Watercourses and Discourses: Coalmining in the Upper Hunter Valley,New South Wales

ABSTRACT Water is a resource that both unites and divides people in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where many communities are facing the prospect of large‐scale open‐cut coalmining developments on productive mixed use land, or already live in proximity to mines and power stations. This article analyses conflicts over a proposed coal mine at Bickham in the Upper Hunter Valley, by contrasting the various protagonists' discourses of water scarcity, supply, and connectivity. It examines the ways in which the terms of opposition are narrowed to the arena of state and industry supported science and economic development, marginalising other cultural values and environmental ethics that are integral to opponents' discourses. Opponents have achieved some measure of success through contestation of the uncertain science of hydrological modelling, bolstered by the context of drought and increasing public acceptance of climate change science.     

Sorcery at court and manor: Margery Jourdemayne, the witch of Eye next Westminster

Margery Jourdemayne, the ‘witch of Eye next Westminster’, Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, and three scholars of the ducal household were foremost amongst those accused of treasonable witchcraft in 1441. The paper explores Margery's part in this episode, and then examines her background: her husband William came from a prosperous Middlesex yeoman family living at Acton, and he himself was a manorial official on Westminster Abbey's Ebury (Eye) estate.     

An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect

This paper contributes to a rethinking of the ethical sensibilities of geographical research in the context of an emerging interest amongst geographers in non-representational registers of thinking and moving. Rather than undermining geographical engagements with questions of the ethical, the paper argues that this emerging interest in questions of the non-representational actually extends the range and repertoire of empirical contexts and conceptual vehicles within and with which such an engagement can take place. The paper argues that attending to and through the relation between affect and ethics is particularly important to this effort. The importance of affect in this regard is illustrated through a series of examples drawn from an 18-month participatory encounter with a specific therapeutic practice, Dance Movement Therapy. Drawing upon such examples, the paper offers some lines of ethical potential that might provide orientation to further geographical research. In doing this, the paper concentrates in particular on the necessity of cultivating a fidelity to the affective event of geographical ethics as much as remaining faithful to the subject or object of an ethical code.     

From the Little Tree,Half a Block Toward the Lake: Popular Geography and Symbolic Discontent in Post‐Sandinista Managua

Abstract: The inhabitants of Managua, Nicaragua have a sophisticated, often bitingly ironic, popular geography that they use to navigate the city. The Nicaraguan capital has been destroyed twice by earthquakes, ravaged by war, left to decay for lack of funds, transformed by the creative destruction of speculative capitalism and subjected to a series of ideological impositions. Few people know the official names of streets, and recent governments have not had the ability to put up signs. So a supple system of popular geography dominates, resisting and ridiculing attempts to impose an official order, and adapting to change while preserving a bottom‐up sense of memory, history and place. Drawing on Allan Pred's classic account of popular geography in late nineteenth century Stockholm, I use Managua's language of spatial orientation as a window into peripheral modernity and the politics of everyday life.