The Unsheltering Sky

The cooperation of China and India in replacing chemicals that damage the stratospheric ozone layer is critical to the success of the world's first environmental agreement, the Montreal Protocol. China's leaders accepted the agreement more readily than did their Indian counterparts. These divergent responses are attributed to the nature of the policy issue in question, the impact of regime type upon state leaders' environmental policies, and dissimilar linkages between international and domestic actors and forces.     

Narrative policy images: Intersecting narrative & attention in presidential stories about the environment

Drawing on ideas about how narratives focus attention, this paper develops a “narrative policy image” using the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Narrative Policy Framework explanations of the policy process. The concept of a narrative policy image is applied to test partisan expectations about presidential environmental policy stories in State of the Union Addresses over 73 years. This research finds that Democratic stories focus on problems like climate change and victims and Republican stories emphasize solutions like new programs and upholding the status quo. These trends point to potential story types and suggest a narrative policy image, including both narrative components and valence, may be a useful concept for understanding narrative attention in macropolitics.     

Graphical Inference in Geographical Research

Graphical inference, a process refined by Buja et al., can be a useful tool for geographers as it provides a visual and spatial method to test null hypotheses. The core idea is to generate sample datasets from a null hypothesis to visually compare with the actual dataset. The comparison is performed from a line‐up of graphs where a single graph of the actual data is hidden among multiple graphs of sample data. If the real data is discernible, the null hypothesis can be rejected. Here, we illustrate the utility of graphical inference using examples from climatology, biogeography, and health geography. The examples include inferences about location of the mean, change across space and time, and clustering. We show that graphical inference is a useful technique to answer a broad range of common questions in geographical datasets. This approach is needed to avoid the common pitfalls of “straw man” hypotheses and “p‐hacking” as datasets become increasingly larger and more complex.     

Choreographing pumping: remaking the ‘ideal’ worker through maternal embodiment in the workplace

The negotiation of employed mothers’ identities as mothers and workers has often been theorized through separation, where women perform their maternal and professional identities differently and distinctly in the home and workplace. However, milk expression in the workplace, as a form of maternal embodiment at work, challenges this separation and the ‘ideal’ worker dedicated entirely to the goals and desires of the firm. This study analyzes how mother-workers negotiate milk expression to suggest that identity practice in the workplace is a choreography between co-workers and supervisors that have the potential to produce hybrid subjectivities outside of the logic of the ‘ideal’ worker or the separation of spheres. Critical moments of performance occur in the movement between spaces within the workplace when maternal and professional work occur simultaneously or maternal embodiment becomes visible to co-workers and supervisors. This paper extends the conversation about gendered organizations to suggest that working mothers are already engaging in the production of hybrid subjectivities in the workplace that have the potential to remake the ‘ideal’ worker.     

Geoengineering: re-making climate for profit or humanitarian intervention?

Climate engineering, or geoengineering, refers to large-scale climate interventions to lower the earth's temperature, either by blocking incoming sunlight or removing carbon dioxide from the biosphere. Regarded as ‘technofixes’ by critics, these strategies have evoked concern that they would extend the shelf life of fossil-fuel driven socio-ecological systems for far longer than they otherwise would, or should, endure. A critical reading views geoengineering as a class project that is designed to keep the climate system stable enough for existing production systems to continue operating. This article first examines these concerns, and then goes on to envision a regime driven by humanitarian agendas and concern for vulnerable populations, implemented through international development and aid institutions. The motivations of those who fund research and implement geoengineering techniques are important, as the rationale for developing geoengineering strategies will determine which techniques are pursued, and hence which ecologies are produced. The logic that shapes the geoengineering research process could potentially influence social ecologies centuries from now.