Getting Behind the Grain: The Politics of Genetic Modification on the Canadian Prairies

Abstract: In 2001 a coalition of actors including farm, consumer, health, environmental and industry organizations announced its opposition to Monsanto's attempts to commercialize GM wheat in Canada. Although this coalition consisted mostly of rural and agricultural groups, the three arguments that came to dominate the discourse advanced by the coalition seem, at first glance, to characterize a politics of consumption. These three arguments revolve around market acceptance, environmental risk, and the lack of democratic and transparent process in biotech regulation and policy. This paper argues that producer interests were not displaced by, but rather articulated alongside and through consumer‐driven discourses. In fact, farmers used claims about the supremacy of the consumer and impending environmental change to advance their vulnerable political and economic positions as producers of food.     

The Geomorphology of Accumulative Alluvial and Lacustrine Plains

The author considers the geomorphology of accumulative alluvial-lacustrine plains to have been largely neglected by geomorphologists, with few generalized studies available in the literature compared with the geomorphology of denudation surfaces. He provides a genetic classification of alluvial plains and lists a number of problems in the geomorphic structure and sculpturing of plains worthy of further investigation and generalization.     

贵德三河杨柳风

是的,如果有谁走在贵德的大山,他也一定会怀疑贵德小江南根本就是一个虚构。是的,贵德是有一些地方比较荒凉,虽然荒凉也是一种大地本色。然而,贵德一定是小江南,一定是,不然就不会一代人,一代人,一叫就叫了多少年……     

《弗吉尼亚人》的史学价值

美国著名作家欧文.威斯特的成名作《弗吉尼亚人—平原骑手》与19世纪末20世纪初美国的社会和文化主题挂钩,表达了镀金时代的美国梦精神,反映了西部牧业开发中东西部矛盾与冲突的走向,展现了怀俄明牧牛业的社会、经济及政治发展状况,不仅是一部影响深远的牛仔小说,而且具有较高的史学价值。同时,受时代和作者阶级立场的局限,《弗吉尼亚人—平原骑手》偏袒大牧场主,带有取悦统治阶级的阶级倾向性,小说中塑造的牛仔形象对西部小说的程式化产生了重要影响。     

折柳送别诗的民俗观照

“折柳”作为我国特有的送别习俗起源很早,因为“柳”在我国是“祝福”的象征,也是可以“驱鬼避邪”的“鬼怖木”;柳在中国古人心目中可以起到保护的作用,它既可以保护逝去的亲人的灵魂远行,同样保护活着的亲人路途平安。折柳送别的习俗植根于我国独特的传统文化,与我国古代人民的文化心理密切相关。     

Bundled Worlds: The Roles and Interactions of Complex Objects from the North American Plains

This paper explores the many dimensions of power exercised by ceremonial bundles that have been held by North American Plains groups since time immemorial. Because bundles are multifarious but strictly ordered sets of objects, they embody the corpus of ecological and cosmological knowledge needed to survive in the human and supernatural worlds. Bundles, like persons, are subject to hierarchical and heterarchical power relations that parallel societal relations within tribal groups. Observations are drawn about the value of studying complex objects such as bundles for expanding and refining archaeological systematics.     

The Levelling Process as a Function of the Masses in the View of Kierkegaard and Ortega Y Gasset

The present article is an analysis of the emergence of a new Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers (1914–94), as well as the publication in 1950 of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman). It focuses on the Uruguayan social body of the 1950s, when society lived the paradox of recognizing women in its legal structure, but limiting them in the everyday social and cultural life. In this context, Somers's novel symbolically explores what I call the “crisis of feminine subjectivity,” through the creation of a woman who on her thirtieth birthday decided to throw away all the costumes and masks with which society and tradition imposed feminine roles and, naked, tried new ways of being, new subjectivities. Central to this study is an analysis of the different ways in which historical, social, and cultural demands produce certain kinds of human bodies, especially how they produce a woman's body. The specific argument that underlies this article is that the body inserts itself in conflictive and tense manners with the marks imposed on the genders. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of “feminine subjectivities” and “historical marked bodies” in a fiction that presents itself as a black box in which Somers finds herself as a woman who became a novelist in the 1950s and in which readers also find themselves questioning the persistence of gender marks on their own social bodies.     

GIS-based modeling of drought and historical population change on the Canadian Prairies

This article describes the development of a GIS-based model of historical drought and population change in western Canada, designed to support qualitative field research into drought adaptation and migration. The model combines digitized census data and recently available modeled historical climate data at a 10 km² grid cell scale and can be used to generate maps of ‘hotspots’ where historical declines in rural populations may be associated with extended periods of heat and lack of precipitation. The results suggest a promising avenue for expanding and refining GIS-based modeling of historical human–climate interactions to support qualitative research and to potentially serve as a stepping stone toward forecasting future risk areas of drought-related migration in continental dryland areas.     

The Difference Context Makes: Planning and Ethnic Minorities in Northern Ireland

The ways the British planning system fosters racial disadvantage and the initiatives taken by local authorities to address such bias have been subject to a number of studies over the last 17 years. This body of research has revealed isolated examples of progressive professional practice within a general pattern of inaction and ignorance. This paper looks at how the needs of ethnic minorities have been accommodated by the planning system in Northern Ireland that has a very different institutional and political context than other parts of the UK. The nature of 'race' relations in Northern Ireland is examined and the concept of 'policy processes' is used to explain why ethnic minorities in the region face similar difficulties to those in Britain. The influence of the political and cultural context is shown to play a key role in framing the policy processes that shape patterns of discrimination. The paper suggests that a full understanding of this context is required if multiculturalism is to be fully accommodated by planning in Europe.