The impact of residential desegregation on social integration: Evidence from a South African neighbourhood

This paper analyses the potential for social integration in post-apartheid urban South Africa by examining the lives of those already living in desegregated spaces. The case study is a low-cost state-assisted housing project situated in the wealthy southern suburbs of Cape Town. In this social housing project, named Westlake village, coloured and Black African (alongside a handful of white and Indian) residents were awarded state housing in 1999 as replacement for their previous homes (informal and formal), which were demolished to make way for a mixed land-use development, of which their new homes form a small component. Westlake’s desegregation is found to extend beyond mere residential abode, affecting resident’s everyday lives to the extent that apartheid’s history and geography are superseded by other factors (such as proximity and affordability) in decision-making. Furthermore, integration at the everyday level of informal neighbourly mixing is prevalent. Although more formal cross-race friendships are rare, discussion reveals this as a consequence of Westlake’s specific socio-historic identity rather than racial divisions per se. Empirical evidence is used to propose a continuum of social integration experience. This continuum addresses the form of integration, for example greeting in the street, visiting homes, inter-marriage; and also the spaces of integration, for example physical space (shared neighbourhood), economic space (common employment-type), social space (cross-race friendship), political space (common involvement in civic organisations) and cultural space (shared sense of belonging).     

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.     

Ethnic coexistence in a pluralistic campus environment

In Malaysia, ethnic segregation seems to have grown more and more pronounced at all levels of education, which may have in the main contributed to increasing occupational segregation by ethnicity when the graduates left to join the job market. Such trends may be disturbing given the effort the country has put in to promote interethnic understanding and reduce interethnic economic disparity since 1970. By critically investigating the dynamics of ethnic coexistence in the microcosm of the university campus environment, this paper provides statistical evidence to show how far the country has progressed in terms of ethnic relations since the watershed events of May 13, 1969; to what extent Malaysian multiethnic society is different now compared to the unmistakable racial “corporateness” and interethnic “separateness” that Furnivall observed in his classic study of 1948; and in what ways ethnic relations have been reshaped by three decades of affirmative action policies and the form of ethnic democracy adapted for this unique society.

A Glimpse of Steel Manufacture

Abstract

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the values that teachers bring to the classroom and their performance. The insights are drawn from the National Science Foundation-funded Finding A Way project that was undertaken by the National Council for Geographic Education. I argue here that without understanding the values and beliefs of classroom teachers, professional development initiatives might, in the end, make little difference in what goes on in the classroom.     

Institutions, cultural politics and the destabilizing Malaysian pig industry

Rising demand for meat has led to changing modes of production in the livestock industry and prompted varied institutional and regulatory changes. For the most part, the latter are enabling measures not fundamentally aimed at restraining the overall growth of the industry. In other words, specific institutional changes are meant to reduce uncertainty by providing a structure to everyday life although at a broader spatial scale, an institutional approach suggests that (a region’s) social infrastructure can help or hinder economic growth. In tracing recent developments in the Malaysian pig industry, this paper highlights an institutional regime that is stable on the surface but is in actuality prone to destabilization. Specifically, the role of cultural politics in shaping, sustaining and destabilizing institutional behavior and regimes will be examined, using the case study of the Malaccan pig industry. In explicating how institutional regimes and development are stabilized and destabilized, the paper argues that cultural politics might be an intractable stumbling block to the future growth and development of the industry.     

Biocultural nationalism? Bananas and biosecurity in Northern Queensland

ABSTRACT

The Cavendish banana is Australia’s most popular fruit and marketed as emblematic of Australian nationalisms. In July 2017, the disease-causing fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense was confirmed present on Australia’s largest Cavendish banana farm, in the worst disease incursion that Northern Queensland Cavendish monocrop plantations have yet faced. Confronted with the potential collapse of the industry, banana growers and Biosecurity Queensland officials have deployed a biosecurity response centred on measures of border control and containment. This paper examines the othering of the disease vector Panama Tropical Race 4, revealing biosecurity attempts as embroiled in cultural preoccupations with invasion. In so doing, this paper establishes that the biosecurity concerns regarding Northern Queensland bananas are not just with the economic and biological productivity of nature, but entangled in post-colonial anxieties over who belongs within the landscape. Following the entangled relations between the disease and Cavendish bananas reveals cultural nuances and multispecies relations. These shape and are shaped by industry and government efforts as experts attempt to maintain governance over entities as they appear to slip from human control. This paper finds that the anxieties and narratives of Australian post-colonial politics are deeply imbricated with the logics of ecological protection, agricultural productivity and the banality of everyday nationalisms.     

Numerical investigation of bore hole filling volume in a coastal area

Tidal energy is a promising way to reduce the carbon fossil energy. Installing tidal converters remains difficult particularly due to the bore hole filling by drill residuals and ambient sediments. To fix this issue, we perform a coupling between a coastal circulation model and a discrete element model, with an application to Alderney Race, and considering spherical particles. The coupled model is firstly described, validated and then used to investigate the parameters controlling the filling volume of monopile and tripod technologies. The results are analysed for different disposition of residuals and initial current direction and intensity. We show that: the distance between the bore hole centre and the residuals is the key parameter controlling the filling by drill residuals; the current direction plays a negligible role in monopile while this distance remains smaller than 20 m; the filling of tripod is strongly influenced by current effects and seabed morphology. Impacts of bed roughness (modelled by steady spherical particles inlaying in the seabed) and ambient sediments are quantified and discussed. Interactions between moving particles and bottom roughness lead to a slight increase of the filling while the impact of ambient sediments strongly depends on seabed morphology and current effects.     

Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States

We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States.     

Housing Foreclosure as A Geographically Contingent Event: Columbus Ohio 2003–2007

This article seeks to better understand geographic manifestations of housing foreclosure, moving beyond the usual portrayal that highlights, e.g., race/ethnicity and income. We depart from the usual analytical strategy which centers on factors that subsume high proportions of variance. Instead, this is the starting point for considering constellations and idiosyncratic but formative characteristics—contingencies—that further understanding of, e.g., why two households with identical attributes experience different outcomes. Empirical focus is on Columbus Ohio, 2003–2007. Regression analysis identifies central tendencies, followed by regression tree procedures that reveal variable combinations which alter correlational expectations. Unique areas are examined by neighborhood reconnaissance, exploratory data analysis, interviews, and archival research. Relevant factors include race/ethnicity and socio-economic characteristics. Beyond that, differing variable combinations lead to different outcomes, as do processes such as neighborhood life cycle, institutional actions/involvement, and year of home purchase/construction relative to housing de/inflation and mortgage market characteristics.     

Emplacement and the dispossessions of cosmopolitan capital

Ananya Roy’s theorization of the urban land question in terms of ‘dis/possessive collectivism’ is a powerful, eloquent intervention at a pivotal moment of intensified, planetary urban land inequalities. In this commentary, we evaluate Roy’s call to identify sites of “strategic illegality” from which to challenge the racial and class inequalities of capitalist colonization of urban land and property. Our analysis focuses on three transformations – evolving jurisdictional geographies, expanded proliferations of disparate impact, and reinforced infrastructures of monetized universalization – in which old, familiar exploitations are produced through the new multicultural meritocracies of an increasingly transnational, cosmopolitan capitalism.