The power of precision air strikes and social media feeds in the 2012 Israel–Hamas conflict: ‘targeting transparency’

This article analyses the evolving uses of social media during wartime through the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson Facebook and Twitter accounts. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-affiliated groups in November 2012 has generated interesting data about social media use by a sovereign power in wartime and the resultant networked discourse. Facebook data is examined for effective patterns of dissemination through both content analysis and discourse analysis. Twitter data is explored through connected concept analysis to map the construction of meaning in social media texts shared by the IDF. The systematic examination of this social media data allows the authors’ analysis to comment on the evolving modes, methods and expectations for state public diplomacy, propaganda and transparency during wartime.     

TERRITORIAL GOVERNANCE,NETWORKS AND POWER: CROSS‐SECTORAL PARTNERSHIPS IN RURAL POLAND

Research on the operation of territorial governance and rural development programmes is dominated by qualitative methodologies, paying little attention heretofore to the characteristics and structures of new horizontal and vertical relationship formations that are the explicit objective of the governance and rural development model. Seeking to address this deficit in the literature, this article adds to a small number of existing contributions that use social network analysis (SNA) to examine the role of inter‐organizational networks in shaping geographic functional regions in the context of governance. Rooted in the methodological perspective of SNA, the analysis focuses on relations between local actors participating in three area‐based rural partnerships in Poland, which are conceptualized as territorially embedded institutional network clusters. The structure of inter‐sectoral relations, understood as interactions (competition, conflict, coordination, cooperation, and control) and flows (information, financial, human, or tangible resources), between the institutional partners of these partnerships is examined. Analysing in detail attributes of network relations, the article identifies structural characteristics of the area‐based partnerships, such as manifestations of how diverse local resources are engaged and how dominance by traditional powerful stakeholders can be overcome by network structures. Structural dynamics and transformations that represent expressions and manifestations of how territorially embedded governance networks are expected to operate are important areas of inquiry in political geography. In this context, the particular empirical and theoretical capacity of SNA is illuminated in this article as part of a broader presentation of primary field data on how network governance and rural development is taking shape in Central and Eastern Europe.     

Digital Dialogue? Australian Politicians' use of the Social Network Tool Twitter

The recent emergence of online social media has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape, yet our understanding of this remains less than complete. This article adds to current understanding of the online engagement between politicians and the public by presenting the first quantitative analysis of the utilisation of the social network tool Twitter by Australian politicians. The analysis suggests that politicians are attempting to use Twitter for political engagement, though some are more successful in this than others. Politicians are noisier than Australians in general on Twitter, though this is due more to broadcasting than conversing. Those who use Twitter to converse appear to gain more political benefit from the platform than others. Though politicians cluster by party, a relatively ‘small world’ network is evident in the Australian political discussion on Twitter.     

Gender and Welfare Reform in Post‐ Revolutionary Mexico

This article discusses the impact a gender and woman's history conference had on the development of my own research and writing. ‘Las Olvidadas’ was a conference held at Yale in the Spring of 2001, and was the first in a series of Mexican women's and gender history conferences organised. My own research, on the gendered nature of the welfare state in Mexico, explores how class and race intersected with gender to produce a welfare system that, while particular to Mexico, also nevertheless had much in common with other Latin American countries. These conferences shaped both my views of gender, but also the importance of the transnational to historical research.     

Tweet Justice: The Canadian Court’s Use of Social Media

ABSTRACT

Like other political institutions in Canada, the judiciary has entered the digital age. Indeed, Canadian courts have been using Twitter for almost a decade. Despite this, there has been very little systematic examination of how Canadian courts use Twitter and the nature of the content they produce. While digital technologies create new challenges for all political actors, this is especially so for the courts, which exist in a very “traditional and conservative environment”. In this research note, we develop a framework for analyzing court-produced content on social media. This framework draws from concepts from digital politics and legal studies. We then apply this framework by conducting a content analysis of tweets from active court Twitter feeds in Canada.     

Wired Communities in the City: Sydney,Australia

Questions relating to the ability of particular groups in society to access information and communications technologies (ICTs) have become a growing part of the academic and policy literature. The issues raised in this literature have revolved around a number of themes, many of which can be subsumed under concerns about a growing digital divide whereby society is being divided into information rich and information poor sectors. This differentiation can be between particular social groups irrespective of place, or between people in particular places be these large regional areas (e.g. metropolitan versus non‐metropolitan) or localities and communities within an urban area. This paper focuses on the existence of a ‘digital divide’ across the Sydney metropolitan area. Using ABS 2001 census data the paper presents an analysis of computer and internet access and use for clusters of local communities and focuses on how usage differs across communities as differentiated by socio‐economic status, household and family status and ethnic background.     

Forest Policy Reform and the Organization of Logging in Peruvian Amazonia

Reform in the forest sector in Peru resulted in a new forestry law, developed with substantial input from international conservation and donor organizations. While it incorporates the principles of sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation and livelihood improvement, inconsistencies remain between the regulatory mechanisms and actual practices and outcomes in the field, leading some to consider the legal framework a failure. This article suggests that problems in the sector persist because the legal and regulatory frameworks do not incorporate existing local institutions, norms and practices — all of which are rooted in complex historical social, political and economic relationships. Based on information from interviews, data on movement of timber and analysis of secondary information, the authors examine the local structure, actors and dynamics of the concession forestry system in the Peruvian Amazon. The article focuses on how financial, social and political relationships in the network of actors, and particularly the patronage system, have helped actors in the sector adapt to the new policy framework. It is proposed that any further reform in the forest sector must be based on a keen understanding and appreciation of the praxis of timber extraction in the region.     

Constructing Policy Narratives in 140 Characters or Less: The Case of Gun Policy Organizations

This study examines interest groups’ framing of gun policy issues via an analysis of nearly 10,000 tweets by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the National Rifle Association spanning from 2009 to 2014. Utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), I investigate the extent to which interest groups use social media to construct policy narratives. This research shows that much can be conveyed in 140 characters; both gun control and gun rights organizations used Twitter to identify victims, blame “villains,” commend “heroes,” and offer policy solutions. This research sheds light on the politics of gun control by revealing trends over time in groups’ framing and suggests refinements for hypotheses of the NPF. Finally, this work underscores the importance of social media for public policy scholarship.     

Becoming Rafinesque: Market Society and Academic Reputation in the Early American Republic

This article focuses on how knowledge came to be valued in conflicting ways in the American Republic during the 1820s and 1830s – one based on a market model that considered knowledge to be a commodity for sale, and another that produced cultural value through social connections created in new academic institutions. Constantine Rafinesque, who taught at Transylvania University in Kentucky, and his research in the natural sciences serve as an example of the first sort of scholarship. His life also illustrates how a market society could lead to dandies, like Rafinesque himself, even in academia, and how that threatened both new middle class social proprieties and a system of clubby social relations that had come to dominate America’s colleges and universities in the early nineteenth century.     

Citizens of Empire: Education and Teacher Exchanges in Canada and the Commonwealth, 1910–40

This article examines how one group of actors actively infused education, citizenship and Canada’s international relationships with a sense of empire in the first third of the twentieth century. Making use of archival and published sources from collections in Canada and Britain, it focuses in particular on imperial citizenship teaching in Canadian schools, a number of education conferences held in the United Kingdom and the exchanges of elementary and high school teachers and school inspectors between commonwealth countries. In this period, politicians and bureaucrats in Canada and other dominions actively connected their education systems to an imperial network at the very moment that others were striving to attain more economic and political autonomy from the British government. Education came to occupy a significant cultural space alongside the trade agreements and constitutional changes that slowly recalibrated the nature of the British imperial system in the interwar period. Imperial education projects were an important feature of the cultural politics of a fading empire, but they were driven by actors in both the imperial centre and the self-governing dominions. This article argues that between 1910 and 1940 teachers and politicians in Canada drew on an international support network, actively fostered new ideas of citizenship, and strove to assert the country’s belonging in the British Empire.     

Advocacy Group Messaging on Social Media: Using the Narrative Policy Framework to Study Twitter Messages about Nuclear Energy Policy in the United States

Increasingly, policy scholars are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to systematically study the narrative elements and strategies that policy actors and groups use to advance their agendas. The majority of these studies analyze reports, documents, and websites published by the actors and groups that are most active in the policy subsystem. Though useful, these “public consumption documents” can be difficult to find and relatively static. In this article, we suggest that the constant flow of messages and content that competing actors and groups publish on social media may provide a solution to this problem. To test this proposition, we use the NPF to analyze messages published on Twitter by competing advocacy groups in the U.S. nuclear energy policy subsystem from January 2014 to May 2014 (n = 703). We find that both groups use Twitter to disseminate messages that contain the basic elements of policy narratives. Moreover, the narratives they use include strategies that are consistent with their position in the subsystem. These findings demonstrate the utility of the NPF for research on social media and, more importantly, validate the use of Twitter data in future work on the NPF.     

Relinquishing nuclear weapons: identities,networks and the British bomb

Recent analysis on the prospects for achieving a world free of nuclear weapons has tended to focus on a set of largely realist strategic security considerations. Such considerations will certainly underpin future decisions to relinquish nuclear weapons, but nuclear disarmament processes are likely to involve a more complex mix of actors, issues and interests. The article examines this complexity through a sociological lens using Britain as a case‐study, where relinquishing a nuclear capability has become a realistic option for a variety of strategic, political and economic reasons. The article examines the core ideational and organizational allies of the UK nuclear weapon ‘actor‐network’ by drawing upon social constructivist accounts of the relationship between identity and interest, and historical sociology of technology analysis of Large Technical Systems and the social construction of technology. It divides the UK actor‐network into three areas: the UK policy elite's collective identity that generates a ‘national interest’ in continued deployment of nuclear weapons; defence–industrial actors that support and operationalize these identities; and international nuclear weapons dynamics that reinforce the network. The article concludes by exploring how the interests and identities that constitute and reproduce the ‘actor‐network’ that makes nuclear armament possible might be transformed to make nuclear disarmament possible. The purpose is not to dismiss or supplant the importance of strategic security‐oriented analysis of the challenges of nuclear disarmament but to augment its understanding by dissecting some of the socio‐political complexities of nuclear disarmament processes.     

A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

SUBURBANIZATION IN COUNTRIES IN TRANSITION: DESTINATIONS OF SUBURBANIZERS IN THE TALLINN METROPOLITAN AREA

Suburbanization is one of the key phenomena of spatial population change in many countries in transition. Yet we know surprisingly little about the population carrying out the post‐socialist suburbanization process. The objective of this article is to improve on this situation by studying the Tallinn metropolis in Estonia. Our analysis, which covers the inter‐censal period 1989 to 2000, focuses on the differences between population subgroups with respect to their probabilities to move to the suburbs. As such, it also clarifies choices of destination by dwelling and municipality type. For the analysis, we use individual anonymous 2000 census data and logistic regression. The results indicate that suburbanization was a socially polarizing process during this period. People with low social status had the highest probability to sub‐urbanize, and mainly occupied the pre‐existing housing stock. Conversely, people with high social status were less likely to move into suburban areas, yet when they did they moved to the most attractive destinations in the suburbs (new single‐family houses, coastal municipalities and municipalities closer to the city).     

From Big Noise to Big Data: Toward the Verification of Large Data sets for Understanding Regional Retail Flows

There has been much excitement among quantitative geographers about newly available data sets, characterized by high volume, velocity, and variety. This phenomenon is often labeled as “Big Data” and has contributed to methodological and empirical advances, particularly in the areas of visualization and analysis of social networks. However, a fourth v—veracity (or lack thereof)—has been conspicuously lacking from the literature. This article sets out to test the potential for verifying large data sets. It does this by cross‐comparing three unrelated estimates of retail flows—human movements from home locations to shopping centers—derived from the following geo‐coded sources: (1) a major mobile telephone service provider; (2) a commercial consumer survey; and (3) geotagged Twitter messages. Three spatial interaction models also provided estimates of flow: constrained and unconstrained versions of the “gravity model” and the recently developed “radiation model.” We found positive relationships between all data‐based and theoretical sources of estimated retail flows. Based on the analysis, the mobile telephone data fitted the modeled flows and consumer survey data closely, while flows obtained directly from the Twitter data diverged from other sources. The research highlights the importance of verification in flow data derived from new sources and demonstrates methods for achieving this.     

Tocqueville's interest in the social: Or how statistics informed his ‘new science of politics’

This essay examines Tocqueville's interest in statistics, and how it informed his analysis of democracy. It explores his early engagement with the discipline and shows how this proved critical to his and Beaumont's 1833 study of the American penitentiary system. It shows that Tocqueville's interest in statistics was long lasting. And it pays particular attention to his links with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, examining his attendance at the statistical section meetings of the BAAS conference in Dublin in 1835. It shows how material presented at this conference appeared in a number of Tocqueville's works. The essay argues against the thesis that Tocqueville resisted the primacy of the social. Rather, it shows that his interest in statistics underscored the importance he attached to the social in his analysis of modern democracy.     

Die stadt und das reich in der verfassungslehre des marsilius von padua

This essay examines Tocqueville's interest in statistics, and how it informed his analysis of democracy. It explores his early engagement with the discipline and shows how this proved critical to his and Beaumont's 1833 study of the American penitentiary system. It shows that Tocqueville's interest in statistics was long lasting. And it pays particular attention to his links with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, examining his attendance at the statistical section meetings of the BAAS conference in Dublin in 1835. It shows how material presented at this conference appeared in a number of Tocqueville's works. The essay argues against the thesis that Tocqueville resisted the primacy of the social. Rather, it shows that his interest in statistics underscored the importance he attached to the social in his analysis of modern democracy.     

Policy Diffusion and Strategies for Promoting Policy Change: Evidence From California Local Gun Control Ordinances

Recent research efforts on policy innovation and diffusion largely have focused upon policymaking at the state government level. In this article we seek to develop an understanding of the ways momentum for policy change can be generated among receptive local governments. We use gun control policymaking within California to illustrate how local government characteristics, the presence of regional associations, and the establishment of interest groups may lead to policy development and diffusion. We also identify linkages between interest groups, focusing events, and the successful use of a new image of gun violence as a public health problem, yielding insights into strategies that may be used successfully to promote policy change.     

The Flemish diamond: urban network in the making?

The network concept has become quite well‐established and is used in a wide variety of disciplines. The application of the concept in the context of spatial planning seems rather vague though. This article focuses on the gap between the normative network concept, as used in the Flemish Diamond, and everyday factual reality. A discourse analysis of the performance of the concept at lower planning levels shows a wide variety of reading and use of the original concept. It is argued that only the careful selection of a strategic project for the Flemish Diamond, which could attract the interest and sympathy of a very diverse range of actors, might be able to bridge the gap. To increase the performance of the concept, principles for network management as a multi‐level activity are formulated.     

Changemakers and change agents: encouraging students as researchers through Changemaker’s programmes

Abstract

This paper examines the role played by a student-organized research conference in the age of research-led teaching and active learning. Drawing on our experiences of organizing two departmental conferences in Geography in March 2016 and March 2017, we begin to outline how institutional support and funding for student-led “Changemakers” projects can not only introduce students to specific aspects of research (in the case of our conference, to disseminating and communicating research findings), but also encourage collaboration and mutual support outside of formal staff-student hierarchies of teaching, learning and marking.