HISTORICAL MEANINGFULNESS IN SHARED ACTION

Why should past occurrences matter to us as such? Are they in fact meaningful in a specifically historical way, or do they only become meaningful in being connected to other sorts of meaning—political or speculative, for example—as many notable theorists imply? Ranke and Oakeshott affirmed a purely historical meaningfulness but left its nature unclear. The purpose of this essay is to confirm historical meaningfulness by arguing that our commanding practical interest in how we share action with other actors is distinctively engaged by presumed information about past occurrences. We recognize that past occurrences have determined the conditions of action sharing, constraining our practice with regard to which actors we share practical reality with and which compounding actions we may or must join in progress.     

论1740～1800年英格兰食物骚乱

1740~1800年是英格兰历史上食物骚乱爆发最频繁的时期。谷物供给不足和跨地区谷物流通的兴起是这一时期食物骚乱丛生的主要原因。食物骚乱是民众在一套关于谷物流通的传统价值观念促发下的仗义行为,是在现有的政治结构之内与当局进行讨价还价的一种形式,也是当时社会调节机制的组成部分。作为一种集体行动,食物骚乱通常开始于小规模的自发行动,然后,最初聚集起来的核心分子走上街头,沿路召集同盟者加入,逐渐发展成大规模的行动。骚乱者努力争取地方官员的支持,在现有的政治结构之内与当局进行讨价还价。地方当局竭力安抚骚乱者,充当民众与中间商人之间的调停人。食物骚乱总是以和平的方式平息下来。     

‘YOUTH RIOTS’ AND THE CONCEPT OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It also uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’. Using police reports and newspapers, the article shows that the riots were part of a European repertoire of post-war ‘youth riots’, but that they also bear similarities to an older popular repertoire of contention in Sweden. However, the riots do not really fit into the concept of ‘contentious politics’, as this concept is built on ‘claim-making’ as a key aspect and the participants did not make explicit claims. This leads to the conclusion that other theoretical tools, inspired by the concept of ‘moral economy’, are better suited for understanding the motivations of the rioters, whose actions are interpreted as a way of defending a perceived moral right of access to the urban public space.     

The Bedouins in the Palestinian–Zionist struggle at the beginning of the British Mandate: 1920–1929

This article presents the causal factors behind the Arab riots of the 1920s and the reasons some of the Bedouin tribes joined that struggle. It provides an overview of the “Events,” as Zionist historiographers termed the riots—the developing conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, the methods and resources used by both parties, as well as the responses of the British authorities—from the local, national, and regional perspectives, especially in the political arena. It investigates the political stances that emerged among the local Bedouin tribes regarding the Zionist–Palestinian struggle and the reasons for the diversity of stances: while some tribes took an active part in the events on the Palestinian side, others remained neutral and a few tribes even chose to ally with the Jews, or at least warn them of forthcoming attacks. These different stances consolidated during this period, affecting the events and outcomes of the Great Palestinian revolt that took place in 1936–1939, as well as the conduct of these groups during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.     

HOW THE VISUAL IS SPATIAL: CONTEMPORARY SPATIAL HISTORY,NEO-MARXISM,AND THE GHOST OF BRAUDEL

Contemporary spatial history is founded on the potential for maps and other visualizations to show the historical constructedness of space, usually in broadly neo-Marxist terms, yet neo-Marxist geographical theory is famously critical of visual representation, especially mapping. At stake in this contradiction isn't just the relationship between digital enthusiasm and spatial theory (or the wider spatial turn), but the theoretical status of the visual itself in spatial scholarship. It raises a crucial question: how does visual material—everything from today's statistical maps and cutting-edge data graphics to the broader use of primary-source photographs or drawings—in fact shape our understanding of space, and what theoretical work does it do? By extension, how can humanists make critical theoretical interventions through their own visual production? This article proposes an analytic vocabulary of “visual argument” grounded in an image-focused rereading of two canonical bodies of work: the neo-Marxist theory most cited by spatial history (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja) and the conspicuously uncited work of Fernand Braudel. By focusing on how these authors’ illustrations make claims about spatial subjectivity and the historicity of space—especially through visual relationships of background and foreground—I argue for a new way of understanding and responding to this work and to the visual project of spatial history today. A visual analysis highlights not only the limitations of neo-Marxism but also the pervasiveness of certain assumptions—shared across the neo-Marxists, Braudel, and digital visualization—about temporality, the natural/human dichotomy, and the methodological tensions between argument and visualization. I present my own mapping of Phoenix as one possibility for an argument-driven rethinking of familiar visual commitments, which also suggests a broader meditation on the relationship between visual and textual scholarship.     

Have we failed our neighbour?

In April 2006, rioting broke out in Honiara, Solomon Islands, following the parliamentary election of Snyder Rini. Occurring almost three years after the commencement of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), the riots sparked intense deliberations about the nature of Australia's engagement with Solomon Islands and the success, or otherwise, of RAMSI. Within the context of discussions about state-building in Melanesia, this article seeks to outline challenges to the success of RAMSI. Ultimately, we argue that successful state-building in Melanesia is highly dependent upon awareness of local conditions, rather than simply the application of international best practice. Moreover, we suggest that unless the current approach is modified to accommodate local circumstances—including social and political structures and locally defined needs and desires—the existing growth of anti-RAMSI sentiment will continue to escalate. In conclusion, we offer policy-relevant suggestions aimed at assisting mission stakeholders to improve RAMSI's viability and impact.     

Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

Reimagining GIScience for relational spaces

A mismatch between largely absolute Newtonian models of space in GIScience and the relational spaces of critical human geography has contributed to mutual disinterest between the fields. Critical GIS has offered an intellectual critique of GIScience without substantially altering how particular key geographical concepts are expressed in data structures. Although keystone ideas in GIScience such as Tobler's “First Law” and the modifiable areal unit problem speak to enduring concerns of human geography, they have drawn little interest from that field. Here, we suggest one way to reformulate the computational approach to the region for relational space, so that regions emerge not through proximity in an absolute space or similarities in intensive properties, but according to their similarities in relations. We show how this might operate theoretically and empirically, working through three illustrative examples. Our approach gestures toward reformulating key terms in GIScience like distance, proximity, networks, and spatial building blocks such as the polygon. Re‐engaging the challenges of representing geographical concepts computationally can yield new kinds of GIS and GIScience resonant with theoretical ideas in human geography, and also lead to critical human geographic practices less antagonistic to computation.     

Explaining Congressional Staff Members’ Decisions to Leave the Hill

The high turnover of congressional staff members can have a negative effect on the functioning of Congress as an institution. Though junior staff turnover is not considered a significant concern, the high turnover of senior staff members is problematic. Using data from a survey of staff members located in the Washington personal offices of House of Representatives members, this article investigates what factors influence the likelihood to leave congressional employment. Specifically, I explore how solidary, purposive, and material work incentives influence staff members’ plans to exit. The results of two different models—one for junior and mid-level staff members and one for executive staff members—indicate that purposive incentives, and material incentives that accrue for future employment opportunities, carry the most weight across both models. Current salary has a significant effect on executive staff members, but not on their lower-level counterparts. Following this analysis, I propose actions that congressional offices might take to retain staff.     

Ritual performances and collective violence in divided cities – The riots in Belfast (1886) and Jerusalem (1929)

This article explores the interrelation of violence, space, and public rituals in Belfast and Jerusalem. With the image of being cities of violence, contested by two groups that compete for political and spatial hegemony, Belfast and Jerusalem are also characterised as divided, both on a material and symbolic level. The roots of this division can be traced back to the era of the British Empire, especially to the riots in Belfast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the uprisings in Jerusalem during the British Mandate of Palestine. In the wider context of British imperial policies of differentiation along religious lines and urban separation, communal identities were strengthened, and processes of residential segregation were accelerated, thereby creating urban frontiers. On the basis of historical sources, particularly reports by Royal Commissions of Inquiry that were set up to investigate the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem, this paper analyses how violent urban geographies were created in both cities in different but also remarkably similar ways. Down to the present day, public religious and political rituals, often combined with nationalist and militarist elements, are a crucial part of periodic manifestations of collective violence in these cities. Practices of appropriation of space and a temporary redrawing of borders and boundaries are dominant features of these rituals. Religious ceremonies, street parades, funeral processions or political demonstrations take place at contested sites or are led through areas “belonging” to the “other” group. The analysis shows that these ritual practices contributed greatly in transforming parts of the cities into urban spaces characterised by exclusion and imbued with memories of violence. This paper concludes that ritual performances in public space have a strong impact on the production and shaping of collective violence during riots.     

Spatial and Temporal Variation in Mesopotamian Agricultural Practices in the Khabur Basin,Syrian Jazira

While archaeologists have long recognized the value of regional analysis to define economic systems, relatively few archaeological data sets—principally settlement patterns, ceramics and lithics—have been used to assess regional-scale spatial variation and temporal change. As with other archaeological data sets, resolution of archaeobotanical data at a regional scale poses some formidable challenges. A new approach in the Near East uses archaeobotanical remains from multiple sites. The data have been drawn from midden assemblages that exhibit high variability between assemblages, requiring the use of random effects logistic regression models that can accommodate high variability. Our approach detects changes over time and over geographical region and tests the statistical significance of these changes. Results show a significant rise in crop-processing wastes, most probably from a specialized focus on barley processing at settlement and storage sites during the 3rd millenniumbc (Ninevite 5 and Early Jazira Periods). This shift to a greater representation of barley-processing by-products represented in middens can most probably be linked with an emerging specialization in pastoral production and re-settlement in arid regions of the northern Mesopotamian steppe in the 3rd millennium bc.     

The "swinish multitude": controversies over hogs in antebellum New York City

In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Yorkers fought passionately over the presence of hogs on their streets and in their city. New York’s filthy streets had cultivated an informal economy and a fertile environment for roaming creatures. The battles—both physical and legal—reveal a city rife with class tensions. After decades of arguments, riots, and petitions, cholera and the fear of other public health crises ultimately spelled the end for New York’s hogs. New York struggled during this period to improve municipal services while adapting to a changing economy and rapid population growth. The fights between those for and against hogs shaped New York City’s landscape and resulted in new rules for using public space a new place for nature in the city.     

A Geographic Network Automata Approach for Modeling Dynamic Ecological Systems

Landscape connectivity networks are composed of nodes representing georeferenced habitat patches that link together based on a species’ maximum dispersal distance. These static representations cannot capture the complexity in species dispersal where the network of habitat patch nodes changes structure over time as a function of local dispersal dynamics. Therefore, the objective of this study is to integrate geographic information, complexity, and network science to propose a novel Geographic Network Automata (GNA) modeling approach for the simulation of dynamic spatial ecological networks. The proposed GNA modeling approach is applied to the emerald ash borer (EAB) forest insect infestation using geospatial data sets from Michigan, U.S.A. and simulates the evolution of the EAB spatiotemporal dispersal network structures across a large regional scale. The GNA model calibration and sensitivity analysis are performed. The simulated spatial network structures are quantified using graph theory measures. Results indicate that the spatial distribution of habitat patch nodes across the landscape in combination with EAB dispersal processes generate a highly connected small-world dispersal network that is robust to node removal. The presented GNA model framework is general and flexible so that different types of geospatial phenomena can be modeled, providing valuable insights for management and decision-making.     

"Ready to shoot and do shoot": black working-class self-defense and community politics in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks’ everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses—self-defense, legal redress, and journalists’ remonstrations—as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.     

Water availability and landuse during the Upper and Epipaleolithic in southwestern Syria

Paleolithic research often assumes that environmental conditions played a major role in shaping human evolution. To study this relationship we present a spatially explicit approach based on the assumption that the distribution of water within the landscape is an essential component of local environmental conditions. Here, we analyze the relation of wetness and human landuse patterns from the Upper Paleolithic (UP) and Epipaleolithic (EP) of Western Syria. In particular the spatially explicit character of the approach enables the detection of a significant change in landuse patterns during the UP and EP accompanied by a significant shift in the wetness characteristics of the preferentially used areas. These results are discussed against the background of published data on climatic conditions in order to identify both a possible time frame and triggers for this change in landuse. While we conclude an increased influence of natural conditions on the spatial behavior for the UP, we suggest an additional influence of cultural circumstances in shaping EP spatial behavior. For the region studied we argue that the bounded pattern observed during the UP changes to a spatially flexible pattern during the Late Natufian.     

Spurious weather effects

Rainfall is exogenous to human actions and hence popular as an exogenous source of variation. But it is also spatially correlated. This can generate spurious relationships between rainfall and other spatially correlated outcomes. As an illustration, rainfall on almost any day of the year has seemingly high predictive power of electoral turnout in Norwegian municipalities. In Monte Carlo analyses, I find that standard tests reject true null hypotheses in as much as 99% of cases. Standard approaches to estimating consistent standard errors do not solve the problem. Instead, I suggest controlling for spatial and spatiotemporal trends using multidimensional polynomials.     

Grief as method: topographies of grief,care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.     

The “Science” of Policy Development During Administrative Rulemaking

The legitimacy of government agencies rests in part on the premise that public administrators use scientific evidence to make policy decisions. Yet, what happens when there is no consensus in the scientific evidence—i.e., when the science is in conflict? I theorize that scientific conflict yields greater policy change during administrative policymaking. I assess this claim using data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I identify policy change—what I refer to as “policy development” in this article—between the FDA's draft and final rules with a novel text analysis measure of shifts in regulatory restrictions. I then go on to find that more policy development does occur with scientific conflict. Moreover, using corresponding survey data, I uncover suggestive evidence that one beneficiary of such conflict may be participating interest groups. Groups lobby harder—and attempt to change more of the rule—during conflict, while an in‐survey experiment provides evidence of increased interest group influence on rule content when scientific conflict is high.     

Digital gravity? Firm birth and relocation patterns of young digital firms in Germany

This paper analyses the spatial patterns of young (<10 years) digital firms in Germany between 2008 and 2017 on county level. Determinants of firm birth locations as well as relocations are considered jointly to understand differences in location choices within firms' life cycles. I match commercial register data of 107,321 firms with county-level administrative data to capture local characteristics. Using an OLS model with fixed effects, I find that the local knowledge base—that is, universities, research institutes, and colocated incumbents—are significant key determinants of digital firm birth when controlling for a host of local characteristics. My results indicate that for five firms per 1000 inhabitants, there is around one firm birth. Second, using a fixed effects gravity model for the analysis of relocations, I find that the most dominant explanatory factor for firm relocation across specifications is distance, that is, relocation costs. Relocation flows are more than twice as high to neighboring counties relative to other locations which shows that digital firms are not as footloose as their business model may suggest. Jointly, my results reflect economic activity's regional persistence, particularly for new firms. My paper provides evidence for policies targeting homogenous digital clusters based on strong colocation and that digital economic activity is not shifted over long distances, but the regional entrepreneurship capital is crucial for local growth.     

Bidirectional blade technology on naviform cores from northern Arabia: New evidence of Arabian-Levantine interactions in the Neolithic

Discovered in March 2015, the sites of DAJ-112 and DAJ-125 in the Al-Jawf province of northern Saudi Arabia consist of a large collection of surface lithic artefacts that can be compared to well-known Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) B technology from the Levant: the two sites include bidirectional blade technology with naviform core preparation and opposed platforms surface exploitation, as well as burin production at a wide scale. Other surface scatters have been identified during the 2013 and 2015 surveys, showing these two sites are not isolated in Al-Jawf, as rather important occurrences of Early Holocene technology have been identified across the region. Although the sites from Al-Jawf are surface occurrences and not radiometrically dated, the finds have proven to be extremely significant, representing a southward incursion of classic naviform cores-based technology, thus expanding the geographical distribution of this technology beyond the Levant. By addressing the lithic evidence from northern Arabia, the expansion and/or influence of PPN populations and cultural elements will be discussed.