Abortion and Nation: The Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Ireland

Abortion politics are contentious and divisive in many parts of the world, but nowhere more so than in Ireland. Abortion and Nation examines the connection between abortion politics and hegemonic struggles over national identity and the nation-state in the Irish Republic. Situating the abortion question in the global context of human rights politics, as well as international social movements, Lisa Smyth analyses the formation and transformation of abortion politics in Ireland from the early 1980s to the present day. She considers whether or not the shifting connections between morality, rights and nationhood promise a new era of gender equality in the context of nation-state citizenship.
The book provides a new sociological framework through which the significance of conflict over abortion and reproductive freedom is connected to conflict over national identity. It also offers a distinctive in-depth consideration of the connection between gender and nationhood, particularly in terms of its impact on women's status as citizens; within the nation-state; within the European Union; and as members of a global civil society.

Euroscepticism in the Netherlands: Stirrings of Dissent

Recent years have seen the emergence of a markedly more critical discourse in the Netherlands as regards European integration. Concerns over both the size of the net national contribution to the European Union budget and the implications for the country of EU enlargement have given rise to high-profile public debates. An explicitly articulated discourse of national interest, centred on but not limited to the Liberal VVD, has become a staple of political debate. At the same time, movements with clearly Eurosceptic agendas (the Pim Fortuyn List and the Socialist Party) have enjoyed unparalleled levels of electoral success. Although not of significant electoral salience, 'Europe' has nevertheless emerged as an issue in Dutch politics. The present article examines these stirrings of dissent in an EU member state which had long been regarded as one of the most enthusiastic supporters of further integration.

UKCP: A Collaborative network of cerebral palsy registers in the United Kingdom

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a relatively rare condition with enormous social and financial impact. Information about CP is not routinely collected in the United Kingdom. We have pooled non-identifiable data from the five currently active UK CP registers to form the UKCP database: birth years 1960–1997. This article describes the rationale behind this collaboration and the creation of the database. Data about 6910 children with CP are currently held. The mean annual prevalence rate was 2.0 per 1000 live births for birth years 1986–1996. Where type is known, 91 per cent have spastic CP. Where data are available, nearly one-third of children have severely impaired lower limb function, and nearly a quarter have severely impaired upper limb function. As well as describing the range and complexity of motor and associated impairments, the pooled data from the UKCP database provide a platform for studies of aetiology, long-term outcomes, participation and service needs. The UKCP database is an important national resource for the surveillance of CP and the study of its epidemiology in the United Kingdom.

The spatial turn: geographical approaches in the history of science

Over the past decade or so a number of historians of science and historical geographers, alert to the situated nature of scientific knowledge production and reception and to the migratory patterns of science on the move, have called for more explicit treatment of the geographies of past scientific knowledge. Closely linked to work in the sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies and connected with a heightened interest in spatiality evident across the humanities and social sciences this ‹spatial turn’ has informed a wide-ranging body of work on the history of science. This discussion essay revisits some of the theoretical props supporting this turn to space and provides a number of worked examples from the history of the life sciences that demonstrate the different ways in which the spaces of science have been comprehended.

Spectroscopy of astrophysical plasmas in the laboratory

Most of the matter in the universe is in the few form of a plasma. Over the past years physicists have produced laboratory plasmas that can mimic those observed in astrophysics. The best known is probably the tokamak, which has similar physical conditions and plasma processes to those found in collisionally dominated solar and stellar transition regions and coronae. Spectroscopy of such laboratory plasmas, in, particular at, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths, has greatly aided our understanding of their astrophysical counterparts. More recently, experiments have been performed on the Z Machine at the Sandia National Laboratory in the USA with the aim of creating, for the first time, steady-state photoionization-dominated plasmas that recreate the conditions found in some accretion-powered X-ray sources, such as X-ray binaries. In the future, experiments are envisaged with laser-produced plasmas at AWE Aldermaston that may be able to mimic the steady-state conditions found in high-energy accretion-powered sources, including the central regions of active galaxies.

What the Papers Say: Trends in Sustainability

This paper presents an overview of the results of a longitudinal analysis of the coverage of sustainability-related concepts in 115 leading national newspapers worldwide between January 1990 and July 2008, covering approximately 20,500,000 articles in 340,000 newspaper issues in 39 countries. On a global level, sustainable development and corporate social responsibility seem to have reached the mainstream public arena, whereas the coverage of corporate citizenship and corporate sustainability remains marginal. The increase in sustainability related media coverage since 1990 largely seems to be of an incremental nature, rather than clearly associated with specific events. Only very few truly global events can be identified that triggered a substantial amount of media coverage globally. Furthermore, marked regional and national differences in the coverage of sustainability related concepts can be identified.

From Rights to Compassion: The D Case and Contemporary Abortion Politics

This chapter is concerned with exploring the dynamics of contemporary debate on women’s reproductive choices and rights in the somewhat transformed social, political and economic context of the Republic of Ireland. News coverage of the events of April and May 2007 provide the focus of attention, as the case of ‘D’, a 17 year old in the temporary care of the state, seeking to terminate her pregnancy after a diagnosis of severe foetal abnormality, became yet again a focus of public debate on abortion access within the state. The analysis explores how the issues this case raised were framed in the public domain, in order to consider the shifting moral grammar shaping the debate. The paper explores the ways in which this case illustrates the ongoing tensions between changing characterisations of Irishness, and the social dynamics of access to reproductive rights, particularly for national minors in the care of the state.

The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture since 1500

Studies on the reception of the classical tradition are an indispensable part of classical studies. Understanding the importance of ancient civilization means also studying how it was used subsequently. This kind of approach is still relatively rare in the field of Byzantine Studies. This volume, which is the result of the range of interests in (mostly) non-English-speaking research communities, takes an important step to filling this gap by investigating the place and dimensions of ‘Byzantium after Byzantium’.
This collection of essays uses the idea of ‘reception-theory’ and expands it to show how European societies after Byzantium have responded to both the reality, and the idea of Byzantine Civilisation. The authors discuss various forms of Byzantine influence in the post-Byzantine world from architecture to literature to music to the place of Byzantium in modern political debates (e.g. in Russia). The intentional focus of the present volume is on those aspects of Byzantine reception less well-known to English-reading audiences, which accounts for the inclusion of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian perspectives. As a result this book shows that although so-called 'Byzantinism' is a pan-European phenomenon, it is made manifest in local/national versions.
The volume brings together specialists from various countries, mainly Byzantinists, whose works focus not only on Byzantine Studies (that is history, literature and culture of the Byzantine Empire), but also on the influence of Byzantine culture on the world after the Fall of Constantinople.