Still methodologically becoming: collaboration,feminist politics and ‘Team Ismaili’

This article mobilizes a feminist analytic to examine team research and collaborative knowledge production. We center our encounter with team research – a collectivity we named ‘Team Ismaili’ – and our study with first- and second-generation East African Shia Ismaili Muslim immigrants in Greater Vancouver, Canada. We draw upon feminist politics to highlight the ways in which ‘Team Ismaili’ at once destabilized and unwittingly reproduced normative academic power relations and lines of authority. A ‘backstage tour’, of ‘Team Ismaili’ shows the messiness and momentum of team research and sheds light on how collaborative knowledge production can challenge and reconfirm assumed hierarchies. Even as we are still methodologically becoming, through this discussion we strive to interrupt the prevailing silence on team research in human geography, to prompt more dialogue on collaboration and to foreground the insight garnered through feminist politics.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

Florida's Mystery Wreck

During the summer of 2005 the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary investigated an unusual shipwreck in 6 m (20 ft) of water off Marathon in the Florida Keys. Known locally as the 'Mystery Wreck' it remained relatively undisturbed for over two decades until State of Florida and Sanctuary archaeologists conducted a research project to learn more about this fascinating early shipwreck. This paper presents a summary of field investigations and a preliminary interpretation of the shipwreck.
© 2006 The Authors     

Educational Conquest: Schools as a Sphere of Politics in French Mandate Syria, 1936-1946

This article deals with the significance of the school as aspace for colonial and diplomatic power struggles in the FrenchMandate territories of Syria and Lebanon between 1936 and 1945.Often underestimated in their importance to colonial and internationalaffairs, schools were an integral part of France’s precariouspolitical administration in the Levant. Although fiercely anti-clericalat home, the French government relied extensively on long-establishedCatholic missionary schools to entrench its control. These schoolsemerged as a space for conflict, both symbolically and physically,as a result of their association with France’s policyof promoting non-Sunni communities at the expense of the regionalSunni majority. Within the context of these policies, Frenchschools became a symbol of privilege for francophile Christianelites and of oppression for Muslim or pan-Arab groups disaffectedwith the regime. The discussion here addresses the role of schoolsas a focus for conflict and cooperation among French officialsand educators working in the Levant, as a forum for Franco-Syriancolonial interaction and as an object of international diplomaticdispute as Syria gained its independence.     

Biotechnology and Food Safety in China: Consumers’ Acceptance or Resistance?

Although China is one of the world's largest producers and consumers of genetically modified (GM) crops and derived food products, little is known about the level of Chinese consumer awareness, understanding and acceptance of GM food. Initially, China pursued relatively aggressive policies for biotechnology development, but in recent years, the central government has become more sensitive to the potential environmental risks of transgenic food crops. To protect domestic biotech industries, the state plays a critical role in the politics of biotechnology, and does not allow GM food to become a prominent public issue. This contribution reports on a survey of 1,000 urban respondents. It demonstrates that most consumers lack the most basic understanding of biotechnology and its potential risks. The majority of the respondents (60 per cent) were either unwilling to consume GM food or were neutral about the idea, but when given neutrally‐worded information about potential GM food allergenicity, the willingness to buy dropped sharply. This might point to future scenarios of consumer resistance against GM food as has happened in European Union member states. This effect demonstrates the malleability of the Chinese consumer in a context of limited understanding and inadequate access to information.     

Rethinking Middle Bronze Age Communities on Cyprus: “Egalitarian” and Isolated or Complex and Interconnected?

Current views of Cyprus during the Middle Bronze Age (or Middle Cypriot period) depict an island largely isolated from the wider eastern Mediterranean world and comprised largely if not exclusively of “egalitarian,” agropastoral communities. In this respect, its economy stands at odds with those of polities in other, nearby regions such as the Levant, or Crete in the Aegean. The publication of new excavations and new readings of legacy data necessitate modification of earlier views about Cyprus’s political economy during the Middle Bronze Age, prompting this review. We discuss at some length the island’s settlement and mortuary records, materials related to internal production, external exchange and connectivities, and the earliest of the much discussed but still enigmatic fortifications. We suggest that Middle Bronze Age communities are likely to have been significantly more complex, mobile, and interconnected than once envisaged and that the changes that mark the closing years of this period and the transition to the internationalism of Late Bronze Age Cyprus represent the culmination of an evolving series of internal developments and external interactions.

     

The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia

Microfinance is a dominant strategy used to promote rural development around the world. Rather than directly track its impact on borrowers, however, microfinance institutions rely on indicators of financial performance adopted from commercial banking as proxies for positive social impact. Yet, as critical research has shown, the industry depends on coercive peer pressure, social shaming and various forms of gendered exploitation to achieve its high rates of loan repayment. This article maintains that there is a need to investigate how the microfinance industry's own indicators of impact contribute to the ways microfinance can harm borrowers. Based on qualitative research in Cambodia during 2021 and 2022, the article demonstrates how financial performance indicators, most notably portfolio quality, both hide and exacerbate the ways that borrowers juggle debt between formal and informal lenders. In making this argument, the article advances critical scholarship on microfinance by showing how microfinance repayment structures debt-juggling practices in ways that put borrowers at greater risk of over-indebtedness. As a result, the microfinance industry is able to claim that it successfully helps to alleviate poverty, even as it accumulates profits by appropriating wealth from poor and low-income households across the global South.     

A Fluid Sea in the Mariana Islands: Community Archaeology and Mapping the Seascape of Saipan

This paper applies both a community archaeology and seascape approach to the investigation of the sea and its importance to the Indigenous community on the island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands in western Oceania. It examines data collected during a community project including archaeological sites, oral histories, lived experiences and contemporary understandings of both tangible and intangible maritime heritage to explore Indigenous connections with the sea and better define the seascape. What the seascape of Saipan conveys in the larger sense is the true fluidity of the sea. In this instance fluidity has more than one connotation; it refers to the sea as both a substance and an idea that permeates and flows into all aspects of Indigenous life. Chamorro and Carolinian people of Saipan identify themselves as having an ancestral connection with the sea that they continue to maintain to this day as they engage in daily activities within their seascape.