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"Irish Belgium."
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That Elusive Fountain of Wisdom
This tale follows fictitious characters as they journey in search of wisdom and the fulfillment of their objectives. Set mainly in the fascinating university town of Leuven, Belgium, it revolves around the personal, social, political and academic aspirations of visiting scholars in the town. Richard Gutierrez from the USA needs to get tenure at his university. Jennifer Sydney from England is determined to advance her career. Aisling O'Shea and her six-year old son Philip from Ireland have different expectations of their trip. Piotr Malachowski wants to understand a life rooted in the bitter experiences of the internment camp of Majdanek in Poland. The nationalistic Fr Miguel Fuentes from the Philippines wonders what he can learn from a Western university to deal with the challenges in his country. What starts out as an academic sojourn for these individuals becomes a life-changing experience as their paths cross in Leuven and they learn about each other and themselves and about life itself.
eBook
Stories from the Walking Library
From August 17 to September 17, 2012, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers created and carried a Walking Library, made for the Sideways Arts Festival. Sideways, an art festival ‘in the open’ and ‘on the go’, aimed to connect ecology and culture through using the ‘slow ways’ or ‘slow paths’ of Flanders. The Walking Library was comprised of more than 90 books suggested as books ‘good to take for a walk’ and functioned as a mobile library for Sideways’ artists and public participants. In addition to carrying a curated stock, the Library offered a peripatetic reading and writing group. Drawing on the Library’s resources and the experience of reading, writing and walking one’s way across Belgium, Heddon and Myers consider how reading in situ affects the experience of the journey and the experience of walking; how journeying affects the experience of reading; how reading affects the experience of writing; and how a walk, as a space of knowledge production, is written and read.
Journal Article
OECD Environmental Performance Reviews: Ireland 2021
Ireland’s progress in delinking the economy from environmental pressures has been uneven in the last decade. Greenhouse gas emissions, waste generation and nutrient pollution rose with strong economic growth between the mid-2010s and the inception of the COVID‑19 pandemic. The country’s dispersed settlement pattern implies that roads are the dominant transport mode. Climate, circular economy and biodiversity policies have gained renewed impetus, with various ambitious policy initiatives and large public investment plans. These need to be swiftly implemented to alleviate the growing pressures from intensification of agricultural practices, demographic development, urban sprawl and road traffic. Encouraging businesses and households to take action is key. This requires providing consistent price signals for the use of energy and natural resources and for better managing travel demand, while taking into account affordability, employment impact and regional disparities.This is the third Environmental Performance Review of Ireland. It evaluates progress towards green growth and sustainable development, with a special chapter focusing on sustainable mobility and freight.
eBook
When the King Becomes your Personal Enemy: W. T. Stead, King Leopold II, and the Congo Free State
This paper will highlight an unknown but important episode in the life of the journalist W. T. Stead, which, intriguingly, remained unmentioned in Belgian, British, and colonial historiography. It concerns a face-to-face meeting between Stead and Leopold II, King of the Belgians, which certainly did not leave Stead the ‘friend of all Kings’, as the posthumous article published by the Daily Mirror contended. Based on Stead’s own Character Sketches in the Review of Reviews, the paper will show how Stead’s perceptions of the scandalous government of the Congo Free State result to a large extent from his own meeting (probably towards the end of 1884) with King Leopold II, and the King’s refusal to cooperate with Britain in an improvised rescue of General Gordon in Sudan.
Journal Article
\Reader, perhaps you were never in Belgium?\: Negotiating British Identity in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette
Critical investigations of the foreign settings of Charlotte Brontë's The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853) have tended to conceive Belgium (fictionalized as Labassecour in Villette) as simply \"not England.\" In contrast, this essay considers the historic and geographic specificity of The Professor and Villette, arguing that Belgium represents a crucial middle-ground between British and French values in the mid nineteenth century. Not only was Belgium the location of the decisive British victory over the French at Waterloo, but British commentators also increasingly depicted Belgium as a \"little Britain on the continent,\" or potentially Anglicized space, in the 1840s. Drawing on both Brontë's explicit references to the Napoleonic Wars in The Professor and Villette and contemporary Victorian conceptions of Belgium, this essay argues that Brontë's use of this particular foreign space is not just a result of her experiences in Brussels in the early 1840s. Instead, the overlooked middle—ground of Belgium epitomizes the conflict between British and French values in Brontë's fiction—and the possibility of their reconciliation. While Brontë ultimately rejects the idea that Belgium represents the site of a possible Anglo-Continental union, it is nonetheless a space in which Brontë's characters reformulate or consolidate their ideas of home, revealing Britishness to be both culturally produced and value-laden in Brontë's fiction.
Journal Article
Landscape, Culture, and Education in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
In their article \"Landscape, Culture, and Education in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe\" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert discuss Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a narrative that translates nature and our dealings with it into a literary text. Vandeermeersche and Soetaert postulate that the novel can be read as a quintessential fable of humans' cultivation of nature and the creation of individuality, which, at the same time, provides its readers with strategies for describing processes such as education. Robinson Crusoe and its characters, metaphors, and scenarios function in the \"auto-communication\" of culture as an enduring equipment for living (Burke), a company readers keep (Booth), and a cognitive tool in modern Western culture.
Journal Article
The influence of survey duration on estimates of food intakes and its relevance for public health nutrition and food safety issues
To examine the influence of food consumption survey duration on estimates of percentage consumers, mean total population intakes and intakes among consumers only and to consider its relevance for public health nutrition and food safety issues.
Prospective food consumption survey.
A multicentre study in five centres in the European Union-Dublin, Ghent, Helsinki, Potsdam and Rome.
Teenage subjects were recruited through schools; 948 (80%) out of 1180 subjects completed the survey.
14-day food diaries were used to collect the food consumption data.
For mean total population intakes, 53% of the foods had slopes significantly different to 0 (P<0.05). In practical terms (g/day), these differences were small, with 41% of foods having differences of
Journal Article
At the Heart of Darkness: Crimes against Humanity and the Banality of Evil
This article, while rooted in critical literature, is interdisciplinary, drawing upon political and social theory, history, law, and social sciences to address the problem of evil in an environment dominated by crimes against humanity: the Congo during the reign of the Belgian King Leopold. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, is based in part on the author's experiences aboard the steamship Roi des Belges on the Congo River in 1890. The narrative contains three representations of evil: the base, primitive, perverse allure of lust and greed in the deepest recesses of the human psyche; evil at the heart of civilization and modernity; and the banal complicity of ordinary people whose silence and denial allows evil to prosper. Without impugning the quality or importance of Heart of Darkness, either as literature or as part of the global discourse on human rights, it is nevertheless argued that the primitive allure of evil is emphasized in the narrative to the detriment of representations of more subtle and civilized manifestations of evil. By redirecting attention to background elements of the story, including the behavior of the Belgian regime and especially the banal complicity of the protagonist Marlow, this essay aims to contribute to the discourse on crimes against humanity and the advancement of human rights.
Journal Article