"Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones": A Personal Geography of Harassment

Over recent months I have received silent phone calls and malicious homophobic mail that has referred to my sexual identity, my research, my teaching, and my position within the discipline of Geography, and I have been "outed" as a lesbian to my parents. This paper attempts to unpack these experiences: first, by examining the different processes (all of which play upon the mutual constitution of my academic self and sexual self) through which my harasser has sought to exclude me from the discipline of Geography; second, by exploring the geography of this harassment—focusing on how malicious letters/calls can disrupt meanings of place, particularly the way that personal geographies can be taken for granted until they are transgressed; third, by considering geographies of the law. Finally, the paper reflects onthe mutual constitution of my sexual identity, geographical research and writing, academic identity as a geographer, and the discipline of Geography itself.     

Encounters and (in)tolerance: perceptions of legality and the regulation of space

Modern western societies are becoming increasingly diverse, undergoing rapid demographic change as a product of new patterns of migration driven by processes of globalization. As populations and cultures have become more heterogeneous in this way, public space has been increasingly defined as a space of encounter. The growing focus on the significance of everyday contact with difference raises questions about the frameworks within which such encounters occur and, specifically, the extent to which incidental encounters are shaped or regulated by perceptions of formal obligations to comply with legislative frameworks, or informal expectations about appropriate ways of behaving in public space. Using original empirical data about what ordinary people think about equality laws, the paper contributes to social geographies by considering the spatial sensitivities and regulatory frameworks that shape encounters with difference.     

Weak Ties and Expertise: Crossing Technological Boundaries

In this article, we question how new technological traits can penetrate cohesive social groups and spread. Based on ethnographic narratives and following studies in sociology, the hypothesis is that not only weak ties are important for linking otherwise unconnected groups and introducing new techniques but also that expertise is required. In order to test this hypothesis, we carried out a set of field experiments in northern India where the kiln has been adopted recently. Our goal was to measure the degree of expertise of the potters distributed between early and late adopters of the kiln. Our results are discussed in the light of oral interviews. Our conclusions suggest that expertise is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for weak ties to act as bridges and thereby for new techniques to spread. As an example, they explain how turntables could have been adopted by potters from the northern Levant during the third millennium BC.     

Interventions in the political geography of ‘libertarian paternalism’

Contributions from political, health and economic geography, social policy and environmental policy studies are brought together here in order to examine the implications of a ‘libertarian paternalist’ political ‘project’ which seeks to react in pragmatic and ideological terms to the excesses and limitations of neoliberalism in liberal democratic contexts. The authors explore the contemporary relevance and historical antecedents of so-called ‘nudge’ tactics of governing, and draw attention to the political geographies encountered in this popular political programme in specific cases.     

A proxy of potters’ throwing skill: ceramic vessels considered in terms of mechanical stress

This study is aimed at evaluating potters’ skills according to the mechanical characteristics of the vessels they produced. It focuses on wheel thrown vessels. In a first stage, considering that the difficulty of throwing ceramic vessels is to a significant extent determined by the risk of collapse of the thrown structure, we applied the method of finite element modelling to derive an index of mechanical stresses operating within a vessel. Validated via compression tests, the so-called Von Mises stress index was employed as a global index of mechanical difficulty. Because this index allows comparisons between vessels of different form, mass, and clay properties, it provides a more powerful tool than existing techno-morphological taxonomies. In a second stage, in order to relate the Von Mises stress index to throwing difficulty, we analysed the geometrical and mechanical characteristics of vessels thrown by eleven expert potters invited to reproduce four different model forms with two different masses of clay. The results demonstrated that reproductions revealed subtle but systematic deviations from the model forms that allowed a decrease in the mechanical difficulty. More difficult forms showed larger degrees of mechanical optimisation. These results, in combination with a new analysis of data from Roux’s (1990) study with potters of different skill levels, indicate that skill resides, at least to a certain extent, in the capacity to marshal the operative mechanical constraints. In other words, the latter, measured by the Von Mises index, provides a useful signature of a potter’s skills.     

Resource depression, climate change, and mountain sheep in the eastern Great Basin of western North America

Strontium, oxygen, and carbon stable isotope analysis may be used in conjunction with archaeofaunal data to identify resource depression by demonstrating that prey were obtained from more distant locations. We use fauna from Five Finger Ridge, a Fremont site in central Utah, to demonstrate that relative abundances of mountain sheep (Ovis canadensis) declined during a period of increased summer precipitation. Strontium ratio values from this period indicate that sheep were acquired from different locations than the preceding period. Specimens from this period also show a moderate increase in carbon ratio values, suggesting that mountain sheep were acquired from higher altitudes. Oxygen isotopes do not vary between temporal periods, possibly the result of the countering effects of higher oxygen isotope values associated with increased summer temperatures and lower oxygen isotope values present at higher elevations. Collectively, these data support that there were localized population declines of mountain sheep that may be related to either climatic changes or hunting pressure.