Spaces of care in the city: the place of a community drop-in centre

This paper explores the ways in which drop-in centres may at times function as spaces of care in the city. Drawing on participant observation research within a particular centre in Bristol, a city in south-west England, it focuses upon social relations within the drop-in space and the various subjectivities that were observed to emerge in this relational environment. Through a consideration of individuals who appeared to be positively assisted by their involvement in the drop-in, a sense is developed of the different ways in which such agencies may function as spaces of care. Use is made of Carl Rogers' notion of the core conditions for successful therapeutic encounter, as developed within the person-centred school of humanistic psychotherapy, to explicate these positive experiences. At the same time it was clear that some individuals found the drop-in to be a less than comfortable or even exclusionary environment. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader significance of drop-in centres as caring environments and on the value of humanistic conceptions of therapeutic relation for interpreting organizational spacings of subjectivity.     

Delocalization,Humanitarianism, and Human Rights: The Mediterranean Border Between Exclusion and Inclusion

By reflecting on both the exclusionary and the inclusionary role of humanitarian migration and border management in the Central Mediterranean, this paper explores the relationship of humanitarianism with the delocalization of the EU border and with human rights. First, the paper analyses the role of human rights in the institutional humanitarian discourse about migration and border management at the Mediterranean EU border. The paper then analyses the Italian operation Mare Nostrum and, more generally, Italian humanitarianized border management in the Central Mediterranean. In doing this, it shows that humanitarianism contributes to the discursive legitimation and spatial delocalization of exclusionary policies and practices. Moreover, humanitarianism contributes to a symbolically and legally subordinate inclusion of migrants in the European space. While such humanitarian inclusion can be more inclusive than what human rights would require, it is posited as an act of grace rather than an enhancement of human rights. In both its exclusionary and inclusionary dimension, humanitarianism transcends and expands territorial boundaries by outsourcing responsibilities and enhancing delocalized border management.     

Assessing Effectiveness of Veto Threats in the Bush Administration (1989-1993): Preliminary Evidence from Case Studies

Presidents have many tools in the policy-making process. One of the most powerful of these is vetoing legislation. Although presidents can veto legislation at will, the use of the veto is costly as it can be perceived as a sign of weakness. Veto threats may provide the president with a bargaining tool relying on the power of the veto without incurring its costs. This article provides a framework for understanding the use and effectiveness of veto threats. First, the present understanding of the use of veto threats is discussed, including the conditions under which they are most likely to occur and to be effective. Next, we provide a conceptualization of the context in which a veto threat is issued and the result of such a threat. Finally, using the Bush administration (1989-1993), we illustrate two possible results with case studies of civil rights and child care legislation.     

The dual-processual model in ancient Greece: Applying a post-neoevolutionary model to a data-rich environment

Dissatisfaction with neoevolutionary concepts in social evolution has prompted archeologists to offer new post-neoevolutionary models to investigate social change. One concept, the dual-processual model, is salient among several because it focuses attention onto the central dynamics of exclusionary/networking or corporate strategies for obtaining power. Yet this model remains somewhat uncontextualized, with knowledge of how each strategy would work in a culture hinted at only in large concepts. This lack of contextualization hinders us from achieving the stated goals of the dual-processual model: the introduction of new cultural axes of analysis and the promotion of cross-cultural comparison. I argue here that we need to apply this model to a data-rich environment to elucidate to a greater degree how each of these power strategies operates. Classical cultures, within which post-neoevolutionary models are rarely applied, can supply this needed fine-grained context. In applying the model to the ancient city of Priene, which supplies several well-understood interactional contexts, I discern how we might define exclusionary/networking or corporate within different social contexts, how people use these strategies to gain power, and how these strategies change over time. Information from this application helps us to further the stated goals of its dual-processual proponents.     

Geographies of gender and feminism in Mexico: a field in construction

Abstract

This paper sets out to present geographies of gender and feminism in Mexico in order to identify some of the conceptual contributions, thematic axes and key problems within the field’s corpus of knowledge that, while widely-recognized internationally, is only beginning to develop in Mexico. I examine the academic production of feminist geography with an emphasis on the institutional contexts that may facilitate or perhaps impede putting such studies into practice in different institutions throughout the country. Additionally, I provide an account of the main objects of study that have contributed to configuring original, committed field research under the conditions of exclusion and marginality that women face on a daily basis.     

Hyperstructure,hierarchy and humanitas in Olympic ritual

The Olympic victory ceremony is a globally familiar and highly stable ritual form of the world system of nation states. In this article, the medal ceremony is placed within the overarching Olympic ritual process, and its evocative power is attributed to its symbolic treatment of the relationship between Individual, National and Human identities in modern worlds. The ritual asserts and performs the compatibility of these identities in the face of all the horrific counter-evidence of the 20th century and today; it presents a very specific strategy for symbolically handling exclusionary nationalism.     

The Mixed Potential of Salvage Commoning: Crisis and Commoning Practices in Washington,DC and New York City

This paper considers how and to what ends commoning practices can take shape in direct response to the spectres and/or realities of eroding resources (we focus especially on public resources) within iterations of what we term “salvage commoning”. We show how, in such contexts, commoning practices may potentially alleviate but also potentially (re)produce inequities, exclusions, and resource retractions. To illustrate, we draw upon two examples: parent-teacher organisations in Washington, DC, and block associations in New York City. In both instances, people have cooperatively built new relations, coordinated voluntary labour, and stewarded resources in connection with specific commons (public schools and urban spaces) threatened by disinvestment and crisis. We show how troubling alignments and exclusions can emerge under these conditions, suggesting critical questions about the starkly mixed potential of salvage commoning—especially in the face of ongoing and emerging crises in which such orientations are likely to become increasingly prevalent.     

Quantifying the Effects of Mask Metadata Disclosure and Multiple Releases on the Confidentiality of Geographically Masked Health Data

The availability of individual-level health data presents opportunities for monitoring the distribution and spread of emergent, acute, and chronic conditions, as well as challenges with respect to maintaining the anonymity of persons with health conditions. Particularly when such data are mapped as point locations, concerns arise regarding the ease with which individual identities may be determined by linking geographic coordinates to digital street networks, then determining residential addresses and, finally, names of occupants at specific addresses. The utility of such data sets must therefore be balanced against the requirements of protecting the confidentiality of individuals whose identities might be revealed through the availability of precise and accurate locational data. Recent literature has pointed toward geographic masking as a means for striking an appropriate balance between data utility and confidentiality. However, questions remain as to whether certain characteristics of the mask (mask metadata) should be disclosed to data users and whether two or more distinct masked versions of the data can be released without breaching confidentiality. In this article, we address these questions by quantifying the extent to which the disclosure of mask metadata and the release of multiple masked versions may affect confidentiality, with a view toward providing guidance to custodians of health data sets. The masks considered include perturbation, areal aggregation, and their combination. Confidentiality is measured by the areas of confidence regions for individuals' locations, which are derived under the probability models governing the masks, conditioned on the disclosed mask metadata.     

A Fresh Eye on Familiar Objects: Rethinking Toiletry Sets in Roman Britain

Toiletry sets are often commonplace on rural Romano‐British sites, leading to speculation that the indigenous population aspired to Roman standards of hygiene and grooming. Artefacts interpreted as cosmetic grinders have been seen as further evidence for body modification for the sake of appearances; these objects are often prominent in discussion of Romanization and identity. Drawing on ethnographic evidence, this paper offers an alternative to the traditional and seemingly unquestioned function of the Pre‐Roman Iron Age (PRIA)/ Romano‐British toiletry sets and cosmetic grinders. It is suggested that they may have had a role in the treatment of trachoma, an eye disease which may have been rampant in some areas of Roman Britain. It is hoped that this view may generate some discussion not only about the artefacts themselves, but also about how we interpret function, often in the face of a real paucity of evidence.     

The limits to optimism: Australia and the rise of China

The Australian government optimistically expects that China's rise can be easily managed. They predict US–China relations will be cooperative, and reject concerns that Australia may face hard choices between them. This optimism seems to be based on the view that as China grows it will become increasingly integrated into a US-led global system. That overestimates America's power, and underestimates China's ambitions. The best we can hope for instead is that China and the US will cooperate in a concert of power, but the US will be very reluctant to make the necessary concessions to China for that to happen. So there is a real risk of even worse outcomes: Chinese primacy, sustained US–China hostility, or war. Australia therefore needs to try to persuade America to work with China in building a new ‘Concert of Asia’.     

STATE-LEVEL COORDINATION AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION

General propositions about the policy resources of a state higher education coordinating board, some determinants of state–level coordination of institutions of higher education, the function of conflict in coordination, the role of a coordinating board in policy making., and conditions under which coordination of institutions and policy implementation may be successful are presented. The conclusion is that a coordinating board, plays an important system–maintenance function and that it is an active rather than passive policy actor, that there are several conditions under which coordination and policy implementation may occur, and that a coordinating board's ability to implement policy in especially dependent upon the political support that it receives and its ability to mobilize resources outside the higher education system.     

Radicalization revisited: violence,politics and the skills of the body

For more than a decade, ‘radicalization’ has been a keyword in our understanding of terrorism. From the outset, radicalization was conceived of as an intellectual process through which an individual would increasingly come under a spell of extremist ideas. This ideological understanding of radicalization still prevails. In a 2015 speech on extremism, British Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, claimed that the ‘root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself’. But the way we understand radicalization has specific consequences for the way we manage and fight the scourge of terrorism. Considering recent events, including the November 2015 Paris attacks, the present article sets out to reassess the above‐mentioned intellectualist understanding of radicalization and come up with new suggestions as to how radicalization may be understood today. Initially, the article suggests that ideology is not necessarily a precondition for violence, but that a prior experience with violence is more often a precondition for engaging an extremist ideology. Such experience with violence can be both domestic and international, obtained in Europe or Syria and other conflict zones. In the second part of the article it is argued that although radicalization is often conceived of as an individual process, pathways towards terrorism are inherently social and political. Finally, the article argues that by stressing the importance of ideology and ideological processes, concepts of radicalization have abstracted away from another factor that is pivotal for understanding pathways towards terrorist violence: the skills and capacities of the body.     

Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: disruptive empathy and binationalism in Israel/Palestine

This article develops a theoretical framework for shared and inclusive Jewish and Palestinian deliberation on the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba. It argues that a joint Arab-Jewish public deliberation on the traumatic memories of these two events is not only possible, however challenging and disruptive it may be, but also fundamental for producing an egalitarian and inclusive ethics of binationalism in Israel/Palestine. In order to develop this conceptual framework, we first present some examples, most notably Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the sun (Bab al-Shams), which bring the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba together in a fashion that disrupts the dominant, antagonistic and exclusionary Israeli and Palestinian national narratives. We then interpret Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, which transforms ‘otherness’ from a problem to be disposed of into a moral and emotional challenge, as a political concept that best captures and explains the disruptive potential of a joint deliberation on these traumatic events. The figure of the refugee, constitutive of Palestinian and Jewish histories and identities, we suggest, serves as a herald of this binational and disruptive ethics. We conclude that ‘empathic unsettlement’ also has a productive and transformative potential which gives further (however partial and initial) meaning, shape and content to the ethics and democratic politics of binationalism heralded by the refugee.     

Organisation and political analysis

The advent of the Hawke government may not warrant the title of ‘The Revolution in Australian Politics’, but it has raised questions about organisation and power, and the way in which these are handled in political science. This paper begins by identifying what is considered problematic in the political practices which are seen as distinctive in the Hawke government. It outlines the elements of the paradigm of organisation which underlies much political science, and identifies the way in which these are challenged by ‘corporatist’ or ‘Hawkeish’ forms of political activity. It argues that this paradigm of organisation is under attack on both conceptual and empirical grounds, and outlines an alternative paradigm of organisation and the way in which it applies to government. It concludes with a consideration of the implications of this approach for theorising about the state.     

Power and the material arrangements of a river basin management plan: the case of the Archipelago Sea

The drive towards collaborative governance has raised critical questions about the hidden forms of power practised in consensual planning processes. In the field of water governance, the issue has been analysed in terms that treat power as an intrinsic property of actors or planning settings. Alternatively power is located in the discursive means mobilized by the human participants. Drawing from actor-network theory, this paper calls attention to the material arrangements constitutive for the practicing of power in target-driven, consensus-seeking planning. It sets focus on the obligatory passage points and factual closures through which a planning task links, for example, to ecosystems, policy principles and trajectories of governance. In the meantime, some other entities and issues may lose their planning-steering potentiality. As shown by the analysis of a river-basin planning process, the arrangements that end up steering consensus-seeking cannot be treated as merely discursive outputs operating upon a passive non-human reality. Materialities and living processes contribute to the outcome. However, the link is not deterministic. With different means of arrangement, the planning reality can – and, in the studied case, could have – end up different.     

The Political Ecology of Transition in Cambodia 1989–1999: War,Peace and Forest Exploitation

Over the last decade, forests have played an important role in the transition from war to peace in Cambodia. Forest exploitation financed the continuation of war beyond the Cold War and regional dynamics, yet it also stimulated co‐operation between conflicting parties. Timber represented a key stake in the rapacious transition from the (benign) socialism of the post‐Khmer Rouge period to (exclusionary) capitalism, thereby becoming the most politicized resource of a reconstruction process that has failed to be either as green or as democratic as the international community had hoped. This article explores the social networks and power politics shaping forest exploitation, with the aim of casting light on the politics of transition. It also scrutinizes the unintended consequences of the international community’s discourse of democracy, good governance, and sustainable development on forest access rights. The commodification of Cambodian forests is interpreted as a process of transforming nature into money through a political ecology of transition that legitimates an exclusionary form of capitalism.     

Remains of the day-preservation of organic micro-residues on stone tools

Here I report on the decay processes of microscopic organic residues left on stone tool surfaces after their use. Residue analysis on ancient stone tools facilitates reconstruction of past activities. This study enables predictions about the circumstances under which ancient residues preserve. Experimental tool sets with modern residues were buried for a year in separate deposits at Sterkfontein, Sibudu (South Africa) and Zelhem (the Netherlands) whose pH and geomorphology varied, they were then analysed using light microscopy. Biological weathering mainly causes residue decay. In unstable environments rich in microbes and micro-organisms, residues decay quickly. From an archaeological perspective this means that sites that are stable, desiccated, waterlogged, extremely acidic or alkaline and extremely cold or hot sites. Different residue types have different preservation optima and this may lead to a preservation and perhaps interpretation bias. The preliminary predictive models presented in this paper could aid in the considered selection of sites and samples.     

LOW- AND MODERATE-INCOME HOUSING IN THE SUBURBS: THE MASSACHUSETTS "ANTI-SNOB ZONING" LAW EXPERIENCE

Can a state re-assertion of power to override local exclusionary zoning practices “open up” the suburbs for low and moderate income households? Such an approach, tried in Massachusetts over the last ten years, has had some notable, though limited results. Some 14,000 units of LMIH have been proposed under the innovative provisions of the Massachusetts “Anti-Snob Zoning” Law, but only about 3,600 have actually been built. The foremost factor limiting the impact of the law has been persistent resistance to it by suburbanites. While much suburban opposition undoubtably stems from racial prejudice and fears, some is based upon rational concern over the costs to local communities of providing services to the residents of subsidized housing. Offsetting these costs with state and/or federal subsidies could lower major barriers to the creation of more housing opportunities in the suburbs for low and moderate income persons.     

Clusters, Power and Place: Inequality and Local Growth in Time–Space

The argument of this paper is that a deeper appreciation of the nature of the power relationships between firms and the circuits of power that bind them together is key to understanding how clusters function — including how they might emerge and how they might decline. We begin to develop a conceptualization that allows us to generate a deeper understanding of the processes that enable the production and reproduction of enterprise clusters under some combinations of circumstances but not others. The sections of the paper explore: (1) concepts of power and circuits of power including their spatialities; (2) the temporarily stabilized relationships which occur in clusters of economic activity; (3) the openness and permeability of clusters as a way of understanding conditions that foster cluster growth; (4) a tentative integration of concepts. From this reading of the concepts of clustering and power we draw the conclusion that clusters are, at any particular point in time, temporary and transient conjunctures of interfirm relationships. They depend on specific circumstances in 'time–space' and, because of their very transience and specificity, those conditions might be very difficult if not impossible to create through the blunt instruments of policy.