An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene

Abstract: Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more‐than‐human actants—a process of co‐transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being‐in‐common of humans and the more‐than‐human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

Of Gardens,Hopes, and Spirits: Unravelling (Extra)Ordinary Community Economic Arrangements as Sites of Transformation in Cape Town,South Africa

Debates around diverse economies have flourished in geography in recent years, challenging the consistent and limiting hegemonic framing of the economy as singularly capitalist and global, through making visible the vast array of economic practices that are taking place alongside and beyond capitalist ones at multiple sites and scales. Bringing together debates around community economies, (relational) approaches to scales and place, and Actor Network Theory, in this article we focus on the narrative of Mama Bokolo, a healer/gardener/diverse economic actor in Cape Town. Grounded on her lived experience, we suggest that allegedly local, marginalised actors like Mama are actively contributing to enact liberatory diverse economic arrangements beyond‐the‐local, by articulating networks across places and scales and fostering relations with a range of diverse, human, natural and supernatural actors. In doing so, we elucidate why precisely these more‐than‐local and more‐than‐human elements can be instrumental to enable transformative economic spaces of hope.     

Progressive localism for an ethics of care: Local Area Co-ordination with people with learning disabilities

In the UK devolution to ‘new’ nations and localities is generating differences in the tone and substance of social care. In Scotland there is an apparent rejection of the ‘personalisation’ model dominant in England and other neoliberal welfare states; in its place, there is an emphasis on locally based co-produced care provision, involving local organisations, practitioners and individuals. The paper argues that this is an outcome of the open and deliberative nature of policy-making, and the further devolution of social care provision to local authorities in Scotland. Local scale networks and spaces of provision are generating a ‘progressive localism’, contesting the association between the local scale and financial austerity, drawing on a relational understanding of place. Non-commodified and locally-based provision expands the discourse of care from ‘caring for’ individuals to ‘caring about’ people and places, in what is termed an ‘ethics of care’. The paper uses the example of people with learning disabilities to examine a more broadly conceived ‘caring’ within local communities, offering possibilities for inclusion and belonging. The paper draws on interviews with key policy makers and place-based care practitioners, known as ‘Local Area Co-ordinators’.     

Walking,mothering and care: a sensory ethnography of journeying on-foot with children in Wollongong,Australia

This article presents a material feminist perspective into motherhood and walking. Our aim is to explore the process of women ‘becoming mothers’ through journeying on-foot somewhere with children in car-dependent cities. To do so we utilise empirical material gathered as part of a walking sensory ethnography with families living in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking and a feminist care ethics we argue that entanglements with bodies and materials alongside ideas, emotions and affects shape how motherhood becomes and is felt on-the-move through ‘moments of care’. We discuss five moments where care emerges not just as a gendered practice, but as an affective force and embodiment of motherhood; these include: preparedness, togetherness, playfulness, watchfulness, and attentiveness. Instead of assuming the figure of the mother is a given identity; insights are provided into how the dilemmas of becoming a ‘good’ mobile mother are felt through moments of care.     

Ethics of care,emotional work,and collective action of solidarity: the Patronas in Mexico

In this paper, we examine the mobilization of the Patronas, a group of Mexican women who have fed thousands of Central American migrants over the past two decades. We argue that the Patronas’ work of feeding and caring for migrants goes beyond essentializing these women’s work as just housewives, mothers, and caregivers. Furthermore, we assert that through these care activities, the Patronas exert a feminist ethic of care that is understood as a set of practices based on trust, reciprocity, and solidarity. The Patronas’ praxis of caring for the migrants resonates with people and attracts hundreds of volunteers to join these women’s emotional and nurturing work leading these women and volunteers to participate in a political practice of solidarity. In this paper, we articulate three key findings: (1) the interplay between the Patronas’ emotional work and the ethics of care, (2) the emergence of a collective act of solidarity around the Patronas’ caring work that leads hundreds of volunteers to visit these women and join them, and (3) the kitchen as a place where the collective act of solidarity begins and where the Patronas experience their personal transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study contributes to further our understanding of the interplay between Latin American women’s participation in social movements, emotional work in these movements, and the ethics of care.     

Age of closure of the foramen of Huschke: an osteological study

The foramen of Huschke is a dehiscence in the antero‐inferior surface of the tympanic plate, which forms during the normal post‐natal development of the temporal bone. Closure of the foramen is generally reported to take place by 5 years of age, although a persistent foramen has been observed in 0–67% of adult crania depending on the population. A persistent foramen of Huschke in adult life may be involved in abnormalities of the external auditory canal and related structures, which can lead to otological complications. This paper examines age‐related changes in the development of the tympanic plate from the perinatal to the adult condition using two osteological samples from Britain, and is the first systematic evaluation beyond the age of six years. The results suggest that the widely cited chronology for the closure of the foramen of Huschke is erroneous. Earlier stages of formation may be used for narrowing age estimation in fragmentary remains of juveniles in a skeletal collection of unknown age or in a forensic or clinical context. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Post‐Mortem Pressure Distortion of Human Crania Uncovered in an Early Medieval Pohansko (Czech Republic) Graveyard

Post‐mortem distortion resulting from the pressure of overlying sediments (i.e. grave backfill) is one of the taphonomic factors capable of altering the geometry of buried and subsequently recovered skeletal remains. If pressure distortion is a frequent occurrence, it could systematically flaw the outcome of an anthropological examination. To study the patterns of post‐mortem distortion in buried crania and shape alterations associated with a specimen's in situ position, 46 male crania recovered from an Old Slavic graveyard (Pohansko, Czech Republic) were analysed together with control specimens from four modern European osteological collections (N = 207) using geometric morphometrics. The results indicate a common pattern of shape change in buried skulls associated with their in situ orientation. However, as the overall shape variation between the Old Slavic crania (which, with their tendency towards longer, narrower shapes differed markedly from the modern Czech crania) oriented in situ on their back and side reflects the duality of dolichocranial and brachycranial forms, it seems likely that the in situ positioning of the crania stemmed from their original morphology. The lack of substantial effect of the in situ orientation on the cranial morphology is associated with a larger cranial size and a tendency for sturdiness in the Old Slavic subsample. Both of these characteristics are likely to be contributing to the resistance of these crania to taphonomic alterations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

The lenses of nationhood: an optical model of identity

ABSTRACT. This paper tries to make the case for a model of political identity based on an optical metaphor, which is especially applicable to nations. Human vision can be separated into sentient object, lenses and inbuilt mental ideas. This corresponds well to identity processes in which ‘light’ from a bounded territorial referent is refracted through various lenses (ideological, material, psychological) to focus in certain ways on particular symbolic resources like genealogy, history, culture or political institutions. Distinguishing between referent, lenses and resources helps us more precisely situate many hitherto disparate problems of national identity. These include the ‘ethnic‐civic’ dilemma, the mystery of national identity before nationalism, and the relationship between local and national, and individual and collective, identities. The model also clarifies the place of universalist ideology, which currently fits poorly within the leading culturalist and materialist theories of nationalism.     

Non‐specific indicators of stress and their association with age at death in Medieval York: Using stature and vertebral neural canal size to examine the effects of stress occurring during different periods of development

Selective mortality can occur towards individuals who survive episodes of physiological stress, such as disease and malnutrition, during development. The skeletal elements affected depend on the timing of these stressful episodes. Studying multiple non‐specific indicators of stress can show which periods of development were affected and whether certain periods can be linked with selective mortality. To examine this method a preliminary study of 61 adult individuals from the Medieval population of Fishergate House, York was undertaken to examine small vertebral neural canal size and reduced adult stature. Previous studies have shown that selective mortality occurs towards individuals who display these non‐specific indicators of stress. Statistical analysis showed that small transverse neural canal diameter was significantly associated with early adult mortality for males and females and there was evidence of selective mortality towards females with reduced stature. This suggests that individuals who died in early adulthood experienced health insults during late childhood which stunted VNC growth but males in particular were not significantly affected by health insults after this age as they achieved a normal adult stature. Therefore it appears that health insults which occurred during late childhood had a greater influence on adult health in the Fishergate House population. This method could be expanded to provide more detailed information by using a greater variety of non‐specific indicators of stress which will allow more specific periods of development to be investigated. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.