Chapter 6 considers how the Liberal Democrats were exploited in legislative terms within the coalition. The chapter provides an overview of the coalition in terms of legislative cohesion. Having identifying the high rate of dissent, and the issues that provoked dissent, the chapter will explore how despite this it made little impact upon the credibility of Cameron as Prime Minister – i.e. perceptions differed for him as a coalition Prime Minister experiencing rebellion. The chapter will also provide an overview of the consequences for the Liberal Democrats of binding themselves legislatively to the Conservatives. The chapter will highlight the issue of austerity being in the national interest and not ideologically driven and tuition fees, as examples of how the distinctiveness of the Liberal Democrats was undermined by being in coalition. Having evaluated the conundrum of providing unity to the government versus maintaining their own distinctiveness for electoral reasons, the chapter considers the limited evidence of the Liberal Democrats being seen to have influence within the coalition. The chapter identifies how this amounted to a success for Cameron as evidenced from the gains made by the Conservatives, at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, at the 2015 General Election.

This volume argues that curatorship may be ‘recalled’and remade through collaborative relationships withcommunities leading to experiments in curatorialtheory and practice. What can museums of ethnographyin the Americas and Europe learn from the experienceof nations where distinctive forms of Indigenousmuseology are emerging and reshaping the conventionsof curatorial practice? In addressing this question,this chapter draws on research by the authors,including interviews with Māori curators, museumprofessionals, academics and community leadersthroughout Aotearoa New Zealand, exploringconnections with the wider Pacific and the world. Indoing so, it focuses on the ‘figure of thekaitiaki’, the Māori ‘guardian’, as a particularlocal development of the ‘figure of the curator’. Itconcludes that museums across the world can learnfrom Pacific experiments and become active agents inshaping cultural revival and future potentialitieson a global scale.

Danish scholarly engagement with the Middle East began in earnest in the second half of the eighteenth century. This was due to Denmark’s political engagement with the piracy states of the Maghreb, but by 1830 this engagement had come to an end. Despite a strong romantic attachment to the Middle East in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, scholarship was concentrated on the study of the classical languages and literatures and few (Danish) scholars ever lived in the region. In the decades following the Second World War, the Middle East as a political entity was largely neglected. Middle East Studies were finally introduced at the University of Odense in 1981, and the two major universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus followed suit by modernising their Oriental departments in the 1990s and 2000s, respectively. Amongst other factors, jihadi terrorism, the cartoon crisis and the thorny issue of immigration have had an immense effect on scholarship and teaching methods. In the public debate, scholars are often criticised for ignoring religion and culture as factors of influence on Middle Eastern society and politics. This chapter argues that, while the new engagement has led to renewed interest and investment in Middle East Studies, some of the old deficiencies have not been overcome. In particular, few scholars pay attention to local Middle Eastern debates.

Teaching the Middle East in Europe cannot ignore its politicised nature: where we typically acknowledge the power–knowledge nexus in research, all too often similar dynamics in teaching are left unexplored. In this chapter I give a personal account of how my teaching ‘the Middle East’ in Europe has developed in a direct and inevitable interaction with the political context: local events have shaped the Dutch political – and by extension academic –context so much that they influence almost every aspect of ‘doing the Middle East’ in the Netherlands today. On the one hand, I show how, in this politicised context, public naming and shaming of perceived ‘left’ or ‘anti-Semitic’ university professors, as well as fierce accusations of bias, via lawfare or otherwise, can lead to self-censorship and a sense of isolation in teaching, especially for early career scholars. On the other hand, I show how students in a classroom environment have changed as well and argue that, in our teaching, we need to apply that critical, ethical and ongoing reflexivity that we normally reserve for our research activities and create the in-depth learning experience that does not deny but embraces the political contestation that is academic knowledge and the transfer thereof.

This chapter explores the issue of the relation between metropole and colony, as well as of the loyalty of imperial subjects, by exploring the phenomenon of compensation, paid by the government in London to those who had incurred losses in relation to the empire. It is, therefore, a study of imperialism in practice, and of the risks associated with imperial expansion, in terms of the response from the centre to failure at the periphery. This is undertaken in order to analyse the assumptions and principles that structured the making, maintenance and loss of empire, themes that require much greater attention than they have received hitherto.

This chapter uses Mass Observation (MO) survey material to assess initial responses to the outbreak of war in the summer of 1950. It first explores the utility of MO surveys and diaries to the social history of the war, before analysing responses in detail, alongside early television and newspaper reports. It concludes that the first few months of the Korean War were a worrying time for many Britons, as anxieties gathered around several areas: aerial attack, nuclear warfare and the mobilisation of male citizens.

Thomas Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy some time in the late 1500s, in an Elizabethan London that was busy reinventing English culture. The legitimate and regionally oriented Plantagenets had been defeated by Henry VII, who quickly moved to establish a centralised, grandiose, imperial state, which his descendants, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, expanded and consolidated. The Spanish Tragedy is the tragedy of a naive and hardworking man at the table of the rich, who is robbed of everything he loves - including justice. In The Spanish Tragedy, the biggest technical problem in the adaptation is pruning away all the extraneous bits and, perhaps, leaving in some of the play's Additions, if they go to pointing out the theme the adaptor has determined has the most relevance for the audience. The Spanish Tragedy is the story of Hieronimo, a hard worker at the table of the King.

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This chapter provides an overview of the historical development and current state of Middle East Studies in French academia. It starts by distinguishing between different French academic traditions when it comes to studying and analysing the Middle East, provides an overview of their historical roots, and traces their changing relevance and evolution over time. In the process, the chapter places a particular emphasis on the interplay of these traditions with France’s evolving overseas interests and her domestic politics and self-perception, noting the significant role that notions of nostalgia and France’s evolving relationship with its former colonies have played in shaping scholarly traditions. The chapter concludes with some observations on the current state of Middle East Studies in France, its wider international relevance, as well as some more general observations on the interplay of scholarship and politics in France’s Fifth Republic.

The aim of chapter 7 is to consider how Cameron responded to the challenges to the existing political order. Focusing in on the rise of multi-party politics, the chapter identifies how the increasing electoral support for the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party and UKIP threatened the existing dimensionality through which British politics operated. The chapter considers the reasons why Cameron decided to offer a referendum on electoral reform and explains why he was successful at nullifying this threat. The chapter examines why Cameron was forced to offer a referendum on Scottish independence, and explores how it failed to quell the tide of Scottish nationalism, but it did create an electoral advantage for the Conservatives given the collapse of Scottish Labour. The third case study of the chapter identifies why Cameron had to offer a referendum on continued membership of the European Union. The chapter focuses in on how the electoral threat from UKIP, and the infighting within his own parliamentary ranks, could have been overcome with a comfortable remain vote. The reason why Cameron failed is attributed to the weakness of the renegotiated terms of membership, and his misplaced assumption that economic security would trump concerns about immigration.

This chapter, by Kath Stevenson, explains that traditions of Christian knowledge are an abiding preoccupation for William Langland in Piers Plowman, with Langland exploring fundamental questions about the pre-eminence or otherwise of abstract learning, textually mediated and transmitted (‘clergie’), over experiential knowledge (‘kynde knowynge’) and about the role of learning in Christian salvation. What good is knowledge? In an age of abstruse academic discourse, in which Langland himself was deeply versed, Langland’s protagonist Will searches urgently for the knowledge that is truly valuable, that is, the knowledge that will enable him to save his soul. Stevenson locates Langland’s ambivalence concerning the efficacy of textually mediated learning within the wider contexts of vernacular theology in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in particular shows Langland’s treatment of the Passion in the central passus of his poem to be informed by the developing traditions of affective piety. For Langland the Passion can function as a site in which textual and experiential knowledge are united, with abstract intellectual knowledge becoming transfigured as it is fused with ‘kynde knowynge’.