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This article argues that it is useful to see historical exhibitions as both responses and contributors to narratives about science that are circulating in the public sphere. It uses the example of the 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus (which was the immediate predecessor of the Science Museum in London). The article demonstrates how, in promoting this huge exhibition and fighting for the necessary support and resources, leading scientific, cultural and political figures engaged with two rather different public interpretations of science’s past, present and future. One dealt with science as a vigorous part of culture with a fascinating and under-appreciated past and a dynamic future coming, internationally, to the fore. The other concerned the threat to Britain’s international economic ascendancy by countries with equal ingenuity and better education that could lead Britain into a decline reminiscent of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. According to this second narrative, science would be the vaccine that would prevent this disease afflicting Britain. In the aftermath of the exhibition, the narratives were drawn upon again to form and sustain a permanent display that was known from 1885 as the Science Museum. While the memory of the Loan Collection itself was obscured in the 1920s during the Museum’s early life as a separate administrative body fighting for resources, the author suggests that continuity can be shown in the narrative arguments used by the creators of the two projects. A greater significance should therefore be given to this exhibition in the story of the development of the Science Museum.

Historically, unmarried mothers have suffered greatly in Irish society. Advocacy for unmarried mothers began in the 1970s with the emergence of the women’s movement in Ireland. ‘Cherish’ became one of the first organisation in Ireland to push for rights for unmarried mothers. This article is the first comprehensive study into the organisation exploring its establishment and development throughout the late twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the larger women’s movement, this article focuses on the early years of the campaign incorporating the push for unmarried mothers allowance; accommodation assistance offered; advice on legal issues including maintenance; as well as lobbying politicians on legislative change. It incorporates the organisation’s connection with the Catholic Church whilst simultaneously and unapologetically challenging Archbishop Dermot Ryan on prejudices against unmarried mothers. In the 1980s, the group faced new challenges as more women with unplanned pregnancies sought information on abortion. The organisations link with the Catholic Church diminished throughout the 1980s as Cherish began to direct women to abortion information helplines and openly supported the Defend the Clinics Campaign, despite their receipt of state funding. The establishment of Cherish and its commitment to advocacy for women in crisis pregnancy has been somewhat overlooked in the historical analysis of the Irish women’s movement.

AbstractThe UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a ground-breaking treaty that constitutes persons with disabilities as holders of rights and active members of society, and encompasses civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. Article 30 of the Convention provides for the right of persons with disabilities to participate in cultural life. The importance of this provision lies in its detailed normative content, and also in that it sheds a light on the need for appropriate policies and practices that enhance cultural participation of persons with disabilities. By investigating the extent to which Article 30 of the Convention has been implemented across five European states (Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden), this article identifies common narratives and counternarratives related to the realization of the right to participate in cultural life. It adopts a socio-legal approach and a blended methodology combining desk-based and empirical research. It contrasts official narratives, which highlight good practices and steps taken to improve access to culture, with counternarratives that reveal a fragmentary approach to cultural participation of persons with disabilities, persisting barriers, limited recognition of artists with disabilities, and the perpetuation of stigma and stereotypes.

International audience; For long, state building has been addressed as the expression of an exclusive power over a portion of space and population. In recent years, the scholarship moved away from such a conception by regarding state building as an assemblage of multi-scalar public and private actors, beneath and beyond its territorial borders. This paper adds to this conversation by focusing on the way states transform as they engage with migration-induced transnational flows. This paper defines the transnational migration state as the set of policies, concepts and institutions designed to make the most of “profitable” migration-related flows (of people, money, ideas, etc.) while filtering out unwanted ones. Next to the national-level administrations in charge of the management of human, financial and immaterial flows, states seek to extend their reach by rescaling their engagement and relying on a range of private and civil society actors, including local authorities. This paper is a theoretical contribution to the debate on state reconfiguration in a world of globalised migration. It distinguishes and conceptualises two types of migration-related transnational migration states: emigration and immigration states tackling incoming and outgoing flows respectively.

Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors' experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts, to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. Citizen curation is proposed in the context of the European project SPICE - Social Participation, Cohesion, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement - as a methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people's responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and motivating users and memory institutions to reflect upon them. We argue that citizen curation urges to rethink the nature of computational infrastructures supporting data management of memory institutions, bringing novel challenges that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management. To approach these issues, we survey relevant literature towards a distributed, Linked Data infrastructure, with a focus on identifying the roles and requirements involved in such an infrastructure. We show how existing research can contribute significantly in facing the challenges raised by citizen curation, and discuss challenges and opportunities from the socio-technical standpoint.

Abstract Those who are under-18 are not often associated with the exercise of political rights. It is argued in this article however that youth-led climate activism is highlighting the extensive potential that children and young people have for political activism. Moreover, youth activists have come to be seen by many as uniquely competent on climate change. Youth activists have moved from the streets to the courts, utilising national and international human rights law mechanisms to further their cause. They are not the first to do so, and the extent of their impact is as yet unclear. Nevertheless, it is argued here that through applications such as Saachi (an application to the Committee on the Rights of the Child) and Duarte Agostinho (an application to the ECtHR) they are shifting the human-centric, highly procedural arena of international human rights law towards an approach which better encompasses person-environment connections.

Abstract Background This study aims to examine whether higher social protection expenditure reduces the negative association of life-course socioeconomic disadvantages with subjective and objective health status and trajectories in later life. Methods We used SHARE data from participants living in 20 European countries aged 50 to 96. Seven waves allowed to examine the trajectories of health inequalities in later life. We used linear mixed-effects models stratified by sex to examine the association between life-course socioeconomic disadvantage and subjective (self-rated health, SRH, N = 55,443) and objective (grip strength, N = 54,718) health. Cross-level interactions between net social protection expenditure as percentage of gross domestic product and life-course socioeconomic disadvantage tested for the moderating effect of social expenditures on the association of disadvantage with SRH and grip strength in later life. Findings Higher social protection expenditure reduced socioeconomic health inequalities in both men and women for grip strength, and in women but not men for SRH. For SRH, the health-inequality-reducing effect of social protection expenditure became weaker with increasing age. This was not observed in grip strength. Some separate expenditure functions (disability, family and children) were found to have inequality-widening effects in men's and women's SRH, which were either offset or overcompensated by the other functions. No inequality-widening effects were observed in grip strength. Interpretation Higher social spending reduces life-course socioeconomic inequalities in women's subjective health and in men's and women's objective health. However, some specific social protection policies may have the unintentional effect of increasing inequalities in people's evaluation of their own health.