Negotiating Authority between UNHCR and ‘The People’

Refugee camps are exceptional places that are left to the benevolent governing of international humanitarian agencies, and offer unique opportunities to explore the making and un‐making of public authority. This article examines how certain groups of young men in a refugee camp in Tanzania manage to establish public authority by relating to ideas of a Burundian moral order, while at the same time relating to the ‘development‐speak’ of international relief operations. The refugees' attempts to establish public authority are highly contested and highly politicized, clashing with the relief agencies' vision of the camp as non‐political. Ironically, the young men who engage in politics in the camp are also closely linked to these relief agencies in their role as brokers between the agencies and the ‘small people’. Public authority is partly produced by the powers that are delegated to them by the agencies and partly formed in the ‘gaps' in the agencies’ system. Similarly, authority rests in part on the respect that these brokers gain from other refugees — a respect that is earned in numerous ways, including outwitting the international organizations — and in part on the recognition that they get from the very same organizations. In other words, public authority rests on complex relations between legitimacy and recognition and between sovereignty and governmentality.     

‘Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity,Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground

This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces for the imagination and can enhance agency and, potentially, resistance. However, virtuality is no ‘liberated space’ and it incorporates norms and practices that often mirror those of the material world.     

Growing up within a Community in Conflict: The Rockford Files

A law suit for racial discrimination brought against the School District of Rockford, IL, over the last decade and more has meant that recent high school graduates have been educated for almost the whole of their school careers within an environment of conflict. The paper outlines the conflict as the context in which the young people have grown up, demonstrating the ways that adults purport to fight for their children, yet transform the issues into their own priorities. It analyses the ‘sensitivity’ and ‘resilience’ of recent high school graduates to such an upbringing. It also explains how the schools are sites where the community conflict is reworked in new ways and perpetuated among the young people. While perhaps an extreme case, Rockford illustrates a continuing, but underplayed, wider social malaise in the USA.     

Trading places: Quentovic and Dorestad reassessed

In any list of Carolingian emporia, Quentovic and Dorestad feature prominently, yet the numismatic evidence reveals a complete contrast between the two. In the late eighth and early ninth centuries, contrary to popular belief, Quentovic was of very little economic significance. At the same time, Dorestad was booming, reaching the peak of its prosperity around 820. Only thirty years later, the situation was dramatically reversed: Dorestad rapidly declined and disappeared, while Quentovic enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. This challenges the current theory that the emporia disappeared in the mid-ninth century, to be replaced by the emerging towns.     

The geographies of Swinging London

The processes of modernisation that re-capitalised London in the post-war period can be located in both dominant and resistant movements. Many aspects of the city's discursive fabric in the 1950s and 1960s were underpinned by a similar geographical imagination. This geographical imagination was characterised by a desire to visualise and represent nature and the real afresh and can be found in modernist architecture and planning aesthetics, Pop Art, Op Art, Angry realist writing, the style of Swinging London, and the tactics of counter-cultural rebellion in the city. Acknowledged geographies of modernity and anti-modernity are therefore questionable. Similarly, the geographies of power and resistance are constituted by more than spatial tactics and moral or behavioural boundaries as they are often rendered. An approach that understands hegemonic processes in terms of geographical imaginations allows an analysis that moves beyond outward manifestations of resistance and enables an engagement with the less palpable aspects of dissent such as ideology and aesthetics.     

The field, the museum and the lecture hall: the spaces of natural history in Victorian Cornwall

This paper contributes to our understandings of the geographies of science through an analysis of nineteenth–century natural history and, in particular, of the provincial natural history society. Focusing on nineteenth–century Cornwall and one of the main natural history societies operating in the county at that time – the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society – it is argued that a set of key spaces were integral to the operations and outputs of such societies. The paper details the significance of the Penzance Society's museum, field sites and lecture hall as sites for communal work of local natural historians. They were also important, it is argued, in their construction of West Cornwall as a site of national natural scientific importance. Lastly, these spaces defined an agenda for regional scientific study. In particular, they promoted a taxonomic method that would transform local people into rigorous scientists and the local region into a 'book of nature'.     

‘Black Economic Empowerment’, Business and the State in South Africa

‘Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE) has been a major policy thrust of the democratic governments in South Africa since 1994 in attempting to redress the effects of apartheid. In this article, we explore the historical precedents to BEE in South Africa, review the different steps taken in promoting it, and assess some of its outcomes to date. We argue that BEE can take only limited forms because of the economic policy constraints in which it has been incorporated. Moreover, these forms have an increasingly managerial logic that further restricts what can be achieved. Short of a major shift in conceptions of — and policy for — BEE, meaningful ‘empowerment’ is unlikely to take place.     

Characterization of lime carbonates in plasters from Teotihuacan,Mexico: preliminary results of cathodoluminescence and carbon isotope analyses

This study characterizes the degree of calcination of lime in lime plaster samples from Teotihuacan, the capital of a regional state in prehispanic Central Mexico. Lime plaster production consists of multiple steps, from the firing of raw materials to the mixing of lime and aggregate and the final application. While previous studies have focused on the compositional variability, specifically the recipe of lime plasters and mortars, the characterization of lime itself has not been sufficiently addressed. In this study, cathodoluminescence analysis coupled with petrographic and image analyses were employed to examine the degree of calcination of lime. The results of cathodoluminescence petrography were further examined through stable carbon isotope and ¹⁴C measurements. It appeared that the results of cathodoluminescence analysis are consistent with those of other analytical methods and that there are diachronic changes in the degree of calcination of lime among lime plaster samples. This implies changes in the organization of lime production, specifically the consistency in the control of firing temperature.