The Trans-Border Arrangement of Ming Pilgrim Flasks and the Narrative of Transculturation in the British Museum

This article revolves around the concepts of trans-border arrangement and transculturation and their significance to a critical theme in the British Museum today: cultural connectivity. Trans-border arrangement refers to displaying and classifying an object in museum space based on the object’s context of production as well as its relations with other objects and people; its transfer, gifting, collection, consumption, and appropriation. It represents, in museum space today, the circulation of material objects across cultural-geographical boundaries over a period of time in the past. To illustrate a trans-border arrangement, this article provides an empirical investigation of the multiple placements of Ming pilgrim flasks in the British Museum’s galleries of China, India, and Europe. This display scheme not only shows how the British Museum can accommodate the narrative of transculturation into its spatial configuration, but also how the institution of the museum can engage in the global turn in art history that blossomed in the late 1990s.

Improved calibration of area detectors using multiple placements

Calibration of area detectors from powder diffraction standards is widely used at synchrotron beamlines. From a single diffraction image, it is not possible to determine both the sample-to-detector distance and the wavelength, but, with images taken from multiple positions along the beam direction and where the relative displacement is known, the sample-to-detector distance and wavelength can both be determined with good precision. An example calibration using the GSAS-II software package is presented.

“The hideous consequences”

This chapter details the problems of abuse, neglect, and overwork that some children had to endure once they entered placement homes. Family violence, overwork, and child neglect were not problems new to the late 1800s, but in previous generations, propriety limited intervention into immediate families, and apprenticed relationships between children and unrelated adults could be policed by the child's parents. In the Progressive Era, placers and child welfare workers came to realize that suffering for placed-out children happened not only as a result of abuse. Whether through isolation and dependence on the farm family or overwork and seasonal placements, the farm contributed to the hazards facing placed-out children. This chapter first explains how multiple placements led to child overwork and neglect before considering the physical abuse suffered by children in placement homes, along with the resistance shown by some children to their placement.

Barriers to permanency planning: What the literature suggests

Early studies concerned with permanency planning identified that many children remained in care for prolonged periods of time, in the absence of clearly defined plans for their long-term future. The studies also highlighted concern that multiple placements have a deleterious impact on children. As a consequence, permanency planning frameworks were developed to address the problems of welfare drift, the essence of permanency planning being timely decision-making and concurrent planning. However, there appear to be some systemic issues impacting on the application of the permanency planning framework. There also remains a policy preference for family preservation, which adversely affects permanency planning. The need is to conceptualise permanency planning as existing along a continuum of planning options for children, co-existing with family preservation models.