Workers' strategies to secure jobs,their uses of scale,and competing economic moralities: Rethinking the ‘geography of justice’

This paper considers workers' strategies to secure jobs, the justice of these strategies, and the spatial scales which they involve. It is argued that the justice of such strategies is strongly bound up with the scales at which they are enacted: the morality of social relations is intrinsically geographical. The paper discusses strategies within which workers compete individually or collectively for a given geographically-structured supply of jobs, including the use of social oppressions and territorial chauvinism in such competition. It contrasts these strategies with actions which challenge social oppression within employment, and which seek to know, contest and control flows of capital at large spatial scales. These latter strategies present a radical alternative to mutual competition, and embody different notions of economic justice. All of these strategies are analysed for the relations among workers and between workers and capital which they construct, the scales at which these relations are played out, the political ideologies they involve, and the moral notions generated and deployed. It is argued that to understand these different moralities, justice needs to be conceptualised not as rights understood as quasi-property of individuals but rather as a moral aspect of social relations. Accordingly, the ‘geography of justice’ is conceived as the geography of these social relations rather than geographical patterns of (dis)advantage. It is argued that the ‘interests’ of individuals and of collectives are not given objectively by social structure but are constructed through and between different feasible strategies of action; this has implications for the problem which selfishness poses to socialist economic strategies.     

International conservation ‘volunteering’ and the geographies of global environmental citizenship

Growing numbers of fee-paying ‘volunteers’ leave the UK each year to work on international nature conservation projects. Powerful advocates argue that such volunteering offers active global environmental citizens the opportunity to make a difference, delivering public services through a politically and economically appealing model of social enterprise. This paper reviews the geographies of citizenship performed in international conservation volunteering from the UK to critically examine these claims. It draws on and develops three conceptual approaches from political geography. First, it examines international conservation volunteering as a mode of cosmopolitan global environmental citizenship, guided by the universal framework of natural science across a flat earth of difference making opportunities. Second, it reviews the material reality of conservation volunteering as an illustration of the neoliberal and neo-colonial tendencies within mainstream global environmentalism. Third, it moves beyond these familiar theoretical tropes to present a more-than-human account of international conservation volunteering from the UK. This attends to the material assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, practices and affects caught up in within these expressions of citizenship. In conclusion the paper critically compares the different materialisations of citizenship offered by these approaches. It finds that the geographies of citizenship performed within the sector are neither ‘global’ or ‘environmental’, nor do they comprise modes of citizenship that embody planetary humanism or panoptic rationalism. Instead, the modes, subjects and spatialities of citizenship performed here are asymmetric, affective and more-than-human. This has important implications for the scope, practices and future of international environmental politics and for the emerging sub-discipline of the geographies of citizenship.     

Electoral and Partisan Forces in the Roosevelt Era: The U.S. Congressional Elections of 1938

Since nearly all studies of U.S. congressional elections test competing theories with data from the postwar era, we know very little about the applicability of contemporary theories to elections in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper takes a first step in exploring theories of electoral politics in the historical context of the 1938 elections. I believe a closer look at this particular election is valuable for a variety of reasons. First, turnover among incumbents in 1938 was extremely high by contemporary standards, yet no systematic explanation for the record number of losses exists. Additionally, this political era was characterized by intense polarization between Congress and the president even though the Democrats controlled both institutions. An extended analysis of this historical era can also explore the role strategic challengers played in the electoral arena before the emergence of candidate-centered elections. By exploring these significant events, I shed light on an otherwise neglected aspect of American political development.     

Consensus,Conflict, and Partisanship in House Decision Making: A Bill-Level Examination of Committee and Floor Behavior

Although conflict and partisanship are deeply entrenched in the public's view of the U.S. Congress, political scientists have noted that consensus characterizes much of the legislative branch's operations. We build on an expanding literature that moves beyond a focus on roll call voting and explore individual bills as the unit of analysis in an attempt to obtain an accurate picture of the broader context in which House decision making occurs. Drawing on evidence spanning 24 years, we document the extent to which consensus rather than conflict typifies House decision making. Our bill-level analysis facilitates a unique examination of the context in which committees operate as well as the ensuing floor environment. The results provide insight into the factors attending to the degree of consensus and conflict associated with bills—particularly the salience of the issue and the committee of origin—while painting a more complete picture of the day-to-day environment of the U.S. House.     

Regional Seismic Risk Assessment of Bridge Network in Charleston,South Carolina

This article presents the results of a seismic risk assessment of the bridge network in Charleston, South Carolina and the surrounding counties to support emergency planning efforts, and for prioritization of bridge retrofit. This study includes an inventory analysis of the approximately 375 bridges in the Charleston area, and convolution of the seismic hazard with fragility curves analytically derived for classes of bridges common to this part of the country. State-of-the-art bridge fragility curves and replacement cost estimates based on region-specific data are used to obtain economic loss estimates. The distribution of potential bridge damage and economic losses are evaluated for several scenario events in order to aid in the identification of emergency routes and assess areas for investment in retrofit. This article also evaluates the effect of uncertainty on the resulting predicted economic losses. The findings reveal that while the risk assessment is very sensitive to both the assumed fragility curves and damage ratios, the estimate of total expected economic losses is more sensitive to the vast differences in damage ratio models considered.     

Agricultural brokers

Pigs worked as brokers of agrarian life in the early medieval west in two ways. First, they converted organisms and spaces that humans did not directly exploit into a ‘commodity’ that humans did value. And the material work that pigs did made possible a second kind of brokerage, this one conceptual: the animals facilitated (or provoked) ways of seeing local phenomena in the context of wider ecological and social systems. Pigs’ ability to make use of a range of habitats, and humans’ interest in exploiting that work despite the trouble that pigs routinely caused, demonstrated that seemingly small things could influence and illuminate early medieval economies, social status, justice, and even metaphysics.