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

Diabetes research in South Carolina:past, present, and future

Medical investigators in South Carolina have been on the "cutting edge" of diabetes research for a number of decades. Despite this fact, our state ranks second in the nation in diabetes prevalence, and diabetes complications are more severe here than anywhere else. It is from the efforts of these investigators that our hope for a brighter future comes. Through a concerted effort toward prevention, improvements in care, and investigation of the pathophysiology of diabetes and its complications, researchers may reduce the substantial burden of diabetes in our state and throughout the world.

The Sacred and the Obscure: Greek in the Carolingian Reception of Martianus Capella

Carolingian scholars paid considerable attention to the Greek found in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a late antique Latin work full of obscurities in language and imagery. This article, focusing on glosses on De nuptiis from the oldest gloss tradition, demonstrates that a range of material was available to ninth-century scholars to elucidate Martianus’s Greek and that Greek seems, at times, to have served as a means to obscure. I argue that their interest in obscurity reflects a widespread epistemology and strategy of concealment, hence their intellectual investment in Martianus. For ninth-century readers, then, the Greek in the glossed Martianus manuscripts, however decorative it may have been, also operated at the core of medieval hermeneutics.

The Library of Essays on Law and Privacy

Privacy has now become a major topic not only in law but in computing, psychology, economics and social studies, and the explosion in scholarship has made it difficult for the student to traverse the field and identify the significant issues across the many disciplines. This series brings together a collection of significant papers with a multi-disciplinary approach which enable the reader to navigate through the complexities of the issues and make sense of the prolific scholarship published in this field.

The three volumes in this series address different themes: an anthropological approach to what privacy means in a cultural context; the issue of state surveillance where the state must both protect the individual and protect others from that individual and also protect itself; and, finally, what privacy might mean in a world where government and commerce collect data incessantly. The regulation of privacy is continually being called for and these papers help enable understanding of the ethical rationales behind the choices made in the sphere of regulation of privacy.

The articles presented in each of these collections have been chosen for the quality of their scholarship and their utility to the researcher, and feature a variety of approaches. The articles which debate the technical context of privacy are accessible to those from the arts and humanities; overall, the breadth of approach taken in the choice of articles has created a series which is an invaluable and important resource for lecturers, researchers and student.

Class and Performance in the Age of Global Capitalism

This article addresses the relative absence of class-based analysis in theatre and performance studies, and suggests the reconfiguration of class as performance rather than as it is traditionally conceived as an identity predicated solely on economic stratification. It engages with the occlusion of class by the ascendancy of identity politics based on race, gender and sexuality and its attendant theoretical counterparts in deconstruction and post-structuralism, which became axiomatic as they displaced earlier methodologies to become hegemonic in the arts and humanities. The article proceeds to an assessment of the development of sociological approaches to theatre, particularly the legacy of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. The argument concludes with the application of an approach which reconfigures class as performance to the production of Declan Hughes's play Shiver of 2003, which dramatizes the consequences of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s for ambitious members of the Irish middle class.