Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

basic research and clinical data in an attempt to derive a cohesive model which explains the behavioral effects of the drug. Johnson is an experimental psychologist, and his work underlies many of the chapters which suggest that lithium decreases the behavioral response to novel external stimuli. He then utilizes this foundation to propose a cognitive model for lithium's anti-manic action, its inhibition of violent impulsivity, and its prophylactic effects in recurrent depression. Previous formulations which were clinically based, such as that of Mabel Blake Cohen and her associates, stressed the primacy of depression and noted the \"manic defense\" as an attempt to ward off intolerable depression. In direct contrast, Johnson views mania as the primary disturbance in bipolar disorder. He considers depression in bipolar disease as an over-zealous homeostatic inhibitory responsf to a maniaassociated cognitive overload. Consistent with this, he believes, lit lum exerts its anti-manic effect by decreasing cognitive processing in a manner analogous to his animal studies. Johnson also suggests that lithium exerts its prophylactic effect in recurrent depressions by treating subclinical mania. These concepts are supported by the work of Johnson's associate, Kukopulos, to whom the book is dedicated. The bulk of the research which describes the cognitive disturbance in mania is complex, however, and uncomfortably open to multiple interpretations. Recognized as a preliminary effort, Johnson's formulation may help to guide further research. Although Johnson clearly traces lithium actions through a broad range of subjects, his discussion of the neurophysiological aspects of this drug is notably spotty. In particular, Johnson ignores the work of Svensson, DeMontigny, Aghajanian, and others who suggest that serotonergic systems may play an important role in the antidepressant actions of lithium. As a result, he fails to discuss one of the most important current uses of lithium: as an agent used in conjunction with antidepressant medications to increase treatment response in medication-resistant forms of depression. Lithium augmentation of antidepressant medication also challenges the formulation presented by Johnson. This formulation suggests that lithium should have no therapeutic value in patients, such as those with endogenous depression, who already \"under-process\" cognitive information. The omission of lithium augmentation in depression is clearly unfortunate in this text. Overall, this volume demonstrates the benefits of a single-authored text. It it clearly organized and readable. The bibliography is also broad and useful. In this book, Johnson primarily addresses a research audience, and his model seems designed to stimulate thought rather than to improve clinical technique. In this capacity, his book will be of most interest to behavioral psychologists. Other books, focusing purely on clinical data, may be more useful to clinicians. Nevertheless, the clear organization, the large bibliography, and the thoughtful presentation may make this text a useful addition to a clinical library as well.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

https://sti.bmj.com/content/sextrans/70/5/364.1.full.pdf

Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles

The experience of grief is one of history’s most universal yet elusive themes, ever present even in peacetime but generated with almost intolerable intensity and frequency by wars. The practice of mourning, both public and private, provided essential consolation for those bereaved as a result of the Great War. Jay Winter admits that \"how healing occurs, and what quietens embitterment and alleviates despair can never be fully known\". Yet \"not to ask the question . . . is both to impoverish the study of history and to evade our responsibility as historians\" (116). If directed to every scholar individually, this injunction would indeed be outrageous – some of us must be allowed to indulge other interests in, say, laughter, labour, railways, sex, incunabula, or diplomacy. In fact, Winter is addressing historians of the Great War as if they were a team, an ideal rarely achieved in scholarship but to some extent realised in the conferences and collaborations associated with the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne, which he helped establish. The collaborative approach suffuses this book, and the endnotes are strewn with warm and deserved acknowledgements of help from numerous colleagues. The effect is to suggest a series of lively and speculative seminars, complete with sometimes indistinct and half-explored images flashing onto the whiteboard from an overheated projector: the 31 illustrations are often dark and dim, in contrast to the splendidly sharp reproductions in Winter’s The Experience of World War I (1988). This is history in the making: inconclusive, uneven, but consistently exhilarating.

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

The article examines the potential and limitations of storytelling for victims of political violence. It rejects the view that storytelling is unproblematic, a way for victims to ‘get things off th...

/pdf/the-burden-of-memory-victims-storytelling-and-resistance-in-11hom6iuhy.pdf

The burden of memory: Victims, storytelling and resistance in Northern Ireland

Politics and Painting is a study of wall murals in Northern Ireland. The core argument is that the art of wall mural painting is influenced by the political conflict in Northern Ireland.

Politics and Painting: Murals and Conflict in Northern Ireland

This article surveys the literature on the global experience of demobilization and reintegration of combatants after wars end. It examines the factors that contribute to successful programmes. Among these, the two most frequently emphasized are the political will of all concerned to ensure the programmes work, and the active participation of ex-combatants in their own programmes of reintegration. The article then examines the situation in Ireland. In ways reintegration has failed, and for the same reasons as elsewhere. At the same time, the Irish case shows elements of success to match the best of reintegration programmes worldwide — not least the contribution of highly politicized ex-prisoners to their own reintegration and to conflict transformation more generally. These similarities have emerged in the relative absence of any involvement of the international community in demobilization and reintegration in Ireland, and indeed without direct comparisons made to good practice elsewhere.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0964663907076534

Demobilization and Reintegration of Ex-Combatants: the Irish Case in International Perspective

This article addresses the nature of contemporary racism and sectarianism in Northern Ireland in the context of the Good Friday Agreement and its outworking. The article responds to the increasing dominance of the ‘good relations’ model for understanding and addressing race and sectarian division in Northern Ireland. It debunks the gathering support for the notion that Northern Ireland is somehow ‘post-sectarian’ - finding instead a state formation hiding its incapacity to address rising racism and sectarianism with the fig leaf of ‘good relations’. It locates these key developments in the specific new formation of the statelet which has emerged from the GFA.

From Good Friday to Good Relations: Sectarianism, Racism and the Northern Ireland State

Ireland is sometimes said to be cursed with a surfeit of history; memory is seen as one of the principal causes of an endless cycle of violence. In contrast, this article focuses on collective memory and examines the way in which this was drawn on as a resource by republican and loyalist communities in terms of identity and endurance during almost four decades of conflict. These identities were displayed in various commemorations and symbols, including wall murals. During the peace process these murals have been judged officially to be anachronistic, leading to a recent government-funded scheme to remove them, the Reimaging Communities Programme. This article questions the political motivation of this programme. It considers the attempts by people in republican and loyalist areas to come to terms with the peace process by emphasizing traditional symbols of identity, while at the same time reinterpreting them for a new era. Symbols can be the bridge between the past and the future which makes the present tolerable.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2635617_code901986.pdf?abstractid=2635617&mirid=1&type=2

Bill Rolston

Papers

The burden of memory: Victims, storytelling and resistance in Northern Ireland

Politics and Painting: Murals and Conflict in Northern Ireland

Demobilization and Reintegration of Ex-Combatants: the Irish Case in International Perspective

From Good Friday to Good Relations: Sectarianism, Racism and the Northern Ireland State

'Trying to Reach the Future Through the Past': Murals and Memory in Northern Ireland