Visualizing Pollution: Representations of Biological Data in Water Pollution Control in the United States, 1948–1962

After the United States Congress passed the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, biologists played an increasingly significant role in scientific studies of water pollution. Biologists interacted with other experts, notably engineers, who managed the public agencies devoted to water pollution control. Although biologists were at first marginalized within these agencies, the situation began to change by the early 1960s. Biological data became an integral part of water pollution control. While changing societal values, stimulated by an emerging ecological awareness, may explain broader shifts in expert opinion during the 1960s, this article explores how graphs changed experts’ perceptions of water pollution. Experts communicated with each other via reports, journal articles, and conference speeches. Those sources reveal that biologists began experimenting with new graphical methods to simplify the complex ecological data they collected from the field. Biologists, I argue, followed the engineers’ lead by developing graphical methods that were concise and quantitative. Their need to collaborate with engineers forced them to communicate, negotiate, and overcome conflicts and misunderstandings. By meeting engineers’ expectations and promoting the value of their data through images as much as words, biologists asserted their authority within water pollution control by the early 1960s.     

Temp to Perm: Stacking the Electoral Deck Through U.S. Senate Appointments?

One concern with allowing governors to appoint replacements for U.S. Senate vacancies is that appointees may have an advantage over their competition in seeking election. Another is that governors may use their power to further their own political ambitions. This investigation explores whether an electoral benefit is conferred through receiving or making an appointment. The analysis provides insight into how gubernatorial appointments shape electoral outcomes for quasi-incumbents and the Senate's membership. Notably, the results reveal an electoral boost for representatives who are appointed prior to making a run for the Senate. Although the results demonstrate that some appointees gain an advantage by receiving appointments, governors who run for Senate do not experience an electoral benefit from making an appointment.     

Do Voluntary Programs Reduce Pollution? Examining ISO 14001's Effectiveness across Countries

Voluntary environmental programs have emerged as important instruments of environmental policy. Despite considerable scholarly scrutiny, there remain debates about whether they reduce pollution among participants, and their overall impact at the country level. We present a cross‐national analysis of the efficacy of ISO 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world. While several single country studies have explored the effect of ISO 14001 participation on pollution reduction at the facility level, this is the first article to assess (i) national level pollution reduction effects of ISO 14001 participation levels, (ii) across a large number of countries, and (iii) across two pollutants. We examine whether all else equal, the national level uptakes of ISO 14001 are associated with reductions in air emissions (sulfur dioxide, SO₂) and water pollution (biochemical oxygen demand, BOD). Because firms, regulators, and environmental groups tend to focus more on visible types of pollution than less visible ones, we hypothesize that ISO 14001 uptake will be associated with more pronounced reductions in air pollution (visible) in relation to water pollution (less visible). Our analyses of pollution levels for a panel of 138 (72 for BOD) countries for the 1991–2005 period suggest that a 1 percent increase in aggregate levels of ISO 14001 adoption is associated with about a 0.064 percent reduction in SO₂ emissions, all else equal. In contrast, we do not find a statistically significant relationship between ISO 14001 adoption levels and changes in water pollution (BOD).     

Gandhi and le gandhisme: Writing Indian Decolonisation and the Appropriation of Gandhi 1919–48

This article considers developments in French sport in the period 1998-2002, with particular emphasis on the social representation of performances by the nation's elite athletes in international competitions. It opens with the victory of the home side in the France 98 football World Cup and closes with the defeat of the national team in the 2002 edition of that same competition. The various attempts made both before and after France 98 to use sport as a means of promoting social inclusion and national solidarity, particularly as regards hitherto alienated young males from ethnic minorities (especially those of North African origin), are considered against this background. In order to place such developments in context, attention is also given to changes in patterns of sports participation and spending among the general French population. The article concludes with a brief survey of some recent intellectual critiques of this newfound national enthusiasm for sports.     

Intergenerational Inequality? Labour,Capital, and Housing Through the Ages

This article examines the relevance of generational relations to emerging patterns of inequality in advanced capitalist societies, with a particular focus on inequalities related to housing wealth. At its heart is a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that generational difference is a crucial axis of inequality today. It argues that while contemporary capitalist societies are certainly characterized by marked inequalities between generations and that the latter are manifested inter alia in housing ownership, understanding such inequalities principally in generational terms is problematic because they reflect deeper, more fundamental, structural inequalities and should therefore be conceptualized as such. The article suggests that the principal significance of generational relations to contemporary inequality dynamics actually concerns economic transfers rather than differences between generations. Within‐family transfers of wealth, especially housing‐related wealth, from older generations to younger ones tend to reproduce pronounced, structurally generated existing patterns of intra‐generational inequality.     

“Québec History X”: Re-Visioning the Past Through Rap 1

This article examines how contemporary rap texts invoke historical events to contribute to a vision of the imagined community of Québec as a diverse and accommodating, “transcultural” society. It examines how the recent anthem rap songs of the controversial, franco-nationalist rappers Loco Locass actually reflect the attitude of accommodation found in the recent Bouchard-Taylor Report. Similar sentiments of reconciliation appear in their collaboration with franco-Algonuin rapper Samian, “La Paix des Braves” (Face à la Musique, 2008) which commemorates the Great Peace of Montréal and the more recent agreement between Québec and the Cree in 2002. In contrast, Webster, a black rapper from Québec City, suggests in “Quebec History X” (Sagesse immobile, 2008) that such visions elide historical incidences of racial oppression and conflict, and that Québécois society still has progress to make in terms of revealing its past in order to enlighten the present.     

Town Twinning in Greece: Reconstructing Local Histories Through Translocal Sensory‐Affective Performances

Twinning arrangements between members and non‐members of the European Union are one of the many Euro‐symbolic measures taken with the aim of making indigenous populations “feel like citizens of Europe at the local level”. This article addresses the ways in which trans‐local projects of indoctrination, such as twinning, force indigenous peoples to reposition themselves toward what is culturally defined as local history. Its focus is on the exchange of small‐scale civilities through which partners engage themselves in sensory and affective performances of their history, and are gradually led to the reorganization of their domestic sensorium or public memory.     

Qualitative Landscape Theories and Archaeological Predictive Modelling—A Journey Through No Man’s Land?

An approach to test and interpret geographic information system-based, quantitative archaeological predictive models using techniques from qualitative (experiential) landscape theory is described and demonstrated via a case study. The result is the transformation of statistical output from quantitative predictive models into more archaeologically meaningful interpretations of spatial data.     

Through a glass,darkly: Some non‐anthropological approaches to cross‐cultural research

Croll, Elisabeth, Delia Davin, and Penny Kane, eds. China's One‐Child Family Policy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. xvi + 237 pp. including individual chapter notes and references and index. $27.50 cloth.

Unschuld, Paul U. Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. xi + 423 pp. including appendix bibliography, and index. $40.00 cloth.     

Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus?

Abstract: Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid) work on the other. A product of three decades of decomposition of the working class, nowtopians are different from “drop‐outs” in general, or surplus populations that constitute the necessary “outside” to capital, in their conscious withdrawal from capitalist culture and concerted rejection of the value form. In emergent convivial “nowtopian” communities, largely grounded in unpaid practical work which creatively meets needs such as transportation (the bicycling subculture), food (urban gardening/agriculture), and communication (open‐source communities), we see a gradual reversal of the extreme atomization of modern life. While facing the threat of corruption via re‐integration into the system, this constellation of practices, if taken together, is an elaborate, decentralized, uncoordinated collective research and development effort exploring a potentially post‐capitalist, post‐petroleum future.