Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.

The discourse around derelict, former industrial and military sites has grown in recent years. This interest is not only theoretical, and landscape professionals are taking new approaches to the design and development of these sites. This book examines the varied ways in which the histories and qualities of these derelict sites are reimagined in the transformed landscape and considers how such approaches can reveal the dramatic changes that have been wrought on these places over a relatively short time scale. It discusses these issues with reference to eleven sites from the UK, Germany, the USA, Australia and China, focusing specifically on how designers incorporate evidence of landscape change, both cultural and natural. There has been little research into how these developed landscapes are perceived by visitors and local residents. This book examines how the tangible material traces of pastness are interpreted by the visitor and the impact of the intangible elements - hidden traces, experiences and memories. The book draws together theory in the field and implications for practice in landscape architecture and concludes with an examination of how different approaches to revealing and reimagining change can affect the future management of the site.

Sparked by the confluence of accelerating domestic transformation and increasingly explicit impacts from ‘globalization’, the Japanese education system has undergone tremendous changes during the turbulence of the past decade. This volume, which brings together some of the foremost scholars in the field of Japanese education, analyzes these recent changes in ways that help us ‘reimagine’ Japan and Japanese educational change at this critical juncture. Rather than simply updating well-worn Western images of Japan and its educational system, the aim of the book is a much deeper critical rethinking of the outmoded paradigms and perspectives that have rendered the massive shifts that have taken place in Japan largely invisible to or forgotten by the outside world. This ‘reimagining’ thus restores Japan to its place as a key comparative link in the global conversation on education and lays out new pathways for comparative research and reflection. Ranging widely across domains of policy and practice, and with a balance of Japanese and foreign scholars, the volume is also indicative of new directions in educational scholarship worldwide: approaches that center global interactions on domestic education and contribute to a far greater recognition of the polycentric, polycontextual World unfolding today. This book will be of keen interest to scholars of education worldwide, as well as those working in and across anthropology, sociology, policy studies, political science, and area studies given that contemporary transformations in Japan at once reflect and approximate political, social, and educational shifts occurring throughout the World in the early decades of the 21st century.

Since the 1960s, policies to 'revive' minority cultures and languages have flourished. But what does it mean to have a 'cultural identity'? And are minorities as deeply attached to their languages and traditions as revival policies suppose? This book is a sophisticated analysis of responses to the 'Gaelic renaissance' in a Scottish Hebridean community. Its description of everyday conceptions of belonging and interpretations of cultural policy takes us into the world of Gaelic playgroups, crofting, local history, religion and community development. Historically and theoretically informed, this book challenges many of the ways in which we conventionally think about ethnic and national identity. This accessible and engaging account of life in this remote region of Europe provides an original and timely contribution to questions of considerable currency in a broad range of social science disciplines.

A vigorous call for rethinking the field of business history. Business history needs a shake-up, Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson argue, as many businesses go global and cultural contexts become critical. Reimagining Business History prods practitioners to take new approaches to entrepreneurial intentions, company scale, corporate strategies, local infrastructure, employee well-being, use of resources, and long-term environmental consequences. During the past half century, the history of American business became an unusually active and rewarding field of scholarship, partly because of the primacy of postwar American capital, at home and abroad, and the rise of a consumer culture but also because of the theoretical originality of Alfred D. Chandler. In a field long given over to banal company histories and biographies of tycoons, Chandler took the subject seriously enough to ask about the large patterns and causes of corporate success. Chandler and his students found the richest material for theorizing about the course of business history in large companies and their institutional structures and cultures. Meantime, Scranton and others found smaller firms, those specializing in batch work as opposed to mass-produced goods, far closer to the norm and more telling. Scranton and Fridenson believe that the time has come for a sweeping rethinking of the field, its materials, and the kinds of questions its practitioners should be asking. How can this field develop in an age of global markets, growing information technology, and diminishing resources? A transnational collaboration between two senior scholars, Reimagining Business History offers direction in forty-four short, pithy essays.

This book approaches the subject of contemporary art by exploring the social embeddedness and identities of Singaporean artists. Linking artistic processes and production to both personal worlds and wider issues, the book examines how artists negotiate their relationships between self and society and between artistic freedom and social responsibility. It is based on original research into the discourses and artistic practices of local artists, with a special focus on emerging artists and artists whose work and perspectives engage with questions of identity. Reimagining contemporary Singapore and their place within it, artists are asserting their multiple and heterogeneous self-identities and contesting hegemonic norms and notions, as they negotiate and adapt to the world around them. This book is relevant to students and researchers in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, art, sociology of art, arts education, and race and ethnicity studies.

Reimagining National Belonging is the first sustained critical examination of post–civil war El Salvador. It describes how one nation, after an extended and divisive conflict, took up the challenge of generating social unity and shared meanings around ideas of the nation. In tracing state-led efforts to promote the concepts of national culture, history, and identity, Robin DeLugan highlights the sites and practices—as well as the complexities—of nation-building in the twenty-first century. Examining events that unfolded between 1992 and 2011, DeLugan both illustrates the idiosyncrasies of state and society in El Salvador and opens a larger portal into conditions of constructing a state in the present day around the globe—particularly the process of democratization in an age of neoliberalism. She demonstrates how academics, culture experts, popular media, and the United Nations and other international agencies have all helped shape ideas about national belonging in El Salvador. She also reveals the efforts that have been made to include populations that might have been overlooked, including indigenous people and faraway citizens not living inside the country’s borders. And she describes how history and memory projects have begun to recall the nation’s violent past with the goal of creating a more just and equitable nation. This illuminating case study fills a gap in the scholarship about culture and society in contemporary El Salvador, while offering an “ethnography of the state” that situates El Salvador in a global context.

This book provides a plethora of insights and perspectives that take up and challenge prevailing points of view about today's Africa. The chapters examine a number of different media and topics: from African theatre to poetry, from accounts of personal history to South Africa's language policy and publishing practices. Their unifying theme is a search for tomorrow's cultural trends in an ever-changing Africa.

In the Preface to his ground-breaking The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell claimed that “the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life.” Forty years after the publication of Fussell’s study, the contributors to this volume reconsider whether the myth generated by World War I is still “part of the fiber of [people’s] lives” in English-speaking countries. What is the place of the First World War in cultural memory today? How have the literary means for remembering the war changed since the war? Can anything new be learned from the effort to re-imagine the First World War after other bloody conflicts of the 20th century? A variety of answers to these questions are provided in Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture, which explores the Great War in British, Irish, Canadian, Australian, and (post)colonial contexts. The contributors to this collection write about the war from a literary perspective, reinterpreting poetry, fiction, letters, and essays created during or shortly after the war, exploring contemporary discourses of commemoration, and presenting in-depth studies of complex conceptual issues, such as gender and citizenship. Re-Imagining the First World War also includes historical, philosophical and sociological investigations of the first industrialised conflict of the 20th century, which focus on responses to the Great War in political discourse, life writing, music, and film: from the experience of missionaries isolated during the war in the Arctic and Asia, through colonial encounters, exploring the role of Irish, Chinese and Canadian First Nations soldiers during the war, to the representation of war in the world-famous series Downton Abbey and the 2013 album released by contemporary Scottish rock singer Fish. The variety of themes covered by the essays here not only confirms the significance of the First World War in memory today, but also illustrates the necessity of developing new approaches to the first global conflict, and of commemorating “new” victims and agents of war. If modes of remembrance have changed with the postmodern ethical shift in historiography and cultural studies, which encourages the exploration of “other” subjectivities in war, so-far concealed affinities and reverberations are still being discovered, on the macro- and micro-historical levels, the Western and other fronts, the battlefield, and the home front. Although it has been a hundred years since the outbreak of hostilities, there is a need for increased sensitivity to the tension between commemoration and contestation, and to re-member, re-conceptualise and re-imagine the Great War.