To what extent can online mapping be decolonial? A journey throughout Indigenous cartography in Canada

In this paper, we describe and reflect upon our journey through Indigenous online mapping in Canada. This journey has been planned according to an academic goal: assessing the potential of online cartography for decolonial purposes. To reach this goal, we have followed methodological directions provided by Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith to review 18 Indigenous web-mapping sites across Canada. Supported by a series of ten interviews, this content analysis enabled us to sketch some of the contours of contemporary Indigenous cartography. On one hand, Indigenous communities largely control the data that are shared on these websites. They also partially control the way these data are represented through the mobilization of digital storytelling technologies that are better aligned with Indigenous ways of envisioning relationships to places than conventional maps. On the other hand, they do not have much control over the technological aspects of these projects, for which they remain heavily dependent on non-Indigenous partners. Throughout this journey, we noticed that women's voices remained marginal in most of these mapping projects, but we also identified evidence supporting the idea that these voices are starting to play a vital role in the on-going effort of decolonizing mapping processes.     

The Life of Constantine,the Life of Methodius and the history of the Slavs in the ninth century: a reassessment

The Slavonic Lives of Constantine/Cyril (d. 869) and Methodius (d. 885) are generally considered to have been written shortly after the death of these two saints, and in any case in the ninth century. However, the present article tries to show that this contention is not conclusive. Instead, it argues for a later writing, in the course of the tenth or eleventh centuries, taking into account in particular the authors' use of older Latin sources on the same theme. As a result, the specific information from these two Lives is subject to caution, which has important consequences for the biography of Constantine/Cyril, for the modalities of the papal mission to Moravia, and more generally for the history of the Slavic countries in the ninth century.     

Resisting the sacred canopy over U.S. ways of war

This article explores the “omnipotent sacrificial sacred canopy” in US war-culture. I argue that sacrificial linguistic habits and patterns of logic in the US successfully discipline citizens, such that the violence of our current wars remains mystified, and clear analysis of the wars' true costs is disabled. Rather than attempt to arrive at one universal theory of sacrifice to analyze and better understand sacrificial US war-culture, I demonstrate that diverse theoretical methods of analysis better help us to understand the pluralistic nuances and permutations of these smothering dynamics. I further argue that increased awareness of the sacrificial sacred canopy over war and militarism in the US finally must lead to self-examination on the part of Christians regarding the way in which sacrificial civil religious admonishments regarding war merge with and are mutually reinforced by theological and ecclesial soteriological habits of Christians in the US Lastly, I advocate a two-fold approach for addressing this disturbing and destructive reality in the nation.     

Examining the effect of occupational structure on social mobility – an investigation of A Black Country village 1851–1901

This article continues research into social mobility in England in the nineteenth century by examining the links with different occupational structures, socio-economic and industry/occupation, for a specific location. This allows an examination of the impact of the characteristics of these structures on occupational and thence on social mobility. Occupational mobility has long been recognised as a major determinant of social mobility and has been the subject of a number of papers, usually to determine how much a specific variable affects the level and type of mobility observed. Rarely do these analyses consider the location’s occupational structure, and its changes, as a determinant of the level of mobility. This paper finds that much of the variability of occupational mobility of a locality is determined by the characteristics of the different industries and occupations in that location. Industries and occupations provide a context within which other factors, such as literacy, operate.     

Of Makerspaces and Hacklabs: Emergence,Experiment and Ontological Theatre at the Edinburgh Hacklab,Scotland

This paper commences a geographical engagement with makerspaces, hacklabs, and other workshop spaces which form part of a broader ‘maker movement’. It examines the arts of inquiry and experimentation found at one such site, drawing on ethnographic field work at the Edinburgh Hacklab, and makes connections with emerging themes of interest to geographers, including creativity, experiment, art, and nonhuman agency. Putting standard innovation-driven narratives of makerspaces into question, attention is instead turned to the events of emergent experimentation and creativity taking place in these spaces. To this end, Andrew Pickering’s concept of ‘ontological theatre’, describing powerful focal instances of agential symmetry between humans and nonhumans, is engaged with, in order to understand the links between Hacklab activities and emergent and complex aspects of nonhuman agency.     

The complexity of aspiration: the role of hope and habitus in shaping working-class young people’s aspirations to higher education

In this paper, I explore how working-class young people in Leicester hope and plan for their futures as they consider the possibility of attending university. I respond to Pimlott-Wilson’s [2011. “The Role of Familial Habitus in Shaping Children’s Views of Their Future Employment.” Children’s Geographies 9 (1): 111–118] call for further research to investigate how individual dispositions and habitus affect how young people hope and aspire towards the future. I do this in three ways. First, I empirically test Webb’s [2007. “Modes of Hoping.” History of the Human Sciences 20 (3): 65–83] hope theory to understand how aspirations are formed on an individual and societal level. In doing so, I critically question what is understood by the term ‘aspiration’. This allows me to question what it means for young people to ‘raise aspirations’ towards university. Second, I explore how a spatial analysis can contribute towards an understanding of how habitus, hope and aspirations interlock to shape young people’s futures. Third, I argue that hope can be regarded as a form of capital which in turn influences habitus.     

Late Holocene Historical Ecology: The Timing of Vertebrate Extirpation on Crooked Island,Commonwealth of The Bahamas

We report eight new accelerator-mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates performed directly on individual bones of extirpated species from Crooked Island, The Bahamas. Three dates from the hutia (Geocapromys ingrahami), recovered from a culturally derived bone assemblage in McKay's Bluff Cave (site CR-5), all broadly overlap from AD 1450 to 1620, which encompasses the time of first European contact with the Lucayan on Crooked Island (AD 1492). Marine fish and hutia dominate the bone assemblage at McKay's Bluff Cave, shedding light on vertebrate consumption by the Lucayans just before their demise. A fourth AMS ¹⁴C date on a hutia bone, from a non-cultural surface context in Crossbed Cave (site CR-25), is similar (AD 1465 to 1645) to those from McKay's Bluff Cave. From Pittstown Landing (site CR-14), an open coastal archaeological site, a femur of the Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer) yielded an AMS ¹⁴C date of AD ～1050–1250, which is early in the Lucayan cultural sequence. From a humerus in a non-cultural surface context in 1702 Cave (site CR-26), we document survival of the Cuban crocodile on Crooked Island until AD ～1300–1400, which is several hundred years later than the well-documented extinction of Cuban crocodiles on Abaco in the northern Bahamas. We lack a clear explanation of why Cuban crocodiles likely survived longer on Crooked Island than on a larger Bahamian island such as Abaco. One AMS ¹⁴C date on Crooked Island's extinct, undescribed species of tortoise (Chelonoidis sp.) from 1702 Cave is BC 790 to 540 (2740 to 2490 cal BP), which is ～1500–1700 years prior to human arrival. A second AMS ¹⁴C date, on a fibula of this tortoise from McKay's Bluff Cave, is AD 1025 to 1165, thereby demonstrating survival of this extinct species into the period of human occupation.     

Formation of beach‐ridge plains: an appreciation of the contribution by Jack L. Davies

A robust debate among coastal geomorphologists as to the processes by which beach‐ridge plains around Australia have formed was initiated by a former President of the Institute of Australian Geographers. This review gives special consideration to the work of Jack L. Davies, whose academic contributions to coastal geomorphology in Australia have not always been appropriately acknowledged when explaining how similar plains have evolved elsewhere in the world. Davies recognised that relatively steep storm waves caused erosion (cut) on beaches, whereas less steep long‐period swell waves returned sand (fill). He considered the beach berm to be the nucleus on which a beach ridge formed, which could subsequently develop into a foredune, in contrast to cobble ridges that were deposited during storms. Offshore conditions regulate supply of sand to the shoreline, partly through effects on wave refraction, with higher rates of supply where the nearshore is shallow. It was apparent to Davies that the elevation of successive ridges might, but not necessarily, provide evidence of past changes of sea level, despite adornment by variable amounts of windblown dune sand. Morphodynamic understanding of long‐term coastal evolution, based on radiocarbon dating chronologies, has demonstrated that Australian coastal plains formed over the past ~6,000 years when sea level has been close to its present level, in contrast to several documented locations in the northern hemisphere where the sea has been rising for the past few millennia. Particularly insightful were observations by Davies that ridge formation could be influenced by a range of factors including changes in sea level, storminess, or sediment supply. These factors acting singly or in combination seem likely to change in the future. Understanding such responses remains a high priority and can be addressed by new technologies, such as light detection and ranging, optically stimulated luminescence dating, ground‐penetrating radar, and computer simulation.     

Cool nothing: Dom Sylvester Houédard’s coexistentialist concrete poetics

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the concrete poetics of Dom Sylvester Houédard, which I define using a term from his 1963 article ‘Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’, ‘coexistentialist’. Houédard's concrete poetry has sometimes been criticized for an anachronistic avant-garde quality, because of its non-semantic use of written language, and its associated air of intermedia experiment. But the term ‘coexistentialist’ has various connotations which allow us to interpret Houédard's work as highly responsive to its cultural moment, and to the unique theological tradition from which it emerged. These connotations include: the relationship between early and mid-twentieth-century modern art and literature; existentialist philosophy, especially the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre; Marshall McLuhan's theories on modern communication and ecumenical dialogue within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. After presenting an outline of Houédard's poetics related to these themes, I analyse some of his concrete poems or ‘typestracts’, produced between 1967 and 1972.