Symbolic Racism,Institutional Bias,and Welfare Drug Testing Legislation: Racial Biases Matter

Since the devolution of welfare policymaking to the states after the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, there has been contentious debate about drug testing welfare applicants. Beyond elite rhetoric and debate points about the implications of welfare drug testing, extant research remains limited insofar as providing theoretical understanding about what factors influence state proposal of legislation requiring welfare applicants to submit to drug tests. I develop and test expectations that derive from research on welfare attitudes, social construction theory, and policy design—specifically, hypotheses that the proportion of blacks on state temporary assistance for needy families caseloads, as well as state‐aggregate levels of symbolic racism, significantly influence state proposal of drug testing legislation. My multilevel analysis of every state proposal of welfare drug testing legislation from 2008 to 2014 yields strong evidence in support of these hypotheses and paints a more complete picture of the influence of racial attitudes on state welfare policymaking. Specifically, while much research finds evidence of institutional racial biases in the implementation of welfare policy, the evidence presented herein shows that these biases, as well as public biases, influence policymaking at the proposal stage. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of recent significant electoral gains made by Republicans in state legislatures.     

Developing ethical geography students? The impact and effectiveness of a tutorial-based approach

This paper explores the effectiveness of a tutorial-based approach in supporting the development of geography undergraduates’ ethical thinking. It was found that overall the intervention had a statistically significant impact on students’ ethical thinking scores as assessed using a Meta-Ethical Questionnaire. The initiative led to a convergence of scores, having a bigger impact on those who had a relatively low score prior to the intervention. Interestingly, the approach had the biggest impact on students who self-identified as physical geographers. Unlike some previous research, there was little evidence of difference between male and female students.     

How clothing design and cultural industries refashioned frontier masculinities: a historical geography of Western wear

Gendered subjectivities emerge historically and geographically, not only in situ, within an ‘authentic’ origin period or site, but through later retrospective commodifications and fantastical popular culture depictions. This article traces the masculine identity of the cowboy as commodified and performed through clothing. The cowboy emerged from colonial origins as a model and myth of frontier masculinity: the ‘rugged outdoor type’. But it was then formularized and stylized when subject to popular culture diffusion, and as accompanying clothing design evolved. Through clothing – advertised by metropolitan manufacturers and consumed across America and beyond – an archetypal, sexualized cowboy ‘look’ thus emerged. The author traces a historical geography of cowboy masculinities in clothing design, from early ‘frontier garments for the outdoor man’ to later Western-wear ‘for that long, lean look’. Related constructions of femininity are also considered, after women's Western-wear clothing lines were produced in the 1950s. To illustrate, I draw on archival brochures, catalogs, and advertising materials from the 1920s to 1970s, as well as discuss the material design of the clothes themselves. I focus especially on the Western snap shirt – an apparel item never actually worn on the nineteenth-century colonial frontier, but that became an ‘essential’ element of the cowboy look, and a vehicle for masculine appearance. Western-wear epitomizes how gendered subject positions are visually constituted in relational fashion via bodies, materials, media, and imagined geographies.     

‘Minilateral’ Development Banks: What the Rise of Africa's Trade and Development Bank says about Multilateral Governance

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are one of the most popular forms of international organization, with at least 27 operating in the world today. Although most academics and policy makers focus on the World Bank and major regional MDBs, the majority of MDBs are in fact relatively small, and controlled by developing as opposed to industrialized countries. How do the differing governance arrangements of these ‘minilateral’ development banks (MnDBs) impact their operations? This article takes the Trade and Development Bank (TDB), an MDB in Africa with 22 regional member countries, as a case study to consider this question. Based on an analysis of TDB's track record since 2005 and interviews with management and shareholders, the author finds that borrower‐led governance leads to substantial disadvantages in terms of access to finance. Borrower‐led governance permits TDB and other MnDBs greater operational flexibility, which partially compensates for this financial disadvantage, but these operational strategies come with trade‐offs in terms of developmental effectiveness. The findings suggest that MnDBs have substantial latent potential and, in an increasingly multipolar world, they are likely to grow in coming years. However, MnDBs need to ensure that their developmental value added is strengthened in step with their financial power.     

Nature's Materiality and the Circuitous Paths of Accumulation: Dispossession of Freshwater Fisheries in Cambodia

This paper examines recent conflicts over freshwater fisheries in Cambodia using the notion of accumulation through dispossession as a conceptual starting point. Despite a recent material turn, theoretical literature on the political economy of the environment has only partially incorporated an ecologically nuanced view of nature into analyses of its transformation under processes of capital accumulation. The biophysical characteristics of riverine fisheries are predicated on the ecohydrologic dynamics of water flows, and these characteristics dictate strategies of appropriation for both subsistence and commercial use. The complexity of these material characteristics is compounded in the case of Cambodian fisheries, where an array of state‐ and market‐driven processes promote the dispossession of resources and constrain the livelihood opportunities of rural communities dependent on fishing. Theories of capital accumulation and how accumulation induces socioecological conflicts can be very useful, firstly, for explaining the origins of environmental conflicts and, secondly, for grounding the analysis of such conflicts in the politics of accumulation as mediated by state actors. Conversely, theoretical framings of primitive accumulation must examine the “things” being accumulated (eg riverine fisheries) in far more biophysically specific ways, and must recognize the circuitous pathways, particularly in cases involving developmental states, that strategies of accumulation follow.     

Modern humans in Sarawak,Malaysian Borneo,during Oxygen Isotope Stage 3: palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Great Cave of Niah

During recent reinvestigations in the Great Cave of Niah in Borneo, the ‘Hell Trench’ sedimentary sequence seen by earlier excavators was re-exposed. Early excavations here yielded the earliest anatomically-modern human remains in island Southeast Asia. Calibrated radiocarbon dates, pollen, algal microfossils, palynofacies, granulometry and geochemistry of the ‘Hell Trench’ sequence provide information about environmental and vegetational changes, elements of geomorphic history and information about human activity. The ‘Hell’ sediments were laid down episodically in an ephemeral stream or pool. The pollen suggests cyclically changing vegetation with forest habitats alternating with more open environments; indicating that phases with both temperatures and precipitation reduced compared with the present. These events can be correlated with global climate change sequences to produce a provisional dating framework. During some forest phases, high counts of Justicia, a plant which today colonises recently burnt forest areas, point to fire in the landscape. This may be evidence for biomass burning by humans, presumably to maintain forest-edge habitats. There is evidence from palynofacies for fire on the cave floor in the ‘Hell’ area. Since the area sampled is beyond the limit of plant growth, this is evidence for human activity. The first such evidence is during an episode with significant grassland indicators, suggesting that people may have reached the site during a climatic phase characterised by relatively open habitats ∼50 ka. Thereafter, people were able to maintain a relatively consistent presence at Niah. The human use of the ‘Hell’ area seems to have intensified through time, probably because changes in the local hydrological regime made the area dryer and more suitable for human use.