What local people? Examining the Gállok mining conflict and the rights of the Sámi population in terms of justice and power

The global extraction of minerals is commonly located in areas populated by indigenous people; and while conflicts between multinational corporations and local activists and indigenous people are widespread today, the understanding of their dynamics are lacking. The Swedish government’s encouragement to an expanding mining industry has caused resistance due to environmental and social implications, particularly its effect on Sámi reindeer husbandry. The resistance to a mine in Gállok is based on the belief that the right to decide about land use historically falls on the Sámi people, and the right to affect land use is detrimental for the survival of Sámi culture and reindeer husbandry. Although the conflict may be perceived as concerning access to natural resources, we argue that the perceived environmental conflict can be viewed as part of a larger struggle over social status and recognition. Data have been collected using qualitative methods such as observations, interviews and documents. The subsequent analysis relies on a meta-theoretical framework of justice as recognition using a typology of relations of power. Our findings suggest that relations of power constitute different categories of social actors. Stakeholders like the Sámi population are subordinated to more dominant stakeholders such as the government, the company and media, who have ‘more’ power or ‘different’ kinds of power ‘over’ others. Through these asymmetric power relations, historical state-Sámi relations are continuously reproduced within prevailing institutions, and also in this mining conflict. Interviewees from business and the municipality testified to the discourses driven by a neoliberal and profit-focused worldview. Challenging the neoliberal discourse, other stakeholders, namely civil society and Sámi, expressed an alternative discourse based on a local, traditional, cultural, environmental and anti-neoliberal worldview.     

It’s not what you eat but how and that you eat: Social media,counter-discourses and disciplined ingestion among amateur competitive eaters

This article interrogates how social media can provide a platform for contesting dominant discourses. It does so through the lens of competitive eating, demonstrating that amateur competitive eaters use social media sites to challenge and subvert mass media representations of their sport while concomitantly upholding normative notions of healthy eating and bodies. Competitors consider themselves to be skilful athletes that discipline and train their bodies to eat. They regard their eating practices, which are often depicted in the mass media as uncontrolled and gluttonous, as controlled ingestion, and present an alternative perspective of their ‘sport’ – a perspective that stresses health, physical expertise and a fit, trained body over voracity and insatiability. Social media acts as a ‘precipitating agency’ for the creation of these alternative definitions of disciplined eating, as well as the construction of new digital eating identities. Instead of focusing on the food being ingested and the ‘Carnivalesque’ practice of competitive eating, we draw attention to the performers’ voices and the ways they attend to the mechanics of gurgitation, including methods of chewing, swallowing and stomach stretching, and their ability to manage, regulate and operate ingestivity. As hegemonic discourses align the notion of ‘good eating’ to discipline, order and restraint, competitive eating is thus revealed to be a practice that mirrors and appropriates, yet also ultimately reproduces, conventional narratives. Social media is, in turn, shown to be a political tool for counter-discursive practices that are produced in dialogue with, and concomitantly uphold and contest, normative discourses of mass media.     

Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the sociospatial dimensions of ‘big data’

Digital social data are now practically ubiquitous, with increasingly large and interconnected databases leading researchers, politicians, and the private sector to focus on how such ‘big data’ can allow potentially unprecedented insights into our world. This paper investigates Twitter activity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in order to demonstrate the complex relationship between the material world and its digital representations. Through documenting the various spatial patterns of Sandy-related tweeting both within the New York metropolitan region and across the United States, we make a series of broader conceptual and methodological interventions into the nascent geographic literature on big data. Rather than focus on how these massive databases are causing necessary and irreversible shifts in the ways that knowledge is produced, we instead find it more productive to ask how small subsets of big data, especially georeferenced social media information scraped from the internet, can reveal the geographies of a range of social processes and practices. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can uncover broad spatial patterns within this data, as well as understand how this data reflects the lived experiences of the people creating it. We also seek to fill a conceptual lacuna in studies of user-generated geographic information, which have often avoided any explicit theorizing of sociospatial relations, by employing Jessop et al.’s TPSN framework. Through these interventions, we demonstrate that any analysis of user-generated geographic information must take into account the existence of more complex spatialities than the relatively simple spatial ontology implied by latitude and longitude coordinates.     

Deploying augmented reality to help engage the public with palaeontological applications

Augmented reality (AR) has huge potential as a science outreach tool, especially around palaeontology where it is possible to bring extinct animals to life. This paper shares our experiences as academic geoscientists in developing a series of AR applications during a three-year period. We do not focus on the technical issues of app design and coding but on the lessons learnt during this time which may be of value to others, whether academics, event coordinators or museum curators interested in using digital technology to enhance user experience or convey educational messages. We identify eight issues that are worth keeping in mind when commissioning, developing, and deploying AR apps for use as a science communication tool. The issues are: (1) download barriers; (2) ageing novelty of AR; (3) the ‘stickiness’ of an app tends to be moment-locations specific; (4) maintenance of bespoke apps; (5) ‘boom and lapse’ cycles in funding; (6) difficulty of embedding educational content; (7) priority conflict between users and event organisers; and (8) the quality of the animation is key.     

Fractured space: a geographical reflection on the digital divide

What does it mean to reflect upon space in connection to telecommunications? If we start with a conception of urban space as being fully integrated, including on an equal footing both information and communication technologies (ICT) and mobility techniques, as well as the founding notion of copresence that we find at the heart of all urban organization, we might then be able to examine the notion of the ‘digital divide’ in a new light. This clearly experimental approach is conducted by a research group called ‘Urbatic’, which is composed of geographers who, for the last three years, have been conducting theoretical research whose objective is to take into account two fields of social science: the theory of urbanity and the theory of telecommunication. Surveys conducted in this perspective focus on the analysis of the choices people make between the different means they can use to cope with distances (copresence, mobility and telecommunication) with a view to constructing their own space. The analysis of these choices leads us to propose a new theorized interpretation of the ‘digital divide’.     

Regional policy in Cameroon: The case of planning without facts

Cameroon's economic development is without doubt a story of success. Since independence, the country has been favoured by internal and external advantages but, as in most African countries south of the Sahara, the results of regional development policies — in spite of an existing and sound planning structure — are disappointing. Cameroon was always well-provided with the now fashionable ‘integrated’, ‘basic need-oriented’, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘development-from-within’ regional policy programmes. In discussing such a programme and proposing elements of a modified development strategy, it can, however, be argued that even the first step of creating a basic regional development project has been far from satisfactory. Further, in spite of government rhetoric, no regional development policy as normally defined exists. What does exist are regional effects of development projects. This prompts the question of whether it may be preferable to replace the term ‘regional development policy’, and to return to a ‘regionally based, comprehensively planned, project policy’, based on facts which first have to be collected and analysed.     

Spatialities of data: mapping social media ‘beyond the geotag’

As emerging sources of so-called ‘big data’ are increasingly utilized in order to understand social and spatial processes, so too have these new data sources become the subject of harsh criticism from more critically-oriented geographers and social scientists. This paper argues that one of the major issues preventing a more productive dialogue between critical human geographers and those already engaging in the mapping and analysis of these new data sources is around the ways that space and spatiality are conceptualized in social media mapping. As such, this paper draws on and extends earlier critiques of the ‘spatial ontology of the geotag’, in which the geographic analysis of geotagged social media data over-privileges the single latitude/longitude coordinate pair attached to each individual data point, often leading to the kind of simplistic mappings and interpretations prevalent today. The goals of this paper are two-fold: first, to demonstrate how the spatial ontology of the geotag is implicitly operationalized within mainstream social media mapping exercises, and how this understanding of space remains incongruent with existing conceptions of space drawn from human geography. Second, using the example of tweeting in the wake of the August 2014 killing of an unarmed African–American teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, this paper demonstrates how a more geographically-situated analysis of this kind of data, inspired by relational or multidimensional conceptualizations of space, can yield alternative understandings of the social processes embedded in such data.     

In the name of Development: Power,profit and the datafication of the global South

We examine the current ‘datafication’ process underway in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the power shifts it is creating in the field of international development. The use of new communications and database technologies in LMICs is generating ‘big data’ (for example from the use of mobile phones, mobile-based financial services and the internet) which is collected and processed by corporations. When shared, these data are also becoming a potentially valuable resource for development research and policy. With these new sources of data, new power structures are emerging within the field of development. We identify two trends in particular, illustrating them with examples: first, the empowerment of public–private partnerships around datafication in LMICs and the consequently growing agency of corporations as development actors. Second, the way commercially generated big data is becoming the foundation for country-level ‘data doubles’, i.e. digital representations of social phenomena and/or territories that are created in parallel with, and sometimes in lieu of, national data and statistics. We explore the resulting shift from legibility (Scott, 1998) to visibility, and the implications of seeing development interventions as a byproduct of larger-scale processes of informational capitalism.     

pH scales and proton-transfer reactions in saline media such as sea water

The three approaches to defining pH scales for use in sea water: the N.B.S. scale, the pH(SWS) or ‘total’ hydrogen ion concentration scale and the ‘free’ hydrogen ion concentration scale are described, and it is shown how these arise as a direct consequence of alternative experimental procedures for determining practical acidity constants. The advantages of conceptual simplicity and of experimental precision inherent in the use of concentration products to describe proton-transfer reactions in saline media are emphasised. In addition, the problems of theoretical interpretation and of reproducibility which result from the conventional nature of the N.B.S. pH scale are described, and the effect on the corresponding ‘apparent’ constants outlined. Insofar as it is concentration products rather than ‘apparent’ constants that are amenable to prediction using models for activity coefficients, the deliberate use of a ‘free’ hydrogen ion concentration scale should be applicable to many areas of aqueous geochemistry in addition to marine chemistry.     

Assessment of agricultural groundwater users in Iran: a cultural environmental bias

Many environmental problems are rooted in human behavior. This study aimed to explore the causal effect of cultural environmental bias on ‘sustainable behavior’ among agricultural groundwater users in Fars province, Iran, according to Klockner’s comprehensive model. A survey-based research project was conducted to gathering data on the paradigm of environmental psychology. The sample included agricultural groundwater users (n = 296) who were selected at random within a structured sampling regime involving study areas that represent three (higher, medium and lower) bounds of the agricultural-groundwater-vulnerability spectrum. Results showed that the “environment as ductile (EnAD)” variable was a strong determinant of sustainable behavior as it related to groundwater use, and that EnAE had the highest causal effect on the behavior of agricultural groundwater users. The adjusted model explained 41% variance of “groundwater sustainable behavior”. Based on the results, the groundwater sustainable behaviors of agricultural groundwater users were found to be affected by personal and subjective norm variables and that they are influenced by casual effects of the “environment as ductile (EnAD)” variable. The conclusions reflect the Fars agricultural groundwater users’ attitude or worldview on groundwater as an unrecoverable resource; thus, it is necessary that scientific disciplines like hydrogeology and psycho-sociology be considered together in a comprehensive approach for every groundwater study.     

Celebrating a Nation’s heritage on music stamps: Constructing an international community

Stamps convey important visible messages about a state’s heritage and worldview. They are images or official visible products seen by those living within the state’s borders and those beyond. They also can be considered as “imagined communities,” as like festivals, holidays, or WWW pages, they represent attachments to and images of place. We investigate stamps as elements of visual culture by examining salient music themes and topics from several countries and then focus on the music stamps of Brazil, Hungary, and Senegal. In each case, we examine the number and variety of issues, the importance they place on musical instruments, composers and performers, and musical events.     

The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism

‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.     

Evolution,science and society: Historical reflections on the geographical experiment

Of the many diverse sources of naturalistic thinking in early modern geography, the penetration of Darwinian evolution is conventionally regarded as one of the most influential. In its application to social processes, the term ‘Social Darwinism’, as it is generally designated, has been used to describe almost any evolutionary perspective on human society. In its most common form, ‘Social Darwinism’ (or ‘Business Darwinism’, as some have designated it) has been portrayed as an attempt to provide ‘scientific’ justification for the cut-throat ethics of late nineteenth century capitalism. The main contention of this essay is that the widespread use of the term ‘Social Darwinism’, has obscured the variety of other ways in which biological analogies were applied to society, and that one of the most influential of these was the social model erected on the Lamarckian evolutionary alternative — a version of evolutionary biology widely espoused by geographers in Britain and America. Social Lamarckism, by emphasizing the cumulation of social improvements, repudiated the non-interventionism of ‘Social Darwinism’ and was used by many geographers to underpin their support for numerous educational, eugenic and environmental movements to improve the condition of humanity. And while biologically bankrupt, the Lamarckian social schema continues to be invoked as a viable model of society's evolution.     

Speleogenesis: the evolution of the Castleton caves

Castleton, in North Derbyshire, is unique in Britain in having four caves open to tourists, as well as several ‘mid’ caves, most of which are only accessible to potholers and speleologists. Together, the tourist and wild caves tell a fascinating story of speleogenesis — the growth and development of a cave system. Both geologists and geomorphologists often ignore cave systems, but such systems play an important part in the evolution of the landscape as we see it today.     

地质大数据特点及其合理开发利用

大数据的合理开发与利用将开辟一个新的认知空间,提出解决各种实际问题的新模式,催生一个前所未有的数字经济新领域和开创一个新的人类生活方式。"数学地质"与"信息技术"结合形成"数字地质"。"数字地质"是地质科学的"数据科学"。地质数据科学是用数据的方法研究地质学,根据地质数据的特点和地质工作的需要研究和开发利用地质大数据。本文概述了地质数据的混合性、抽样性、因果性、时空性、多态性和多元性等主要特点,提出地质大数据的开发利用宜首先建立"知识库",据此建立"数据库""模型库"和"方法库",以便有针对性地做到获取、分析、研究和应用大数据。     

Emotion and politics in a mediated public sphere: Questioning democracy,responsibility and ethics in a computer mediated world

This article debates the extent to which particular forums of the internet enable democratic discussions around social and political issues, developing the interest in cyber-geographies from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The paper investigates discussions around abortion in the UK media, and public response(s) to such discussions. The analysis originates from an article written for the Huffington post by political editor Medhi Hasan and deconstructs subsequent reactions to this through mainstream media and news sites, comments pages on these sites, and reactions on Twitter. We assess the democratic potential of these types of media, developing Habermasian notions of the public sphere by analyzing the extent to which specific forums within the internet sphere play a role in facilitating emotions in political discussions. We also discuss the impact of individual narrative and personal perspective and its role within this quasi-political space. In so doing, we question the extent to which these types of ‘new media’, as a forum for public discussion and interaction, enable democratic deliberation by assessing the engagement between users of this sphere, and the nature of those discussions. This presents an assessment of computer mediated communication as a new way of ‘doing’ politics through its absence and presence(s) and through ideas of distance, moral responsibility, and an understanding of ethics and care at-a-distance, presenting a holistic account of how we might envision these debates playing out.     

Mimicking state diplomacy: The legitimizing strategies of unofficial diplomacies

Diplomacy and recognition play central roles in the conventional conferral of state legitimacy and functioning of the inter-state system. In broadening the diplomatic frame by stepping outside the conventional state-system, this paper brings a poststructuralist and performative toolkit to mimetic diplomatic practices. Adapting Bhabha’s notion of mimicry to diplomatic discourse, it demonstrates how non-state diplomacies draw on, mimic and intervene in the realm of formal political action in ways which both promote ‘official’ state diplomacy as an ideal and dilute its distinction from other, ‘unofficial’ diplomacies. In thereby examining the enactment of international diplomacy in unexpected spaces, this paper brings together three empirical studies: a Government-in-Exile, a religious community and micropatrias (self-declared parodic nations). In each of these cases, attention focuses on: discourses of recognition; sovereignty and legitimacy; the diplomatic relationships fostered and institutions of diplomacy constructed; and the strategic position of such diplomacy vis-à-vis the conventional state-system. Unpacking the relationship between legitimacy, recognition and diplomacy and exploring the tension between state-centric and non-state diplomatic practices, this paper foregrounds the points of connection between the official and the unofficial. As a result, this paper expands the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies while incorporating lessons from the margins into our understandings of legitimacy, recognition, statecraft and sovereignty.     

Driving the ‘Starship Enterprise’ through London: Constructing the im/moral driver-citizen through HGV safety technology

The intersections between technology, mobility and citizenship have been relatively neglected in current geographical enquiry. Through qualitative analysis of user, operator and media accounts of retro-fitted safety technology on HGVs (Heavy Goods Vehicles), this paper illustrates the ways in which citizenship as a moral accomplishment is dependent upon the socio-technical worlds into which individual actors are folded. In response to the growing incidence of cyclist fatalities under the wheels of HGVs, various safety technologies have been positioned as reliable ‘intermediaries’ by policymakers, manufacturers and operators seeking to mitigate the risks of the HGV. However, we demonstrate that these technologies are more accurately seen as ‘mediators’, because of the ways in which they distort and translate information, producing and reshaping new tasks and roles for HGV drivers. One of the consequences of this is a shift in responsibility towards the drivers, which increases the potential to construct them as negligent if accidents still occur. Accordingly, we indicate how technologies ‘push back’ on mobile subjects, shaping not only their ability for moral conduct, but broader social identities as citizens.     

Beyond flexible citizenship: Towards a study of many Chinese transnationalisms

Over the last decade, flexible citizenship has contributed much to our understandings of how contemporary Chinese migrate across the world in late capitalism. This corpus has not only called attention to the manifold strategies that these migrants adopt to inhabit multiple spaces, but has also elucidated how transnational migration can be deployed for the purposes of capital accumulation and enhancement of one’s lifestyle. This paper argues that the current fixation on the flexible strategies of the Chinese ‘shuttling’ between the East and West inevitably occludes other logics of mobilities that may be more germane for other (neglected) segments of the ‘new Chinese diaspora’. Through its consistent rehearsal, the present preoccupation may have led to an inadvertent reification of flexible citizenship, as the paradigmatic model of modern-day Chinese mobilities. In an effort to move the discussion forward, this paper weaves a deliberately dissonant story with the narratives of 50 Singaporean Chinese migrants who are living in, or who have returned to Singapore from, New York or the Californian-Bay Area. The viewpoints offered by these less ‘conventional’ Chinese subjects not only diverge from the usual ‘strategic’ or ‘calculative’ storylines among the Hong Kongers and Taiwanese, but also uncover distinctive assemblages that span across multi-sited and transcultural contexts. Although this paper has no intentions to discredit flexible citizenship, it hopes to have begun the process of decentring the locus of our knowledge pertaining to the subject, drawing attention to the possibility of alternative realities within many Chinese transnationalisms.     

A method of time-dependent analysis using elastic solutions for nonlinear materials

The formulation of viscoelastic solutions from elastic equations using the ‘correspondence principle’ and an inverse Laplace transform has been discussed extensively in the literature. Because this method has been developed, many time-dependent solutions can be obtained from closed form elastic solutions and conditions have been delineated in which the ‘quasi-elastic’ approximation of the viscoelastic solution is within acceptable tolerance. This communication shows the feasibility of the application of these methods to formulate approximate nonlinear viscoelastic solutions with nonlinear stress-strain materials, and for want of a specific nonlinear model to demonstrate this, the hyperbolic model was selected. The ‘power law’ is used to model the relaxation modulus of the viscoelastic materials. There are five related development that are discussed here using a simple numerical example to illustrate each of them and they are: (1) a linear elastic solution, (2) a linear viscoelastic solution, (3) a nonlinear elastic solution, (4) a nonlinear viscoelastic solution and finally, (5) a ‘regression’ approximation of the nonlinear viscoelastic solution which is suggested by the series form of the elastic solution. All of these are related to one another and each provides an acceptably accurate solution of the problem it addresses. The latter is of particular practical interest since it can be used to provide answers to problems involving nonlinear viscoelastic materials while requiring only very small calculation times. The problem used as an example is the calculation of the displacement of a circular hole in an infinite plate made of a material with a nonlinear time-dependent stress-strain relationship. The nonlinear elastic form of the solution was developed by matching results from nonlinear finite element analysis.