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It is exceedingly rare for dural arteriovenous fistulae (DAVFs) outside of the cavernous sinus to present with ophthalmological symptoms and signs. Hypoglossal canal DAVFs (HC-DAVFs) have only previously been reported as individual cases or small case series. Further, only an estimated 31% of HC-DAVFs present with ophthalmological findings. We report a noteworthy case of an HC-DAVF in a 74-year-old male who presented with proptosis, chemosis, and reduced visual acuity. He was treated endovascularly with liquid embolic filling. This report aims to highlight HC-DAVF as an important differential diagnosis for patients presenting with symptoms suggestive of arterialisation of the ophthalmic veins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes. Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequately – and vice versa. This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from often highly specific institutional and political contexts, as though all movements learned in the same way across space and time and popular education's role in fostering this learning is simple. Unchecked, this leads to the reification of 'critical' theory and the reduction and flattening of emancipatory practices to methods or even predefined goals. This paper constructs a dialogue between the work of Choudry, Freire and other authors in both fields, aimed at both celebrating and problematising their contribution to learning from our struggles. By developing a conversation between them, we want to explore how their insights might be usefully integrated for contemporary social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalising "Buddhism" beyond its pre-colonial homelands was a complex practical challenge. Actors seeking to bring Buddhism to new audiences in very different cultures met with failure far more often than success until recent decades. Modern-era Buddhist missionaries to Europe had to experiment, selecting elements of Asian Buddhism that could theoretically be transmitted -- ordinations, preaching, textual knowledge, rituals etc. -- and attempt to institutionalise these as conversion mechanisms. This article uses the lens of Irish and British converts and sympathisers in Asia and Europe in the late C19th and early C20th centuries to explore the European situation -- one with fewer Asian missionaries and different relationships between society and religion than those in North America. It explores the sources of their various versions of Buddhism; their organising techniques and repertoires of "Buddhist" activity, their audiences and how they defined "Buddhism" in relation to politics, ethnicity and colonialism. It argues that meditation (and "practice") became central to European Buddhism because it solved a crucial organisational problem: what could Buddhist globalisers offer to turn audiences into Buddhists? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that there is no single relationship between Japanese Buddhism and Ireland. Rather, there is a series of changing relationships mediated by different world-system contexts between one island and another (peripheral and post-colonial) one: as ethnographic information, as cultural influence and as religious practice. The process of building such relationships has a long history, stretching back to the Irish reception of both Jesuit and traveller's accounts of Japan, later made concrete by early intermediaries like Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo and Charles Pfoundes. W.B. Yeats in particular helped to give Japanese Buddhism a significant place in Irish culture, notably in poetry. From the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Buddhists started to settle in Ireland and Japanese Buddhism began to be practiced; both are now an established part of the Irish religious landscape. The article sketches this history, culminating in the present situation of Japanese Buddhism in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the tensions between activism and academia, the role of Marxism in the study of social movements, and the contours of the current political moment. Topics discussed include information on financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007–2009; decline of neoliberal hegemony; and importance of Marxism in the study of social movements.

Sociology’s marginality to public discussion of the current economic, social and political crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors’ interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue. Starting from existing discussions of social movements and their knowledge production, the article focuses on the organisational dimension of such knowledge and explores how this is elaborated in the current movement wave. Looking at movement spaces of theoretical analysis, new popular education processes and movements’ knowledge creation institutions, the article highlights potential contributions to renewing sociological processes of theorising, teaching and engaged research respectively, paying particular attention to movement practices of ‘talking between worlds’. It concludes with a call for a dialogue of critical solidarity between public sociology and new forms of social knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on toxic capitalism, which refers to the negative byproducts of capitalism in society. Topics include the effectiveness of direct action social movements, the use of repression strategies and state violence, and resistance to corporate hegemony. Information is provided on the resource-based conflicts in the Niger Delta and Rossport, Ireland.

Single-country approaches to the study of Buddhism miss the crucial significance of international networks in the making of modern Buddhism, in a period when the material basis for such networks had been transformed. Southeast Asia in particular acted as a dynamic crossroads in this period enabling the emergence of a ‘global Buddhism’ not controlled by any single sect, while India and Japan both played unexpectedly significant roles in this crossroads. A key element of this process was the encounter between Asian Buddhist networks and western would-be Buddhists. Those involved, however, were often marginal - ‘creative failures’ in many cases - whose stories enable us to think this history in a more diverse way than is often done. In other cases as isolated figures they could pave the way for the ‘mainstreaming’ of new forms of Buddhism by established actors in later decades. This article introduces the special issue ofContemporary Buddhismentitled ‘A Buddhist crossroads: pioneer European Buddhists and globalizing Asian networks 1860–1960’. The research described in this issue often raises other methodological questions of representativity and significance, while posing important challenges around collaborative research and the use of new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research on the life of U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia has interesting implications in relation to class, ethnicity and politics. ‘Beachcomber Buddhists’ highlight the wider situation of ‘poor whites’ in Asia—needed by empire but prone to defect from elite standards of behaviour designed to maintain imperial and racial power. ‘Going native’, exemplified by the European bhikkhu, highlights the difficulties faced by empire in policing these racial boundaries and the role of Asian agency in early ‘western’ Buddhism. Finally, such ‘dissident Orientalism’ has political implications, as with specifically Irish forms of solidarity with Asian anti-colonial movements. Within the limits imposed by the data, this article rethinks ‘early western Buddhism’ in Asia as a creative response to colonialism, shaped by Asian actors, marked by cross-racial solidarity and oriented to alternative possible futures beyond empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action research carried out within the left-libertarian ('Grassroots') wing of the movement, it notes imbalances in participation in a very intensive form of political activity, and asks how activists understand winning. It finds substantial congruence between organisational practice and long-term goals, noting social justice and participatory democracy along with feminist, environmental and anti-war concerns as central. Using Wallerstein's proposed transition strategy for anti-systemic movements, it argues that Irish alter-globalisation activists are realistic about popular support and state power, and concerned to link short-term work around basic needs with the construction of alternative institutions and long-term struggles for a different social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some important aspects of U Dhammaloka's Buddhism, drawing in particular on the work of his Rangoon-based Buddhist Tract Society between 1907 and 1910. It explores his work-in the Society and more generally-as in effect a social movement organiser within the Buddhist Revival, looking at his funders, publishers, printers, translators and distributors as well as those who wrote about him, laid down their hair for him to walk on, covered his train or boat fares, put up his friends in monasteries or let them cross borders, and so forth. It also looks at what we know about his organisations and involvement in other people's organisations, asking who he intended to mobilise and who his audience was, how his use of confrontation and polemic fitted into this, and how successful he was. Following this, it goes on to discuss the intellectual sources of the free-thinking (atheist) positions espoused in the Society's publications, and asks more generally how his posture can be located in relation to the politics of plebeian freethought in Ireland, Britain, the USA and Asia. These questions arose out of an attempt to shed some light on the missing half-century before Dhammaloka became a public Buddhist figure; while the article can give no definite answers in terms of organising experience, intellectual inheritance or formative backgrounds, it suggests an alternative perspective that highlights a substantial, internationally connected 'Workers' University', grounded in the freethinking cultures of self-taught plebeian radicals, at the roots of western Buddhism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled 'U Dhammaloka, 'The Irish Buddhist': Rewriting the History of Early Western Buddhist Monastics'. Traditional accounts of pioneer western Buddhist monastics begin with the 1899 ordination of H. Gordon Douglas (Asoka), and highlight gentleman scholars writing for a European audience. They consign to obscurity a pre-existing world of western Buddhist monastics of all social classes. To open a window onto this hidden history, this issue presents new material relating to the extraordinary career of U Dhammaloka (?1856-?1914), widely known as 'The Irish Buddhist'. A working-class autodidact, freethinker and temperance campaigner from Dublin, Dhammaloka became renowned throughout colonial Asia as an implacable critic of Christian missionaries and tireless transnational organiser of Asian Buddhists from Burma to Japan. The research described in this issue is innovative not only in content but also in method and approach, having advanced through collaborative, international research employing web-based research tools and online resources. These offer new possibilities for other translocative and interdisciplinary research projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on the arguments on the study of religion in Ireland. It says that on the first academic conference held at Samhain in Maynooth, Ireland, Peter Mulholland initiated a process on the research of new religious movement (NRM), migrant religion, and new age or alternative spirituality. Bozena Gierek also discussed the Celtic spirituality and the pagan forms of Celticism while Lyn Thomas explores the negotiation among cloistered monasticism and reality television (TV).

Proponents of routine circumcision of male minors tend to downplay or ignore the adverse effects of circumcision on male sexual experience and to assert that only an insignificant minority of circumcised men are unhappy about their condition. We present evidence dating back to the nineteenth century that significant numbers of men have been sufficiently concerned to complain, and we particularly consider three attitude surveys carried out in Britain, the USA and Australia in the 1990s. We argue for the relevance of ethical, biological and subjective factors in decision- making about routine circumcision of minors, and conclude with a discussion of the implications of these considerations for medical policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]