International relations research performance among Australian universities

In this research note, the authors briefly report the results of an exercise measuring the relative research performance of Australian universities in the field of international relations (IR). The findings are based on counting articles in the leading journals in the field, as determined by the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) journal ranking. The authors also present the number of IR scholars in each university according to a 2011 survey. Three issues are addressed: the logic of journal rankings, especially in light of the decision to drop these from the ERA exercise; the method by which the data was compiled; and a discussion of the findings. These results build on and update those reported earlier for the broader discipline of political science, extending to the period 2003–11.     

Passing as a tourist: Exploring the everyday urban geopolitics of tourism

This paper presents a case study of territorial boundary transgression and intergroup encounters mediated by tourism in a volatile and contested urban space. I present the notion of ‘passing as a tourist’ as a prism to investigate the nexus between performative tourism and everyday urban geopolitics. Situated in East Jerusalem's core geographies of colonization and political violence, this paper uses archival news material and a textual analysis of primary questionnaire data to critically examine how Jewish Israeli Jerusalemites visiting the Muslim Quarter in the Old City negotiate encounters in a conflicted space. The study reveals how the performative dimensions of ‘tourism’ in a context of polarized ethnonational division expose the role of embodied, everyday geopolitics in the production of urban spaces of tourism.     

International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies,cultures and geopolitics

ABSTRACT

This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed most of Asia's large rivers. In recent years, India and China have pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and droughts. However, the region's complexity is not matched by IR's theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent conflict between state actors. We argue that IR's analysis of the region must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political authority and the region's environment.     

Woman as Utopia. Against relations of representation

The argument of this paper is based on water, i.e. on the metaphor of something that does not have a form, but is forming. Attempting to write herself without representing herself, the author invites the reader to understand her/his self without having to define it. In order to do that the question ‘What IS a woman?’ must be put in question. Then the definite existence of the IS can be turned into a paradoxical (non‐)being like that of Utopia. The space of geography is a space of what IS. Could woman feel at home in such a framework? Or does she inhabit the paradoxical space of Utopia? What would a geography of the Utopia be like? What is the space of the woman?     

Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender,space and the everyday

Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, ‘gendering’ militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisation – and transformation – possible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites.     

Touring as labour: mobilities and reconsideration of tour guiding in everyday life

Abstract

The research adopts the mobilities approach to examining the everyday experience of tour guides. Scholars tend to highlight guides as service providers and cultural brokers, whose activities and feelings seem to be subordinate to tourism consumption. In contrast, the research moves beyond the context of business and economy and seeks to resituate tour guiding in ordinary life. It draws on the ethnographic fieldwork in Sanya, a coastal city in south China, and adopts the methods of secondary data collection, interviews and participant observation for data generation. Specifically, the research scrutinises how tourism mobilities are embedded into the production of local guides’ daily practices, emotions and feelings. Tour guiding is characterised by movement/stillness, instability and contested meanings. On working days, guides travel with tourists between scenic sites, receiving unstable income. The mobile work greatly shapes their everyday rhythms, social networks, familial lives and identities. On jobless days, guides are likely to confine ordinary practices to residence and suffer from deep anxiety. Immobilities arouse their feelings of inability and worries about the future, thus lowering their expectations of career and personal development. The research problematises the idiosyncrasy of tour guiding and underscores its close relationship with the production of everyday practices and experience, thus giving a wider view on tourism work. In so doing, it also enriches our understanding of the complexity of tourism mobilities and contributes to the debate on the de-differentiation of tourism.     

International relations and foreign policy in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS) has evolved from a publication that deliberately relegated articles in international relations (IR) to a secondary status to one that has defined and encouraged leading-edge contributions to that field. This development can be attributed to successive AJPS editorial teams’ realisation that contemporary political problems are increasingly interconnected and that emerging approaches to IR reflect this condition. Several recent and key IR debates that have emerged within the journal’s pages are assigned special attention here: the linking of Australia’s domestic politics to that country’s foreign policy interests and behaviour; in-depth discussions that relate to ongoing trends in the international political economy; critical analysis of national defence and regional security postures; and diverse theoretical perspectives that are increasingly shaping the IR field’s paradigmatic identity. It is concluded that the AJPS is now a leading source of IR thought and discourse.     

Periodic amplitude variations as precursors of plumes of equatorial ionospheric irregularities

Periodic amplitude fluctuations of VHF signals from a geostationary satellite monitored from near the magnetic equator have been observed in the evening hours as precursors of strong Rayleigh fading associated with plumes of irregularities. These periodic fluctuations called “amplitude waves” exhibit amplitude changes of only 1 to 2 dB and have been observed for up to 30 minutes before the onset of strong scintillations. Individual fades are correlated over distances of at least 120 km in the magnetic eastwest direction. The velocity of these wavelike disturbances has been found to be approximately 140 ms⁻¹ eastward with a corresponding wavelength of 25 km. No wavelike behavior of Faraday rotation, a measure of the background changes in TEC, was observed during these times. Several mechanisms are examined as the cause of these amplitude waves; however, none was found to be completely satisfactory in explaining the observations.     

The influence of the 'spaces of everyday life' on pregnancy health

Given the recent focus of medical geography on the social influences of health and illness, this paper draws upon a socio‐theoretical framework to show the link between pregnancy health and the spaces of everyday life. The health of pregnant women is becoming increasingly important given that 85 percent of women work during their pregnancy. Employment during pregnancy is consistently linked with good health for infants; however, large discrepancies exist on the effects for employed mothers. This study estimates the health effect of women's employment during pregnancy with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Findings show that women's involvement in paid employment has a beneficial impact for infants compared to women not involved in paid labour. Women who work one job or more per week experience more health problems than women who work less than one job per week. Finally, women who work in male‐dominated and gender‐neutral workspaces experience significantly more prenatal problems than women in female‐dominated workspaces. In conclusion, there is evidence to support that differences in employment status, number of workplaces involved in and gendered workspaces influence the experience of health and illness that are negotiated in the spaces of everyday life.     

Microcredit as a Grass-Roots Policy for International Development

The failure of top-down development policies in the Third World has given rise to a variety of grass-roots, or bottom-up, development strategies to combat the severe poverty that continues to plague developing countries. Among these grass-roots approaches, microcredit has grown rapidly in popularity, scope, and impact over the last two decades. Microcredit provides financial capital for poor entrepreneurs who toil in the informal, poverty sectors in developing country economies. In addition to the thousands of predominantly nongovernmental organizations that offer microcredit programs, many national governments in the Third World are now seeking to integrate microcredit strategies into their development policy and planning. Accordingly, this article examines the microcredit movement, including its rationale and underlying premises, its impact on the poor, and its role in development policy.     

Geomagnetic field variations as a dating tool: Application to Sicilian lavas

Over 40 historically dated Mt Etna lava flows have been carefully sampled for the purpose of palaeomagnetic analysis. The natural remanent magnetization (NRM) of each lava flow contains a record of both the magnitude and direction of the Earth's magnetic field at the time of its eruption. Our analysis has thus enabled us to determine the change of the magnetic field in Sicily through historic times and to construct curves which show this secular variation of the field in both direction and magnitude. In this paper, the curves are used to reconsider the historical dates attributed to a number of Etna lavas, dates which had since been questioned by recent palaeomagnetic and geological studies. In a similar manner, these secular variation curves can be used as a powerful archaeological dating tool by comparison with the NRM of fired artifacts.     

Childhood narratives: adult reflections on encounters with difference in everyday spaces

Research on children and young people commonly focuses on the present experiences of childhood. Yet Philo, C. [2003. “‘To Go Back up the Side Hill’: Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood.” Children's Geographies 1 (1): 7–24] has argued that we might also access the ‘worlds’ of children and childhood through the memories or recollections of adults, given that we have all been children once. In response, this paper explores the narratives of adults reflecting on their childhood experiences and in particular, on the formation of their attitudes towards difference. The paper offers a means of understanding how adults reflect on their childhood encounters with difference, how their attitudes towards difference are developed over time and the extent to which these childhood narratives are carried into adult lives. This is not to suggest that early experiences are deterministic. Rather, individuals can reflect on their own lives and encounters and choose to change or react to wider social relations in new ways such that they produce and embody new dispositions.