The end of flanerie

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The Italian transition that never was

The recent argument that the notion of ‘transition’ should be set aside in attempting to explain the trajectory of Italian politics in the past two decades is to be welcomed, but does not go far enough in explaining why we, as Italianists, got our case wrong and how exactly we might get our case right today. The transitional ‘myth’ was born and maintained despite growing evidence of its inherently problematic nature, both in conceptual and empirical terms. The concept of ‘transition’ needs more serious conceptual treatment and empirical application, but even with this work it is unlikely to be concluded that Italy is in transition. Freeing Italy and Italianists from this conventional wisdom, while, at the same time, not abandoning the idea that something exceptional happened to Italian politics in the early 1990s, will help enrich the debate on the nature of the political change that Italy has experienced in the past seventeen years

Editorial. A new venture

Even if there ever existed a time when it could be argued that ‘interdisciplinary’ research was unnecessary or a luxury, there can be little doubt that today it is essential to helping understand and solve the world’s problems. And the first building block of trans-disciplinary research must be raising knowledge and awareness of what other disciplines are doing. It could be said that this is what lies at the heart of this new venture, for this journal aims to publish work from an extensive range of fields, thus bringing scholars from a variety of disciplines ‘together’, promoting greater cross-disciplinary awareness of major themes and debates, and hopefully prompting inter-disciplinary projects in the future. This, moreover, is very much needed because the challenges facing the social sciences today are probably greater than at any time in their history

Chinese whispers

This short piece is based on a reading of James Moran's 'Reflections of the first onstage protest at the Royal National Theatre &c' published in STP, Volume 32, Number 1 (2012). It looks in some detail at the exact nature of the protest from the perspective of someone who was actually present at the event, and offers some tentative connected thoughts about the way in which theatrical histories can sometimes be constructed