Global supply chains and networking: A critical perspective on learning challenges in the New Zealand dairy and sheepmeat commodity chains

Vertical and horizontal networks in food chains and rural areasinteract on rural development through a potentially global reach.This paper adopts a knowledge systems framework incorporatingnetworking dimensions to explore problems of supply chain reorganisation.In New Zealand this framework is being applied in agri-industriesthrough the input of research institutes, partly in responseto buyer-driven pressures for supply chain realignment and productionto more precise specification. The paper reports on networkinginterventions by AgResearch in the farmer-processor relationin two New Zealand export food chains (dairy and meat). Findingsfrom the Learning Challenges Project where focus groups areused to conceptualise and define aspects of the chains and toascertain knowledge networking dimensions point to the potentialof networking methodologies as policy tools.     

Participatory and community‐based research,Indigenous geographies,and the spaces of friendship: A critical engagement

Geographic engagement with Indigenous peoples remains inextricably linked to colonialism. Consequently, studying Indigenous geographies is fraught with ethical and political dilemmas. Participatory and community‐based research methods have recently been offered as one solution to address concerns about the politics of gathering, framing, producing, disseminating, and controlling knowledge about Indigenous peoples. In this article, we critically engage with the emergence of participatory and community‐based research methods as “best practice” for undertaking research into Indigenous geographies. We articulate four concerns with this form of research: a) dissent may be stifled by non‐Indigenous researchers’ investments in being “good”; b) claims to overcome difference and distance may actually retrench colonial research relations; c) the framing of particular methods as “best practices” risks closing down necessary and ongoing critique; and d) institutional pressures work against the development and maintenance of meaningful, accountable, and non‐extractive relations with Indigenous communities. We then contemplate the spatiality of the critique itself. We consider the ways in which our longstanding friendship, as researchers invested at multiple scales with Indigenous geographies and identities, provides its own distinct space of practice within which to confront the political and ethical challenges posed by research with/about/upon Indigenous geographies and peoples. While not arriving at any concrete template for undertaking research about Indigenous geographies, we suggest that certain friendships, established and situated outside research relationships, may be productive spaces within and through which research methods may be decolonized.     

New evidence on the origins of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls from a forgotten Paduan manuscript

This article examines an overlooked fifteenth-century document which attacks and refutes 35 extracts from a Latin copy of the condemned fourteenth-century work The Mirror of Simple Souls. It gives an overview of the document's origins, provenance and contents, and then discusses how certain omissions in the text's source citations have crucial implications for more firmly establishing the date of origin for the Latin translation of the Mirror.