Creative geographies of ceramic artists: knowledges and experiences of landscape,practices of art and skill

This paper argues for a conception of art as an embodied and creative material practice. It draws on research conducted with seven professional ceramic artists who deal with landscape in their work to explore their processes of art-making through interview and (filmed) observation. It demonstrates the distributed range of embodied and relational more-than-artistic practices which inform how landscape is encountered, known and ultimately represented. It argues that artists’ self-expression in art is based upon material, social and political knowledges which interweave in artists’ lives. By studying ceramicists’ making this paper demonstrates both the non-conscious skill and the conscious technical knowledge needed to make art. It shows chance to have a triple role in practices of making, as something to work alongside, to work against and to draw on as a creative resource. This paper both argues for and demonstrates the value of an approach to art-making that frames it as a complex of both conscious, socio-cultural, technical knowledges and non-conscious skills which together (in)form works of (ceramic) art.     

Differences in Manufacturing Traditions and Assemblage-Level Patterns: the Origins of Cultural Differences in Archaeological Data

A relationship between behavioral variability and artifactual variability is a founding principle of archaeology. However, this relationship is surprisingly not well studied empirically from an explicitly “microevolutionary” perspective. Here, we experimentally simulated artifactual variation in two populations of “artifact” manufacturers, involving only a single behavioral difference in terms of their “tradition” of manufacturing tool. We then statistically analyzed shape variation in the resultant artifacts. In many respects, patterned differences might not have been expected to emerge given the simple nature of the task, the fact that only a single behavioral variable differed in our two populations, and all participants copied the same target artifact. However, multivariate analyses identified significant differences between the two “assemblages.” These results have several implications for our understanding and theoretical conceptualization of the relationship between behavior and artifactual variability, including the analytical potency of conceiving of artifacts as the product of behavioral “recipes” comprised of individual “ingredient” behavioral properties. Indeed, quite trivial behavioral differences, in generating microevolutionarily potent variability, can thus have long-term consequences for artifactual changes measured over time and space. Moreover, measurable “cultural” differences in artifacts can emerge not necessarily only because of a strict “mental template” but as the result of subtle differences in behavioral ingredients that are socially learned at the community level.     

Setting the agenda for evidence-based research on ending mass atrocities

The question of how mass atrocities end has been dominated by a normative approach regarding how they ought to end. Arguing that an evidence-based approach to terminate mass atrocities might offer profound insights into theories of mass atrocities as well as policies designed to prevent or end their occurrence, this article outlines the key questions and approaches needed for an evidence-based study of atrocity endings. It draws on theories of genocide, political violence and civil war termination, and presents initial insights from case studies, including the killing of civilians in colonial German Southwest Africa, the Soviet Union, the Nigerian civil war, the Guatemalan civil war, the Nuba Mountains of Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina.     

Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter

In this paper, I seek to gain an understanding of the power that water meters are able to acquire in regulating the daily rhythms of life in the South African city of Durban. In doing so, I put Georg Lukács's writings on reification to work. Lukács's theorisation of the phenomenon of reification captures the twin processes of encroaching formal rationalisation and commodity fetishism. Charting the history of the introduction of water meters and the rise in power of associated infrastructures, I seek to put a historical geographical materialist imagination to work. Thus, I develop a relational ontology of the urban waterscape before seeking to identify lines of struggle that might challenge the dictatorship of the water meter and move towards radically democratic technologies for a more equitable distribution of water.     

Securing international society: towards an English school discourse of security

English School approaches to international politics, which focus on the idea of an international society of states bound together by shared rules and norms, have not paid significant explicit attention to the study of security in international relations. This is curious given the centrality of security to the study of world politics and the recent resurgence of English School scholarship in general. This article attempts to redress this gap by locating and explicating an English School discourse of security. We argue here that there is indeed an English School discourse of security, although an important internal distinction exists here between pluralist and solidarist accounts, which focus on questions of order and justice in international society respectively. In making this argument, we also seek to explore the extent to which emerging solidarist accounts of security serve to redress the insecurity of security in international relations: the tendency of traditional security praxes to privilege the state in ways that renders individuals insecure.     

众信国旅邀你猜猜这是哪儿？

数亿年前,这些山峰努力像分娩的婴儿一样挣向天空,浮出水面得以新生; 260万年——这条不起眼的小河用这个时间长度在地球上打磨出了最不像地球景色的这片区域;