‘Our home on the ocean’: Lady Brassey and the voyages of the Sunbeam, 1874–1887

Between 1874 and 1887 the exceptionally wealthy Brassey family embarked on a series of extensive cruises abroad on their private steam yacht the Sunbeam. Lady Annie Brassey's accounts of these worldwide journeys, notably her best-selling A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’: Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months (1878), made her, her family and the Sunbeam household names in Victorian Britain and beyond. With a professional crew and domestic staff, the Sunbeam enabled the Brasseys to go wherever they pleased and provided Lady Brassey with a mobile home from which to compose her travel writings and collect souvenirs from around the world. This paper contributes to a broader historical geography of the sea by considering the contemporary appeal of Lady Brassey's popular accounts of sea travel and shipboard life. It explores how Lady Brassey's narratives of these grand oceanic tours surveyed and domesticated the world beyond England, and how they were shaped through the construction of the Sunbeam as a ‘home’ in which discourses of domesticity, gender and empire were played out.     

Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology

Abstract:  Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor-network theory (ANT)—in particular, the agency of nonhumans—while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT—specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour—provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the  social  and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities.     

Gypsy‐Travellers and Welfare Professional Discourse: On Individualization and Social Integration

Abstract: This paper examines the subtle ways in which welfare professionals in the UK construct Gypsy culture as subordinate to the dominant Western concept of “civilization”. Qualitative empirical evidence is presented to show how notions of a resistance to processes of individualization and social integration—which draw on conflicting interpretations of childhood and a perceived lack of aspiration among Gypsy‐Travellers—are seen as legitimate grounds for state and social welfare intervention. The paper argues that a strong group orientation and a more marked gendered division of labour are constructed as being at odds with these dominant social processes. It is posited that the “civilizing” project against Gypsy‐Travellers ignores cultural norms and values resulting in the perception that they are undeserving. The paper suggests that theoretical accounts of social processes at a society wide level require revision in order to understand their varying impact on peripheral minorities in specific spaces.     

SHIPPING COSTS,INFORMATION COSTS,AND THE SOURCES OF INDUSTRIAL COAGGLOMERATION*

ABSTRACT Direct trade between establishments, coupled with costs of trading goods and information across space, has long been considered a primary determinant of industrial colocation. However, researchers have had difficulty decomposing the effects of interindustry trade into these two cost components. Using new techniques for separately estimating shipping and information costs, this paper provides an empirical framework for identifying the various sources of industrial coagglomeration among U.S. manufacturing industries. My findings suggest that both interindustry shipping costs and information costs influence metropolitan‐level coagglomeration. Additional evidence points to the significant role of direct information costs in determining intraindustry agglomerations.