This chapter covers Richard Darré and Nazi inner colonization, and race breeding through peasant farming. Sering turned against Darré and the race-based Nazi agrarian policy, and so Darré had Sering removed. Konrad Meyer took over the role of godfather of inner colonization. Ihe chapter then discussed race science and the rise of eugenics. Sering became an Ostforscher, an eastern researcher. Mitteleuropa ideas for southeastern Europe are touched upon. During his carrer, Sering was great supporter of female academics, and in his later years helps Von Dietze get out of prison. Schacht was a major supporter of Sering. Sering’s final act was the writing of a paper on the new war economy. The chapter concludes with Sering’s death.

Early on in the First World War Sering was preparing for Germany to be starved by a British Blockade. Erich Keup was an early key contributor to Sering’s thinking about Eastern Europe during the war. Immanuel Geiss and the Border Strip story, the Wartheland, food security, blockades, submarines, and Tirpitz are all discussed, along with the slaughter of the pigs. The inner colonial thinkers suddenly saw Germany as full and turned their sights to the newly conquered East of 1915. Sering’s journey through Poland and Latvia in 1915 was followed by plans for the settlement of two million Germans in Latvia and Courland. Sering then journeyed east in 1916. The Kingdom of Poland, German freedom, Adolf Harnack, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, and Otto Hintze are all covered here. Sering discussed the colonial potential of Belarus in the 1917 edited volume Western Russia and its Importance in the Development of Central Europe. Anti-semitism is discussed, along with Schwerin and Lindequist in the East. Schwerin very close to Ludendorff. It then covers Ober Ost, War Land on the Eastern Front, Liulevicius, Brest-Litovsk, a massive German colonial empire in the Eastin 1918, and Sering’s visit to Kiev. Land and people became race and space. The period ended in defeat.

This chapter covers Heinrich Sohnrey, the Question of the Land debate, Junker, the Agrarian League, the marriage of Rye and Iron, Adolf Wagner, Karl Oldenberg, Agrar- und Industriestaat, and Lujo Brentano. It discusses an Agrarian versus an industrial future for Germany. Bernhard von Bülow became Chancellor in 1900. Inner Colonization had been difficult in Posen and West Prussia, as Poles organizde a counter-colonial program. The chapter also discusses the Expropriation Law of 1908, alongside Junker, Bethmann-Hollweg, Sering in the Navy League, Agrarian Romantics who support building an iron Navy, overseas colonialism, and Geoff Eley. This period sees Sering challenged to a duel, Sayre’s law, Dernburg, and German southwest Africa. In 1908, Sering published Inheritance Law and Agriculture in Schleswig-Holstein from an Historical Basis. Race and Colonialism. The journal Archive of Inner Colonization was founded in this period. Inner colonization was a part of a continuum, from adjacent land to overseas colonies. The Society for the Advancement of Inner Colonization was also founded. The Junker were against Sering and the idea of inner colonization, for it demanded the break up of their large landed estates and parcellization into small farms. In 1912 Sering went to Russia.

This chapter turns to the conception of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, first examining constructions of ‘legitimacy’, drawing on political, sociological, and philosophical conceptions. The construction of legitimate knowledge in relation to the conceptions of belief, truth, and justification are considered. In addition, debates pertaining to the recent discourses of the democratisation of knowledge, linked to the notion of ‘expertise’ and ‘stakeholders’, indigenous knowledge and decolonising knowledge are discussed; this entails a critical exploration of various types of factors complicit in the formulation of knowledge, including positionality, with respect to class, political interest, gender, race, and so on; university diversity initiatives; disciplinary quality; methodology and the ‘Canon’; skills, employment, and research assessment initiatives; funding and international partnerships; and global legitimating systems such as global university rankings, publication systems, and citation practices. Furthermore, it is argued that the production of research does not sit outside these positionalities and the politics of knowledge production.

This chapter covers the long story of migration and settlement in the borderlands of Germany and Poland. It explores the difference between migration and settlement, along with modern German history and Polish space, 1772–1871, and Flottwell. The argument for Poland as German colonial space is explored, alongside Max Sering’s early life. It also explores Alsace as borderland, Gustav Schmoller, and the Historical School. It covers Sering’s six month journey throughout North America and his subsequent analysis of homesteading and the settlement of the frontier. Sering’s discovery of the concept of inner colonization, Indigenous, Métis, and Removal vs Assimilation are all discussed.

This chapter explores how religious knowledge, including rituals, was learned and transmitted by putting forward a novel, cognitive-based, theoretical framework for analysing ritual practices in the Graeco-Roman world. This framework, termed the Religious Learning Network (RLN) theoretical model, is tested within a case study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence of Nutrices Augustae, a cult of local Pannonian healing mother-goddesses. Applying the Religious Learning Network model provides an insight into the types of rituals that may have taken place within this cult as well as the cognitive and social effects that these rituals may have produced upon the ritual participants. This chapter demonstrates that rituals were learned and transmitted within intimate circles through cult members’ interaction with objects, places, and events; forming a dynamic network of memory associations that helped in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of religious and ritual memories.

This chapter introduces the context and rationale for the book, noting the increased media and policy focus over the last decade, as well as the broader sociopolitical context of the Covid-19 pandemic, post-Brexit, and post-Trump milieux. The case is made for revisiting and challenging the dominant national frame for understanding academic freedom, noting the internationalisation and massification of higher education globally. The outline of the book is situated as addressing this gap and examining three theoretical and interrelated challenges: i) the presumed dichotomy between freedom and diversity/inclusion, ii) the relative lack of attention to the role of academic freedom in knowledge production, and iii) the lack of recognition of the transnational nature of academic freedom.

The book is bought to a close by the invasion and occupation of Poland, the radical inner colonization of the Warthegau, ethnic cleansing of Poles, the simultaneous ghettoization of Jews, Lebensraum and the conquest of Eastern Europe, Christaller and his organizational plans for the conquered East, Zamosc, the Holocaust, and the post-war legacy. Posen and West Prussia were cleared of Germans and Poland successfully inner colonized this space. The Junker estates of East Germany were broken up. West Germany accepted 8 million expellees from Eastern Europe and, in their final act, the inner colonizers helped settle many of them on farms.

From painted embellishments on altars and temples, marble flooring, dyed sacrificial ribbons and even the colouration of ritual animals, colour was an inescapable aspect of religious experience. Polychromy was not only decorative, it created a visual medium with which those navigating sacred spaces could interact, together with the written word and the language of shape and form. Colour could communicate to the ancient viewer associations of its source; the significance of both where its pigment or dyestuff was harvested and the journey it undertook, both in terms of manufacture and simple geography, in order to arrive before the observer. The very conception of ancient sight, with rays reaching from the eyes in a particularly haptic process of sensory feedback, meant that looking at colours was for the ancient viewer an experience in itself. How would visitors to the sacred spaces of the ancient world have ‘read’ the visual cues surrounding them, and how could the design of colours in ritual spaces influence the reactions and emotions of those witnessing sacred activity? This paper seeks to investigate and unpick some of the chromatic language found in religious spaces to better inform an understanding of ritual activity in Greco-Roman society.

The relationship between academic freedom and knowledge production is examined in in this chapter. Various contested constructions of knowledge within and across the different geographical contexts and by discipline are critically interrogated, and the implications of these constructions are considered for pedagogy, research, and understanding of academic freedom. As such, conceptions of knowledge invoke particular conceptions of the value of education and its aims. This is examined in relation to neoliberal discourses of skills, impact and marketability, positionality, and decolonisation of knowledge initiatives. The temporal and geographical positionality of knowledge is critically interrogated, recognising the Western hegemony of knowledge and its production, calling for the need to situate knowledge sociopolitically and historically. This necessitates the recognition that academic freedom is similarly situated in space and time, with discussions of examples across the four national contexts. Debates surrounding the organisation and gatekeeping of knowledge through the disciplines and the rise of interdisciplinarity are also addressed in this chapter.

This chapter considers a range of internal and external restrictions (individual, institutional, national, and international) on the production of knowledge, which is situated in the dominant framing discourse of global neoliberalism. Recognising forms of restrictions on knowledge relates to how academic freedom itself is constructed, invoking the proposition that certain prerequisites are necessary for the practice of academic freedom. The chapter examines how university governance and funding mechanisms can constrain academic freedom. Within the university context, it extends its consideration to the role of ethics committees, bureaucratisation of university procedures, role of students, and university environment. The role of self-censorship at the individual level and the notion of scholars’ responsibility as well as freedom are critically examined. State-level restrictions are also considered. The chapter also situates these university-level and state-level restrictions within transnational restrictions, including international law and movement across borders.

Processions were among the earliest ‘moving pictures’ in which the brain could develop the cognitive process of ‘reading’ a landscape and embedding a memory through sensory experiences. Salutaris’ foundation, a text inscribed outside the theatre at Ephesus which records the organization of a ritual procession for Artemis, tends to be treated as a factual guide by scholars, rather than as aspirational script for an event: repeated legal clauses, claims of control and permanency, and the white marble on which it was carved, underwrite the vivid sensual experience and transiency of a ritual event. This paper endeavors to contextualize Salutaris’ foundation by incorporating directives of the text together with an analysis of the procession as a practical event and an emotional experience. As a sensorial experience, one can explore aspects of the performance that could not be controlled: the weather, the attitude of the audience, and the behaviour of the performers. Did aspirational directives of ritual behavior come to fruition in a ritual event? How did the experience of an event shape its role and meaning? This cognitive approach provides insights to both the ritual event and the ways that processions could be read by the viewer.

How do we experience ritual? What role does this experience play in the perception and codification memory? This chapter begins by considering the relationship between senses, cognition, and memory in ritual experiences, in particular, the complex interplay between ritual performance, emotions, and material objects, together with the limitations of script-based approaches to surviving accounts. Situating the volume within current debates on religious ritual in the ancient world from the perspectives of cognitive science of religion and sensory studies, this chapter explores how variability in ritual experiences can be assessed through cognitive approaches to rituals as lived experiences. Having outlined why this volume is timely, necessary, and how it contributes to challenging established views and furthering debate surrounding ritual experiences in the Roman world, the introduction also addresses the challenges of cognitive assessments and how these challenges are met across the volume, through a variety of different contexts and approaches. Lastly, the introduction briefly presents each of the five case studies, drawing on common themes and issues explored in each case study, and considering the global relevance and transdisciplinary applications of scholarship in this volume.