Ecological livelihoods of farmers and pollinators in the Himalayas: Doing critical physical geography using citizen science

In farming communities dependent on the cultivation of pollinator-dependent crops, the livelihoods of farmers are inextricably linked with pollinator health. A global pollination crisis interlinked with a crisis of food production and farmer livelihoods, exacerbated by processes of socio-environmental change, is emblematic of the Anthropocene and of the kinds of ecosocial problems with which critical physical geography (CPG) engages. We propose examining the farmer-pollinator system in the Indian Himalayas through an ecological livelihoods approach using a range of collaborative citizen science methods including bloom observations to document pollinator visits, plant phenological observations to document year-round floral resource availability, and farm diaries to document orchard management practices. An ecological livelihoods approach draws on posthumanist theory, which has remained largely disengaged with methodological questions that are of concern to CPG. Citizen science, although widely used across a range of disciplines, has seen limited engagement in CPG. After elaborating some of the opportunities and challenges that an engagement between CPG, posthumanist theory, and citizen science opens up, we propose a methodology that would be simultaneously epistemological (understanding interdependence between livelihoods of farmers and pollinators) and ontological (imagining and building worlds where farmer and pollinator habitats are recomposed).     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.