Wild(er)ness: Reconfiguring the Geographies of Wildlife

Amidst millennial talk of the 'end of nature' ( McKibben 1989 ), this paper examines the precarious geographies of 'wildlife' in rather less apocalyptic terms. Animal (and plant) species designated wild are placed categorically outside the ambit of 'human society', confined to inhabiting the margins and interstices of the social world. Yet, we contend, such animals have long been routinely imagined and organized within multiple circuits of social power, which (re)configure them in important ways. These social orderings of animal life confound the moral geographies of wilderness, which presuppose an easy coincidence between the species and spaces of a pristine nature. In this paper, we employ the fluid spatial vocabulary of topology to map a more volatile and relational conception of the fabrics of wildlife. Our arguments are worked through glimpses of two historically very different social orderings of 'wild' animals – those associated with the military vernacular of the gladiatorial games of Imperial Rome, and the scientific vernacular of endangered species listing and conservation under CITES (the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species). These 'foldings' of wildlife in distant time/space aim to disrupt the linear historical narratives of 'civilization' and 'evolution', which consign wildlife to marginal spaces with a teleological destiny of erasure.     

Performance and Risks of Salt-Accumulating Renders in Relation to Their Moisture Transport Properties

Salt-accumulating renders are usually applied in several layers with different specific properties of moisture transport. An extensive experimental programme was carried out to establish a relationship between those properties of individual layers and the performance of combined systems on a salt-laden substrate. Each of the 20 renders was characterized separately in absorption and drying tests, vacuum saturation tests, dry cup tests, mercury intrusion porosimetry, and ultrasound wave velocity measurements. Each of the 12 combined render systems was applied on a brick, which was then saturated with a concentrated NaCl solution by free capillary uptake. Subsequently the assembly was closed at the bottom and subjected to an accelerated drying test (50° C and 15% relative humidity). Moisture and salt profiles over the depth were taken regularly during 1 month. The results reveal very different degrees of effectiveness and levels of risk for the substrate, which are related to the moisture transport properties.     

Digital technologies,children and young people's relationships and self-care

Children's and young people's access to and use of digital technologies have received increasing attention in recent years. While influential UK media commentators have often focused on associated risks, researchers have taken a less exclusively problem-focused approach. Children and young people's use of, for example, social media and computer games to extend the spaces available to them in which to maintain relationships, to experiment with social identities, and to engage in an ‘economy of dignity’, however fragile, have all been highlighted. This paper builds on this work to further consider the role of such resources, accessed primarily through computers and mobile phones, as means of caring for oneself or ‘self-care’. It draws on a qualitative study which employed visual and audial methods to explore the sense of belonging (or not) of young people who have been ‘looked after’ by others than their biological parents, often in less affluent circumstances.     

A Landscape of Assimilation and Resistance: The Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School

In the late nineteenth century the United States Federal government established off-reservation boarding schools that sought to accomplish an internal colonialism of American Indian communities by forcefully assimilating them into mainstream American culture. The landscape of these institutions was a primary tool to achieve their assimilationist goals. This research examines the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School through archival, archaeological and oral history evidence. The landscape and material record of this school also indicate that students vigorously resisted the institution.     

Zooarchaeology and Changing Food Practices at Carrizales,Peru Following the Spanish Invasion

Through analysis of zooarchaeological remains from two occupations at the site of Carrizales, we examine how an indigenous Peruvian maritime community responded to imperial interventions in their daily lives in the late sixteenth century. Following their forced resettlement into a planned reducción village, and amidst demographic decline and tribute extraction, Carrizales’s residents significantly changed how they put food on the table, pursuing less time-intensive strategies of food collection and incorporating Eurasian animals into their diets. These results illustrate the dynamism of relations between imperial political economies and domestic life and the efficacy of indigenous survival strategies.