Transient dwelling: trains as places of identification for the floating population of China

China has experienced massive rural–urban migration, producing the huge so-called ‘floating population’ (liudong renkou). This article attends to what it means to be thus between places by focusing on the embodied and emotional experience of migrant travel. Each year sees the Spring Festival rush (Chun Yun) with the largest annual movement of people as millions of these rural migrant laborers (nongmingong) return to their homes for the holidays. The Spring Festival rush is marked by huge crowds queuing overnight for train tickets, with throngs of migrants carrying woven bags of belongings and gifts on their shoulders, who end up standing in the overcrowded ‘hard-seat’ carriages of trains. By closely reading some of the poems from the emerging genre of ‘Hired laborers literature,’ this article explores migrants' affective and emotional journeys. It argues that this transit experience is one of the key shared sites of common identification for a migrant population whose mode of inhabitation is through circulation and mobility. It also argues that mobility creates shared experiences characterized by specific corporealities, material cultures, and senses of social stratification.     

Healed injuries in Early Cambrian trilobites from South Australia

Examples of an undescribed species of the trilobite Redlichia from the Emu Bay Shale (Early Cambrian), Kangaroo Island, South Australia, show damage to the exoskeleton attributed to the action of predators. Injury was probably not lethal. The identity of the predators is unresolved, notwithstanding soft-part preservation within the fossil assemblage. Possible culprits include either a rare and presumably large animal such as an arthropod or conceivably cannibalism by Redlichia itself. This report provides new data on the occurrence of Cambrian predators, and casts further doubt on earlier suggestions that macrophagous predation was insignificant at this time. Aspects of trilobite predation during the Palaeozoic are reviewed, with emphasis placed on their ability to withstand substantial injuries and the possible repair mechanisms that promoted wound healing and survival.     

Displaying the future: techno‐nationalism and the rise of the consumer in Postwar Japan

This paper explains how, in the aftermath of World War II, a type of techno‐nationalism emerged that linked being Japanese to science and technology and the increased consumption of electrical appliances. By closely examining official exhibitions, we can see how the state and private sector strongly encouraged this techno‐scientific dreaming. Dazzling displays highlighted how the peaceful atom would help lead the nation to achieve high economic growth. At the same time, through the judicious purchase of labor saving appliances, consumers could reconcile the need to spend with the need to save.     

Continuity and Discontinuity in the Historical Development of Modern Psychopharmacology

In the middle of the twentieth century psychiatry underwent a transition that is often referred to as the “psychopharmacology revolution.” Implicit in the term revolution is the idea that a paradigm shift occurred. Specifically, it has been argued that psychiatry abandoned the psychoanalytic paradigm in favor of a qualitatively distinct conceptual system based on brain chemistry. The validity of this view requires that psychoanalysis had the status of a paradigm. This paper presents evidence that psychoanalysis did not constitute a paradigm and that the advent of psychopharmacology was not, technically, a scientific revolution. Instead, the rise of modern psychopharmacology was the culmination of a linear growth of biological knowledge that began to develop in the nineteenth century.     

Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated,Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract

Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.     

Theatre sports in the Southern Ocean: engagement options for Australia in whale research protest action

In the great whaling debate, fuelled twice yearly by the annual International Whaling Commission meeting and the departure of the Japanese research fleet for the Southern Ocean, silliness knows no bounds. 2008 was no exception, as the Southern Ocean again became the location of protest action (sometimes provocative and potentially life-threatening) against Japanese scientific research vessels. The Japanese are accused of ‘whaling’ in a whale sanctuary off the Australian Antarctic Territory, yet this claim to sovereignty is not legally proven and therefore not universally accepted. The Rudd Labor Government bowed to significant pressure and sent its Customs vessel, the Oceanic Viking, to spy on the Japanese fleet and gather evidence for a possible ‘world court’ action. This paper examines what options were available to Australia to intervene in the protest action, to monitor the Japanese research and to take legal action in an international forum within the constraints of internationally defined diplomatic and legal boundaries. It concludes that the risk of attracting the wrath of the Japanese government and other Antarctic Treaty countries is great indeed and the Australian government must be careful not to step too far outside these boundaries.     

State Implementation of Federal Environmental Policy: Explaining Leveraging in the Clean Water State Revolving Fund

The Clean Water State Revolving fund (CWSRF) program provides states with significant discretion to design, implement, and administer the program to meet their water quality needs. An important aspect of the program is the decision whether to leverage existing funds to generate additional capital for loans. This article seeks to explain the leveraging decision process, using three models as explanators. We conceive leveraging as a two-stage process—(1) the decision to leverage and (2) the decision of how much to leverage. By employing regression techniques, we find that the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) stated reasons for leveraging—environmental needs and demand for loans—are not significant in the decision to leverage, although needs are significant at the second stage. Likewise, there is limited support for Lester's (1994 ) "capacity/commitment" model of environmental implementation. A third model employing a larger range of independent variables is the best predictor of both the decision to leverage and the amount of leveraging. Furthermore, the factors important at each stage of the decision process differ substantially, reinforcing our conception of a two-stage decision process.     

Company Growth,Acquisitions and Access to Complementary Assets in Israel's Data Security Sector

This article analyses aspects of high-tech cluster emergence in Israel during the 1990s with focuses on the data security software industry and on strategies of very successful companies dominating such an industry. Most of the industry is concentrated in Tel Aviv and close-by Hertzliya and to a lesser extent Haifa and Jerusalem. It starts by characterizing the industry as a whole and the universe of 19 companies comprising it. It then proceeds with an in-depth analysis of the growth trajectories of very successful companies, some of which are listed in NASDAQ or have been acquired by large multinational corporations. A fast 'IPO' and a 'fast M&A' track have been identified and characterized. The analysis suggests that while globalization could be beneficial to skill intensive peripheral economies like Israel, a significant economic impact may require an appropriate balance between start-up activity and downstream production and marketing activities.