The Family Behind the Farm: Race and the Affective Geographies of Manitoba Pork Production

As increasing toxicity of Manitoba lakes garners public concern, the environmental impacts of pork producers have come under scrutiny. In this context, the Manitoba Pork Council launched The Family Behind the Farm, a series of advertisements and testimonials featuring pork producers and their families. We examine how this campaign operates affectively to distance the family farm from industrial pork production. Building upon geographical literature theorizing the relationship between race and affect, we argue that the campaign mobilizes pride in the family farm through heteronormative and racialized affects of intimacy, tradition, and intergenerational continuity. In the process, not only is pork production made innocent, but the family farm, and rural Manitoba itself, is reproduced as a white, heteronormative space with an innocent past and secure future. By analyzing this specific case, the paper demonstrates the role of the heteronormative family in reproducing affective geographies of whiteness.     

Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia: the challenge of embedding field-based learning

Abstract

In the context of continuing pressures from managerialist and neoliberal drivers of university reform in Australia, Macquarie University’s recent undergraduate curriculum innovation, based on “People,” “Planet,” and “Participation,” has resulted in the embedding and integration of experiential learning in its curriculum and institutional framework. Such an approach challenges academic and administrative staff, students, and partners in industry, the community and public sector settings, to engage and collaborate across significant boundaries. This article outlines the scope and nature of the curriculum reform, then considers the way geographers have both shaped and responded to the opportunities it created. In so doing, it proposes a number of challenges and recommendations for geographers who might seek to extend their longstanding commitment to field-based learning through similar reforms. In this regard, the discipline of geography and its tendency to engage with the “field” can offer much in fostering deeply transformative learning.     

Stable isotope evidence for salt-marsh grazing in the Bronze Age Severn Estuary,UK: implications for palaeodietary analysis at coastal sites

Stable isotope analyses of modern coastal and salt-marsh plant species (‘salt-loving’ plants or halophytes) have demonstrated that these are significantly enriched in ¹⁵N compared to other terrestrial plants. Coastal salt-marshes were far more extensive in the past than they are today. They represented a vast and much-exploited resource in many areas of the UK and north-western Europe and were considered to be prime land for the grazing of animal stock.     

Locational Disadvantage and Household Locational Decisions: Changing Contexts and Responses in the Cessnock District of New South Wales,Australia. 1964–1999

Following the rapid demise of local coalmining in the 1950s and early 1960s, the former coal towns of the Cessnock area have survived in their newfound dormitory role, with cheap serviced housing acting as a major constraint on out–migration and an incentive for in–migration for low–income householders, mainly engaged in external commuting or outside the workforce. Behavioural responses to widening local job deficits in the early 1960s were reported in this journal (Holmes, 1965). From household surveys and other sources, Holmes examined the interplay between individual, household and locality variables and presented a spectrum of projected future outcomes for localities, according to accessibility, size and service provision, either attached to the Newcastle–Maitland labour market as low–income outer suburbs or experiencing varying rates of decline while providing low–cost welfare housing. While these broad trends have continued over the last 35 years, significant variants, not predictable in 1965 have emerged, notably: the increased residential attractiveness of some small localities; the strengthening of welfare migration, notably from Sydney; the increase in non–workforce households; and, some evidence of emerging socio–economic polarisation in larger towns. In these respects, Cessnock localities can be viewed as a microcosm of wider trends in Australian society, trends which are most fully revealed in disadvantaged metropolitan peripheral localities.     

Con-artists or entrepreneurs? Fripperers and market space in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris

Medieval prohibitions abound against artisans selling stolen or bloodied goods, and refabricating used clothing to deceive customers. Such prohibitions have led scholars to suggest the secondhand trade in the Middle Ages was one of poverty or marginality. Yet, if we read trade regulations carefully and alongside other types of sources as well as consider the context of a late medieval economy undergirded by credit, a complex image of fripperers materialises. This was a trade populated by both men and women of various means vying with each other and other merchants and artisans for control of retail space. This paper works to uncover the economic and cultural standing of fripperers in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris and the commercial space of Les Halles.