Pedagogy, post-coloniality and care-full encounters in the classroom

In this paper, I consider what it means to take up the twin post-colonial commitment to critique and destabilization, and open and ’future-oriented’ practices, in the neglected space of the classroom. I make a case for extending how we conceive of our responsibility to this commitment to include the care-full work of interrogating how we encourage students in developing fresh ways of relating to difference and inequality. Care embraces responsibility yet it usefully forces attention to the mediation and embeddedness of responsible relations in the interpersonal contact zones of the classroom. In its cautionary meaning, care also brings to questions of responsibility a carefulness, which alerts us to the difficulties of exercising such an engaged and indeterminate pedagogy in an institutional setting driven by the norms of assessment, benchmarking statements, disciplinary expectations and the conventions of academic discourse. It draws attention further to the potentially un-caring consequences of framing post-colonial commitments through intersubjective categories of self-other. In this paper I reflect on my own experiences teaching a level three module on the post-colonial Caribbean and, in particular, my use of fiction as a way to initiate more responsive and open-ended encounters with Caribbean peoples and places. I highlight some of the opportunities created by the use of different forms of writing but also the institutional and discursive constraints, including my own mediation of the texts and student expectations, which persistently threaten to settle and reclaim evidence of destabilisation and newness.     

Solar limb brightening and enhancement measurements at 1.2 mm

Solar intensity measurements at a mean wavelength of 1.2 mm were made using a 1.6 m Cassegrain telescope. The measurements included a series of scans made during the partial solar eclipse of May 20th, 1966.A high degree of solar limb brightening is inferred from the measured intensity distribution. The ratio of the disk-averaged brightness temperature to the central brightness temperature at 1.2 mm is calculated to be 1.11 ± 0.02.A fairly intense solar outburst, of approximate duration 50 min, was observed towards the end of the eclipse.     

Scaling Caribbean (in)dependence

Recently there has been much ado about the territorial implications of globalization. Geographers have made a significant contribution to these debates, pointing to the tension between forces of deterritorialization and those of re-territorialization. In particular, there is a growing body of work in political and economic geography that draws attention to processes of re-scaling where, at the same time as scales such as the nation-state appear threatened, new scales of economic, political and social regulation emerge. Much of this literature, however, focuses on the ability of already powerful states to re-scale their activities and manage the border crossing abilities of global capital. In this paper I examine the process of supra-national regional integration in the Caribbean as an example of re-scaling and re-territorialization in a post-colonial context. I draw attention to the historic permeability of Caribbean states and argue regionalism in the Caribbean needs to be viewed as part of a longer process of defining economic, political and cultural independence in what, for post-colonial states, has always been an interdependent world economy. This analysis suggests that while new scales can be understood as spatialized attempts to manage changing global economics, they are also ambivalent productions, and as such, sites of resistance as well as domination and regulation.     

Regional governmentality: Neoliberalization and the Caribbean Community Single Market and Economy

Formally launched on 30 January 2006, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Single Market and Economy (CSME) is, like many other regional economic initiatives, designed to create an economic space in which the uninhibited flow of goods, capital and skills across the borders of member states is anticipated to generate competitive business opportunities and external investment. Despite the intensification of such regional programmes, promoters and critics alike continue to consider CARICOM to be an intergovernmental organization dependent on the political will of member states as they negotiate the pressures of neoliberal globalization. In this paper, I argue that such a framing of regional integration in the Caribbean misses some of the tangible ways that CARICOM works beyond the sovereign intent of member states to enable the encroachment of neoliberal-style economic orders across the space of the region. I adopt a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to unhinge CARICOM from the governments of its member states. Once freed from a persistent statism it becomes possible to consider the technical competencies through which CARICOM initiatives increasingly connect and cohere with neoliberal rationalities. My goal in developing such an analytics is not to suggest CARICOM operates as a superstate but rather to broaden the sites considered relevant to understanding the encroachment of neoliberalism in the Caribbean.