From “industrial paternalism” to “welfare capitalism” and “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR Act I)” and despite a deceptive tentative to introduce a “welfare State” in America, all these concepts were meant to allow the private sector to keep the initiative in organizing an institutional business environment and a social order that would…[Read more]

The line “Enge anpaðas uncuð gelad” [narrow path, unknown way] appears twice in the Old English corpus: once in the Old English Exodus (a tale from Old Testament narrative poetry that tells us a story of the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians) and once in Beowulf (an epic story of masculine bravado, intense alienation and Otherness, and time past…[Read more]

C’est dans un contexte historique bien particulier, la seconde guerre mondiale, puis la guerre froide, et dans un pays (les Etats-Unis) qui se pose en leader du combat contre le communisme mondial et la socialisation de l’Economie, que des chercheurs en sciences économiques vont élaborer les cadres conceptuels et théoriques qui deviendront autant…[Read more]

Il est un « conte de fées » – issu de médias ne pratiquant pas la distanciation critique déontologiquement requise par rapport à leurs principaux actionnaires – selon lequel les organisations représentatives de la société civile et du monde des affaires exerceraient, dans les mêmes conditions, des pressions sur la décision politique pour assur…[Read more]

Book review. Marcin Moskalewicz and Wojciech Przybylski “Understanding Central Europe,” Routledge, 2017.

Diskriminierung und Menschenrechtsverletzungen gegenüber LSBTI-Personen werden heute international thematisiert und angeprangert – ein vergleichsweise neues Phänomen. Dennoch tragen die herrschenden Normen von Zweigeschlechtlichkeit und Heterosexualität weiterhin zur Diskriminierung bei: So sind gleichgeschlechtliche Partnerschaften in fast alle…[Read more]

Menschenrechtsverletzungen aufgrund sexueller Orientierung und Geschlechtsidentität (SOGI) wurden auf internationaler Ebene lange Zeit kaum zur Kenntnis genommen. Doch seit einigen Jahren wird dem Thema in den Vereinten Nationen breiterer Raum eingeräumt. Die Yogyakarta-Prinzipien und eine Studie des Amtes des Hohen Kommissars für Me…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

What is, or should be, the academic life? After many years of thinking about academic ideals to live by, and occasionally writing about academic standards and ethics, the author wrote this forthright series of three articles on the global essentials of the academic life and the universality of the university.

In this article, I contextualise the emergence and describe the political processes of a grassroots mobilisation against the structural violence of neoliberalism in Mexico in order to suggest the necessity of re-thinking conjunctural analysis in a posthegemonic direction. The National Assembly of the Environmentally Affected (ANAA) is a nationwide…[Read more]

Three articles originally published in the American electronic literary magazine Webgeist: 1) “Olympic Results Reflect Trajectory of Post-War Japan,” 2) “Language as a Window into Japanese Culture,” and 3) “Educational Rigors Begin Early in East Asia.” The series begins lightheartedly observing patterns in post-War Japanese society, secondly…[Read more]

An archaeological field research database that can be used for different projects poses an advanced technical problem. It does not only have to deal with different needs of a variety of disciplines and methods like excavation and survey but also be usable for architectural or object studies. Therefore, a generic data model is required that can…[Read more]

Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who called himself Question Mark, left a lot of questions behind him. One of them obviously speaks for itself: what motivated him to kill thirty-three strangers at Virginia Tech? Another question almost goes without saying: why do we seek refuge behind moral explanations? Like ‘the question mark kid’ the adult…[Read more]

In Castile, where the purity of blood supposedly did not allow the merchants access to the privileged, we found an extremely powerful and rich group, the Cargadores a Indias. This group was made up of international merchants, almost all from humble origins, in many cases converso, who rose socially in a vertiginous way. For this, they were…[Read more]

Nine various essays from 1999-2000 in The Education Companion Newsletter based in New York City: 1) “Culture Crossed” [humor], 2) “More Culture Crossed”; 3) “Making Real Haiku Poetry”; 4) “The Woman Diver: Discovering East Asian Values in a Buddhist Folktale”; 5) “Conducting Academic Conferences Online”; 6) “Motivating Interfaces for the 2000s”;…[Read more]

Print-friendly remediation and backup copy of my course site for “Digital Public Humanities,” part of the Spring 2016 offerings in the Public Humanities MA program at Brown University. Course web site can be found here: http://digitalpublichumanities.jimmcgrath.us/. While not the first DH course offered at Brown or the first course in Public…[Read more]

PDF of syllabus for Brown University Leadership Institute course on media literacy. Course was taught over two weeks on Brown University campus in the summer of 2018. “Leadership” language and “Action Plan” part of Institute branding and course requirements. Syllabus may be of interest to students and instructors interested in high school /…[Read more]

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right-wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg’s ur…[Read more]

How, why and under what conditions do new racial categories form? This dissertation examines the construction of South and Southeast Asian migrants (tongnama) as a new racial category in South Korea: a country in a continent long neglected within studies of race. Through ethnographic research on foreign migrant workers and marriage immigrants in…[Read more]

In addition to the enigmatic The Codomas, Henri Matisse distinguished three other images with a name, Icarus, Monsieur Loyal and Pierrot’s Funeral for his landmark livre d’artiste Jazz. While the characters Loyal, Pierrot and Icarus were readily identifiable and the images could be interpreted within the context of the difficulties of the Ger…[Read more]