Faculti

Gregory Fried provides a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life he calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons.

Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees outraged its eighteenth-century audience by proclaiming that private vices lead to public prosperity. Today the work is best known as an early iteration of laissez-faire capitalism. Focusing on Mandeville's moral, social, and political ideas, Robin Douglass offers an account of why we should take Mandeville seriously as a philosopher.

When Henry Brougham, first Baron Brougham and Vaux, died in his villa in Cannes in May 1868 at the age of eighty-nine, he was well known for his many achievements in the fields of politics, law and education, and also as the man who put the Mediterranean town Cannes on the map. Rosemary Ashton discusses the origin of Cannes as a resort to a chance visit in 1834 by Lord Brougham.

Paul James discusses the significance of engaged globalization theory and critical reflexivity and the development of an integrated method of analysis.

Anthony Best discusses the circumstances which led to the unlikely alliance of 1902 to 1922 between Britain, the leading world power of the day and Japan, an Asian, non-European nation which had only recently emerged from self-imposed isolation.

A growing retreat from multilateralism is threatening to upend the institutions that underpin the liberal international order. Bryan H. Druzin applies network theory to this crisis in global governance, arguing that policymakers can strengthen these institutions by leveraging network effect pressures.

Jeremy Crang traces the wartime history of the WAAF, ATS and WRNS and the integration of women into the British armed forces.

For centuries, Ferdinand Magellan has been celebrated as a hero: a noble adventurer who circumnavigated the globe in an extraordinary feat of human bravery; a paragon of daring and chivalry. Felipe Fernández-Armesto untangles the myths that made Magellan a hero.

Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region—the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders—Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a “white man's country.”

Deborah Brown suggests René Descartes philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation

Among the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons in Germany at the end of World War II, approximately 40,000 were unaccompanied children. Lynne Taylor discusses the heated battles that erupted amongst the various entities (military, governments, and NGOs) responsible for children's care and disposition.

Anne O'Brien discusses two moments of human rights advocacy for those experiencing homelessness; the Burdekan report on homeless children and the opposition to the Howard government erosion of democratic norms.

Thomas Irvine discusses how the sonic encounter with China shaped perceptions of Europe's own musical development.

Peter Diggle discusses how core statistical ideas of experimental design, modelling, and data analysis are integral to the scientific method.

Riccardo Bavaj introduces and discusses spatial history through the lens of the different primary sources that historians use

Paul Cartledge discusses the differences and the interconnections between the Thebes of myth and the Thebes of history.

Throughout the long nineteenth-century the sounds of liberty resonated across the Anglophone world. Focusing on radicals and reformers committed to the struggle for a better future, Paul Pickering explores the role of music in the transmission of political culture over time and distance

Over the past century, while democratic governments have become more efficient, they have also become more disconnected from the people they purport to represent. John Matsusaka discusses how direct democracy can bring policies back in line with the will of the people.populism

As a French artist who lived in Polynesia, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) occupies a crucial position in histories of European primitivism. Linda Goddard discusses his wide-ranging literary output, which included journalism, travel writing, art criticism, and essays on aesthetics, religion, and politics.

The striped velvet pantaloons of James, an enslaved man in the South Carolina upcountry, might not seem like an important legal artifact, but they are. Laura F. Edwards discusses how the legalities of textiles recast our understanding of Americans’ relationship to law and the economy in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Ramie Targoff discusses Vittoria Colonna, a confidante of Michelangelo, the scion of one of the most powerful families of her era, and a pivotal figure in the Italian Renaissance.

Beryl Pong discusses British late modernism's relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future.

Prose poetry is a resurgent literary form in the English-speaking world and has been rapidly gaining popularity in Australia. Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington discuss Australian prose poetry written over the last fifty years.

Artist Si Sapsford discusses her new book which looks at the installation of her mechanical piece Civil Unrest.

In educational research, girls are frequently depicted as success stories, able to effortlessly navigate academic excellence as empowered females. However, these depictions lack nuance and often fail to capture the complexity of young women’s experiences as they shift from compulsory schooling into higher education.

Marc Fleurbaey and Brody Viney consider and assesses the concept of social externalities through human interdependence, in relation to the economic analysis of externalities in the tradition of Pigou and Arrow, including the analysis of the commons. It argues that there are limits to economic analysis.

Tipping points exist in social, ecological and climate systems and those systems are increasingly causally intertwined in the Anthropocene. Climate change and biosphere degradation have advanced to the point where we are already triggering damaging environmental tipping points, and to avoid worse ones ahead will require finding and triggering positive tipping points towards sustainability in coupled social, ecological and technological systems.

Margaret MacMillan discusses the tangled history of war and society and our complicated feelings towards it and towards those who fight. MacMillan explores the ways in which changes in society have affected the nature of war and how in turn wars have changed the societies that fight them, including the ways in which women have been both participants in and the objects of war.

In The Social Leap, William von Hippel lays out this revolutionary hypothesis, tracing human development through three critical evolutionary inflection points to explain how events in our distant past shape our lives today. From the mundane, such as why we exaggerate, to the surprising, such as why we believe our own lies and why fame and fortune are as likely to bring misery as happiness, the implications are far reaching and extraordinary.

Attempts to constrain the spread of Covid-19 included the temporal reintroduction of travel restrictions and border controls within the Schengen area. While such restrictions clearly involve costs, their benefits have been disputed. Using a new set of daily regional data of confirmed Covid-19 cases from the respective statistical agencies of 18 Western European countries Matthias Eckardt, Kalle Kappner and Nikolaus Wolf suggest that border controls had a significant effect to limit the pandemic.

Re-Creation, Fragmentation, and Resilience tells the story of post Second World War Canada by exploring ten themes key to the Canadian experience since 1945. Dimitry Anastakis helps students to look at the period not only through the lens of traditional themes such a politics and foreign policy, but also through new, innovative themes such as the environment, the family, and technology.

Outbreaks of severe virus infections with the potential to cause global pandemics are increasing. In many instances these outbreaks have been newly emerging (SARS coronavirus), re-emerging (Ebola virus, Zika virus) or zoonotic (avian influenza H5N1) virus infections. In the absence of a targeted vaccine or a pathogen-specific antiviral, broad-spectrum antivirals would function to limit virus spread.

We live in a time of crises - economic turmoil, workplace disempowerment, unresponsive government, environmental degradation, social disintegration, and international rivalry. In The 99 Percent Economy, Paul S. Adler, a leading expert on business management, argues that these crises are destined to deepen unless we radically transform our economy.

Marius Calu investigates how the management of plurality is a fundamental element of contemporary state-building seeking to build social cohesion, while for the new-born Kosovo it stands as vital symbol for its domestic sovereignty and legitimisation. https://faculti.net/kosovo-divided/

Rick Sarre discusses the relationship between the private sector and criminal justice. The private sector has become an increasingly important 'partner' in contemporary criminal justice with the unprecedented growth of public sector 'outsourcing' arrangements. This has resulted in an increasingly pluralised and marketised landscape of contemporary criminal justice.

Problematic interactive media use (PIMU) is a real and growing health problem among children and adolescents of the digital age. In the digital age, we may have encountered a new pathology, or group of pathologies, to which we must develop a thoughtful, responsive, and structured systemic response. Children and adolescents are the sentinel cases of PIMU; they are early and enthusiastic adopters of new technologies and they have yet to develop self-regulating executive brain function.

Alison Carrol examines French policies to reintegrate the recovered region of Alsace into France after the First World War. As integration programs became increasingly contentious, administrators sent from Paris to Alsace read the situation through the lens of German influence. No French administrator used the term ‘national indifference’, but their worries bear a striking similarity to those expressed with regard to so-called nationally indifferent populations in East Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century: bilingualism, intermarriage, and Catholicism each represented alternative points of loyalty to the French nation, as well as sources of concern to the French government.

For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. Debra Myhill discusses differing perspectives on the value of grammar for the language learner and opposing views of what educational benefits learning grammar may or may not accrue.

Gareth Loudon discusses the physiological response of participants during a creative activity and compares the results to their physiological response during states of high attention and relaxation.

The heterogeneity of the contemporary Indian middle-class has been discussed widely. However, the effect of its internal differences on the distribution of educational resources needs to be examined systematically. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with parents in 53 middle-class families in Dehradun, India, Achala Gupta explores three aspects of the home-school relationship: how socioeconomic transformations shape parents’ aspirations for their children’s future, educational decisions parents make to realise those aspirations, and mothers’ engagement in their children’s everyday schooling.

Mark Pennington explores the relationship between freedom, regulation, and public policy. Adopting a “non-ideal” approach, he argues that there is no necessary connection between different conceptions of liberty and any particular sort of regulatory/public policy framework. Both negative and positive conceptions of freedom require a role for “regulation,” but whether this “regulation” arises from public policy or is best left to emerge through private agency in a competitive environment is a matter that can only be resolved by theoretical speculation and empirical inquiry.

Geetha Marcus presents the untold stories of Gypsy and Traveller girls living in Scotland. Drawing on accounts of the girls’ lives and offering space for their voices to be heard, the author addresses contemporary and traditional stereotypes and racialised misconceptions of Gypsies and Travellers. Marcus explores how the stubborn persistence of these negative views appears to contribute to policies and practices of neglect, inertia or intervention that often aim to ‘civilise’ and further assimilate these communities into the mainstream settled population.

There is evidence that in the United States popular attitudes about environmental problems have been shaped by elite polarization on environmental issues. Yet there has been little systematic analysis of the impact of elite polarization on environmental attitudes in other parts of the world. Sarah Birch discusses a general theory of the role of elite polarization in conditioning popular support for environmental protection.

Andrew Moran considers the claim that ‘change’ during the Obama years amounted to an acceptance of American global decline. It contends that sensible retrenchment should not be equated with ‘decline.’

Teaching is a complex practice that requires teachers to draw upon their content knowledge, pedagogical approaches and strategies, and knowledge about learners in order to support learning. Integrating technology into the teaching and learning practice of a classroom is a strategy that many teachers are drawing upon. Joanna Masingila reports on the initial findings on information communication technology (ICT) implementation in Kenyan secondary schools and discusses factors affecting effective technology integration. Joanna Masingila is Dean of the School of Education at Syracuse University and a professor of mathematics and mathematics education.

For centuries elegy has been instrumental to Irish culture and its self-expression. Alison Morgan discusses the elegies both by and about Robert Emmet written by Thomas Moore, Robert Southey and Percy Bysshe Shelley as well those written by anonymous balladeers.

Robert Williams discusses how art investigates the nuclear Anthropocene, nuclear sites and materiality and the philosophical concept of radiation as a hyperobject.

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of “social preferences.” Gary Charness discusses a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing social welfare—sacrificing to increase the payoffs for all recipients, especially low-payoff recipients—than with reducing differences in payoffs (as supposed in recent models). Subjects are also motivated by reciprocity: they withdraw willingness to sacrifice to achieve a fair outcome when others are themselves unwilling to sacrifice, and sometimes punish unfair behavior.

CEOs who formerly served in the U.S. military are prevalent among U.S. firms. The military puts strong emphasis on the obedience of its personnel. Georg Wernicke discusses time spent in the military leads individuals to be more obedient to rules and regulations in the years after they have left the military and become CEOs.

Thomas Roulet discusses three “degrowth”-oriented strategies that companies can pursue to open new opportunities while benefitting the environmen. Dr Thomas Roulet, University Senior Lecturer in Organisation Theory & Information Systems at Cambridge Judge Business School. Companies can apply degrowth to product design to create products with a longer lifespan or which are locally produced. An example is social enterprise Fairphone, which makes phones that can be more easily repaired in the interest of longevity. Companies can reposition themselves in the value chain by delegating some tasks to stakeholders. Toymaker LEGO has launched marketplaces for trading used products or creating new designs. Firms can create degrowth-focused standards for others in the industry to follow, the way apparel company Patagonia provides free repairs for its products and those of other manufacturers.

The economics of language may not yet be a mainstream subfield of economics. In this interview, Andrew John discusses the following questions: how do economic analysis and economic reasoning provide insight into linguistic phenomena? How does economics and economic models shed light on language change?