Integrating isotopes and documentary evidence: dietary patterns in a late medieval and early modern mining community,Sweden

This study explores the relationship between dietary patterns and social structure in a pre-industrial mining community in Salberget, Sweden c. 1470 to 1600 A.D. using a combination of different research approaches and tools, including archaeology, osteology, bone chemistry and history. The correlation between demographic criteria (sex and age) and archaeological variables (burial type and burial location) shows that Salberget was a highly stratified community. Group diets were investigated through analyses of stable isotopes (carbon, δ ¹³C, and nitrogen, δ ¹⁵N) of bone collagen from a sub-sample of individuals buried at the site (n = 67), interpreted alongside data from human dental lesions and deficiencies, animal bone waste and information on eating habits extracted from the extensive historical documents regarding mining activities at Salberget. These integrated analyses provide a clear association between social status and diet and confirm that social status, and to a lesser extent sex, gender and age, likely governed food choice and opportunity in this diverse community.     

Gendering the city: the lived experience of transforming cities,urban cultures and spaces of belonging

Debates centred on ‘planetary urbanisation’ have raised questions over the adequacy of existing theories and epistemologies to explain the quantitative and qualitative transformations of cities. However, this theorization of the urban has met with opposition from post-colonial and feminist researchers amongst others. The comparative, empirical research in this collection, from Bolivia, India and Turkey, highlights that the city remains an important analytical and concrete framework, demarcated by contingency and cultural change through which residents must navigate. In particular we focus on the specificity of women’s lives and their capacity to problematise universalist theory, documenting their interrogation of simplistic binaries such as modern/traditional; their innovative approaches to informal settlement, housing and markets; their production of urban knowledge in order to negotiate the city; and processes and practices of mobility, experimentation, risk taking and aspiration that contest or support a myriad of urban imaginaries. Whilst not rejecting the need for theories that allow comparative perspectives on cities, our conclusions underscore the importance of recognising the multiple logics that generate city space and urban cultures, and the consequent need to parochialise the empirical basis of theories that claim to be global in outreach.     

Manufacturing Disorder: Liberalization,Informal Enterprise and Economic ‘Ungovernance’ in African Small Firm Clusters

Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small‐firm development even in contexts of unstable markets and weak states. Yet the emergence of successful enterprise clusters in developing regions of Southern Europe, Asia and Latin America contrasts with their conspicuous absence in Africa. This article challenges ahistorical and culturalist explanations regarding the lack of successful enterprise clusters in Africa through a comparative analysis of three dynamic and increasingly globalized informal manufacturing clusters in two different regions of Nigeria. Focusing on a Muslim Yoruba weaving cluster in the town of Ilorin in south‐western Nigeria, and two Christian Igbo shoe and garment clusters in the town of Aba in south‐eastern Nigeria, this article explores the role of culture, religion and the state in shaping informal economic governance in an African context. An account of the varied and complex history of these Nigerian enterprise networks reveals both their capacity for institutional innovation and economic linkages across ethnic, religious and gender boundaries, as well as their vulnerability to fragmentation and involution in the context of liberalization, state neglect and political opportunism. Far from demonstrating the inadequacies of African cultural institutions, the slide of African entrepreneurial networks into social disorder and economic ‘ungovernance’¹ is traced to the destructive impact of neoliberal reforms in a context of poverty and formal institutional exclusion.     

Unintended effects of technology on climate change adaptation: an historical analysis of water conflicts below Andean Glaciers

Climate change adaptation measures can generate long-term unintended consequences, as this paper demonstrates through an empirical case study of water conflicts at Lake Parón in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range. This decade-long struggle culminated in 2008 when a coalition of local groups (stakeholders) from the Cruz de Mayo and Caraz communities in the Callejón de Huaylas seized control of the Lake Parón reservoir from a private multinational corporation, Duke Energy. This clash over Parón’s water in the Llullán and Santa River watersheds emerged much earlier than climatic-hydrologic models had predicted, and it occurred, this paper argues, largely because of previously successful climate adaptation measures. The drainage tunnel and floodgates originally installed at Parón in the 1980s to prevent a climate-related outburst flood led to unintended or perverse outcomes because these technological artifacts subsequently allowed a diversity of stakeholders—including rural subsistence farmers, urban residents, national park officials, tourism promoters, the state energy company Electroperú, and Duke Energy—to manage water differently depending on their priorities and the existing governance structures. Neoliberal reforms that altered state-society-environment relations in Peru played a key role in these changing stakeholder power dynamics that were reflected in the management of water infrastructure at Parón. Examining this water conflict that emerged from the unintended effects of climate adaptation demonstrates not only how technology and society are mutually constitutive, but also why the politics of technologies must be considered more carefully in the analysis of social-ecological systems, hydro-social cycles, and climate change adaptation.     

Class, Agency and Resistance in the Old Industrial City

Abstract:  Recent left academic work on the consequences of economic restructuring and local labour market change in old industrial cities has been important in emphasising the role of local context and contingency in the shaping of labour market outcomes. However, in such accounts agency is often limited to capital and state actors, albeit working across scales from the local upwards. There is little sense of agency for individuals and communities in the midst of economic restructuring. Instead, they are usually treated as passive victims of deeper underlying processes. In this paper, our purpose is to highlight the autonomy and agency of workers, people and communities in old industrial cities. Rather than starting from the perspective of capital, our starting point is to emphasise how those experiencing economic change forge strategies and practices for "getting by". This leads us to call for a re-theorisation of labour agency, drawing upon the Autonomous Marxist tradition and the more recent work of Cindi Katz, in order to offer fresh insight into the agency of labour and the prospect for recovering a class politics based upon lived experience over reified abstractions.