‘Books are for white people.’ It’s an old idea, and historically, mostly a true one, at least in British publishing. Not only have most books, including children’s books, been written for and about white people in Britain, the scholarly and critical histories of literature, including children’s literature, have focused on these same books and their presumed-white audie…
Asking is one of the simplest and most familiar of human actions, and has a right to be thought of as single most powerful and most variously cohering form of social-symbolic gesture. Because so much is at stake in the act of asking, asking, or asking for, almost anything, whether information, help, love or respect, can be asking for trouble, so a great deal of care must be taken with the ways …
Doctoral education has become a key element of the higher education landscape everywhere. With the spread of higher education massification and the rise of the global knowledge economy that began in the late twentieth century and continues today, doctoral education has expanded tremendously. There have been significant changes in doctoral education worldwide in the twent…
Agricultural development in Asia has undergone multiple phases and has experienced a remarkable evolution that also advanced general economic development. The region has become a major agricultural producer in the world due to the Green Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century (Hazell 2009). In particular, its rice exports have become essentia…
The capacity for sound to be powerfully evocative is unquestionable. An old photograph, or even a silent cine film from one’s childhood, brings back memories and can have strong emotional resonances. Listening to the ‘unseen sound’ of an old audio recording however, can almost without warning, engulf us in the feelings it triggers. The sound of a distant night-time …
Sub-Saharan Africa has the most rapidly growing population of any region of the world. The human population is about 5M0 million and it is expected to reach about 1300 million by the year 2025. In 1990 354 million people, 71% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, lived in rural areas and by the year 2025 this figure will have increased by more than 68% to about 5W0 million. Cities in sub-Sah…
It was due to a mysterious dispensation of Providence, and a good deal to Leslie Graeme, that I found myself in the heart of the Selkirks for my Christmas Eve as the year 1882 was dying. It had been my plan to spend my Christmas far away in Toronto, with such Bohemian and boon companions as could be found in that cosmopolitan and kindly city. But Leslie Graeme changed all that, for, disco…