Review Symposium

Books reviewed: Don Watson, Death Sentence: the Decay of Public Language. Phillip O’Neill, Introduction to the Symposium Bob Fagan, Globalisation and the Death Sentence Elissa Sutherland, Getting Inside the Heads of our Audience: Creating Inclusive Public Debate Kevin Dunn, New Words within New Worlds: Academic Dynamism as Elixir Chris Gibson, On Academic Language, and Publishing Books: Whither the Bestseller? Phillip O’Neill, Writing Geography to be Read     

Review Symposium

Abstract

This book is an attempt to make sense of, on the one hand, the intersection between Christianity, place, and identity, and on the other, the relationship between church, civil society, the market and the state.²     

Making Space in Geographical Analysis

In this commentary we reflect on the potential and power of geographical analysis, as a set of methods, theoretical approaches, and perspectives, to increase our understanding of how space and place matter for all. We emphasize key aspects of the field, including accessibility, urban change, and spatial interaction and behavior, providing a high-level research agenda that indicates a variety of gaps and routes for future research that will not only lead to more equitable and aware solutions to local and global challenges, but also innovative and novel research methods, concepts, and data. We close with a set of representation and inclusion challenges to our discipline, researchers, and publication outlets.     

"留学生与中外文化"国际学术研讨会综述

在津、徐两地召开的迄今为止国内规模最大的一次研究留学生的会议——“留学生与中外化国际学术研讨会”上,来自美、法、日、韩等国以及中国大陆、香港、台湾地区的一百多位学就“留学生与中外化”问题提交了各自的最新研究成果。会议体现了如下特点：对留学史的研究对象从时间上和空间上进行了新的拓展;对留学生群体和个案的研究进行了进一步挖掘;在研究方法上,体现了现代学科之间的交叉融合;在学术理念上,则淡出了意识形态的制约,体现了研究的纯学术性;史料的运用也呈现出推陈出新的景象。选题视角开阔、观点新颖,体现了学术的创新精神以及同现实的紧密联系。     

Textiles and the Making of Sacred Space

This paper develops a perspective on fabric and its use in religious settings, working from a comparative survey of critical literature arising, primarily, from anthropological writings on cloth and clothing in conjunction with insights gained from ethnographic research among Eastern Orthodox Christians. While the character of Orthodox Christianity and the broad nature of comparative religion shape how the argument is presented, the primary focus of the paper is not on the religious contexts, but rather the particular items of fabric in use, and, more generally, the exact qualities of fabric that allow for its use in such diverse contexts. Rather than taking an argument of historical specificity, the paper is grounded in a material culture approach to fabric, suggesting that a cross-cultural appraisal of fabric that spans different historical periods allows critical insight into the modes of operation within human experience. The central argument of the paper is that, because of the material qualities inherent in fabric, it can be used in such a manner as to make present the sacred.     

A Review of the International Academic Symposium on Tibetan Archaeology and Art

To date at least two aspects of Tibetan studies have become prominent. One is Tibetan archaeology which has grown from a base of ever-enriching fieldwork, and the other is Tibetan art studies which is dominated by Tibetan Buddhist art. In western humanity disciplines,archaeology and art history have always been regarded     

Making Space: Women's urban and rural activism and the Australian state

Recent discussions of political actions have emphasised the ways that strategic use of spaces, places and various spatial scales helps to constitute activist practice. Advancing their interests involves activists in spatial practices that seek simultaneously to achieve cohesion and identity for their group, and to negotiate the shifting 'opportunity structures' of their context. In this article, the authors use examples of Australian women's activism in urban and rural contexts to show (1) the spatial processes with which activist groups have negotiated their strategic identities, and (2) how activist groups have constructed their politics spatially with reference to the opportunities presented by the Australian state of the early to mid-1990s. The urban activism discussed is that of parents (primarily women) contesting the quality of children's services in an outer suburban Melbourne municipality; the rural activism is that of the national Women in Agriculture movement, seeking increased recognition of the roles of women in agricultural occupations and sectors. The article elaborates on how the groups have mobilised to develop their constituencies within the contexts of the Australian state of the time, using different spaces and sites, finding appropriate languages and bureaucratic targets, and making a space for their concerns politically, symbolically and materially.     

论元明清时期的西南少数民族土司土官制度与改土归流

羁縻职官制度既是我国少数民族传统职官制度的主要形式,也是以皇权统治为核心的封建王朝实行的基本民族政策。元明清时期的西南少数民族土司土官制度是诸朝历代羁縻职官制度的进一步发展和集大成。土司土官制度既是皇权统治下二元结构的职官制度,也是最终将少数民族纳入统一职官制度管理的一种过渡和准备。土司土官制度始于元代,盛行于明代,衰落于清代,其残余一直延续到新中国成立。土司土官制度的兴衰始终与改土归流活动联系在一起。     

Warfare,Imperialism, and the Making of Modern Chinese History: A Review Essay

This historiographic essay contends that warfare made and unmade the Qing dynasty between 1644 and 1911, and its study has helped to create the field of modern Chinese history during the past seventy years. It advances three principal claims. First, the literature on war, especially interstate conflict, can serve as a synecdoche for the development of the modern China field as a whole since the 1950s. The research interests of late Qing specialists have oscillated along an “external-internal-external” axis that corresponds with three distinct periods of intellectual inquiry, scholarly production, and generational dominance. Second, historians have reached inaccurate conclusions about the state capacity of the Qing Empire after 1840 through a crude analysis of the First Sino-Japanese War, a mistake they can rectify by adopting a longer-term perspective on the state-making process. Third, scholars have deftly traced the changing role of military power in modern Chinese politics but have also adopted the interpretive categories of wen and wu from literati discourse without sufficient critical reflection. In the future, researchers may seek to explore the intersection of warfare and the environment, technology, and ethnic identity, approaches that will continue to move the field in comparative, global, and Inner Asian directions.     

Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development,Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions

This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and communities whose land use practices contradict these logics. Since the 1970s, “improvement” has meant establishing different types of tree plantations on wastelands to ostensibly provide energy security. These projects have dispossessed land users by enclosing common property lands and by providing forms of energy incommensurate with local needs, a trend I term “energy dispossessions”. Factors enabling energy dispossessions include the government's increased attempts to establish public–private partnerships to carry out “improvement” and a “field of observation” constructed to obscure local livelihoods. Unveiling these logics will help to problematize and contest future iterations of wasteland development.     

Making Space for Wind Farms: Practices of Territorial Stigmatisation in Rural Denmark

While issues of siting wind farms have often revolved around their local resistance, finding adequate locations and gaining access to land for large wind energy projects has become an increasingly significant challenge for developers, in particular in small countries with relatively mature wind energy sectors, such as Denmark. By drawing on the case of “Outskirts‐Denmark”, this paper focuses on how existing territorial stigma of rural areas is co‐produced and mobilised by wind farm developers to make space for large wind farm projects. In doing so, we demonstrate that the mobilisation of stigma through derogatory rhetoric and forecasting rural decline is used to legitimise the purchase and demolition of properties in marginalised rural areas. We then critically discuss how these developer practices produce controversies over the erosion of rural communities and are entangled in a neoliberal undermining of the planning system, revealing issues of rural energy justice.     

Making Space and Place for the Knowledge Economy: Knowledge-based Development of Australian Cities

The impact of what has been broadly labelled the knowledge economy has been such that, even in the absence of precise measurement, it is the undoubted dynamo of today's global market and an essential part of any global city. The socio-economic importance of knowledge production in a knowledge economy is clear, and it is an emerging social phenomenon and research agenda in geographical studies. Knowledge production, and where, how and by whom it is produced, is an urban phenomenon that is poorly understood in an era of strong urbanization. This paper focuses on knowledge community precincts as the catalytic magnet infrastructures impacting on knowledge production in cities. The paper discusses the increasing importance of knowledge-based urban development (KBUD) within the paradigm of the knowledge economy and the role of knowledge community precincts as instruments to seed the foundation of knowledge production in cities. This paper explores the KBUD, and particularly knowledge community precinct development, potentials of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and benchmarks this against that of Boston, MA.