Shaping the city (c. AD 52–60)

This chapter describes how London was rebuilt in a major phase of urban redesign likely to date c. AD 52, perhaps when an earlier supply-base was converted into a city. This involved a significant degree of cadastral reform. These works were probably initiated by the governor Didius Gallus. Busy construction programmes of the 50s involved the introduction of a new street grid, London’s first waterfront revetments, warehouses around the forum, and new bathhouses on the borders of town. A sacred precinct may also have been established around natural springs on a hillside overlooking the town. London’s first suburbs were established, and included workshops built and used following pre-Roman technologies. The contrast presented by these unusual and peripheral sites is used to argue the marginal status of British communities within the Roman city. A further programme of urban expansion dating c. AD 60 is also described.

In/visibility in Social Media Work: The Hidden Labor Behind the Brands

Despite the staggering uptick in social media employment over the last decade, this nascent category of cultural labor remains comparatively under-theorized. In this paper, we contend that social media work is configured by a visibility paradox: while workers are tasked with elevating the presence—or visibility—of their employers’ brands across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more, their identities—and much of their labor—remains hidden behind branded social media accounts. To illuminate how this ostensible paradox impacts laborers’ conditions and experiences of work, we present data from in-depth interviews with more than 40 social media professionals. Their accounts make clear that social media work is not just materially concealed, but rendered socially invisible through its lack of crediting, marginal status, and incessant demands for un/under-compensated emotional labor. This patterned devaluation of social media employment can, we show, be situated along two gender-coded axes that have long structured the value of labor in the media and cultural industries: 1). technical-communication and 2). creation-circulation. After detailing these in/visibility mechanisms, we conclude by addressing the implications of our findings for the politics and subjectivities of work in an increasingly digital media economy.

Hunter Beattie (1876–1951): A Conscientious Objector at the Margins

Glasgow was the Scottish city in which the Open Brethren movement grew most profusely. During the First World War, significant sections of the leadership of their assemblies supported the British war effort. One individual who stood apart from this was the evangelist and homeopath, Hunter Beattie. He was the leading individual in an assembly in the east end who launched an occasional periodical in which he expounded his pacifist views. His publication was criticized in a Sunday newspaper, and his subsequent military hearing and criminal trial was covered by the newspaper. Other leading Glasgow Brethren publicly disassociated themselves from his position, which, in turn, led to criticism of them by some Brethren non-combatants. As well as giving an example of the treatment of conscientious objectors during the First World War, the paper examines the positions adopted towards war by both Beattie and his antagonists, illuminating aspects of the Brethren, their social class and relationships to society. It examines how some Brethren rejected a completely marginal status in church and society, but others saw the attraction of the margins.

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Indigenous-Australian Swansong or Songline?

The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.

Career Difficulties That Chinese Academic Journal Editors Face and Their Causes

The purpose of this article is twofold: 1) to analyse common career difficulties experienced by academic journal editors in China and explain their causes; and 2) to identify how stakeholders in Chinese scholarly publishing can support editors. Thirty-two academic journal editors were surveyed, and fourteen of those were subsequently interviewed. We found that a deficit of high-quality manuscripts, a large number of laborious tasks at work, limited opportunities for professional advancement, and low job satisfaction were the main career difficulties, of which the two most common were a deficit of high-quality manuscripts and low job satisfaction. The key causes of these difficulties were an unbalanced academic evaluation system that rewarded indexed over non-indexed journals and the marginal status of journal offices at their affiliated institutions. The forms of support most desired by respondents were recognition for their work, salary increases, greater opportunities for continued learning, easier job title promotion, and more scholarly communication with their peers.

Accommodating Disability at University

Disabled students in Canadian universities obtain academic accommodations through an individualized service approach. The implementation of these learning supports is dependent on students' ability to navigate institutional policies and procedures that require engagement with faculty who are variably willing to respond. This study documents the experiences of disabled students and their professors as they worked to make these individual arrangements on three Nova Scotia university campuses. Findings centre the relational elements of accommodation procedures and expose their potential to reinforce and naturalize the marginal status of disabled learners while also elucidating the possibility for meaningful systemic change. Findings also situate the student/faculty relationship as an important site of inquiry and analysis for Canadian post-secondary institutions working to become more accessible for a diversity of disabled students.

Memories of Migration

Based on key concepts of memory studies, this article investigates how immigration is remembered in two different societies: the United Kingdom and Germany. Starting from the assumption that social remembering has the potential to encourage the integration of migrants, we analyze in several case studies how civil society organizations and government actors remember historical immigration processes and how the immigrant past is reflected in popular culture. Our analysis shows that both countries have several factors in common with regard to the role of immigration in collective memory. A common feature is the marginal status accorded to migration and, when it is remembered, the highly restricted role offered to immigrants. However, our studies also reveal that memory can become an important mode for the integration of migrants if it is used as a form of political activism and if organizations proactively use the past to make demands for the incorporation of immigrants.

L2 university students’ motivational self system in English writing: a sociocultural inquiry

Although there is no lack of studies on L2 motivation in applied linguistics, research on L2 writing motivation remains scanty. Drawing upon Dornyei’s L2-motivational-self-system and the notions of identity, this study analyzed 27 Chinese university-based students’ English writing learning experiences. Data were gathered through individual interviews and written reflections. The findings showed that the students’ experience of learning to write was not conducive to their formation of identity as a multilingual writer because their ideal L2 selves in EFL writing were influenced by the overall learning and testing cultures. The findings also reveal that the teachers, parents, and schools played little role in shaping the students’ ought-to selves due to the marginal status of EFL writing in both the nation-wide exams and the institutional curricula. Overall, the students’ investment in learning to write yielded mostly a “passive and mediocre test-oriented” writer identity, with the capital to construct customized writings for individual and professional communication remained unattainable. The findings call for attention to the prevalent native speaker ideology and the ideology that considers students’ L1 as problem.

Government

Driven by new hope, those born-again Protestants who expect to contribute to the long-term reconstruction of the United States of America agree that this renewal will have significant implications for government. This chapter will survey a variety of evangelical responses to recent trends in American government. It will argue that the large pan-denominational and politically pragmatic religious coalitions that dominated an earlier phase of evangelical political engagement have fractured, and have given way to a much more vigorous, variegated, and entrepreneurial evangelical political landscape. These believers are not sure how best to respond to their sense of marginalization, but many among their number are returning to and developing the arguments of earlier Reconstructionists. This chapter will explore the complexity of political thinking among those born-again Protestants who embrace their marginal status in order to propose strategies of survival, resistance, and reconstruction in evangelical America.

Native Culture and Gender Politics in Nagaland: A Study of Easterine Iralu a Terrible Matriarchy

The paper aims at examining Easterine Kire Iralu’s novel A Terrible Matriarchy (2007) from feminist point of view. The novel A Terrible Matriarchy is the coming-of-age story of a young girl, Dielieno. The narrative explores the suffering of innocent Dielieno and her confrontation with the traditional Angami society to which she belongs to. In the ethnic world of Nagaland, both patriarchal and matriarchal control co-exists but it also has a strong Tantric tradition from time immemorial. For various reasons the status of women in the northeast has not been different from the women in the mainstream of India. Easterine Iralu through her girl protagonist Dielieno depicts the severe gender discrimination where the grandmother neglected Lieno to the worst extent, always caring and preferring the boys. The grandmother's matriarchal hegemony makes Lieno revolt silently. The various aspects of women's marginal status and native culture have been analyzed in the paper.