The spectacle of modernity: blood, microscopes and mirrors in Colonial Tanganyika

The chapter focuses on attempts to change and improve the subjects of the colonial regime in what was the British Protectorate of Tanganyika, contemporary Tanzania. The colonial project in Africa was surrounded by technology, ideology, and representations of modernity based on the application of instrumental rationality. Through the example of colonial practices to control sleeping sickness, it examines how local forms of knowledge and livelihoods were negated and counter-tendencies people generated, offering explanations for the predicament of the human condition consequent upon the colonial experience.

Exploring socioeconomic impacts of forest based mitigation projects: Lessons from Brazil and Bolivia

This paper aims to contribute new insights globally and regionally on how carbon forest mitigation contributes to sustainable development in South America. Carbon finance has emerged as a potential policy option to tackling global climate change, degradation of forests, and social development in poor countries. This paper focuses on evaluating the socioeconomic impacts of a set of forest based mitigation pilot projects that emerged under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The paper reviews research conducted in 2001–2002, drawing from empirical data from four pilot projects, derived from qualitative stakeholder interviews, and complemented by policy documents and literature. Of the four projects studied three are located in frontier areas, where there are considerable pressures for conversion of standing forest to agriculture. In this sense, forest mitigation projects have a substantial role to play in the region. Findings suggest however, that all four projects have experienced cumbersome implementation processes specifically, due to weak social objectives, poor communication, as well as time constraints. In three out of four cases, stakeholders highlighted limited local acceptance at the implementation stages. In the light of these findings, we discuss opportunities for implementation of future forest based mitigation projects in the land use sector.

Learning to think in a second language: effects of proficiency and length of exposure in English learners of German

The aim of the current study is to investigate motion event cognition in second language learners in a higher education learning context. Based on recent findings showing that speakers of grammatical aspect languages like English attend less to the endpoint (goal) of events than speakers of non-aspect languages like Swedish in a nonverbal categorization task involving working memory (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2013; Bylund & Athanasopoulos, this issue), the current study asks whether native speakers of an aspect language start paying more attention to event endpoints when learning a non-aspect language. Native English and German (a non-aspect language) speakers, and English learners of L2 German, who were pursuing studies in German language and literature at an English university, were asked to match a target scene with intermediate degree of endpoint orientation with two alternate scenes with low and high degree of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that, when compared to the native English speakers, the learners of German were more prone to base their similarity judgements on endpoint saliency, rather than ongoingness, primarily as a function of increasing L2 proficiency and year of university study. Further analyses revealed a non-linear relationship between length of L2 exposure and categorization patterns, subserved by a progressive strengthening of the relationship between L2 proficiency and categorization as length of exposure increased. These findings present evidence that cognitive restructuring may occur through increasing experience with an L2, but also suggest that this relationship may be complex, and unfold over a long period of time.

The neoliberal way of war: a critical analysis of contemporary British security in policy and practice.

Dominant paradigms of causal explanation for why and how Western liberal-democracies go to war in the post-Cold War era remain versions of the 'liberal peace' or 'democratic peace' thesis. Yet such explanations have been shown to rest upon deeply problematic epistemological and methodological assumptions. Of equal importance, however, is the failure of these dominant paradigms to account for the 'neoliberal revolution' that has gripped Western liberal-democracies since the 1970s. The transition from liberalism to neoliberalism remains neglected in analyses of the contemporary Western security constellation. Arguing that neoliberalism can be understood simultaneously through the Marxian concept of ideology and the Foucauldian concept of governmentality – that is, as a complementary set of 'ways of seeing' and 'ways of being' – the thesis goes on to analyse British security in policy and practice, considering it as an instantiation of a wider neoliberal way of war. In so doing, the thesis draws upon, but also challenges and develops, established critical discourse analytic methods, incorporating within its purview not only the textual data that is usually considered by discourse analysts, but also material practices of security. This analysis finds that contemporary British security policy is predicated on a neoliberal social ontology, morphology and morality – an ideology or 'way of seeing' – focused on the notion of a globalised 'network-market', and is aimed at rendering circulations through this network-market amenable to neoliberal techniques of government. It is further argued that security practices shaped by this ideology imperfectly and unevenly achieve the realisation of neoliberal 'ways of being' – especially modes of governing self and other or the 'conduct of conduct' – and the re-articulation of subjectivities in line with neoliberal principles of individualism, risk, responsibility and flexibility. The policy and practice of contemporary British 'security' is thus recontextualised as a component of a broader 'neoliberal way of war'.

Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890-1910

The drug quinine figured as an object of enforced consumption in British India between the late 1890s and the 1910s, when the corresponding diagnostic category malaria itself was redefined as a mosquito-borne fever disease. This article details an overlapping milieu in which quinine, mosquitoes and malaria emerged as intrinsic components of shared and symbiotic histories. It combines insights from new imperial histories, constructivism in the histories of medicine and literature about non-humans in science studies to examine the ways in which histories of insects, drugs, disease and empire interacted and shaped one another. Firstly, it locates the production of historical intimacies between quinine, malaria and mosquitoes within the exigencies and apparatuses of imperial rule. In so doing, it explores the intersections between the worlds of colonial governance, medical knowledge, vernacular markets and pharmaceutical business. Secondly, it outlines ways to narrate characteristics and enabling properties of non-humans (such as quinines and mosquitoes) while retaining a constructivist critique of scientism and empire. Thirdly, it shows how empire itself was reshaped and reinforced while occasioning the proliferation of categories and entities like malaria, quinine and mosquitoes.

Family, locality and nationality: vernacular adaptations of the Expugnatio Hibernica from late medieval Ireland

This paper examines two late medieval abridgements of Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica, one in Hiberno-English and one in Irish. The manuscripts in which these adaptations survive all date from the late fifteenth century and appear to bear witness to a sudden and pronounced interest in Gerald’s text. Drawing on evidence from the extant manuscripts, this paper explores the readerships of, and the nature of their interest in, these adaptations. A key conclusion is that the Expugnatio, which gives prominence to Gerald's own relatives, the Fitzgeralds, was valued as a family history by the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and their allies. The Earls were at the height of their power in the period in which these manuscripts were produced. Examination of this neglected evidence of the adaptation and readership of the Expugnatio in late medieval Ireland suggests that, for some medieval readers at least, the primary identities Gerald’s text expressed were familial and local rather than colonial or national.