Social Sciences and Cultural Studies

This is a unique and groundbreaking collection of questions and answers coming from higher education institutions on diverse fields and across a wide spectrum of countries and cultures. It creates routes for further innovation, collaboration amidst the Sciences (both Natural and Social) and the Humanities and the private and the public sectors of society. The chapters speak across socio-cultural concerns, education, welfare and artistic sectors under the common desire for direct responses in more effective ways by means of interaction across societal structures

Buried Beneath The River City: Investigating An Archaeological Landscape and its Community Value in Richmond, Virginia

Richmond, Virginia, located along the fall line of the James River, was an important political boundary during prehistory; was established as an English colonial town in 1737; and was a center of the interstate slave trade and the capitol of the Confederacy during the nineteenth century. Although Richmond holds a prominent place in the narrative of American and Virginia history, the city’s archaeological resources have received incredibly little attention or preservation advocacy. However, in the wake of a 2013 proposal to construct a baseball stadium in the heart of the city’s slave trading district, archaeological sensitivity and vulnerability became a political force that shaped conversations around the economic development proposal and contributed to its defeat. This dissertation employs archival research and archaeological ethnography to study the variable development of Richmond’s archaeological value as the outcome of significant racial politics, historic and present inequities, trends in academic and commercial archaeology, and an imperfect system of archaeological stewardship. This work also employs spatial sensitivity analysis and studies of archaeological policy to examine how the city’s newly emerging awareness of archaeology might improve investigation and interpretation of this significant urban archaeological resource. This research builds upon several bodies of scholarship: the study of urban heritage management and municipal archaeology; the concept of archaeological ethnography; and anthropological studies into how value should be defined and identified. It concludes that Richmond’s archaeological remains attract attention and perceived importance in part through their proximity and relation to other political and moral debates within the city, but that in some cases political interests ensnare archaeological meaning or inhibit interest in certain archaeological subjects. This analysis illuminates how archaeological materiality and the history of Richmond’s preservation movements has created an interest in using archaeological investigations as a tool for restorative justice to create a more equitable historic record. Additionally, it studies the complexity of improving American urban archaeological stewardship within a municipal system closely connected with city power structures

Soldiers and Civil Power: Supporting or Substituting Civil Authorities in Modern Peace Operations

Peace operations became the core focus of many Western armed forces after the Cold War. The wish amongst political and military leaders during the 1990s to hold on to the classical identity of the armed forces as an instrument of force made them pursue a strict separation between military operations and the civilian aspects of peacekeeping, such as policing, administrative functions, and political and societal reconstruction. In his book Soldiers and Civil Power, Thijs Brocades Zaalberg argues that this policy failed to match up to reality. Supporting civil authorities, and at times even substituting them (de facto military governance), became the key to reaching any level of success in Cambodia, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. As a result of the false segregation between the civilian and the military domain, this was accomplished mostly by improvisation and creativity of commanders who probed for the limiting boundaries of their original mandate by reaching ever further into the civilian sphere

’Improperly and amorously consorting’: post-1945 relationships between British women and German prisoners of war held in the UK

This thesis concerns transgressive gender relations in Britain in the aftermath of WW2. It examines illicit intimate relationships between British women and German prisoners of war held in the UK for several years immediately following WW2. In discussing the significance of these relationships relative to gender roles, sexual relations and war, this study seeks to re-address and add a nuanced aspect to the question of the effect of the war on British women. It is argued that in the context of the gendered dimension of the transition from war to peace, these controversial relationships highlight a neglected narrative of the conflicted early postwar years. By exploring the subjectivity of both sides, this thesis also attempts to show how these relationships demonstrate susceptibility among younger age cohorts to wartime influences on British women. Oral history testimony from the subjects themselves forms the main primary source material. These narratives, comprising interviews and correspondence with 38 former prisoners of war and 61 women, were mostly collected in the mid- to late-1980s, when many of the subjects were in their early 60s. A wide range of other sources, both primary and secondary, including official documents, newspapers and autobiographical accounts, has been used to complement, inform and verify or compare with the primary source material. Secondary sources have been drawn on for contextual, comparative and reference purposes. These initially prohibited relationships have been summarised in general discussion of fraternisation with UK-held enemy POWs, in terms of formal and informal policing of sexuality. This thesis argues for the relevance of exploring individual protagonists’ lived experience in greater depth, to clarify their place in the debate on post-conflict sexuality, and their significance in the context of war, gender relations and women’s history

URI Undergraduate and Graduate Course Catalog 2007-2008

This is a digitized, downloadable version of the University of Rhode Island course catalog.https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/course-catalogs/1059/thumbnail.jp