churchmen I know in itt ... I hope ... that The World may See how much I abhorr what I Soe long lov'd, & how much I Glory in repentance in Gods Service. bestow your prayers upon mee that God would spare me, (if itt bee his Good Will) To shew a True repentance, & amendment of life for the Time to come, or els ... that hee would mercifully except of my death bed repentance ...2Within five weeks, Rochester was dead, and the news of his self-styled 'death bed repentance' swiftly reverberated through the Court, the City and the Church. This was achieved initially by astounded word of mouth, and then reinforced through the rapid publication of both Rochester's letter to Burnet and the funeral sermon delivered by his mother's chaplain, Robert Parsons; three months later, Burnet issued a biography largely fashioned out of conversations he had held with the earl during the previous winter and latterly over a period of four days during Rochester's final illness. Parsons and Burnet had no doubt as to the genuineness of the earl's volte face, but their shared conviction has been tarnished by suspicions of ecclesial selfinterest; many contemporaries found it simply incredible to accept that Rochester had repented of 'the commissions of some sins extraordinary'. Some may have rejected out of hand the whole notion of repentance, sharing the sentiments expressed by Sulpitius in Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1680), 'A Curse on all Repentance! How I hate it! / I'd rather hear a Dog howl than a Man whine!' (p. 66), and one of Rochester's regular companions, William Fanshaw, is representative in attributing his conversion simply to delirium, 'for to [my] knowledge', he commented at the time, '[my Lord] believed neither in God nor Jesus Christ'. Nonetheless, the Earl of Halifax, the unamiable Earl of Mulgrave (Rochester's bitter enemy) and John Tillotson, the Dean (later Archbishop) of Canterbury, were amongst those who seem to have accepted the conversion at face value, and during the next 150 years, the accounts by Parsons and Burnet of Rochester's 'death bed repentance', passing through over thirty reissues and editions, would provide a staple of the popular devotional diet. 3This paper seeks to explore the context and validity of Rochester's profession of faith. After a review of his family background and the contemporary political situation, Rochester's letters and poetry will be examined for any evidence of his religious views and, finally, the conclusions drawn by Burnet and Parsons will be sifted and assessed.The social and political backgroundRochester was born on 1 April 1647, just under two years before the lawful monarch, Charles I, was publicly executed outside the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall Palace. His father, Baron Wilmot of Adderbury (he would be created Earl of Rochester in 1652), was one of Charles I's principal cavalry commanders during the Civil War, but falling into disgrace in 1644 he had joined the Queen's court which had removed to France. …