‘IT'S ALL A QUESTION OF BUSINESS’: INVESTMENT IDENTITIES,NETWORKS AND DECISION‐MAKING IN THE CLEANTECH ECONOMY

Cleantech has emerged in the last decade as a major new investment sector at the forefront of the green economy. It responds to the need for innovative technologies to combat the impact of global environmental, climate and resource trends. Focusing on the cleantech sector, this article explores the central importance of relationality within the financial domain of the green economy. The central aim of this article is to deepen understandings of the operation of cleantech investment by examining the decision‐making processes of cleantech actors, how these are influenced by (and influence) cleantech investment networks, and the relationships between these factors and the macro‐level drivers and discourses focused on the cleantech sector. A relational economic geography approach is used in conjunction with other frameworks (spanning the cultural, structural and actor‐network dimensions of cleantech investment) to investigate: how cleantech investors define the sector; the macro‐ and micro‐level drivers of cleantech investment; and how cleantech networks form and operate to create and disseminate cleantech discourses and to generate the mutual trust and information sharing needed to secure cleantech investments. In so doing, the article seeks to shed greater light on the micro‐level processes contributing to the creation and growth of cleantech investment markets as an essential catalyst and component of the green economy.     

MacLiammóir's minstrel and Johnston's morality: cultural memories of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Gate Theatre

This article explores how Micheál MacLiammóir and Denis Johnston attempted to perform cultural memories of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Gate Theatre and thereby articulated their respective views on a colonial past that had to be reassessed anew, on the one hand, and a postcolonial future that still had to be made possible, on the other. By analysing how these two prominent Gate Theatre playwrights sought to commemorate the Rising through mediated performances, this article argues that the Gate Theatre did not simply serve as a playground for disinterested aestheticists but also created a stylised forum where the perceived strain between Ireland's traumatic history and its uncertain future could be addressed and reconfigured into a meaningful teleology. In doing so, this article attempts to demonstrate that the Gate Theatre served as a cultural counterweight to the Abbey's ostensible hegemony as a theatrical force in Irish identity formation.     

The Neolithic refrigerator on a Friday night: How many people are coming to dinner and just what should I do with the slimy veggies in the back of the fridge?

Abstract

The prehistoric development of food storage represents a major evolutionary transition, one potentially more important than the initial domestication of plants. Researchers, however, have yet to really deal with some of the critical practical questions related to the materiality of food storage and decision-making. Drawing upon experimental research this paper seeks to identify and model some of the critical interconnections between anticipated food loss due to spoilage, storage decision-making and the need for people to store food for multiple years. Building on this foundation, and echoing ethnographic, ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research, this study argues that the concept of storage and surplus is underdeveloped and that in many cases the storage practices of prehistoric sedentary people do not reflect a food surplus so much as normal storage. Turning to a case study of changing Near Eastern Neolithic grain storage practices, this research argues that from the Natufian through Neolithic periods people increasingly relied upon cultivated domesticated plants and food storage. This required people to expand their use of pre-existing technology, such as plaster for lining storage features, to store sufficient amounts of food to overcome seasonal shortages, potential crop failures and minimise food spoilage due to a range of biological agents. Tracking shifts through time, the results of this study suggest that it is only with increased scale of food storage in the later stages of the Neolithic that we may see a materialization of a food surplus.     

Tea Party imitators? The campaign against the carbon tax,the media and a new uncivil politics

The Gillard government's decision to reverse an election promise to not introduce a carbon tax prompted protest rallies around Australia during 2011–12. Beneath the hyperbole of critics who dismissed these protests as imitating US Tea Party extremism lies an intriguing possibility: that these are each examples of a new form of right-wing political expression enabled by structural changes in the media. This article considers the nature of the anti-carbon tax ‘people's revolt’ and its resemblance to the Tea Party. Both are a hybrid mix of top-down control and bottom-up grassroots populism whose emergence ‘outrage media’ facilitated. In a manner that echoes the support Fox News gave Tea Partiers, talkback radio in Sydney appears to have played a particular role shaping the identity, agenda and uncivil tone of the campaign against the carbon tax.

吉拉德政府决定背弃不征碳税的竞选承诺,在2011-12年引发了全澳大利亚的抗议示威。批评者将示威斥为对美国茶党极端主义的模仿。批评者夸张言辞的背后却是一种有趣的可能：此乃媒体结构变化所造成的、右翼政治表达的新形式。本文思考了反碳税“人民反叛”的性质,以及它与茶党的相似性。二者都是自上而下控制与自下而上草根民粹的混合,“愤怒的媒体”有利于它们的出现。就像狐狸新闻声援茶党那样,悉尼的对讲电台似乎在塑造反碳税运动的身份、议题以及粗暴的口吻方面发挥了特殊的作用。     

The Future of Utopia

The widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions.     

Learning to teach geography for primary education: results of an experimental programme

Students training to become primary school teachers appear to have little awareness of the core concepts of geography (teaching). To ensure that future primary school teachers are able to develop their pupils’ geographical awareness, a six weeks programme was developed. The characteristics of this programme – named Consciously Teaching Geography (CTG) – are: principles of good geography teaching, conjunction and a recurrent structure during training, modelling and reflection. In a quasi-experimental research design the question is answered what the effects are of CTG on the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for the subject of geography of first year primary student teachers. The results indicated that the programme has a positive effect on the domain-specific PCK development in the short term.