135 research outputs found
A remembrance of things (best) forgotten: The 'allegorical past' and the feminist imagination
This is the author's PDF version of an article published in Feminist theologyŠ 2012. The definitive version is available at http://fth.sagepub.com/This article discusses the US TV series Mad Men, which is set in an advertising agency in 1960s New York, in relation to two key elements which seem significant for a consideration of the current state of feminism in church and academy, both of which centre around what it means to remember or (not) to forget
âScots and Scabs from North-by-Tweedâ:Undesirable Scottish Migrants in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England
While very prominent in the contemporary world, anxiety about the potentially negative impact that immigrants might have on their host communities has deep historical roots. In a British context, such fears were particularly heightened following the regal union of 1603 when large numbers of Scots began settling in England. This article offers a fresh perspective on these issues by exploring the experiences and reception of poor, deviant or otherwise âundesirableâ Scottish migrants to England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing in particular on chapmen, vagrants and criminals, it suggests that, while in general Scots were able to integrate relatively easily into English society, there existed an unwelcome subset surviving by dubious means. Though not usually attracting unduly severe treatment on account of their nationality, these unwelcome migrants had a disproportionate effect on English perceptions of and attitudes towards the broader cohort of Scottish migrants in their midst
Transportations of space, time and self: the role of reading groups in managing mental distress in the community
Background: The practice of reading and discussing literature in groups is long established, stretching back into classical antiquity. Although benefits of therapeutic reading groups have been highlighted, research into participantsâ perceptions of these groups has been limited.
Aims: To explore the experiences of those attending therapeutic reading groups, considering the role of both the group, and the literature itself, in participantsâ ongoing experiences of distress.
Method: Eleven participants were recruited from two reading groups in the South-East of England. One focus group was run, and eight individuals self-selected for individual interviews. The data were analysed together using a thematic analysis drawing on dialogical theories.
Results: Participants described the group as an anchor, which enabled them to use fiction to facilitate the discussion of difficult emotional topics, without referring directly to personal experience. Two aspects of this process are explored in detail: the use of narratives as transportation, helping to mitigate the intensity of distress; and using fiction to explore possibilities, alternative selves and lives.
Conclusions: For those who are interested and able, reading groups offer a relatively de-stigmatised route to exploring and mediating experiences of distress. Implications in the present UK funding environment are discussed
Premodern debasement: a messy affair
The paper argues that in premodern Europe, the practice of debasement was far more âmessyâ than research has generally recognised. First, high information costs often prevented the effective control of mint officials who could exploit their resulting autonomy in order to debase coins on their own account. Second, these costs made it impossible to monitor markets closely enough to enforce regulations. Attempts by governments to debase coins by increasing their nominal value therefore âworkedâ only if they conformed to the market rates of these coins. Finally, high information costs prevented the creation of closed areas where the domestic currency enjoyed a monopoly. The resulting trade in coinage created incentives for governments to issue inferior copies of their neighbourâs coins â a practice that had the same consequences as a debasement â and forced the affected governments to follow suit by debasing their own coinage, too
Construing the child reader: a cognitive stylistic analysis of the opening to Neil Gaimanâs The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaimanâs The Graveyard Book (2009) charts the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who is adopted by supernatural entities in the local graveyard after his family is murdered. This article draws on the notion of the âconstrued reader,â and combines two cognitive stylistic frameworks to analyse the opening section of the novel. In doing so, the article explores the representation and significance of the family home in relation to what follows in the narrative. The analysis largely draws on Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007), but also integrates some aspects of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), which allows for a more nuanced discussion of textual features. The article pays particular attention to the way Gaiman frames his narrative and positions his reader to view the fictional events from a distinctive vantage point and subsequently demonstrates that a stylistic analysis of childrenâs literature can lay bare how such writing is designed with a young readership in mind
Gender gaps in education
This chapter reviews the growing body of research in economics which concentrates on the education gender gap and its evolution, over time and across countries. The survey first focuses on gender differentials in the historical period that roughly goes from 1850 to the 1940s and documents the deep determinants of the early phase of female education expansion, including preindustrial conditions, religion, and family and kinship patterns. Next, the survey describes the stylized facts of contemporaneous gender gaps in education, from the 1950s to the present day, accounting for several alternative measures of attainment and achievement and for geographic and temporal differentiations. The determinants of the gaps are then summarized, while keeping a strong emphasis on an historical perspective and disentangling factors related to the labor market, family formation, psychological elements, and societal cultural norms. A discussion follows of the implications of the education gender gap for multiple realms, from economic growth to family life, taking into account the potential for reverse causation. Special attention is devoted to the persistency of gender gaps in the STEM and economics fields
Gender Gaps in Education
This chapter reviews the growing body of research in economics which concentrates on the education gender gap and its evolution, over time and across countries. The survey first focuses on gender differentials in the historical period that roughly goes from 1850 to the 1940s and documents the deep determinants of the early phase of female education expansion, including preindustrial conditions, religion, and family and kinship patterns. Next, the survey describes the stylized facts of contemporaneous gender gaps in education, from the 1950s to the present day, accounting for several alternative measures of attainment and achievement and for geographic and temporal differentiations. The determinants of the gaps are then summarized, while keeping a strong emphasis on an historical perspective and disentangling factors related to the labor market, family formation, psychological elements, and societal cultural norms. A discussion follows of the implications of the education gender gap for multiple realms, from economic growth to family life, taking into account the potential for reverse causation. Special attention is devoted to the persistency of gender gaps in the STEM and economics fields
Introduction: new research in monetary history - A map
This handbook aims to provide a comprehensive (though obviously not exhaustive) picture of state-of-the-art international scholarship on the history of money and currency. The chapters of this handbook cover a wide selection of research topics. They span chronologically from antiquity to nowadays and are geographically stretched from Latin America to Asia, although most of them focus on Western Europe and the USA, as a large part of the existing research does. The authors of these chapters constitute, we hope, a balanced sample of various generations of scholars who contributed to what Barry Eichengreen defined as "the new monetary and financial history" – an approach that combines the analysis of monetary aggregates and policies with the structure and dynamics of the banking sector and financial markets. We have structured this handbook in ten broad thematic parts: the historical origins of money; money, coinage, and the state; trade, money markets, and international currencies; money and metals; monetary experiments; Asian monetary systems; exchange rate regimes; monetary integration; central banking and monetary policy; and aggregate price shocks. In this introduction, we offer for each part some historical context, a few key insights from the literature, and a brief analytical summary of each chapter. Our aim is to draw a map that hopefully will help readers to organize their journey through this very wide and diverse research area
The economics of debt clearing mechanisms
We examine the evolution of decentralized clearinghouse mechanisms from the
13th to the 18th century; in particular, we explore the clearing of non- or
limitedtradable debts like bills of exchange. We construct a theoretical model
of these clearinghouse mechanisms, similar to the models in the theoretical
matching literature, and show that specific decentralized multilateral
clearing algorithms known as rescontre, skontrieren or virement des parties
used by merchants were efficient in specific historical contexts. We can
explain both the evolutionary self-organizing emergence of late medieval and
early modern fairs, and its robustness during the 17th and 18th century
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