The Political Iconography of Aboriginality1

The politics of ambiguity is about multiplicities and is inherent in the politics of representation. Political satire has always been a weapon of critique levelled at those in positions of power, unmasking the disjunctures between the current slogans or discursive strategies of political pretenders and the stark social realities of the people whose interests they apparently protect. Political satire necessarily obscures complexities, precisely those complexities which are disavowed in the dominant discourses.     

Italian Industrial Districts on the Move: Where Are They Going?

Since the second half of the 1990s the Italian economy has experienced a significant slowdown in the rate of economic growth. The “dwarfism” of its manufacturing firms, their specialization in traditional sectors and their organization in industrial districts have been identified by many scholars as major structural weaknesses in the Italian industrial system. Nevertheless, there is a vast and flourishing empirical literature showing that many industrial districts are actually changing in terms of sector specialization, international and innovation strategies and emergence of new forms of enterprise organization. In this paper, we provide a critical survey of the new and different patterns of industrial organization emerging in industrial districts.     

María Zambrano’s and Albert Camus’s communal ethics

ABSTRACT

Maria Zambrano and Albert Camus had much in common, especially their sympathy for the Second Spanish Republic and their ethical vision. Both intellectuals employed literary forms to explore philosophical ideas allegorically, explicitly notions related to exile and solitude. Works included in the study are ‘Delirio de Antigone,’ La tumba de Antigone, and Delirio y destino [Delirum and Destiny] by Zambrano and The Plague and The Myth of Sysifus by Camus. Zambrano’s works are interpreted as allegories of Franco’s Spain, while Camus’s novel and essay represent Vichy France under the Nazis. Like Camus, Zambrano was a master of blending political, philosophical, and literary themes and genres.     

SPATIAL HETEROGENEITY IN KNOWLEDGE,INNOVATION, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH NEXUS: CONCEPTUAL REFLECTIONS AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

By drawing on the Schumpeterian distinction between invention (i.e., new ideas and knowledge creation) and commercialization of new ideas (i.e., innovation), this paper shows that knowledge and innovation are both important drivers of economic growth, but have heterogeneous spatial impacts. In particular, the growth benefits accruing from knowledge seem rather selective and concentrated across space whereas the growth benefits generated by innovation seem more diffusive, and regions innovating in the absence of a strong local knowledge base can be as successful as more knowledge‐intensive regions in turning innovation into a higher growth rate, possibly by exploiting local informal knowledge and/or knowledge spillovers. These results are of great importance for the design of research and innovation policies within the frame of the Europe 2020 strategy.     

Quality Assurance in Archaeological Survey

To have confidence in the results of an archaeological survey, whether for heritage management or research objectives, we must have some assurance that the survey was carried out to a reasonably high standard. This paper discusses the use of Quality Assurance (QA) approaches and empirical methods for estimating surveys’ effectiveness at discovering archaeological artifacts as a means for ensuring quality standards. We illustrate with the example of two surveys in Cyprus and Jordan in which resurvey, measurement of surveyor “sweep widths,” and realistic estimates of survey coverage allow us to evaluate explicitly the probability that the survey missed pottery or lithics, as well as to decide when survey has been thorough enough to warrant moving to another survey unit.     

Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/turn: poetics and practices for new disciplinary spaces

We are two feminist geographers working as practitioners and researchers in creative geographies and the discipline’s creative re/turn. Human geographers interested in new representational and non-representational methods and methodologies are, as we explore in this article, increasingly turning to artistic and creative modes of expression, including (amongst others) literary and visual arts, in which we are both involved. For some time now, we have been curious about what we experience as a lack of expressly politicized critical interrogations of the discipline’s creative re/turn and a shortage of expressly critical and politicized creative outputs. In this article, then, we explore geography’s embrace of creative practices as research methods and as means of developing outputs but, more specifically, we ask about where and how decolonizing, feminist, anti-racist, and/or queer voices, practices, and theorizations might fit within the creative re/turn. Using two different creative geographic works (one a book of poetry, the other a curation project), we trouble what we conclude may be ongoing (perhaps unconsciously) masculinist, often White and colonial, perhaps overly heteronormative, modes of geographic inquiry and practice within geography’s creative re/turn. In this context, we reflexively consider our own creative practices as ones that may offer examples to open new critical spaces and modes of representation for creative geographers.     

Anzac for Sale: Consumer Culture,Regulation and the Shaping of a Legend, 1915–21

After the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915, the word Anzac began to appear with increasing frequency to brand a range of Australian consumer products, and many traders applied to change the name of their businesses to Anzac. On 25 May 1916, the federal government issued War Precautions Regulations prohibiting the unauthorised use of the word Anzac ‘in any trade, business, calling or profession’. This article explores applications to use the word Anzac for commercial purposes between 1915 and 1921 to argue that consumer culture became a battleground where individuals and groups competed to assert ownership over the word and the social currency it represented.     

Spatial and Sectoral Characteristics of Relational Capital in Innovation Activity

The paper presents prima facie evidence of the role of relational capital in innovation activities, and underlines the spatial and sectoral difference of the effects of relational capital on innovation processes. Relational cpaital is defined in this paper as the stock of relations that a firm can entertain with other firms, institutions, research centres, measured through the intensity of cooperation among local actors. The paper is structured in two parts. In the first part, a review on the literature is presented, and the similarities and differences between the concept of relational capital and the more common concept of knowledge spillovers is underlined. In the second part, the empirical results of the analysis are presented; the empirical analysis is based on a database of 133 firms' observations, located in different geographical areas. With a quantitative approach, the paper replies to the following key questions: Is relational capital a determinant for innovation activities? If it is so, does it have the same role in urban and non-urban areas? Does it have a different role in specialized and despecialized areas? The empirical results to these questions help in understanding whether it is true that competitive city regions in the global economy are the major locations for relatively exclusive knowledge and learning resources. The paper shows that if relational capital plays a role in innovation activities, it may very well be that its role strongly depends on the sectoral as well as the spatial characteristics in which the innovation process takes place. Non-urban areas characterized by strong local synergies and highly specialized activities may even be more facilitated in their inovation activity.     

Rice temper: technological solutions and source identification in the Indian Ocean

This paper defines a group of pottery tempered with rice husk and stem occurring in a restricted range of forms that is found throughout the Indian Ocean between approximately the first centuries BC/AD and the third century AD. Samples from the Red Sea and India are examined petrographically to compare their clay matrix, which isolates a range of variability within a restricted suite indicative of a shared source region. The rice husk temper is further examined biologically and by SEM to identify more closely what parts of it were used, how it may have been processed prior to being added and the technological choice of rice husk and stem as a temper. Given the variability in fabric it is suggested that the making of this pottery was undertaken on a small scale and through comparative studies we isolate the region of Gujarat, India as its source region, enabling the pottery to be used as a trade indicator.