The Mediation and Remediation of Disaster: Hurricanes Katrina and Felix in/and the New Media Environment

Hurricanes Katrina and Felix made landfall in 2005 and 2007 on the Gulf Coast of the US and the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua respectively. Despite many economic, political and cultural differences between these two sites, they share a number of interesting similarities. Their inhabitants are subject to similar modes of racialized Othering and internal colonialism, and both places have vital links with the transnational cultural consciousness that Gilroy referred to as the Black Atlantic. Katrina and Felix also occurred at a time when centralized forms of media are increasingly perceived to be in crisis. This crisis is creating new spaces for the development of alternative ways of knowing, watching and making media. This paper draws on recent literature on decolonization by Mignolo, Escobar, Quijano and others to explore the prospects for decolonizing energies within the new media environment and a context of devastation wrought by neoliberalism and disaster. This research examines disasters in/and the new media environment, and suggests that activists should understand the distinctions between mainstream (or corporate) and alternative media, between top‐down and grassroots media, and between “old” and “new” media, in relational and non‐categorical rather than absolute terms. These media realms should be engaged from an awareness of how they interact with and impact upon one another. This research also suggests that disasters must be understood as ongoing and open‐ended events embedded within historical, social, cultural, economic and political processes and systems. Media, policymaking and emergency management practices that are informed by an awareness of this complex embedding, and which are therefore able to take a long‐term view of the unfolding of disasters, will be best equipped to engage effectively, and in democratically responsive ways, with disasters and in particular with the needs of those populations most vulnerable to their impacts.     

Iron isotope analysis of red and black pigments on pottery in Nasca,Peru

The Nasca culture of the south coast of Peru developed during the first millennium ad and is known internationally for its elaborately decorated polychrome pots. Despite decades of iconographic analysis, little is known about the more technological aspects of Nasca pigment production and application. We present results from a pilot study on iron isotopes as a potential line of inquiry into the differences between red and black pigments in Nasca pigments. As well, we conduct a small firing experiment to examine potential changes in isotope composition. Our analyses show three significant results. First, firing does not change the isotopic ratios of Fe in pigments. Second, red and black pigments show differences in their iron isotope composition, which relate to differences in the minerals used to make the different colors. Third, naturally available hematite samples show greater isotopic variation than pigment samples, suggesting that people selected a limited range of iron oxides to produce pigments.     

A Family of Location Models for Multiple-Type Discrete Dispersion

One of the defining objectives in location science is to maximize dispersion. Facilities can be dispersed for a wide variety of purposes, including attempts to optimize competitive market advantage, disperse negative impacts, and optimize security. With one exception, all of the extant dispersion models consider only one type of facility, and ignore problems where multiple types of facilities must be located. We provide examples where multiple-type dispersion is appropriate and based on this develop a general class of facility location problems that optimize multiple-type dispersion. This family of models expands on the previously formulated definitions of dispersion for single types of facilities, by allowing the interactions among different types of facilities to determine the extent to which they will be spatially dispersed. We provide a set of integer-linear programming formulations for the principal models of this class and suggest a methodology for intelligent constraint elimination. We also present results of solving a range of multiple-type dispersion problems optimally and demonstrate that only the smallest versions of such problems can be solved in a reasonable amount of computer time using general-purpose optimization software. We conclude that the family of multiple-type dispersion models provides a more comprehensive, flexible, and realistic framework for locating facilities where weighted distances should be maximized, when compared with the special case of locating only a single type of facility.     

A Minimum-Impact Method for Measuring Corrosion Rate of Steel-Hulled Shipwrecks in Seawater

Current research on USS Arizona is focused on a minimum-impact technique for calculating corrosion rate of the battleship's steel hull by analysing physical and chemical properties of marine encrustation covering the exposed hull. An equation is derived that allows concretion thickness, density, and total iron content to be used to calculate corrosion rate of steel hull plate.
© 2006 The Authors     

Mark Latham and the ideology of the ALP

This article focuses on Mark Latham's views on equality. Latham's emphasis on education and on overcoming suburban, spatial inequality draws on the Whitlamite tradition. However, his work also draws on neoliberal influences and on arguments regarding the impact of the information economy. Both these influences have contributed to a move away from more traditional Labor and social‐democratic views on class, racial and gender inequality. This article considers Latham's relationship with traditional Labor ideology as well as with Third Way politics. Latham's arguments regarding the role of elites and the implications that this has for his understandings of the city, capitalism and diverse forms of inequality are also addressed. Latham's earlier views still influence his speeches and electoral strategy as Labor Leader.     

Sustainable regions: Governance,innovation and scale

This article seeks, first, to respond to some of the more pertinent points raised in the 'new regionalism' debate, like how 'regions' are constituted and how the 'regional scale' relates to other scales in what I call the 'multi-level polity' in the European Union. Second, it explores the potential of regional innovation strategies in the context of less favoured regions and argues that they have an important role to play in regional renewal even though their impact to date has been modest. Finally, it suggests that the most limiting aspect of the 'new regionalism' debate is that virtually all contributions tend to confine themselves to an inordinately narrow metric of development and, wittingly or not, this tends to conflate what is instrumentally significant with what is intrinsically significant, a conflation of means and ends     

Rethinking suburban development in Australia: a Melbourne case study

This article considers suburban development in Australia through the lens of its second largest city, Melbourne. Contemporary urban policies have focussed on the low densities within Australia's capitals and tried to achieve sustainability through urban consolidation policies. The article argues that these policies are often based on a distorted understanding of the relationship between housing markets and labour markets in Australia's large metropolises. The analysis of suburban development in Melbourne shows that suburban development involves complex links between changes in housing and job location and that urban sustainability policy needs to include actions designed to change the distribution of employment as well as the location and density of housing. The article shows that the vast spread of the Melbourne population masks closely linked regional labour and housing markets.     

The dynamics of family farming in North Huron County, Ontario. Part II. Farm–community interactions

In Canada and elsewhere, there is a growing belief that farming and rural communities have become effectively disconnected from one another. While attention to recent media reporting suggests that incidences of conflict are now as common as examples of support and collaboration, it is suggested that many examples of complementarity remain. These evolving relationships may, however, be linked to the nature of specific farm development trajectories. Such possibilities warrant empirical examination, with attention to known diversity in the family farm sector. This paper reports on an empirical investigation of farm and community linkages in North Huron County, Ontario. The paper builds upon a recent investigation of change in family farming in this region and seeks to document the ways in which local farmers continue to look to their rural communities for support of various kinds. Data are drawn from a survey of farmers in Ashfield and Colborne Townships in 1999. The research explores community linkages around three dominant themes: participation in organisations, purchasing and perceptions and experiences of community support for farming. The findings indicate the persistence of strong linkages between farms and local communities in the study region but point to a potential tendency for disconnection between farms pursuing aggressive expansion and local community organisations and businesses. There is some evidence that jobs and a variety of farm household considerations may form key linkage points between the two sectors, with the importance of these mediated by farm business trajectories and the family life course.     

Uncommon Ground: The ‘Poverty of History’ in Common Property Discourse

It would not be a great exaggeration to say that scholars of environmental conservation and conflict have re‐discovered the institutional foundations of social and economic life. At the heart of this ‘renaissance’ is the belief that property and property relations have a strong bearing on how people use, manage and abuse natural resource systems, and that institutional arrangements based on the creation and management of common property can have positive impacts on resource use and conservation. Two bodies of thought compete for a voice in this literature. One, which aims to resolve Hardin's tragedy of the commons, is primarily concerned with the problem of encouraging collective action to conserve resources that are both depletable and unregulated. A second, influenced by notions of moral economy and entitlement, deals with the problem of creating and sustaining resource access for poor and vulnerable groups in society. This article argues that the literature on common property has become divided between a body of scholarship that uses deductive models of individual decision‐making and rational choice to explain the ways in which different types of property rights arrangements emerge and change over time, and one whose questions, aims and methods are more modest, and historically‐specific. It then aims to understand this evolution by situating the mainstream common property discourse in the wider intellectual trend of positivism, methodological individualism and formal modelling that has come to dominate social science in the United States. In so doing, it attempts to unravel the political and ideological foundations of what has come to be a dominant mode of understanding environmental problems, and solutions to these problems.