Viewing animal bodies: truths,practical aesthetics and ethical considerability in UK livestock breeding

This paper focuses on the production of aesthetic ‘truths’ in UK livestock breeding, drawing on detailed qualitative research with breeders and breed societies. It extends emerging interest in the aesthetic in human geographical research, examining how aesthetic judgements about non-human animals depend, in part, on the agency of the animal and their inter-subjective relations with humans in specific places. Aesthetic evaluation further produces implicit judgements about animals' ethical considerability, at the same time obscuring the effects of such judgements on their framing and treatment. Aesthetic evaluation is thus related to sets of material and ethical interests. The paper develops a more-than-human reading of Foucault's biopower, which explores how truths about visual evaluations of animals become established. Two empirical perspectives explore, first, a ‘relational practical aesthetic’ for evaluating beef cattle and sheep, exploring the implications of the aesthetic framing of specific animals and, second, the tensions involved in looking at animals when different aesthetic truths conflict and when traditions of aesthetic evaluation encounter genetic modes of evaluation. The paper concludes by discussing the ethical implications of ongoing transformations of evaluative modes in livestock breeding, suggesting that shifts away from inter-subjective modes of aesthetic evaluation further diminish the ethical status of animals.     

Belief System Continuity and Change in Policy Advocacy Coalitions: Using Cultural Theory to Specify Belief Systems,Coalitions, and Sources of Change

This paper evaluates the prospects for application of the “grid/group” cultural theory (CT), as advanced by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, to the Advocacy Coalition Theory (ACF). CT would seem to be relevant to several key aspects of the ACF: the content of the core beliefs that provide the “glue” that binds coalitions; the resilience of core beliefs and associated implications for belief change and learning; and the structure of coalitions and the mechanisms for coordination and control within them. The paper considers the compatibility of the ACF's account of deep core beliefs and coalition structure with that of CT; surveys an array of empirical studies based on variations of CT; and extends accounts of change in cultural identities from CT to the ACF. In addition, we highlight some of the ways in which the ACF may offer important theoretical insights for scholars of CT, potentially clarifying hypotheses concerning the relationships among basic worldviews, more specific beliefs, and behaviors.     

Scale,Factor Analyses,and Neighborhood Effects

Studies of potential neighborhood effects have been constrained in most situations by the absence of small‐area data generated to characterize the local contexts within which individuals operate. Using small‐area data from the U.K. Census, this paper Illustrates the creation of bespoke neighborhoods—local areas defined separately for each individual in a sample survey—at a variety of scales, and their characterization using factor analysis techniques. Theories of neighborhood effects are uncertain as to the spatial scale at which the relevant processes operate, hence the value of exploring patterns consistent with those processes at a range of spatial scales. One problem with such comparative study is the incommensurability of regression coefficients derived from analyses using factor scores as the independent variables. The work reported here adapts a procedure introduced for reconstituting partial regression coefficients to circumvent that problem, and illustrates that patterns of voting at a recent British general election showed neighborhood‐effect‐like patterns at two separate scales simultaneously—with individual voter characteristics held constant.     

Looking for Heroes in All the Wrong Places: African Americans' Search for a Champion in the Far East

Book reviewed in this article:
Marc S. Gallicchio, The African–American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945     

Heteronormative Citizenship: The Howard Government's Views on Gay and Lesbian Issues

This article analyses recent federal debates regarding gay and lesbian issues, focusing on the Howard government, and drawing attention to the arguably heteronormative nature of many politicians' views. Policy issues analysed include assisted reproductive technology, superannuation rights and censorship. Reference is also made to the Justice Kirby controversy. The article explores the way in which heteronormative arguments not only construct heterosexual citizens as the norm but are also used to discount arguments that discrimination against gay and lesbian citizens is taking place.     

Hillslope Runoff and Soil Erosion Following Reforestation in the Copper Basin,Tennessee, USA

The landscape of the 130 km² Copper Basin, in the southeastern USA, became extremely degraded during more than a century of logging, mining, acidification, grazing, and fire. In the twentieth century, the Copper Basin became the focus of a series of reforestation programs and is now largely tree‐covered again. To investigate the effects of over 50 years of reforestation efforts, we developed a space‐for‐time substitution and conducted rainfall simulation experiments in ‘forest’ patches of various ages, at sites remaining unvegetated, and at forested reference sites outside the basin. At 59 sites, we monitored surface runoff and sediment detachment rates during 30‐minute rainfall simulation experiments; and at 54 of those sites, we determined soil organic matter content. Then, we measured litter and observed soils at 25 of the sites, and measured soil respiration at a site in each age zone. The results demonstrate that soil erosion by sediment detachment decreases within a decade following reforestation. Recently reforested sites have soils with significantly less organic matter and have higher runoff rates than forests more than 50 years old. The long‐term persistence of low infiltration rates suggests that, at sites where the A and B soil horizons and the biological health of the soil have been lost, restoration of the hydrologic function of a landscape by reforestation may require centuries.