Arena or Temple?

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-203
Author(s):  
Mark Seymour

States anxious to wrest power from religious authorities viewed their courts of law as quasi-sacred spaces, often characterizing them as a form of ‘temple’ to signal the reverential emotional style required within. Foregrounding the emotional overlap between religious and legal spaces, this chapter portrays Rome’s Court of Assizes during the Fadda murder trial as both secular temple and emotional arena with great symbolic value for Liberal Italy. The argument is contextualized against analysis of the symbolic role of law at crucial stages in the development of other states, particularly England and France. After unification, Italian courts were opened to the public, in some cases for the first time. The civic audience in legal hearings, especially in criminal cases, was a fundamental tenet of Italy’s liberal ideology. The chapter analyses public participation in the Fadda trial against the background of a state’s need to engage its citizens in spaces and rituals that were unmistakably identified with the nation. The Fadda trial’s fascination both helped and hindered the state’s cause, drawing great crowds but provoking emotions that threatened to blur the line between dignified court and popular arena. The trial lasted a month and dominated the nation’s newspapers, drawing Italians from all over the peninsula into the drama in Rome. Ultimately the event was an opportunity to establish the contours of a new type of social space, a new emotional arena, for a new nation.

1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Lonsdale

This paper attempts to provide a frame of reference for evaluating the role of ordinary rural Africans in national movements, in the belief that scholarly preoccupation with élites will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism. Kenya has been taken as the main field of enquiry, with contrasts and comparisons drawn from Uganda and Tanganyika. The processes of social change are discussed with a view to establishing that by the end of the colonial period one can talk of peasants rather than tribesmen in some of the more progressive areas. This change entailed a decline in the leadership functions of tribal chiefs who were also the official agents of colonial rule, but did not necessarily mean the firm establishment of a new type of rural leadership. The central part of the paper is taken up with an account of the competition between these older and newer leaderships, for official recognition rather than a mass following. A popular following was one of the conditions for such recognition, but neither really achieved this prior to 1945 except in Kikuyuland, and there the newer leaders did not want official recognition. After 1945 the newer leadership, comprising especially traders and officials of marketing co-operatives, seems everywhere to have won a properly representative position, due mainly to the enforced agrarian changes which brought the peasant face to face with the central government, perhaps for the first time. This confrontation, together with the experience of failure in earlier and more local political activity, resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated rather than instigated by the educated élite.


Author(s):  
Tolga Demirbas

Regional development agencies (RDAs) are governance-based institutions that aim to help a specific region to socioeconomically develop by ensuring cooperation among the public sector, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations within that specific geographical region. In Turkey, which was not able to eliminate the regional differences via centralized policies, development agencies (DAs) were established as “the new-type organizations of public management” in the early 2000s. Taking part in regional development that is a vital area and not having a usual organization have increased the expectations from these agencies. Today, there is a great pressure on DAs concerning their accountability. The best way to understand the level of accountability of DAs that have an approximately 10-year history is to analyze the annual reports they have to announce to the public. This chapter carries out a content analysis on disclosure items in the annual reports of 25 DAs in Turkey and examines their level of accountability to their stakeholders.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Smart

Urban metropolitan city-centers offer the most complex, socially connective environments in the built world. The social structures fundamentally embedded in city life are, however increasingly being overshadowed by an isolating system of city densification. The City of Toronto, as a territory of exploration, is one of many cities that are evolving a dense array of restrictive boundaries that increasingly challenge human connectivity, and the deep-rooted ability of these environments to establish vibrant city life. It is the role of architecture to mediate the relationships between the public and private territories and to understand how these environments are utilized and engaged by the surrounding context. This thesis has extracted critical environmental components exemplified in city, community, and building territories, and has re-integrated these defining characteristics into an alternative design strategy that establishes a balanced symbiotic relationship between the private and public realms of Toronto’s future City Core.


Author(s):  
Olivier Walusinski

An exhaustive biography of French neuropsychiatrist Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904) has never been undertaken. Gilles de la Tourette worked closely with the nineteenth-century founder of neurology in Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot. His name is universally known because of the eponymous, disabling syndrome that affects 0.9% of children/adolescents. Unpublished family archives, as well as Gilles de la Tourette’s correspondence with the Parisian journalist Georges Montorgueil, conserved at the national Archives in Paris, were examined together with press and police archives to portray Georges Gilles de la Tourette’s family and professional life in an original light. These archives have never before been studied or made available to the public. How the eponymous syndrome was isolated, the errors initially made in its description, the hidden role of Jean-Martin Charcot, and the disputes with other authors are covered in detail based on multiple sources, original or already published. An in-depth analysis of the genesis of Gilles de la Tourette’s prolific neurological and psychiatric works within their historical context rounds out this biography. Major figures of neurology of the time are also featured—including Freud, Charcot and his son, Brissaud, and Babiński. Interwoven with Gilles de la Tourette’s life and times are discussions of politics, theater, literature, the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, and numerous letters exchanged with Jules Claretie of the Académie Française to highlight his significant involvement in each of these domains. The book concludes with a complete bibliography of all works written by Gilles de la Tourette, compiled for the first time.


2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter E. Thomas

The number of people in Australia that are currently covered by a hospital private health insurance product continues to rise every quarter. In September 2010, for the first time since the introduction of the public universal social insurance scheme, Medicare, more than 10 million persons in Australia are covered by private health insurance. Although the number of persons covered by private health insurance continues to grow, the quality and level of cover that members are holding is changing significantly. In an effort to limit premium rises and to reduce the benefits paid for treatment, private health insurers have introduced, and moved a large number of existing members to, less-than-comprehensive private health insurance policies. These policies, known as ‘exclusionary’ policies, are changing the dynamics of private health insurance in Australia. After examining the emergence and prevalence of these products, this commentary gives three different examples to illustrate how such products are changing the nature of private health insurance in Australia and are now set to create a series of policy issues that will require future attention.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 194
Author(s):  
John R Bates

The Public Health Laboratory Network had its inaugural meeting on 26 June 1997. The meeting was chaired by Professor Lyn Gilbert who played a pivotal role in establishing this group. This was the first time that all the state and territory public health laboratory directors had been called to meet together. Members expressed a strong desire to communicate more closely on issues of public health importance and recognised the importance of promoting the role of public health laboratories in outbreak investigations and routine and enhanced surveillance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daisy Payling

AbstractThe Second World War and the rise of social medicine in 1940s Britain reframed population health as a social problem in need of state investigation. The resulting government inquiry, the Survey of Sickness, sampled the whole adult population of England and Wales, engaging a broad and diverse cross-section in public health research for the first time. Complaints made against the Survey of Sickness reveal a complex set of relationships between different sections of the public and the British state. This article situates complaints about privacy, liberty, and wasted resources, as well as challenges to the authority of survey fieldworkers, in the context of wider resistance to postwar controls. By viewing these protests and criticisms in light of the material circumstances of the people who made them, this article argues that, for those with social, economic, and political capital, the role of the public in public health was up for negotiation in postwar Britain. The everyday politics of the survey's doorstep encounters were heavily influenced by gendered notions of home and citizenship. This exploration of how different sections of the public were constructed by public health and how they responded to that construction describes the hierarchies of expertise under formation while illuminating how class and gender informed contemporary understandings of citizenship in the emerging postwar British state.


2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Rutherford

This article examines the role NGOs have played in placing and controlling the landmineban issue on the international arms control agenda, which eventually changed state behavior toward landmines. It develops a framework for agenda setting to examine how and why NGOs were successful in this role. More importantly, the article also examines how NGOs were able to generate state action toward the support of the Ottawa Treaty banning antipersonnel landmines, which marked the first time a weapon in widespread use has been banned. The article makes two interrelated arguments. First, NGOs initiated the landmine ban by placing it on the international arms control agenda, which gained intense media and public attention for the cause. The NGOs accomplished their goal by utilizing cognitive attribution strategies to educate the public about the minimal military utility of landmines and the humanitarian problems they pose. Second, NGOs changed states’ perception toward the legality and use of landmines once the issue was on the agenda by highlighting the horrible effects and disproportionate consequences of landmine use, playing leadership games with influential individuals and states, and claiming that antiban states were using incoherent arguments. In comparison, NGOs have not been included in the agenda-setting processes of most other major arms control and disarmament treaties, which typically are negotiated at the behest of major powers. These arguments address the broader question of agency in world politics by showing potential conditions of how NGOs can instigate governments to address issues in a way that may culminate in international law.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francine May ◽  
Fiona Black

Objectives – To describe aspects of the 21st century role of the public library as a physical space by observing the actual use of a selection of public libraries. This study seeks to reveal how patrons are using and experiencing these institutions as spaces and how patrons and staff characterize the role of public libraries in communities. Methods – A multiple case study design was used to examine three urban and three small town public libraries within Nova Scotia, Canada. A triangulated set of methods including patron interviews and questionnaires, staff interviews, and seating sweeps was used to develop answers to the research questions. Results – These public libraries are functioning as successful public places in that they are community spaces used in a multitude of ways and where patrons feel welcome. These libraries play important roles in the lives of respondents and, while respondents were willing to give critical feedback, they generally described the spaces positively. Patron use and experience of these library spaces can be broken into three themes that describe the roles of public libraries in communities. These include the role of provider of books and information, provider of access to technology and provider of a social space where members of the public are welcome. Conclusions – Patron experiences in Nova Scotia public libraries show that libraries are vibrant places that are highly valued by their communities. A number of common themes about the use and perception of these spaces emerged, yet when examined individually each library was also revealed to be a unique place, reflecting the particular qualities of the community and the physical space of the library building itself. It is clear that public libraries are complex institutions which play a variety of valuable roles in the community.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pegah Rategh

Nowadays, due to economic dynamics, modernity, technology and urban sprawl, humans are suffering from “placelessness”. A look at the urban fabric of metropolitan cities makes evident that public places are losing their distinctive idiosyncrasies. 21st-century built environments are diminishing the unique characters that make places noteworthy. The problem with this is that people have the desire to associate with distinctive places. Ignoring this tendency will create a type of environment where places do not matter any more. Public spaces that serve as platforms for life are not only essential to the identity of cities but also provide venues for social-cultural activities that will attract people. This thesis aims to investigate the role of architecture in increasing the quality of people’s daily experiences in the public domain, and to explore opportunities to frame a new type of public market place in Toronto by imbuing ‘The Architecture of Place’ with ‘a sense of place’.


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