Geographies of Responsibility

Abstract Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both.     

战后日本农村地域社会的变迁

马克思在《资本制生产前的诸形态》一文中,曾经指出：共同体型社会(包括村落共同体)解体后产生近代社会(近代资本主义社会)。明治维新后,日本虽然开始了资本主义工业化的进程,但是明治政府实行的是     

Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children's Literature

This paper argues for the uses of children's literature in the study of children's geographies. It focuses in particular on the nature of representations of urban space in children's literature, a genre more usually connected with the pastoral and explores the narrative strategies and approaches of children's literature which does venture into the city. I propose five modes in which the city is written for children and ask, from the position of literary criticism which distrusts children's stories' ability to speak for children, how far these modes can be said to coincide with children's lived experience of the city.     

Geographies of relatedness

This paper explores the analytic purchase and substantive concerns of what I am calling geographies of relatedness . Drawing on recent work in feminist anthropology which has reconsidered kinship as classificatory system and practice, and highlighting the attentiveness to sites, scales and contexts within this work, I suggest ways in which a focus on relatedness may shape approaches to established and emerging matters of concern in human geography. I consider first the foundational status but flexible meaning of 'blood' in kinship thinking, and the ways the flexibility of kinship can be curtailed and its foundational status reinstated in relation to the nation and the state. Second, I consider the geographies of relatedness that are constituted through and practised in the process of establishing degrees of biological connection, delimiting difference, mapping human 'diversity' and defining personal, collective and human origins at different scales and with different effects. A focus on geographies of relatedness, I argue, highlights the ways blood ties or similarly naturalized connections move between and connect categories of relatedness with different sizes, extents and configurations across space, as well as different temporalities. It suggests an alertness to new global mappings of human relatedness and difference and combines a critical attention to ideas of the 'nature' of human reproduction as foundational, original or primal in the natural order of the social, to ideas of 'place of origin': personal, national, ethnic, racialized, universal in their familiar and emergent forms.     

对外经济援助在战后日本国家发展中的地位

本文试图从国家发展战略的角度 ,通过对不同阶段、不同战略目标下 ,日本对外经济援助政策的特点分析 ,探讨对外经济援助在战后日本国家发展进程中的地位与作用 ,以揭示其对外援助的真实目的 ,并从一个侧面了解日本现代史的发展历程。文章指出日本对外经济援助政策的制订、实施及发展演变不但与其国家发展战略密切相关 ,而且始终是日本获取国家利益的重要工具。对外援助这种特殊的经济手段 ,在战后日本国家发展进程中起着军事力量无法替代的作用。日本之所以如此钟情于对外经济援助的“投入” ,归根结底源自于其对“产出”效果的执着追求。     

The Rapidly Evolving Geographies of the Eurasian Internet

A noted American geographer surveys the spatial distribution and growth (between 2000 and 2008) of Internet users in the 15 countries of the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Afghanistan (Eurasia). A major focus is exploration of the correlations between rapidly increasing penetration rates in the region and hypothesized drivers of Internet growth worldwide (such as income, literacy, and telephone access). The author proceeds to examine various forms of Internet censorship practiced in Eurasia, which exhibit different degrees of severity and types depending on the country in question. A third section of the paper assesses the potentially transformative role of electronic commerce and governance among the region's states, including types of applications and the obstacles that this phenomenon confronts. A concluding section includes penetrating observations on the implications of continued expansion of Internet use on commerce, information access, and civil society in the region.     

Geographies of Hardy's Wessex

The novels of Thomas Hardy represent a number of different “geographies”—the means by which their various characters and narrators explore places and come to know them. The “geographies” of the characters and narrators in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The return of the native are examined in this essay. It shows that the “primal” geography of the youthful Tess, and of those who live on Egdon Heath, is represented as circular, and is constructed by more senses than the visual, while that of the reader is linear and wholly visual in its preoccupations with geology, cartography and the picturesque; and it examines the destruction of the “primal” geography in Tess, as she becomes an itinerant labourer. The task of the narrators, in their attempt to mediate between the two geographies, is considered, and it is suggested that this attempt is bound to fail, because the division between them is founded in an idea of history, as of a moment of primal unity and its subsequent differentiation, which is not perceived as open to question.     

Geographies of Power in Nazarbayev's Astana

An American geographer examines the recent move of Kazakhstan's capital from Almaty to Astana, focusing in particular on the links between the move and the development of official nationalism in the era of Nursultan Nazarbayev's post-communist governance. The capital move is discussed within a wider theoretical framework to highlight the unique role that the national capital plays in the nationalist imagination. The paper also highlights interesting features of the new capital's physical layout as well as changes in its ethnic composition due to migration patterns following the relocation. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, H82, J61, O18. 2 figures, 2 tables, 49 references.     

Geographies of Industrial Convergence: The Case of Retail Banking

This paper considers the relationship between space, place and the convergence of industrial structures and organizational forms by way of an analysis of the retail banking industry in the USA and the UK. The paper examines this process from two theoretical positions. It does so firstly by viewing the process of convergence through the analytical lens of political economy, which looks for explanation in broad structural forces, such as changes in regulatory space and pressures on profitability. The paper then goes on to draw attention to some of the limitations of interpretations of this kind by drawing attention to the importance of place-based evolutionary economic change, and the ways in which conventions of industrial restructuring are transmitted over space. By way of illustration the paper focuses upon the organizational and practical implications of the implementation of two banking technologies: Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) and telephone banking. In doing so, the paper calls for accounts of economic change to pay attention to the rich histories of industrial sectors and for a more active account of economic change which pays attention to the ways in which outcomes are produced through the mixing and borrowing of technologies and practices through space and over time.     

战后英国共识政治的成因

共识政治是战后英国政党政治史的一个显著特点 ,其成因不止一端。第三次科技革命的兴起导致英国社会经济结构的变化和中产阶级迅速崛起 ,并由此导致轮流上台执政的两党领导集团阶级属性的趋同 ,此为共识政治产生的根本原因。凯恩斯主义和第二次世界大战为共识政治的产生提供了理论基础和推动力。英国议会民主的宪政体制则是战后共识政治产生的制度保障     

大众社会与战后日本的推理小说

日本的推理小说一词,始于第二次世界大战结束以后。实际上它就是战前的侦探小说。因战后实行了文字改革,日文的当用汉字中取消了“侦”字,才改称为推理小说。从狭义上讲,推理是小说构成的主要要素,亦即以设立悬念并运用逻辑推理的方法进行侦破为主要内容的小说便是推理小说。