Edmonton,Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan,and a Papaschase suburb for settlers

The Papaschase Indian Reservation outside Edmonton, Alberta was established as part of Treaty 6 in 1877, but annulled in 1888. A significant portion of the land was later assembled in Canada's first land bank and sold at below-market prices to create “Mill Woods,” an idealistic vision for a planned mixed-use suburb. Settler Colonial Theory is introduced to explore the history of the Papaschase Cree and the Reservation. This testifies to the process of dispossession, settler colonial occupation, and respatialization of the Canadian landscape. Canadian suburbia is not placeless. Methods for examining such “erased spaces” and layers of previous occupation are discussed. Canadian urban historical geography and suburban research have not sufficiently examined settler colonial dispossession. This is an opportunity for geographers to contribute to Canadian reconciliation between Settler and Indigenous cultures.     

‘It’s a horrible,horrible feeling’: ghosting and the layered geographies of absent–presence in the prison visiting room

This paper advances geographies of absence by considering the multiscalar, overlapping, ambiguous and reciprocal absences inherent in incarceration, and the compound nature of the experiential and embodied absences characteristic of prison visiting. It progresses extant literatures by considering as absent a group which differs from those previously thus conceptualised, and by postulating absence even when whereabouts are known and co-presence is possible. Drawing on a major RCUK-funded study of the socio-spatial context of prison visitation in the U.K., it brings carceral geographies and geographies of absence into productive dialogue, demonstrating that attention to the felt presence of absence in the context of prison visiting is highly revealing of the poignant and bittersweet nature of family contact during incarceration.     

A Women's Health Issue?: Framing Post-Abortion Syndrome in the 1980s

In the 1980s, a subset of anti-abortion activists in the US claimed the existence of ‘post-abortion syndrome’ (PAS), a mental illness resulting from the trauma of abortion. Appropriating vocabulary from 1970s feminist health activism, these anti-abortion activists argued against the main goal of that movement, reproductive justice. Instead, conservative and essentialist PAS activists argued ‘aborted women’ needed to take control of their health by telling their stories of victimisation. Using interviews, congressional hearings and contemporary texts, this article uses PAS to discuss tensions over women's mental health amid the 1980s' backlash.     

Interview with Adrián Curiel Rivera

Adrián Curiel Rivera is a Mexican novelist, short-story writer and academic. In addition to his novels Vikingos (2012), A bocajarro (2008) and Bogavante (2000), and the collections of stories Día franco (2016) and Madrid al través (2003), he has published two substantial volumes of critical essays, Los piratas del Caribe en la novelística hispanoamericana del siglo XIX (2010) and Novela española y boom hispanoamericano (2006). In 2013 he published Blanco Trópico, an excoriating and often hilarious fictional account of life in the Mexican Academy in the wake of sweeping neoliberal reforms in the university sector, the nature and consequences of which will be all too familiar to many European and US academics. The book caused something of a storm in his native Mexico. In the following interview, which took place in the summer of 2016, he discusses the genesis of and reactions to the novel, but also touches on a broad range of social and literary issues which the book raises: globalization, publishing, the Mexican literary canon and its sacred cows, as well as the place of the campus novel and science fiction in the current Latin American literary landscape.     

The Last Assignment: David Atlee Phillips and the Birth of CIA Public Relations

In recent years, scholars of international history and intelligence have argued that, since the 1990s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been engaged in public-relations campaigns to promote its image. As evidence of this, they point to the CIA's willingness to provide more briefings to the media, its greater engagement with Hollywood, and the appearance of CIA staff historians at academic conferences. Drawing on recently declassified documents and unpublished correspondence from the private papers of CIA officers, this article will argue that efforts by the CIA in the realm of opinion-forming began much earlier than the existing historiography dictates. In the 1970s, embarrassing revelations about CIA domestic operations prompted a host of loyal veterans, most notably David Atlee Phillips, to speak out in favour of the intelligence community as an indispensible, effective, and honourable arm of government. They did this by speaking at universities and by writing memoirs. It will be suggested that the Agency itself was initially reluctant to support the veterans, mindful of the need for secrecy, meaning that the frustrated veterans were required to operate in a strictly private capacity. By the end of the decade, however, attitudes at Langley had changed and perception management was finally put on a formal institutional footing. In charting the birth of CIA public relations, this article provides a fresh vista on the Agency's broader attitudes and policies towards secrecy and openness during the cold war and into the twenty-first century.     

Budgie smuggling or doing bird? Human-animal interactions in carceral space: prison(er) animals as abject and subject

Carceral geography, whilst in dialogue with many aspects of theory-building in contemporary human geography, including notions of affect, mobility and embodiment, has yet to meaningfully engage with animal geographies to consider the nonhuman dimension of carceral experience. Likewise, criminological scholarship of human-animal carceral co-presence has yet to progress far beyond the consideration of animals as mere ‘signifiers’ of human endeavour and meaning. Further, the study of prison animals has thus far considered only those nonhumans intentionally present in carceral space, such as therapeutic animals, eliding completely those considered ‘vermin’. This paper broadens the scope of extant scholarship, considering the parallels between the discourses of the ‘rehabilitation’ both of prisoners and prison animals during incarceration, and of both the prisoner and the prison animal as abject.     

半坡“人面衔鱼”图案再分析

半坡"人面衔鱼"图案表现的是一条俯视视角下的鱼,而非戴有装饰的人,应定名为"人面鱼"纹。对观者来说,它是"对视"和"远观"两种视角的结合,其设计目的在于通过二维的方式表现三维场景。参考玛雅文明关于地下水世界和人化鱼重生的观念,依据此类图形的出土情境,我们推测它很可能表达了半坡人群希望部分死者能够转化为鱼,穿过象征死亡的水域,进而重生或转世的愿望。