Heritage managers and caretakers often have to prioritize and make choices about how best to use the available resources to protect collections, buildings, monuments and sites. This means, for instance, having to decide among options such as increasing security against theft and vandalism, improving building maintenance to reduce water leaks, installing air conditioning in collection storage ar…
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, three mysterious texts stirredup much debate in the intellectual world: TheFama Fraternitatis(Fame ofthe Fraternity, 1614), theConfessioFraternitatis(Confession of the Fraternity,1615),and,differentfrombutrelatedtoboth,theChymischeHochzeit:ChristianiRosencreutz(Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, 1616).2 While theChemicalWeddingpresents a fict…
ato san from Japan is a 90-year-old master of flower arrangement (ike-bana). She is still practising and also teaches her traditional craft from her Kyoto home. In the three years since she obtained a smartphone, it has become central to her work and life. Sato san arranges her students’ lessons via the messaging application LINE, on which she has over 100 …
Longstanding residents—members of formerly migrant groups whose families had been in Marshall for over a generation—often told stories that compared their own families’ migrant histories with Mexican migrants’. Many of these stories described similarities between the narrators’ migrant ancestors and contemporary Mexicans. In the passage above …
Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. While the author discusses such we…
In 1954, Dame Enid Lyons, the first Australian woman elected to the House of Representatives, remarked in an interview with ABC Weekly that radio had ‘created a bigger revolution in the life of a woman than anything that has happened any time’, as it enabled women to engage with world affairs while doing the housework. According to Lyons, radio had given women the ‘confidenceâ…
Political demography, or the systematic study of population changeand politics, public policies and polities, sees population dynamics (struc-ture and change) as one of the main drivers of politics at the meso-and macro-level. As an approach, it can be defined as the study of thedynamics in the size, composition and distribution of populations andtheir effects on political and policy processes.…
Money, as the saying goes, makes the world go round. Everybody uses it; ourmodern societies would not function without it. Credit is just as crucial, as borrowingallows businesses to invest and consumers to buy goods and services today againsttheir income tomorrow. But although money and debt are central in our societies andto our welfare, how they actually function is not easily understood.The…
Energy poverty refers to issues that span access to energy, energy depri-vation, and its under-use within daily life. Broadly, the central concern ofresearch and policy in this space is with the negative outcomes that a lackof energy use has for wellbeing. Within the UK and many other globalcontexts, the focus has often been on those that cannot afford to heattheir homes, with solutions posed a…