Samuel Beckett, the Gate Theatre Dublin, and the contemporary Irish independent theater sector: fragments of performance history

From 1991, when the Dublin Gate Theatre launched their Samuel Beckett Festival featuring nineteen of Beckett’s stage plays, to more recent years, the Gate dominated Irish productions of Beckett’s theater. The Gate Beckett Festival was remounted in 1996 at the Lincoln Center, New York, and at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1999, and individual or grouped productions have toured regularly since then in Ireland and internationally. However, since the Irish premiere of Waiting of Godot at the Pike Theatre in 1955, in addition to several Beckett plays mounted by the National Theatre, many independent Irish theater companies, such as Focus Theatre, Druid Theatre, and more recently Pan Pan Theatre, Blue Raincoat Theatre, The Corn Exchange, and Company SJ (under director Sarah Jane Scaife), have produced Beckett’s drama. While acknowledging earlier Irish productions, this essay will consider the role of the Dublin Gate Beckett Festival and the Beckett Centenary celebrations in Dublin in 2006 in greatly enhancing the marketability of Beckett’s work, and will discuss the proliferation of productions of Beckett’s stage plays (as opposed to stage adaptations of the prose work, which is a topic for another essay) in the independent theater sector in the Republic of Ireland since 2006. In addition to giving an overview of these recent productions, the essay will consider some issues at stake in creating or constructing performance histories

The behavior and natural history of Chartergellus, a little-known genus of neotropical social wasps (Vespidae Polistinae Epiponini)

This study reviews published data on the behavior and natural history of Chartergellus and presents the first observations on social interactions in this genus of tropical swarm-founding wasps. Observations of Chartergellus golfitensis in Costa Rica and C. punctatior in Colombia showed that queens perform a post-oviposition egg-guarding vigil, and a bending display like that characteristic of epiponine social wasps that lack consistent morphological differences between workers and queens and have caste determination in the adult stage. Young, old, and queen (egg-laying) females of C. golfitensis showed small differences that indicate color changes with age, and structural differences that could be due to seasonal or colony-cycle changes in developmental conditions, but do not rule out the possibility of pre-adult caste determination, a phenomenon that needs to be carefully distinguished from pre-adult caste bias. Sexual dimorphism and the behavior of males at the nest in C. golfitensis is described, as well as the aggressive and avoidance behavior of females toward males. Nest structure in both species is as described previously for Chartergellus species, but some anomalies and their possible evolutionary significance are discussed. Cell initiation by an egg-laying queen, a behavior never seen by workers, and by a young female with slightly developed ovaries, may be vestiges of ancestral solitary reproductive traits where developed ovaries are associated with cell construction. © 2010 Dipartimento di Biologia Evoluzionistica dell'Università, Firenze, Italia.

The history of the social stratification of Latin America

Includes bibliography

Stratified Boston: The Brahmins, the Irish and the Boston Police Strike of 1919

This thesis explores the Boston Police Strike of 1919 through the lens of class struggle and ethnic tension. Through an examination of the development of Boston’s class structure, particularly focused on the upper class Brahmins and the Irish working class, it concludes that the Brahmins’ success in suppressing the police strikeallowed for their maintenance of socioeconomic power within the city despite their relatively small population. Based on their extreme class cohesion resulting from the growing prominence of Harvard University as well as the Brahmins’ unabashed discrimination against their ethnic neighbors in almost every sphere of society, theBrahmins were able to maintain their power in Boston’s cultural world. The Irish working class, on the other hand, which attempted to use the increasing popularity of public and police unionization to challenge the status and power of the Brahmins through the creation of the Boston Police Union and subsequently through the notorious Boston Police Strike of 1919 was ultimately unsuccessful, and it was left in the same position in which it started, at the bottom of the social ladder. The suppression of the strike by members of the upper class and their allies, particularly those in high government positions, served to preserve and affirm the socioeconomic power of the Brahmins over much of Boston society and brought the era of public police unionization to a close.

Introduction: A brief journey through the 80 year history of the International Association of Schools of Social Work

The leaders of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) have played major roles in shaping the organization over its 80 year history. This brief introduction will put their roles in the context of the organization’s history. While influenced by its presidents in significant ways, the organization’s trajectory has also been affected by the political, economic and social developments of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Significant changes have occurred in the organization and in social work education, yet, as Feustel (2006) observed, “the history of the IASSW demonstrates lines of continuity that are even more remarkable for the fact that it was caught up in the great historical ruptures of the 20th century” (p. 3).

Male reproductive pattern in a polygynous ungulate with a slow life-history: the role of age, social status and alternative mating tactics

According to life-history theory age-dependent investments into reproduction are thought to co-vary with survival and growth of animals. In polygynous species, in which size is an important determinant of reproductive success, male reproduction via alternative mating tactics at young age are consequently expected to be the less frequent in species with higher survival. We tested this hypothesis in male Alpine ibex (Capra ibex), a highly sexually dimorphic mountain ungulate whose males have been reported to exhibit extremely high adult survival rates. Using data from two offspring cohorts in a population in the Swiss Alps, the effects of age, dominance and mating tactic on the likelihood of paternity were inferred within a Bayesian framework. In accordance with our hypothesis, reproductive success in male Alpine ibex was heavily biased towards older, dominant males that monopolized access to receptive females by adopting the 'tending' tactic, while success among young, subordinate males via the sneaking tactic 'coursing' was in general low and rare. In addition, we detected a high reproductive skew in male Alpine ibex, suggesting a large opportunity for selection. Compared with other ungulates with higher mortality rates, reproduction among young male Alpine ibex was much lower and more sporadic. Consistent with that, further examinations on the species level indicated that in polygynous ungulates the significance of early reproduction appears to decrease with increasing survival. Overall, this study supports the theory that survival prospects of males modulate the investments into reproduction via alternative mating tactics early in life. In the case of male Alpine ibex, the results indicate that their life-history strategy targets for long life, slow and prolonged growth and late reproduction.

Zionism and world politics : a study in history and social psychology

by Horace Meyer Kallen

Social status regulates growth rate: Consequences for life-history strategies

The life-history strategies of organisms are sculpted over evolutionary time by the relative prospects of present and future reproductive success. As a consequence, animals of many species show flexible behavioral responses to environmental and social change. Here we show that disruption of the habitat of a colony of African cichlid fish, Haplochromis burtoni (Günther) caused males to switch social status more frequently than animals kept in a stable environment. H. burtoni males can be either reproductively active, guarding a territory, or reproductively inactive (nonterritorial). Although on average 25–50% of the males are territorial in both the stable and unstable environments, during the 20-week study, nearly two-thirds of the animals became territorial for at least 1 week. Moreover, many fish changed social status several times. Surprisingly, the induced changes in social status caused changes in somatic growth. Nonterritorial males and animals ascending in social rank showed an increased growth rate whereas territorial males and animals descending in social rank slowed their growth rate or even shrank. Similar behavioral and physiological changes are caused by social change in animals kept in stable environmental conditions, although at a lower rate. This suggests that differential growth, in interaction with environmental conditions, is a central mechanism underlying the changes in social status. Such reversible phenotypic plasticity in a crucial life-history trait may have evolved to enable animals to shift resources from reproduction to growth or vice versa, depending on present and future reproductive prospects.