Culture, religion and curriculum: lessons from the 'three books' controversy in Surrey, BC

This article considers the spatial, cultural, and legal dimensions of the controversy surrounding the Surrey School Board's religiously motivated refusal to approve three books portraying families with same-sex parents. It examines the issue in terms of debates over the public/private distinction, and the notion of a 'culture war' between progressive and orthodox stakeholders. The polarized opinions advanced in such debates not only invoke and rely upon particular understandings of space, they also have ramifications for the organization of the public sphere, and services such as public education in particular. This article focuses on the three decisions handed down in the Surrey case, culminating in the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling that religious concerns have a place in public decision making, but not to the exclusion of other considerations. This decision signals that the religious opinions of some parents may shape the public school curriculum, and thus the instruction of all pupils. In this respect, it poses a serious challenge to liberal visions of secular public education, and to a secular public sphere more generally.     

Infrastructures of trust and distrust: The politics and ethics of emerging cryptographic technologies

The authors of this article are engaged in anthropological research on the links between the growing interest in privacy and data security as a technical field and how notions of trust, security and accountability are practised in and beyond technical fields of cryptography, specifically a field called multi-party computation (MPC). They pursue the relationship between trust in different forms of cryptography – academic and activist – and notions of trust as they are articulated in relation to data security and the protection of citizens’ data. There is a tension between the concerns raised in public debates about data security and the promises of emerging cryptographic protocols. In political speeches and public debates, citizens’ trust that governments and tech companies will protect their data is framed as important and essential. In the environments of emerging cryptographic technologies, such as blockchains, bitcoin and MPC, a promise to provide ‘trustless trust’ and abandon the need for trusted intermediaries, authorities and institutions is articulated.     

Globalization,State Restructuring and Innovation in European Water Management Systems: Reflections from England and Wales

Since the mid-1990s the notion of 'hollowing out' has been increasingly used within debates about the changing role of the nation-state in the management and regulation of public services. This paper is concerned with the impact of the various processes of hollowing out on innovation actions in the privatized water sector, particularly in terms of the changing drivers for innovation and the reconfiguration of public and private sector roles across Europe. In order to develop a more detailed case study of English water management, we draw on the Innovation Systems literature, regulation theory and globalization debates to locate a shift from a hierarchical and insular national system in England pre-privatization to a more complex and diffuse system after 1989. In common with some of the more sophisticated accounts of hollowing out we demonstrate that the role of the nation-state in shaping innovation decisions has not necessarily diminished, rather it has been reconfigured in response to various social, economic and environmental factors.     

‘On the Road to Mandalay’: The Development of Railways in British Burma, 1870–1900

ABSTRACT

This article examines the history of railway development in British Burma between 1870 until 1900. In particular, it focuses on how railways and public works projects became a key site of contestation about Burma’s prospects, value, and future during the late nineteenth century, as well as how a litany of agents – both official and non-official – influenced the path of railway development in the colony. This article not only reveals the difficulties and disputes that impacted railway construction in Burma, but also how these debates led to the eventual privatisation of Burma’s railway system in the 1890s. In doing so, this article demonstrates how myriad agents with often competing aims affected the colony’s social and economic development, as well as how the results of these debates and the subsequent construction of railways produced a new geography of occupation in British Burma.     

Disentangling the politics of breastfeeding

Infant feeding has become a target of policy at international, national and local levels. In the UK, although breastfeeding has been recognised as having a major role to play in public health, less than 1% of babies are exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life. In this article, I highlight the need to better understand this gap between policy and practice. I describe how Actor-Network Theory and the debates around vibrant materialities can bring fresh insights into the complex entanglements around breastfeeding, and its particular forms of politics, and consider how infant feeding might challenge and enrich these approaches.     

'The ravages of permissiveness': sex education and the permissive society

In this article we explore how sex education in schools has become an adversarial political issue. Although sex education has never been a wholly uncontroversial subject, we show that for two decades after the Second World War there was a broad consensus among policy-makers that it offered a solution to public health and social problems, especially venereal disease. From the late 1960s, this consensus came under attack. As part of a wider effort to reverse the changes associated with the 'permissive' society and legislation of the late 1960s, moral traditionalists and pro-family campaigners sought to problematize sex education. They depicted it as morally corrupting and redefined it as a problem rather than a public health solution. Henceforth, the politics of sex education became increasingly polarized and adversarial. We conclude that the fractious debates about sex education in the 1980s and 1990s are a legacy of this reaction against the permissive society.     

Infective Economies: Empire,Panic and the Business of Disease

The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, the paper suggests that an analysis of a ‘local’ epidemic episode and its wider reverberations provides a new perspective on the often heated debates during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the meaning and scope of empire in relation to new communication networks. The paper shows how expanding global networks were construed alternatively as sustaining and jeopardising imperial power. The bubonic plague in Hong Kong—a hub of ‘free trade’ in East Asia—and the panicked reactions elicited by the disease's diffusion westwards revealed the economic priorities that informed colonial public health concerns as well as the challenges posed to laissez-faire economic policy and ‘free trade’ by the expanding influence of capital in the ‘New Imperialism’. In so doing, the paper suggests that contemporary preoccupations with ‘globalisation’, ‘biosecurity’ and ‘emerging diseases’ have antecedents that lie beyond the Second World War and the interwar period in a late-nineteenth-century imperial biopolitics.     

Networks of connectivity,territorial fragmentation,uneven development: The new politics of city-regionalism

Over the past decade much has been written about the centrality of city-regions to accounts of economic success. But despite a rich and varied literature highlighting the importance of city-centric capitalism, the concept of the city-region remains ambiguous. Defined in economic terms, all too often what is missing from these accounts is how city-regions are constructed politically, and the processes by which they are rendered visible spaces. While recent interventions have done much to advance debates on the former, this paper explores the struggle to define, delimit and designate city-regions through recent endeavours to construct a spatial map of city-regions in England. The aim is to demonstrate how the processes by which city-regions are constructed politically are the mediated outcome of trans-regional economic flows and political claims to territory. The paper concludes by relating these findings to ongoing debates around state, space and scalar geographies, and speculates what they might mean for the future of city-regional debate.     

Governance,public policy and boundary-making

This symposium draws attention to innovative and emerging research in Australian public policy exploring the interplay of governance, public policy and boundary-making. Conceptually and substantively, boundaries are fundamental to understanding policy outcomes, yet remain overlooked and undertheorised. We aim to contribute to public policy debates, in Australia and beyond, by provoking further reflection on this theme, in particular, the distributive effects of boundaries in policy-making; the blurring of boundaries implicit to governance frameworks; the crossing of boundaries, especially by policy-officials within and between institutions; the construction of boundaries to separate and marginalise; and the existence of temporal–spatial boundaries that demarcate jurisdiction and authority. In short, the study of governance and public policy-making is marked by multiple different types of boundaries but the way in which boundaries get drawn and redrawn is also suffuse with political contestation meaning they raise crucial questions about the exercise of power.     

Negotiating alliances: Muslims,gay rights and the Christian right in a Polish‐American city (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Muslim involvement in debates over municipal gay rights legislation became a hotly contested issue in Hamtramck, Michigan, during the summer of 2008. The article analyzes how faith‐based and other kinds of alliance building that took place in the context of these debates impacted processes of boundary formation among Muslim, Christian and secular‐humanist groups. In Hamtramck, debate over the Human Rights Ordinance served as a rich and generative nexus point for the proliferation and exchange of ideas about the incorporation of Muslim values and sentiments in the public sphere. A study of these debates offers us a window into understanding the politicization of Islam as a minority religion, the symbolic space it occupies, and its engagement with the institutionalization of secularism in the US at the current time.     

Islam: Issues of Political Authority and Pluralism

Abstract

Islam and the Muslim world are very much part of the current discussions on religion and global politics. This article looks at some of the more general debates about the gradual rise of Islam in the public and political consciousness. It is not a systematic analysis of Islamic political systems or political thought nor a discussion about key thinkers of the last century. It does, however, provide a glimpse into diverse views about leadership and governance in early and more recent Islamic history. The article concentrates more on Sunni Islam though the author is well aware that this is not the normative tradition in some parts of the Muslim world. Within the context of this diversity, it looks at issues of religious diversity and how they fit into current debates about inter-religious dialogue and pluralism.     

The European Family and Athenian Fatherland: Political Metaphors Ancient and Modern

Abstract

This article explores the role and modes of operation of metaphorical framing in ancient Greek and modern European and American political discourse. It looks at how concepts such as citizenship, ownership, family, morality, finance, sport, war, domination, human life, and animals are used to reframe political issues in ways promoted by the speaker, and how they may continue to be reshaped in the ongoing political discourse. The analysis of examples of ancient Athenian public rhetoric and of modern European and American political debates reveals the differences and some striking similarities in the ways political and civic values were expressed and reframed in antiquity and how they are used today. This essay also discusses the potential effects of such framing in antiquity and in more recent times.     

Water wizards: reshaping wet nature and society

The article investigates how humans ‘networked’ wet nature and how this affected the shaping of Dutch society. First, it takes a grand view of Dutch history and describes how wet network building intertwined with the shaping of the Dutch landscape, its economy and its polity. Second, it investigates the specific challenges of wet network building—integrating potentially conflicting uses of water into one design—for the case of the national fresh water supply network (1940–1971). Finally, it discusses ecological damage, emerging new risks and cultural patterns related to wet network building.     

Sovereignty,Risk and Biotechnology: Zambia's 2002 GM Controversy in Retrospect

The southern African food crisis of 2002 led to one of the most significant controversies over the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in the developing world to date. Zambia's staunch opposition to GM food aid during the crisis is still frequently used as a reference point in debates over GM seed technology in agricultural development, and the morality of advanced biotechnology. This article re‐examines the controversy and its contemporary relevance using oral history interviews with key scientists, policy makers and development practitioners engaged in debates and decision‐making processes in Zambia in 2002, alongside a review of discourses in the Zambian press. The author argues that, rather than different perceptions of health and environmental risks derived from GM crops, it was questions of sovereign regulatory control of technology in a context of diminished state capacity — and the decline in the Zambian state's capacity for agricultural science research in particular — that played a central role in shaping anti‐GM attitudes. In addition, trust in the arguments of GM advocates was diminished by communication efforts which treated Zambian scientists and policy elites as a lay rather than an expert audience.     

Flows,Friction and the Sociomaterial Metabolization of Alcohol

Abstract: Political ecologists have considered the sociomateriality of diverse hybrids and the metabolism and circulation of urban flows such as water, food and waste. Adding alcohol to this list enhances our understanding of the geography of alcohol as well as the theory of sociomateriality. Viewing alcohol as a sociomaterial hybrid draws attention to the power‐laden, dynamic processes which shape its flow, rather than considering it as already in place. Additionally, my examination of alcohol calls attention to aspects of sociomateriality which are widely relevant but underexplored in the literature: the role of friction in shaping flows; the need to examine microscale impacts of sociomateriality on the body and community; and the conditional impacts of complex, unpredictable sociomaterial hybrids. I use a case study of alcohol in Cape Town to examine how alcohol flows, encounters friction, flows over boundaries and shapes sociability and harm in complex, indeterminate ways. Studies of alcohol typically focus on either its negative impacts on health and wellbeing or positive impacts on economic development, while policy debates focus on whether and how to control access. In this paper, I move beyond these binaries to provide a more nuanced, grounded articulation of how alcohol flows and what inhibits its flow. I examine the distribution of power and agency, limitations of state regulation, willingness of community members to act outside of and with little fear of the law, and the specificity of alcohol as a highly desirable commodity which easily flows around artificial barriers. These insights help clarify relationships, power and the (in)efficacy of policy efforts, and suggest the need to refocus debates. The paper is unable to provide specific policy recommendations, but instead argues that a better understanding of flows and frictions can move the focus from alcohol control to reducing alcohol‐related harm.     

Public Significance and Imagined Archaeologists: Authoring Pasts in Context

This paper explores how archaeological authorship is an articulation of the imagined social roles archaeologists play with the actual contexts of our practice. The discovery of popular public discourses on archaeology should not be seen as impediments to pure archaeologies, but as routes to the significance archaeology seeks to attain. A parallel concern with the determining influence of public concerns in ethnography is reviewed to develop a method for an archaeology that is truly publicly formed. An example of a public archaeology program developed in dialogue with existing historical debates in Annapolis, Maryland illustrates.     

Strengthening the Role of Public Health in Environmental Policy

Over the past 25 years there has been a steady decline in the role of public health agencies in environmental protection. This paper examines the major factors that have contributed to that decline, including the impact of federal environmental laws, the disparity in funding between regulatory and public health activities in environmental protection, and the emergence of risk assessment as a basis for environmental decisions. The methods of risk assessment and traditional public health approaches are contrasted, and the advantages of the involvement of public health agencies are discussed. Recommendations are presented for strengthening the role of public health in environmental decisionmaking to address more effectively public concerns about environmental risks.     

Uncertainty, Risk, Trust, and Information: Public Perceptions of Environmental Issues and Willingness to Take Action

Environmental policymaking has remained an important issue in American public policy for many years. While many individuals have proenvironmental attitudes, they remain unwilling to take the actions necessary to achieve environmental goals. Many variables have been used to explain support for environmental policymaking. This study looks at the effect of uncertainty about environmental quality, perception of risk from environmental hazards, and trust in government and university scientists on willingness to take environmental action. The study examines the impact of these three variables on two environmental issues—tap water and nuclear power. The data were collected from a national sample of 400 individuals. This article presents the results of this research and examines the complex relationships among risks, trust, uncertainty, and willingness to take environmental action. The conclusions improve our understanding of environmental attitudes as well as have practical implications for policymakers who need to build public support for policies designed to improve the environment.     

The Neoliberalisation of the Local State in Durban,South Africa

Abstract: There exists a growing literature on the geographical aspects of neoliberalism and neoliberalisation. In this paper I focus on how the neoliberalisation process is articulated at the scale of the local state in Durban, South Africa. I examine the neoliberalisation process through the lens of the water sector. This paper contributes to the body of literature showing how private sector governance techniques are being used in the public sector effecting its neoliberalisation. I show how pricing structures are neoliberal and in turn how they are deployed and contribute to the neoliberalisation of the local state in Durban. I show that accounting strategies, tariff structures, and cost recovery measures are central to the neoliberalisation process in Durban.