Communities,abandonment and ‘recognition’: The case of post-state funding community bodies

Communities have increasingly been internalised as subjects with responsibilities in the delivery of urban policy and involvement in broader urban governance. A prominent example is the English New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme that ran between 2001 and 2012. Towards the end of government funding, NDCs were required to develop succession strategies that would leave a ‘legacy’ for their communities. This involved the development of social enterprise bodies that would continue to support community involvement and regeneration efforts through ownership of capital assets, acquisition of public service contracts, and partnership working with mainstream service providers. This paper examines the influence of communities on post-NDC bodies, and the relationship between these organisations and local government, which was a critical agent in the management of the previous NDC bodies. The ‘recognition’ perspective of Honneth (1995), which is concerned with the self-actualisation of actors through inter-subjective relations based on forms of recognition (e.g. respect), is deployed in the analysis of post-NDC bodies. The paper concludes that long term community representatives’ have incorporated market values as a means in which to acquire ‘respect’ from social enterprise professionals, and that there is a lack of recognition by state agents of the role of post-NDC bodies in contemporary urban governance.     

‘There’s no future here’: The time and place of children’s migration aspirations in Peru

This article examines young Peruvians’ aspirations and the role of migration in their imagined futures, from a generational perspective. The data come from Young Lives, a long-term study of childhood poverty combining survey and qualitative approaches with children and their parents. The paper uses a biographical approach that sees migration as part of individual biographies as well as social structures and life course processes. The aim is to deepen understanding of the social contexts in which aspirations for and by children are generated, paying close attention to family migration histories, dynamic household contexts, and children’s migration networks. The analysis focuses on the time-spaces of migration aspirations, showing the way past, present and future are interconnected. It also emplaces aspirations by focusing on the way aspirations by and for children are constituted in and through particular places. The conclusion reflects on the role of poverty and argues that ‘aspirations’ are about much more than abstract ‘futures’; they orient actions in the present and say a great deal about young people’s current realities and relationships.     

Borders on the move: Cross-strait tourists’ material moments on ‘the other side’ in the midst of rapprochement between China and Taiwan

This paper forms part of an endeavour to elicit the cultural-geo-politics of rapprochement tourism between China and Taiwan from a grounded approach. It seeks to examine cross-strait tourists’ travel experiences on ‘the other side’ through the lens of ‘border’, ‘materiality’ and ‘identity’ in an attempt to move beyond the often state-centric analyses of cross-strait ties. Discussion shows that travel documents that are close to the personal or those that are part and parcel of a touring experience are far from inert; they participate in the social and political lives of their owners, feature in bordering practices between the Chinese and the Taiwanese, and are often platforms through which identities are performed. Importantly too, as the various travel narratives reveal, the ubiquitous border certainly does not exist only in its physical form; imagined and perceived social borders are equally potent in (re)shaping cross-strait relations. A study that captures the often neglected field of comparative tourists’ travel experiences is timely in the advent of a warming relationship between China and Taiwan and the unprecedented increase in tourism exchanges that ensues.     

A new spin on ‘non-rotating’ porphyroblasts: implications of cleavage refraction and reference frames

It has been claimed that rigid porphyroblasts which grow before or during folding and concurrent cleavage development do not rotate with respect to the geographical reference frame (GRF), even if the straining is non-coaxial (Bell, 1985, Bell and Johnson, 1990). The explanation offered is based on strain partitioning. It is argued that the initial orientations of early fabrics included as internal foliations (S_i) in the porphyroblasts have been preserved after polyphase deformation, and even after successive orogenies. According to the strain partitioning model, the porphyroblasts are fixed in domains of coaxial straining (microlithons) and are isolated from the non-coaxial straining associated with the enveloping septa (S_e). This hypothesis, and also its discussions both pro and contra, suffer from insufficient attention to reference frames. We therefore attempt to demonstrate: (a) the need for rigorous treatment of reference frames in geological interpretations; (b) that, in a folding situation, grains that do not rotate with respect to their immediate matrix generally rotate with respect to the GRF; (c) that lack of porphyroblast rotation with respect to the GRF demands a rare folding mechanism (slip fold model); and (d) that the non-rotation hypothesis is in conflict with heterogeneous deformation (cleavage refraction). Finally, we question the validity of the evidence in a study by Fyson (1980), cited in support of non-rotation with respect to the GRF during folding. Fyson reported orientations of S_i that are constant, after folding, over a large area; this scenario is a product of selective data acquisition. In summary, our investigation shows that the lack of porphyroblast rotation with respect to a GRF during folding, while possible, is not universal. The development of microstructures (e.g. curved S_i) is only related to the local deformation path, the characterisation of which does not rely on the GRF.     

Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’

Through the lens of the dancing body, this paper examines practices of health and wellbeing produced in response to City of Vancouver urban governance policies. In particular, it calls attention to the legislative onslaught by city government in the years abutting the 2010 Winter Olympics to cultivate and manage healthy people, communities, and environments. In an effort to sell Vancouver’s ‘liveability’, I argue City of Vancouver endorsed a new legislative alliance that merged a conspicuously Anglo-American wellbeing lexicon, favouring individual responsibility and self-governance, with the performing arts industries. Drawing upon interviews and performance-based research, the paper illustrates how Karen Jamieson’s community dance project Connect, created for the In the Heart of the City festival, embodies Vancouver’s tri-level legislative ambitions to nurture A Healthy City For All. This materialised through the crafting of a dance-health body practice (healthy people), by choreographing a sense of belonging among ‘at risk’ communities (healthy communities), and in the uniting of the arts and health professions in the process of ‘cleaning up’ disenfranchised neighbourhoods (healthy environments). In bringing together scholarship on cultures of wellbeing and creative dance practice, the article contributes to understandings of how the health-seeking subject is embodied and performed. It also offers a productive critique of the exclusionary nature of urban health legislation, and of the contested role artists and arts festivals can play in nurturing urban wellbeing and normalising inequalities.     

Melanesia’s violent environments: Towards a political ecology of conflict in the western Pacific

This paper draws upon Michael Watts’s work on governable spaces and “economies of violence” in the Niger Delta (2004a,b,c) and Colin Filer’s concept of the “ideology of landownership” in Papua New Guinea (1997) to explore how resource capitalism has been at the heart of violent conflict in post-colonial Melanesia. This schema of the political ecology of violence is elucidated with reference to three governable spaces – landownership, indigeneity, and nationalism; four different resource–industrial complexes – mining, oil and gas, logging, and oil palm; and the region’s three most serious conflicts to date – the Bougainville conflict, the Solomon Islands ‘ethnic tension’, and on-going violence in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, particularly in Enga and Southern Highlands provinces. It is argued that in each of these places the story of violent conflict is ineluctably one of resource capitalism and its engagement with local socio-political contexts. In sharp contrast to the resource determinism, state-centrism and ahistoricism of much of the ‘resource conflict’ literature, attention to governmentality and scale highlights the highly contextual and contingent nature of resource-related violence in Melanesia. The diverse experiences of different regulatory approaches to the encounters between resource complexes and governable spaces across time and space are also examined, giving rise to policy implications for governing resource conflict in Melanesia.     

Late Tertiary ‘grey billy’ and the age and origin of surficial silicifications (silcrete) in South Australia

A late‐Tertiary age, as well as the commonly accepted mid‐Tertiary age, is proved for widespread silcretes in S.A. This is demonstrated by stratigraphic relationships with palynologically dated sequences, and evidence of erosion of silcretes. The age limits are Early Eocene to Early Miocene and Medial Miocene to Early Pleistocene, probably Late Pliocene. The late‐Tertiary silcrete dominates the duricrusted landscape flanking the north of the Willouran and Flinders Ranges, and forms patches throughout the Tarkarooloo Lobe (Lake Frome area). Silica type varies according to the material cemented; chalcedony and opal are more common in finer grained, less permeable, clayey clastics, and micro‐ to crypto‐crystalline quartz ('grey billy’ or ‘terrazzo') in porous permeable arenites and regoliths.

‘Grey billy’ silcretes with pedogenic features resembling massive nodular calcretes were probably formed close to phreatic surfaces or in the soil zone, and result from deposition of silica and titania from surface waters near ground level. They can be used to mark unconformities. Those without such features were formed at depths of several to tens of metres in the phreatic zone, beyond the effects of a fluctuating groundwater table.

The varying composition of groundwaters and fluctuations of the phreatic surface probably occurred as the result of climatic changes from wet to arid to wet, causing alternate solution and redeposition of silica. Silcrete was essentially a late Mesozoic‐Cainozoic phenomenon, this being a time of general uplift of the Australian continent during intervals of climatic fluctuation. However, the time spans of Australian silcretes are not sufficiently known to make correlations with major climatic events, which are on a finer time‐scale.     

Splendid isolation: ‘Philosopher’s islands’ and the reimagination of space

This paper argues that the metaphorical figure of the island plays an important but profoundly ambiguous role in the imagination of social space. The paper argues that ‘utopic’ islands have historically provided a fictional domain of experimentation that has informed the constitution of ‘real’ state spaces. From the 16th to 20th centuries this took the form of an increasingly consolidated and ‘global’ endotopia: a world, exemplified by the ‘political’ map, full of state spaces constituted as interiors. More recently, islands have served a very different metaphoric function, being used to create and legitimise spaces of exteriority – ‘xenospaces’ such as the online worlds of the ‘metaverse’ and the arcane legal/financial spaces of offshore – which in combination constitute an emergent xenotopia. The ‘philosopher’s island’ (Mackay, 2010), therefore, represents a complex and polyvalent spatial form that serves to continuously and expediently redefine the nature of social space.     

The ethnographic spectacle of the ‘other’ Filipinos in early cinema

My paper aims to ask what space characterizes the various constructs of orientalism and othering in the early short films of Thomas Edison. Using Lefebvre’s concept that social space “subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity” in these early shorts, I will look at three Biograph actualities found at the Library of Congress-American Memory page to show how space is manifested and negotiated onscreen. I will examine Edison’s “Filipinos Retreat From Trenches”, “Capture of Trenches at Candaba” and “U.S. Troops and Red Cross in the Trenches Before Caloocan” which were all released in 1899. These reenacted short films were shot during the tumultuous years of the Spanish-American War. In the Biograph shorts, the privileged positions of both Spanish and American forces in relation to the annexation of a foreign land in world history books is indicative of the tendency to de-emphasize the contribution of the native population in the war. Manthia Diawara has said that “space is related to power and powerlessness, insofar as those who occupy the center of the screen are usually more powerful than those in the background or completely absent from the screen.” The spatial hierarchies and spatially situated images in Edison’s short films show how historically configured power relations encrypted oppression to its external “others” through the cinematic apparatus.

The theory of magnetic hole formation in the vicinity of the Earth’s magnetoshere

Doklady Earth Sciences -     

Competitiveness versus ‘clean and green’? The regulation and governance of GMOs in Australia and the UK

It is increasingly argued that we are entering into a “biotech century”, in which biotechnology promises major advances in agricultural productivity. The development of biotechnology is not a straightforward affair, however, and the advent of GMOs has led to public protest and consumer resistance. This paper draws upon a comparative Australian-UK project concerned with the role of regulation and governance in mediating the debates and managing the associated risks. Regulatory responses and the mediation of conflicts by the Australian and UK governments have been shaped by the institutional and policy environments in these two countries. The implications of these public debates and regulatory responses for the capture of competitive opportunities are considered. The fact that the two countries have broadly similar systems of governance and regulation reveals how alike the circumstances are in many respects. But at the same time there are important differences in both the style and the content of the policy debates. In both the UK and Australia, the respective central governments remain committed to a ‘biotechnology future’. Against this background, there is little doubt that the choices about biotechnology will play a defining role in shaping the future of rural places.     

Model or measurements? A discussion of the key issue in Chapman and Pollack’s critique of Hamza et al.’s re-evaluation of oceanic heat flux and the global power

Chapman and Pollack (C and P)[2007, Int J Earth Sci] criticize Hamza et al. [2007, Int J Earth Sci] for using actual heat flux measurements in young oceanic crust instead of values from 1-D cooling models. The rationalization of C and P and previous authors is that hydrothermal circulation causes the discrepancy between model and measurement. However, the discrepancy between model values and measured heat flux exists over the entire ocean floor and is opposite to the perturbations that hydrothermal circulation would superimpose on a conductive system [Hofmeister and Criss (2005) Tectonophysics 409:199–203]. The error lies in force-fitting a 1-D cooling model to the 3-D oceanic crust [Hofmeister and Criss (2005) Tectonophysics 395:159–177]. Shortcomings of the 1-D model include mathematical errors, such as use of volumetric rather than linear thermal expansivity to describe contraction which, by assumption, is limited only to the Z -direction [Hofmeister and Criss (2006) Tectonophysics]. This 3× error, traceable to McKenzie and Sclater [1969, Bull Vocanol 33–1:101–118], accidentally provides good agreement of model values with globally averaged seafloor depths for young, but not old ages, and is the sole rationale for using the simplistic cooling model. There is no justification for selective substitution of erroneous 1-D model values for measurements only for the younger half of the 3-D oceanic crust, as stridently and arbitrarily promoted by C and P. Hamza et al. [2007, Int J Earth Sci], in contrast, use the scientific method, which calls for discarding models that do not well describe physical phenomena. The remainder of this report summarizes the shortcomings of cooling models, particularly the half-space cooling (HSC) model touted by C and P, and explains how hydrothermal circulation affects heat flux. We focus on the basics, as these have been misunderstood. With the key issues of C and P being erroneous, it is not necessary to address their remaining comments, many of which enumerate the vote for an imagined, gargantuan circulation of hot fluid through oceanic basins that is somehow warmed without removing heat from the rocks. The use of “consensus” to belittle valid challenge is the enemy of the scientific method.     

The role of conjugate crenulation cleavage in the development of ‘millipede’ microstructures

Millipede microstructures are described from Archean metaturbidites surrounding the Back River volcanic complex, eastern Slave Structural Province. They are locally developed within andalusite porphyroblasts that grew in response to the intrusion of late syn-kinematic granitoids. The porphyroblasts acted as a mechanical heterogeneity and resulted in the nucleation of conjugate crenulations, which were then helicitically overgrown by the porphyroblasts. This process produced the millipede morphology through a simple, consistent mechanism. The model presented here for the development of millipede microstructures represents an alternative to other models requiring complex deformation partitioning and restricted porphyroblast growth.     

The Relationship between Global Volcanic Activity and Variations in the Velocity of Earth’s Rotation

Doklady Earth Sciences - Analysis of observations of the Earth’s rotational velocity and volcanic activity of the planet from 1720 until 2015 suggests that higher volcanic activity temporally...     

The 3d relief models and structure of the Earth’s upper crust in the Amur region

The analysis of 3D relief models of the lower Amur region and several adjacent areas suggested that the structure of the region is related to the horizontal tectonic layering of the upper part of the Amur plate. When it was dislocated to the northwest at the terminal Cretaceous, some fragments of the upper layers were displaced not strictly synchronously but with some lag relative to the whole plate. This scenario was responsible for the formation of the main morphostructural elements of the region: river valleys, mountain ranges, and graben series. These inferences are supported by field observations and some geological data. The proposed hypothesis can also be applied for several other regions.     

A ‘cartography of concern’: Place-making practices and gender in the artisanal mining sector in Africa

Sites of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in sub-Saharan Africa are often places of contestation and dispossession, particularly because mining laws and policies have generally been crafted to foster large-scale mining. This paper builds on research mapping the multiple ways in which ASM is associated with various wrongs – criminality, illegality, immorality, destructiveness - to consider how various, complex gendered relations and place-making practices within mine sites are occluded as a result. We consider these erasures in the context of ASM formalization efforts linked to particular state visions. We note that while negative perceptions of ASM persist, governments, donors and mining companies are increasingly engaging in different forms of negotiation with ASM representatives, particularly through establishing legal ‘ASM zones’ and encouraging or mandating artisanal miners to form associations or cooperatives: processes of formalization. With reference to African case studies, we outline potential issues and challenges in efforts to formalize ASM, while offering insights into how the politics of place-making inform these initiatives. Focusing in particular on the gendering of both the dominant place-making of ASM by policy-makers and regulators and the actual emplaced practices of ASM activities in specific mining sites we highlight the multiple, at times competing and other times overlapping, visions of space at work in this widespread economic activity.