Making Home(s) in Displacement

Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.

Slaveries of the First Millennium

In a world where princesses found themselves enslaved, kidnapped boys became army generals, and biblical Joseph was a role model, this book narrates the formation of the Middle Ages from the point of view of slavery, and outlines a new approach to enhance our understanding of modern forms of enslavement. Offering an analysis of recent scholarship and an array of sources, never before studied together, from distinct societies and cultures of the first millennium, it challenges the traditional dichotomy between ancient and medieval slaveries. Revealing the dynamic, versatile, and adaptable character of slavery it presents an innovative definition of slavery as a historical process.

Eumenides and the Invention of Politics

Recent scholarship has shown that the Eumenides of Aeschylus, far from presenting a complete and coherent picture of the well-ordered polis, in fact offers something quite different, namely, a complex set of questions, concerns and conundrums regarding the very nature of political society. But I suggest that the literature has not yet provided a fully satisfying account of the ways in which those questions are underwritten by the specifically literary practice of Aeschylus as it develops the play’s larger theoretical – especially moral – implications. I argue that the Eumenides can fruitfully be read as a sustained exercise in the subversion of expectations that unsettles its audience and thereby opens up a discursive and aesthetic space for the development of a distinctive political problematic; and further, that this problematic involves a challenging series of meditations on what today would be called political ethics, broadly conceived.

Moral Value and Commercial Gain

This paper presents three theoretical accounts developed to assess the moral value and legal status of acts designed to promote commercial gain in the thought of major classical Muslim scholars. There has been an increased interest in Islamic commercial law and ethics in recent years. Much of the recent scholarship consists of practically inclined studies that tend to lump the Islamic tradition of evaluation of commerce under the principles of social justice and avoidance of harm. Our study of three selected scholars will reveal distinct approaches that are characteristic of classical Islamic ethical discussions: anchoring moral value in this world, attributing moral goodness to salvation in the next world, and finding a balance between these two approaches. Counterintuitively, we will see that the naturalistic view that ascribes moral values to things and actions was the most restrictive, whereas the dualistic model that focuses on salvation in the next world was markedly more permissive of commercial transactions.

Pedro de Alvarado, Tonatiuh: Reconsidering Apotheosis in Nahua and Highland Maya Narratives of the Spanish Invasion

Recent scholarship on the Spanish invasion of the New World has brought under scrutiny the historiographic theme of apotheosis—the notion that Indigenous peoples regarded the invaders as gods or godlike beings and that such beliefs influenced their responses. This article examines the question by focusing on Pedro de Alvarado, a leading member of Hernán Cortés’s contingent, who was known as Tonatiuh—a Nahuatl word that designated the sun, the day, and the sun god. Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Guatemala used the name during the invasion, and Nahua, K’iche’, and Kaqchikel authors employed it frequently in later writings that variously hinted at, endorsed, or questioned Alvarado’s associations with the sun god. Rather than an imposition resulting from Spanish teachings, the association of Alvarado with the sun god derived from Mesoamerican beliefs about the rise and fall of successive eras, which provided Indigenous paradigms to explain the Spanish invasion.

Including animals in sociology

How do we include animals in sociology? Although sociology’s initial avoidance of the nonhuman world may have been necessary to the field’s development, recent scholarship – within mainstream sociology, environmental sociology and animal-centred research – is helping expand the field’s horizons. With a focus on variety, this article reviews four key paths that researchers are taking to include animals in their research: (1) studying interspecies relations, (2) theorizing animals as an oppressed group, (3) investigating the social and ecological impacts of animal agriculture and (4) analysing social-ecological networks. This review shows how applying – and innovating – existing social theories and research methods allows researchers to include animals in their analyses and will be relevant to a variety of scholars, including mainstream and environmental sociologists, animal-focused researchers and social network analysts, to name a few.

Exploiting the Urban System? The Frictions of Military Finance and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic, 1688–1714

This article examines how international military finance operated in the Dutch Republic between 1688–1714. The region’s unique urban geography in which the political and financial infrastructures crucial for military financing were geographically dispersed created stresses and strains. These inconveniences were overcome due to the Republic’s excellent intra-urban infrastructure – creating fast and reliable communication between the different urban centers – and their reliance on (semi-)private agents, the solliciteurs-militair. As a result, the urban system created a level of flexibility: credit for military purposes could be found both in The Hague and Amsterdam, rather than having to rely on a single city as was the case in London. This focus on the urban has broader historiographical importance because recent scholarship on early modern war and state formation is increasingly questioning whether the focus on political and financial centralization is necessarily the best way to understand these processes.

Wonder and the Divine. The Eternal Chain in Plutarch’s, De E apud Delphos 384D-385D

The first two introductory chapters of De E apud Delphos are confusing from a chronological point of view. A close reading and detailed analysis, however, reveals that Plutarch hid a chain throughout this part of the text, by means of thematic and verbal connections. This chain highlights that every mystery related to Apollo raises wonder about the god that leads to philosophical discussions. These discussions never result in a full answer, but lead to a new mystery related to the god that will elicit new discussions. This not only shows that recent scholarship is correct in claiming that Ammonius’ lengthy reply at the end of De E is not the eventual solution to the meaning of the E, but also clarifies Sarapion’s precise function as Plutarch’s dedicatee.

Discussion of Issues Related to Language Assessment Literacy in Second Signed and Spoken Languages

This chapter is a joint discussion of key items related to language assessment literacy related to signed and spoken language assessment that were discussed in Chapters 11.1 and 11.2, and the implications that these issues might have on the other field. It is clear that language assessment literacy (LAL) in the context of signed languages—(S)LAL by the authors—is still in a very nascent form. Although in the field of spoken language assessment there is a tendency to discuss LAL as being a “new” development and recent scholarship suggests that issues and constructs remain undertheorized, there is a considerable body of literature on LAL oriented toward spoken language (as surveyed in the Chapter 11.1), to the extent that LAL is now a core area of research and scholarship in the field. This is in sharp contrast with the paucity addressing LAL in the context of signed languages. This chapter is the result of a collaborative process during which the two sets of authors read each other’s chapters and responded to a set of guided questions. The result is the synthesis of this dialogic process.