Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy

In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to new and ever changing economic circumstances. In these pedagogies, gender is a key instrument. Rather than a straightforward feminization of the economy, what is at stake is a performance of openness towards becoming adaptable to future labour market demands. Asking men to depart their attachments to Fordist working class masculinities and its material translations is an exercise toward becoming pliable enough for post-Fordist precarious labour markets.     

Past pedagogy

Si la arqueología puede fácilmente apoyar la violencia política, debe haber una manera de prevenir esta situación poniendo la arqueología a trabajar promoviendo soluciones pacíficas ante los conflictos políticos. La clave de revolución en la arqueología está en reconocer los mensajes sublimes que perpetuamos con la sabiduría recibida y saber ense?ar dentro de la nueva perspectiva ante-colonial.

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Résumé Si l'archéologie peut aussi facilement servir d'instrument pour soutenir la violence politique, il doit y avoir un moyen de prévenir cette situation en employant l'archéologie afin de promouvoir des solutions pacifiques aux conflits politiques. La clé d'une révolution dans l'archéologie se trouve dans la prise de conscience que nous propageons insidieusement des idées re?ues et que nous devons apprendre une autre fa?on d'enseigner, dans de nouveaux cadres anti-colonialistes.

     

Towards a molecular agenda for the Left

In his talk, communications scholar and cultural critic Alejandro Kaufman analyses some of the contradictions in which the Latin American progressive projects became entangled in a context dominated by the ‘happy totalitarianism’ of consumption and the spectacle as a seemingly irreducible contemporary order of being on a global scale. The great challenge for the Left, he suggests, is to move away from a representationalist paradigm of the struggle for power and towards a politics of molecular interventions on the level of lived experience.     

Towards a Better System for Immigration Control

We study different methods of immigration control using a simple model of a congested world. Our main comparison involves quotas, the predominant instrument of immigration control, and a proposed system of immigration tolls and emigration subsidies. We show that the equilibrium of the proposed system is Pareto superior to the quota system. This is consistent with the tolls and subsidies creating a market for international migrants. When countries are price-takers the market becomes perfect and the exploitation of gains from trade complete. From a normative perspective, an open- borders policy is preferred to both control methods but will meet political opposition because it hurts the residents of the rich country.     

Evolving technology,shifting expectations: cultivating pedagogy for a rapidly changing GIS landscape

As humans and natural processes continuously reshape the surface of the Earth, there is an unceasing need to document and analyze them through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The public is gaining more access to spatial technologies that were once only available to highly trained professionals. With technological evolution comes a requirement to transition traditional GIS training for the next generation of GIS professionals. Traditional GIS combined with non-traditional GIS (i.e. mobile and location media) and CyberGIS educational materials could attract new and diverse students into Geography departments while informing the next generation of geospatial tool builders and users. Here we pose an applied pedagogical framework for teaching cutting-edge GIS material to diverse student populations with varying levels of technological experience and professional goals. The framework was developed as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberGIS Fellows program and was applied as a course template at the University of Washington Tacoma’s Master’s of Science in Geospatial Technologies. We chart how the framework developed into a cyclical structure from our original conceptualization as a hierarchy. This changed the epistemological orientation accommodating the shifting technological terrain of the GIS landscape to improve the skills of those driving the machines.     

Towards a feminist geopolitics

The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography. This paper aims to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics is not an alternative theory of geopolitics, nor the ushering in of a new spatial order, but is an approach to global issues with feminist politics in mind. 'Feminist' in this context refers to analyses and political interventions that address the unequal and often violent relationships among people based on real or perceived differences. Building upon the literature from critical geopolitics, feminist international relations, and transnational feminist studies, I develop a framework for feminist political engagement. The paper interrogates concepts of human security and juxtaposes them with state security, arguing for a more accountable, embodied, and responsive notion of geopolitics. A feminist geopolitics is sought by examining politics at scales other than that of the nation-state; by challenging the public/private divide at a global scale; and by analyzing the politics of mobility for perpetrators of crimes against humanity. As such, feminist geopolitics is a critical approach and a contingent set of political practices operating at scales finer and coarser than the nation-state.     

Canada in a global economy

This paper questions the neoliberal understanding of globalization as a coherent and progressive force representing the apotheosis of late capitalism. Here, globalization is seen as a contested and sometimes even chaotic process, which needs to be interpreted in the context of the local geographies and histories in which it is embedded. Viewed as a socio-economic process, globalization is characterized by a recurring interplay between local and global interests, implying that Canada's relations with the global economy have been socially constructed in diverse ways, at different times, in different places. Five distinct relations are examined here, each one being linked to a well known historical figure, as follows: the ecological depletion of resources (John Cabot); technological dependence (Alexander Graham Bell); continental integration (C.D. Howe); cultural deterritorialization (Walt Disney); and the new geometries of power (Conrad Black). Each of these five relations has found distinctive local expression.     

On the pedagogy of 'small wars'

This article argues that flawed western strategies for 'small wars', those fought in the non—European world, have been informed by illusions concerning the cultural, military and political superiority of the West. With 9/11, such wars ceased to be small. The main threat to the western powers no longer emanates from other states organized along lines similar to their own, but from a transnational network enterprise that has its origins in the global South and the Islamic world. Nonetheless, old imperial and orientalist constructions continue to inform western and particularly US perceptions of the war on terror. 'Knowing thy enemy' and 'knowing thyself', Sun Tzu's formula for victory, requires abandoning flattering accounts of western identity and learning to empathize with those we call terrorists.     

Why Scotland needs more than just a new migration policy

The Scottish Executive has adopted a policy to combat Scotland's declining population by encouraging inward migration. Using a multi‐state population model this paper presents nine long‐term population scenarios for Scotland using three net international migration levels and three fertility paths. The results show inward migration can slow population decline but makes little difference to population ageing. Without a higher fertility rate Scotland's population will become demographically unsustainable. Our simulations show that a higher fertility rate substantially reduces the future ageing.     

Towards a Democratic Bill of Rights

This paper examines two different bill of rights models for Australia: the Dialogue model and a Democratic model. The Dialogue model aims to protect rights through a bill of rights, strong political review mechanisms, intergovernmental dialogue, and rights-based judicial review. The paper argues that, despite its popularity, there are serious problems with the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Dialogue model and it outlines an alternative model, a ‘democratic bill of rights’, which attempts to avoid these problems by strengthening democratic institutions and political review mechanisms without adopting rights-based judicial review. The paper concludes that a democratic bill of rights is likely to be an effective and more democratically legitimate way of protecting and promoting human rights in Australia.     

Reconceptualizing Participation for Sustainable Rural Development: Towards a Negotiation Approach

In many popular intervention methodologies aimed at stimulating sustainable rural development (in the widest possible sense) the idea of ‘participation’ is a leading principle. This article will demonstrate that the process in which actors are supposed to participate is often thought of as being a process of planning, decision‐making and/or social learning. It will be argued that such an operationalization of development processes is based on inconsistent theoretical assumptions, and can easily lead to unproductive development interventions due to an inability to handle conflicts. As an alternative it is proposed to use negotiation theory as a basis for organizing participatory development efforts. The implications of such a shift in thinking about participation are far‐reaching: it requires new modes of analysis, and different roles, tasks and skills for facilitators of participatory processes.     

Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization

The term “safe space” dates to the late twentieth century women's movement, but it has since been used in many different contexts. In this paper, we review and analyze historical and contemporary “safe spaces”. These include “separatist” safe spaces in women's, anti‐racist, and feminist communities, “inclusive” safe space classrooms, and safe spaces in which (non‐human) objects are central. We argue that safe spaces should be understood not through static and acontextual notions of “safe” or “unsafe”, but rather through the relational work of cultivating them. Such an understanding reveals several tendencies. Namely, safe spaces are inherently paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries (safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries. Renegotiating these binaries is necessarily incomplete; a safe space is never completely safe. Even so, we encourage the critical cultivation of safe space as a site for negotiating difference and challenging oppression.