Hyper or hypo-masculine? Re-conceptualizing ‘hyper-masculinity’ through Seattle’s gay,leather community

This article offers a critique of the concept of hyper-masculinity and a more nuanced, place contingent, critical way to think about masculinity. I use the concept of hyper-masculinity to highlight a conceptual problem between essentialist and de-essentialized notions of gender. Constructionist notions of masculinity (and gender) do not escape the essentialist problem; however, by critiquing and offering a placed conceptualization of hyper-masculinity based on Seattle’s gay leather community, I push the boundaries of masculinity and gender to arrive at a more nuanced, embodied, place-based and contingent understanding of hyper-masculinity thereby side-stepping debates that essentialist/constructionist. Through participant-observations and ethnographic interviews with men who practice hyper-masculinity within the gay leather community in Seattle, USA, I interrogate hyper-masculinity within the community to demonstrate how it reinforces and subverts heterosexual gender roles and homonormativity.     

Assessing the Scale and Pace of Large Shell-Bearing Site Occupation in the Prince Rupert Harbour Area,British Columbia

Methodological advancements in geoarchaeology and spatial and chronological modeling are opening new avenues to interpreting large coastal shell-bearing sites. We document the developmental histories of two such sites around Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada, using systematic percussion coring, intensive radiocarbon dating, and 3D surface mapping with Total Station and LiDAR. We also re-analyze a third site (Boardwalk/GbTo-31) excavated and radiocarbon dated in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 2000s using archival field notes, site maps, and stratigraphic profiles georectified using LiDAR. We map the natural landform beneath the sites and document the degree to which people physically modified landforms through the deposition of massive shell accumulations. We model site development through time and space and use accumulation rates and OxCal modeling to test for intentional deposition events. All three sites demonstrate complex and heterogeneous occupation histories. At each we identify instances of very rapid deposition that effectively terraced and extended parts of the natural landform to create places for constructing houses, though these episodes take place within longer histories of slower quotidian deposition. The anthropogenic modifications to the coastline in this area are the result of these mixed processes associated with long histories of occupation.     

Controlled Rocking CLT Walls for Buildings in Regions of Moderate Seismicity: Design Procedure and Numerical Collapse Assessment

Controlled rocking heavy timber walls are designed to rock on their foundations in response to earthquakes. For regions of moderate seismicity, it is proposed that this rocking behaviour can be adequately controlled using only post-tensioning, even with a large force-reduction factor and no supplemental energy dissipation. This article presents a force-based design procedure for controlled rocking cross-laminated timber walls without supplemental energy dissipation, including a method for estimating higher mode effects. Fragility analyses of three prototype walls demonstrate that the procedure can limit the probability of collapse to <10% during a maximum considered earthquake in a region of moderate seismicity.     

A geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effects of contaminated sites

While the links between contaminated sites and adverse effects on human health and well‐being are being increasingly recognised, some argue that the magnitude of the health problem is inadequately addressed because it is largely invisible. Health geographies literature has sought to highlight this invisibility by focusing on the link between contaminated sites and health. This study adds to health geographies by presenting unique insights into the geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effect of environmental contamination on health and well‐being. It analyses a sample of residents (n = 485) living near 13 contaminated sites across Australia. Ordinal logistic regression analysis of closed‐format survey questions was combined with coding of open‐ended survey questions to reveal the geography of residents' worry about contamination from nearby sites. First, the study explores some of the main relationships between residents, their environs, and contaminants from nearby source sites, which determines their levels of worry: residents' demographics, residents' proximity to sites, contaminant boundaries and borders, and type of contaminant. Second, the study investigates how worry affects residents' health and well‐being, ranging from effects on their personal functioning through to their sense of ontological security, which depends in part upon their perceptions of contaminants' impacts. Despite having identified a range of diverse and negative effects of worry about contamination on residents, we found that worry for contamination can also prompt coping strategies and problem‐solving, reinforcing the need for more research on this subject.     

Governing urban regeneration in the UK: a case of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ in action?

The article focuses on the redevelopment of previously developed land by public-private sector partnerships in three cities/towns in South-West England, two of which can be described as medium-sized places with little previous experience of such developments. In each case we situated the redevelopment process in its wider multi-level and horizontal relationships using Social Network Analysis to produce network and centrality maps to reveal the complex network of relationships the process was embedded within and shaped by. These developments took place in what is termed the ‘roll-out’ phase of neoliberalism and we illustrate how the overarching planning and regulatory regimes (including contracts), along with wider economic conditions, shaped the development process, with the proviso that in each case these factors were mediated and themselves shaped by the assortment and interaction of local organizational, political, economic and civic forces. These included local planning committees and their interpretation of planning regulations and the developers involved, but also opposition to the developments from local sources. Much, however, depended on the ‘capacity to act’ of the relevant partnerships, in the sense of mobilizing and deploying available resources to realize the proposed developments.     

Whistling the Death March? Listening in to the Acoustics of Ludwig Leichhardt's Australian Exploration

Scholars considering the acoustics of exploration have focused on how explorers heard Australian space in terms of silence, to argue this silenced Indigenous presence, or that stillness, was incongruous with how a place to be colonised should sound. I focus on the acoustically attuned Ludwig Leichhardt, a science-poet indebted to the Enlightenment, but also engaged with the German Romantic legacy. The manifold acoustic dimensions of expeditioning – including music – were important to him in different ways. The acoustic world could be assayed and harnessed in ways that were often consistent with colonialism. But there was also something fugitive about acoustics. They could mark a site for emotional engagement with place, and sometimes embryonic cross-cultural dialogue. Yet the possibilities were not always heard and, in line with Romanticism, the acoustic could drag down expeditioners’ spirits just as it could buoy them up. It could baffle or be a site for Indigenous resistance.