The Future of Anglican Studies

This essay explores the concept of “mutuality” through the relationship between Jesus and his mother, Mary, as a model for theology and public life. It presents female-maternal-embodied knowledge as a framework to understand the eight stages of the female maternal body, from birth to death. The essay highlights how Mary’s consent, relational autonomy, and the Incarnation exemplify transformative and intergenerational mutuality. It examines key scenes in their relationship, showing the shifts in agency, power, and reflexivity, including the need for “mutual distancing” during Jesus’ public ministry. The essay then applies this model to missiology, noting how it can inform discussions around power dynamics, financial dependency, and the challenge of “letting go” in Christian institutions. It also suggests the relevance of this model for intercultural communication, family life, congregational studies, and the one’s individual path of transformation. Ultimately, the essay proposes that the relationship between Jesus and Mary serves as a profound example of transforming mutuality, which has the potential to invigorate theology, biblical studies, and practical applications for public life.

Little has been printed in English on Gramsci's sociology of religion, despite considerable work done in European languages, particularly Italian. Yet Gramsci wrote extensively on the subject as well as on the link of religion to hegemony, the best known of his concepts. The main aim of the article is to supply English readers with an introduction to the topic. This is done with direct reference to Gramsci's writings, particularly The Prison Notebooks, but also with the aid of the main French and Italian commentators. Gramsci's understanding of religion is bound up with the principal concern of his work: to understand the dynamics of power in society both in the past as well as in the present, with an aim to bringing about a socialist “intellectual and moral reformation.” The article examines this key term and its link with religion in Gramsci's outlook, before proceeding to the key concepts for analyzing religion: the common sense, the religion of the people, philosophy, the religion of the intellectuals, folklore and hegemony. Gramsci's analysis of history as a study of the interplay between religion and social structure is then outlined. Finally, the writer concludes that there is much to be learned from Gramsci's method and conceptual framework if one is seeking to re-discover the link between religion and politics in social-structural analysis.

This response discusses the conjunction of “queer,” “temporalities,” and “biblical interpretation.” I argue that these essays demonstrate, through their turn to queer temporalities, that attending to queer time means attending to people in time, to their social practices, to dynamics of power, to violence, to survival, to the lost pasts whose voices still call out to our own, and to the choices we make in reading. The response also turns to borderlands theories, especially the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and decolonial feminist thought, particularly that of María Lugones, in order to ask questions about biblical studies that cross borders.

This paper presents a filter that is able to simultaneously estimate the behaviors of traffic participants and anticipate their future trajectories. This is achieved by recognizing the type of situation derived from the local situational context, which subsumes all information relevant for the drivers decision making. By explicitly taking into account the interactions between vehicles, it achieves a comprehensive situational understanding, inevitable for autonomous vehicles and driver assistance systems. This provides the necessary information for safe behavior decision making or motion planning. The filter is modeled as a Dynamic Bayesian Network. The factored state space, modeling the causal dependencies, allows to describe the models in a compact fashion and reduces the computational complexity of the inference process. The filter is evaluated in the context of a highway scenario, showing a good performance even with very noisy measurements. The presented framework is intended to be used in traffic environments but can be easily transferred to other robotic domains.

The institutionalisation of new technologies, information systems, norms, practices and other innovations for improving governance, planning, operational efficiency and service delivery in the public sector remain a challenge. Power dynamics, and politics have also been recognised as playing a critical role in the institutionalisation of information systems for promoting digital transformation of the public sector. This study used data collected through an extensive review of literature and empirical data from a case study of South Africa’s government digital transformation journey. The study explored power dynamics and the role of politics in the institutionalisation of reforms and deinstitutionalisation of institutionalised practices that constrain transformation in institutions. Power dynamics, and politics in institutions were found to have a significant bearing on the institutionalisation of reforms that include information systems in the digital transformation of government. The study found that the digital transformation of the public is more than the implementation technology and requires the holistic view of institutions as social, economic, and political structures.

This book introduces a new analytical framework, the “dynamic pyramid model,” to analyze China’s unique regulatory model. The model comprises three critical features: hierarchy, volatility, and fragility—depicting the structure, process, and potential outcomes of China’s regulatory system, respectively. These three features, interconnected through intricate feedback loops, form an extensive network, effectively representing the regulatory dynamics in China. By employing China’s tech crackdown from 2020 to 2022 as a comprehensive case study, the book illuminates how the dynamic pyramid model has affected a broad spectrum of legal domains such as antitrust, data, and labor enforcement in China. It further delves into how platforms strategically self-regulate in the shadow of this regulatory system. Meanwhile, comparative exploration of the evolving regulatory landscapes in the United States and the European Union demonstrates that China grapples with many similar regulatory issues as its Western counterparts, while also shedding light on the future trajectory of China’s legal developments. Furthermore, the book finds that the tech crackdown has resulted in a significant shift in power dynamics between businesses and the Chinese state, leading to the retreat of the private sector and the emergence of the administrative state. The book concludes with some measured predictions of China’s future tech governance, focusing on its recent initiative to regulate the rapidly expanding field of generative artificial intelligence.

Global environmental governance is initiated, encouraged, coordinated, strengthened and monitored by a series of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), with exclusive or partial environmental mandates. The environment as an issue for global governance organizations appeared on the international agenda in the late 1960s, and the intersection between environment and development has gone on to become a central focus of global governance ever since. IGOs have played a critical role in this process. This chapter reviews the functions and operation of existing global and regional IGOs as they pertain to global environmental governance. It examines lines of inquiry into their role in the international political system, both individually and as a collective whole, and how they have been applied in research on environmental IGOs to further our understanding of this set of actors. The chapter outlines possible future trajectories and reforms for this complex institutional terrain.

North–South research collaboration involves navigating two terrains, which have, in the past, been areas of bitter contestation. One area is to negotiate the unequal power dynamics that shape what ‘partnership’ means and determine the division of labour in the research collaboration. The other is a tussle over concepts that underpin research, which may have different meanings or no meaning at all in the local context. In this essay, I share my experiences on both areas as a researcher based in the global South. I contend that these power dynamics not only reinforce the extractive nature of research, but also undermine different ways of knowing and registering that are not part of dominant intellectual toolkits in the global North. I conclude that the hierarchy of knowledge generation embedded in North–South collaboration hinders the creativity and intellectual advancement of researchers and also diminishes the quality of the knowledge that is produced.

The third chapter assesses the exploitation of existing economic and security dependencies (i.e., coercion) by the EU and Russia. It presents a systematic comparison of their uses of coercive actions towards Moldova and Armenia and an analysis of the perceptions of local actors. Both the EU and Russia coerced Moldova and Armenia, but the difference was in the institutionalisation of the mechanism. The chapter details the coercion mechanism, illustrating how threats influence the political elite’s preferences. The effectiveness of coercion depends on the communicated threats, rewards, and demands, and how these are perceived by the target state’s political elite. It also considers the existing interdependencies with other powers and the local context in which coercive activities are received. EU conditionality was perceived as positive and legitimate, associated with economic opportunities and reforms beneficial to the countries. Russian coercive actions were seen as negative and threatening, creating fear and resistance. This difference in perception highlights the importance of normative justification in the effectiveness of coercive strategies. This comparative analysis provides valuable insights into the dynamics of hegemonic power in the shared neighbourhood of the EU and Russia.

Reflecting on our experience as educators in a semester long “Disability and Christian Ministry” mini-course with ministerial students from Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and Career and Community Studies (CCS) students with I/DD from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in Spring 2020, we illuminate the critical role the Spirit and togetherness play in confronting covert ableism in the classroom, disrupting conventional values and power dynamics, and cultivating a new ethos for mutual ministry and leadership. We argue that the dynamic, experiential, and collaborative learning process in the mini- course encouraged students to take greater shared responsibility for their learning in the classroom, equipping them for ministerial leadership by allowing them to experience mutual leadership with one another. The leadership of the Spirit, through the spontaneous distribution of gifts, reconstituted the body, helping PTS and CCS students see themselves as full partners in ministry. However, this article also puts our course in conversation with the broader literature on disability and theological education, emphasizing the need for theological educators to embrace inclusive, experiential theological education as a site for justice and transformation. We make the argument that theological educators, seminaries, and divinity schools must not be satisfied with social programming, community living, or fellowship opportunities with persons with disabilities, but must receive the ministry of people with disabilities in the classroom in order that theological education may be rid of its ableist biases and transformed from the inside out. By withholding classroom space from students with disabilities, theological institutions restrict the dynamic work of the Spirit from the practice of education, hampering the heart of theological education.

The Punk Turn in Comedy: Masks of Anarchy

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> It is virtually certain that Antarctica's contribution to sea-level rise will increase with future warming, although competing mass balance processes hamper accurate quantification of the exact magnitudes. Today, ocean-induced melting underneath the floating ice shelves dominates mass losses, but melting at the surface will gain importance as global warming continues. Meltwater at the ice surface has crucial implications for the ice sheet's stability, as it increases the risk of hydrofracturing and ice-shelf collapse that could cause enhanced glacier outflow into the ocean. Simultaneously, positive feedbacks between the atmosphere and the ice elevation and albedo can accelerate mass losses and increase the ice sheet's sensitivity to warming. However, due to long response times it may take hundreds to thousands of years until the ice sheet fully adjusts to the environmental changes. Therefore, ice sheet model simulations must be computationally fast and capture the relevant feedbacks, including the ones at the ice&ndash;atmosphere interface. Here we use the novel surface melt module dEBM-simple, coupled to the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM), to estimate the impact of 21^st-century atmospheric warming on Antarctic surface melt and long-term ice dynamics. As an enhancement compared to the widely adopted positive degree-day (PDD) scheme, dEBM-simple includes an implicit diurnal cycle and computes melt not only from the temperature, but also from the influence of solar radiation and changes in ice albedo, thus accounting for the melt&ndash;albedo feedback. We calibrate PISM-dEBM-simple to reproduce historical and present-day Antarctic surface melt rates given by the regional climate model RACMO2.3p2 and use the calibrated model to assess the range of possible future surface melt trajectories under SSP5-8.5 warming projections, extended beyond 2100 under fixed climatological conditions. Our findings reveal a substantial speed-up in ice flow associated with large-scale elevation reductions in sensitive ice-sheet regions, underscoring the critical role of self-reinforcing ice-sheet&ndash;atmosphere feedbacks on future mass losses and sea-level contribution from the Antarctic Ice Sheet on centennial to millennial timescales.

This article constitutes a single case study of snapshots of the life of a young, gay isiXhosa-speaking man, and his narrative on relationships. The case study is a part of a broader study exploring gay male relationships with a particular focus on the dynamics of control, power, and abuse. The broader literature on gay relationships, both internationally and locally, highlights the pervasiveness of heteropatriarchal stereotypical constructions in many gay relationships, believed to facilitate unequal power relations (as they do in heterosexual relationships), but also foregrounds a more ‘flexible’ approach to constructing masculinities and sexual roles among gay men. The article highlights the experience of performances of sexuality and relationship that mirror heterosexual traditional roles, with accompanying power inequalities, as well as a shift to alternative, more flexible and possibly more equitable relationships. It is also argued that homophobia, emerging in multiple sites and including internalised homophobia, plays a powerful role in the reproduction of inequality and abusive practices within gay male relationships. The article interrogates some of the local contexts of homophobia in contemporary South Africa and the way in which the participant's experiences, within and outside his relationships, reflect a corroding of self-confidence and sense of power. It also explores the challenges faced in constructing equitable intimate relationships within a society that still adheres to hegemonic practices of masculinity and heteronormative models of relation.

Bernard Ganne and Yveline Lecler (eds.) Asian industrial clusters, global competitiveness and new policy initiatives, Singapore, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2009, 562 pp.The clustering phenomenon shapes local economies worldwide. The concentration of specialised firms benefiting from advan- tages of co-location in terms of information sharing, labour mar- ket, and specialisation processes is indeed a systemic organisation form of economic development in both industrialised and emerging coun- tries. This book joins in such an outlook and provides fieldwork results on multiple forms of cluster-based industrialisation patterns experi- enced by Asian countries positioned at different stages of developmen- tal maturity. After first tackling Japan's manufacturing decline, it turns to a masterful analysis of the SME-based industrialisation process of China and the surrounding countries of Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia.Edited by Bernard Ganne and Yveline Lecler, the book stems from a re- search program whose final scientific results were presented in an interna- tional workshop held in 2006. Contributors carried out extensive surveys in Asian countries; the book is therefore a structured collection of highly orig- inal material. This makes for fascinating reading right from the outset, in an investigation of topical dynamics through close observation within a timeless socio-economic paradigm in which SME systems characterise country-specific industrial transformations ranging from the traditional to the globally competitive.This book aims to answer the following questions: which lessons can be learned from the Asian experiences of industrial clusters? Which are the prevailing policy approaches? Are traditional conceptualisations suitable for Asian studies?As the editors point out in the introductory chapter, the industrial policy approach to local development sometimes fails to detect diversified or- ganisation models at the local level in Asian countries. One of the major attempts of the book is a re-evaluation of the traditional theoretical ap- proach in light of the Asian experience, in order to grasp the essential dy- namics of industrial clusters underlying future trajectories. Above all, the risk of reducing the variety of specificities in the local context is high if ob- servers are Western-oriented and use traditional categories of analysis. History, tradition, and social roots have to be taken into account.Part One provides the theoretical framework and underlines the shift from a general industrial policy approach to an industrial clusterpolicy ap- proach in Asian countries. Bernard Ganne and Yveline Lecler review the theoretical scenario on agglomerations of firms, pointing out the prevailing force of interpretative Western models of industrial districts, industrial clusters, and poles of competitiveness. They consistently highlight new lenses through which we can closely observe and interpret industrial trans- formations of Asian countries based on sociological and local economic development bases. Differences between the industrial policy approaches followed by Japan and those of other East Asian countries are clearly laid out by Akira Suehiro, who provides a taxonomy of industrial clusters and policies in an evolutionary perspective.Part Two focuses on Japan. Industrial policies on SMEs implemented since the late 1970s have been predominant in setting the legal stage for devel- opment during the rural urbanisation path. Policy measures were initially devoted to the creation of geographically localised industries, and then shifted towards the promotion of innovation through technology transfer and university-industry linkages. More recently, the central government has supported collaboration among local players in order to enhance sci- ence and technology (Akira Hattori). Decentralised governance and the in- volvement of the private sector is a prerequisite for the success of indus- trial cluster formation, as demonstrated by the repeated failure of indus- trial policy based on the creation of various types of industrial parks during the 1990s (Yoichi Sekizawa). …

This Special Issue was invited by LAND as a follow-up on the Special Issue on “Changing Land Uses, Changing Livelihoods,”, published in 2016, but with a specific focus on Africa and on exploring the linkages between various aspects of human—environmental change and climate change. Given that Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions globally to climate change, we felt a focus on this region was timely and critical. Improved knowledge on the complex interactions between the multiple drivers of landscape and livelihood change and the impacts of and responses to these changes is required if we are to consider future pathways that are African-led, equitable, and just and that take account of local contexts, cultures, complexities, and realities. Too often development and landscape management interventions and adaptation options are imported from elsewhere and consequently de-contextualized and de-politicized, ignoring the legacies of colonialism, as well as important local sociocultural contexts. See Editorial for Special Issue: “Livelihood and Landscape Change in Africa: Future Trajectories for Improved Well-Being under a Changing Climate”.