Civic engagement and the arts and humanities: a UK perspective

Higher education in the UK is in a state of flux and this is having particular impact on the humanities. On the one hand the pressure to support a STEM agenda is seen by some as forcing higher education down a narrow economic agenda, while government requirements for assessing the social and economic impact of research has raised concerns about excessive utilitarianism and a downgrading of ‘disinterested enquiry’. This paper argues that these concerns may be misplaced. The research impact agenda has the potential to promote more socially engaged research and more democratic engagement in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. In the US concerns about the democratic role of higher education more often seem to focus on the student experience. By contrast, in the UK concerns about citizenship education and democratic participation more often focus on high school students, perhaps because university students are more likely to have a formal role in institutional governance. The paper concludes that the papers in this forum have a very American feel, but the issues they address resonate on a much wider scale.

Science, the Arts and Palliative Care: bridging the two cultures

Invited keynote presentation

Imported and translated landscapes: Buenos Aires nineteenth-century waterfront parks

The study of urban and landscape history has recently questioned the peripheral condition of certain areas and re-examined them as valuable parts of an international network . In such a framework cities are not only recipients of foreign influences but active agents in their own urban transformations. Meanwhile, the regeneration of urban waterfronts appears increasingly in the spotlight globally , but the re-use of the waterfront as public space began more than a century ago.

Buenos Aires is an example of a ‘peripheral’ city, in which waterfront parks at the end of the nineteenth century were the product of international influences combined with local conditions, needs and expertise. Buenos Aires developed a continuous increase and diversity of leisure waterfront space, making it different from most European or ‘central’ cities. This paper will analyse the process of translation of landscape design on Buenos Aires’ waterfront while outlining the significance of waterfront parks to the city and its growing urban population.

Job Strain as a Risk Factor for Leisure-Time Physical Inactivity: An Individual-Participant Meta-Analysis of Up to 170,000 Men and Women

Unfavorable work characteristics, such as low job control and too high or too low job demands, have been suggested to increase the likelihood of physical inactivity during leisure time, but this has not been verified in large-scale studies. The authors combined individual-level data from 14 European cohort studies (baseline years from 19851988 to 20062008) to examine the association between unfavorable work characteristics and leisure-time physical inactivity in a total of 170,162 employees (50 women; mean age, 43.5 years). Of these employees, 56,735 were reexamined after 29 years. In cross-sectional analyses, the odds for physical inactivity were 26 higher (odds ratio 1.26, 95 confidence interval: 1.15, 1.38) for employees with high-strain jobs (low control/high demands) and 21 higher (odds ratio 1.21, 95 confidence interval: 1.11, 1.31) for those with passive jobs (low control/low demands) compared with employees in low-strain jobs (high control/low demands). In prospective analyses restricted to physically active participants, the odds of becoming physically inactive during follow-up were 21 and 20 higher for those with high-strain (odds ratio 1.21, 95 confidence interval: 1.11, 1.32) and passive (odds ratio 1.20, 95 confidence interval: 1.11, 1.30) jobs at baseline. These data suggest that unfavorable work characteristics may have a spillover effect on leisure-time physical activity.

Post-Conflict Performance, Film and Visual Arts:Cities of Memory

This book examines how contemporary theatre, performance, film and the visual arts respond to the post-conflict condition. The contents of the volume focus on a range of post-conflict cities, encouraging interdisciplinary discussion on the role of the arts and its relation to issues of testimony, witnessing, forgetting, representation, healing, reconciliation, agency, and metaphor. Contributors include: Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Taylor, Marvin Carlson, Rob Stone, Laurel Borisenko, Katarzyna Puzon, Miriam Paeslack, Emma Grey, Paula Blair, Zoran Poposki, Marija Todorova, Elena Carduro, and Paul Devlin.

Arts Management and Cultural Policy

This chapter explores the relationship between cultural policy and arts management. A connection between policy and practice is visible through initiatives within specific localities, nations and at an international scale. Yet, there is little scholarship that develops our understanding of how these two areas interact, how ideas are exchanged and implemented, and where the power is located within this relationship. The approach to arts and cultural management in the UK has a history of professionalization that has developed increasing influence internationally. As a result, this chapter takes the UK as a case study and presents new empirical work to examine how educators and individuals practicing in both fields perceive the relationship of policymaking to the work of management.

Off-Duty Resilience: Re-orienting Tourism, Leisure and Recreation in the US Army BOSS program

Understanding how US imperial strategy is sustained by tourism and militarism requires an account of how American soldiers learn to understand themselves in relation to a variety of marginalized others. This paper explores how the US Army’s ‘Ready and Resilient’ (R2) campaign constructs soldier / other relations by mobilizing off-duty time through the ‘Better Opportunities for Single Soldiers’ (BOSS) program. BOSS’s first two platforms of ‘Well-Being’ and ‘Community Service’ feed into the R2 agenda by producing highly-skilled leaders (who govern a disengaged rank and file) and benevolent humanitarians (who provide charity for abject civilians). When these dispositions are transposed into BOSS’s third platform of ‘Recreation and Leisure’, soldiers turn away from the goals of leadership and humanitarianism to reveal the privileged narcissism underscoring the R2 agenda. This self-focus is intensified by familiar power relations in the tourism industry as soldiers pursue self-improvement by commodifying, distancing and effacing local tourist workers. Using the BOSS program as a case study, this paper critically interrogates how the US Army is assimilating off-duty practices of tourism, leisure and recreation into the wider program of resilience training.

Revolution and the ritual year: religious conflict and innovation in Cristero Mexico

This article analyses Catholic responses to persecution of the Church by the Mexican state during Mexico's cristero rebellion (1926–9) and seeks to make a new contribution to the revolt's religious history. Faced with the Calles regime's anticlericalism, the article argues, Mexico's episcopate developed an alternative cultic model premised on a revitalised lay religion. The article then focuses on changes and continuities in lay – clerical relations, and on the new religious powers of the faithful, now empowered to celebrate ‘white’ masses and certain sacraments by themselves. The article concludes that persecution created new spaces for lay religious participation, showing the 1910–40 Revolution to be a period of religious, as well as social, upheaval.