Proximity and economic activity: An analysis of vendor‐university transactions

This paper uses transaction‐based data to provide new insights into the link between the geographic proximity of businesses and associated economic activity. It develops two new measures of, and a set of stylized facts about, the distances between observed transactions between customers and vendors for a research intensive sector. Spending on research inputs is more likely with businesses physically closer to universities than those further away. Firms supplying a university project in one year are more likely to subsequently open an establishment near that university. Vendors who have supplied a project, are subsequently more likely to be a vendor on the same or related project.     

Uncoupling binaries,unsettling narratives and enriching pedagogical practice: lessons from a trial to Indigenize geography curricula at the University of Adelaide,Australia

The development of culturally and social inclusive curricula is an important aspect of teaching geography. In countries such as Australia with a history of colonial oppression and dispossession the need to acknowledge Indigenous history and peoples in teaching is vital. This paper reports on the lessons learned from being part of the Indigenous Enrichment of Curricula Project (IECP) for geography curricula at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Drawing on advice from an Indigenous Reference Group, this project trialled the use of visual and aural delivery mechanisms, the development of country-based assessments, the use of “co-run conversations in safe spaces” and embedding of key narratives and storylines to provoke student learning and cultural reflexivity. Challenges are reported on, including working out how to decolonize curricula without adopting binary and essentialist constructions of Indigeneity, how to involve Indigenous colleagues without overburdening them, and how to represent Indigenous knowledge. The paper concludes that Indigenizing or enriching curricula must go beyond a content focus and avoid superficially gilding the lily (by the addition of culturally palatable and romanticized “nuggets” of Indigenous knowledge) but build towards a drastic re-structuring in practice of entire course frameworks consistent with Indigenous ways of doing and seeing.     

Competition for talent: retaining graduates in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine

Graduates are considered a convenient source of human capital in today’s knowledge-based economy. It is therefore crucial to understand what drives their mobility intentions to retain larger numbers of graduates. This is particularly true for peripheral regions, which need to compete with economic centres that are assumed to be more attractive. This paper adds a euregional perspective to the existing literature on graduate migration by investigating whether or not students intend to stay in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine (EMR) after graduation. It takes into account the role of hard and soft locational factors, social factors as well as individual characteristics in shaping future graduates’ mobility preferences. Using survey data from 2015 from five higher education institutions in the EMR, this paper finds that mobility intentions are determined by students’ perceptions of the quality of life, openness and career opportunities in the euroregion. In addition, distance to the partner and other social ties such as family and friends influence migration intentions.     

Fashioned Forest Pasts,Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales

This article considers how environmental problematics are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa’s humid forest zone. Examing the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine‐grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with ‘discourse’ perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and ‘local’ knowledges. The authors explore the day‐to‐day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers’ alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.     

From Democracy to Bureaucracy： The Baojia in Nationalist Thought and Practice, 1927-1949

In the 1939 New County Reforms, the Nationalist government made the baojia system the lowest level of self-government in the country. This decision was the result of more than ten years of discussion among Nationalist administrators and writers who were searching for a tutelary system to train the people in their political rights in preparation for constitutional rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nationalist writers claimed to be following Sun Zhongshan＇s （Sun Yat-sen） philosophy by reinventing the baojia as a form of democracy. Harkening back to a reimagined national past, they ＂discovered＂ that the imperial baojia was not a system of local control, but a traditional model of bureaucratically-designed local self-government. Nationalist writers dovetailed this new baojia with Sun Zhongshan＇s philosophy in order to rationalize its position as the foundation of the Three Principles of the People State. Once philosophically legitimized, Nationalist writers endorsed the baojia as a top-down bureaucratic system that would transform the political, social, and economic life of the country; it would become the core political unit of their state-making and nation-building projects. In so doing, the baojia came to represent the Nationalists＇ deeply-held belief in the power of human agency to create state institutions capable of entirely remaking society and transforming the nation.