Appropriating the Aurora: Christopher Hansteen and the Circumpolar Auroral Rings

Abstract

The Norwegian astronomer and mathematician Christopher Hansteen (1784–1873) is best known for his career-long contribution to the study of terrestrial magnetism. In his monumental Magnetismus der Erde (1819), he suggests that the earth had two magnetic axes and thus four magnetic poles. It is less known that Hansteen planned to publish a second part of Magnetismus der Erde devoted solely to the polar lights, but this work was never completed. In this article, I reconstruct Hansteen's strategy for studying the aurora borealis and explain how the polar lights were connected to his four-pole theory. I emphasize in particular the spatial and geographical dimension of Hansteen's approach, focusing on his analysis of both the auroral corona and the auroral ring. In accordance with his own theory of terrestrial magnetism, he suggested the existence of four such circumpolar auroral rings, each centered around one of the four magnetic poles identified in Magnetismus der Erde. Hansteen's auroral project entailed an appropriation of earlier ideas and methods, especially those of Edmond Halley and Alexander von Humboldt. He sought to bolster the claim for the privileged position of the Scandinavian countries for observing and analyzing the aurora.     

Seeking the State: Appropriating Bureaucratic Symbolism and Wealth in the Margins of Southeast Asia

Anthropological research on Southeast Asian states has contributed to understanding how local communities engage with states in their everyday lives. Two approaches drawing out the complexities of state‐society entanglement stand out. First is Foucault's idea that states possess the art‐of‐government. Through techniques such as mapping, census data, biometrics and so on, states are believed to achieve new levels of control over people, who are thus rendered as individual citizens. Second is Scott's idea that societies possess the art‐of‐not‐being‐governed. People, particularly in peripheral areas, seek to escape state control, for instance by sheltering in the hills and forests of Asia. In this article, we seek to identify and expand upon a literature which we see as emerging from the space opened between Foucault and Scott's work, to demonstrate the many creative and diverse ways that peripheral societies seek out states. In doing this we present a synthesis of diverse forms of entanglement to provide new insights into understanding relations between societies and states.     

Regulating Meaning, Appropriating Nature: The Codification of California Organic Agriculture

In California, conventional agro-food firms are beginning to appropriate the most lucrative aspects of organic food provision and to abandon the agronomic and marketing practices associated with organic agriculture's oppositional origins. Echoing the uneasy and complex dialectic between nature and capital in the American West, organic farming is becoming more akin to farming off of nature's image, as the idiom of a "purer" nature is deployed to sell what is increasingly commodified nature. The direction of organic agriculture in California can be understood as reflecting global trends in agro-food provision and regulation, but it is also uniquely grounded in the context of California's regional history: on the one hand, a product of the counterculture, bolstered by a strong climate of environmental regulation; on the other hand, a legacy of California's exceptional agriculture, characterized in part by the dominance of growers' organizations and a focus on high-value specialty crops. This paper also discusses three ways in which the political construction of the meaning of "organic" and its institutionalization in regulatory agencies such as private certification organizations have facilitated both the proliferation of agribusiness entrants and their adoption of questionably sustainable practices: first, certification agencies have their own institutional logic and are most beholden to their client-growers; second, regulation requires the definition of enforceable standards out of complicated ecological, economic, and even sociocultural concerns; third, the certification process, by conferring a legal right to market food as organic, has created distinct incentives that shape participation in the sector.     

Collective Action and the Evolution of Intergovernmental Cooperation

Voluntary cooperation among governments holds tremendous promise for solving policy problems with regional and national scope. In this article, we apply insights from the theory of institutional collective action to understand the evolution of cooperative governmental institutions. We address the question: What makes a government decide to exit an existing cooperative arrangement and join a new one with a stronger central authority? Our empirical analyses examine state choices about whether to participate in the new Interstate Compact for Juveniles or remain in an existing compact that serves the same purpose. The findings shed light on how governments make trade‐offs between their desire to maintain their autonomy and the need to overcome the transactions costs, coordination problems, and free‐rider problems associated with cooperative governance in order to achieve policy gains.     

1934-1936年间国民政府划拨外交机密费史料一组

九一八事变后,蒋汪合组国民政府,由军委会委员长蒋介石主持军政,汪精卫则出任行政院院长并兼外交部长等职,主持内政及对日交涉。不久两人在合作过程中矛盾加剧,为拉拢汪氏继续在前台主持,经中政会议决由财政部于每月初拨发5万元作为行政院外交秘密活动费。本组史料从一侧面反映了抗战爆发前蒋汪两派合作与争斗情形。     

Public Housing and Intergovernmental Reform in the 1990s

The problem identified in this paper is twofold. One is the plight of public housing at the end of the decade, with State programs undermined by Commonwealth funding cuts; the other is the problem of intergovernmental reform and its consequences for discrete areas of policy such as housing. The paper traces developments in CommonwealthState housing arrangements, beginning with the reforms initiated through the Council of Australian Governments through to the still uncertain future of public housing under the Howard government. It examines a number of inquiries into housing and recommendations for reform which served the plans of reformist governments intent on separating out the functional roles and responsibilities of the Commonwealth and the States. In particular, these inquiries advocated an ‘affordability’s benchmark which sought to blur the distinction between public and private rental housing leading, inevitably, to the residualisation of the public housing sector.     

Regulatory Reform and the Management of Intergovernmental Relations in Australia

There have been three waves of regulatory reform in Australia since the 1980s, each informed by broadly similar neoliberal political and economic objectives, but with important differences of emphasis that reflect key priorities and changing contexts. This article argues that the second and third waves brought with them three significant developments: (1) A substantially enhanced capacity for the organisation and management of intergovernmental relations in Australia; (2) a new, national emphasis on the need for microeconomic reform, reinvigorated and broadened in the third wave by a broadening of the national ‘productivity and efficiency’ debate through the Human Capital agenda of Council of Australian Governments (COAG); and (3) markedly changed funding and policy responsibilities between the levels of government. These changes include new arrangements for intergovernmental funding; a new performance oversight body, the COAG Reform Council; a revised Intergovernmental Agreement on Federal Financial Relations; and a new role for Commonwealth ministers in chairing COAG working parties.     

Moderating Local Capacity: Exploring EO 12372's Intergovernmental Review Effects on Federal Grant Awards

This article asks whether the Reagan Executive Order (EO) 12372 matters for intergovernmental fiscal relations today. To address this question, federal grant receipts from programs that are, and programs that are not, covered by EO 12372 are compared by examining the differential effects of political and local administrative capacity on each. Grant receipts are examined by coding federal grant award data from 1993 to 2003 using Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance reference numbers. In the case state, Kentucky, Area Development Districts are the regional functionaries for the state single point of contact clearinghouse, by virtue of which status they review proposals for federal funding originating in, or affecting, their districts. Since federal award decisions take clearinghouse information into account on grant programs covered by EO 12372, differences in the effects of local capacity on receipt of grants covered and not covered by the EO are expected. Methodology used in this post‐only analysis is pooled cross‐sectional time series analysis with panel corrected standard errors. Results focus attention on the differential effects of government administrative and political capacity as they apply to federal grants covered, and not covered, by the EO.     

Public Policy and Intergovernmental Relations: Measuring Perceived Change(s) in National Influence-The Effects of the Federalism Decade

Federal grants-in-aid have been a major instrument for the exercise of national influence on the states. This research investigates empirically the degree of perceived national influence (PNI) exerted through the grant process during the 1970s and 1980s. Respondents were state administrators heading agencies that received federal grants. Surveys at four points in time across the two decades produced a unidimensional measure of PNI. PNI levels were notably higher in the 1970s than in the 1980s. Two competing explanations were offered to account for the decline: (a) intergovernmental institutional policy changes promoted by the Ronald Reagan administration from 1981 through 1988, and (b) symbolic and rhetorical advocacy of an altered (reduced) national role in relation to the states. Both factors appear to have contributed to sharp decline in PNI between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s.     

Militarisation,universities and the university armed service units

This paper asks what militarisation looks like when encountered in university settings, using the example of the UK university armed service units. It identifies a specific definition of militarisation, which is then used as a framework to explore the USUs. The USUs have been subject to critique as emblematic of militarisation, and thus problematic. The paper looks at practices where militarisation can be identified as evident on university campuses, such as in disciplinary engagements with military institutions and activities, as well as flows of funding and knowledge. We show how the military-university nexus problematizes the idea of separate and distinctive military and civilian spheres which pervades much of the discourse around military involvement at universities, and highlight the generative and creative capabilities of militarisation as co-constituted within the military-university nexus. The paper then examines in detail how the process of militarisation works in practice through the USUs. This confirms the importance of individual agency to a conceptualisation of militarisation. In conclusion, we argue for the continued utility of process-focussed understandings of militarisation which emphasise how such processes are generative of social relations. We emphasise the necessity of capturing the nuance and complexity through which processes work not least around the engagements of people as active agents with such processes. We also note the potential significance of scale to future conceptualisations of militarisation.     

Teaching landscape in Spanish universities: looking for new approaches in Geography

In order to determine the degree of implementation of the teaching of landscape in the new curriculum for Geography Degrees in Spain, some aspects are analysed: educational plans are analysed and verified, the presence therein of subjects directly devoted to landscape, as well as the inclusion of indirect or cross landscape issues in the subjects related to teaching guides. We propose ideas for the necessary updating of landscape teaching at the university level in the context of Geography, with a view to adapting both professional practice and research.     

Italian universities,Fascism and the promotion of corporative studies

This article deals with a specific aspect of the development of corporativism as ‘unofficial’ doctrine of Fascist Italy: its presence in Italian universities. It argues that corporatist schools followed the fortune of the ideals they were called to represent, which were definitely eclipsed by the mid-1930s, when the economic crisis called for more direct and effective forms of state intervention in economic life. In the universities, the rise of corporativism as a specific field of study, and the broader project of creating an ideologically educated future ruling class, challenged the domination exercised by the powerful faculties of law in particular, which traditionally were the key paths for access to the legal profession and the civil service. The resistance of the conservative university establishment meant that the plans to promote corporatist curricula had failed well before the fall of the regime, but many of those appointed to teach Corporative Studies under Fascism maintained their academic positions in Italy's ‘de-Fascistized’ post-war law faculties, and made innovative contributions to Italian social and economic thought.