The Location Choice of Employment‐based Immigrants among U.S. Metro Areas*

Abstract. This paper examines the initial location choice of legal employment‐based immigrants to the United States using Immigration and Naturalization Service data on individual immigrants, as well as economic, demographic, and social data to characterize the 298 metropolitan areas we define as the universal choice set. Focusing on interactions between place characteristics and immigrant characteristics, we provide multinomial logit model estimates for the location choices of about 38,000 employment‐based immigrants to the United States in 1995, focusing on the top 10 source countries. We find that, as groups, immigrants from nearly all countries are attracted to large cities with superior climates, and to cities with relatively well‐educated adults and high wages. We also find evidence that employment‐based immigrants tend to choose cities where there are relatively few immigrants of nationalities other than their own. However, when we introduce interaction terms to account for the sociodemographic characteristics of the individual immigrants, we find that the estimated effects of location destination factors can reverse as one takes account of the age, gender, marital status, and previous occupation of the immigrants.     

Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption

Geography's debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in which the ethics, morality, and politics of responsibility has been problematised, we argue that existing research on consumption fails to register the full complexity of the practices, motivations and mechanisms through which the working-up of moral selves is undertaken in relation to consumption practices. Rather than assuming that ethical decision‐making works through the rational calculation of obligations, we conceptualise the emergence of ethical consumption as ways in which everyday practical moral dispositions are re‐articulated by policies, campaigns and practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change. Ethical consumption, then, involves both a governing of consumption and a governing of the consuming self. Using the example of Traidcraft , we present a detailed examination of one particular context in which self‐consciously ethical consumption is mediated, suggesting that ethical consumption can be understood as opening up ethical and political considerations in new combinations. We therefore argue for the importance of the growth of ethical consumption as a new terrain of political action, while also emphasising the grounds upon which ethical consumption can be opened up to normative critique.     

Bedding, hearths, and site maintenance in the Middle Stone Age of Sibudu Cave, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Micromorphological analysis of sediments from the Middle Stone Age site of Sibudu Cave, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, provides a high-resolution sequence and evidence of site formation processes of predominantly anthropogenic deposits. This methodology allows for a detailed interpretation of individual anthropogenic activities, including the construction of hearths and bedding and the maintenance of occupational surfaces through the sweep out of hearths and the repeated burning of bedding. This analysis also provides a context for evaluating other studies at the site relating to magnetic susceptibility, paleobotany, paleozoology, anthracology, and studies of ochre.     

Convergence space: process geographies of grassroots globalization networks

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey's notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People's Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People's Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action.     

A Forest of Contradictions: Producing the Landscapes of the Scottish Highlands

While total global forest cover is decreasing, in many parts of the world forests are on the rebound. Uncritical examinations of this phenomenon credit the benign diffusion of capitalist development for this "forest transition." More critical readings of this question—including green Marxian and poststructuralist approaches—might conclude something very different, however. In this paper, we explore the question of expanding forest cover, using the case of the Scottish Highlands, where forestland has tripled since the 1920s, in an attempt to critically explain regional land–cover change. Drawing upon historical sources and Scottish Executive and Forestry Commission data, we examine the specific environments currently forming in the Highlands under conditions of economic change. We conclude that two divergent forestry practices and ecologies have been formed in the wake of economic restructuring: those geared towards industrial production and those targeted at consumption through ecotourism. We conclude, therefore, that capitalism's spatial fix to declining industrial power in the region is an inherently ecological one that takes the form of "schizophrenic forestry," in which forest expansion leads to the rise of degraded monocultures alongside "pristine" sites of conservation.     

The Political Importance of Provincial Newspapers, 1903-1945: The Rowntrees and the Liberal Press

This article argues that the political importance of provincialnewspapers run by the Rowntree family in the Liberal cause declinedbetween 1903 and 1945. This decline is identified in changingattitudes to the funding of newspapers, and in the reasons forthose changes. Before the Second World War the Rowntrees consideredsubsidies to provincial newspapers vital, to keep the pressat the forefront of partisan campaigning, until at last it beganto pay its way. Yet such newspapers' eventually strong financescontrasted with their political weakness, as they appeared helplessto prevent the Liberal Party's electoral decline. After 1945the Rowntrees, in contrast to their earlier strategy, no longerconsidered the funding of newspapers a priority. Instead, theytargeted money directly at the strengthening of the LiberalParty, both in Parliament and in the party organization, insteadof at the press. This switch of strategy was the earliest exampleof a wider Liberal emphasis, from the 1940s, on improving parliamentaryrecruitment and party organization. The fading political importanceof the Rowntrees' newspapers and of the wider Liberal presswould lead to loss-making Liberal papers closing, while survivingones ceased to support the Liberal Party. Instead, the Liberalscame to depend on television and community politics.     

Semitella,an Italian Bell-Beaker (Final Copper Age) animal burial ground

The Italian Bell-Beaker (Final Copper Age) has been widely studied, yet little is known about its archaeofaunas. Reported are the results of the analysis of the archaeofauna from Semitella, which is one of the largest and most important Bell-Beaker sites in Italy. The site yielded an intentionally buried bovine skeleton and contained many pits, scattered throughout the excavated area. These pits may have originally contained the corpses of the animals whose bones are represented in the sample. The hypothesis is that Semitella was a sort of cemetery for animal carcasses, or a dumping ground where carcass discards and animal cadavers were thrown or buried. A careful taphonomic and zooarchaeological analyses were therefore mandatory. The study confirmed the hypothesis. It in fact revealed a poorly diversified, selected fauna, dominated by domestic taxa, matched to a strikingly low incidence of bone surface modifications, which is the expected state of bones that have been rapidly subtracted to biostratinomic agents. The accumulated evidence indicates that Semitella was a dumping and/or a burial ground for animal corpses in the surroundings of a nearby settlement. The assemblage's final arrangement is the result of floodings that removed the disarticulated skeletal parts scattering them downstream. What remains unresolved is whether, or not, the burials were connected with ritual practices.