Good Love and Hard Words

2021 ◽  
pp. 241-266
Author(s):  
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Keyword(s):  
Political Consequences ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practical Necessity ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Forgiveness And Reconciliation

This chapter opens with the murder of Étienne Marcel and the fall of Paris to the Dauphin at the end of August, and focuses on how the crown and its subjects negotiated the social and emotional—as well as the legal and political—consequences of the Jacquerie. While the crown began by enacting spectacularly harsh penalties against its enemies in Paris, it almost immediately moved to a policy of forgiveness and reconciliation. After publicly executing prominent reformers, the crown issued general pardons to those who participated in the Parisians’ treachery, the Jacquerie, and the Counter-Jacquerie. This was both a practical necessity and an astute political move that allowed the crown to place itself above the fray and to impose its own interpretation of events. But as the subsequent proliferation of individualized pardons and lawsuits show, subjects’ own stories were more varied, demonstrating different ways of thinking about the revolt. Long-running lawsuits and the failure even of extra-judicial agreements reveal enduring barriers to reconciling people to the past, as well as to one another. Relations between some individuals remained emotionally fraught, roiled by anger and anxiety for decades after the revolt, manifesting in the exchange of ‘hard words’ and homicidal quarrels.

Afterword

Neo-Passing ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Elam
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post Civil Rights

The afterword argues that so-called neo-passing narratives distinctively highlight the performative dimension to racial formation and are, moreover, particularly attentive to the social and political consequences of race. This essay argues that the desire for passing to be a phenomenon of the past can be problematic in that it wills away the social insights afforded by cultural and literary narratives of passing in the post–Civil Rights era.

scholarly journals Editorial

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Georgine Clarsen ◽  
Gijs Mom
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mobility Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Extensive List

This issue we mourn the untimely death of John Urry, our much-loved friend and colleague. John’s role in the emergence of mobility studies, our robust and multidisciplinary field of scholarship, is well-known. Based at Lancaster for most of his working life, John was central to launching new ways of thinking and researching, not only in his own discipline of sociology but across the social sciences and humanities. The breadth and scope of John’s scholarship is evident in his extensive list of publications. They date from the early 1970s, gathered momentum over the past two decades, and will continue into the future with material still in press.

scholarly journals Demographic perspectives on the rise of longevity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W Vaupel ◽  
Francisco Villavicencio ◽  
Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher
Keyword(s):  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Demographic Data ◽  
Considerable Uncertainty ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Estimate Life Expectancy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specific Mortality ◽  
Substantial Progress ◽  
Length Of Life

Background: This article reviews findings about the rise of life expectancy, current levels of life expectancy in countries with high life expectancies, and possible future trends in life expectancy. Maximum lifespans and the equality of lifespans are also considered. Methods: Demographic data on age-specific mortality are used to estimate life expectancy. Validated data on exceptional lifespans are used to study the maximum length of life. Findings of the most significant publications are critically summarized.Results: In the countries doing best, life expectancy started to increase around 1840 at a pace of almost 2.5 years per decade. This trend has continued until the present. Contrary to classical evolutionary theories of senescence and contrary to the predictions of many experts, the frontier of survival is advancing to higher ages. Furthermore, lifespans are becoming more equal, with octogenarians and nonagenarians accounting for most deaths in countries with high life expectancy. Extrapolation of the trend indicates that most children born this millennium will celebrate their 100th birthdays. Considerable uncertainty, however, clouds forecasts of life expectancy and maximum lifespans: life expectancy and maximum lifespan might increase very little if at all or longevity might rise much faster than in the past. Conclusions: Substantial progress has been made over the past three decades in deepening understanding of how long humans have lived and have long they might live. The social, economic, health, cultural and political consequences of further increases in longevity are so significant that the development of more powerful methods of forecasting is a priority.

FROM CENTER STAGE TO BIT PLAYER: TRADE UNIONS AND THE BRITISH ECONOMY

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (04) ◽  
pp. 1450030 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS F. WRIGHT ◽  
WILLIAM BROWN
Keyword(s):  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Union Membership ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
High Inflation ◽  
Labour Standards

Over the past 30 years, British unions have been marginalised from economic policymaking. Union membership and collective bargaining coverage have fallen dramatically, and the sometimes negative economic impact of unions at the workplace level has disappeared. While strong unions were once key contributors to macroeconomic problems such as high inflation, the weakening of organised labour has created other economic problems for policymakers in Britain, such as rising inequality. The social and political consequences of deepening inequality may force a reconsideration of the role of both the state and of unions in upholding labour standards.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Disciplining Polenta: A Parody on the Politics of Saving Food

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Zachary Nowak ◽  
Bradley M. Jones ◽  
Elisa Ascione
Keyword(s):  
Food Products ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Traditional Food ◽  
Traditional Foods ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article begins with a parody, a fictitious set of regulations for the production of “traditional” Italian polenta. Through analysis of primary and secondary historical sources we then discuss the various meanings of which polenta has been the bearer through time and space in order to emphasize the mutability of the modes of preparation, ingredients, and the social value of traditional food products. Finally, we situate polenta within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, underlining the uses and abuses of rendering foods as traditional—a process always incomplete, often contested, never organic. In stirring up the past and present of polenta and placing it within both the projects of Italian identity creation and the broader scholarly literature on culinary tradition and taste, we emphasize that for so-called traditional foods to be saved, they must be continually reinvented.

Founding Gods, Inventing Nations

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. McCants
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Cultural Orientation ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Islamic Empire ◽  
First Time ◽  
Vast Range

From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, this book traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests of the Near East, the book looks at the ways the conquerors and those they conquered reshaped their myths of civilization's origins in response to the social and political consequences of empire. The Greek and Roman conquests brought with them a learned culture that competed with that of native elites. The conquering Arabs, in contrast, had no learned culture, which led to three hundred years of Muslim competition over the cultural orientation of Islam, a contest reflected in the culture myths of that time. What we know today as Islamic culture is the product of this contest, whose protagonists drew heavily on the lore of non-Arab and pagan antiquity. The book argues that authors in all three periods did not write about civilization's origins solely out of pure antiquarian interest—they also sought to address the social and political tensions of the day. The strategies they employed and the postcolonial dilemmas they confronted provide invaluable context for understanding how authors today use myth and history to locate themselves in the confusing aftermath of empire.

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