bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Parents’ Value of their Children Learning about Agriculture in School
Authors: Miller Amelia , Warnick Brian K. , Spielmaker Debra M. , Pate Michael L. , Judd-Murray Rose , Longhurst Max L.
Published: January 2025

It is commonly held that parents have a profound impact on child development. Decades of research investigated the ways parents, the community, and school staff interact to foster student learning during kindergarten through twelfth grade education. Agriculture provides for daily needs through the growth, harvest, and processing of food, fiber, fuel, and forestry products. This research sought to understand the level of importance parents place on their children learning about agriculture in school. A 26-question survey was distributed to a nationally representative sample of parents having at least one child in K-12 education within the United States. Results of this study indicate parents found it important, even very important, for students to learn about many agricultural topics in school. Factors historically associated with parent perceptions and support of student learning proved to not significantly impact this indicated level of importance. Therefore, further research is needed to understand what impacts parents’ value of their students learning about agricultural topics in school. The conclusions of this study are of primary importance to entities conducting agricultural education outreach such as Agriculture in the Classroom programs, Extension, Career and Technical Education, agricultural industry organizations, and others interested in agricultural literacy.
Emerging Trends for Middle School Agricultural Education in the United States: A Scoping Review
Authors: Englin Jacob , Roberts Richie , Stair Kristin S. , Burnett Michael F.
Published: January 2025

Recent trends in agricultural education have demonstrated that the number of middle school programs and students has been increasing. Despite this, middle school agricultural education students, teachers, and programs have been underserved. For example, middle school agricultural education teachers lack the training and resources to meet the needs of this diverse learning population. In response, this investigation’s purpose was to synthesize the published research on middle school agricultural education. This scoping review revealed limited peer-reviewed publications on middle school agricultural education. However, the most commonly reported subject areas taught at the middle school level included career exploration, environmental and natural resources, international agriculture, and leadership/human relations, which included FFA-related topics. Additional research should be conducted to describe the characteristics of quality middle school SAE programs and determine the relevance of agricultural education’s comprehensive, three-circle model to middle school programs. Moving forward, we recommend that middle school agricultural education teachers be provided with targeted professional development to serve students of this age level better and to create additional opportunities for students to be recognized through FFA award programs.
Successful Programming for the Recruitment of Underrepresented Student Populations in Agriculture: A Case Study of a Diversity Initiative at an 1862 Land-Grant University
Authors: Spillman-Decell Allison , Roberts Richie , Stair Kristin S. , Burnett Michael F.
Published: January 2025

Effective recruitment initiatives for underrepresented student populations interested in pursuing degrees in agricultural-related sciences have the potential to diversify colleges of agriculture while also increasing enrollment. In the current study, we used a qualitative case study approach to examine the effectiveness of the recruitment initiative, called the Ag Fellows Program, designed to attract underrepresented populations to agricultural-related majors. The case was bounded by time and place; for instance, we analyzed the outcomes from the Ag Fellows Program from Fall 2021 and 2022 cohorts at an 1862 Land-Grant University. As a result, the underrepresented student populations reported lacking information about the agricultural industry before the Ag Fellows Program and perceived that agriculture was limited to farming, ranching, and other related careers. Further, they indicated that academic interests, financial aid, and an amiable atmosphere were influential factors when deciding to pursue a degree in agricultural-related sciences. As a result, we recommend conducting additional research to evaluate the effectiveness of other strategic programming initiatives designed by colleges of agriculture to attract more educated, diverse employees into the agricultural workforce.
Evaluating the Local, State and National Economic Impact of Supervised Agricultural Experiences: A National Perspective
Authors: Norris William , Hanagriff Roger , Edgar Don , Swortzel Kirk
Published: January 2025

Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) has been a critical component of School-Based Agricultural Education (SBAE) for decades. Formally called the ‘home project’, Rufus Stimson developed the concept of SAE in the early 20th century. This work-based learning concept provides students with experiential instruction that strengthens their employability and technical skills. While SAE has a long-standing tradition in SBAE, little is known about its national economic impact. This study utilized data collected through the Agricultural Experience Tracker (AET) system to assess the economic impact of SAE nationally. Overall, there are approximately 8,690 agricultural education programs nationwide, with 6,752 of those programs utilizing the AET system. Upon further analysis, 1,932 programs only utilized AET for FFA award applications and did not input SAE records into the system. These programs were removed from the study, and data from 4,820 SBAE programs were analyzed for economic impact. It was determined that the average SBAE program has $98,672 in investments and $64,212 in income annually. In addition, students’ SAEs account for approximately $857 million in direct spending. These figures were utilized to derive national economic impact estimates utilizing the IMPLAN Type II Model. Overall, it is estimated that student SAE projects have an economic impact of approximately $1.6 billion nationally. This impact has implications for agricultural education professionals nationally and should be leveraged with key stakeholders including legislative officials, educational administrators, and other CTE professionals to advance the mission and goals of SBAE.
Resilient Extension for Resilient Client: Understanding the Response of Florida Cooperative Extension to the Marketing Challenges of Producers During the Covid-19 Lockdown
Authors: Joshi Arati , Galindo Sebastian , Diaz John , Outerbridge David , Blare Trent
Published: January 2025

Cooperative Extension plays a vital role in supporting rural communities during crises and in building community resilience. Studies report that during the COVID-19 lockdown, producers in the USA reported concern about the demand for their fresh produce and needed information on marketing, digital marketing, community engagement, and collective marketing and distribution of products. Extension continued to support its clients and their changing demands during this dynamic time. However, the role of Extension in responding to its clients’ evolving needs regarding marketing produce during the COVID-19 lockdown has not been explored. Using a capabilities-based organizational resilience model, this study aimed to understand the anticipation, coping, and adaptation capabilities of Florida Cooperative Extension (FCE) during the COVID-19 lockdown, particularly focusing on response to marketing challenges of producers. A narrative research approach was used, and data were collected through Zoom interviews with Extension agents (n = 9), and Extension leaders (n = 6). The six-step thematic data analysis process resulted in four major themes. Participants described FCE as unprepared to deal with the challenges of lockdown. FCE’s response to the challenges of producers was reactive, and it primarily helped producers market their products by connecting producers with consumers through online platforms and setting up farm stands. After the lockdown, Extension agents made some changes in their Extension programs, however, no higher-level changes were found. Our findings suggest strengthening adaptation capabilities by including reflective activities to take lessons from this event, which could also be incorporated into future crisis planning to enhance resilience.
An Investigation Into SME Existence and the Reduction of Unemployment in South Africa: Impact of the Macro Environment
Authors: Chindoga Lynety , Chodokufa Kudakwashe , Ladzani Mmboswobeni Watson
Published: January 2025

Small and medium enterprise (SME) existence in South Africa is very low while the unemployment rate is extremely high. This has been a long-term trend. The primary objective of this study was to investigate the influence of macro environment factors on SME existence (establishment, growth and sustainability) and its eventual impact on employment growth. A questionnaire comprising of closed-ended questions was administered to SME owners, managers or owner managers in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Respondents were selected using a simple random sampling method. Responses were measured using a five-point Likert scale. Data were analysed using SMART Partial Least Square (PLS) software. The results indicate that macro environment factors have an influence on SME existence. The findings revealed a significant relationship between SMEs in the establishment and the growth stage and employment growth while SMEs in the sustainability stage show no significant relationship with employment growth. The impact of macro environment factors on SMEs thus vary with the specific stage of SME existence.
The Social Drama of Daily Work
Authors: Schneewind Sarah
Published: January 2025

Part manifesto, part manual, this book offers historians of all levels both subject and approach. The subject is work. In every place-time people made and sold objects - and struggled with annoying customers or government regulation. They healed clients - and wanted to bolster their prestige and keep out interlopers. Studying work allows historians to delve into the experiences of non-elite groups using texts, images, or objects. The wide-ranging approach is based on the Chicago-school sociology of occupations, which starts from the premise that work isn’t just a job: it’s a drama created by people making decisions that shape and are shaped by their place-time. Packed with examples from Ming Chinese apothecaries to twentieth-century New York City doormen, this book is a must for those who want to enliven their study of the past by examining how people spent most of their days and lives: at work.
Caterina Tarabotti Unveiled
Authors: Markou Georgios E.
Published: January 2025

In her book La semplicità ingannata (1654), the nun Arcangela Tarabotti recorded the many talents of her sister Caterina. Arcangela was not alone in admiring her sister’s artistic abilities. Marco Boschini also praised Caterina’s skills and noted her training with Chiara Varotari. However celebrated by contemporary critics and peers, Caterina was nevertheless condemned to oblivion. Through the study of archival sources and published documentation, this essay proposes to retrieve Caterina Tarabotti’s life and career from historical obscurity in order to give a window onto the experience of female artists in seventeenth-century Venice.
Shining a Light on Giulia Lama’s Painting Practice in the San Marziale Four Evangelists
Authors: Nisse Cleo
Published: January 2025

The remarkable artistic career of Giulia Lama (1681-1747) produced independent works for Venetian churches as well as istorie (history paintings). Atypically, she drew after both the male and female nude model, yet her lack of historiographic visibility, compounded by the difficulty in viewing her work, has impeded the study of her oeuvre. Four spandrel paintings of the Evangelists attributed to Lama hang high above two altars in the Venetian church of San Marziale. The opportunity for an intimate view of the Evangelists due to their current conservation sponsored by Save Venice Inc. has allowed an enquiry into Lama’s technique in these canvas paintings.
Cultural Analysis: A Global South Critical Approach
Authors: Fugellie Paulina Aroch
Published: January 2025

In this essay, I juxtapose cultural analysis, critical theory, and a Global South perspective to recuperate the critical potential of working with the limits of our methods. My object of analysis is “Bannatyne Takes on Big Tobacco,” a 2008 episode of BBC’s This World, which indexes a set of contradictions proper to the era Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism.” Interested in Africa’s role as the constitutive exclusion of capitalist realism, I employ the concept-based methodology of cultural analysis for a close reading across disciplinary boundaries while simultaneously benefiting from critical theory’s approach to particulars as symptoms of a systemic totality. The Global South operates as a perspectival locus, interrupting semiotic closure to include colonialism as the structural causation of capitalism.
From Situated Knowledge to Intensional Field Theory
Authors: Diamanti Jeff
Published: January 2025

This essay suggests that the status of the field in the hu¬manistic sciences has altered in the decades of scholarship responsive to anthropogenic climate change, and that the methodological tools available to tend to this shift involve a reconsideration of environmental deixis and intensional reading and writing. While much of the analytic impulse forwarding attention to deixis and intensionality has come from anthropology, I suggest that cultural analysis has always been a discipline uniquely sensitive to the iterative and situated relation between reader, object, and field, and is thus a discipline well-suited to experimental forms of collaborative and creative fieldwork outside of the classroom.
Making Monuments from Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain
Authors: Palacios González Daniel
Published: January 2025

This book narrates how, beginning in 1936, bodies buried in mass graves during the Spanish War and subsequent dictatorship were turned into monuments. The book describes how the production of monuments evolved and what forms this process and these monuments took; it examines how the monuments were incorporated into society and used to influence public opinion; and it argues that this process was not simply based on the formal logic of tradition but instead reflected a conscious plan with a specific and rational end goal. As such, this book puts forward the idea that the monument as a material object became an expression of the historical consciousness of its producers, relating how different actors communicated their memories into meaningful gestures while limited by the material reality of integrating the bodies into a novel artefact. Finally, it contends that the people creating these monuments did not just bury their dead according to a funerary tradition but also sought to influence society.
Leaving Fossil Fuels Underground
Authors: Gupta Joyeeta , Hogenboom Barbara , Rempel Arthur , Valladares Carolina , Verrest Hebe
Published: January 2025

How do different actors engage with fossil fuel phase-out? Which arguments and approaches are successful in dealing with the multiple trade-offs involved in the fossil fuel discussion, and how can these be scaled up? And, most fundamentally, how can societies move away from a global system based on fossil fuels and its deeply vested economic, financial and political interests and achieve energy transition, inclusive development and socio-environmental justice? This introductory chapter points at the academic, societal and policy importance of understanding and engaging with leaving fossil fuels underground (LFFU) initiatives. It presents the knowledge gap regarding the ways in which different actors, ranging from investors to social movements and from state to non-state actors at all levels of the geographical scale, use and develop different arguments and approaches in phasing out fossil fuels at multiple levels of governance. Finally, it explains how the other chapters in the book examine the potential of LFFU within a global framework of North-South studies, with special reference to Africa and Latin America and case studies on South Africa and Ecuador.
Analytical Framework: Inclusive Development, Justice and Energy Transition
Authors: Gupta Joyeeta , Hogenboom Barbara , Rempel Arthur
Published: January 2025

Understanding how fossil fuels can be rapidly phased out in a just manner requires an analytical framework. This chapter combines an energy transition framework with an inclusive development framework. The energy transition is about how niche ideas can become regimes and then cause landscape transformation. Inclusive development focuses on social inclusiveness, ecological inclusiveness and relational inclusiveness. This chapter aims to create an analytical framework for this book (and future studies) to analyse whether ideas of energy transformations are in a niche or transformation stage and whether they are socially, ecologically and relationally inclusive. It also looks at the role of key actors-local groups (through using theories of social movements), investors and producers, and states in the phasing-out of fossil fuel and niche ideas that they are promoting.
Latin America, Ecuador and Social Mobilisation for LFFU
Authors: Valladares Carolina , Hogenboom Barbara
Published: January 2025

Latin American social movements have globally been at the forefront of resisting fossil fuel projects and developing arguments and approaches to leave fossil fuels underground. This chapter analyses the LFFU arguments and approaches of these bottom-up actors in Ecuador and other Latin American countries. From the perspective of the politics of ideas, the chapter looks into the ways in which bottom-up actors operating in countries with major development challenges envision LFFU and an energy transition, and how they deal with dominant imaginaries of fossil fuels as a source of development. Since the turn of the century, social mobilization for LFFU in Latin America has strengthened and connected to various struggles for social and environmental justice. Agendas of various civil society actors come together: environmental protection, territorial rights, women’s rights, protecting land and water for agriculture, and countering unsafe living and working conditions. The analysis shows that Latin American LFFU proposals are linked to broader processes for change, including alternative views on development and rights.
South Africa and Social Mobilisation for LFFU
Authors: Olofsson Malin
Published: January 2025

This chapter demonstrates how since the 2010s there has been an expansion and convergence in social mobilization for LFFU across South Africa, including labour movements, feminist movements and environmental and social movements. This is particularly impressive, considering the deep and widespread social and economic deprivations the country faces. While the arguments, approaches and strategies employed by the different actors are diverse, many have managed to unite in broad coalitions for climate justice. Beyond the work done around fighting single-issue cases, through the successful partnerships between community-based, national and international organisations, significant arguments engage with the politics of the possible and shift beyond a just transition to transformative ideas for a post-capitalist world focused on eco-socialist and feminist alternatives. This chapter illuminates important developments for advancing the energy transition in a just and inclusive manner in South Africa, but also some controversies and challenges that prevent the movement from gaining more traction.
The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade
Authors: Negrón Ramona , den Oudsten Jessica , de Koning Camilla , Fatah-Black Karwan
Published: January 2025

In this book, a new generation of scholars offers fresh perspectives on the history of the Dutch slave trade. Traditionally, Dutch research has focused on business practices, often overlooking the enslaved and the complexities of illegal trade and violence. By experimenting with innovative methodologies and underutilised primary sources, this volume reveals the potential to uncover perspectives of enslaved people aboard slave ships, to investigate unstudied areas like sexual violence, and to examine the roles of Dutch elite in the trade.
Arming the Slave Trade: Evidence on the Gun-Slave Hypothesis from Dutch Slavers*
Authors: Huber Philipp
Published: January 2025

Firearms and gunpowder were among the most important goods bartered between Europeans and Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, as highlighted in the literature on the gun-slave hypothesis. The data backing this theory to date is very limited and draws exclusively from British sources. This article uses the archives of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC), a Dutch slave trading company, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, to properly chart regional differences and changes over time in the export of military goods for the first time. The weapons export of the MCC expanded strongly throughout the eighteenth century, with gunpowder playing an especially important role. The rise in the volume of this arms trade is explained by the increase in the volume of the slave trade, not by an increasing African demand for firearms specifically.
The Slave Trade on the Return Voyage
Authors: van Yperen Ben
Published: January 2025

In the debate concerning the transatlantic slave trade the focus has mainly been on the triangular trade. However, slave trade was carried out on other voyages such as the small shipping in the Caribbean and the return voyages, the bilateral voyages between Europe and West Africa. These voyages formed a link in the whole “product chain” of the transatlantic slave trade. This article concentrates on the Dutch return voyages on which hardly any research has been done and gives an answer to questions as: how this trade took place, in what quantities, and what the financial importance for the traders was. The analysis of the ships’ administrations of thirty-eight return voyages of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC) provides insight into these questions.
Rice, Barley and Beans: Extensity and Severity of Malnutrition in the Dutch Slave Trade*
Authors: Oosterwijk Lucas
Published: January 2025

Malnutrition on board of slave ships importantly contributed to the mortality and the lasting impact of the Middle Passage on the enslaved. Scholars have investigated how different slave trading companies and empires fed the imprisoned population on board. This study offers both new data and a new methodology to approach this theme by using the extensive records found in Dutch archives. Despite the availability of detailed records, such a study has not been undertaken for the Dutch case before now. By combining quantitative data from the fifth voyage of the MCC’s Middelburgs Welvaren with medical knowledge, the extensity and severity of malnutrition on board can be reconstructed. The data details the daily food intake for the over 450 enslaved people that were bought and brought aboard. We found that the slavers bought food both at the port of departure and on the West African coast and distributed it aboard the ship. As this insufficiently fed the enslaved people, the latter part of this article discusses the consequences of the malnutrition the enslaved aboard suffered from. The results of this article show that the model of combining medical data and shipping data can be used to study the question of nutrition in other cases as well.
Abolitionist Grandstanding: Resisting the Illegal Slave Trade in Nineteenth Century Suriname*
Authors: Ben-Ur Aviva
Published: January 2025

Previous scholarship on the mixed-court effort to suppress the illegal slave trade in Suriname after 1807 has argued that the acquiescence of colonial officials to government venality was inevitable in the face of a powerful system whose political might and sociological reach subsumed individuality. This inevitability was also fostered by the hierarchy and colonial careerism that inclined officials towards quiescence and even collusion. The activities of English-born Christopher Edward Lefroy (1785–1856), however, raise a potential challenge to these contentions. In his professional capacity as British Commissary Judge in Paramaribo, he confronted both the Dutch government and British metropolitan authorities about their unofficial tolerance of the enduring illegal slave trade. His protests rebuffed, Lefroy resorted to publishing the novel Outalissi (1826), a sensational exposé of the connivance of British and Dutch officials with the local planter class in sustaining the contraband traffick in humans. This chapter closely examines Lefroy’s life to determine whether he was in fact a hypocrite who benefited from illegal trafficking, or a naïve idealist. A close examination of Lefroy’s public and private personas allows us to draw new conclusions about the nature and efficacy of Britain’s ban against international smuggling in forced migrants.
Reimagining Relationality for Reproductive Care: Understanding Obstetric Violence as “Separation”
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , van Nistelrooij Inge
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we identify a structural form of violence that a care ethical relational approach to reproductive care is up against: that of “maternal separation.” Confronted with reproductive and obstetric violence globally, we show that a hegemonic, racialized, instrumentalized, and individualized conception of pregnancy is responsible for a severance of relationalities that are essential to safe reproductive care: (1) the relationship between the person and their child or reproductive capabilities; and (2) the relationship between the pregnant person and their community of care. We pinpoint a dissolution of reproductive relationality in at least two discursive domains, namely, the juridical-political and the ethical-existential.
Introduction
Authors: Dietz Feike , Noorman Judith
Published: January 2025

The introduction to the volume demonstrates that material cultures of the Dutch Republic are studied in various disciplines, such as art history, economic history and religious history. This book, resulting from the collaborations between scholars working in different fields, brings these strands together. Their essays narrate the lives of objects that have been invisible or marginalized in current scholarship. In the wealth of methodological and disciplinary variation displayed by these essays, five dimensions of objects come to the fore: the artistic, commercial, knowledge, memorial and spatial dimension of objects. Together, the essays demonstrate that an object-oriented, interdisciplinary approach offers the opportunity to work towards a multilayered and in some cases more inclusive perspective on the early modern Netherlands.
The Bullet and the Printing Press
Authors: van Netten Djoeke
Published: January 2025

How to celebrate a victorious naval battle? This essay starts with the Spanish bullet that fatally struck the Dutch admiral Jacob van Heemskerck during the Battle of Gibraltar in 1607. It was arguably the greatest maritime victory of the Eighty Years’ War, marking the first time the Dutch triumphed in Spanish territory. While the bullet decided Heemskerck’s fate, the story of the battle was told by other objects: a grave, armour, several paintings, medals and - most importantly - pamphlets and (news)prints. As a relatively cheap and easy means to copy and spread the news, the paper objects shaped history. This essay demonstrates how a range of objects shaped the remembrance of military conflicts and created ‘heroes’.
Shells
Authors: Grootenboer Hanneke , Kok Cynthia , Paijmans Marrigje
Published: January 2025

This essay discusses various ways that the seventeenth-century engage-ment with shells enlivened them so as to provoke a deeper contemplation of artistic, political or philosophical questions. The Dutch East India Company’s forays into Asia brought an influx of novel shell specimens and resources to European collectors, makers and thinkers. At once com-moditized resources and objects of contemplation, shells circulated within the Dutch Republic and impacted the thinking of those who came into contact with them. Each of this essay’s authors traces a specific species of shell - Pinctada margaritifera, Murex brandaris and Strombus gigas, respectively - to show how the discourse around shells connected material realities to the immaterial cultures of the Dutch Republic.
The Muller
Authors: Stols-Witlox Maartje
Published: January 2025

This essay argues that investigations into objects from the past benefit from a move beyond reading and looking, discussing how multi-sensory experiences help unpack the black box of historical artistic practice. The essay focuses on the muller, an object that played a central role in historical painting, as it was used to grind pigment in oil. As evident from historical written sources (c.1580-1900), handling the muller required skill and an intimate knowledge of the various pigment properties. This essay not only unravels written advice on how to use a muller but also reconstructs that advice. Such a reconstruction allows us to examine the influence of mulling on pigment particle size and paint flow properties.
Handbook of Japanese Security
Authors: Buszynski Leszek
Published: January 2025

Japan has risen in stature to become an important player not only in the Western Pacific, but the wider Indo-Pacific. From a defeated nation that adopted a pacifist constitution and demilitarization, Japan has been provoked by unwelcomed external events to ensure its security. It has faced a challenging security environment and specific threats that have transformed its domestic politics and given rise to debates about the relevance of its pacifist constitution. North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests, and China’s pressure in the maritime Southwest and the South China Sea, as well as its belligerence over Taiwan, have raised Japanese fears of instability and conflict. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has alarmed Japan that China would similarly resort to force. This present volume includes chapters by experts, Japanese as well as non-Japanese, who examine these issues and how Japan responds to a more threatening security environment while managing its domestic politics. They discuss the debate about the pacifist constitution, the alliance with the US, Japan’s Quad partners, India and Australia and how Japan moves to maintain and protect a free and open regional and international order from which it has benefited.
Willem or Balthasar? The Portrait of a Member of the Coymans Family by Frans Hals Reconsidered
Authors: Biesboer Pieter
Published: January 2025

The identification of the portrait Frans Hals painted of a member of the Coymans family in 1645 (Washington, National Gallery of Art) is based on an analysis of the inscription in the painting. It originally appeared to show the sitter’s age as ‘22’; now it reads ‘26’. Willem Coymans was baptized in 1623, so he seemed to be a logical candidate, but is he the actual sitter? To answer this question, it proved essential to establish the reason for the apparent correction of the young man’s age.
Ecological Imperialism in Early Modern Spanish Narratives
Authors: Aristondo Miguel Ibáñez
Published: January 2025

How are the environmental conflicts of our time intertwined with the legacies of Spanish imperialism and early modern globalization? In this volume, Miguel Ibáñez Aristondo argues that to understand the historical ramifications of the ecological crisis, it is imperative to excavate the fragmented histories and bottom-up viewpoints associated with European imperialism. Drawing on early modern Iberian, Indigenous, and European sources, the book interrogates how early modern debates regarding war, free trade, abundance, wilderness, property, race, and sovereignty were deeply entangled within ideas and theories driving the relationship between humans and the environment. By exploring the heterogeneous and conflict-ridden experiences arising from Spanish imperialism, the book contends that the climate and ecological crises have engendered divergent visions and social strata over time, stemming from the uneven distribution of environmental conflicts spanning local, regional, and global scales.
Attending to the Tacit; or, Knowledge Trickles Upwards
Authors: Hannan Leonie
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores forms of embodied knowing as they operated within the early modern household (ca. 1660–1830) and, in doing so, offers a critique of the many dichotomous categories that litter the path of intellectual history: mind/body; scholar/artisan; professional/amateur, and so on. The home was a complex space through which people, things, materials, and knowledge circulated, and by looking in detail at how curious householders acquired knowledge at home, we are better able to understand ways of knowing in this period more generally. By attending to the tacit, this chapter argues that the methods of the intellectual elite had their roots in common domestic practices and shows, therefore, that knowledge trickles upwards.
Eye Tracking
Authors: Segijn Claire M. , Vraga Emily
Published: January 2025

In this chapter we discuss eye-tracking measures, terms and metrics, hardware and measurement (in section 7.2), their pros and cons (section 7.3), and quality (section 7.4). Concluding remarks can be found in section 7.5.
Learning to Xinshang (Appreciate): Young Adults’ Pursuit of Non-standardized Sensibilities
Authors: Hizi Gil
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the application of xinshang (appreciation) in the attempts of Chinese young adults to foster good taste and aesthetic sensibilities, which in turn elevates their moral competence. Based on ethnographic data from workshops for extracurricular self-improvement in Jinan, along with additional textual data from popular media and intellectual discourse, this chapter analyses xinshang as a subtle, yet seemingly fundamental, aspect of self-development, which seems to evade the impulsive and crude mechanical reproduction of the market economy. Xinshang both underlines modernist agendas of social development while seeking to identify room for more moral and singular ways of being.
The Inescapability of Neijuan (Involution)
Authors: Qian Linda , Bram Barclay
Published: January 2025

Neijuan—literally, to spiral inwards—is a repurposing of the anthropological term “involution.” Neijuan defines a form of “stagnation” within contemporary China, where an increased input of effort neither results in perceivable output nor any substantive form of change in “wealth,” “status,” or subjective experiences of “happiness” and “fulfilment.” Based on case studies from the authors’ respective research on “return youth” in rural Zhejiang (Qian) and psychological counselling in Chengdu, Sichuan (Bram), the authors discuss the materialization of involution in different contexts and its ironic re-materialization even in attempts to evade it. They ultimately posit: Is it possible to escape involution? And if so, what would it mean to “escape involution” and what would one be “escaping” to?
Tangping (Lying Flat) among Young Adults : Shameful, Courageous or Just Fleeting Resistance?
Authors: Matthyssen Mieke
Published: January 2025

As a reaction to fierce competition and non-stop overwork, a movement of young people started to deliberately reject society’s ideas of success by “lying flat” (tangping). In public debates, tangping knows both supporters and opposers, and argumentations originating in both Chinese and Western traditions. Primarily based on data from digital ethnography complemented with interviews, this chapter investigates how the lying-flat movement serves as a barometer for how young adults negotiate their personal development in socially and politically unwanted though not entirely new ways. Tangping is discussed as a self-chosen, courageous resistance to an oppressive society that reflects a genuine need for sustained quality of life, rewarding self-development and, ultimately self-preservation while at the same time renouncing mainstream values.
Introduction
Authors: Hizi Gil
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the significance of self-development in China today, as a phenomenon that lies at the heart of the process of becoming a person. Self-development carries influences of past practices of self-cultivation while also demonstrating the global capitalist imperatives of self-reliance, skill cultivation and individualized aspirations. The meanings of self-development in China are further shaped by the education system, the autocratic state and familial responsibilities, as people navigate between areas of perceived individual choice and commanding obligations. This chapter introduces our “keyword” approach, by which we examine the various ethical definitions of self-development expressed by people across Chinese society. These keywords illuminate visions of social development, psychotherapeutic sensibilities and indigenous values, as well as new forms of social critique.
Space, Images, and Art Perception in Napoleonic Paris
Authors: Murgia Camilla
Published: January 2025

This book examines the impact of space on the perception of art and visual culture in early nineteenth-century Paris. It turns its attention to the way in which space determines the understanding and the development of visual culture. The abundance of images, their status, and their employment alike offer a means to grasp the extent of the development of an approach to art which further involved the spectator. Space is here conceived as a multifaceted entity, spanning architectural, scholarly, artistic, and visual dimensions. These various aspects offer means to consider the way in which images work and are consumed, and the individual experience they represent. Space works as a link and a connecting tool between different intellectual and visual categories, and this study examines how this interaction applies to works of art as well as everyday objects.
Sir Rutherford Alcock
Authors: Morton Robert
Published: January 2025

The son of a village doctor, Rutherford Alcock trained in medicine and became a battlefield surgeon, working in Portugal and Spain during the civil wars there in the 1830s. In a major career shift, he entered the consular service, went to China, and ended up as British Minister (the equivalent of today’s ambassador) to Japan and then China. This progression was unique, indeed bizarre, especially as every senior position he got was one he specifically said he did not want. Nonetheless, he was the man who commenced Britain’s relations with Japan and introduced Japan’s arts and crafts to the UK, in addition to playing a central role in Britain’s relationship with China. He was no rampant imperialist and expressed ambivalence about Britain’s position in East Asia as he contended with intractable issues like the opium trade and how to punish attacks on British interests without starting a war. This book fills a major gap in the study of Japan’s opening to the West from a British perspective, as well as Britain’s relationship with East Asia as a whole, through the eyes of a brilliant, but complicated and contradictory figure.
From Rubble to Ruins
Authors: Pitassio Francesco , Praetorius-Rhein Johannes , Val Perrine
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the role non-fiction cinema played in depicting the destruction caused by warfare and the effort of reconstruction. The basic assumption, which refers to the work of philosopher Michel de Certeau and social anthropologist Paul Connerton, is that urban space brings together two features: on the one hand, it is a built environment; on the other hand, its appropriation and experience create memory and identity. The postwar era set a major task for European nations: How to reconstruct urban environments and mend the social fabric? Focusing on examples from Italy, France, and Germany, this chapter discusses how non-fiction cinema contributed to promoting this endeavor and negotiated new urban spaces with reference to previous experience and traditions, in narrative and visual terms.
Screening (at) the Workplace
Authors: Česálková Lucie , Dotto Simone
Published: January 2025

The chapter focuses on the role played by cinema in postwar labor governmentality across Eastern and Western Europe. It considers recruitment, career choice, and instructional films within the wider category of “work-motivated films”— films that provide both a representation of and a social guidance to the working world. These films tended to anchor the representation of labor to differently nuanced “senses of place,” reinterpreting the workplace in terms of social belonging, living conditions, and spatial materiality. Following this threefold characterization, the chapter aims to provide an overview on how film and media intersected labor policies of productivity and of mobilization of workforce, questioning whether the postwar period established a specific mode of presenting men and women at work.
Choreographies of Public Space
Authors: Praetorius-Rhein Johannes , Průchová Hrůzová Andrea
Published: January 2025

This chapter revolves around a critical analysis of the body in documentary films from postwar Europe. Films are not seen merely as images of idealized or real bodies, but as a formative element for the public performance of citizenship. It explores constellations between the staging of collective bodies as well as the dynamics of individual figures and the cinematographic representation of public space. Drawing on the philosophical concept of “rhythmanalysis” developed by Henri Lefebvre, such constellations are conceived as choreographies. The analyses seeks to transcend the binary logic of West versus East. It points at the importance and the use of public bodies as cinematographic political figures in both, the liberal democratic system and the communist regime.
Frames of Reconstruction: An Introduction
Authors: Česálková Lucie , Praetorius-Rhein Johannes , Val Perrine , Villa Paolo
Published: January 2025

In the process of recovering from WWII, European societies greatly relied on non-fiction cinema a fundamental means of communication, propaganda, and governmentality. In both the Western and the Eastern Bloc, documentaries, newsreels, and amateur production served the goal of rebuilding the war-devastated nations, reconfiguring their political, economic, and cultural spheres while dealing with the recent trauma of the conflict. Highlighting the concepts of spatiality, proxemics, and public space, this introduction intends to frame through a transnational perspective the complex media system and visual culture centered around non-fiction films, and how they were a major actor in shaping postwar Europe.
Bodies with Songs
Authors: Graves Eben
Published: January 2025

Recent research on devotional song in South Asia has noted how the “oral-performative” sphere is a space of live interaction between singing and listening bodies, where dynamic transformation calls into question the ontology of the written text itself. This chapter concerns a type of devotional song in Bengal, padābalī kīrtan, where there exists a large repertoire of lyrics that are only sounded and actualized in performance. These interstitial lines expand on the images and affective import of each song text, and further advance the theological, didactic, and aesthetic aims of the repertoire. The absence of these lyrics in the published archive of padābalī kīrtan raises questions about the politics that define the relationship between written texts and the oral-performative sphere.
The Mobility of Regional Labor Hierarchies: Nepali Employment and Entrepreneurialism in the “South Asian” Gas Stations of North Texas
Authors: Nelson Andrew
Published: January 2025

Through an ethnographic portrait of music videos, wage labor, and entrepreneurialism related to the Nepali migrant experience working in North Texas gas stations, this chapter examines how multiple dimensions of mobility (physical, social, infrastructural) shape a pan-ethnic economy of South Asian-owned gas stations. Rather than understanding the gas stations as an “occupational niche” based on ethnicity, I apply a mobility paradigm for the more holistic framework it provides. A mobility approach highlights the regimes of migration that funnel temporary visa holders into the stigmatized and precarious service labor of gas stations often organized according to a South Asian diasporic hierarchy. At the same rate, a mobility trajectory approach emphasizes the creative agency of migrants to craft and enact narratives of cross-immigrant mutual help and solidarity, and gas station innovation.
Empowering Citizenship Through Academic Practices: The Case Study of Amazonian Civic Media
Authors: Baptista Cavalcante Acilon H. , Cardoso Ana Claudia Duarte
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the potential contribution of academic practices to the training of young people for civic action in the periphery of an Amazonian metropolis. The text presents an account of the Data Firme project, carried out from 2018 to 2020 by a partnership of professors, technicians, and students from the Federal University of Pará. Data Firme used Design Thinking strategies to co-create media practices that disrupted the mainstream narrative, giving visibility to the area’s cultural, social, and economic life and fostering civic movements with the support of digital media; such efforts form a central component of citizenship-building. This organized action resulted in social innovations being introduced in the relationship between community, media, and government.
Speculative Data Infrastructures: Prototyping a Public Database on Corporate Tax Avoidance
Authors: Gray Jonathan W. Y.
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines and reflects on three ways of workshopping ‘data in the making’ – redesigning, prototyping, and interfacing – drawing on activities leading towards a collaborative public database on the economic activities and tax contributions of multinational corporations. It examines how prototyping data infrastructures may serve as a method to engage with organizations, groups, and communities who are concerned with or affected by an issue, in order to materialize problems and to support learning which may go on to inform advocacy, policy, and reporting activities. It draws on ‘engaged research-led teaching’ activities with King’s College London, the Public Data Lab, and the Tax Justice Network to consider formats for critically engaging with data as a medium for issue articulation.
The DataWorkplace: Collaborative Learning about Datafication in Local Government
Authors: Ettlinger Krista , Schäfer Mirko Tobias , Meijer Albert , Branderhorst Martiene
Published: January 2025

The DataWorkplace is a transdisciplinary research collaboration between Utrecht University and a group of local and regional government organizations in the Netherlands. Its goal is to investigate and to support the digital transformation of public management in local and regional government organizations. The transdisciplinary quality of the DataWorkplace manifests in its hands-on, participation-intensive style of collaborative research; academic researchers and practitioners from local and regional government organizations collaborate on an equal basis while exploring pressing research questions together. This chapter presents outcomes of this ongoing cooperation and discusses the benefits and challenges of engaging in transdisciplinary work for academics, practitioners, networked collaborators, and society at large.