The corporeal,the social and space/place: exploring intersections from a midwifery perspective in New Zealand

This article explores the interrelations between the corporeal, the social and the spatial as they operate to shape the discursive and material realities of childbirth in the obstetric hospital setting. It draws on interviews conducted with midwives throughout New Zealand and embodies key insights derived from the work of Michel Foucault and Elizabeth Grosz. The obstetric hospital is theorised as a product of particular socio-political relations that privilege biomedical constructions of the body and childbirth. Midwives, however, proffer an alternative construction of childbirth and the space/place it is enacted. It is one that requires a woman to actively engage with a variety of birth spaces and take up a range of subject positions that enable her to be a more active agent in the process of parturition. The limited and limiting spatial and discursive arrangements of the obstetric hospital, it is argued, shape the behaviour, subjectivity and corporeality of the maternal body confined within it and therefore the practises of midwives. Unfortunately, and as this article demonstrates, the opportunity to take up such an alternative is limited in the obstetric hospital despite some recent cosmetic attempts to render it more welcoming.     

Ned Kelly Died for our Sins

From time to time scholars have posed the question: why have Australian Aborigines not developed cargo cults with the same intensity and flamboyance as their Melanesian neighbours? This discussion evades the implications that Aborigines may have been negligent in their cultural production of responses to colonisation, and seeks to engage with some of the responses some Aboriginal people actually have made to colonisation. Focussing on stories of Ned Kelly, and contrasting them with stories of Captain Cook, the suggestion here is that Aboriginal people's search for a moral European communicates the challenging and provocative possibility that coloniser and colonised can share a moral history and thus can fashion a just society.     

Tomorrow’s Country: Practice-oriented principles for Indigenous cultural fire research in south-east Australia

First Nations peoples are revitalising diverse cultural fire practices and knowledge. Institutional and societal recognition of these practices is growing. Yet there has been little academic research on these fire practices in south-east Australia, let alone research led by Aboriginal people. We are a group of Indigenous and settler academics, practitioners, and experts focused on cultural fire management in the Victorian Loddon Mallee region. Using interviews and workshops, we facilitated knowledge sharing and discussion. In this paper, we describe three practice-oriented principles to develop and maintain collaborations across Aboriginal groups, researchers, and government in the Indigenous-led revitalisation of fire on Country: relationships (creating reciprocity and trust), Country (working with place and people), and power (acknowledging structures and values). Collaborations based on these principles will be unique to each temporal, social, cultural, and geographic context. Considering our findings, we acknowledge the challenges that exist and the opportunities that emerge to constructively hold space to grow genuinely collaborative research that creates change. We suggest that the principles we identify can be applied by anyone wanting to form genuine collaborations around the world as the need for social–ecological justice grows.     

Partnerships for Social Change in the Canadian North: Revisiting the Insider–Outsider Dialectic

In the two decades since Alexander Lockhart's seminal article on the insider–outsider dialectic in native socioeconomic development, a great deal of change has occurred in the Canadian North and new challenges have emerged for community‐based participatory research and development. This is particularly the case in the Northwest Territories, where Aboriginal communities are facing for the first time the triple challenges of Aboriginal land claims implementation, Aboriginal self‐government, and a boom in mining and petroleum development. Increasingly, participatory methods in research and community development are being co‐opted to serve state or corporate interests, far from their radical origins in movements for social change. A historical analysis is called for that accounts for the contradictory and contested social contexts in which participatory activities are imbedded. This article suggests that a return to the roots of the participatory method requires the creation of a new autonomous space of resistance. The academic outsider is uniquely positioned to facilitate critical interventions in both community and university contexts. The resulting convergence of critical outsider and insider has great potential in the forging of new knowledge that can contribute to self‐determination beyond the bounds of the state.     

Privatising the suburbs: examining the trends and implications of 20 years of private residential development in Sydney,Australia

Master planned estates have been the subject of considerable academic interest since the publication of Blakely and Snyder's ( 1997 ) typology. The growing provision of private assets, facilities, and infrastructure in such estates has been documented and discussed. However, the extent of this form of residential estate in Australia has yet to be systematically documented. This paper seeks to contribute to knowledge in this field by reference to findings from an investigation in Sydney, Australia, using data from 300 private residential estates constructed under the New South Wales Community Land Development Act, 1989 (community title) over a 20‐year period. The aim is to understand the broad trends emerging in relation to the nature and extent of these types of developments and to consider some of their potential implications. This research suggests that there has been a quiet revolution in residential development and postulates that the extent of privatisation of essential neighbourhood infrastructure has been considerable. The study finds that master planned residential estate development has proliferated, particularly in the outer suburbs and in areas of relative disadvantage, and resulted in enclaves of comparative affluence disconnected from surrounding areas. In addition, the restrictive covenants usually applied in these estates are often designed to prevent change, including future densification or environmental adaptation. To this extent, the privatised nature of these estates puts them beyond the reach of broader urban planning goals.     

From Contentious to Contended: An ‘Event’‐ful Account of Karavaran History

In 2019, we returned to Karavar, one of Papua New Guinea's Duke of York Islands. Since our last visit 28 years earlier, many with whom we worked had died. However, their children knew about us and were eager for our recollections about the lives and times of their parents. We, in turn, wished to learn about current lives and times. Our conversations, thus, often focused on multi‐generational changes. Significantly, most Karavarans thought that these changes had been for the better. Indeed, they seemed relatively satisfied with their present circumstances. In contrast, the Karavarans we had earlier known were frequently fired up with grievance, disappointment, possibility, and occasional exultation. Here we consider how contentiousness turned into contentment; how, what Karavarans had been, approached what they wanted to be. In understanding this historical process, we consider several ramifying ‘events’: happenings that Karavarans recognized, whether immediately or in retrospect, as interrupting business as usual and, ultimately, as challenging assumptions about the workings of their world.     

On the Transformative Potential of Community Land Trusts in the United States

Growing interest in non‐capitalist ownership models raises empirical questions about the political implications of such models. In this paper we ask: are non‐capitalist property ownership models inherently politically transformative? A study of community land trusts (CLTs) based in Minnesota illustrates that alternative property models do not necessarily produce transformative political outcomes. Interviews of those involved in CLTs revealed that they most often engage in affirmative politics, rather than challenging structural problems. Seeds of transformation were evident in these CLTs as well, however, and we explore these moments through four lenses of transformation in order to see the potential building blocks toward other worlds. To this end, we highlight changes in participant subjectivities, collective relationship building, the cultivation of community control, and the subversion of power hierarchies. While these moments offer pathways toward greater transformation, this study reveals the necessity of intentionally transformative practice in alternative ownership models.     

The Underwater Recovery of Monumental Marble Column Drums from an Ancient Shipwreck at Kızılburun,Turkey

In the first century B.C., a stone carrier sank off the Aegean coast of Turkey at K?z?lburun transporting all the elements of a monumental marble column, including a single Doric capital and eight drums. The 60-tonne cargo lay at a depth of 45–48 m and was excavated in its entirety by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University between 2005 and 2011. Ongoing research has shown that the Doric column pieces in the K?z?lburun cargo originated in the marble quarries on Proconnesus Island in the Sea of Marmara and were very likely heading for the Temple of Apollo at Claros when the ship sank just 50 km short of its destination. The complete recovery of the ship’s cargo posed a unique set of methodological challenges involving lifting the multi-tonne marble drums without disturbing the delicate waterlogged wooden hull remains preserved beneath. This report summarizes the solutions developed over five seasons in order to rig, hoist, move, and ultimately raise to the surface eight large ancient marble column drums (as well as all the other marble artifacts in the cargo) from a depth of almost 50 m under water.     

Arsur Castle Maritime Installation (1241–1265 CE)*

Abstract

This article provides a detailed review of the early explorations of Tel Burna (Arabic Tell Bornat) from the earliest explorers until the recent excavations led by Itzhaq Shai and Joe Uziel under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University. Beyond offering various possibilities for the identification of the site, this paper's purposes are as follows: first, to serve as a case study on investigation of the early sources associated with the discipline of Historical Geography; second, to provide a detailed history of research related to Tel Burna by examining each major explorer and their respective contributions; third, to compare the recent survey and ongoing excavation to the results of the explorations of the 19th and 20th centuries.