Urban Agriculture in the Food‐Disabling City: (Re)defining Urban Food Justice,Reimagining a Politics of Empowerment

Recent literature has pointed to the role of urban agriculture in self‐empowerment and learning, and in constituting ways to achieve food justice. Building on this work the paper looks at the potential and constraints for overcoming the residual and contingent status of urban agriculture. The first part of the paper aims to expand traditional class/race/ethnicity discussions and to reflect on global, cultural, procedural, capability, distributional and socio‐environmental forms of injustice that unfold in the different stages of urban food production. The second part reflects on how to bring forward food justice and build a politics of engagement, capability and empowerment. Three interlinked strategies for action are presented: (1) enhancing the reflexivity and cohesion of the urban food movement by articulating a challenge to neoliberal urbanism; (2) converging urban and agrarian food justice struggles by shaping urban agroecology; and (3) regaining control over social reproduction by engaging with food commoning.     

Recursive Estimation of the Spatial Error Model

In this paper, we propose a recursive approach to estimate the spatial error model. We compare the suggested methodology with standard estimation procedures and we report a set of Monte Carlo experiments which show that the recursive approach substantially reduces the computational effort affecting the precision of the estimators within reasonable limits. The proposed technique can prove helpful when applied to real-time streams of geographical data that are becoming increasingly available in the big data era. Finally, we illustrate this methodology using a set of earthquake data.     

Remembering the Sea: Personal and Communal Recollections of Maritime Life in Jizan and the Farasan Islands,Saudi Arabia

People create narratives of their maritime past through the remembering and forgetting of seafaring experiences, and through the retention and disposal of maritime artefacts that function mnemonically to evoke or suppress those experiences. The sustenance and reproduction of the resulting narratives depends further on effective media of intergenerational transmission; otherwise, they are lost. Rapid socio-economic transformation across Saudi Arabia in the age of oil has disrupted longstanding seafaring economies in the Red Sea archipelago of the Farasan Islands, and the nearby mainland port of Jizan. Vestiges of wooden boatbuilding activity are few; long-distance dhow trade with South Asia, the Arabian-Persian Gulf and East Africa has ceased; and a once substantial pearling and nacre (mother of pearl) collection industry has dwindled to a tiny group of hobbyists: no youth dive today. This widespread withdrawal from seafaring activity among many people in these formerly maritime-oriented communities has diminished the salience of such activity in cultural memory, and has set in motion narrative creation processes, through which memories are filtered and selected, and objects preserved, discarded, or lost. This paper is a product of the encounter of the authors with keepers of maritime memories and objects in the Farasan Islands and Jizan. An older generation of men recall memories of their experiences as boat builders, captains, seafarers, pearl divers and fishermen. Their recounted memories are inscribed, and Arabic seafaring terms recorded. The extent of the retention of maritime material cultural items as memorials is also assessed, and the rôle of individual, communal and state actors in that retention is considered. Through this reflection, it becomes clear that the extra-biological memory and archive of the region’s maritime past is sparse; that intergenerational transmission is failing; that the participation of state agencies in maritime heritage creation is highly limited; and that, as a result, memories current among the older generation have limited prospect of survival. These memories, recorded and interpreted here, identify the Farasan Islands as a former centre of the pearling industry in the Red Sea, and identify them and Jizan as open to far-reaching maritime-mediated cultural influences in an era before the imposition of the attributes of the modern nation-state.     

Cubism and the Fourth Dimension

This article revisits the historiography of Cubism and mathematics, with a particular focus on Pablo Picasso's uses of geometry at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In particular, I consider the artistic appropriation of the concept of the fourth dimension, and its pictorial uses as a conduit for a conceptual reformulation of pictorial space. I investigate Picasso's distinctive adoption of this geometric framework in relation to one of his 1909 experiments across painting and photography, and advocate the possibility of drawing novel historiographical lessons from Picasso's work — lessons that bring the historiography of Cubism in a closer dialogue with recent debates in the historiography of science. I conclude with an appeal to consider the continued relevance of this past experiment in art and science when assessing the contemporary drive toward art-science collaborations, and use the case of Cubism and the fourth dimension as a springboard for a critical reflection on the future directions of art-science collaborations.     

Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women

The second part of 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning author David I. Kertzer's interview with the Italian political leader Romano Prodi covers the period from the fall of Prodi's first government in 1998. Starting with the causes of the 1998 crisis, the discussion follows Prodi's subsequent career as President of the European Commission (1999–2004), the introduction of the Euro, the expansion of the EU, and the attempts to introduce a new European constitution, before moving to the second Prodi government (2006–08). Describing his subsequent role as UN Special Envoy for the Sahel and his candidacy in the 2013 Italian presidential elections, Italy's former Prime Minister reflects more widely on the current state of European and Italian politics.     

Effects of Confidentiality-Preserving Geo-Masking on the Estimation of Semivariogram and of the Kriging Variance

Geostatistical methods, such as semivariograms and kriging are well-known spatial tools commonly employed in many disciplines such as health, mining, forestry, meteorology to name only few. They are based essentially on point-referenced data on a continuous space and on the calculation of distances between them. In many practical instances, however, the exact point location, even if exactly known, is geo-masked to preserve confidentiality. This typically happens when dealing with confidential data related to individuals-health and their biometric parameters. In these situations, the estimation of the semivariogram and, hence, the spatial prediction can become biased and highly inefficient. This paper examines the extent of the bias in the particular case when the geo-masking mechanism is known (called “intentional locational error”) and lays the ground to a full understanding of the phenomenon in more general cases. We also examine how the geo-masking affects the estimation of the kriging variance thus reducing the efficiency of spatial prediction. We pursue our aims by developing some theoretical results and by making use of simulated and real data analysis.     

Decolonial encounters in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente: indigeneity,coevalness and intercultural dialogue

This article analyses the politics and aesthetics of the depiction of the encounter between the West and the non-West in Ciro Guerra’s film El abrazo de la serpiente, examining how the film deconstructs colonialist imagery and discourses, and engages with the notion and cinematic representation of indigeneity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article identifies and discusses the strategies employed in the film to decolonise the category of the ‘Indian’: challenging the colonial linguistic of domination and undermining the tropes of imperialist representations; staging and re-enacting colonial encounters; and subverting the power relations embedded in colonialist ethnography. The article argues that El abrazo de la serpiente acts as an instrument of political and cultural inquiry into the past and the present, and that it both proposes and enacts interculturalidad and intercultural dialogue as a cinematic approach to native culture. While the notion of indigeneity at play is not unproblematic, the film succeeds in foregrounding Indigenous points of view and ‘points of hearing’, challenging a Eurocentric politics of recognition and evolutionary epistemology in favour of a ‘coevalness’ of the native.