Changing the face of GIS education with communities of practice

A principal focus in GIS higher education has been with developing curricula or accommodating new technologies to reflect the needs of the developing discipline. Pedagogy has largely reflected traditional metaphors of acquisition and transfer in the context of formal education, and this extends to preparation of students for the workplace. In this paper, the authors explore the potential for communities of practice, and in particular virtual communities of practice as a complement to more formal GIS education to provide a route to more situated, participatory learning. In so doing, the emphasis towards creating a GIS professional community of practice offers both the recognition of the role of situated knowledge in developing professional GIS expertise, and provides an important bridge from higher education to the workplace.     

Panda politics

This article argues that China's agreement in 2012 to loan Canada two panda bears is emblematic of animals’ simultaneous material‐symbolic inclusion and exclusion in contemporary politics. Employing a material focus, this article draws a connection between the panda gift and the promise to which it is attached: a promise of material flows; of Chinese access to Canadian resources, especially; and controversially, tar sands oil. Common to geographical flows of both pandas and oil is a devaluation of nonhuman life. In one flow, two pandas cross the Pacific for a decade of captivity at the Toronto and Calgary Zoos, where visitors will pay to view the permanently visible pandas. In the other instance, oil will be shipped across the same ocean, oil whose production comes at great cost to wildlife, including caribou, birds, and fish, and whose spill at any point along its journey to China would devastate marine and terrestrial wildlife populations. Stark power imbalances between species are at the heart of both of these flows and their material consequences. This article argues that, in emphasizing what the pandas symbolize, the extent to which their own and others’ lives are materially affected is elided.     

Exhibiting enterprise: how New Zealand museums generate revenue

Museums in New Zealand are not a homogeneous group in terms of their level of incomegenerating activity or the nature of those activities. The gap of knowledge consequent on this situation led to the National Services unit of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, commissioning primary research into the revenue‐generation activities of the sector. This paper presents the results of that research, specifically the data gathered through a questionnaire. The results provide a profile of respondents in relation to their operating contexts, the sources of financial and non‐financial support they received (from the local community, local authorities and central government), and the types of income‐generating activities they undertook. The results contribute to a better understanding of both how organisations within the sector generate income (from traditional sources and new, more innovative activities) and what factors influence their ability to do so.     

Spiders,Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction

By the 1850s, the representation of the spider in Victorian natural history was beginning to change. No longer associated solely with ingenuity and industry, the spider took on more disturbing connotations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unable to pin down the creature's precise rhetorical and metaphorical function, naturalists could not decide whether the spider ought to be loved or feared and at the same time the spider began to emerge as a ubiquitous, protean and unstable Gothic trope in popular fiction. While natural history books warned of the hazards of the foreign spider's bite, in adventure fiction the alien arachnid lurks in liminal spaces far from the safety of British shores. Much maligned as the unfamiliar Other, the spider caused – and mitigated – anxieties about the limits of the human. In the Gothic empire fiction of Bertram Mitford and H.G. Wells, the spider takes on the role of the harbinger of death on both sides of the colonial encounter.     

Disaster Capitalism and the Quick,Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life

Sea otters have barely survived centuries of colonial and capitalist development. To understand why, I examine how they have been oriented in capitalist social relations in Alaska, and with what effects. I follow sea otters through three overlapping political economic episodes, each of which shapes the next: colonial expansion and the fur trade; petro‐capitalism and the negligent neoliberal state, culminating in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill; and finally, spill cleanup and “green” capitalism, when sea otters are produced as data points and spectacle. In each episode, I describe (1) sea otters’ orientation in relation to capitalism and the state, and (2) the nature and temporality of violence and ecological loss that attends their orientation. In conversation with theorisations of extinction as a “slow unravelling”, I suggest animal life can unravel less slowly than haltingly—quick, quick, slow—and that the unravelling and animals’ orientation in capitalism are co‐constituted.     

Reviews

DEFEATING COMMUNIST INSURGENCY: EXPERIENCES FROM MALAYA AND VIETNAM. Sir Robert Thompson. Chatto & Windus, 1966. Pp. 171. $3.60.

THE REVOLUTION IN EGYPT'S ECONOMIC SYSTEM. FROM PRIVATE ENTERPRISE TO SOCIALISM 1952–1965. P. O'Brien. Oxford University Press for R.I.I.A., 1936. Pp xviii + 354. $8.55.

SOUTH ASIAN POLITICS AND RELIGION. Donald E. Smith (editor). Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1966. Pp. 563. $15.00 (U.S.).

THE POLITICS OF ECONOMIC COOPERATION IN ASIA. A STUDY OF ASIAN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS. Lalita Prasad Singh. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1966. Pp. xiii + 271. $7.00 (U.S.).

THE ORIGINS OF MALAY NATIONALISM. W. R. Roff. Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 2. Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, University of Malaya Press; New Haven and London, Yale University Press. 1967. Pp. 297. $10 (Malaysian).

UNITED NATIONS PEACE‐KEEPING OPERATIONS — HIGHER CONDUCT. Major General J. J. Rikye. Paris, International Information Centre on Peace‐Keeping Operations, 1967. Pp. 17. $U.S. 1.00.

SOME PRINCIPLES FOR PEACE‐KEEPING OPERATIONS — A GUIDE FOR SENIOR OFFICERS. Brigadier A. J. Wilson. International Information Centre on Peace‐Keeping Operations, 1967. Pp. 12. $U.S. 1.00.

MILITARY STAFFING AT U.N. HEADQUARTERS FOR PEACE‐KEEPING OPERATIONS — A PROPOSAL. Lt. Col. L. M. K. Stern. International Information Centre on Peace‐Keeping Operations, 1967. Pp. 14. ?U.S. 1.00.

THE SWEDISH U.N. STAND‐BY FORCE AND EXPERIENCE. Colonel Nils Stenqvist. International Information Centre on Peace‐Keeping Operations, 1967. Pp. 18. ?U.S. 1.00.

RESEARCH ON PEACE‐KEEPING OPERATIONS — CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE NEEDS. Albert Legaiult. International Information Centre on Peace‐Keeping Operations, 1967. Pp. 57. $U.S. 1.00.

PEACE‐KEEPING OPERATIONS. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Prepared by Albert Legault. International Information Centre on Peace‐Keeping Operations, 1967. Pp. 203. $U.S. 5.00.

KEEPING THE PEACE. Lt. Col. R. B. Tackaberry. Toronto, Canadian Institute of International Affairs, September 1966. Pp. 26. 35c.

BRITAIN'S WITHDRAWAL FROM ASIA. ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AUSTRALIA. T. B. Millar (ed.). ANU, 1967. Pp. 114. $2.10. . THE CONCEPT OF A PACIFIC COMMUNITY. National Catholic Rural Movement, 1967. Pp. 79. $0.50.

CHANGING AUSTRALIA'S ROLE IN ASIA. J. F. Cairns. Melbourne University. Democratic Socialist Club, 1967. Pp. 8. $0.15.

AUSTRALIA FACES SOUTHEAST ASIA. THE EMERGENCE OF A FOREIGN POLICY. Awry and Mary Belle Vandenbosch. Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1967. Pp. vi + 175. $5.75 (U.S.).

WHY VIETNAM? Frank N. Trager. Pall Mall Press, 1966. Pp. 238. $5.85.