‘The confidence to know I can survive’: resilience and recovery in post-quake Christchurch

This paper explores the relevance of terms such as resilience and recovery when analysing earthquake stories recorded for the Women's Voices/Ngā Reo o Ngā Wahine Project after the sequence of earthquakes and aftershocks in Christchurch, New Zealand's second-largest city, in 2010–2011. While the media focused on stories of victims, the heroic work of rescue teams, policy, army and firefighters, or the deliberations of national and local politicians, the National Council of Women of New Zealand wanted to ensure that women's everyday quake experiences were recorded for posterity. The outcome was an oral history project that documented the stories of women all over the city, both beneficiaries of earthquake support and those active in assisting others. Their narratives illustrate how resilience in the face of natural hazard events, such as this earthquake sequence, requires effort, ingenuity and imagination, but also the activation of multiple actor networks and relevant technologies. These ‘insider stories’ also highlight the ways in which expectations of ‘resilience’ can obscure vulnerability after natural hazard events and the complex and uneven processes associated with ‘recovery’. The relevance of critical reflections on discourses of resilience is explored through attention to the stories of specific women.     

“Snow’s Proposition” and Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences

“斯诺命题”提出了“科学文化”和“文学文化”的矛盾和冲突, 以及“两种文 化”发展中的困境问题。“斯诺命题”在积极意义上涉及提出了人文科学、社会科学 和自然科学之间存在的对象的整体性与既定学科的局部性的矛盾问题, 提出了人文社 会科学“次文化”分裂和分离化倾向的问题。走跨学科之路是破解“斯诺命题”关键 所在, 其中特别要注重解决好学科研究和问题研究的结合、个体研究和团队研究的结 合、学者的个人禀赋发挥、研究的社会导向和环境导向、研究的评价体制和机制优化 等问题。

关键词: 斯诺命题 科学文化 文学文化 人文社会科学 跨学科研究

“Snow’s proposition” points out the contradictions and conflicts between “scientific culture” and “literary culture” and the dilemma of the development of the “two cultures.” In the positive sense, Snow’s proposition concerns the contradictions between the integrity of the research subject and the particularity of established disciplines, as well as the trend toward division and isolation in subdivisions of the humanities and social sciences. The key to solving Snow’s proposition is to take an inter-disciplinary path that pays particular attention to combining discipline-centered with issue-centered research and individual work with teamwork, giving full play to individual endowment, social orientation and environmental orientation and to the optimization of evaluation systems and mechanisms.     

“You’ve never seen anything like it”: multiplexes,shopping malls and sensory overwhelm in Milton Keynes, 1979–1986

Abstract

From 1979, the new town of Milton Keynes embraced a new marketing approach which emphasised its capacity to elicit wondrous, uplifting, and desirable bodily sensations. This coincided with the transformation of the town’s central landscape, with Britain’s largest mall, The Shopping Building opening in 1979, followed in 1985 by Britain’s first multiplex cinema, The Point. This new direction in Milton Keynes’ marketing rejected national media narratives of the town’s sterility, while reorienting its administration away from the now-toxic political legacy of Keynesianism and towards consumer capitalism. This presented the Shopping Building, The Point and Milton Keynes as a whole, as containing forces that intensified and proliferated potential sensory experiences which resisted quantification and could only be understood fully through immediate presence. This deliberate non-specificity equated the undifferentiated general ideal of sensation with the liberatory capacities of consumer choice, while concealing the encroaching constraints on human possibility arising from commodification of sensations and public space. While critical accounts identified this new determinism as a damaging force, Milton Keynes was nonetheless able to redefine its public image during the early years of the Thatcher government by association with private consumption and private sensation.     

The Bruce Report and social welfare leadership in the politics of Toronto’s “Slums”, 1934–1939

Slum clearance and rebuilding first became a serious political project in Toronto during the 1930s. Following the release of a systematic housing survey known as the Bruce Report (1934), a set of actors distinguished by their planning authority with respect to social agencies, influence over social work education, coordination of social research, and role as spokespersons of religious bodies inaugurated a political struggle over state power. While the campaign failed, it called forth a reaction from established authorities and reconfigured the local political field as it related to low-income housing. This article gives an account of these processes by drawing upon correspondence and minutes of meetings of city officials and the campaign’s organizers, newspaper clippings, and published materials.     

Xun Zi’s Image across the Qin-Han Period: Three Types of Discourse on a “Great Confucian” and Their Significance in Intellectual History

Abstract

This article scrutinizes three texts about Xun Zi written during the Qin-Han period: the final part of “The Questions of Yao” in the Xunzi, a rebuttal by one of Xun Zi’s disciples of the idea that Xun Zi was inferior to Confucius; “Mencius and Xun Zi” by Sima Qian in his Records of the Grand Historian; and the Annotated Book of the Xunzi by Liu Xiang. We explore the images of Xun Zi as a great Confucian (大儒) that emerge from these texts, as well as their authors’ motives for writing. These texts are understood within three contexts: first, the self-identification of a Confucian; second, the dispute between Confucianism and Daoism; and lastly, the distinction between the classics and the annals and biographies. Due to their different discourse environments, Xun Zi’s great Confucian image project a different significance in each: in one, he is a model of action who can act in accordance with perfected morality; in another, he is a model of “private words,” who can counter the philosophers of his day and become the teacher of kings; and finally, he is a model of “official learning,” able to use his knowledge of the classics in practical statecraft and elucidate the kingly Way. Overall, these three texts represent three types of discourse on a great Confucian. At the same time, they also exhibit their writers’ consciousness of their times and their views of the genealogy of daotong, or transmission of the Way; hence their significance for intellectual history.