Australindia: the geography of imperial desire

A tradition of imperial geographical fantasy fuses India and Australia. This paper discusses the strategic role these utopian proposals played in imperial erotics, in aiding the foundational ambition of empire, which is to connect. The proponents of these geographical hybrids (T.J. Maslen, W. Pickering and Thomas Livingston Mitchell) occupied very different positions in Greater Britain's colonial administration and the minority knowledges represented by their speculative overlays of India onto Australia circulated in very different cultural circles. The insider/outsider status of these ex-army, turned surveyors suggests a more complex ecology of alternative discourses circulating in the imperial imaginary: as proposals for future places, the schemes discussed in this article were fictions that aestheticized invasion, making it a metaphor for ultimate unity.     

Reader’s Letter

<正>Dear Editor China's Tibet:Number Two is very good from front page to last page.First I went through the pictures.I liked every one of the pictures especially that fantastic FrontBack.Then I read the articles.It is very interesting how village boy becomes Thangka painter.I read the teacher teaching blind and know about how is deaf and dumb in Tibet.It makes me think of my knotted cords-when I started about 40 years ago I sent letter to Royal Blind Institute     

Trafficking in Law: Cause Lawyer,Bureaucratic State and Rights of Human Trafficking Victims in Thailand

Abstract

In this case study of a young, Thai “cause lawyer”, advocacy for human rights is considered in context. The most important elements of that context are the path of development of Thai political and legal institutions, globalisation of law, and the networks of relationships that penetrate the state. The case study shows that human rights advocacy by NGO lawyers can adapt creatively to unpromising conditions under which courts provide little access or oversight. At the same time, the case study raises profound questions about the ultimate independence of cause lawyers when the state must be made a partner in order to establish the authority of law needed to make human rights advocacy possible. The ambiguity of the lawyer’s position is apparent from the relative ineffectiveness of her interventions and her growing moral authority on behalf of best practices under law. Her position suggests the limitations on law imposed by the underpinnings of the Thai state itself.     

COUNTERFACTUAL SPATIAL DISTRIBUTIONS

Recent contributions provide researchers with a useful toolbox to estimate counterfactual distributions of scalar random variables. These techniques have been widely applied in the literature. Typically, the dependent variable of interest has been a scalar and little consideration has been given to spatial factors. In this paper we propose a simple method to construct the counterfactual distribution of the location of a variable across space. We apply the spatial counterfactual technique to assess how much changes in individual characteristics of Hispanics in the Washington DC area account for changes in the distribution of their residential location choices.