The head vs. the gut: Emotions, positionality, and the challenges of fieldwork with a Southern nationalist movement

This essay explores the inner process of researching a group that is proudly white, conservative, fundamentalist Christian, and Southern. The recent attention to emotions in scholarship has not extended to the subject of fieldwork with right-wing movements. I discuss my experience interviewing members of the League of the South and explore the extent to which my positionality shaped the interactions that I had with League members and informed my emotional response to the fieldwork.     

Airports, mobility and the calculative architecture of affective control

Drawing on work surrounding the theorisation of concepts such as mobility, affect and emotion, the paper argues that their control is now being intertwined in places like airports which are employing a number of techniques that engineer affects. Airport affect is enacted, in one way, by planning and designing the situational affective context one inhabits - throwing up structures of ethological possibility that shape capacities for the corporeal body to move and be moved. It is shown that the engineering of airport affect is premised upon a wider discursive framework of calculation and indeterminacy, and that selective techniques summon a number of different modalities of control. The paper concludes with a series of implications for the understanding of power, and the study of mobility, emotion and affect.     

Feeling Slow Food: Visceral fieldwork and empathetic research relations in the alternative food movement

This paper details the author’s experiments with accessing the visceral realm in research on the food-based social movement, Slow Food (SF). “Visceral” is defined as the bodily realm where feelings, sensations, moods and so on are experienced. Fieldwork methods aimed at participatory co-creation of data through verbal communications in the form of in-depth conversations and group discussions, as well as non-verbal communications in the form of “intentionally designed experiences” and other forms of sensory involvement. Communications centered on understanding how foods and food-based settings elicit feelings and sensations that move and power bodies differently, and specifically how SF guides bodies to be affected by specific foods and environments. The paper details how data were created and recorded, specifically exploring how sensory-based research events were translated to data through the creation of imagined bodily empathies. The paper also discusses the emergence of change-oriented communications that pushed for transformation in SF’s (in)attention to visceral differences, thus demonstrating how visceral research can challenge researchers and participants to critically reflect upon, and perhaps transform, how their own bodies feel (and respond to) the world.     

A Janus-faced biodiversity change and the partiality of ecological knowledge in a world biodiversity hotspot in Ghana: Implications for biodiversity rehabilitation

The Gyamfiase-Adenya-Obom cluster of villages in the forest-savanna region of Ghana is located within one of Conservation International’s 34 “World Biodiversity Hotspots” of the most biodiversity-threatened regions of the world. In collaboration with local farmers in this area since 1993, the People, Land Management and Ecological Change Project in Ghana (PLEC-Ghana) has been working on promoting biodiversity rehabilitation to address problems of biodiversity change. This goal is expected to be achieved through agrobiodiversity or biodiversity-friendly agricultural practices. However, farmers’ employment of these practices has been lackluster, even while they acknowledge biodiversity changes, dominated by Chromolaena odorata and other herbaceous species, that are driving the decline in forests and their biodiversity. In interpreting the difficulties of biodiversity rehabilitation in Gyamfiase-Adenya-Obom, this study outlines the diverging ecological knowledge of non-residents/outsiders and local farmers about biodiversity change, which it describes as Janus-like with two diverging faces. One face of biodiversity change shows the detrimental impacts on biodiversity and its observers—non-residents/outsiders—insist on biodiversity rehabilitation that nurtures forests, and the growth and domination of tree species. The other face of biodiversity change shows its agronomic advantages and its observers—the local farmers—are skeptical of current biodiversity rehabilitation practices. Farmers see agronomic benefits in biodiversity change, in particular the benefit of faster soil regeneration within the predominant bush fallow system of farming. And as a result of this observation, farmers continue with practices that sustain a decline in forests and biodiversity. Based on social and ecological research that explores three biodiversity-friendly practices promoted by PLEC-Ghana (fallow management, mulching, and intensive weeding to protect tree seedlings), this article discusses the partiality of ecological perspectives that emphasize either face of biodiversity change but not both, and the implications for biodiversity rehabilitation.     

The decline of a model community-based conservation project: Governance, capacity, and devolution in Mahenye, Zimbabwe

This paper reports the results of our research, conducted from June to August 2004, on the community-based conservation project in Mahenye, Zimbabwe. Previous studies have described this project as a model example of Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program. We explore the project’s recent performance within the context of the country’s post-2000 political and economic crisis and address the implications of our findings for arguments supporting devolution of authority for natural resource management to the community level. These issues are related in that calls for devolution are at least partly contingent on the demonstrated capacity of local institutions to manage projects in the community interest despite difficult circumstances. In our research, we found that outcomes in Mahenye have deteriorated sharply from conditions described in earlier studies. We found further that local failures of leadership combined with the withdrawal of outside agencies responsible for oversight and assistance may be more to blame for this decline than the ongoing national turmoil. Our results suggest that even in apparently successful conservation and development projects, local participatory decision-making institutions are fragile and require continuing external support. Consequently, we argue for caution in promoting full devolution of authority to the community level without safeguards to maintain good governance and adequate capacity.     

Government and urban management in the 20th century: policies,contradictions, and weaknesses of the New Right

Throughout the 20th century, government in the U.S. has gone through significant changes; initially responding to the disorder of early capitalism, and later, to the economic crisis of the 1970s. This article will explore the changes in the U.S. political landscape over the last century, as well as the recent rise of neo-liberalism. In addition, with the analysis of the model laissez-faire municipal government, the City of Houston, the article will illustrate how the basic weaknesses of neoliberalism at the national level are also evident at the local scale of government.

The political ecology of hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada: Masculinities, work and the production of the forestscape

This article attempts to empirically demonstrate how the struggle for bourgeois hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada, was fought for through the production of new natures. Bringing together Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony with marxist understandings of political ecology, I examine how the legitimacy of particular groups’ dominance over subordinate groups and the survival of specific social relations was built and contested through the (re)making of the material-symbolic landscape. However, I also take seriously Stuart Hall’s argument that we must take note of the multi-dimensional character of hegemony by paying attention to the entanglement of class, gender and ecological relations during the 1930s. In order to demonstrate these arguments I examine the economic, social, moral and ecological crisis that rippled across the socionatural fabric of B.C. during the depression years. I detail how the federal and provincial states responded to the interlaced crises of class, gender and ecological relations through launching a series of public works programs and training programs. These projects were intended to modernize the forestry industry and remake unemployed men in body and soul. In doing so, I demonstrate how ideologies regarding nature come to be both enrolled in the struggle for hegemony and materialized in the making of the forestscape. By weaving theoretical insights through the socionatural history of British Columbia, I demonstrate how a gramscian sensibility pushes us to take seriously the relationality of socionatural processes and the embededdness of concepts in material histories.     

Campus sustainability at the edges: Emotions,relations, and bio-cultural connections

The university campus is often considered a key site for the development of environmental sustainability initiatives. At the same time, the concept and practice of sustainability has been critiqued for its lack of conceptual clarity and its proneness to co-optation by neoliberal institutions and organizations. Using a just sustainabilities framework, this article strives to respond to this tension by exploring the possibility of a campus sustainability at the edges, one that is interested in engaging the broader socio-spatial context of a university as well as in tapping into the emotional and relational realms of fostering more sustainable socio-ecological assemblages. Through a case study analysis of the Philadelphia Urban Creators (PUC), a youth-led organization operating within the Temple University-North Philadelphia interface, I find that grassroots sustainability actors possess important knowledge for understanding how sustainability can be a tool for restoring emotional affinity with the environment as well as for enacting transformative socio-ecological change in the urban university context and beyond. Through these explorations, my purpose is twofold: (1) to envision a more diverse, inclusive, and meaningful campus sustainability model that seeks to confront urban crises such as gentrification, racialized poverty, and mass incarceration, and (2) to incorporate emotion and affect geographies into the just sustainabilities research agenda.     

What is a forest? Competing meanings and the politics of forest classification in Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand

Based on a case study in a Thai forest reserve, this article compares two modes of ‘reading’ the forest - official and local forest classification systems - and discusses how they imply different ideas about the forest, and how these competing knowledges interact with the politics of forest governance. Forest classification conventions are shown to slip, as ‘facts’ about the forest, from their origins in extraction-oriented forestry to the realm of conservation. Through a comparison of conventional vegetation classifications used in the state’s governance of the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in Thailand, with the classificatory systems of resident Pwo Karen communities, this paper examines the slippage of conventional classifications through various uses and the emphases placed by competing representations of the forest within the context of conservation politics in Thailand. It was found that conventional classifications continued to prioritise the silvicultural potential of trees within a conservation context, downplaying other notions of forests - such as their importance to livelihoods and as lived spaces - which are present in Karen classifications.     

Understanding governance and networks: EU-US interactions and the regulation of genetically modified organisms

EU-US (European Union-United States) interactions in relation to the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been examined in detail in recent years. To do this scholars have tended to focus on a small number of high profile processes, such as the formal complaint of the US to the World Trade Organisation regarding the regulation of GMOs in the Europe. It is important to analyse developments of this kind but overemphasis on them has also lead to a distorted view of the case and a failure to appreciate the significance of other, less visible, types of interaction. In this paper we focus instead on trying to understand the roles played by various EU-US transnational networks—The Transatlantic Business Dialogue, The Transatlantic Economic Partnership, The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, The Transatlantic Environmental Dialogue and the EU-US Consultative Forum on Biotechnology. These networks have been trying to shape the regulation of GMOs in both jurisdictions since the mid 1990s. By analysing them through a ‘governance lens’ we find that we can better understand EU-US interactions and the dynamics and influences around the regulation of GMOs. This gives us valuable insights into processes of contemporary governance.     

Burning issues: Whiteness, rurality and the politics of difference

In the past decade geographers have critiqued the exclusivity of idyllic representations of rurality and sought to explore the diverse experiences of Other social groups in the countryside. This paper builds upon that small but significant strand of research which has highlighted the whiteness of representations of rurality and the consequences of this for racialised minorities. These debates have been crucially important in forwarding our understanding of racially-exclusive constructions of idyllic country living; however, it is important that academics neither assume that such ideas are forever fixed, nor that they affect all minority ethnic groups in the same ways. This paper takes both the potential power and frailty of these ideas seriously, as it examines how the concepts of race, racism and rurality are deployed by different commentators as they debate the place of one specific minority ethnic group in the English countryside. The route taken into this is a consideration of print-media reporting of events in Firle, Sussex, where, in 2003, some white rural residents symbolically purged their village of Gypsy-Travellers by burning a mock caravan complete with effigies at their annual bonfire celebrations. In conclusion, the paper challenges the relative lack of attention to these issues within the white-dominated discipline of geography, and argues that it is imperative to trace the dynamic ways in which the whiteness of idyllic understandings of the rural are reinforced and challenged through contemporary social practice.     

Food porn,pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace

By engaging with ‘pro-anorexia’ and ‘food porn’ on the Internet, this paper explores eating in cyberspace. Reflecting on the ways in which virtual, but affective, consumption is central to both food porn and pro-anorexia websites, the paper asks what the act of eating ‘triggers’ and produces, connects and displaces. It traces how eating in, and through, cyberspace shapes the biological materialities of bodies whilst also collapsing neat distinctions between offline and online worlds. Virtual vectors of spectating, salivating and digesting are disembodied and yet corporeal. Eating is seen to take place beyond and among bodies and to be dissipated both spatially and temporally. As such, cyberspace is outside and other to lived corporeality, and yet also folded into and productive of the intimate geographies and embodied subjectivities of everyday lives. As eating takes myriad forms across the de-materialised viscerality of the Internet, it also emerges as central to the production and ‘matter(ing)’ of cyberspace itself; this is (an) eating space in which what is eaten, by whom and with what bodies, perpetually shifts. Thus, seeking to contribute to geographical scholarship on affect and food, this paper engages with eating as both the subject of enquiry and also as a productive pathway into an interrogation of cyberspace and its place within the affective productions of the everyday. It suggests that this is a key site in which to explore the intimate socialities, materialities and biopolitics of food.     

Vulnerability and adaptive capacities to slope failure threat: a study of the Klang Valley Region

This article examines the relationship between vulnerability and adaptive capacities of urban dwellers to slope failure threats. The Klang Valley Region in Peninsular Malaysia was selected as the study area based on the increasing frequency and impact of slope failures in the last decade. The study identified, examined, and mapped 10 slope failure locations, and the vulnerability characteristics of urban dwellers staying in areas that are prone to and threatened by slope failures were described. The identified vulnerability indicators are related to factors such as (1) socio-economic status, (2) population, (3) external characteristics, (4) physical structure of dwellings, and (5) adaptation measures. Finally, the perceptions of the residents who are at risk of slope failure hazards and their inherent coping mechanisms were analyzed. A model describing the relationships among slope failure threats, vulnerability of urban dwellers, and their adaptive capacities was formulated.     

Late Quaternary vegetation dynamics in a biodiversity hotspot, the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania

Late Quaternary vegetation history and environmental changes in a biodiverse tropical ecosystem are inferred from pollen, charcoal and carbon isotope evidence derived from a ∼ 48,000-yr sedimentary record from the Uluguru Mountains, a component of the Eastern Arc Mountains of Kenya and Tanzania. Results indicate that Eastern Arc forest composition has remained relatively stable during the past ∼ 48,000 yr. Long-term environmental stability of the Eastern Arc forests has been proposed as a mechanism for the accumulation and persistence of species during glacial periods, thus resulting in the diverse forests observed today. The pollen and isotope data presented here indicate some marked changes in abundance but no significant loss in moist forest taxa through the last glacial maximum, thereby providing support for the long-term environmental stability of the Eastern Arc. Anthropogenic activities, including burning and forest clearance, were found to play a moderate role in shaping the mosaic of forest patches and high-altitude grasslands that characterise the site today; however, this influence was tempered by the inaccessibility of the mountain.     

Breakthroughs in the biodiversity, biogeography, biostratigraphy, and basin analysis of the Beaufort group

Over the past decade researchers working on the rocks of the Beaufort Group in the main Karoo Basin of South Africa have vastly increased our understanding of this important Permo-Triassic sequence. Many new fossil forms have been discovered, allowing for breakthroughs into the biodiversity, biogeography and biostratigraphy of the group. Taxonomic and phylogenetic advances are many and varied, and cover most of the vertebrate taxa, but with emphasis placed on the temnospondyl amphibians, archosauriforms and non-mammalian synapsids, in particular the anomodontia. Biostratigraphic breakthroughs have centered on the Middle Permian Eodicynodon and Tapinocephalus assemblage zones, the Late Permian Dicynodon Assemblage Zone, and the Triassic Lystrosaurus and Cynognathus assemblage zones. Correlation of these biozones with better dated sequences in Europe, Russia and China has allowed for many chronostratigraphic refinements, which are in turn vital for sequence stratigraphical analysis of the basin fill. Based on fossil data, both the lower (Ecca–Beaufort) and upper (Beaufort–Molteno) contacts of the group have been proved to be highly diachronous. The refined chronostratigraphic framework has also allowed for a better analysis of the basin evolution through time, particularly in terms of the correlation of external stimuli that affect basin sedimentation patterns.     

Stratigraphy and facies development of the marine Late Devonian near the Boulongour Reservoir,northwest Xinjiang,China

Late Devonian to Early Carboniferous stratigraphic units within the ‘Zhulumute’ Formation, Hongguleleng Formation (stratotype), ‘Hebukehe’ Formation and the Heishantou Formation near the Boulongour Reservoir in northwestern Xinjiang are fossil-rich. The Hongguleleng and ‘Hebukehe’ formations are biostratigraphically well constrained by microfossils from the latest Frasnian linguiformis to mid-Famennian trachytera conodont biozones. The Hongguleleng Formation (96.8 m) is characterized by bioclastic argillaceous limestones and marls (the dominant facies) intercalated with green spiculitic calcareous shales. It yields abundant and highly diverse faunas of bryozoans, brachiopods and crinoids with subordinate solitary rugose corals, ostracods, trilobites, conodonts and other fish teeth. The succeeding ‘Hebukehe’ Formation (95.7 m) consists of siltstones, mudstones, arenites and intervals of bioclastic limestone (e.g. ‘Blastoid Hill’) and cherts with radiolarians. A diverse ichnofauna, phacopid trilobites, echinoderms (crinoids and blastoids) together with brachiopods, ostracods, bryozoans and rare cephalopods have been collected from this interval. Analysis of geochemical data, microfacies and especially the distribution of marine organisms, which are not described in detail here, but used for facies analysis, indicate a deepening of the depositional environment at the Boulongour Reservoir section. Results presented here concern mainly the sedimentological and stratigraphical context of the investigated section. Additionally, one Late Devonian palaeo-oceanic and biotic event, the Upper Kellwasser Event is recognized near the section base.     

Contested carbon: Carbon forestry as a speculatively virtual,falteringly material and disputed territorial assemblage

Assemblage approaches are increasingly being used to understand new socio-natural formations arising in relation to the multiple crises of capitalism, climate change and environmental degradation. The valuation of nature is key to these new formations, which the creation of new ‘valued entities’, through calculative practices, that can be accounted for, costed and circulated in monetised and financialised forms in order to ostensibly ‘fix’ certain environmental outcomes in relation to contemporary global crisis. This paper uses an assemblage approach in relation to the global’ transnational project of carbon forestry offsetting and REDD+ in a particular place, Uganda, arguing that it has utility in this respect. While Uganda has been named by Lang and Byakola (2005) as a ‘funny place to store carbon’ due to its contested land politics and history of violence its weak governance context paradoxically re-enforces the imperative for intervention. The paper argues that carbon forestry assemblages are inherently ephemeral and fundamentally contested in three ways: exhibiting a speculative virtuality, faltering materiality and disputed territoriality. Such analysis has the ability to go beyond technical and managerial, or solely pollical economic critiques of carbon forestry, to point at openings for alternatives.     

Acacia exchanges: Wattles, thorn trees, and the study of plant movements

Plants are frequently moved around the world, creating new regional landscapes and environmental imaginaries. Building on previous work in environmental history and geography, we develop a three-part approach to analyzing plant movements and apply it to trees from the Acacia genus (sens. lat.) exchanged between Australia and the rest of the world. First, we investigate the agents, circuits, and frequencies of acacia movements, including transoceanic transfers, regional diffusion, and ecological dispersal. Second, we trace bundles of knowledge or technology that accompany the acacias, highlighting how they help shape regional biogeographies. Finally, we analyze how different societies, with distinct economies, politics, and environmental sensibilities, receive introduced plants. This approach allows us to see transferred plants as active agents in region-forming processes, and to avoid normative tropes like ‘miracle plants’ or ‘alien invasives’. The highlighted species include Acacia colei, Acacia melanoxylon, Acacia mearnsii, Acacia farnesiana, Acacia nilotica, Acacia mangium, and their close relatives.     

Modernizing the nation: Postcolonialism, postdevelopmentalism, and ambivalent spaces of difference in southeastern Turkey

This paper advances recent conversations related to the need to better engage postcolonial scholarship in development geography. To do so, I bring together analytics offered by postdevelopmental, feminist geographic, and postcolonial scholarship to analyze contemporary development efforts in southeastern Turkey. To provide necessary background for the case study context, the paper considers three key moments foundational for Turkish modernist development aspirations: the foundations of the Republic through Kemalism, the emergence of Kurdish separatism and PKK resistance, and Turkish efforts to gain entry to the EU. Reading these moments, and their culmination in contemporary development efforts focused on the southeastern Anatolia region, through postdevelopmental and feminist geographic literatures invites a reading that highlights socio-spatial difference as underwriting modernist development interventions in this region. Drawing on postcolonial scholarship, particularly Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence, further enables a reading of socio-spatial difference as also undermining Turkish modernist development, signaling precisely the points where the project comes undone. The example thus lends endorsement to the need for enriched engagement between postcolonial theory, feminist and development discussions in geography, suggesting that postcolonial concepts might enable clearer focus on the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions inherent to development geographies.     

Authigenic sericite record of a fossil geothermal system: the Offenburg trough,central Black Forest,Germany

A fossil geothermal area is hosted by the Carboniferous, Permian and Bunter sandstones of the Offenburg intramontane trough in the central Black Forest. The hydrothermal alteration is identified on the basis of newly formed sericites, which appear as pseudomorphs after feldspar and filling of pore spaces. According to K–Ar dating of sericite, serititization occurred about 145 Ma ago (Jurassic). On the basis of ¹⁸O analyses of sericite, sericite composition and vitrinite reflectance, the hydrothermal fluids had temperatures of 150–210 °C. Because their electrolyte content was low, these fluids are assumed to have derived from meteoric water. A second pulse of electrolyte-rich hydrothermal fluids resulted in quartz overgrowths. Fluid mobilization seems to be linked to the disintegration of Pangaea and to reactivated fault systems extending from the crystalline basement into the intramontane sediments.