Whitewash: white privilege and racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia

This paper examines racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia to better understand the ways that whiteness—or more specifically white privilege—is positioned in and uses landscapes. Given a history of segregation, violently contested desegregation, and a contemporary student body that is disproportionately white (compared to the population of the entire state of Georgia), we investigate the meanings and contradictions of the University's historic ‘North Campus’. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and ‘roving focus groups’—we argue that privileged, white landscapes operate through a kind of whitewashing of history, which seeks to deploy race strategically to create a progressive landscape narrative pertaining to ‘race’.     

The state of environmental protection in the Russian Federation: a review of the post-Soviet era

Abstract

In the 25 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, sweeping political, economic, and social changes have profoundly influenced environmental protection in Russia, the world’s largest country and one of global importance with respect to natural resources, biodiversity conservation, wilderness preservation, and climate change mitigation. This paper reviews the state of the environment by assessing post-Soviet era changes to legislation, government regulatory institutions, and civil society. A gulf exists between Russia’s formal environmental laws and state agency capacity and interest in enforcing them. This stems, in part, from repeated bureaucratic reorganizations that have progressively eroded environmental institutions. The Russian environmental movement, which blossomed during Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, struggled in the 1990s to mobilize the broader public due to economic hardship and political instability. Since then, the Putin administration has labeled many environmental groups “anti-Russian” and used aggressive tactics such as raiding NGO offices, intimidating journalists, and instituting severe legislative measures to quash advocacy and dissent. Post-Soviet environmental successes have been relatively few, with expansion of the protected area system and forest certification notable exceptions. These successes can partially be attributed to efforts by large environmental organizations, but expansion of certification and corporate social responsibility is also tied to Russian business interests dependent on natural resource export to global markets increasingly sensitive to environmental concerns. The paper concludes by illustrating how corruption, poor enforcement, and the muzzling of civil society render the state incapable of resolving arguably its most significant environmental challenge: illegal and unregulated resource use.     

ALL IN?

This review treats Mark Greif's remarkable inquiry into what he calls the crisis of man and man‐talk: the invocation to inquire into humanity that Greif traces out through various genres of writing (philosophy, journalism, literature, and literary criticism) through a succession of decades (1930s–1960s) within an exclusively North American US context. As seems suitable for this journal, the review focuses primarily on Greif's own standpoint and methods. In its first half, it identifies and ultimately questions Greif's decidedly anti‐hermeneutic stance. Greif cordons off his own discourse from those he treats, picking an approach that prevents his making their questions his own, despite the fact that many of his chosen texts raise issues pertaining to how history, especially intellectual history, is to be conducted. In the review's second half, two key instances are surveyed: Greif's discussions of Hannah Arendt and of Ralph Ellison.