首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
相似文献
 共查询到20条相似文献,搜索用时 57 毫秒
1.
This paper argues, following Friedrich Nietzsche, that recent evaluations of Google Earth uncritically privilege the product’s Apollonian determinations at the expense of its Dionysian uncertainties. Specifically, when we understand Google Earth as a virtual globe composed of surveyed panoramas, sober rationalization, dystopic control, and transparent order – or, even, as a tool for participation and empowerment – we undersell its capacities as an alluring digital peep-box, an uncertain orb spangled with vertiginous paranoia, frenzied navigation, jubilatory dissolution, and intoxicating giddiness. We argue that the former interpretations not only risk foreclosing our theorizations about how Google Earth is actually used in various ways and different contexts, they also reproduce a one-dimensional and conservative reading of technology that can be traced back (at least) to the writings of Theodor Adorno. By drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin (Adorno’s critic and pen pal for more than a decade) we aim to ‘go beyond Apollo and Adorno’ by illustrating the extent to which Apollonian order and Dionysian love makes Google Earth go round. To do this, we examine Google Earth as a “digital peep-box” with an online collective that revels in its “Spot the Black Helicopter” competitions; illuminated profanities; alien and giant insect invaders; naked sunbathers; and crashed transport planes in Darfur.  相似文献   

2.
We reply to Gwilym Eades’s (2010) criticisms by emphasizing the dangers of predestined readings and restating three key points that we made in our previous article (Kingsbury and Jones, 2009): first, that Apollo and Dionysus are mutually affirming rather than oppositional; second, that Walter Benjamin provides valuable theoretical resources to consider the uncertainties and possibilities of technology; and third, that one cannot simply read politics off technology.  相似文献   

3.
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   

4.
Security and the future: Anticipating the event of terror   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Ben Anderson 《Geoforum》2010,41(2):227-235
This paper explores the relation between processes of security and futurity in the context of efforts to govern the complexity and contingency of events of terror. It argues that processes of securing function by generating a dangerous or promissory supplement to the present that thereafter propels the extension of forms of security. The paper develops this argument through an example of how an event of terror was anticipated: a RAND exercise into the aftermath of a ‘ground burst’ nuclear explosion in Long Beach, California on March 14th 2005. It argues that exercises (in)secure through three quasi-causal operations, each of which render events of terror actionable and result in specific relations between the present and future. First, ‘hypothetically possible’ generic events are named. The future takes place as a threatening horizon. Second, the defined phases of an event’s happening are staged (an advent, its multiplication into a crisis in the context of a milieu, and a response/recovery phase). The here and now is suspended between an ‘as if’ future and the present. Third, the consequences of the event are played. The future is both an intensified ‘practical’ presence embodied by exercise participants and an outside that exceeds attempts to definitively know it. The conclusion summarises the implications of the paper for work on futurity, security and the event.  相似文献   

5.
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   

6.
Jessica Dempsey 《Geoforum》2011,42(2):211-221
Environmental politics, argues French philosopher Bruno Latour, have been a ‘disappointment’. Rather than trying to bring environmental concerns into a political world split into two - between Nature/Science and politics/society - Latour argues that environmental movements ought to focus on destroying this two-house collective, and develop ‘an understanding of ecological crises that no longer uses nature to account for the tasks to be accomplished’. In this paper I put my research on the politics and science of the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR), a large tract of temperate rainforest on the central and north coast of British Columbia, into direct conversation with Latour’s arguments about science, epistemology and environmental politics. The GBR was a site of intense political struggle focused predominantly on the scale and scope of industrial forestry, a struggle which ‘ended’ in 2006 with what some call a historic compromise between some high-profile environmental groups, First Nations, the Provincial government, and the forest industry. This paper focuses on two interlinked questions: do the environmental organizations at the centre of the struggle demonstrate the maladies identified by Latour; are they too preoccupied with representing Nature through Science? And second, do these maladies help us explain or understand the politics over the GBR? Were the politics of the GBR limited by environmentalist invocations of a singular Nature through Science, what Latour calls ‘Naturpolitik’? The encounter between theory and practice leads to a more cautious and critical assessment of the environmental politics in the GBR, but also tempers Latour’s arguments. Environmentalists in the GBR do exhibit Latour’s maladies, but in tracing the Politics of Nature there, it seems that Naturpolitik is not as powerful as Latour argues.  相似文献   

7.
Katharine N. Rankin 《Geoforum》2008,39(6):1965-1977
This paper takes up the proposition that institutions mediate market formation, through a comparative study of rural finance in Nepal and Vietnam. It explores how microfinance, as an iconic institution of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’, articulates political-economic and cultural-political milieux—with particular emphasis given to the ways in which the Vietnamese Party-state has engaged rural finance to further the socialist transition even as it has undergone significant ‘economic renovation’. In so doing, the paper adopts a processual interpretation of institutions not as bounded structures, but as arenas of ongoing debate over culturally constructed meanings and ‘practices of assemblage’ [Li, T.M., 2007a. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society 36 (2), 263–293] that are inextricably linked with wider-scale political-economic and cultural-political formations. A comparative approach is pursued here to emphasize spatio-temporal contingencies in the articulation of a market-led development institution with specific national regulatory frameworks and political cultures. A critical-geographical orientation helps to deepen Polanyi’s proposition that the economy is an instituted process, to challenge the prevailing binary opposition between state- and market-led development, account for the multiple scales at which power and interest reside in the formation of markets, and highlight the variable ways in which markets are embodied and enacted in particular places.  相似文献   

8.
Eleanor Jupp 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):331-343
Initiatives around ‘public participation’ and ‘community involvement’ have become increasingly central to UK government policy programmes, particularly within interventions aimed at disadvantaged neighbourhoods. These initiatives have been the subject of extensive critical comment, essentially focusing on the ways in which power is often maintained by state agencies, whatever the surrounding rhetoric. This article attempts to consider what more productive forms of participation might feel like, through drawing on fieldwork with two small community groups on housing estates in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, to look at how and why they were able to generate successful participation in their activities. The importance of the small-scale interactions and feelings that made up their spaces of participation is explored. These can be characterised through ideas such as ‘feeling comfortable’, ‘feeling at home’, ‘helping out’ and ‘keeping going’, and involve everyday sociability and informal forms of volunteering. If government is serious about supporting political participation in such contexts it needs to consider how official projects might learn from these kinds of spaces.  相似文献   

9.
Henrik Gutzon Larsen 《Geoforum》2008,39(6):2000-2008
The Baltic Sea environment has since the early 1970s passed through several phases of spatial objectification in which the ostensibly well-defined semi-enclosed sea has been framed and reframed as a geographical object for intergovernmental environmental politics. Based on a historical analysis of this development, this article suggests that environmental politics critically depend on the delineation of relatively bounded spaces that identify and situate particular environmental concerns as spatial objects for politics. These spaces are not simply determined by ‘nature’ or some environmental-scientific logic, but should rather be seen as temporal outcomes of scale framing processes, processes that are accentuated by contemporary conceptions of the environment (or nature) in terms of multi-scalar ecosystems. This has implications for how an environmental concern is perceived and politically addressed.  相似文献   

10.
Digging into Google Earth: An analysis of “Crisis in Darfur”   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Lisa Parks   《Geoforum》2009,40(4):535-545
Google publicists have suggested the Crisis in Darfur is an example of the Google Earth software’s “success at tangibly impacting what is happening on the ground.” Yet whether or not Google Earth’s interface, along with a medley of other media representations of the conflict, have impacted events on the ground or led to coherent policies of humanitarian intervention remains open to debate. This article draws upon critical approaches from media studies—namely discourse analysis—to analyze several aspects of the Google Earth/USHMM Crisis in Darfur project. While this project was no doubt developed with the noble intention of generating international awareness about widespread violence that has recently occurred in the Darfur region, it is important to evaluate how representations of global conflicts are changing with uses of new information technologies and whether such representations can actually achieve their desired impacts or effects. The article begins with a discussion of the Crisis in Darfur project’s history, proceeds to analyze some of the press coverage of the project and then moves to a critique of the layer using four categories of analysis: (1) the shifting role of satellite image; (2) the temporality of the interface; (3) the practice of conflict branding; and (4) the practice of “information intervention.” Throughout the article, I explore how the presentation of Darfur-related materials through Google Earth reproduces problematic Western tropes of African tragedy and misses an opportunity to generate public literacy around satellite images. I also consider how humanitarianism is intertwined with digital and disaster capitalism, and suggest that this instance of “information intervention” makes patently clear that high visual capital alone cannot resolve global conflicts.  相似文献   

11.
This paper explores the shifting cultural politics of development as expressed in the changing narratives and discursive transparencies of fair trade marketing tactics in the UK. Pursued through what I call ‘developmental consumption’ and the increasing celebritization of development, it is now through the global media mega-star that the subaltern speaks. After a more general discussion of the implications of the celebritization of development, specific analysis focuses on two parallel processes complicit in the ‘mainstreaming’ of fair trade markets and the desire to develop fair trade as a product of ‘quality’. The first involves improving the taste of fair trade commodities through alterations in their material supply chains while the second involves novel marketing narratives designed to invoke these conventions of quality through highly meaningful discursive and visual means. The later process is conceptualized through the theoretical device of the shifting ‘embodiments’ of fair trade which have moved from small farmers’ livelihoods, to landscapes of ‘quality’, to increasing congeries of celebrities such as Chris Martin from the UK band Coldplay. These shifts encapsulate what is referred to here as fair trade’s Faustian Bargain and its ambiguous results: the creation of increasing economic returns and, thus, more development through the movement of fair trade goods into mainstream retail markets at the same time there is a de-centering of the historical discursive transparency at the core of fair trade’s moral economy. Here, then, the celebritization of fair trade has the potential to create ‘the mirror of consumption’, whereby, our gaze is reflected back upon ourselves in the form of ‘the rich and famous’ Northern celebrity muddling the ethics of care developed by connecting consumers to fair trade farmers and their livelihoods. The paper concludes with a consideration of development and fair trade politics in the context of their growing aestheticization and celebritization.  相似文献   

12.
Despite uncertainties in our understanding of early Earth volcanism and atmospheric composition, thermodynamic modelling is able to offer estimates of the global production of reactive trace species (NO, OH, SO3, Cl, Br and I) from early Earth volcanism, and thereby to shed light on processes which may have been different in Earth’s early atmosphere. Model results show that thermal decomposition of magmatic H2O, CO2 and SO2 in high-T mixtures of magmatic and atmospheric gases (at T > 1400 °C) generate high levels of reactive trace gas species. Production of these reactive trace species is insensitive to atmospheric CO2 in mixtures where the atmospheric gas is the minor component and will hence continue during periods of low atmospheric CO2. Fluxes of NO, OH, Cl, Br and I from early Earth volcanism are predicted to exceed those from modern Earth volcanism as the higher temperature of early Earth emissions compensates for lower levels of O2 in the atmosphere, compared to the modern Earth. Under certain conditions, the volcanic NO flux from early Earth volcanism is found to be comparable to other sources of reactive N such as lightning NO and photochemical HCN. This is one possible source of fixed nitrogen which may alleviate any postulated Archean nitrogen crisis. Our thermodynamic model reveals that production of SO3 (a potential precursor for near-source volcanic sulphate and hence ‘primary’ volcanic aerosol) is likely to be significantly lower from early Earth volcanism. Uncertainty in the pathway to near-source sulphate in modern volcanism (i.e., the reaction of SO3 with water or direct emission) introduces a large uncertainty into the production rate of near-source volcanic sulphate on the early Earth.  相似文献   

13.
Transfrontier conservation has taken Southern Africa by storm, where the modus operandi remains simple and intuitive: by dissolving boundaries, local benefits grow as conservation and development spread regionally. However, in the case of South Africa’s section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, political and economic change redirects benefits to support ‘modern’ economies at the expense of rural livelihoods through community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Neo-liberal agendas promoted by government and the transfrontier park derail efforts at decentralizing CBNRM initiatives beyond markets and state control. This paper argues that ‘hybrid neoliberal’ CBNRM has arisen in private and public sector delivery of devolved conservation and poverty relief projects as ‘tertiary production’ for regional development. As a result, ‘CBNRM’ projects related to and independent of transfrontier conservation support private sector interests rather than the resource base of rural livelihoods. Concluding sections assert that CBNRM can counter this neoliberal trend by supporting the land-based economy of local users living near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.  相似文献   

14.
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   

15.
Ingunn Moser 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):98-110
This article contributes to recent discussions about the politics of nature by exploring how Alzheimer’s disease is being shaped as a ‘matter of concern’. Drawing on work on differences in medicine from science and technology studies, and from the geographies of naturecultures, it explores the ‘mattering’ of this disease in a number of locations including: an international Alzheimer’s patients’ movement; a medical textbook; laboratory science; daily care practice; an advertisement for anti-dementia medication; general practice; parliamentary politics; and a conference on dementia. It explores how these locations interfere and co-exist with one another and argues against the ‘science centrism’ of science and technology studies which contributes to the dominance of science and medicine by granting these analytical privilege. The same problem is posed in the recent STS turn from science to politics - the danger is that politics is similarly privileged.  相似文献   

16.
Sarah Hall 《Geoforum》2007,38(4):710-719
This paper argues that the conflicts of interest cases brought against Wall Street investment banks in the early 2000s were neither geographically nor institutionally isolated events. Rather, by combining recent work on financial knowledges in both economic geography and the social studies of finance with the growing interest in topological spatial imaginaries, I explore how London’s corporate finance industry was unable to distance itself from both the conflicts of interest allegations and the ensuing regulatory changes of the ‘Global Settlement’ in the US. Analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews conducted in London in the early 2000s is used to explore how a range of individual interests, institutional demands and structural changes within London’s financial district affected analysts’ ability to produce ‘objective’ research. As well as pointing to the problematic nature of certain aspects of knowledge rich ‘communities of practice’ [Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge], I explore how the resulting contingent and situated nature of research practice is at odds with a weakly defined notion of ‘objective’ research that underpins the Financial Services Authority’s regulatory response.  相似文献   

17.
Al James 《Geoforum》2007,38(2):393-413
In recent years, economic geographers have drawn extensively upon notions of ‘cultural embeddedness’ to explore how spatially variable sets of cultural conventions, norms, values and beliefs shape firms’ innovative performance in dynamic regional economies. However, our understanding of these causal links remains partial, reinforced by an ‘over-territorialised’ conception of cultural embeddedness which sidelines the role of institutional actors operating outside and across the boundaries of ‘the local’. So motivated, this paper offers a theoretically-informed - and theoretically informing - empirical analysis of the high tech regional economy in Salt Lake City, Utah to explore the everyday causal mechanisms, practices and processes - both local and extra-local - through which firms’ cultural embedding within the region is manifested, performed and (un)intentionally (re)produced. In so doing, this paper aims to further our understanding of the constitutive entanglement and complex interweaving of cultural/economic practices, and to contribute to the development of an in-depth empirical corpus of work which compliments the exciting conceptual developments that have largely dominated cultural economic geography over the last decade.  相似文献   

18.
Peter Kraftl  John Horton 《Geoforum》2007,38(5):1012-1027
This paper is about a single event: a conference (A.K.A. ‘the health event’) held in the English East Midlands in July 2005, at which findings from a policy-led research project regarding young people’s health needs were fed back to research participants. The paper foregrounds some of the everyday work, happenings, emotions, conversations and materialities which were fundamentally constitutive of ‘the health event’ and, thus fundamentally constituted the moments of affirmative, politically-charged participation which could and did happen therein. Thus the paper bears witness to the sorts of practices, minutiae and highs and lows which are surely fundamentally constitutive of participation, policy and politics per se, but which (despite the growing visibility of nonrepresentational theories) are typically absent from salient accounts of participation, Children’s Geographies and Post-medical Geographies.  相似文献   

19.
Mark Wise 《Geoforum》2007,38(1):171-189
The political salience of demands from minority and regional groups for greater language rights increases across Europe. To draw more geographical attention to a particular aspect of these developments, this article identifies the main generic problems of converting demands for ‘linguistic rights’ into applied language policies. It does this by first outlining how the historic process of nation-state building in Europe reduced linguistic diversity, but has not eliminated language demands emanating from regional minorities. It then analyses how the concept of ‘linguistic rights’, as a part of human rights in general, has been developing within the United Nations and bodies including the Council of Europe and the European Union. Having outlined the political-legal frameworks within which minority language rights are pursued, the article then discusses the major difficulties of putting them into practice in particular places and spaces. They can be summarised as: the weakness of relevant international agreements; the dominance of state sovereignty in determining language policies; the limited public support for minority language rights; the difficulties of defining minority languages and delimiting the geographical spaces they occupy; the challenges posed by the growing geographical mobility of populations; and the problem of balancing collective and individual rights. Two fundamental issues linking these different problems are identified. First, there are problems of definition: what constitutes a ‘minority’ or ‘regional’ language and within what geographical space(s) is such a language spoken? This spatial dimension underlies a second fundamental problem, namely that of resolving conflicts between individual personality rights and collective territorial rights in increasing hybrid geolinguistic situations created by the growing geographical mobility of populations. Sociolinguists study these issues, but usually treat these essential spatial dimensions in a superficial fashion. Thus, there is an opportunity for geographers to develop more sophisticated geolinguistic analyses as a contribution to this interdisciplinary field.  相似文献   

20.
Paul Chatterton 《Geoforum》2005,36(5):545-561
This paper addresses the idea of autonomy—the desire for freedom, self-organisation and mutual aid. Through challenging economic neoliberalism, state repression, a powerful transnational elite, and the commodification of nature and resources, many communities, especially in the global south, are trying to manage their own affairs. Using the example of the Movement of Unemployed Workers (El Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados) in Argentina, I explore the idea of autonomous geographies and how they are made and remade at three overlapping levels: the territorial, through the emergence of networked autonomous neighbourhoods which are selectively open and closed to translocal links; the material, through the development of a solidarity economy where immediate needs are met and work is redefined, and; the social, where collective action and daily practice helps constitute more collective, autonomous forms of social interactions. In their desire to manage connections with the outside world while at the same time inspire autonomous place projects elsewhere, the MTDs represent both a ‘militant localism’ and ‘militant pluriversalism’. Moreover, while such experiments in making and embedding ‘autonomous geographies’ face limits and have few widespread examples on which to draw, it is through constant questioning and collective struggle at the everyday level that autonomy is made real.  相似文献   

设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号