Critical artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands

Something about the apparent romanticism of islands prompts creative reflections such as those comprising visual artworks in the Dis-covery exhibition touring Australia for 2 years from 2011. The exhibition forms the basis for this paper, written by its progenitor and curator—an artist, and its essayist—a cultural geographer. The curatorial premise was that islands and island cultures are at risk from global and multinational forces, as well as from amplified local impacts internal to the limits of their boundaries. In turn, the exhibition's aim was to trouble the layered cultural clichés that represent island conditions especially in terms of the romantic. Participating artists—all of whom have lived on islands—were invited to explore how islands and romanticism are both containers for disparate yet overlapping ideas, among them references to imagination, projected desire, unsatisfied longing, rising tides, exoticism, resource mining, militarism and marginalization. Drawing on conversations with the artists, and on their writings and works, this paper captures insightful reflections about islands, arts and the geopolitical imagination; reveals significant artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands; and underscores the productive relations that derive from critical and creative engagements between geography and art.     

The development of a new geospatial framework for the palaeoanthropological site of the Sterkfontein Caves,Cradle of Humankind,Gauteng, South Africa

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provide an essential element in modern paleoanthropological inquiry through their ability to integrate a diverse range of data within a multidimensional spatial framework which can be used for data storage, analysis and modeling. One of the challenges of creating such a framework is the integration of legacy and new data (collected with digital technologies) at large sites with a long history of research. The Sterkfontein Caves, located in the Cradle of Humankind, is the richest Australopithecus-bearing locality in the world and has been the focus of intense palaeoanthropological research for the past 80 years. A diverse range of spatial data has been collected over this history and future integrative research necessitates the development of a unified, cohesive 3D GIS framework. In this paper we describe three phases of work undertaken to implement such a framework and discuss the next steps in its development and utilization for spatial analyses.     

9/11 and Middle Eastern Studies past and future: revisiting Ivory towers on sand

The events of 9/11 intensified attacks on the field of Middle Eastern Studies, especially in the US—attacks whose reverberations have been felt ever since in academia and beyond. A key moment was the publication in 2001 of a book by Martin Kramer, Ivory towers on sand , which accused the field of irrelevance, failure to predict, lack of patriotism and wilful blindness to the failings in the Arab and Islamic world. In a Foreword to this review article, Gerd Nonneman points out that the importance of the heated debate this occasioned, both on intellectual and political grounds, has if anything been heightened in today's policy environment. At the request of International Affairs , Fred Halliday therefore revisits the book's arguments. He accepts the desirability for scholars to engage in public assessment and critique of others' work and to relate this to broader concerns of both epistemology and public policy. He also acknowledges shortcomings in the literature on Islamism and civil society, and in Edward Said's Orientalism . But he concludes that Kramer's book fails to resolve the questions broached, adds nothing that is original to debates on social science method and theory, distorts the state of contemporary Middle Eastern Studies (in part by ignoring most of the important work done outside the US) and that the book has had damaging consequences for university life itself. In part, the article suggests, this is a reflection of a lack—shared by significant areas of recent social science writing, including Said's Orientalism —of an adequate grounding in issues of social science methodology and philosophy. It also reflects an untenable assumption about the nature of the relationship between academic work and public policy issues.