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This paper explores the iconography of climate change in contemporary climate action campaigns in the UK. I aim to show how sample images are simultaneously scientific denotations of global warming and cultural connotations of danger and vulnerability. I further demonstrate that while similar images are associated with different agendas and geographical visions, they attach to a shared discourse of vulnerability that has Western (colonial) roots. The paper concludes with an overview of possible ways for climate action campaigns to effectively convey their political messages without recycling colonial visions of the world....
As a result of its importance to the discipline's identity and epistemology, the nature of fieldwork and the fieldtrip itself have recently come under close scrutiny in the education and geographical literature. Moreover, not only is their pedagogical importance being debated, but also their future viability at a time of increasing pressure on institutions to minimise potential risk situations in the field, offer value for money to students as well as following the increasingly common and popular trend of long‐haul fieldtrips. This paper therefore critically interrogates the role and use of fieldwork within geographical teaching and learning in the light of its changing and increasingly contested status within the discipline in three parts. First, it outlines and reflects upon the current debate surrounding the threat to the primacy of fieldtrips in geography at a time of ongoing upheaval in higher education. Second, through the empirical example of personal experiences teaching on second‐year undergraduate urban geography fieldtrips to San Francisco in December 2007 and 2008, the paper engages with the current discussions of the pedagogical importance of fieldtrips. Third, the paper asks, to what extent teaching in ‘the field’ might foster the ‘experiential’ or ‘active’ learning needed to inspire the kind of ‘deep learning’ approaches that hold the kind of ‘transformative’ potential envisaged as a key goal of education more broadly. Through exploring these ideas with reference to recent and relevant experience, the paper aims to critically interrogate the role and value of fieldtrips at a time when their potential demise is being cast as a fundamental assault on geography's founding identity and pedagogical traditions. The paper concludes that despite the threats it faces, the pedagogical significance of fieldwork means that it must remain a fundamental tenet of the geographical educational experience....
Gated communities have been characterised as representing processes of ‘forting up’ and ‘civic secession’, in which their residents use gating as a strategy for withdrawing from political life and from taking collective responsibility for others. The assumption is that the residents of private gated communities should be less likely to participate in political life, and/or be more likely to support political parties on the right who advocate privatisation, reduced government expenditures and lower taxes. If the act of living in a gated community is associated with either greater support for parties and policies on the right of the political spectrum, or limited political participation, then the growth of such forms of privatised communities has potential implications for the future of urban politics and even for national political systems. However, despite surveys that have dealt with social attitudes ‘behind the gates’, insufficient attention has been paid to the politics of gated community residents. This paper fills this gap through a comparative analysis of electoral behaviour during the 2006 federal election at the level of the polling station. Electoral participation and partisanship in 27 gated communities in three Canadian metropolitan areas is compared against that of non‐gated residents. Regression analysis is conducted in order to determine whether gated community residents differ from their non‐gated counterparts in the way they vote and their levels of electoral turnout, after controlling for social composition. The potential implications of this research are then discussed....
Mainstream and alternative media play an important role in circulating powerful narratives within and often beyond a country's borders. This article specifically examines how Malaysia's media have framed the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the country's electoral process. To this end, the authors conducted a content analysis of selected domestic mainstream and alternative media sources for two weeks before and two weeks after Malaysia's last three federal elections – 1999, 2004 and 2008 – to gauge how coverage has changed over time with shifts in the local political landscape and growing ICT access and usage....
For almost 30 years, the Soviet government hid a large part of its biological weapons programme behind the façade of a network of civilian bio‐technology facilities, called the All‐Union Production Association Biopreparat, which were established to overcome deficiencies in molecular biology and genetics research. This paper, which is developed from a presentation given during an ESRC‐sponsored seminar series, ‘Locating Technoscience: The Geographies of Science, Technology and Politics’, details the secret geography of one of those Biopreparat facilities located in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. In doing this the paper illustrates how secret geographies can operate simultaneously, and at multiple scales. In the case of the Soviet bio‐weapons programme, enacting secrecy at these multiple scales was made possible by the purposeful exploitation of ‘dual use’ technologies. By recounting a trip made to the Kazak facility, and using personal communications with UK and US experts involved with uncovering the Soviet bio‐warfare programme, the author addresses some of the methodological challenges involved with researching secret geographies. This case study therefore looks in several directions – to work on the geographies of scale, research on the geographies of knowledge and work on secrecy in science and technology studies....
This paper proposes a novel and simple measure of the world's economic centre of gravity. Over the recent decades, this centre has shifted towards Asia, but is still located in Europe.
The implementation of policies of pre‐emption and securitisation by a number of states has led to an increase in the number of aerial incursions by one state's air force into another state's territory in recent years, often occurring before and, indeed, instead of ground incursions. This paper argues that it is vital that we conceptualise territory as a three‐dimensional volume, rather than simply a flat area, in order to enable an analysis of how these events impact state sovereignty. The central contention of the paper is to extend recent work on territorial integrity and contingent sovereignty into this aerial dimension. A number of brief case studies are provided to illustrate how different incursion practices actively violate territorial integrity or render state sovereignty contingent. The conclusion seeks to answer the question of whether these incidents imply a crisis in aerial sovereignty or whether they confirm the chronic decline of this norm of international law....
The production of organic food has been regarded for a long time as being synonymous with ecological regional production systems. However, the increased production of organic food products has led to an ongoing industrialisation and also to a global spread of network structures within this segment of agriculture. This paper provides a case study of the integration of organic pepper farmers from an indigenous tribe in Kerala, India, into global agro‐food networks, linking them to a German producer of organic meat products. The results of this study show that the importance of the territorial embeddedness and the abandonment of the exercise of power can be crucial for the success of global organic agro‐food networks....
This paper presents one case of the particularities of power. Drawing upon interviews with UK‐based elites, I unpack the general with the specific through discussing how I experienced power as a relational effect of social interaction. Within the parameters of a collaborative research project, this involved the challenge of gaining access to and interviewing elites as means to explore the role of a flagship shopping mall as part of a wider urban regeneration agenda. I conclude with some recommendations on how to negotiate the unequal power relations between elites and researchers....
The imprint of the past upon contemporary landscape forms and processes is differentiated in terms of geologic, climatic and anthropogenic memory. Geologic memory refers to controls exerted upon relief, erodibility, erosivity and accommodation space (areas in landscapes where sediments are stored and reworked). These factors set the imposed boundary conditions within which contemporary landscape‐forming processes operate. Climatic memory refers to the influence of past climatic conditions upon contemporary landscape forms and processes. Climatic controls exert a primary influence upon the nature of geomorphic processes, while the influence of climate upon ground cover affects the effectiveness of these processes. Climate change may induce profound alterations to the flux boundary conditions under which contemporary landscapes operate. This is exemplified by the variable imprint of glacial/interglacial cycles in differing parts of the world. Anthropogenic memory refers to the imprint of past human activities on contemporary landscapes, whereby human disturbance in the past altered landscape forms, processes and associated flow/sediment fluxes in a manner that continues to affect the way the contemporary landscape works. Contrasting examples from a tectonically stable landscape (Australia) and a tectonically uplifting landscape (New Zealand) are used to highlight the variable influence of geologic, climatic and anthropogenic memory upon the persistence and erasure of landscape forms and resulting implications for sediment flux in differing settings....
Social volcanology refers to the integration of social science research methods into the traditionally physical domain of volcanology. This emerging multi‐methodological research area draws from many disciplines in order to examine hazard‐mitigation strategies that are community focused. A key facet of social volcanology is the role of culture and this paper explores the influence of traditional cultural values in relation to the 2006 volcanic crisis at Mt Merapi (Java). This paper describes the complex amalgam of cultural and socio‐economic factors that influence community reactions to volcanic hazards and demonstrates the need for interdisciplinary hazard research....
This paper presents an analysis of the geography of the booming ‘Islamic financial services’ (IFS) sector, which provides a host of financial services based on Islamic religious grounds. The relevance of such an analysis is discussed against the conceptual backdrop of the world city network literature. It is argued that a focus on the globalisation of the IFS sector may provide an alternative to hegemonic geographical imaginations of world city‐formation through its focus on other forms of globalising economic processes and regions that do not commonly feature in this literature. Based on information on the location strategies of 28 leading IFS firms in 64 cities across the world, we analyse different features of this decentred global urban geography. Manama is hereby identified as the Mecca of the IFS sector, while other major Gulf cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi are also primary nodes in this urban network. Other major Middle East North Africa (MENA) cities such as Tehran follow suit, but also more traditional financial centres such as London are well connected....
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