Creative class politics: unions and the creative economy

This article examines how cultural workers participate in the construction and contestation of the creative economy at the policy level. An analysis of the role unions play in the film and television industry association FilmOntario demonstrates the paradox that the creative economy, as an economic development strategy, presents to the cultural workforce. FilmOntario has succeeded in attracting a high volume of work to the province through film and television tax credit advocacy. Although FilmOntario’s success in policy advocacy is deeply tied to union resources, the unions’ decision to work within creative economy discourses, and in association with employers, has prevented core issues related to the quality of work from being articulated as a function of policy design. The argument is that the discursive and associational choices unions, as the collective voice of the (creative) working class, make as policy actors have a significant impact on the degree to which cultural labour problems are understood as cultural policy problems.     

Nineteenth-century planned industrial communities and the role of aesthetics in spatial practices: the visual ideologies of Pullman and Port Sunlight

In the 1880s British and American planned industrial communities revealed a distinct shift in spatial practices as two discrete architecture and landscape architectural aesthetics were applied to community design: Beaux Arts, and Arts and Crafts. Two of the most extensive planned industrial communities during this decade received aesthetic attention: Pullman, Illinois near Chicago (1880), established by George Pullman, and Port Sunlight, near Liverpool (1888), established by William Lever. Both Pullman and Lever believed that by applying a distinctive aesthetic they could establish a cohesive visual ideology for social control. Lever and Pullman believed that by creating “beautiful” spaces, this would encourage and/or constrain worker attitudes and behaviors, what Henri Lefebvre calls “means of control” (1991, p 26). In addition, both Pullman and Port Sunlight became central to establishing and maintaining each company's brand identity. This paper explores the visual ideologies these two industrialists used to produce a distinctive sense of community while also revealing the inherent tensions and limitations of those aesthetics. Not only do Pullman and Port Sunlight reflect an important shift in spatial practices during the 1880s, their architects and landscape architects became influential leaders in the visual ideologies of the City Beautiful and Garden City planning movements.     

Rocks are heavy: transport costs and Paleoarchaic quarry behavior in the Great Basin

Central place foraging models are used to investigate assemblage variability at two Paleoarchaic (terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene) dacite quarries in the central and eastern Great Basin. Our analyses focus specifically on biface reduction and how varying degrees of reduction relate to the costs of transporting the resulting products upon departing the quarry. Our results suggest that when the distance to be traveled to a residential base is great, reduction will proceed further at the quarry than if the residential base is fairly close. Further, a residential site assemblage will consist of bifaces at later stages of reduction than its associated quarry.     

Using plant microfossils from dental calculus to recover human diet: a case study from Tell al-Raqā'i,Syria

Dietary reconstructions based on plant microfossils, such as starch grains and phytoliths, have been useful in increasing our understanding of past human populations. Microfossils have been recovered from sediments, stone tools, and, more recently, dental calculus. Methods for recovering microfossils from dental calculus have yet to be firmly established and there is some question about potential damage to the teeth. Using a sample of teeth from the middle Holocene site of Tell al-Raqā'i, Syria, we tested using a dental pick to sample the calculus. ESEM images taken before and after sampling show no damage to the enamel surface, and examination of the recovered microfossils show that this method provides ample material for study, even when not all of the calculus is removed from the tooth. Preliminary identification of the plant microfossils suggests that these individuals were consuming a variety of plant foods, but that domesticated cereals such as wheat and barley made up a surprisingly small portion of their diet.     

Rural futures? Mapping newcomers' hopes about potential resettlement in Canadian rural areas

The Canadian government recently launched initiatives to promote immigrant settlement outside of traditional gateway cities, in small towns and rural areas. These initiatives attempt to mitigate socio-economic impacts of population decline, and address barriers to successful integration in urban areas. Drawing on the geographies of hope, this paper examines how newcomers navigate hopes as they imagine rural resettlement in Ontario. Based on focus groups with immigrants (n = 50), the findings suggest that newcomers' imagined rural futures are a dynamic and mobile process, shaped by competing hopes for a stable life. Rural imaginaries can sometimes provide a generative space to realize hopes and develop new future aspirations, other times they can constrain hopes for intergenerational futures. We contend that newcomer hopes arise in moments of relocation uncertainty, shaped by competing visions, interests, and priorities at individual and collective scales. Newcomers' expectations of rural futures are always enlivened with a sense of optimism for what has not yet become, but are equally replete with angst and anxiety for the future. This article concludes that future geographic research on migration-hope-place interactions, particularly in the health subfield, should engage constructions, experiences, and enactments of hope that mediate relocations and the policies governing them.     

The Mixed Potential of Salvage Commoning: Crisis and Commoning Practices in Washington,DC and New York City

This paper considers how and to what ends commoning practices can take shape in direct response to the spectres and/or realities of eroding resources (we focus especially on public resources) within iterations of what we term “salvage commoning”. We show how, in such contexts, commoning practices may potentially alleviate but also potentially (re)produce inequities, exclusions, and resource retractions. To illustrate, we draw upon two examples: parent-teacher organisations in Washington, DC, and block associations in New York City. In both instances, people have cooperatively built new relations, coordinated voluntary labour, and stewarded resources in connection with specific commons (public schools and urban spaces) threatened by disinvestment and crisis. We show how troubling alignments and exclusions can emerge under these conditions, suggesting critical questions about the starkly mixed potential of salvage commoning—especially in the face of ongoing and emerging crises in which such orientations are likely to become increasingly prevalent.     

Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier

A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia's colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.