Alternatives to Urbanism? Reconsidering <Emphasis Type="Italic">Oppida</Emphasis> and the Urban Question in Late Iron Age Europe

The mega-sites of Late Iron Age Europe (traditionally known as oppida) provide an important dataset for exploring how complex social systems can articulate power in novel ways. The question of whether these can be described as ‘urban’ has overshadowed a deeper understanding of the development and role of such sites, with many studies examining this issue almost wholly against peculiarly classical concepts of urbanism, isolating Iron Age studies from wider debate. Rather than seek to redefine ‘towns’, this paper explores how and why oppida diverge from traditional concepts of urbanism, arguing that the form of oppida reflects their focus on particular aspects—assembly, theatricality, and the household—which reflect the nature of Late Iron Age societies. It will be suggested that oppida are comparable to a range of mega-sites and low-density settlements recognised throughout the world that represent alternative solutions to the social complications urbanism seeks to address.     

‘My Country is like my Mother…’: respect,care, interaction and closeness as principles for undertaking cultural heritage assessments

Investigation of social values is essential to understanding relationships between people and place, particularly in Indigenous cultural heritage management. The value of long-term ethnographic studies is well recognised, however, such approaches are generally not possible in many heritage studies due to time or other constraints. Qualitative research methods have considerable potential in this space, yet few have systematically applied them to understanding Indigenous peoples’ relationships with place. This paper reports on a qualitative study with Alngith people from north-eastern Australia. It begins by exploring the embodied, experiential nature of Alngith peoples’ conception of Country and their emphasis on four interrelated themes: Respect, Care, Interaction and Closeness when describing relationships to Country. We suggest that Alngith people-to-place relationships are underwritten by these ideals and are central to local expectations for respectful, inclusive heritage practices. The results also reveal new perspectives and pathways for Aboriginal communities, and heritage managers dissatisfied with the constraints of ‘traditional’ cultural heritage assessment frameworks that emphasise archaeological methods and values. The paper further demonstrates how qualitative research methodologies can assist heritage managers to move beyond the limitations of surveys and quantitative studies and develop a deeper understanding of Indigenous values, concepts and aspirations (social values).     

On the relational dynamics of caring: a psychotherapeutic approach to emotional and power dimensions of women's care work

Care is double-edged and paradoxical, inspiring a vast range of strong feelings in both care-givers and care-recipients. This article draws on ideas about psychotherapeutic relationships to offer a theorisation of the complex emotional and power dynamics and imaginative geographies of care. Examining the humanistic approach developed by Carl Rogers as well as the psychoanalytic tradition, I advance an interpretation of psychotherapeutic practices that foregrounds the fundamental importance of the emotional and power-inflected relationship between practitioners and those with whom they work. I show how different traditions offer conceptualisations of the shape of therapeutic relationships that are highly relevant to consideration of the emotional and power dynamics of giving and receiving care. Against this background I discuss current debates about care, emotions and power, drawing especially on feminist and disability perspectives and arguing that psychotherapeutic approaches offer a powerful lens through which to understand the emotional and power dynamics of caring relationships. I conclude by emphasising how this theorisation helps to illuminate ubiquitous features of women's care work.     

Parading the green – Procession as subaltern resistance in Manchester in 1867

This paper discusses the use of procession as a technique of subaltern resistance in a situation where hegemonic power is particularly dominant. After a review of the literature on hegemony, resistance and the origin and nature of processions, it discusses the situation in Manchester in late 1867 following the execution of the three Irishmen who became known as “The Manchester Martyrs”. Using contemporary British and Irish newspapers of varied outlook, it analyses processions of sympathy held on 24 November and 1 December. The organisation, route and composition of the processions and the dress and behaviour of the participants are analysed to demonstrate how procession can express resistance. The case study demonstrates how hegemony and resistance are closely intertwined and that spaces for resistance exist even in the most difficult circumstances, provided those organising resistance show sufficient understanding of the opportunities offered by national and local cultural traditions and local power relationships, and are able to persuade their followers to tailor their act of resistance to that context.     

Heroic Power in Thomas Carlyle and Leo Tolstoy

This paper explores two opposed paradigmatic approaches to heroic power: Thomas Carlyle's versus Leo Tolstoy's. In On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), Carlyle argues for its crucial importance, whereas in War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy denies its very possibility. Carlyle's heroic model attributes to the hero (the leader) a high degree of mastery and control over social and political circumstances, whereas Tolstoy's a-heroic model implies a small degree of personal mastery and much greater constraints on the individual leader. Both models achieved prominence in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, which brought the role of the individual (hero) in history to the forefront of intellectual and political debate throughout Europe. The two models are shown as parts of and important links in long-established traditions; they are internally coherent yet totally contradictory of each other. The comparison of these opposed perceptions of heroic figures in history suggests that they might originate in an ambivalent, polarized perception of power and mastery, and in the sense of individual insecurity in the face of historical upheavals.     

Rethinking electoral geography: spaces and practices of democracy in Nicaragua

Despite engagements with Foucauldian and Deleuzian insights by many geographers, concerns remain that we are still failing to understand the difference geography makes to the exercise of power. This article, which focuses on the 2006 Nicaraguan elections, has three main aims. The first is to explore the relationship between power and space through the lens of an electoral campaign. The second is to contribute to recent attempts to theoretically reinvigorate electoral geography. The third is to provide an alternative reading of democratisation in Nicaragua. Ultimately, this article focuses on how ordinary people in the interests of creating a better life for themselves make do with the circumstances in which they live.     

Afghanistan's energy sociotechnical imaginaries: Alternative visions in a conflict zone

Imaginaries are understood to be both discursive and cognitive constructs that shape behaviour, policies, and institutions – but how do longstanding imaginaries evolve in new circumstances, and how do they interact with existing power structures in changed circumstances? Drawing on conceptions of discursive power, this paper investigates the interplay of power with both new and old imaginaries in the case of Afghanistan, specifically regarding alternative energy futures. Employing an interpretive approach, we draw on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with elite stakeholders and policy observers, to provide an account of the relations between alternative energy futures imaginaries and political power. We demonstrate, how certain discursive practices are made possible, authorised and articulated through imaginative geographies. Critically, the government-advocated imaginary of Afghanistan as an energy corridor and hence an energy importer both represents the views of several powerful interests and concurs with the long-held idea of Afghanistan as a buffer state. In this way, political path dependencies are reinforced through a supportive imaginary, just as the dominant imaginary is itself reinforced by the main stakeholders. While in line with our interpretive epistemology we do not make claims for the specific configuration of imaginaries being generalisable elsewhere, we do find the general theoretical approach useful for understanding discursive aspects of conflict zone politics, particularly vis-à-vis energy system trajectories.     

PHOTOGRAPHS, SYMBOLIC IMAGES, AND THE HOLOCAUST: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING HISTORICAL TRUTH

Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the "limits of representation." Nevertheless there are many photographs "showing" the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that bespeak the photographers' gaze and the circumstances of the photographs' production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as "evil." Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography (Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag, Barthes) to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may—despite their abstract meaning—be able to depict historical truth.     

Exploring the Frontier of Livelihoods Research

This article discusses the value of livelihoods studies and examines the obstacles which have prevented it from making a greater contribution to understanding the lives of poor people over the past decade. After examining the roots of the livelihoods approach, two major challenges are explored: the conceptualization of the problem of access, and how to achieve a better understanding of the mutual link between livelihood opportunities and decision‐making. The article concludes that access to livelihood opportunities is governed by social relations, institutions and organizations, and that power is an important (and sometimes overlooked) explanatory variable. In discussing the issue of access to livelihood opportunities, the authors note the occurrence of both strategic and unintentional behaviour and the importance of structural factors; they discuss concepts of styles and pathways, which try to cater for structural components and regularities; and they propose livelihood trajectories as an appropriate methodology for examining these issues. In this way, the article also sets the agenda for future livelihoods research.     

There's No‐Place Like Home: emotional geographies of researching ‘race’ and refuge provision in Britain

In this article we draw on feminist and psychodynamic theory to discuss processes of researching service provision for minoritised women escaping domestic violence. Our aim is to take seriously the ways particular contexts, in this case as produced by the process of researching this topic, elicit specific responses. In particular we offer some conceptual tools for analysing the emotions generated in these geographies. Taking the ‘space’ of the research team as our focus, we analyse how culturally defined meanings of ‘home’, community and refuge that were the focus of our research topic also functioned as a lens through which tensions and dynamics within the project team could be understood. Just as secrecy, silence and shame figured in our participants' accounts, so they circulated between the team. Drawing on the motifs of the intersection of ‘space’ and ‘place’ (as they occur within discourses and practices around domestic violence and minoritisation) as well as the psychodynamic notions of ‘mirroring’ and ‘parallel process’, we consider the extent to which the combined racialised, gendered and institutional relationships structuring the research team constituted it as a ‘non‐place’. This is because it was a space produced by the research process which, other than this, had no acknowledged tradition of history or memory to anchor it. We discuss how this space functioned paradoxically to foster creativity and innovation in generating discourses and practices working across difference, as well as inevitably at times recapitulating prevailing power (including racialised) relationships. We end by evaluating the usefulness of such concepts for wider analyses of intercultural and antiracist feminist practice.     

Community sustainability and resilience: similarities,differences and indicators

Sustainability has been a core conceptual framework for community development since the approach was popularized in 1987, although in its essence it reflects a long history of environmental conservation reactions to industrialization. Resilience, as a framework for understanding and approaching community development, emerged more gradually out of ecological studies in the 1980s, but has only recently, since the mid-2000s, emerged as a focus of public interest as a way of responding and adapting to the planet's growing anthropogenic changes. For many, sustainability and resilience are slightly nuanced perspectives on the same phenomenon. For others, however, there are distinct differences between them, with sustainability's conservation goals being in opposition to the adaptation goals of resilience. Two major reasons for these confusions are (1) both concepts are defined and used in many different ways to achieve a variety of political goals that may not reflect their core definitions, and (2) both concepts share similar goals and some common approaches, such as a focus on climate change and seeking a balance between humans and nature. Returning to the core definitions of conservation and adaptation helps to clarify their similarities and differences, as well as to articulate indicators for understanding how each applies to community tourism development. Indicators from research in rural Taiwan tourism communities were therefore based on responses to the questions: What does the community want to conserve and how do they want to do it (sustainability)? What do they want to change and how do they want to do it (resilience)? Preliminary results suggest that the new ideal community is the one that is both sustainable and resilient.     

环境政治中国际非政府组织的角色——基于批判地缘政治的视角

国际非政府组织（INGO）在国际环境政治中发挥着日益重要的角色,也是中国"一带一路"走出去的关键影响要素之一。批判地缘政治关注主权国家之外的非政府行为体,同时对权力概念提出了新的理解。借助其思想,本文指出国际环境政治中INGO的作用,并通过尺度-权力框架分析其行动和角色。发现：①INGO在环境等国际公共事务上作用不断凸显;②INGO在多个尺度上通过不同的权力影响环境政治;③INGO与政府存在依赖、合作和对抗等不同的互动关系。因此,应处理好与INGO的关系,借助其独特的权力助力"一带一路"建设。     

Trans-Subsystem Dynamics: Policy Topography, Mass Opinion, and Policy Change

We argue that the treatment of trans-subsystem change, and particularly the role of public opinion in fostering such change, within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been underspecified. We propose a model of "policy topography" that combines the concepts of public opinion, clusters of linked subsystems, and policy issue venues. While the ACF has characterized subsystems as relatively self-contained, we argue that they are more usefully understood as operating in a relatively permeable fashion among evolving clusters of subsystems linked together by networked relations, strategically overlapping policy considerations, and public opinion disruptions. The "policy topography" model offers opportunities to assess the relationships across policy subsystems, and to better specify the critical relationship between public policy and mass opinions. We offer examples, and suggest hypotheses along with avenues for appropriate empirical analysis.     

Instrumental routes to emotional geographies

Emotional experiences and relationships have traditionally been marginalized in human geography despite their impact on all aspects of social life. We argue, however, that understanding emotions is crucial for appreciating how the world of human (inter)actions works. To develop this argument we address two key questions. First, we ask how it is possible for social scientists to access the intimate emotional content of human affairs. One answer to this lies in settings where the emotional dimensions of social relations are deliberately and routinely enhanced. The example we take is that of musical performance. Second, we consider what might be done with these emotional ways of knowing once they have been acquired. What relevance does emotional knowing and being have? To address this, we turn to the relatively neglected concept of social well‐being, and we outline some ways in which ‘musicking’ might be used to promote it. These include music as therapy; music as a way of enhancing quality of life; and music as a medium of empowerment.     

Pastoral Power, Governmentality and Cultures of Order in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia

I deploy Michel Foucault's concepts of pastoral power and governmentality to investigate the material consequences of two very different visions of the governance of Native people in nineteenth-century British Columbia. This entails a consideration of these modalities of power, and of the usefulness of relocating them in a colonial context. But I also argue that the conceptions of order embedded within these two modalities of power bear the stamp of, and demonstrate, very distinctive cultural geographies.     

Not a zero-sum game: inequalities and resilience in Sumner,Missouri, the Gooseless Goose Capital of the World

Recent works on socio-ecological resilience stress the need to integrate inequalities and power into considerations of how communities are reorganized in response to socio-ecological transformations such as climate change. These works have often approached inequalities and power as zero-sum games, with scholars framing individuals and groups within communities as either empowered or marginalized. Drawing from 20 months of fieldwork in a rural community in the central United States that was being rearranged in response to shifts in trans-national goose migration patterns, the author shows inequalities and power do not work in such dichotomous manners because different dimensions of inequality intersect and transform each other in reciprocal manners. Gender, class, and sexuality intersected to inform how individuals sustained their community, and particular men and women were simultaneously (dis)advantaged because of how their relationships with each other were rearranged in response to shifting goose migration patterns. These findings suggest scholars and policy makers working on issues related to socio-ecological resilience can better account for inequalities and power by utilizing the theoretical framework of intersectionality.     

Power and the Spirit of Clustering

This paper utilizes the Scotch Whisky industry to identify an issue which is absent from the current literature on sector specific clusters namely the concept of power. It is argued that in order to understand the nature of power relationships within a cluster it is necessary to adopt a radical Coasian framework. The paper utilizes a typical Structure-conduct-performance approach to analyse the Scotch Whisky industry and to highlight the problems that power relationships pose within a typical cluster. It is imperative that policy-makers are aware of the power relationships which exist in clusters if clustering strategies are to deliver the perceived potential.     

A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.     

Gold Chemistry is Different

Abstract

The attractive properties of gold have long been taken for granted without any questioning of the basic chemistry that lies behind them. Today, chemists are beginning to find the reasons for gold's unique position among the family of elements. After a general introduction to gold chemicals and a review of some of the element's unusual facets, the author, who has contributed much himself to this research, explains that only through a consideration of relativistic effects has a deeper understanding of the chemistry of gold emerged. These theoretical advances have led to the preparation of a multitude of novel gold compounds characterised by clusters of gold atoms which can incorporate carbon and nitrogen atoms. In the light of these modern concepts of bonding and structure, the chemistry of gold is now a subject of research in many laboratories and its literature has exploded.