Search

The Canadian archivist Jennifer Douglas has highlighted six layers of archival creation which she argues shape the ways in which a writer’s archive is formed, appraised, enhanced, arranged and interpreted over time. This article applies Douglas’s notion of the six layers of creation to the George Orwell archive, which is held at University College London, by showing the ways in which the archive has been shaped and interpreted over time by various contributors; it discusses not only the value of these contributions, but also how typical such contributions are. The article also discusses the challenge that collections like the Orwell archive pose to our understanding of the concept of the fonds. In agreement with Geoffrey Yeo’s recent writings on the subject, this article concludes that a collection such as the Orwell archive, which has been supplemented with additional material over time, is best understood as a collection of items that reflects the contributions of a number of different creators and custodians, something that is distinct from its main creator’s ‘conceptual’ fonds, which is dispersed across a number of collections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tissue engineering is one potential arm of the much-heralded regenerative medicine. We use the concepts of technological zone, risk framing and regulatory jurisdiction to analyse what risks are formulated in the zone of tissue engineering and whether those risks are reflected in emerging regulatory policy in Europe. In the regulatory jurisdictions of the European Union, public health risks have become increasingly important. Tissue engineering challenges pre-existing regulatory frameworks. Scientific-industrial actors formulate the risks of tissue engineering in three primary frames: technological safety risk; therapeutic efficacy risk; and economic risk. Study of the prevailing configuration of European Commission institutions and the EU process of regulatory regime-building for tissue engineering shows that risk frames are mobilized selectively. Whilst the technological safety frame and the economic frame are strongly mobilized, therapeutic efficacy—especially comparative efficacy—is not. Additionally the regime avoids any Europe-level position on the so-called ethics of sourcing and engineering tissues and cells. Efficacy and ethics are defined as the jurisdiction of national authorities, underpinned by the subsidiarity principle. Outcomes include the likely banning of certain therapeutic technologies by European countries that have objections to products deriving from controversial materials and processes, and the prevention of adoption of products due to efficacy concerns, so creating new imbalances in the European therapeutic marketplace. Consequently, the tissue-engineered medical products that European societies consume, at least in the near term, will reflect the medically defined needs of the European population to a limited and patchy extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the summary of the paper, The Irish in Britain: Settlers or Transients, which was presented at the Irish in British History conference held on March 12, 1992 in Liverpool, England. The themes of settlement and transience have shaped contrasting historical interpretations of the Irish immigrant experience in nineteenth-century Great Britain. For those who have emphasized the alienation of Irish immigrants from the supposed British community, a second set of sources is exploited. Excess criminality and prostitution among Irish immigrants have been interpreted likewise, though according to a rival model these were predictable sources of supplementary income for marginal workers. Only by defining a multiplicity of networks, within Britain and beyond, may we hope to interpret the career strategies of particular immigrants, and the success with which they were pursued.