Syrian refugee resettlement and the role of local immigration partnerships in Ontario,Canada

We examine Canada's recent Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI) paying close attention to the resettlement role played by mid‐sized urban communities. We elaborate on a key policy dimension at work at this scale of action: local immigration partnerships (LIPs). We start with a very brief review of Canada's history of mass refugee resettlement. Second, we assess the policy of LIPs, particularly how they have been presented as a form of “place‐based policy,” and third, we offer an overview of the role the LIPs played in three case study communities (Hamilton, Ottawa, and Waterloo) during the SRRI. Finally, we present three overarching themes that emerged from our research in each of these communities: the importance of each community's history of immigration and refugee resettlement; the embeddedness of the LIP and its leadership in the local community; and how the positioning of each LIP relative to the three levels of government and its official Resettlement Assistance Program agreement holders impacted its ability to act. The history, location, and place characteristics of each community influenced the nature of intersectoral and intergovernmental relations in distinctive ways, and differentially shaped the effectiveness of each LIP's ability to contribute to the SRRI.     

Financialisation,Climate Finance,and the Calculative Challenges of Managing Environmental Change

This article describes the emergent and unstable dispositif of climate finance that is being built from iterative experiments in climate finance provision. The article provides a periodisation of different phases of climate finance from the 1990s onward using examples from REDD+, ecosystem services, the Green Climate Fund, green bonds, and insurance‐based derivatives, and connects this periodisation to broader processes of financialisation. It analyses how climate finance projects incorporate competing systems of accounting denominated in carbon, natural capital, “green‐ness”, insurance risk and internationally transferred mitigation outcomes. The article argues that many accounting units are evident in current climate finance products, each loosely derived from a different phase in this periodisation. However, experiments in calculating time and value in climate finance continue, and although risk is being increasingly used to correlate different denominators of value, an overall solution for how climate change is to be accounted for in financial interventions remains elusive.     

Franks,Greeks, and Saracens: violence,empire, and religion in early medieval southern Italy

This paper examines the violence between Carolingians, Saracens, and Byzantines in southern Italy during the second half of the ninth century. Traditionally these conflicts have been viewed as violence between Muslims and Christians. This paper argues that contemporary southern Italians did not perceive this violence to be religiously motivated, because they did not understand Saracens to be Muslims. Instead, these tensions were about local and foreign claims to political authority and control of territory.     

A feminist perspective on digital geographies: activism,affect and emotion,and gendered human-technology relations in Australia

Feminist digital geographies are an important part of the digital turn currently underway in geographic scholarship. At the same time, feminist movements are taking advantage of, and emerging from, digital spaces. This article considers how the digital intersects with gender and what opportunities the digital affords feminist movements. We do so by drawing on a case study of feminist activism within Destroy the Joint (DTJ), an online social media activist group, and build a qualitative analysis of a dynamic, reflexive digital space. Qualitative studies of emotion, affect and the power of digital geographies, including social media spaces populated by groups like DTJ, demonstrate how cultural and social practices are changing along with technologies. This research does not draw on a techno-deterministic approach to digital geographies but forwards a feminist perspective that critically engages with the constraints and possibilities of the complex, paradoxical and contingent within the digital.     

Alternative Cartographies of Homelessness: Rendering visible British women's experiences of ‘visible’ homelessness

This article focuses on a group largely ignored by both geographers and feminist scholars of homelessness alike—the growing number of ‘visibly homeless’ women in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 ‘visibly homeless’ women, we delineate between four ‘alternative cartographies’ of homelessness, each articulating quite different gendered homeless identities. The article suggests that whilst it is important to recognise that women too suffer the exclusions of visible homelessness, it is also clear that the experience of visible homelessness differs for different women. Any attempt to respond to the (immediate) needs of such women necessitates a recognition rather than denial of these differences.     

Mesowear as a means of determining diets in African antelopes

Analysis of dental mesowear is a useful tool to examine dietary strategies in ungulates, and provides a palaeoenvironmental proxy at archaeological and palaeontological sites. We examine the distribution of traditional qualitative mesowear variables amongst 33 species of extant African antelope. We also examine the relationship of our dataset with the original dataset of Fortelius and Solounias (2000). We find that confining mesowear analyses to antelope species alone reduces their discriminating power relative to that found in analyses using a broader range of taxa. Variability in mesowear scores along the toothrow suggest that different teeth do not wear equivalently over an individual’s life-time, so it is important to confine comparisons to individual tooth positions for palaeodietary classifications. Mesowear scores from the third upper molar were found to have the greatest discriminating power. Frugivores displayed unique mesowear signatures, suggesting that this trophic guild should be taken into consideration separately in future mesowear analyses. These results have implications which can improve the application and the discriminatory power of mesowear analyses for the determination of the palaeodiets of extinct taxa, and, by extension, their palaeoenvironments.     

Collagen fingerprinting of archaeological bone and teeth remains from Domuztepe,South Eastern Turkey

We applied a recently developed method of collagen peptide mass fingerprinting for taxonomic identification in faunal remains to 111 specimens from the Neolithic site of Domuztepe in southeastern Turkey. Advances on the published technique allow us to move beyond the key domesticated fauna (sheep, goat, pig and cattle) to include non-domesticates (deer and gazelle, as well as humans). As the animal economy of Domuztepe was dominated by domestic sheep and goats, a large number of the samples tested were morphologically indistinguishable sheep/goat remains. A number of samples represented elements that provide information on age (i.e., mandibles) or sex (pelvis); thus, this represents the first major study to attempt to improve kill-off profiles using collagen fingerprinting. We also show that the collagen extracted from dentine is equally amenable to the proposed methodology as bone collagen.     

The Materiality of Mental Health at the Morrissey World War I Internment Camp

Historical Archaeology - To date, very little is known archaeologically about First World War–era internment camps, especially in Canada, where this history was actively erased through the...