Anastasia's Journeys: Two Voices in a Limited Space

Anastasia’s Journeys was a temporary exhibition in the Australian History Museum, Macquarie University, Australia. Developed from the oral history of a post-World War Two Russian immigrant who survived Stalin’s policies of forced collectivisation and engineered famine, the display communicated primarily through audio tracks, supported by text panels and objects. This article articulates the creative tensions between theory and practice of public history which were encountered when planning the target audience, content, and design of the exhibition. It describes the process by which the oral history was placed at the centre of the presentation while objects were used both to illustrate changing social situations and introduce an opposing interpretation. The attributes of the oral history which made it suitable for an audio presentation are then discussed

Bible and Gun: Militarism in Jerusalem's Holy Places

Violence is a regular occurrence at many of Jerusalem’s holy sites. Ongoing civilian clashes play a role, but official modes of control through the Israeli army (IDF) and Border Police, as well as more informal private security operations are often involved. Such militarisation may keep violent upheavals in check, but it is carried out within the framework of a long and harsh occupation. The two sites considered here—the Western Wall in the Old City and Rachel’s Tomb on the border of Jerusalem and Bethlehem—each have a history of war and are fixtures of the occupation. This study explores the mechanisms that embed religious and militaristic meanings at each site. In so doing, certain questions are addressed. Firstly, how are the sites being constructed and used as popular and dramatic settings for certain constituents to promote religious militarism/militarised religion in Jerusalem? In which ways do these characteristics act to intertwine with the religious and militaristic aspects of the sites, making them more extreme but also, in some circles, more attractive? And finally, how do these sites contribute to the character of Jerusalem, both in their own construction and image but also in the roles they play within the wider urban topography?The research for this article forms part of the ESRC Large Grant project, ‘Conflict in Cities and the Contested State’, undertaken 2007-13 (RES-060-25- 0015 ) and the ESRC-funded ‘Conflict in Cities: Architecture and Urban Order in Divided Jerusalem’, 2005-7 (RES-228-25-0056). Historical research on the Western Wall and Rachel’s Tomb was begun in the early 1990s. I am grateful to Lefkos Kyriacou for drawing the maps for this article and for comments by the anonymous reviewers.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.85349

Is the EU Any More Progressive on Abortion Policy Than Post-Roe America?

The US Supreme Court recently overturned the federal right to abortion, leaving many open questions about the future of abortion policy in the US and around the globe. Danielle Pullan compares the new post-Roe abortion policy landscape in the US to the current state of abortion governance in Europe, highlighting its similarity to the EU’s approach

'Marriage had bastilled me for life': Propertied Women as Property in the Legal Fictions of Richardson, Wollstonecraft and Collins

When a woman married during the eighteenth century, according to Blackstone’s 'Commentaries on the Laws of England' (1765-69), her autonomous identity was removed and she was immediately classed as one with her husband. This consolidation into the husband’s own identity means that she is automatically classed as his property, as to incorporate and consolidate implies a taking over of ownership of the item being transferred – and thus, of course, a complete lack of self-governance over mind, body and actions on behalf of the woman. This leads to the perception that the woman has been transformed from a human into a mere thing, whilst still retaining human function. It is this mid-existence of the eighteenth and nineteenth century woman and her entrapment somewhere between human and thing that raises a key question. Is it possible for such a legal phenomenon to own property (thus, another thing) itself without repercussions – essentially, if the propertied woman was herself property? This ‘work in progress’ paper examines the extent to which this may be true, and if so, how it affected her identity as an independent human being in a patriarchal legal system over a specific time period by studying several themes of what are arguably legal fictions. The gendered inheritance of Samuel Richardson’s work and the obstacles this incurs due to the female’s lack of legal recognition in the eighteenth century are referred to, and explorations are made into the questions about inheritance, identity and what constitutes as property raised by the French Revolution of the 1790s, and the representations of this in Gothic and revolutionary literature, specifically Wollstonecraft’s 'Maria' (1798). Moreover, I consider the effects of the Gothic upon the development of sensation fiction, positing the latter as a direct descendant rather than subscribing to the notion of them being related but rigidly disparate, with sensation fiction suddenly emerging in the mid-nineteenth century (Hughes, 1980; Thomas, 1994; Herbert, 2008). Within these two genres, the entity of the married woman is well-established, but, I argue, warrants further examination of its representations of the legal entity of woman in her occupation of the domestic sphere as a wife and the social sphere as a single, propertied, legally existing woman in Wilkie Collins’s 'The Woman in White' (1860-61)

Outsourcing Strategies – Future Trends?

Outsourcing production of bulk active ingredient manufacture has recently been a growing trend amongst many pharmaceutical companies. To consider how the trend might develop, one needs to consider the factors that have driven outsourcing and the critical role of the custom synthesis industry in delivering expectations

Controlled polymerisation and industrial application of poly(2-chloro-1,3-butadiene)

Poly(2-chloro-1,3-butadiene) (PCB, polychloroprene) has wide-ranging applications as neoprene rubber. Favourable chemical and physical properties in the material are attributed to a three-dimensional network of polymer chains, which is realised through cross-linking. Ethylene thiourea (ETU) and zinc oxide (ZnO) are the standard reagents which facilitate this in industrial processes. However, ETU is a suspected carcinogen and its usage is due tobecome severely restricted, so much so that the future production of neoprene rubber is at risk. Hence, an alternative, non-toxic cross-linking agent is required which can cross-linkPCB in the same fashion. The way in which the ETU/ZnO system functions must first beunderstood before a replacement can be proposed. Thus, mechanistic studies were initially undertaken with PCB oligomers in order to elucidate the reaction. To this end, a synthetic protocol was established for 2-chloro-1,3-butadiene (CB) and the monomer was subsequently adopted in numerous polymerisation reactions. Investigations into the reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerisation of CBproceeded to predefine low molecular weight PCB. A successful procedure was realised, employing 2-cyano-2-propylbenzodithioate (CPD) CTA and conditions which were able to furnish <1000 g/mol to 50,000 g/mol, low dispersity PCB in a controlled manner. This invention was novel in that PCB has historically been synthesised via conventional(uncontrolled) free radical techniques. PCB oligomers were adopted in cross-linking reactions with ETU and various model compounds, alone, and with ZnO, to aid the interpretation of the ETU/ZnO mechanism. Spectroscopic analyses and the observation of by-products revealed that three disparate reactions occur; ETU and ZnO were found to act both synergistically and independently of each other. A newly-proposed mechanism describes activation of the polymer chain by ZnOand subsequent reaction through sulfur. As a result of this discovery, alternative compounds have been tested and found capable of cross-linking PCB. In a second industrial study, the eradication of allergy-causing cross-linking additives for PCBlatex (gloves) was investigated. PCB latex films were generated under various conditions and the materials physically tested. A novel amine-dithiocarbamate complex, combined with a xanthogen polysulfide, afforded comparable properties in PCB latex and as such is apotential replacement system

The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem's Colonial Space Revisited

This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem’s contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to “satellite neighbourhoods”, i.e. Jerusalem’s colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance of geopolitics to the study of neighbourhood planning, by which we mean not merely a discussion of international relations and conflict or of the roles of military acts and wars in producing space. Rather, geopolitics refers to the emergence of discourses and forces connected with the technologies of control, patterns of internal migrations by individuals and communities, and the flow of cultures and capital.This article forms a part of the research of ‘Conflict in Cities and the Contested State’, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (RES-060-25-0015), and the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship ‘Neighbouring and the Geopolitics of Ethnically “Mixed Cities”’ (No: 252369)