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1.
The idea of climate has both statistical and social foundations. Both of these dimensions of climate change over time: climate, as defined by meteorological statistics, changes for both natural and anthropogenic reasons; and our expectations of future climate also change, as cultures, societies and knowledge evolves. This paper explores the interactions between these different expressions of climate change by focusing on the idea of ‘normal’ climates defined by statistics. We show how this idea came into being in meteorological circles and then review how this idea of climatic normality gets entangled with cultural and psychological processes. Using data from historical and predicted climates in the UK, we illustrate the significance of choosing different baseline ‘normals’ for retrospective and prospective interpretations of climate change. Since the choice of these statistical ‘normals’ reflects cultural, political and psychological preferences and practices as much as scientific ones, we argue that expectations of the climatic future are influenced by social as well as statistical norms. Seeing climate as co-constructed between the psycho-cultural constraints of society and the physical constraints of the material world offers a different way of thinking about the instabilities of climate and the ways we adapt to them. 相似文献
2.
Clive Barnett 《Geoforum》2005,36(1):7-12
Recent work on neoliberalism has sought to reconcile a Marxist understanding of hegemony with poststructuralist ideas of discourse and governmentality derived from Foucault. This paper argues that this convergence cannot resolve the limitations of Marxist theories of contemporary socio-economic change, and nor do they do justice to the degree to which Foucault’s work might be thought of as a supplement to liberal political thought. The turn to Foucault highlights the difficulty that theories of hegemony have in accounting for the suturing together of top-down programmes with the activities of everyday life. However, the prevalent interpretation of governmentality only compounds this problem, by supposing that the implied subject-effects of programmes of rule are either automatically realised, or more or less successfully ‘contested’ and ‘resisted’. Theories of hegemony and of governmentality both assume that subject-formation works through a circular process of recognition and subjection. Both approaches therefore treat ‘the social’ as a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental rationalities. This means that neither approach can acknowledge the proactive role that long-term rhythms of socio-cultural change can play in reshaping formal practices of politics, policy, and administration. The instrumental use of notions of governmentality to sustain theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization supports a two-dimensional understanding of political power—which is understood in terms of relations of imposition and resistance—and of geographical space—which is understood in terms of the diffusion and contingent combination of hegemonic projects. Theories of neoliberalism provide a consoling image of how the world works, and in their simplistic reiteration of the idea that liberalism privileges the market and individual self-interest, they provide little assistance in thinking about how best to balance equally compelling imperatives to respect pluralistic difference and enable effective collective action. 相似文献
3.
With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science-policy-celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees. 相似文献
4.
The everyday implications of a volatile geopolitical climate are increasingly recognised, but far less is known about how people’s emotional geographies are affected by geopolitical change. This paper offers a critical examination of how some young people in different parts of the world navigate fears and hopes that might be considered ‘global’ in nature, and those that might be considered ‘everyday’. We report from participatory research conducted with young people from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds living in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We examine how personal fears and hopes intersect with wider anxieties about youth, urban crime and terrorism. The research suggests that global-everyday emotions are not separated out in young people’s analyses. They are critically reflexive about wider discourses of fear, while undertaking the day to day business of navigating what are sometimes challenging emotional topographies. 相似文献
5.
Ruth Fincher 《Geoforum》2011,42(5):539-549
In creating separate and distinct spaces and forms of socialising for themselves, ‘international’ and ‘local’ university students in central Melbourne are influenced by three key, spatially-linked processes. The first is institutional - it includes the allocation of international students to a certain type of housing which differs from that chosen by local students, and the practice of universities, student clubs and local churches to gather international and local students into separate groupings. The second is locational. It is the process by which international students find themselves living principally in and around the edge of the central city, an entertainment district with rowdy characteristics that these students often find distasteful. Local students, in contrast, locate in the inner suburbs for the most part, at a distance from the city centre hotspot. The third process sees socialising habits that are enacted in and by virtue of the public places in which they occur. This self-enacting socialisation further separates local students from international students. All three processes demonstrate how certain characteristics of the built environment can be invested with particular meanings and become complicit in shaping racialised social interactions. 相似文献
6.
Oil ‘futures’: Shell’s Scenarios and the social constitution of the global oil market 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Anna Zalik 《Geoforum》2010,41(4):553-564
This article explores the relationship between the oil industry’s representation of operating conditions in key sites of extraction and the constitution of oil futures markets. An analysis of Shell Oil’s recent Scenarios publications, the ‘Trilemma Scenarios to 2025’ and subsequent ‘Scramble and Blueprints Scenarios to 2050’, provides insight into both the (global) social construction of oil prices and the oil industry’s reaction to social resistance in its operating environment - whether in the form of movements for resource sovereignty or climate change activism. Examining the implications of these two Scenario publications for key sites of Shell investment, the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Canadian Tar Sands, the article demonstrates that understanding the discursive implications of ‘peak oil’ for the petroleum industry requires contextualizing discussions of ‘scarcity’ within business agents role in shaping oil futures markets, and private industry’s interest in the ongoing development of unconventional fossil fuel sources. While the role of deregulated futures trading receives little attention in the Shell Scenarios, speculative trading - and thus perception concerning supply among business agents - is central to shaping global oil prices and thus the social conditions of the oil market. 相似文献
7.
Parvati Raghuram 《Geoforum》2009,40(1):25-33
The migration of health professionals has been accompanied by politically and morally charged discussions on the effect of such migration on the health of those left behind in their countries of origin. In the UK, the National Health Service, which has long been dependent on overseas migrants to bolster its own staffing, has responded to critics accusing it of ‘poaching’ health professionals from poorer countries with a range of measures to limit health worker mobility. These measures counterpose the right to mobility of health workers with the right to health for those they leave behind, posing academics working on brain drain with a quandary: how do we think ethically about brain drain migration? This paper aims to address this question by exploring the spatial and temporal ontologies that are being mobilised in current thinking around the brain drain. It explores how these ontologies shape both public debates and policy initiatives, foreclosing other ways of thinking about health worker mobility. It argues that routing discourses of brain drain through insights drawn from care ethics and postcolonial thinking will highlight the historical transnational connections that mark medical labour markets and how the category ‘medical worker’ is precisely dependent on this transnationalism. 相似文献
8.
Presented here are stable nitrogen isotope data from a rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) middens from northwestern Namibia that record a series of rapid aridification events beginning at ca. 3800 cal yr BP, and which mark a progressive decrease in regional humidity across the Holocene. Strong correlations exist between this record and other terrestrial and marine archives from southern Africa, indicating that the observed pattern of climate change is regionally coherent. Combined, these data indicate hemispheric synchrony in tropical African climate change during the Holocene, with similar trends characterising the termination of the ‘African Humid Period’ (AHP) in both the northern and southern tropics. These findings run counter to the widely accepted model of direct low-latitude insolation forcing, which requires an anti-phase relationship to exist between the hemispheres. The combined dataset highlights: 1) the importance of forcing mechanisms influencing the high northern latitudes in effecting low-latitude climate change in Africa, and 2) the potential importance of solar forcing and variations in the Earth's geomagnetic shield in determining both long-term and rapid centennial-scale climate changes, identifying a possible mechanism for the variations marking the AHP termination in both the southern and northern tropics. 相似文献
9.
David Crouch 《Geoforum》2003,34(3):395-408
In this paper we explore history and heritage mobilised to do service for marginalized interests. We discuss how resources, such as, place, texts, artefacts and practice are drawn upon to forward particular political interests. Touching on recent work in non-representational theory we suggest that more attention be paid to the micro-politics of doing and link more formal action to that of ‘everyday’ practice. The examples used show how particular actors draw on history and heritage to advance their positions and how their performances reinforce claims based on alternative practices. The examples used illustrate how this involves the notion of ‘reclaiming’ historical action, historical texts and historical place. In particular how this relates to land and specifically in this paper the metaphor, representation and practice of ‘digging’. 相似文献
10.
Steven Tufts Author Vitae 《Geoforum》2004,35(1):47-58
Toronto’s quest to host the Summer Olympic Games has dominated both contemporary planning discourse and practice. For some, the pursuit of the games embodies Toronto’s transformation into a ‘competitive’ global city. Relatively unexplored in this discourse are the contradictory roles that labour plays in contemporary urban development. I argue that the new labour geography can provide some interesting insights into such processes. Specifically, labour geographers have given workers with divergent interests greater agency in shaping economic landscapes and have noted the multi-scalar organisation of labour. The paper looks at the contradictory and conflicting positions held by different labour unions in Toronto toward the city’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The case study suggests that labour is an active agent in processes shaping contemporary Toronto and support the bid for complex reasons ranging from the promise of jobs to potential future organising opportunities. 相似文献
11.
Navigating the terrains of transnational education: Children of Chinese ‘study mothers’ in Singapore
This paper demonstrates the value of child-centred migration studies which highlight children’s role in shaping the migration journeys of their families, as well as their own projected journeyings. It examines the case of children from China who move to Singapore, an aspiring global education hub, expressly for the purpose of an overseas education that will facilitate longer-term migration and life goals. Focus is given specifically to the children of ‘study mothers’ or peidu mama (literally: ‘mothers accompanying their children who are studying’). Through interviews with the teenagers and the conceptual optic of ‘social navigation’, our paper demonstrates that children are resilient and creative beings able to navigate the twists and turns of their immediate trajectories, as well as develop their own goals and projected destinations for their futures. The paper calls for a refinement in the way we understand children’s mobilities. First, in arguing that their spatial journeying across the terrains of transnational education cannot be decoupled from their process of social becoming and emotional development from passive followers to active negotiators, we wish to disrupt hegemonic discourses and dominant representations of children in migration as simply ‘migrant’s children’ and restore them to the status of ‘migrant children’. Second, adopting the concept of social navigation as an analytical lens allows us to highlight the fluid ways that young people think about their futures and the different pathways by which they can get there. This leads us to conceive of social and cultural capital accumulation through transnational education as a process with many more degrees of provisionality than what is often presented in the literature as a ‘strategic project’ with a fixed and abstract goal. 相似文献
12.
Bushfire and everyday life: Examining the awareness-action ‘gap’ in changing rural landscapes 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
In this paper we use the notion of ‘everyday life’ to critically examine an apparent ‘gap’ between bushfire risk awareness and preparedness amongst diverse landholders in rural landscapes affected by amenity-led in-migration in southeast Australia. Landholders were found to bring their own agency to bushfire preparedness in the relationships between everyday procedures, dilemmas, and tradeoffs. Consequently, regardless of landholders’ awareness levels, attitudes towards bushfire and natural resource management influence if, how, and to what extent landowners prepare for bushfires. We argue that not only is the ‘gap’ complex but also paradoxical in that it is both evident in, and constituted by, landholder attitudes and action and simultaneously dissolved in their practices and decision-making in everyday life. Three dilemmas of everyday life in particular were found to underpin these attitudes: costs (in terms of monetary and time values), gender roles, and priorities. Using a mixed-methods research approach, this simultaneous cultural construction and material nature of bushfire in everyday life is mapped out through landholders’ narratives and actions that embody living with fire on the land. The place of bushfire in landholders’ everyday life has direct relevance to recent international discussions of the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in bushfire-prone rural-urban interface areas. 相似文献
13.
Thomas MacMillan 《Geoforum》2003,34(2):187-201
Biotechnology regulation has been dogged by allegations of bias, usually phrased in terms of ‘conflicts of interest’. Social constructionist analyses of regulatory science have shown up serious epistemological difficulties with such ‘interest’ explanations of regulatory power, but in the process they have also destabilised the platforms such as ‘objectivity’, upon which critiques of regulatory bias are usually grounded. This paper argues that their critical impotence follows from not being constructivist enough. Building on Hajer’s notions of ‘story-lines’ and ‘discourse coalitions’, it argues that recovering the non-human, material components that construct regulation offers sufficiently firm ground for evaluating regulatory power even in the absence of the firm benchmarks assumed by interest accounts. The paper develops this approach by focusing on a single story-line, characterised as ‘scientism’, as it is deployed in the build up to a European Union (EU) ban on bovine somatotrophin, the first food-related product of the ‘new biotechnology’. The essay ends by discussing how far this retrospective analysis can help us to understand and intervene in the current and future EU regulation of biotechnology. 相似文献
14.
In this paper, we explore how ‘peak oil’ anxieties are woven into the spaces and practices of the state in Norway and the consequences of this for environmental justice and the public sphere more widely. We focus in particular on an ongoing struggle over access to hydrocarbon deposits in the Norwegian Arctic, the so-called ‘Battle of the North’. We use this dispute to highlight three wider theoretical points regarding (i) the continuing relevance of the state in the governing of nature-society relations, (ii) the increasingly fragmented and fluid nature of state space, and (iii) the significance of ‘security’ as a term around which social, economic and environmental tensions pivot. The paper concludes by reflecting on current efforts to prevent new oil activities in the north of Norway. 相似文献
15.
Anastasia Christou 《Geoforum》2010,41(4):638-646
This article presents research on second-generation Greek-Germans, both those living in diaspora, and those who have ‘returned’ to Greece. The research is multi-sited, with fieldwork in Berlin, Athens, central and northern Greece. After defining and problematising the notions of ‘second generation’ and ‘return’ - especially complex in this context - we focus on the second generation’s diasporic imaginings of ‘home’, particularly their experiences and narrative framings of landscape, space and place. In their narratives, participants ‘remember’ their parents’ narratives about the homeland, and narrate their own experiences of returning to the diasporic hearth. Contrasts are drawn across diverse diasporic landscape imaginings and experiences: between received diasporic memories and ‘pragmatic’ experiences; holiday visits and long-term return; urban, rural and other spaces; and different sites in the diaspora, such as the place of upbringing and the ancestral home. 相似文献
16.
Tim Schwanen 《Geoforum》2006,37(6):882-894
The time-geographical concept of coupling constraints, which define when, where and for how long individuals have to join other individuals and material objects, can be useful to ‘time squeeze’ studies. Geographers have typically operationalised the ‘when’ dimension of coupling constrains through arrival times at locations in physical space or the starting time of specific activities. This paper questions this approach and posits that it may be more productive to identify time-spans of acceptable or appropriate arrival times. However, these time-spans should not be expressed solely with reference to clock time. This is because boundaries on what is acceptable or appropriate depend not only on clock time but also on the times of the body and especially the time inherent to the dynamics in the juxtapositions and presence/absence of human beings and inanimate objects within a bounded physical space. Interview excerpts are presented to reveal how clock time interacts with contextual times in the modes in which parents in two-worker families perceive and cope with coupling constraints during workdays. 相似文献
17.
18.
Merje Kuus 《Geoforum》2007,38(2):241-251
This paper investigates the role of intellectuals in the production of geopolitical discourses. It analyzes how the cultural capital of humanist credentials and artistic aura functions to authenticate and legitimate geopolitical claims. Drawing empirically from Central Europe and especially Estonia, I argue that intellectuals are central to the production of a particular ‘cultural’ concept of geopolitics - the notion that foreign policy expresses the state’s and the nation’s identity. As cultural capital gives intellectuals a special license to speak about culture, it constitutes an essential component in geopolitical discourses in Central Europe.The paper contributes to Europeanist geography by clarifying the mechanisms through which Central Europe is cast externally and internally as a place particularly imbued with culture and identity - a place whose integration with the EU and NATO represents its cultural ‘return’ to Europe. It takes us beyond the romanticized notion of intellectuals - especially the formerly dissident ones - as ‘speaking truth to power’, and offers a more subtle account of their role as producers of power discourses.Beyond Central Europe, the paper underscores the political and cultural milieu of geopolitical claims and the specific structures of legitimacy through which these claims are justified and normalized. A nuanced understanding of the role of ‘culture’ in geopolitical discourses requires that we closely examine the cultural and moral capital of intellectuals. This would also enable us to better delineate human agency in the production of geopolitics. 相似文献
19.
Marcus Power 《Geoforum》2009,40(1):14-24
One important (though often neglected) part of the ‘development business’ committed to principles of partnership is the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 54 independent countries, almost all of which were formerly under British rule. This paper focuses on the Commonwealth’s contemporary sense of ‘responsibility’ for shaping African development through ‘partnership’ and by promoting ‘good governance’ and examines the particular example of Mozambique, which joined the Commonwealth in 1995. In exploring exactly what membership of this post-colonial ‘family’ has meant for Mozambique the paper explores the neocolonial paternalism and sense of trusteeship that the Commonwealth has articulated in its often very apolitical vision of African development which seems to lock the continent into a permanent stage of tutelage and to repetitively reduce Africa to a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. More generally, the paper also examines the wider context of the Commonwealth’s involvement in Africa by looking at the connections it has made to British industry, British charities and the British Department for International Development (DFID). The paper concludes with an assessment of the ‘showcase’ potential of Mozambique and its importance to Commonwealth and DFID narrations of an African ‘success’ story of peace, stability and growth since the end of the country’s devastating civil war in 1992. 相似文献
20.
Following things of rubbish value: End-of-life ships, ‘chock-chocky’ furniture and the Bangladeshi middle class consumer 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
There has been an upsurge of geographical work tracing globalised flows of commodities in the wake of Appadurai’s (1986) call to ‘follow the things’. This paper engages with calls to follow the thing but argues that work thus far has been concentrated, first, on global flows from developing world producers to developed world consumers, and, second, on things that remain stable as they circulate. This paper instead argues that ‘follow the thing’ research needs to also attend to flows ‘down’ the value chain, from developed to less developed worlds, and to things that are either coming apart or being disassembled. The case presented here is end-of-life ships, sent to be broken in less developed countries, as most are, in this case in Bangladesh. It looks at how the arts of transience re-work materials from rubbish value ships into new forms and objects in the household furnishing sector, which are then appropriated by Bangladeshi middle class consumers. Far from being a minor feature this is shown to be empirically a significant component of the Bangladeshi economy. Theoretically the paper challenges many habitual assumptions about global flows of commodities and urges ‘follow the thing’ research to rethink the thing. Paying attention to the back-end of the value chain shows that things are but temporary configurations of material. At best partially stable, things are argued to be endlessly being assembled, always becoming something else somewhere else. 相似文献