Whose Minerals,Whose Development? Rhetoric and Reality in Post‐Conflict Sierra Leone

Despite boosts in mineral exports, popular post‐conflict minerals‐for‐development reforms in Sierra Leone have failed to significantly reduce poverty. This article uses power as an analytical lens to explore the reasons for this failure, with empirical material from the diamond sector's mining cooperatives scheme (2005), the Diamond Areas Community Development Fund (DACDF), and Kono District. The study shows that there was no significant improvement along four dimensions: material deprivation, education and health, vulnerability, and powerlessness. The authors argue that understanding the impact of these reforms requires a nuanced multi‐scalar examination of power relations, actors, and the social, political, economic and historical context within which mining is embedded. Their findings point to: 1) limits to mineral‐led poverty reduction and the need for realistic expectations and diversification of livelihood opportunities; and 2) the need for interventions that balance power asymmetries and the way that power is exercised among diverse actors, wherein decentralization offers early hope.     

The Cultural Turn: Fashion or Progress in Human Geography?

The cultural turn marks a reorientation of human geography's interdisciplinary concerns toward the wide field of cultural studies. It is argued that this reorientation has been mediated by distinctive forms of commercial academic book publishing. These have been the medium for the internationalisation of cultural studies upon which human geography'sserious engagement with the field has depended. It is argued that the combination of a greater reliance upon work drawn from the humanities and the imperatives of publishing have led to the contemporary proliferation of cultural theory being associated with new forms of academic celebrity. The critical questioning of the cultural turn is therefore located in relation to the formsof authority and evaluation that it has the potential to promote.     

Whose Modernity? Indigenous Modernities and Land Claims after Apartheid

This article questions some of the key assumptions of post‐development and anti‐development critics such as Arturo Escobar and Wolfgang Sachs, who tend to prescribe a puritanical and principled rejection of ‘exogenous development’ that does not necessarily reflect the needs and desires of the beneficiaries of development. Drawing on fieldwork research on land claims in Northern Cape and Northern Provinces (South Africa), the author argues that these beneficiaries tend to deploy hybrid and highly selective and situational responses to development interventions. These hybrid responses can be regarded as indigenous modernities. Development packages are resisted, embraced, reshaped or accommodated depending on the specific content and context. The author also questions James Ferguson's conclusion that depoliticizing development discourses inevitably buttresses bureaucratic state power. Rather, the fieldwork findings suggest that state‐led development is often an extremely risky business that can undermine the legitimacy and authority of governments. In addition, in many parts of the developing world, it is the retreat of the neo‐liberal state, rather than ‘the tyranny of development’, that poses the most serious threat to household livelihood strategies and economic survival. The case studies discussed here suggest that responses to development are usually neither wholesale endorsements nor radical rejections of modernity. Even when resisting and subverting development ideas and practices, people do not generally do so on the basis of either radical populist politics or in defence of pristine and authentic local cultural traditions.     

China and Geography in the 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is to help the subdiscipline at large develop a more international and inclusive approach, it must be driven by questions of significance in China, yield constructive answers of relevance to China, and at the same time derive theoretical ideas that diversify the collective geographical imagination.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

History,Geography and Difference in the Post‐socialist World: Or,Do We Still Need Post‐Socialism?

Abstract: This paper seeks to build on ongoing work in east central Europe and the former Soviet Union—in geography and beyond—to think through the conceptualisation of post‐socialism. The rationale for this is threefold. Firstly, we see a need to understand post‐socialist conditions as they are lived and experienced by those in the region. Secondly, we seek to challenge the persistent tendency to marginalise the experiences of the non‐western world in a discourse of globalisation and universalisation. Thirdly, we identify a need to ask how the conditions of post‐socialism reshape our theorising more widely. Centring our analysis on history, geography and difference, we review a wide range of perspectives on the socialist and post‐socialist, but argue for a strategic essentialism that recognises post‐socialist difference without eclipsing differences. In outlining how we might understand history, geography and difference in post‐socialism, we draw on key theorisations from post‐colonialism (such as the articulation of the post‐ with the pre‐, the relationship to the west, the rethinking of histories/categories, the end of the post) and outline post‐socialisms that are partial and not always explanatory but nevertheless important.     

Is Cross‐Section Shape a Distinct Feature in Plant Fibre Identification?

Correct identification of textile fibres is an important issue in archaeology because the use of different materials can yield crucial information about the society that produced the textiles. Textiles made of plant and animal fibres can normally be easily distinguished, but to distinguish between different types of plant fibres, in particular different types of bast fibres, is difficult. Some years back it was shown that the features fibre diameter, lumen diameter, dislocation (nodes), and cross markings cannot be used on their own to distinguish between the typical bast fibres used for textiles in ancient Europe: flax, hemp, and nettle. Particularly not when only a few fibres are available for an examination so that statistical analysis is not possible, as is often the case in archaeology. The last two characterization features typically used to distinguish between bast fibres are cross‐section shape and lumen shape. In this paper, we present a study of retted and unretted fibres (in the stem) of flax, nettle, and hemp, and show that also cross‐section shape and lumen shape cannot be used as distinguishing features on their own.     

Why Women of Colour in Geography?

The dismally low number of women of colour in the discipline of geography in dominantly English-speaking countries can be explained by a number of systemic features of the discipline. Evidence suggests that a culture of whiteness in academic hiring has overtaken more overt forms of racial and sexist discrimination to limit the number of women of colour hired. More fundamentally, a lack of mentoring discourages women of colour from entering the discipline from undergraduate studies onward. We now face the ironic situation that as more and more studies of racism and other forms of discrimination appear in the geographical literature, the number of women of colour doing those studies remains static.

¿Por qué mujeres de color en geografía?

Las cifras deplorablemente bajas de mujeres de color en la disciplina de geografía anglo-americana pueden ser explicado por varios característicos sistemático de la disciplina. La evidencia sugiere que una cultura de blancura en la contratación académica ha alcanzado formas más explícito de discriminación racial y sexual que limita el número de mujeres en la disciplina. Más fundamental, la falta de dar consejo disuade mujeres de color de abrazar la disciplina desde los estudios universitario no graduado hacia adelante. Nos enfrentamos con la situación irónica que mientras se publican más y más estudios de racismo y otras formas de discriminación en las revistas geográficas, el número de mujeres de color que produce estos estudios queda estático.     

Research Quality Assessment and Geography in Australia: Can Anything be Learned from the UK Experience?1

The assessment of research activity in universities is now undertaken regularly in a number of countries, with resources then being allocated according to the results of those evaluations. Such an exercise (a Research Quality Framework – RQF) has recently been proposed for Australia. This paper suggests likely consequences of such an exercise for geography in Australian universities, given its current situation there, on the basis of experience with the Research Assessment Exercises undertaken in the UK since 1986.     

The Magic of Narrative in the Emplotment of State‐Subject Relations: Who's Telling Whose Story in the Native Title Process in Australia?

Since 1992 Australian Aboriginal communities have been engaged in a complex and fraught legal process for the recognition of their traditional rights to country (‘native title’). In this article I argue that it is theoretically and critically illuminating to investigate the broader ‘meaning effects’ of the native title determination process on the subjective experience of the state in Australia. The article demonstrates this through examining the narrative effects of certain discursive moments through which identities get objectified. Through examining such moments in the discourse and practice of native title from the perspective of a participant‐observer, I seek to advance our theoretical understanding of how the narrative properties of speech (or other performative behaviours) in specific contexts structure the subjective experience of the state.     

‘Concerns,Attitudes and Abilities of Early-career Geography Faculty’: Research Context and Future Directions

This article reflects on the experience of a large interdisciplinary research team that included geographers in a study of older people's participation in community life in areas of rural Britain. The mechanisms used for facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration around the development of a collective conceptual framework and associated methodologies for investigating aspects of rural community inclusion in later life are outlined. Lessons relevant to geography education learned about the benefits and “messy reality” of interdisciplinary working are highlighted.     

What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.