This chapter examines the ‘orthodox’ case of representative groups that under-perform. It makes the point that a major source of pessimism about groups as democratic agents is not the lack of democratic practices constitutionally within representation groups, but with the lack of this constitutional promise being implemented. The hollowing out of the UK Federation of Small Businesses and the NSW Farmers' Association, in Australia, was a choice made by groups who needed to balance the active engagement of members with a desire to grow the group such that it had the resources for a research-based policy advocacy. They chose a pathway to group growth that necessitated a substantial increase in resources. Small businesses or farmers would and did join for policy related reasons, but just not in big enough numbers to build the resources desired by leaders to engage in resource-intensive research-based advocacy.

This chapter reports the in/security discourse of the Colombian government. Colombia can be represented as a new war, as a situation of violence fed by criminals in search for profit, as a society at war, as a fragile state or as an internal armed conflict. In the particular case of Colombia, the thesis of state weakness is presented in a direct relationship to the emergence of guerrilla and paramilitary groups. Most of the analyses of the Colombian conflict merge several explanations (new wars, search for profit and failed states), and do not affirm one and only one cause or characterisation of violence. The Democratic Security Policy is the favoured ‘weapon’ of the Colombian government to fight the narco-terrorist threat. Colombian administrations have transformed the representation of the conflict from a communist struggle to a war against narco-terrorism, hand in hand with US foreign policy priorities.

The assessment of Humphrey Jennings' early career generally was passed by biographers and other writers on their way to discussion of the mature work. Jennings' early films are either ignored or noted only briefly, although his foundational films do connect with and inform his early and ongoing intellectual preoccupations. This chapter analyses some of the aspects – modernity, myth, colour and collage – of his earlier works. Jennings' lifelong concern with aspects of technological modernity is evident in his earliest films, Post Haste and Locomotives, with their focus on locomotives as symbols of modern experience. In another way, his films The Farm (1938) and English Harvest (1939) apply and exploit features of a myth of rural England, an ideological strain that Jennings analyses in his studies of British poetry and which he also deploys in various forms in a number of later films. Jennings' early work also includes a number of films shot in colour.

This chapter examines a connection between Jacobean drama and contemporary discourses concerning the Protestant family and its relation to the state. Taking such diverse texts as William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties and King James's writing on government, as well as the popular genre of mothers' legacies, it suggests that the representation and reception of motherhood in drama is coloured by shifts in religious and political pressures rather than because of a new celebration of affective family relations. William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi revisit the focus upon motherhood and meaning treated in the first chapter. In different ways, the potency of the mothers in The Winter's Tale and The Duchess of Malfi is, to quote Hermione, ‘preserv'd’ and memorialised so that motherhood transcends mortality to offer the unthreatening and unthreatened reassurance of everlasting and unconditional love.

This chapter is concerned with the Khrushchev era and the enormous housing programme which attempted to deliver ‘to every family its own apartment’. Khrushchev admitted that the apartments would not be luxurious. Despite Khrushchev's insistence that newly-weds would be entitled to their own apartments, in reality there was little chance of a young married couple with no children receiving an apartment. Women suffered considerable discrimination in housing distribution. It was not only residents of self-build or cooperative housing who were able to feel themselves ‘masters of their world’. The attempt to achieve a high degree of standardisation in the self-contained apartment might have been a way of counteracting its potential for creating a degree of privacy. The Khrushchev housing programme did constitute a major turning point. The Soviet Union was ideologically opposed to the private home ownership which was a prominent part of the American Dream.

This chapter describes the construction of the reawakening of the Israeli Jewish memory of the Nakba as a ‘road to Damascus’ tale told by post- and anti-Zionist Israeli Jews. It tries to fathom the preoccupation of Israeli scholars with Palestine and the Palestinians and asking, after Saul Friedländer's theorisation of Nazism, kitsch and death, whether the Israeli left's preoccupation with the Nakba might harbour a degree of prurient fascination with Israeli atrocities. It then reviews the distinctions between the terms anti-Zionism and post-Zionism. Friedländer's argument is that there is a ‘new discourse’ on Nazism that denotes a kind of aesthetic titillation borne out of the association of Nazism with death. The prominence of the Zionist discourse means that the Israeli Damascene narratives often struggle with the tellers' self-definitions. David Grossman uses his observations to envisage a better future.

This chapter discusses the importance of the physical specialness of the mother's body to her dramatic value. Taking two plays about Patient Griselda written forty years apart (by Phillip and Dekker) and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, it suggests that the body of the mother was subjected to an increasingly voyeuristic public scrutiny, not only on the stage, but in contemporary culture and practice, as maternity was increasingly exposed and controlled through state legislation and the processes of commodification. The discursive tensions created by an ambivalent appreciation of motherhood – sexual and creatural; spiritual and noble; endowing death as it gives life – are contained through performance. Theatre spectators were thus free to take pleasure in the spectacle of the maternal body and of its scrutiny and control. The production of obstetric manuals and also of domestic conduct books where the mother's role is clearly adumbrated is symptomatic of an increased emphasis upon motherhood as a fundamentally social function that is important in ensuring stability in the wider world.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines some of the principal generic features of longitudinal documentary and considers the highly significant role that particular broadcasting institutions have had on their production, promotion and dissemination. It presents the examples of long doc works which resulted in the discovery of Seven Up's two best-known international 'competitors', the German series The Children of Golzow and the Swedish series The Children of Jordbrö. The book explores how the individual works originated, with a special emphasis on the nurturing role of particular institutions. It also explores the affinities that long docs have with soap opera texts, which have similar aspirations to never-endingness. The book concerns to explore the variety of ways in which long doc filmmakers contrive to bring their work to a satisfactory conclusion.

This chapter presents an examination of social conditions and social policies. It specifically argues that the nationalist vision of frugality and simplicity translated into a lack of initiative on the part of successive Irish governments, and children paid a particularly high price for that lack of initiative. It is noted that the larger the family, the more likely it was that the children of the family would experience poverty, poor living conditions and malnutrition as part of their daily lives. Financial constraints aside, the boards of public assistance often displayed a mean spiritedness that may seem staggering to modern sensibilities. Many poor families were broken up when children were sent to industrial schools for no reason other than that their parents could not support them. The life of the average poor legitimate children does not appear to have been all that much better than the life of the illegitimate child.

This chapter discusses the connection between philosophy and ignorance. It examines some of the lessons on ignorance taught by Socrates, and suggests that, while literature and philosophy can be combined and differentiated in a number of ways, the main distinction made with regards to ignorance is on the question of whether or not one moves beyond not knowing. The chapter then studies the ‘disease’ of ignorance, which may be said to make up the very condition of poetry and of literature, and also considers the possibility to see philosophical scepticism as part of, or engaged with, a theory of ignorance.

This chapter examines the nature of the relationship between the emerging public discourse in Ireland and the hegemonic discourse of globalisation. It analyses the discourses of the key institutional actors to determine how the globalisation discourse implicated in the discourses, strategies, policies, and identities of these actors and how the materialisation of globalisation discourse was affected by the domestic institutional configuration. This chapter highlights the fact that the concept of globalisation was relatively absent from Irish public discourse during the period 1996–2001 and this absence was complemented by the existence of an all-powerful economic globalisation agenda.