Part of the United Kingdom's national reconstruction following the Second World War was reforming its self-image as a global power in light of imperial decline. This recasting took place across political and cultural spheres and emphasized the Commonwealth, idealized as a friendly collection of current and former colonies linked by British culture. In this article, I demonstrate how music broadcasting functioned as a site of diplomacy, using white, middle-class taste for light entertainment to reinforce British values at the Empire's twilight. I focus on musical depictions of the Commonwealth on the BBC radio programme Commonwealth of Song. Using archival records, I reconstruct debates concerning Commonwealth representation and its importance to British citizens. I argue that Commonwealth of Song was a site of testing and reformulating new sonic constructions of globally minded ‘Britishness’ in the 1950s, yet conflicting messaging about what musics and people should represent the Commonwealth led to a lukewarm reception.

This article explores how Marshallese radiation songs, written during and after the nuclear testing period as nuclear survivors tried to make sense of their sufferings, yield insight into processes of imperial ruination, rupture, and fragmentation by resounding the powerful impress of radioactive decay in Marshallese lives. In assessing the parameters through which radiation becomes sensible, how, and to whom, it becomes all the clearer how the US nuclear project can be considered in terms of ‘imperial ruination’. US geopolitical accrual has depended on the structural dispossession of Marshallese from their Indigenous agency rooted in and routed through their matrilineal culture. Focusing on women's performances from the Rongelapese community, the presence of radiation – lyrically and affectively – can be traced through vocalized moments of decay that intimate how rubble is embodied and shared in the aftermath of nuclear destruction.

This collection of articles proposes a theoretical model for understanding and analysing the persistence of music making as a response to urban catastrophe. In the Introduction, the authors present an overview of recent humanistic literature on ruin aesthetics, positioning music as a vital yet overlooked dimension of aesthetic responses to disaster. The forum delves into the moral and ethical complexities of performing in ruins from second-century Jerusalem to contemporary Haiti. By tracing the sound of music in and about ruins, this forum offers a timely reflection on the nature of post-catastrophic music making, proposing new directions for analysing the relationships between music, traumatic memory, and spaces of performance.

A travelogue of an Israeli musicologist, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, her real and imaginary sonic journey roams between ruins and rubble in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She takes ruins as iconic, allegoric, and reverberating; partially resisting the ravages of time, enshrining sounds and memory. She deems rubble as formless, plain, and voiceless, devoid of identity, transient, and forgetful. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce by the Romans is her starting point, and the currently occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli armed forces is where she ends. The imaginary soundscapes she unfolds resonates forlorn heavenly voices, Nazi youth's ditties, Israeli pop songs, operatic voices, and redemptive and subversive German and Israeli oratorios.

How language learners and teachers actually use pedagogical materials in classrooms is a ‘groundbreaking’ subject of applied linguistics inquiry (Tarone, 2014, p. 653), referred to in this research agenda article as materials use. We begin with a theoretically-oriented overview of language education scholarship on pedagogical materials (henceforth materials). Then, we focus on seven qualitative research tasks across three thematic areas, namely materials use and: (A) language pedagogy, (B) classroom interaction, and (C) language diversity, culture, and power. The first section on pedagogy outlines research tasks on: (1) the roles of materials in classrooms, (2) the influences of materials on practicing educators’ expertise, and (3) how language teacher education programmes address materials use. The second section on classroom interaction proposes inquiry into: (4) polysemiotic patterns of materials-in-interaction, and (5) the expected and unexpected outcomes of materials regarding students’ target language use. The third section focuses on: (6) teachers’ and learners’ responses to diverse linguistic varieties and cultures represented in materials, and (7) instructional materials used in language policy and planning endeavours. Throughout this article we reference interdisciplinary connections to curriculum studies, cultural studies, sociology, and materials scholarship in general education. The seven research tasks are critical next steps for understanding materials use – a vast new field that promises to advance language education practice and theory.

The dual theatre complex of the Württembergische Staatstheater in Stuttgart sustained serious damage during the Second World War. While the larger theatre was eventually able to be repaired, the smaller theatre was destroyed, leading to a multi-phased and controversial process to determine how best to replace it. Many of Stuttgart's citizens publicly pleaded that the smaller theatre should be reconstructed according to its original design, in order to restore its historical beauty and its integrity with the complex. The company's Intendant and numerous architects, however, took a more modern approach that manifested in a variety of proposed designs, including that by Hans Volkart, which opened in 1962. Countering the binary represented by ‘faithful reconstruction’ on one end (Vienna, Munich) and by completely modern designs on the other (West Berlin, Cologne), the case of Stuttgart perhaps serves as a better metaphor for the compromises of continuity and change in post-war culture.

The sonic aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti continue to reverberate throughout the cultural landscape, particularly within the relatively small but long-standing mizik klasik community. In this article, I analyse the sometimes divergent performances of a composition that commemorates that tragedy. Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume wrote ‘N'ap Debat’ (‘We're Hangin’ On’) from Los Angeles shortly after the earthquake. One performance of this work takes place far from the site of ruin, voiced by distant observers. The other performance happens in Haiti, sung by its survivors. Both performances transform rubble into ruin.

During the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture, which he believed had suffered a grave injury. This article considers how Rochberg reconstructed his wartime sketches – short miniatures composed during the European campaign – into material for his Sixth Symphony (1986). I argue that Rochberg clearly conceived of musical reconstruction as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed accountable for the decline of Western culture that he increasingly perceived towards the end of his life. The article ends with a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption that challenges Rochberg's false sense of moral superiority and the motivations of ‘rubble narratives’ more generally.

The 2014 film Whiplash depicts successful jazz drumming as an athletic exhibition of speed and endurance, in a manner that reflects its protagonist's idolization of Buddy Rich (1917–87). The crowd-pleasing virtuosity of Rich and Whiplash has drawn critics’ ire, but this article interrogates the ideas of musical authenticity that underpin their complaints, and offers a more productive analysis of the film's drum kit performances and their inspiration, informed by a range of jazz, film, and performance scholarship. Specific attention is drawn to the performances’ visual attractions. Whiplash's fast editing style and shots of exertion – grimacing, sweat, blood – give non-expert viewers a sense of drumming's physical and mental demands, and much the same is true of Rich's exaggerated movements and expressions, whether seen live or (as is commonly the case) amplified by a screen's mediation.

This article explores the shift to non-rhoticity in Oldham (UK), using oral history interviews recorded in the 1980s, with speakers born between 1893 and 1929. We first account for the linguistic constraints on /r/ use and explore macro-level social patterns, where the women were more advanced in the change. We investigate this finding further using a modified version of the lectal focusing in interaction method (Sharma & Rampton 2015), tracking two speakers’ variation through the course of an interaction, and providing insight into the social meaning of rhoticity for these speakers. We suggest that, for them, rhoticity may be ideologically linked to tradition and older ways of life, and non-rhoticity may be ideologically linked to modernity and mobility, and the gender split may partly reflect the men and women's differing orientations to these concepts. We also evaluate the effectiveness of applying modern methods, such as LFI analysis, to archival data. (Rhoticity, social meaning, language variation and change, gender, sociophonetics)*

This article focuses on one section of the former Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria that incorporates diverse memory events after the political change in 1989. The article concentrates on the Hungarian region during the last nearly three decades and investigates the actors and the memories of the former historic period, which show a uniquely diverse set of realizations. Among others, two private museums about the Iron Curtain (established and managed by two former border guards) and a memorial park (commemorating only one day, established and managed by a civil organization) in comparison to the official narrative presented in the last room of the permanent exhibition at the Hungarian National Museum in the capital are subjects of this investigation. Besides the actual memory places and the actors (those who initiated, maintain, and visit these memory spots), their relationship and role in the formation of the regional identity are also analyzed. As theoretical background, the connection between heritage, museum, and memory; the notion of post-Soviet nostalgia; authenticity; and the importance of time are activated for the analysis and to disentangle the complexity of the chosen case study.

This article surveys nation-building in post-Soviet Azerbaijan over the country’s first quarter-century of restored independence. It examines the core dimensions of ethno-demographic and national minority issues, language policy, and the role of religion in the development of the state’s formal ideology Azerbaycançılıq (Azerbaijanism). The article highlights the nexus of nation-building and regime-building as a dominant trend over the last two decades, generating what we term “civic dominion”: the domination of a regime tradition, legitimated through the imagery and ideology of civic nationhood. Finally, the article considers the role of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict as a long-standing exception to the ostensibly civic ethos of post-Soviet Azerbaijani nation-building.

The issue of duplicates and duplication in ethnographic collection is frequently regarded as a process that begins and ends in the museum as a fundamental act of the process of curating. In contrast, this article maintains, this practice occurred all along the chain of collecting, where indigenous artefacts operated as items of exchange in the context of the colonial encounter. Using the example of German New Guinea, the article maintains that epistemological concerns, as symbolic currency both in terms of inter-museum exchange and in terms of contributing to individual and institutional prestige, guiding ethnographic intuitions had little influence on colonial resident collectors. Colonial residents, who resented the heavy hand of colonial and museum officials in Berlin, infused duplication with their own desires, which included commercial gain or the conferment of the many German state decorations. The colonized indigenous population benefited from the increasing demand for their material culture, which provided valuable items and bargaining chips in the emerging colonial exchange. Duplicates are identified as doppelgängers to explore the political tensions that emerged in connection with duplication among museum officials and European and indigenous colonial residents.

What is faith? And what makes faith reasonable, when it is so? I first defend approaching the question of faith and its reasonableness by starting from faith in the religious context. Next, I develop a ‘venture’ theory of a specific kind of faith of which religious – and specifically Christian – practical commitment to a whole worldview may be taken methodologically as a paradigm case. Then I consider the conditions under which faith-commitment of this general type may be reasonable. I suggest that faith-ventures of this kind are morally permissible only when they are made reasonably, with epistemic integrity. I consider the role an appeal to epistemic externalism may have in defending the epistemic integrity of venturing beyond (though not against) the available evidence. I advance a moderate fideist thesis (inspired by William James's ‘justification of faith’), and consider the debate between Jamesian fideists and evidentialists for whom epistemic integrity requires commitment to be made to truth-claims only to the extent supported by evidence for their truth.

This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination with Spondylus shells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens. Spondylus shells were crucial for regulating gift and commercial exchanges in the societies of both regions. Famously, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski claimed that these shells were an essential element of the gift-based kula exchange, which helped him distinguish Western capitalist society from less developed societies without commercial trade. Yet Spondylus shells were also collected and exchanged as gifts amongst British and European naturalists in this period, performing the same roles as in Melanesia. In addition, such gift exchanges could only come into being thanks to the actions of commercially motivated dealers, located both in the Pacific and in Europe, who were the suppliers of these shells both to Melanesian participants in the kula and to Western natural historians and collectors. These observations call into question earlier arguments that equate modernity with the rise of commercial capitalism. It is instead claimed that commercial and gift exchanges were intricately connected and reliant on each other throughout the period, whether in the worlds of Western museums or in Pacific archipelagos. The act of turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens was the key tool for regulating these exchanges.