‘Globalization with hardware’: ITER’s fusion of technology,policy, and politics

This article explores the history of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a fusion energy megaproject currently being built in southern France. It examines three main aspects of the project’s history, focusing largely on the European research community’s perspective. First, it explores how European scientists and science managers constructed a transnational research community around fusion energy after 1960 that was part of Europe’s larger technological integration. This article also expands Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of ‘technopolitics’ to the larger international dimension and explores how the political environment of the late Cold War and the post‐9/11 era helped shape ITER’s history, sometimes in ways not entirely within researchers’ control. Finally, this essay considers ITER as a technological project that gradually became globalized. At various stages in the project’s 30‐year history, we discover processes whereby national borders became less important while social, economic, legal and technological linkages created a shared social space for fusion research on an expanding scale.     

Witchcraft,Social Cohesion and Participation in a South African Village

The past thirty years have seen development agencies, non‐governmental organizations and their funders embrace ‘participatory’ development strategies. These strategies require the poor to take part in decision‐making about, and the implementation of, development projects and programmes. Underlying enthusiasm for participation is the recognition that centralized, top‐down systems and methods have not delivered development, and the assumption that the poor are eager and able to ‘participate’. Using ethnographic research on witch beliefs and their impact on social relations in a South African village, this article argues that such assumptions are not always justified. It shows that witch beliefs and related conflicts have long‐term negative consequences for intra‐community relations and examines what this implies for development policy and practice.     

Children,social capital and health: increasing the well‐being of young people in rural Wales

This paper explores the usefulness of employing the concept of social capital within a research project investigating the best ways of meeting the health and well‐being needs of young people living in rural Wales. The first part of the paper provides an overview of some of the current research exploring the relationship between social capital, health and young people. The second part provides an overview of findings from an action research project to illustrate how social capital is conceived and applied in this context. It concludes by stating that children and young people do actively generate, draw upon and negotiate their own social capital, and that this is an under‐utilised resource in terms of promoting health and well‐being.     

‘Stuffed if I know!’: Reflections on post‐modern feminist social research

This paper tells the tale of a social research project which has been situated within and shaped by the flux of current feminist debates. In particular it addresses the challenges posed by post‐modern theory to feminist social research which hinge on the status of women as an identity. If we are to accept that there is no unity, centre or actuality to discover for women, what is feminist research about? What might be the effects of researching women in mining towns as though such a group were a natural, self‐evident and coherent category? In this paper I explore the politics of situating a research project on women with respect to the discursive terrain already mapped out. I rethink action research methods in the light of post‐modern politics and research practice, and I argue that social research can play a role in discursive destabilisation and in the creation and promotion of alternative discourses of gendered subjects.     

Doing Research with Young People: Participatory Research and the Rituals of Collective Work

This is an exciting juncture at which to bear witness to the growing, multidisciplinary support for youth participation and more inclusive collaborative research practices in geography and the social sciences. Participatory action research and practice offers a promising new framework for researchers who are committed to social justice and change. The multiple benefits of engaging the perspectives of young people in research have served to challenge social exclusion, redistribute power within the research process and build the capacity of young people to analyze and transform their own lives and become partners in the building of more sound, democratic, communities. In this paper, I offer a broad overview of the principles of participatory research and reflect on my own experience of doing a participatory action research project with young people. Specifically, I will discuss a ‘collective praxis approach’ (a set of rituals and practices for sharing power within the research process), the role of the facilitator, and the processes of collective data analysis.     

Can You Hear us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research

Indigenous methodologies are an alternative way of thinking about research processes. Although these methodologies vary according to the ways in which different Indigenous communities express their own unique knowledge systems, they do have common traits. This article argues that research on Indigenous issues should be carried out in a manner which is respectful and ethically sound from an Indigenous perspective. This naturally challenges Western research paradigms, yet it also affords opportunities to contribute to the body of knowledge about Indigenous peoples. It is further argued that providing a mechanism for Indigenous peoples to participate in and direct these research agendas ensures that their communal needs are met, and that geographers then learn how to build ethical research relationships with them. Indigenous methodologies do not privilege Indigenous researchers because of their Indigeneity, since there are many ‘insider’ views, and these are thus suitable for both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous researchers. However, there is a difference between research done within an Indigenous context using Western methodologies and research done using Indigenous methodologies which integrates Indigenous voices. This paper will discuss those differences while presenting a historical context of research on Indigenous peoples, providing further insights into what Indigenous methodologies entail, and proposing ways in which the academy can create space for this discourse.     

Four Perspectives on Public Participation Process in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making: Combined Results from 10 Case Studies

Knowing how people think about public participation processes and knowing what people want from these processes is essential to crafting a legitimate and effective process and delivering a program that is widely viewed as meaningful and successful. This article reports on research to investigate the nature of diversity among participants' perceptions of what is the most appropriate public participation process for environmental assessment and decision making in 10 different cases. Results show that there are clearly distinct perspectives on what an appropriate public participation process should be. We identified four perspectives: Science‐Centered Stakeholder Consultation, Egalitarian Deliberation, Efficient Cooperation, and Informed Collaboration. The literature on public participation tends to presume that there are clear and universal criteria on how to “do” public participation correctly or that context is the critical factor. This study has revealed that even within a specific assessment or decision‐making effort, there may be different perspectives about what is viewed as appropriate, which poses a challenge for both theorists and practitioners. Among the active participants in these 10 case studies, we found limited agreement and strong differences of opinions for what is a good process. Points of consensus across these cases are that good processes reach out to all stakeholders, share information openly and readily, engage people in meaningful interaction, and attempt to satisfy multiple interest positions. Differences appeared about how strongly to emphasize science and information, how much leadership and direction the process needs, what is the proper behavior of participants, how to tackle issues of power and trust, and what are the outcome‐related goals of the process. These results challenge researchers and practitioners to consider the diversity of participant needs in addition to the broad context when conceptualizing or carrying out participatory processes.     

Participatory and community‐based research,Indigenous geographies,and the spaces of friendship: A critical engagement

Geographic engagement with Indigenous peoples remains inextricably linked to colonialism. Consequently, studying Indigenous geographies is fraught with ethical and political dilemmas. Participatory and community‐based research methods have recently been offered as one solution to address concerns about the politics of gathering, framing, producing, disseminating, and controlling knowledge about Indigenous peoples. In this article, we critically engage with the emergence of participatory and community‐based research methods as “best practice” for undertaking research into Indigenous geographies. We articulate four concerns with this form of research: a) dissent may be stifled by non‐Indigenous researchers’ investments in being “good”; b) claims to overcome difference and distance may actually retrench colonial research relations; c) the framing of particular methods as “best practices” risks closing down necessary and ongoing critique; and d) institutional pressures work against the development and maintenance of meaningful, accountable, and non‐extractive relations with Indigenous communities. We then contemplate the spatiality of the critique itself. We consider the ways in which our longstanding friendship, as researchers invested at multiple scales with Indigenous geographies and identities, provides its own distinct space of practice within which to confront the political and ethical challenges posed by research with/about/upon Indigenous geographies and peoples. While not arriving at any concrete template for undertaking research about Indigenous geographies, we suggest that certain friendships, established and situated outside research relationships, may be productive spaces within and through which research methods may be decolonized.     

Disciplining technology: Electronic reliability,Cold‐War military culture and the topside ionogram

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between cold‐war military electronics and the material culture of space science. Focusing on the world's first ionospheric research satellite, designed and built by the Canadian Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment at the height of the Cold War, it seeks to situate the practices and beliefs that underwrote the reliability of this instrument within more profound changes in electronics and electrical engineering during the 1950s. Rather than invoke a monolithic culture of reliability to explain the work of satellite technicians and engineers, this investigation identifies instead two principle approaches to the question of reliability in cold‐war electronics, their origin in the shortcomings of industrial electronics after the Second World War, as well as the place of the satellite project within them. By concentrating our attention on the conceptual and technical dimensions of electronic reliability, radier than on more traditional aspects of solid‐state research and industrial innovation, we can understand how technicians and engineers, developing weapons systems and scientific instruments alike, struggled to understand and use operationally and cognitively unstable electronic devices, and what these struggles suggest about the complex material and social legacy of the Cold War.     

Counterinsurgency and the M‐VICO System: Human Relations Area Files and anthropology's dual‐use legacy

Over the past decade, ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY has published a number of features covering the relationship between anthropology and the security state. Here, David Price draws attention to an aborted counterinsurgency project, known as the M‐VICO project. Building on the categories and structures employed in the Human Relation Area Files (HRAF), this project relied on anthropologists to encode data cross‐culturally on all forms of behaviour in as many strategic localities as possible, which the security services subsequently scrutinize and probe for possible weaknesses that could be exploited. In this article, David Price shows that, in the secrecy that often surrounds the financing and precise purposes of its projects, anthropology is not all that different from many other disciplines, with some projects serving what he calls ‘dual‐use’ ends. Since civilian researchers are not supposed to have full knowledge of these ends, research into these semi‐covert purposes is particularly challenging.     

Negotiating human research ethics: Case notes from anthropologists in the field (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The human ethics issues surrounding the conduct of health science research have been the subject of increasing debate among biomedical and social science researchers in recent years. Ethics procedures in health‐science research are typically concerned with protecting anonymity and confidentiality, and are tailored to work that primarily uses quantitative methodologies. For qualitative research in the health social sciences, a different set of ethical issues often arises in the research process. This article examines three case studies of qualitative researchers working with Indigenous Australian communities, focusing on the researchers’ experiences with ethics committees and how they approached a range of ethical issues arising in the course of their research. Key issues include: obtaining informed consent for participant observation; the evolving nature of qualitative research; the difficulties in foreseeing changes in approach; and the distinction between the research team and the researched in participatory action research.     

On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine's Danube Delta

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine's Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated or mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain why a 2005 World Bank assessment report could only see failure in the Reserve's implementation of participatory management, and why liberal participatory management approaches may founder when introduced in settings where relationships are based on non‐liberal political ontologies. The author argues that environmental management needs to be rethought in ways that take ontological differences seriously rather than assuming the universality of liberal assumptions about the individual, the political and politics.     

Connecting global health interventions and lived experiences: suspending ‘normality’ at funerals in rural Tanzania

In this paper, we use the funeral space and its liminal nature as a milieu for exploring how a ‘modern’ health intervention, the mosquito bednet, is negotiated by its recipients in relation to its (non)-usage in such spaces. With a focus on sleeping arrangements at funerals and drawing on empirical data from participants living in rural southern Tanzania, we discuss how the bednet is linked to the notion of being unsympathetic to the death. Viewed as a symbol of modernity and a reflection of wealth and individual pride, the bednet becomes physically and symbolically inappropriate in the more sacred, ‘in-between’ site of the funeral. We also uncover how risk perceptions regarding malaria transmission are re-cast in funeral spaces, with socio-cultural practices and health-related behaviours being simultaneously ‘risky’ for individual mourners and reinforcing in terms of group social cohesion. As individual mourners' concerns about malaria risks are suspended, notions of pain and discomfort come to the fore as part of the mourning process and respect for the deceased.     

The Micropolitics of Dispossession and Resistance: Case Study of a Proposed Dam in Central India

This article presents a study of the micropolitics of dispossession for a proposed medium‐sized irrigation project in an Adivasi region of Central India. The article explores the complex micropolitics of dispossession and collective action in the project planning stage, long before the formal processes of land acquisition actually begin. It highlights the importance of training the researchers’ gaze on the functioning of the local state in the pre‐acquisition phase. It shows how the local state uses various powers of exclusion to fracture emerging cross‐class, multi‐caste alliances, while maintaining formal compliance with a range of social safeguard policies aimed at protecting vulnerable groups and fragile landscapes. The ‘everyday’ decisions of local state actors during the project planning stage produce site‐specific, differentiated and shifting matrices of risks and opportunities for the local people, who are already divided along class and caste lines. This, in turn, is likely to inform their political responses at the actual moment of enclosure. Thus the durability and success of anti‐dispossession collective action is likely to vary depending on the dynamic interactions of local state and non‐state actors, mediated by regional electoral politics and the overall safeguard policy regime governing land acquisition.     

Heritage and participatory governance: An analysis of political strategies and social fractures in Spain

In the heritage field, institutions tend to see social participation as a synonym for good governance practice. This extends to other areas such as the environment, humanitarian aid, and sustainable development. In this article, the authors analyze the use of participatory models in the management of heritage through the study of three heritage sites in Spain: the prehistoric paintings in Altamira, the Mosque‐Cathedral in Córdoba, and the Cabo de Gata‐Nijar Natural Park. Their study suggests that, despite the promises of more democratic heritage governance, participatory methods are commonly bounded by social fractures that are concomitant to certain ‘heritage regimes’. They conclude that the critical study of participation in heritage should go beyond the dichotomy between ‘good and bad’ participation. Rather, it should focus on understanding what participation does to the entire heritagization process.     

WINNING THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF FARMERS: INSTITUTIONALIZED INNOVATION DIFFUSION IN SRI LANKA

Classical diffusion research, both in geography and sociology, received considerable criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, but after that the diffusion debate has faded away. At the same time, one of the earliest contributors to diffusion research, Gabriel Tarde, is now attracting the attention of both geographers and sociologists. Drawing on earlier experiences with agricultural extension and the Green Revolution, this Tarde‐inspired article aims to revitalize the diffusion debate through an ethnographic case study of extension practices in Hambantota District, Sri Lanka. The study is based on field material collected between 2009 and 2011, which includes semi‐structured interviews with representatives from various spread agencies – government agricultural instructors, NGOs, social enterprises, and the inorganic industry – as well as with farmers and other key informants. Following the recent work of Nigel Thrift, it is argued that such an approach to the study of innovation diffusion can be a way of uncovering “the political economy of propensity”. The article suggests that a return to Tarde should not lead researchers back into naïve diffusionism, or towards a position that blames traditionalist farmers for non‐diffusion. Non‐human actors can also exhibit resistance and sociality: innovations travel through a landscape which is both human and non‐human, and the spread of organic farming practices is configured by both bonds of trust among farmers and bonds of chemicals in the soil. Furthermore, it contends that future research may interrogate the ways in which the very medium of diffusion is being reconfigured, following actors' institutionalization of innovation diffusion methods.     

‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.     

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.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

What's in a name? Anthrozoology,human‐animal studies,animal studies or…? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Human interactions with other animals feature regularly in the pages of Anthropology Today, and academic research focusing on the human‐animal relationship is undergoing something of a boom in the social sciences and humanities generally. This comment, prompted by Caplan's paper ‘Death on the farm’ in the last issue of AT, considers the place of human‐animal interactions in anthropology through a discussion of the terminology and methodologies employed by scholars within this area. It is argued that such a discussion is instructive because, as the etymology of the term suggests, anthropology is ultimately concerned with ‘understanding humans’. The ways that we, as researchers, choose to distinguish between humans and other animals, and the ways that we choose to represent our informants' interactions with other animals, can provide considerable insight into how all concerned think about what it means to be human.