Seniors’ Long-Term Care in Canada: A Continuum of Soft to Brutal Privatisation

We situate the contemporary crisis of COVID-19 deaths in seniors’ care facilities within the restructuring and privatisation of this sector. Through an ethnographic comparison in a for-profit and nonprofit facility, we explore what we identify as brutal and soft modes of privatisation within publicly subsidised long-term seniors’ care in Vancouver, British Columbia, and their influence on the material and relational conditions of work and care. Workers in both places are explicit that they deliver only bare-bones care to seniors with increasingly complex care needs, and we document the distinct forms and extent to which these precarious workers give gifts of their time, labour and other resources to compensate for the gaps in care that result from state withdrawal and the extraction of profits within the sector. We nonetheless locate more humane and hopeful processes in the nonprofit facility, where a history of cooperative relations between workers, management and families suggest the possibility of re-valuing the essential work of care.     

Progressive and reactionary rhetoric in the municipal reform debate in New South Wales,Australia

Albert Hirschman's rhetoric of reaction is a potentially powerful typology of the arguments made by both proponents and opponents of reform (1991. The rhetoric of reaction: Perversity, futility, jeopardy. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). However, scholars have identified a number of gaps in the typology, in particular that it has struggled to explain the lines of rhetoric associated with disputed empirical evidence. This paper reviews Hirschman's typology before applying it to the contentious municipal amalgamation debates currently unfolding in New South Wales, Australia. We then examine the lines of attack open to progressives and reactionaries on the basis of empirical data. We conclude that the use of empirical data opens new lines of rhetoric for both ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’ generally, but that both information costs and complexity significantly affect the timing and penetration of the arguments.     

The Tragedy of Cambridge Anthropology: Edwardian Historical Thought and the Contact of Peoples

The essay identifies and explores the intellectual formation of a hitherto overlooked constellation of ‘anthropologists’ in Edwardian Cambridge. Three core members of this group were William Ridgeway, Hector Munro Chadwick, and William H. R. Rivers, who today are more normally associated with (respectively) Classics, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Anthropology. However, in the decade before World War I all three were active members of the new Board of Anthropology, and each, in his particular field of study, began to turn away from established evolutionary explanation to investigate social phenomena as arising out of the contact of different peoples. The essay first shows the connections between the work of Chadwick and Rivers, and then suggests that both were following a path recently beaten down by Ridgeway who, in his disputes with the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, advanced an account of ancient Greek tragedy as arising out of a fusion of native and intrusive performances, both relating to the commemoration of the dead.     

Co-Producing Mobilities: negotiating geographical knowledge in a conference session on the move

In an experimental session entitled Co-Producing Mobilities held at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 20 mobility scholars travelled around London on foot, by bus and by Tube to investigate how mobilities could be considered co-produced. In this paper, 18 participants reflect on this collaborative experiment and on how it influenced their thinking about mobilities, geographical knowledge and pedagogy. Contributions cast light on the function of conferences and the multiple forms of pedagogy they enable, and provide guiding resources for those now wanting to continue such experiments.     

Planning the post‐political city: exploring public participation in the contemporary Australian city

This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post‐political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio‐spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.     

Raised relief on nephrite jade artifacts: observations,explanations and implications

Mineralogical analyses of nephrite jade artifacts have been used to identify likely causes of alterations in which some specimens exhibit raised relief above the original polished surfaces. In all of the specimens examined, the raised areas consist of either large diopside ± large tremolite crystals, or, in a few cases, only fibrous tremolite, within a non-raised matrix of nephrite (fibrous tremolite). Apparent relief may be cause by a number of different effects, either mechanical (abrasive), chemical (e.g., dissolution), or a combination (mineralogical alteration leading to formation of relief). The most enigmatic examples occur where the relief formed after the object was polished and can not be easily attributed to chemical dissolution or mechanical abrasion. One possible explanation for these is that minor amounts of secondary growth of hydrous minerals, such as clays along grain boundaries, produced a volume increase which caused the crystals to rise. Carbon-14 analysis on one vessel that displays raised relief has produced an age of 3010 ± 30 years before present for organic material that coated the alteration.