Adaptive capacity in Tanzanian Maasailand: Changing strategies to cope with drought in fragmented landscapes

This study examines the ways in which the adaptive capacity of households to climatic events varies within communities and is mediated by institutional and landscape changes. We present qualitative and quantitative data from two Maasai communities differentially exposed to the devastating drought of 2009 in Northern Tanzania. We show how rangeland fragmentation combined with the decoupling of institutions and landscapes are affecting pastoralists’ ability to cope with drought. Our data highlight that mobility remains a key coping mechanism for pastoralists to avoid cattle loss during a drought. However, mobility is now happening in new ways that require not only large amounts of money but new forms of knowledge and connections outside of customary reciprocity networks. Those least affected by the drought, in terms of cattle lost, were those with large herds who were able to sell some of their cattle and to pay for private access to pastures outside of Maasai areas. Drawing on an entitlements framework, we argue that the new coping mechanisms are not available to all, could be making some households more vulnerable to climate change, and reduce the adaptive capacity of the overall system as reciprocity networks and customary institutions are weakened. As such, we posit that adaptive capacity to climate change is uneven within and across communities, is scale-dependent, and is intimately tied to institutional and landscape changes.     

Sorption and desorption behavior of residual antidepressants and caffeine in freshwater sediment and sewage sludge

The use of antidepressants is widespread in modern times. Thus, they present a potential risk for ecosystems due to occurrence in domestic sewage containing unaltered metabolites and structures, even after the treatment plants have processed the sewage. The current research investigated the sorption and desorption of antidepressants(citalopram, venlafaxine, fluoxetine, sertraline, and amitriptyline) and caffeine from freshwater sediment and sewage sludge. The samples of freshwater sediment were ...     

Putting accessibility in place: A relational reading of accessibility in policies for transit-oriented development

In order to facilitate sustainable development, a shift from mobility-based to accessibility-based planning has been suggested. However, if we rely on the modern conceptualisation of accessibility, such a shift would have limited results. As an alternative, this paper proposes a relational reading of accessibility, which questions the divide between mobility and place upon which the modern definition is based. It argues that the accessibility of a place is characterised by a specific coordination of presences and absences that depends as much on boundaries and exclusions as on mobility. If accessibility changes, so does the place. This interpretation makes accessibility a matter of priorities and provides a critical perspective on arguments for time–space compressions and progress. This is illustrated here using the example of a regional strategy for transit-oriented development in Sweden (Region Scania). For that case, the discourse on accessibility revealed simplified arguments for densification, progress and metropolitan ideals, contradicting the initial inclusive intentions of the strategy. Thus, there is a need to put accessibility in place so that a shift to accessibility-based planning facilitates a move towards social and environmental sustainability.     

Geographies of citizenship and everyday (im)mobility

This introduction and the collection of papers it introduces seek to progress debates on the intersections between citizenship, practice, materiality, and mobility. In contrast to more static framings of formal citizenship where subjects are considered equal in terms of enjoying the same safeties and freedoms, in this introduction citizenship is conceived of as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens that ebbs and flows. Through the papers that comprise this collection we see the process of citizenship becoming fragmented in both urban and rural mobility spaces. We also see it as being shaped by particular technologies and artefacts which construct and relate mobile subjects to each other and the state in particular ways. Our key contribution lies in outlining three related areas where work informed by the mobilities turn could focus: Firstly we seek to demonstrate that far from being a product of citizenship status, mobility must be seen as actively constituting citizenship relations. Secondly we seek to demonstrate the roles that styles of movement and the ‘stuff’ of mobility play in shaping the extent of citizenship for particular mobile publics. Thirdly we illustrate the ways in which cross-border flows relating to concepts such as cosmopolitan and ecological citizenship can act through mobility practices to challenge locally held notions of appropriate mobility and inevitably citizenship. Ultimately what we argue and intend to demonstrate is that mobility is such an important, pervasive and politicised element of late modernity that the ways in which we move and confer meanings on movement, cut across and even over-ride more established relationships between social and cultural identity, citizenship and the state.     

“One needs to be very brave to stand all that”: Cycling,rational dress and the struggle for citizenship in late nineteenth century Britain

The article discusses changing ideas around citizenship through an analysis of first person accounts of women cyclists in Rational Dress in late nineteenth century Britain. A close reading of personal correspondence provides a sense of how it felt to cycle while dressed in new mobility costumes, such as bloomers, in urban and suburban English landscapes. Such attired and independently mobile women affirmed or unsettled onlooker’s understandings of how middle and upper class women should look and act in public. Some viewers subjected them to verbal and often physical assault. Others, in awe of their socio-technical sophistication were more supportive. Taking a ’bloomer point of view’ provides a unique socio-material way of gaining a deeper understanding of what enabled and also inhibited women’s claims to citizenship and freedom of movement, especially at a time when women were not citizens in a legal sense. I argue that through these richly described accounts we gain insightful glimpses into how individual sensory, embodied and political experiences collectively illuminate the becoming of ’citizen’ as it relates to mobility, gender and landscape.     

Konzepte zur Mobilitätsabschätzung von Schadstoffen in Boden- und Abfallmaterialien

Concepts for the Evaluation of Contaminant Mobility in Soil and Waste Materials Elution tests (S4, pH_stat, and SDS test) are presented, enabling the evaluation of the mobility of hydrophilic/hydrophobic and inorganic/organic contaminants in soil and waste materials. While elution tests for estimation of the mobilization potential of hydrophilic substances are performed following the pH_stat method, for hydrophobic species surfactant-containing eluents are used. The individual parameters of the elution process are selected assuming a "worst-case" scenario. In principle, because of economic reasons, detailed analytical investigations should be preceded by relevant screening tests.     

Distinctive and comparative places: Alternative narratives of distinction within international student mobility

Moving beyond the ‘world-class’ institutional model of international student mobility, this paper examines alternative narratives of distinction relating to place of study. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with international students at universities in the UK, Austria and Latvia, we illustrate how students inside and outside mainstream reputable higher education institutions narrate and reconfigure markers of distinction to validate their international mobility and location of study, in part to compete with peers at other (more prestigious) institutions. We demonstrate the importance of lifestyle and experiential places within a global differentiated higher education landscape and argue that many students engage in comparative narratives of place of study to authorise the symbolic capital associated with international education. The findings also consider how experiential places and mobility capital are used for distinction not only during educational mobility but within post-study aspirations.     

Simulation of the subsurface mobility of carbon nanoparticles at the field scale

The production and use of nanomaterials will inevitably lead to their disposal in the natural environment. To assess the risk that these materials pose to human and ecosystem health an understanding of their mobility and ultimate fate is essential. To date, however, relatively little research has been conducted on the fate of nanoparticles in subsurface systems. In this study the subsurface mobility of two carbon nanoparticles: nano-fullerenes (nC₆₀) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) is assessed. A two-dimensional finite element model was used to simulate the movement of these nanoparticles under a range of hydrologic and geological conditions, including a heterogeneous permeability field. The numerical model is based on colloid filtration theory (CFT) with a maximum retention capacity term. For the conditions evaluated the carbon nanotubes are much more mobile than nC₆₀ due to the smaller collector efficiency associated with carbon nanotubes. However, the mobility of nC₆₀ increased significantly when a maximum retention capacity term was included in the model. Model results also demonstrate that, for the systems examined, nanoparticles were predicted to be less mobile in heterogeneous systems compared to the homogeneous systems with the same average hydraulic properties.