Siren songs or path to salvation? Interpreting the visions of web technology at a UK regional newspaper in crisis, 2006-11

A 5-year case study of an established regional newspaper in Britain investigates journalists about their perceptions of convergence in digital technologies. This research is the first ethnographic longitudinal case study of a UK regional newspaper. Although conforming to some trends observed in the wider field of scholarship, the analysis adds to skepticism about any linear or directional views of innovation and adoption: the Northern Echo newspaper journalists were observed to have revised their opinions of optimum Web practices, and sometimes radically reversed policies. Technology is seen in the period as a fluid, amorphous entity. Central corporate authority appeared to diminish in the period as part of a wider reduction in formalism. Questioning functionalist notions of the market, the study suggests cause and effect models of change are often subverted by contradictory perceptions of particular actions. Meanwhile, during technological evolution, the ‘professional imagination’ can be understood as strongly reflecting the parent print culture and its routines, despite pioneering a new convergence partnership with an independent television company

Gatherings of mobility and immobility: itinerant “criminal tribes” and their containment by the Salvation Army in colonial South India

In retelling the history of “criminal tribe” settlements managed by the Salvation Army in Madras Presidency (colonial India) from 1911, I argue that neither the mobility–immobility relationship nor the compositional heterogeneity of (im)mobility practices can be adequately captured by relational dialecticism espoused by leading mobilities scholars. Rather than emerging as an opposition through dialectics, the relationship between (relative) mobility and containment may be characterized by overlapping hybridity and difference. This differential hybridity becomes apparent in two ways if mobility and containment are viewed as immanent gatherings of humans and nonhumans. First, the same entities may participate in gatherings of mobility and of containment, while producing different effects in each gathering. Here, nonhumans enter a gathering, and constitute (im)mobility practices, as actors that make history irreducibly differently from other actors that they may be entangled with. Second, modern technologies and amodern “institutions” may be indiscriminately drawn together in all gatherings

A Review of John Rists\u27 Augustine on Free Will and Predestination

In this paper I seek to summarize and critique John Rist’s article “Augustine on Free Will and Predestination.” Rist treats Augustine with honesty. When someone is as prominent, loved, and recognized as Augustine, when someone has as much authority as he does, the temptation to manipulate his writings into saying things which agree with one’s own position is strong. Rist resists this temptation, even concluding that Augustine holds a position on free will and predestination which Rist finds highly objectionable. But in his objections to Augustine’s position, Rist does not do justice to the whole system of Augustine’s thought. In my critique I will focus on two points where Rist takes issue with Augustine: 1) Augustine’s lack of an account of how God acts justly in election and 2) the demeaning of man to the level of a “puppet.” I will attempt to demonstrate that Rist’s criticisms are accounted for by extending Augustine’s teachings of, regarding 1), causality and the will and, in regard to 2), the solidarity of humanity with Adam. The aim of this paper is not to prove that Augustine’s articulation of free will and God’s predestination is the correct one but only that his position can withstand the criticisms Rist brings against it

Antigüedad Tardía islámica y Fatḥ: efectos tomados por causas

El objetivo de este trabajo es reconsiderar el concepto de conquista islámica -Fatḥ- en tanto que medio para la expansión islámica, así como contestar el modo en que tendemos a describir una serie de acciones bélicas en Oriente Medio y en el Mediterráneo calificándolas a veces de “islámicas” y otras veces de “árabes”. Se destacará lo inapropiado de considerar históricamente todas estas conquistas -futūḥ-, pertenecientes al ámbito de lo literario en las muy tardías crónicas árabes. Tales narraciones establecen una cadena de eventos interrelacionados y centralizados en una sola t simple causa: la matriz del Islam, siendo éste el modo erróneo en que suelen considerarse y enseñarse los orígenes del Islam.The aim of this paper is to reconsider the very concept of Fatḥ -conquestas means of early Islamic expansion as well as the way we tend to describe so many war actions in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region, the seventh and the eighth centuries, sometimes as Islamic, sometimes as Arab futūḥ -conquests-. It will also focus on the inappropriateness of considering those several war actions –those futūḥ, to literary effects in later Arabic chronicles- as a chain of subsequent events, interrelated, centralized and derived from a single cause, i.e. the matrix of Islam, as it is usually considered and taught