Cultural Conservation Meets Douyin

We arrived very late to the city shimmering with neon lights. The road was narrow, long and winding, but the driver knew it like the back of his hand. We entered huge gates decorated with flags and the guesthouse owner decked out in traditional attire welcomed us by serving up a late night dinner. Tasty. The place we arrived at was Danba, or Rongzhag, a county of the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. Zhonglu is one of the area's oldest and best pre-served villages. In Tibetan, the name means "the promised land."     

Imperial Families: women writing home in Georgian Britain

This article critically engages with the concept of home to question what home meant and how it was constructed in eighteenth-century Britain. It particularly focuses on elite imperial families for whom ideas of home were significant, yet fragile as family members became dispersed across ever-greater distances. It uses letters as its source base to examine how families managed to construct a sense of home and belonging despite different locations and underlines the important role that women played in organizing and completing the work of home building. In doing so this article challenges understandings of homes as stable entities and highlights how elite imperial families worked to constantly negotiate and construct them.     

Negotiating Russian Federalism: A Simulation for Comparative Politics

While the use of simulations in the international relations classroom has proliferated over the past decade, this pedagogical tool has been largely neglected in the comparative politics classroom. Simulations in comparative politics can be a useful component in teaching students about the diversity within foreign countries and the dynamic of domestic policymaking. We describe here an informative and easy-to-run simulation on Russian federalism which can be integrated into courses on Russian politics or easily adapted for use in other courses, especially those focusing on countries in which center-regional relations are an important dimension. The simulation is based on the Russian Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Federal Assembly, and is a great way to illustrate through experiential learning the quid pro quo of Russian federalism. We provide detailed information on English-language sources that both instructors and students can use during the simulation, along with an Appendix and a Website that provides everything instructors need to run the simulation in their own classes.     

Sex Crimes in the Fifties

Sex Crimes in the Fifties. By Lisa Featherstone and Amanda Kaladelfos (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016), pp.xii + 243, AU$59.99 (pb).