Teaching ethics when working with geocoded data: a novel experiential learning approach

Research ethics are not the favourite subject of most undergraduate geography students. However, in the light of increasing mixed-methods research, as well as research using geocodes, it is necessary to train students in the field of ethics. Experiential learning is an approach to teaching that is potentially suitable for teaching ethics. The aim of this article is to discuss how the experiential learning process in a course on Ethics & GPS-tracking contributed to the ethical awareness of third-year undergraduate geography students. We conducted a qualitative study in which we held four focus group discussions with two cohorts of students (2016 and 2017). We explored the students’ views on the learning environment in relation to ethics in GPS-based and mixed-methods research. Our findings show how an informal learning environment and collaborative learning in a small group contributed to deep understanding of research ethics. These aspects of the learning environment are tied to an ethical framework that consists of three dimensions: (1) the ethics of collaborative research between staff and students; (2) the ethics of privacy raised by the geo-technology adopted in this research case study; and (3) the ethics of the research process with respect to informed consent and data storage.     

Becoming-minoritarian in Paco Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones

Abstract

Marginalization is at the core of Paco Bezerra’s work. The dramatic themes explored in his plays are varied, ranging from molestation, feminism, ecoterrorism, and immigration to bullying and many others. However, on another level throughout his oeuvre, there is always another element that stems from the marginalization aspect embedded in the dramatic conflict: a far more insidious and entrenched rotten core that affects everything and everyone on stage. While most of his characters are clearly beleaguered on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or a combination of several biases that act unabashedly on the surface, there is also an unrelenting criticism toward a higher form of political oppression or authoritarianism that pervades each play. In this article, I examine Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones as enunciative acts of oppositional discursive strategy to show how the marginalization process, at the two levels sketched above, occurs. By analyzing the plays under Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minoritarian, minor literature and becoming-minoritarian, we can witness how marginalization functions to rupture the fragile order in Bezerra’s plays at both levels. Hereby we can see that the playwright has created works that belong to a minor language as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Examining the move from the particular issue at hand, the dramatic motor, to some larger unspecified phenomena, suggests a potentially troubling forecast for Spanish society.     

Maori Socio-Political Organization in Pre- and Proto-History

At present it is widely assumed that the socio-political organisation of Maori society is made up of four structural levels: the ‘extended family’, the ‘sub-tribe’, the ‘tribe’ and the ‘super-tribe’, each of which, in turn, corresponds with a certain type of Maori leader. It is rarely realised that a consensus about this framework for understanding Maori socio-political organisation did not emerge until the 1930s, approximately 150 years after colonial contact had begun. This raises the question to what extent the standard model of Maori socio-political organisation is based on the same a-historic and objectivist assumptions that were held around the turn of the century when it was developed. The extent to which these assumptions may have influenced the ethnohistorical and ethnographic analysis of Maori society in past and present also requires examination. It is argued that an essentialist model of Maori tribal organisation hampers the understanding of the dynamics of socio-political practices in Maori society.     

Development for Children,or Children for Development? Examining Children's Participation in School‐Led Total Sanitation Programmes

The Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach is said to have radically revolutionized a poorly performing sanitation sector. The claims of CLTS programmes successfully stopping practices of open defecation have only recently begun to be critically reviewed: scholars and practitioners are questioning the sustainability and scrutinizing the participatory nature of this approach. This article builds on these analyses to draw attention to the School‐Led Total Sanitation (SLTS) programme which promotes the role of children as sanitation change agents to ‘trigger’ a shift of behaviour in their peers and elders in school and surrounding environments. The article reviews the active role of children in SLTS in the context of how ‘participation’ is structured in demand‐led sanitation approaches, as well as in relation to children's rights to participation in developmental projects in general. Reviewing the arguments supporting SLTS in practitioner literature and drawing on observations from SLTS case studies in Ghana, the authors notice a significant contradiction in the concept of children's participation as premised in SLTS initiatives and as outlined in the child rights agenda. These findings expose inherent tensions in SLTS between children's rights, participation and the role of children as sanitation change agents. They build on existing critiques of participation as coercion within demand‐led sanitation approaches that have ‘gone global’.     

SHAKESPEARE IN THE UGANDAN BUSH

A conversation in a car in Northern Uganda wanders off to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Then the old Italian love story leads to a discussion about feudal fights and reconciliation. A decade after the raids by the Lord's Resistance Army on the villages we pass, people are still struggling with the aftermath of that war. Victims and perpetrators are living together and try to pick up ordinary life. Traditional ways of forgiving and reconciliation have become urgent concerns today. The next day I reread Shakespeare's play and discover that it teaches the same lesson: the need for reconciliation.     

Debating Natural Law in the Banda Islands: A Case Study in Anglo–Dutch Imperial Competition in the East Indies, 1609–1621

This article examines Anglo–Dutch rivalry in the Banda Islands in the period from 1609 to 1621, with a particular focus on the process of claiming initiated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and English East India Company (EIC). Historians have paid little attention to the precise legal justifications employed by these organisations, and how they affected the outcome of events. For both companies, treaties with Asian rulers and peoples were essential in staking out claims to trade and territory. Because so many different parties were involved, individual documents had to serve multiple purposes, both on the ground in the East Indies and at the negotiating tables back in Europe. Whenever a VOC or EIC official presented a treaty to a Bandanese leader, he had to recognise local power structures in the Spice Islands, but also needed to consider his European competitors in the area, his superiors in Batavia or Bantam, and the company directors back in Amsterdam or London. Consequently, the safest and most reliable course of action was to make as many arguments as possible, piling them on top of one another. The result was an inherently messy process of claiming, yet one that was also clearly intelligible to most parties involved, including Asian rulers and peoples. A constantly changing legal suite extended to freedom of trade and navigation, contracts and alliances with native peoples, just war, conquest, actual possession, and the (perceived) surrender of native sovereignty to European authorities.