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This chapter takes a long view of the British state and its geographical division of powers. Stretching over 500 years the chapter looks at the history of local government and its origins in the parish. It then focuses on the gradual centralisation and standardisation that took place from the early nineteenth century. The chapter also looks at the rise of democratic social movements that promoted new forms of localism during the 1960s. This legacy frames the challenges in developing localist statecraft and citizenship today. The chapter ends with an overview of the shifting spatial orders of English government from the seventeenth century to the present day.

The focus in this chapter is on local roles and local-international partnerships in recovery from disaster in shattered societies. The chapter does not discount the roles that external actors can usefully play but rather, as Susan Allen writes in Chapter Eleven, to highlight the opportunities for local actors to intervene in their own societies. In addressing this question, Allen considers the case study of rebuilding Georgian–South Ossetian relationships so as to consider who in practice rebuilds shattered societies, how this rebuilding unfolds as an ongoing process, and how the skills and abilities that come to the foreground in the aftermath of traumatic evolve. In turn, the chapter examines the various actions that are part of rebuilding and the different ways people contribute to such a process. Third, considered are the varied actors, the partnerships, and finally the roles of individuals involved in rebuilding. Finally, even while acknowledging partnerships, the chapter also considers individual agency and the ways that a recognised or emergent leader can exercise what John Paul Lederach (2005) refers to as the ‘moral imagination’.

Using the Poisson model problem as a motivation, the chapter shows that evaluation of computational cost in computations using Krylov subspace methods depends on unresolved but important issues such as the local distribution of the algebraic error. The chapter discusses principal differences between direct and iterative computations, computational cost of individual iterations, the concept of convergence, and cost of particular computations in contrast with the concept of complexity. These issues, including effects of rounding errors, are then illustrated and developed further using the conjugate gradient method (CG) and the generalised minimal residual method (GMRES). Special attention is paid to the intriguing relationship between spectral information and convergence behaviour, including the role of clustered eigenvalues and, in the Hermitian (positive definite) case, the related sensitivity of the Gauss–Christoffel quadrature. It is further shown that the algebraic error in CG computations tends to have oscillating components. After a brief summary of main numerical stability results concerning CG and GMRES, the chapter ends by pointing out some omitted issues and an outlook to further work.

One characteristic of modernity has been the discursive displacement of place (with its foundations in ideas of differentiation and qualification) in favor of “space” (based in quantification and standardization). Focusing on The Hamlet, this essay eschews modernity’s investments in discourses of space over place and explores ways of re-thinking Faulkner’s work in terms of a revitalized sense of place, embedded in the body. This essay also seeks to better understand the Faulknerian sense of place as dynamic, deeply historical, and, often, grotesque, emerging from a breeding ground where the grotesque and the beautiful, the normative and the deviant are inseparable, a location I call the “crossroads local,” a term that underscores the challenge this revitalized sense of place issues to standard paradigms of literary nationalisms and regionalisms.

Chapter six discuss the notion of ‘the local‘ through the history of governance in colonial and post-colonial India. The authors focus on ability of liberal governance to adapt to local culture. They discuss Ilan Kapoor's integration of postcolonial theory with debates on development and use this to identify what could make the liberal peacebuilders more open towards the idea of greater inclusion of local voices. The authors suggest that emphasis should be put on socio-cultural sensitivity. This entails that the international interveners should familiarize themselves with the context as much as possible. They invite critical analysis of the main issues at stake, which would be aimed against relevant theoretical debates. The authors also call for attention to the distribution of resources that are usually limited in conflict settings. They conclude that as long as subjective norms and interests of the peacebuilders are harmonised with local culture and practices - not creating tensions - they can be legitimately promoted.

As a small and relatively peripheral nation, Ireland's film industry is largely state-funded with additional support from European sources and co-production deals with the commercial industry. It produces between 10 and 15 feature films per year as well as a range of shorts, documentaries and animation films. Ireland is also a popular location for large-scale American and British film and television productions, which bring additional economic and training benefits to the local indigenous industry. Although this industry only emerged relatively recently in the 1980s/1990s, Ireland has had a presence in the American and British film industries since the earliest days of filmmaking and a range of dominant tropes has emerged in the representation of Ireland and the Irish. Much indigenous filmmaking is a response to these traditions of representation as well as a response to the rapid economic and social changes that have characterised Ireland since the 1980s. Indeed, Irish cinema has played a key role in tracking and representing these transformations so that, despite the low profile of Irish cinema internationally (with the exception of Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan) the indigenous cinema has played a key role in the cultural re-imagining of Ireland and the Irish at home.

As in World War I, the second World War resulted in the disappearance of pre-war spatial boundaries governing drinking. Young women began visiting pubs in growing numbers first in early 1941 and with increasing frequency in the following years. Improved interwar premises facilitated the entry to licensed premises of adolescents and less affluent young women from unskilled working-class families. Women’s public drinking, reaching about 40% of all women on the eve of the war, rose perhaps by one-fifth, so that well over half and perhaps as many as three-fifths of all females were using pubs during the war. From the late 1940s, however, women shunned pubs in striking numbers. Public opinion polls suggest that the war ingrained deep hostility in many juvenile and young women to every frequenting drink premises thereafter. One enduring change was the widespread acceptance of the pub’s new name, the “local.”

This introduction provides an intellectual road map for the individual contributions to the volume that are summarized in the latter section. Five themes frame the analyses of the transnational movement of knowledge: the centrality of travel, the role of the regulatory state, the meaning of "borders" and networks, the significance of nationality and political allegiance, and the intersection between the local and the global. By focusing on the practices of state power to police "borders," these themes demolish a widespread assumption that, in a global world, knowledge moves "by itself." The political economy of knowledge production and cross-border movement produces lumpy networks of unevenly distributed power. They are held together by various factors, including the ideology of scientific internationalism, the adoption or imposition of standards that facilitate knowledge exchange (including the increasingly dominant role of English in scientific exchanges) and the principle of reciprocity whereby both members of a dyad benefit, sometimes in quite different ways, from the transnational transaction, including the urge to be "modern." The performance of transnational history in these essays confirms its value as a way of seeing, opening new intellectual and political perspectives on how knowledge moves in an interconnected world that is not "flat."

Focusing on shopping malls, this chapter seeks to track the ways in which ‘social’ and consuming life are imagined within narratives of their design, operation, and use. It is concerned with competing and complementary meanings of space that circulate through the web of relationships between mall visitors and planners. It is through a discussion of spaces that the chapter explores the ways in which consumers are imagined as differentiated consuming units located between multiple binaries such as ‘global’ and ‘local, and ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’. Through explorations of spatial discourses of mall planners, architects, managers, and theoreticians (such as those who write in trade magazines)–the chapter seeks to outline what is specific about the ways in which Indian malls produce spatial ‘myths of identity’

This chapter examines the significance of the 1958 student strike organized by middle class universitarios in support of striking bus drivers. It argues that, despite the protest's short duration (August 22 to September 4), this event should be interpreted as one of the most important student actions of postrevolutionary Mexico that would partly influence the rise of Mexico's New Left. Following the 1958 strike, students began to see themselves as a unifying front—“el estudiantado”—a “movement” that could challenge the institutionalized barriers of class differences that had traditionally kept students from different institutions apart. In particular, this chapter argues that the uprisings of 1958 emerged to a large extent as a direct response to the consolidation of charrismo as a mechanism of control across the domains of labor and education.

It is now widely acknowledged, and far beyond Ireland, that Tim Robinson’s two volumes jointly known as Stones of Aran (‘Pilgrimage’ and ‘Labyrinth’) are modern classics, exemplary in every way of how to write about place and to do so with a formal, literary accomplishment that more than earns the right to nod at Ruskin’s own classic. In 2012, Robinson went back to Árainn, the largest of the three islands, for the first time in nearly ten years. He did so at the urging of Andrew McNeillie, with whom he spent two and a half days revisiting old haunts. This chapter makes account of the occasion and uses, in the process, a unique document provided by Robinson as an experiment in annotating his work. This prompts McNeillie to investigate some of his own annotations and footnotes to Aran.