This article revisits Japan's empire-building in Northeast China through the construction of and reactions to the Daidō hiroba 大同広場 (Plaza of Great Unity) in Shinkyō, showing how Chinese and Japanese challenged the top-down attempt for building a totalitarian empire. These re-interpretations and definitions of Hiroba unveiled the diversity, dynamics, and complexity of Manchukuo society that cannot be fully grasped in a nation-state framework. Moreover, their voices challenged the previous depiction of such imperial monumental space as the physical materialization of imperial governmentality but a contested site where individuals challenged the official vision of Manchukuo. This article examines documents ranging from governmental documents to works of literature in both Chinese and Japanese. Compared to Japanese planners' vision of the Hiroba as a site of governmentality, visitors and local residents held differing interpretations of this space: some Japanese disapproved the attempt to reframe the urban space by a totalitarian regime, and many Chinese redefined the meaning of this “utopian” urban space to accord with their own tradition and everyday life.

This article explores one tumultuous encounter between a religious legal tradition and the modern principle of equality—an encounter that also has the potential to shed light on a much wider cluster of questions. The author tracks the ways that the responsa written by prominent Conservative rabbis on the subject of female rabbinic ordination and gender equality implicitly (but unambiguously) reflect the push toward increased equality that weighed on the movement's trajectory, showing that the debate about the ordination of female rabbis reveals two principal trends in Conservative legal rulings, which differ in their responses to the challenge of egalitarianism and their visions of the law, and notes two outlier responsa that cannot be neatly classified within either trend. The author then examines the deep-seated historical, ideational, and sociological processes concurrent with the rise of what some have called the egalitarian age, which have produced these diverging responses and visions, and it determines an appropriate framework to understand them. The author shows that the fight for increased gender equality is situated within an intricate social context that imbues it with meaning and shapes its outcomes and modes of expression. In concluding, the author suggests applying the insights gained in the course of the analysis to other circumstances in which gender egalitarianism clashes with religious tradition. The framework by which the ordination of women in the Conservative movement is analyzed also proves useful, mutatis mutandis, in understanding and comparing the responses of other faith communities as they deal with challenges caused by the egalitarian age.

In February 1915, non-citizen teachers throughout California abruptly learned that they would soon lose their jobs when state officials announced that local and county governments were required to enforce a long-forgotten anti-alien public employment law. In response, one Canadian immigrant teacher, Katharine Short, launched a diplomatic, legal, political, and public relations campaign against the policy. Earning the support of powerful (Anglo-)Canadian nationalists in wartime and a favorable depiction in California news coverage as a “practically American” Canadian woman, Short’s efforts culminated in an exemption for most immigrant teachers from the state’s nativist public employment policies. This article recovers, recounts, and contextualizes the California Alien Teachers Controversy of 1915 at the center of transformations in the political development, law, and politics of American citizenship and citizenship rights from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It testifies to the growing power and powers of state governments to shape immigrants' lives and livelihoods via alienage law long into the mid-twentieth century, the rhetorical strength and courtroom limits of “right to contract” arguments in the context of anti-alien hiring and licensure disputes, and the disparate impact of these nativist laws on immigrants owing to inequalities of race, gender, and class and how those inequalities shaped the less-than-inclusive aims and strategies of Katharine Short in her campaign to alter the state's nativist public employment policies.

Moving away from the text-centered paradigm in film studies, the present research explores the relationship between the growing popularity of the film in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century and city governance in the International Settlement. It argues that the rise of movie halls contributed to creating a new kind of crowd that blended Chinese moviegoers with non-Chinese viewers. The emergence of the cinema as a space where people of different racial and ethnic origins encountered impelled the Shanghai Municipal Council – the governing body of the International Settlement in Shanghai – to respond by implementing new measures of public safety and altering its decades-long unspoken rules of segregation in the realm of everyday life. For Chinese enlightenment intellectuals and government officials, meanwhile, anxiety over their fellow Chinese's lack of basic decorum in public spaces arose with the intense intermingling of Chinese and non-Chinese filmgoers under the same roof. Thus, the cinema became a “contact zone” – a space of asymmetrical relations resulting not necessarily from colonists' exercise of colonial power but from the Chinese elite's wrapping of the discussion of movie theater etiquette reform within a political and ideological framework of modernization, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.

This article provides an insight into the heteroglossic and intersectional construction of fatherhood in the self-recorded, spontaneous talk of a group of young men from ethnically and racially mixed working-class backgrounds in southeast London. By adopting an interactional sociolinguistic approach, informed by Bakhtin's (1981, 1984, 1986) work on dialogicality and Tannen's (1989, 2004) notion of constructed dialogue, this article explores the young men's use of voices for their positioning in a range of fathering discourses which are shaped by and shape intersectional and hegemonic masculinities. Intersections of race, ethnicity, and social class inform many of the young men's positions, especially in their talk about the influences of hip hop on their children. This polyphony of voices allows the group to balance traditional discourses of fathers as providers, protectors, and moral guides with contemporary models of intimate and involved fatherhood, but also competing discourses of virile masculinity and bad boy identity. (Dialogicality, discourse, ethnicity, fatherhood, hegemony, heteroglossia, intersectionality, identity, masculinity, race, social class, voice)*

Marketing research shows that organizations tailor communication for particular customer ‘segments’, but little is known about the live design of interaction for different categories. To investigate this, we examine telephone calls to a holiday sales call-centre (for ‘seniors’) and a university admissions call-centre (for ‘young’ students). While topically different, call-takers in both datasets requested callers’ email addresses in order to progress service. Using conversation analysis, we examine how these requests were designed, where and how ‘age’ was made relevant, and how subsequent service provision was handled in a way that matched callers’ presumed age categories. Contrastive to the static notion of ‘segments’, we show how recipient design is bound up with categorial considerations while being responsive to the live unfolding of actual interaction. The article demonstrates how a comparative collection-based approach can be used to analyse the relevance of social categories in situations where this is implicit or ambiguous. (Membership categorization, customer segmentation, conversation analysis, recipient design, requests, age)*

It has long been assumed that lead glazing technology preceded glassmaking in the Western world and that the technological transfer was from glazes to glass. Here, we present new evidence for the reverse, the indigenous innovation of glassmaking and its transfer to glazes in early Islamic al-Andalus (Spain). Compositional analyses show that Islamic lead glazes from Córdoba are intimately related to a distinct type of high-lead glass, suggesting a connection between the two technologies. The archaeological remains from a pottery workshop indicate that the glazing process initially involved the production of a lead glass and is not linked to earlier Roman or other contemporary glazing technologies. The data also demonstrate that the potters not only used the same materials and techniques but borrowed stylistic and decorative models from glassmaking.

Following indigenous thought, this article urges readers to understand that the past lies before us, more knowable than our ideologies ordinarily allow. The article specifically asserts that if, for England, imperialism was the last model of city-building, in the United States it was the first. A pattern of ‘improvement’ financed by negative externalities established from first contact remains visible, especially in US metropolitan areas. The article's example is one site in Ohio. Indicative of virtually all US metropolitan areas, it has nonetheless a specific history that includes an occasion, recorded in negotiator Hendrick Aupaumut's 1792 narrative, when a break from the pattern was possible.

In this paper, we carried out two experimental studies to investigate whether verbal tenses, in their perspectival usages, give access to the speaker’s perspective. Study 1 is an annotation study in which annotators evaluated corpus excerpts as expressing situations or narrating events in a subjective or objective way. We manipulated access to the verbal tense: half of the annotators saw the tense of the verbs, and half saw only infinitive forms of the verbs. Study 2 is a self-paced reading experiment in which we examined how native speakers of French process utterances with the Passé Simple when it is preceded by aujourd’hui (semantic incompatibility solved pragmatically by perspective-taking), hier (semantic and pragmatic compatibility) and en ce moment (semantic incompatibility which cannot be solved pragmatically). The results of Study 1 suggest that the subjective interpretation of an utterance is not triggered by its verbal tense. Study 2 questions the idea that perspective-taking is a component of speaker’s subjectivity. In general, our experimental findings do not support the hypothesis that verbal tenses give access to speaker’s subjectivity, a theoretical hypothesis which has never before been directly experimentally tested.

Deception, Bridgeman and Penguin are the three most recently active volcanic islands in the South Shetland Islands. Since the discovery of the archipelago in 1819, Deception Island has erupted on frequent occasions, most recently in August 1970. A number of nineteenth-century observers reported fumarolic or volcanic activity from Bridgeman Island. No eyewitness accounts of activity from Penguin Island have been found. A chronological list detailing the historic reports from Bridgeman Island was compiled to compare and establish their veracity. This process revealed a consistency of observation from independent observers. An effort has been made to consider if any of these reports of activity may have belonged instead to Penguin Island volcano, 60 km (32 NM) away. A review of the timing of discovery and availability of the first charts of the South Shetlands was also examined to narrow the period when mariners might have mistaken one island for another. Only the three earliest observations of activity from an unnamed volcano, during the short period when no maps were available, may be questioned. A useful chart of the region was published in 1822, and all subsequent observations of activity were from Bridgeman, not Penguin Island.

In Italy, living close to or even within a place of business is not in and of itself unusual. Forms of housing in Italy are similar to many other European countries in that people primarily live in mixed-use spaces. It is common to have an apartment above cafés, bars, and bakeries. In this article, I examine how this form of mixed-use residence shapes market practices, decision-making, and labour relations among owners and workers. I argue that the spaces in which employees participate in the market economy also mirror their commitments to family. By examining workspaces across two food certifications in Milan, Italy – a Made in Italy certification (Food Italy) and a halal certification (Halal Italia) – I argue that Italian kinship networks structure how workers in each business operate. This intervention contributes to a larger literature on the cultural dimensions of capitalism.

In April 1848, a proclamation of friendship to the Germans sent by the Provisional Government of Milan to the Fünfzigerausschuss (Committee of Fifty) in Frankfurt was rejected by the latter, creating widespread outrage in Italy. Concurrently, a parallel controversy over the possession of South Tyrol arose between the two revolutions. This article provides an exploratory analysis of these two episodes, examining the role they played in shaping relations between the two revolutions, and in influencing the image Italians had of the revolution in Germany. Shedding light on an episode until now overlooked by historiography, this article seeks to contribute to the salient debate on the peculiar relationship between internationalist ideals and nationalist claims during the 1848 revolution. It argues that the disillusioning impact on revolutionary audiences of specific ‘episodes of friction’, such as those examined in this article,was greater than the ‘natural convergence of goals’ of the various national revolutions in 1848.

This paper traces France’s role in the Antarctic from 1840, when explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville discovered the slice of the white continent he named Terre Adélie, to the present day. Since World War II, Terre Adélie has been the site of a host of performances of sovereignty: the French have built bases, drawn maps, conducted scientific investigations and erected plaques. But France’s commitment to Terre Adélie has been tested and has fallen into crisis several times. The history of France in Antarctica is a tale of ambition, ambivalence, trade-offs and political strategy. This paper aims to elucidate this story, focusing on the concept of sovereignty and the nexus of scientific and political interests. I argue that France’s relationship with the Antarctic has been characterised by continual tension, by peaks and troughs and by brinkmanship on the part of actors with their own stakes. While there is broad agreement that Terre Adélie serves a fundamental national interest, I show that France’s ambitions on the white continent are far from decided. With its focus on France, which has largely been left out of the growing body of literature on the Antarctic, this paper contributes to building a robust historical understanding of Antarctic claims.