Political Ecologies of Global Health: Pesticide Exposure in Southwestern Ecuador's Banana Industry

Pesticide exposure in Ecuador's banana industry reflects political economic and ecological processes that interact across scales to affect human health. We use this case study to illustrate opportunities for applying political ecology of health scholarship in the burgeoning field of global health. Drawing on an historical literature review and ethnographic data collected in Ecuador's El Oro province, we present three main areas where a political ecological approach can enrich global health scholarship: perceptive characterization of multi‐scalar and ecologically entangled pathways to health outcomes; critical analysis of discursive dynamics such as competing scalar narratives; and appreciation of the environment‐linked subjectivities and emotions of people experiencing globalized health impacts. Rapprochement between these fields may also provide political ecologists with access to valuable empirical data on health outcomes, venues for engaged scholarship, and opportunities to synthesize numerous insightful case studies and discern broader patterns.     

Archaeomagnetic Dating of Pyrotechnological Contexts: a Case Study for Copper Smelting Sites in the Central Timna Valley,Israel

This study is focused on establishing age constraints for several copper slag deposits at the centre of the Timna Valley (Israel) via reconstruction of their ancient geomagnetic intensities as recorded by the individual slag samples at the time of their formation. The results show a correlation between the location of the slag deposits (labelled as individual ‘mounds’ in our survey) and their inferred ages, reflecting varying socio‐economic and political dynamics in the region. While the slag mounds found at the unprotected foothills represent a variety of dates (mostly Early Islamic), the slag mounds on the hilltops are chronologically constrained to the early Iron Age (late 11th to 10th centuries bce ), supporting the idea for a need for protection during this period. Furthermore, in comparing the new data with previous archaeomagnetic studies from Timna, we can assert the existence of simultaneous copper production at the archaeological Sites 30, 30a and 34. This gives further support to the claim of intense smelting in the central Timna Valley during the early Iron Age. Finally, this project demonstrates the potential of archaeomagnetic experiments to provide chronological insights, and their particular advantage in addressing pyrotechnology‐related cases.     

Conquest,ceramics, continuity and change. Beyond representational approaches to continuity and change in early medieval England: a case study from Anglo‐Norman Southampton

Studies of Anglo‐Norman material culture, and pottery in particular, have struggled to see how processes of change are reflected in the material record. In this paper I propose a new approach to the analysis of this material. By reconstructing how people interacted with objects, we can see how the agency to create Anglo‐Norman England was distributed through interactions between people and their surroundings. Furthermore, rather than being reflected in such interactions, continuity and change flowed through engagements with objects, generating unique meanings and experiences. This approach therefore challenges the existing ontology that underlies our understanding of the period and its political developments and ethnic identities.     

A sense of proportion: An aspect of the theology of the chronicler 1

Abstract

The Chronicler's emphasis on certain theological teachings rather than others is better explained in terms of the rhetorical situation of the writer and the historical audience, and of their theological/ideological questions, rather than by assuming a dogmatic writer who was inconsistent or incoherent at times, or alternatively, one who grudgingly admitted here and there that reality did not follow the prescribed path.

In fact, the Chronicler consistently set the lessons that the historical audience may have learned from some, or even many, of the individual accounts in the book in theological/ideological perspective by qualifying them with the message conveyed by other accounts. The Chronicler, thus, shaped within the text, and communicated to the audience, a sense of proportion that is integral to the thought and teachings conveyed by the Book of Chronicles as a whole. This sense of proportion conveyed an image of God's ways in a manner consistent with a less than predictable world; moreover, it allowed for a variety of potential interpretations of (socially accepted) historical events, and of the actual experiences of the audience for which this book was written.     

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.     

Joseph Dennie and The Farmer's Weekly Museum: Readership and Pseudonymous Celebrity in Early National Journalism

The early national period witnessed an explosion in newspaper journalism in terms of both the quantity of publications produced and their geographic reach. This essay examines these issues through the case of an editor, Joseph Dennie, who worked in New Hampshire in the late 1790s. Dennie is an early (although not an original) example of the dedicated, white-collar editor, and his Weekly Museum and Lay Preacher articles achieved widespread notice. Dennie did not, during his New Hampshire career at least, become a household name, by virtue of publishing exclusively under pseudonyms. The essay looks at the opportunities that this presented and what it allowed him to get away with.     

Three arguments against ‘soft innovation’: towards a richer understanding of cultural innovation

This paper critiques recent research on innovation in the cultural and creative industries. In particular, this paper examines Paul Stoneman’s idea of ‘soft innovation’ as a jumping off point for discussing theories of cultural innovation more broadly. Three critiques are advanced. Firstly, soft innovation is a theoretical perspective that has developed from neoclassical economics, and is therefore vulnerable to criticisms levelled at neoclassical explanations of economic behaviour. Secondly, the theory of soft innovation can be criticised for being contingently inaccurate: the observed reality of cultural industries and marketplaces may not reflect the theory’s premises. Thirdly, because soft innovation defines the significance of an innovation in terms of marketplace success, it implies that only high-selling cultural products are significant, a difficult claim to substantiate. This paper concludes by arguing that our understanding of innovation in the cultural sphere can benefit from a multi-disciplinary approach grounded in the full gamut of human creativity.