Reading the Irishwoman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714-1960

In 1700 few Irishwomen were literate. Most lived in a rural environment, rarely encountered a book or a play or ventured much beyond their own domestic space. By 1960 literacy was universal, all Irishwomen attended primary school, had access to a variety of books, magazines, newspapers and other forms of popular media and the wider world was now part of their every-day life. This study seeks to examine the cultural encounters and exchanges inherent in this transformation. It analyses reading and popular and consumer culture as sites of negotiation of gender roles. This is not an exhaustive treatment of the theme but focusses on three key points of cultural encounter: the Enlightenment, emigration and modernism. The writings and intellectual discourse generated by the Enlightenment was one of the most influential forces shaping western society. It set the agenda for scientific, political and social thought for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The migration of peoples to north America was another key historical marker in the development of the modern world. Emigration altered and shaped American society as well as the lives of those who remained behind. By the twentieth century, aesthetic modernism suspicious of enlightenment rationalism and determined to produce new cultural forms developed in a complex relationship with the forces of industrialisation, urbanisation and social change. This study analyses the impact of these three key forces in Western culture on changing roles and perceptions of Irish women from 1700 to 1960.

Music, rhythm, rise time perception and developmental dyslexia: Perception of musical meter predicts reading and phonology

Introduction: Rhythm organises musical events into patterns and forms, and rhythm perception in music is usually studied by using metrical tasks. Metrical structure also plays an organisational function in the phonology of language, via speech prosody, and there is evidence for rhythmic perceptual difficulties in developmental dyslexia. Here we investigate the hypothesis that the accurate perception of musical metrical structure is related to basic auditory perception of rise time, and also to phonological and literacy development in children. Methods: A battery of behavioural tasks was devised to explore relations between musical metrical perception, auditory perception of amplitude envelope structure, phonological awareness (PA) and reading in a sample of 64 typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. Results: We show that individual differences in the perception of amplitude envelope rise time are linked to musical metrical sensitivity, and that musical metrical sensitivity predicts PA and reading development, accounting for over 60% of variance in reading along with age and I.Q. Even the simplest metrical task, based on a duple metrical structure, was performed significantly more poorly by the children with dyslexia. Conclusions: The accurate perception of metrical structure may be critical for phonological development and consequently for the development of literacy. Difficulties in metrical processing are associated with basic auditory rise time processing difficulties, suggesting a primary sensory impairment in developmental dyslexia in tracking the lower-frequency modulations in the speech envelope. © 2010 Elsevier.

Pitfalls in Strategic Planning: Lessons for Legitimacy

The paper considers how planning as a political activity is underpinned by concepts of justice and how professional practitioners are consistently faced with making ethical choices in the public interest. The key objective is therefore to identify the centrality of ethics in praxis. In this context, political liberal theory is empirically useful in exploring both the role of participants and the processes employed in strategic planning. A case study analysis generates key issues which are relevant to planning in the wider arena and an extensive series of interviews provides interesting insights into the dynamic between those involved and the effectiveness of procedures followed.

The Roads from Rio: Lessons From 20 Years of Multilateral Environmental Negotiations

A review of international environmental negotiations since the 'Earth Summit' in Rio de Janiero 1992

Archiving Qualitative Data in the Context of a Society Coming out of Conflict: Some Lessons from Northern Ireland.

ARK (‘Access Research Knowledge’) was set up with a single goal: to make social science information on Northern Ireland available to the widest possible audience. The most well-known and widely used part of the ARK resource is CAIN (Conflict Archive on the INternet), which is one of the largest on-line collections of source material and information and about the Northern Ireland conflict. The compilation of CAIN's new Remembering: Victims, Survivors and Commemoration section raised issues related to the sensitivity of the material, as it feeds into the fundamental debate on the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict. It also fundamentally raises the question to what extent archiving is a neutral or political activity and necessitates a discourse on responsibility and ethics among social researchers. Experiences from the establishment of the Northern Ireland Qualitative Archive (NIQA) shed light on future possibilities with regard to qualitative archives on the Northern Ireland conflict.

Towards an Acceptable Level of Violence: Institutional Lessons from Northern Ireland

Institutional and economic development has recently returned to the forefront of economic analysis. The use of case studies (both historical and contemporary) has been important in this revival. Likewise, it has been argued recently by economic methodologists that historical context provides a kind of ‘‘laboratory’’ for the researcher interested in real world economic phenomena. Counterterrorism economics, in contrast with much of the rest of the literature on terrorism, has all too rarely drawn upon detailed contextual case studies. This article seeks to help remedy this problem. Archival evidence, including previously unpublished material on the DeLorean case, is an important feature of this article. The article examines how an inter-related strategy, which traded-off economic, security, and political considerations, operated during the Troubles. Economic repercussions of this strategy are discussed. An economic analysis of technical and organizational change within paramilitarism is also presented. A number of institutional lessons are discussed including: the optimal balance between carrot versus stick, centralization relative to decentralization, the economics of intelligence operations, and tit-for-tat violence. While existing economic models are arguably correct in identifying benefits from politico-economic decentralization, they downplay the element highlighted by institutional analysis.