720 research outputs found
Textualizing cultures: thinking beyond the MIT controversy
This essay examines how the MIT Controversy hardened identities in terms of the timeworn template of geopolitical conflict of national stereotypes. It critically analyzes the Chinese studentsâ response to the âVisualizing Culturesâ project by putting it in the context of the PRCâs patriotic education policy that securitizes culture by focusing on identity as difference in a zero-sum game that distinguishes civilization from barbarism, and China from the rest of the world. It critically analyzes the professors response to the controversy by highlighting how meaning is not only produced by the author; it is also consumed by various audiences that bring diverse sets of experiences into meaning making. It concludes that the controversy is less about content, and more about who controls knowledge production and distribution
The politics of walls: barriers, flows, and the sublime
As Donald Trumpâs presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While âglobalisationâ, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israelâs West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate â and of political resistanc
Moralidad catĂłlica y cambio econĂłmico
Este artĂculo explica las corrientes eclesiĂĄsticas de crĂtica basada en cuestiones morales hacia la polĂtica econĂłmica auspiciada por la burocracia borbĂłnica de la MonarquĂa HispĂĄnica a lo largo del siglo XVIII.Aquest article exposa el desenvolupament dels corrents eclesiĂ stics de crĂtica moral envers la polĂtica econĂČmica auspiciada per la burocrĂ cia borbĂČnica de la Monarquia HispĂ nica al llarg del segle XVIII.This article expounds the evolution of an ecclesiastic critical thought based on morals and referred to the economic policy sponsored by the Bourbon bureaucracy in the Spanish Monarchy during the eighteenth century
Identity and security in China: the negative soft power of the China dream
Joseph Nye concentrates on the positive attractive aspects of soft power as a foreign policy tool. This article will argue that the Chinese discussion of soft power is interesting because it does the opposite: soft power is negative rather than positive, and is employed as a tool in domestic policy more than in foreign affairs. It will use Chinese President Xi Jinping's new âChina Dreamâ discourse to explore China's ânegative soft powerâ strategy. Rather than take for granted that we understand what the âChinese valuesâ are that inform the PRC's soft power, it argues that soft power discourse is a useful heuristic device for understanding how Chinese policy makers and public intellectuals are actively constructing a âChinaâ and a âworldâ to promote regime legitimacy. The Chinese case thus suggests that we need a more complex view of power that considers the contingent dynamics of its hard/soft, positive/negative, foreign/domestic aspects
Review: \u3ci\u3eChinaâs Megatrends: The Eight Pillars of a New Society\u3c/i\u3e
The future is a hot topic in China; bookstores are full of tomes asserting the 21st century as Chinaâs century: Liu Mingfuâs The China Dream(2010) and Chan Koon-chungâs The Gilded Era: China 2013 (2009) are but two of the most recent books that describe how China is destined to become the number one country in the world
An Update on Solid Grass Biomass Fuels in Vermont
This report documents recent testing involving the densification and combustion of solid, grass biomass fuels in a small commercial boiler (342,100 BTU/hr output rating). Fuel briquettes (or âpucksâ) were made from Switchgrass, Miscanthus, Reed Canary, MulchHay and âAg Biomassâ / Field Residue as well as mixtures of these feedstocks with ground wood chips. Our findings were:
1.On-farm, small scale densification of grass and agricultural biomass solid fuels via pucking is feasible with a conversion (densification) cost of 85-228 per ton (214 per ton(85 per ton ($5.2per million BTU)and a potential payback period of 2.4 years
History, tradition and the China dream: socialist modernization in the world of great harmony
How will China influence world politics in the twenty-first century? Many people answer this question by looking to Chinese history, and particularly to traditional models of Chinese world order. This essay seeks to complicate this question by asking which history, and which tradition? While it is common to look at China's pre-modern history as âtraditionâ, this essay argues that we also need to appreciate how âsocialismâ is treated as a tradition alongside Chinese civilization. It does this by examining how China's public intellectuals appeal to two seemingly odd sources: Mao Zedong's 1956 speech âStrengthen Party Unity and Carry Forward Party Traditionsâ, and the âGreat Harmonyâ passage from the two millennia-old Book of Rites. It will argue that these two passages are employed as a way of salvaging socialism; the ideological transition thus is not from communism to nationalism, but to a curious combination of socialism and Chinese civilization. This new socialist/civilization dynamic integrates equality and hierarchy into a new form of statism, which is involved in a global competition of social models. Or to put it another way, what these two passages have in common is not necessarily a positive ideal, but a common enemy: liberalism, the West and the United States
The visual turn in IR: documentary filmmaking as a critical method
Millennium: Journal of International Studies aims to publish the most innovative peer-reviewed articles from the discipline of international studies, as well as original thinking from elsewhere in the social sciences with an international dimension. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in scope, the journal provides a forum for discussion on the latest developments in the theory of international relations, welcoming innovative and critical approaches
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