Managing 'civilian deaths due to war operations': Yorkshire experiences during world war II

Air raid precautions prior to and during the Second World War included guidance on the burial of civilians who had been killed by enemy bombardment. The Ministry of Health Circular 1779 was published before the start of the war, on the understanding that 'scheme-making' authorities would need time to prepare for the interment of mass fatalities. As the Blitz got underway, tensions emerged between the state's pragmatic concerns to restrict the cost and resources afforded to burial, and the wish of many local authorities to secure decent burial for their citizens. Key issues on which there was disagreement included the state-proposed use of shrouds instead of coffins, and mass interment. These practices carried overtones of the much-hated pauper funeral and ran counter to the political imperative to present civilian death as 'heroic'. This local study is placed in the wider context of the history of death and burial, and provides an indicator of the strength of attachment to customary funerary ritual during the middle of the twentieth century.     

IMPLAN's Induced Effects Identified Through Multiplier Decomposition

An analysis of regional multipliers is developed to reveal a structural flaw in how IMPLAN computes induced effects. This analysis reveals a fixed ratio across sectors between total and Type I employment multipliers, and that IMPLAN's "Type III" income multipliers are inversely related to the average wages in the direct and indirect sectors, and that "Type III" output multipliers are not affected by wages. A multiplier decomposition is developed that separates direct and indirect effects from the induced and further separates the induced impact into relative wage and regional income retention effects. The decomposition is useful in making comparisons among impact models.     

Letters to Lizzie: Archival Practice and the Entangled Worlds of Charlie Fraser

Letters exchanged between immigrants and their relatives who remained ‘at home’ are recognised as a valuable resource for exploring identities and emotions in the formation of settler societies. This article departs from this cultural approach to focus instead on the materiality and mobility of the letters as ‘analogue’ sources of knowledge suitable for digitisation, and what this means for histories of place. Our case study traces the movement of an emigrant’s correspondence from Newcastle, Australia to Duffus, Scotland between 1914 and 1924, the subsequent return of these letters and their enclosures to Newcastle and our decision to request digitisation of the items. We show that while traditional archival practice necessarily alienated collections of letters from either their point of origin or their destination, digitisation has the potential to reconnect geographically distant but entangled worlds.     

Islands,the Anthropocene,and Decolonisation

The Anthropocene is deployed as incontrovertible fact, yet its foundations merit strong critique to challenge how particular voices and locations are absented, silenced, or enrolled in the fallacies that attend this epochal framework. Other placed, grounded, and scale-sensitive explanations exist for present and future state scenarios, including on islands—often the focus of apocalyptic thinking. Dealing with historical and contemporary struggles to decolonise is more powerful than engaging with a reified framework that is part of ongoing colonial-imperial excesses, uneven development, and racial capitalism. This work considers how four of us, as instigating authors, worked with five others, as collaborating authors, to understand academic works, activism, and artistic expressions of island life and concerns. Our aim was to learn about how and why their efforts to prioritise decolonisation is at the heart of what is needed to shore up island peoples’ futures.     

The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance

Abstract: Voluntary food labels that express ecological, social, and/or place‐based values have been posed as an important form of resistance to neoliberalization in the Polanyian sense of protecting land, other natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market. At the same time, these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market. After reviewing the Polanyian claims about these labels, the paper examines how these labels are operationalized and notes important differences in the sort of barriers to entry they erect, which in turn have quite different distributional consequences. It then goes on to discuss how these labels look to be an expression of roll‐out neoliberalization. Following Heynen and Robbins who note four dominant aspects of neoliberalization of environmental governance (governance, privatization, enclosure, and valuation), to which a fifth (devolution) is added, the paper shows how these labels not only concede the market as the locus of regulation, but in keeping with neoliberalism's fetish of market mechanisms, they employ tools designed to create markets where none previously existed. In recognition that neoliberal political economies and subjectivities have delimited the possible, the paper also grapples with how these labels may produce political openings outside of their most proximate effects.     

Disruptive Voices and Boundaries of Respectability in Christchurch,New Zealand

In 1998, New Zealand's TV3 broadcast two programmes featuring women who alleged that a prominent Christchurch physician and local politician had sexually assaulted them while they were patients in his care. The allegations unleashed an immediate and decisive backlash in the mainstream media and this article explores that media response. The analysis of the media debate demonstrates the ideological work which must be constantly carried out by the hegemonic groups in society in order to hold on to the power to define normative geographies, which in this case had been destabilised by the women's allegations. The mainstream media attempted to restore the boundaries of hegemonic respectability by calling on gendered notions of typical female behaviour in order to undermine the validity of the women's experiences. The 'official' image of Christchurch was also evoked in order to reassert ideological values in the face of resistance. The process whereby hegemonic groups attempt to secure control of established geographies is always open to contestation, however, and some media forums opened alternative discursive spaces within which to explore women's narratives. This media event highlights the underlying tensions in society surrounding the production of meanings attached to spaces and places, tensions which problematise the common-sense notions regarding public and private, identity, subjectivity and credibility.