Geographies of capital formation and rescaling: A historical‐geographical approach to the food desert problem

Although the “food desert” concept has captured the public imagination and spurred public policy efforts in many North American cities, the term has been critiqued by academics for being definitionally and methodologically vague, and for providing an incomplete picture of the complexity of food access. Rather than dismiss the study of urban, inner‐city food deserts, however, scholars can study disparities in retail food access through a historical, critical political economy lens to understand underserved retail landscapes as a product of capital formation and rescaling over time. The purpose of this article is to conduct such an analysis, using the case study of a low‐income community in Kingston, Ontario. Using historical research and qualitative interviews, the major finding of this analysis is that the physical accessibility of retail food appears to have declined over time in relation to the capitalization of the retail food sector. An imperfect relationship can be outlined over three phases of Canadian urban economic history to suggest that the food desert problem emerged largely in the transition from a decentralized, small‐scale, and neighbourhood‐embedded retail food industry to the scaled‐up, disembedded industry that now dominates the landscape. This industry‐level rescaling is contributing to a new urban politics of class and consumption through subtle, everyday activities such as food shopping.     

‘Ugly but . . . important’: the Albanian Hoard and the making of the archaeological treasure in the early twentieth century

This paper deploys the Metropolitan Museum's Albanian (or Avar) Treasure as a case study to explore the role and value assigned to the named treasure during the early twentieth century, a moment when Americans – most notably J.P. Morgan – were among the wealthiest and most avid collectors of Byzantine and medieval art. Outlining the market conditions for such treasures, the archaeological practices that authenticated them, and the art historical categories that gave them meaning, the paper demonstrates the extent to which the archaeological treasure was a social creation built by various players: finders, dealers, scholars, museums and collectors.     

“A Set of Very Fair Cups and Saucers”: Stamped Ceramics as an Example of Inuit Incorporation

During the nineteenth century, the Labrador Inuit were incorporated into the global economic system primarily through contact with Moravian missionaries. Although they never abandoned traditional food procurement strategies, some Inuit became wage laborers for missions, and others participated in a market economy based on their procurement of marine mammals, fish, and furbearers. Excavations conducted at the Inuit village site of Nain attest to the increased consumption of European products throughout the nineteenth century. We describe one recovered artifact type, stamped earthenware, in detail and discuss how these artifacts provide insight into global economic processes.     

‘Vile liars and truth distorters’; Truth,trust and the asylum system (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Immigration detainees and failed asylum seekers constitute some of the most mistrusted persons in British society. There is some basis to this stereotype – many people do provide information they know to be untrue or request asylum when they have no valid claim under the Refugee Convention. One could of course challenge this picture by critiquing the definition of ‘lies’, identifying flawed bureaucratic assumptions about what information people can be expected to know, and highlighting the reductive narrowness of immigration categorisation. However, rather than examine the association of asylum seekers with lying, this paper draws on ethnographic research to explore how those within the asylum system experience, understand and explain the bureaucracy they are embedded in. It suggests that deception, uncertainty and mistrust are as much characteristics of asylum seekers' perspective of the immigration system as of the reverse. In so doing, the paper contributes to a wider discussion about the fairness and consistency of immigration systems, as recently addressed in this journal by Caroline White and Zachary Whyte (White, 2012; Whyte, 2011).”     

Producing Privatization: Re‐articulating Race,Gender, Class and Space

Abstract: This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal‐type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class.     

A flock of sheep,goats and cattle: ancient DNA analysis reveals complexities of historical parchment manufacture

Parchments comprise one of the most common and valuable sources of archaeological and historical data. Previous studies have shown that parchment also preserves genetic data. These data could be valuable for population studies, to understand past animal husbandry, the development of breeds and varieties and to comment on the provenance of parchments. To improve our understanding of DNA contained in parchments, we analysed genetic data, including both mitochondrial and autosomal loci, from 18th to 19th century English parchments which stable isotope analysis had indicated were well-preserved. DNA results were unexpected. All but one of the parchments produced multiple sequences matching several different species. Ion beam analysis ruled out surface treatments of the parchments (including ink and animal glues) as the origin of these multiple sequences. Our results suggest that the DNA content of parchment is more complex than previous research has suggested and that multiple stages of parchment manufacture, treatment and storage are preserved in parchment DNA extracts.