The Tell-Tale Hand: Gothic Narratives and the Brain

The opening story in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson is called simply “Hands.” It is about a teacher’s remarkable hands that sometimes seem to move independently of his will. This essay explores some of the relevant contexts and potential links, beginning with other representations of teachers’ hands, such as Caravaggio’s St. Matthew and the Angel, early efforts to establish a sign-language for the deaf, and including the Montessori method of teaching children to read and write by tracing the shape of letters with their hands on rough emery paper. The essay then explores filmic hands that betray or work independently of conscious intentions, from Dr Strangelove, Mad Love, to The Beast With Five Fingers. Discussion of the medical literature about the “double” of our hands in the brain, including “phantom hands,” leads on to a series of images that register Rodin’s lifelong fascination with sculpting separate hands

Spinning a Conflict Management Web in Vanuatu: Creating and Strengthening Links between State and non-State Legal Institutions

This article argues that increasing the quality of conflict management in legally plural countries requires creating and strengthening linkages between state and non-state justice systems. Given that the resources relevant to conflict management are currently held by both state and non-state actors and institutions, this will facilitate a more efficient and effective sharing of these resources. It will also help to eliminate the problems involved with forum shopping, and promote the development of more endogenous and legitimate conflict management institutions as each legal system learns from and adapts to the other. The article discusses a number of initiatives that have taken place in Vanuatu, a country in the South Pacific, that have forged such linkages, and draws out lessons from them about how to better create and strengthen such linkages. The final section of the article proposes a new conceptual framework to help to centralise the analysis of links in conflict management reform. The conflict management web framework presented here approaches reform in a holistic way, taking account of all the actors and institutions involved in this field in a given jurisdiction. It emphasises the need to develop and strengthen the links between institutions and actors whose actions directly or indirectly affect one another in order to help them to work together better. This means both between state, non-state and hybrid actors and institutions, and also between international donors, academics and NGOs

Inequality and identity in contemporary processes of labour market restructuring

Contemporary processes of labour market restructuring have resulted in increasing social and spacial inequalities in the United Kingdom. While the well discussed-issues of class, race and gender continue to be correlated to inequality, the decline in manufacturing jobs and rise in low-level service work has brought a new reality of identity-correlation. To remain employed, workers must increasingly transcend their geography and current job role; presenting an identity that is appealing to employers. Thus, in today's labour market with its increasing economic polarisation, previously strong social and work identities are now challenged by the logic of capital

Partnerships for technology transfer: how can investors and communities build renewable energy in Asia?

Technology transfer for climate change mitigation needs to focus on the diffusion of existing technologies as well as the innovation of technologies. • Diffusion requires full involvement of non-state actors, particularly business investors in new and renewable energy technologies and the local communities who adopt technologies. • This paper presents advice about how partnerships between investors and communities can accelerate technology transfer by reducing investors’ costs and making technologies more relevant to local development. Partnerships are based on a combination of creating assurance mechanisms, reducing transaction costs, and building trust and accountability. • Capacity-building and enabling environments for technology transfer therefore have to include building these partnerships between investors and host communities

Sorcery and the Criminal Law in Vanuatu

This paper examines the problems of incorporating norms of customary law into the substantive criminal laws of a Melanesian state system. It focuses on the particular crime of sorcery in Vanuatu. It explores the historical and sociological contexts to the belief in sorcery in society today, and also how behaviour generated by the belief (allegations of sorcery and sorcerer-related attacks) is dealt with by the non-state customary legal system. It then investigates how the state has treated the issue of sorcery, discussing both legislative initiatives and also a number of cases brought before the courts in recent years. The paper argues that merely transplanting substantive norms from the customary system into the state system without consideration of the procedural and institutional framework those norms were developed within, or the ramifications the law may have on other aspects of the legal system, is doomed to failure. Finally, it highlights a number of issues that must be considered in order to successfully initiate a more fruitful process of legal pluralism

Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world

Understanding Judicial Independence in Vanuatu

This paper is intended to fill a gap in the literature concerning the Vanuatu judiciary, as this topic is rarely addressed other than in reports by international non-government organisations, such as Transparency International and its local chapter, Transparency International (Vanuatu), or bilateral donors and multilateral organisations engaged in law and justice work (which is often unpublished). The paper also identifies potential sources of influence that threaten judicial independence, and reflects upon what insights Vanuatu's experiences may provide into the influence of informal networks on judicial independence more broadly. The paper also raises a number of unanswered questions relating to broader questions about the sources of respect for the judiciary in Vanuatu and the role of culture in relation to this respect.AusAI