Becoming Men: Masculinities and the Juvenile Convict Institutions of Carters’ Barracks and Point Puer in Nineteenth‐Century Australia

Carters’ Barracks and Point Puer were the first attempts at creating a prison institution specifically for the growing number of juvenile male transportees who were being sent to the Australian colonies. Beyond the structures and regulations of the institutions, this article seeks to examine the ways in which the boys’ understanding of masculinities shaped their relationships with prison authorities and within the juvenile prison community.     

Destitute Women and Smoking at the Hyde Park Barracks,Sydney, Australia

The Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Australia, was established in 1819 to accommodate male convicts, but in later years the building served as a depot for immigrant women (1848–86) and as an asylum for destitute women (1862–86). The occupation of the latter group in particular resulted in the loss of large numbers of clay tobacco pipes under the floorboards. The quantity and distribution of the pipes is used here to examine smoking behavior among the destitute female inmates, and to assess their relationships with each other and the institution in which they were confined.     

Bodies That Walk,Bodies That Talk,Bodies That Love: Palestinian Women Refugees,Affectivity, and the Politics of the Ordinary

In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the affective memories of Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I reflect on how bodies and spaces connect and disconnect at violent junctures, and on the vital forces vulnerability and precariousness ignite in displacement. Throughout the geography of separations and shifting shelters, refugee women engaged in place‐making, transforming the transience enforced by their continuous evictions into the permanence of home, not as a static identity‐place‐nation, but as a site of dynamic affective, social relations and connections. Read through Michael Hardt's metaphor of “social muscles”, as bodily and emotional drives that blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for concrete relations and for existing in the world.     

Vagrant,Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture of Cannibalism in Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see in Great Expectations.     

Race,Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard

This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as formerly industrial and contaminated properties, in the 1990s brownfields emerged as the grounds for new forms of urbanization and an emerging environmental remediation industry. Through their redevelopment, the twentieth century's urban wastelands—environmentally degraded, economically divested, and often racially marked—have become sites of investment, resignification, and value formation. The concept of waste formations provides a critical framework on the ways these socio‐ecological transformations rework twentieth century urban inequalities—in particular, the articulation of waste and toxic waste—and the ways they produce new geographies of environmental injustice through the displacement of toxic waste to newly waste‐able spaces. This paper develops an analytic of waste formations and applies it to the process of brownfield redevelopment at the Hunters Point Shipyard in southeast San Francisco.     

Water from a Rock: Archaeology,Ideology, and the Bible

In a series of studies over the last decade, Avi Faust suggested that several ideologies of ancient Israel could be identified on the basis of archaeological features (four-room houses, tombs, certain pottery vessels, etc.), namely, egalitarianism, simplicity, unity, and purity. The aim of this paper is to review these studies, asking what ideology is and if it can be retrieved from archaeology. While “there are multiple dangers when walking into the field of ideology” (Vincent 2010:21), avoiding discussion is not an option. In my view, most of the things identified by Faust are not ideologies. To the extent that they have an ideological content, it is based not on archaeological remains, but on a conservative reading of the Hebrew Bible. The identified “ideologies” are described as static, valid for the entire society, and eternal (from the Iron Age I until the end of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah). They turn ancient Israel into an ideal society, a model for our times—but an unrealistic one.     

Religion and the US Presidency: Politics,the Media,and Religious Identity

Abstract

The relationship between religion and the presidency impacts both the viability of candidates and the manner in which decisions are made in the voting booth. Today we are living in culture where religion is front and center in politics. This article examines the role of religion in political discourse with special attention to the 2012 presidential election. It focuses on the manner in which religion and politics have become inextricably interwoven in the past sixty years. It begins by establishing the role of religion in the broader political arena. The article then turns to the manner in which religious identity and participation influence voting patterns, and how religious affiliation shapes the office of the presidency. The conclusion offers some reflections on the future of religion in presidential politics, an issue that will continue to be a significant factor in how and why voters support and marginalize particular candidates.     

The Formation of Large-scale Collaborative Resource Management Institutions: Clarifying the Roles of Stakeholders, Science, and Institutions

This article explores the emergence of collaborative institutional arrangements for managing natural resources in large-scale and complex resource settings, among numerous political jurisdictions and stakeholders. It examines four regional institutions in the United States: the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's Fish and Wildlife Program, the Chesapeake Bay Program, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, and the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. While a wealth of literature has looked at the emergence of smaller-scale resource management institutions, and some literature has begun to look at the characteristics and successes of these regional institutions, theory is lacking to explain the formation of these regional institutions. We first introduce three relevant streams of literature—on common pool resources management, on policy entrepreneurs and social capital, and on science and information in policy change—to frame our analysis. The comparisons of the cases point to the importance of integrating key insights from the literature for understanding the formation of collaborative resource governance. We emphasize how science, leadership, and prior organizational experience interact in facilitating institutional change, particularly in the process of raising awareness about resource management problems. In tracing the formation of these institutions, we also identify how external institutional triggers can help spur collaborative governance.