Environment/Equity: Tensions in North American Politics

Throughout the past 30 years there has been a perception of tension between social equity objectives and the agenda of environmental politics. This tension has arisen in many forms and arenas: on a social class basis, on a gender basis, and on a racial basis; regarding jobs, regarding health, and regarding competition for governmental funding. At the base, however, many of the tensions are as much perceived as real. There is more basis far common purpose between these several social movements and objectives than is ordinarily perceived.     

"Environmental awareness" and rock climbing: changing pedagogies to enhance pro-environmental graduate attributes

Geography has long been seen as having a central role in education for sustainable development, and yet the degree to which a geographical education translates to personal capacities for action has been questioned. Having struggled for some years to engage Outdoor Adventure Education students with physical geography science-based knowledge of the environment, we trialled a pedagogical shift to emphasize a relational, self-in-environment consciousness developed through autoethnography. We recount this experience to suggest that a similar approach may have potential to connect geography students’ cognitive knowledge of societies and environments with personal identities and capacities for action.     

Nuclear science and the story of a preserved leaf from a copy of the Great Bible

Three pressed leaves of Ulmus glabra (Wych Elm) were found within the pages of a copy of the Great Bible in the Library of the University of Western Australia. The Bible dates from AD 1540 and was originally housed at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. A radiocarbon age on one of the leaves found it was about as old as the Great Bible itself, and stable C and N isotope and neutron activation analyses were carried out on the same leaf. The δ¹⁵N values were elevated and the content of iron, arsenic, bromine, silver, gold and mercury were relatively high. These analyses are consistent with an environment where water logging is present, as at Ely at the time, and the silver and gold content are probably consistent with the cathedral setting. The mercury was found to be associated with the red ink in the Bible. It is intriguing to ponder why Wych elm leaves were placed in the Bible, especially in the light that a copy of an original edition of the King James version of the Bible from Ely, also in the library in Perth has many dozens of U. glabra leaves also preserved within in its pages.     

Questioning the Rhetoric of Social Mix: Courteous Community or Hidden Hostility?

This paper explores the increasingly important role of ‘social mix’ in the management practices of the NSW Department of Housing. Social mix is a policy response to the many perceived social, cultural and economic problems related to the concentration of public tenants within larger housing estates. Social mix involves the integration and assimilation of public housing tenants into areas dominated by private home ownership and private rental. Such policies are based upon the belief that social mix has the ability to alter many of these problems simply through the presence of a ‘community’. However, this paper questions the normative construction of homeowners as possessing a ‘community’ which, by implication, will be passed on to public tenants. Through an in‐depth case‐study, it is shown that ‘community’, as constructed by social mix policy rhetoric, may in fact further disadvantage public tenants through processes of othering, stigmatisation and oppression, which operate outside these traditional understandings of community. In addition, this research shows that, rather than increased community integration, it is the physical function of neighbourhood and its direct role in service provision which is the most advantageous constituent of social mix for public housing tenants.     

Cora Du Bois,Henrietta Schmerler,and the Role of Women in Mid-Twentieth Century American Anthropology

Cora Du Bois (1903–1991) achieved distinction in anthropology and the U.S. government—including leadership roles in the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department, a professorship at Harvard, and the presidency of the American Anthropological Association. Her contemporary, Henrietta Schmerler (1908–1931), suffered rape and murder while conducting her first summer of ethnographic fieldwork. Despite these stark differences, when taken together, Schmerler’s and Du Bois’s careers and reputations shed light on sexism and homophobia in and around the discipline, changing approaches to fieldwork and cultural analysis, and the political and public contexts of American anthropology in the mid-20th century.