Bridges to learning: international student mobilities,education agencies and inter‐personal networks

International education is a fundamentally transnational project. It relies on the movement of individuals or knowledge across national borders, disturbs the centrality of the nation‐state in educational reproduction, and is facilitated by economic and social networks that act as bridges between countries of origin and education. In this article, I address this latter point through reference to research conducted with South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand. In particular, I discuss the emergence of transnational social and economic activities that are facilitating the movement of international students from South Korea to Auckland — activities that might usefully be understood as forming ‘bridges to learning’. These include the activities of education agencies, immigrant entrepreneurs and the interpersonal relationships with which many students engage in the negotiation of their transnational lives. In a broader sense I illustrate how the emerging mobilities of international students cannot be viewed as independent of other phenomena but must be seen as embedded within transnational processes that take place at different geographic and social scales.     

The New Rugged Individualism: Modernity and Countersystem in Post-World War II Fiction

Abstract

This essay examines the work of J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac as a reaction to the overarching nihilism, exhaustion and despair of modernity and postmodernity. More specifically, these works are seen through the lens of the sociological 'countersystem' model of Sjoberg and Cain, who posit that studying behavior defined as 'negative' by the dominant social system can act as a heuristic device for that system. Novelists such as Kerouac and Salinger create fictive countersystems as a means of addressing weaknesses in the existing social structure and implicitly trying to resolve them. Their countersystems are, to a large extent, a hybrid of Buddhism and Romanticism. Finally, the characters of Kerouac and Salinger are discussed as representing a return to the individualistic heroes of American premodernity, such as Huck Finn and Hester Prynne. The work of Kerouac and Salinger, among others, is termed New Rugged Individualism.     

Frank O'Hara in New York Race relations,poetic situations,postcolonial space

Abstract

Frank O'Hara's 1958 poem 'Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets' cites 'race' as 'the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles', a phrase that points to both domestic and international contexts for reading this New York poet. At the same time, 'race' has a history of specific valences in O'Hara's work – as a focus of exoticized images of desire, aesthetic fulfillment, and social energy. Further, race, inflected through various colonial screens, becomes the central avenue leading toward O'Hara's project of rewriting the parameters of social space in poetry, a radical aestheticization not just of landscape but of social relations, with a consequent socialization of the act of writing. This article explores O'Hara's spatial poetics through the terms of Situationist theory, in which the techniques of dérive and détournement are applied to a reading of the poet's active suspension of the 'rules' of a gridded and hierarchical social order.     

¿Qué hacen los nuevos americanistas? Collaborative strategies for a postnationalist American Studies

Abstract

This article advocates that the field of American Studies institutionalize Spanish as its second language in order both to address the cultural importance of the growing US Spanish-speaking population and to ensure productive scholarly dialogue within the context of the Americas. Its ideas follow up on recent proposals for 'new' or 'postnationalist' American Studies. It warns that Americanists must be conscious of unresolved issues raised in recent debates on Latin Americanism regarding the increasingly privileged status of English (vs. Spanish) language and US (vs. Latin America) based scholarship in the globalized field of Latin American Studies, problems sure to be exacerbated by a globalizing but US centered and monolingual American Studies. It concludes by suggesting a series of strategies to promote the incorporation of Spanish into both undergraduate and graduate level pedagogy, as well as to foment bilingual scholarly dialogue across the disciplines in the context of the Americas.     

新时期滨海新区承接国际服务外包转移的对策

承接国际服务外包是滨海新区生产性服务业快速发展的新的增长点,是滨海新区转变外资增长方式的重要抓手。本文结合国际外包服务国内外发展现状和趋势,分析滨海新区承接国际外包转移的环境,提出新时期滨海新区发展国际外包的战略与对策。     

论孙中山三民主义对新民主主义理论形成的推动作用

在新民主主义革命时期,中国共产党在批判地继承中华民族文化遗产的过程中,孙中山的三民主义占有突出的地位。抗战时期,中共党内出现了一个思想现象和文化现象：掀起了对于三民主义的研究热潮,它对新民主主义理论的发展和完善,起着重要的推动作用。本文从何以需要、何以表现、何以可能和何以为鉴四个方面进行了论证。     

Associational links with home among Zimbabweans in the UK: reflections on long‐distance nationalisms

In this article, I provide an overview of the character of associations formed in Britain by Zimbabweans in the context of the mass exodus that gathered pace from the late 1990s. I discuss the politicization of the Zimbabwe diaspora, which infuses many aspects of associational life beyond specifically political organizations, and also emphasize the importance of Zimbabwean church fellowships. I offer an historical explanation for the strength of nationalism expressed in the diaspora and the absence of ‘translocal’ associations characteristic of other African diaspora groups, such as hometown associations, and explore reasons why burial societies, which have been centrally important for Zimbabwean migrants in other periods and contexts, are less prevalent in Britain. I build my argument on an historical discussion of continuities and changes in the associational forms characteristic of labour migrancy and urbanization within the southern African region. I emphasize the legacies of a strong segregationist settler state, the mobilizations and international solidarities of the protracted struggle for independence, the Christianization of elite African culture in Zimbabwe's cities, and the international politics of the recent multifaceted crisis. My discussion of the associational expression of ‘long distance nationalisms’ is based on interviews conducted in 2004–5, participation in diaspora meetings and events, and reading of diaspora media and websites. In the article I aim to highlight the specific social histories of association and the political context of diaspora formation, which are essential for understanding the nature of institutions connecting with home, and ideas about home itself.     

Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London

In this article, I explore the ways in which ‘middling’ migrant New Zealanders living in London and New Zealand discuss and identify with home. For these multi‐local individuals, the discursive and material aspects of New Zealand as home form a framework for their everyday life as migrants living in London. Interpretation of the interviews using thematic and narrative analyses works through a conceptualization of home, migration, and identity as interdependent, through three interrelated themes: the symbolic or political nature of home; the importance of family and familiarity for a sense of home; and the role of physical material objects and places. Participants in this study see New Zealand as their home, yet by being away from home they gain new perspectives on home. In London, they engage with or resist a collective imaginary of New Zealand as home that is both self‐perpetuated and externally imposed, and which both reveals and conceals ideas about individual and group identity and community. On returning from London, the idealistic and sometimes simplistic visions of New Zealand as home that structure their lives in London are often disrupted by the more complex yet more mundane version of home and self with which they are confronted.     

Women Working Worldwide: transnational networks,corporate social responsibility and action research

In this article we trace the history of a new form of labour internationalism that emerged in support of women workers’ organizations, in particular in the garment industry, from the 1980s. We tell the story of the emergence of Women Working Worldwide (WWW), a small UK‐based NGO that provides solidarity and support for a network of women workers’ organizations in the commodity producing zones of the global South. WWW grew along with other organizations that have succeeded in forcing global corporations to take some responsibility for the employment conditions along their supply chains. In what has become corporate social responsibility (CSR), companies now establish codes of conduct and workplace audits of employment conditions in those factories to which they subcontract manufacturing work. WWW played a key part in the establishment of the Clean Clothes Campaign, Labour Behind the Label and the Ethical Trading Initiative that continue to develop such practices today. WWW used the power of transnational networks to ensure that the needs and voices of women workers were put on the agenda for action. The story of WWW demonstrates the potential to effect change through transnational networking, the extent to which different local organizations can find common cause with each other and the benefits of engaging in locally‐focused but transnationally coordinated educational and action research projects.     

Charles Sheeler's imprecise precisionism

Abstract

In this article I address the significance of a series of images of New York skyscrapers fundamental to the work of American modernist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883–1965). The article examines three works – a photograph, a drawing and a painting – produced between 1919–23 of the same scene: the rear of the Park Row Building, Manhattan. I argue that these images introduce imprecisions that disrupt the notion of Sheeler as the pre-eminent Precisionist artist. Following aspects of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, I suggest that Sheeler's works adopt the language of rationalization whilst remaining critical of it. As such, the more positive conceptions of Sheeler's skyscraper works are juxtaposed against the actuality of the imprecision in the works, a dialectical move that unveils a negative critique of the rationalized culture of American modernity.