Darwin's Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872

This article explores the relationship between Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872) and the debates surrounding audiences of sensation theatre. It takes as its starting point a flinch performed by Darwin in a self-experiment at London Zoological Gardens. Darwin's flinch combined the act of scientific observation with a self-consciously staged emotional gesture. In the 1860s and early 1870s, the passionate and demonstrative audiences of sensation plays were similarly understood to watch themselves feeling. In this economy of emotional surfaces, actors and audience were caught up in unsettling relations between outwards expression and the remote landscape of interior feeling. Entangled in this theatrical instability, Darwin's scientific observation reflected broader cultural concerns about the reliability of the emotional body. Thus the article offers Darwin's Expression as an unusual but nonetheless suggestive artefact of theatrical spectatorship in 1872, while also contributing to recent debates about the history of objectivity and its supposedly unemotional and restrained scientific observer. It argues that the technique of self-conscious emotional spectatorship, shared by Darwin and theatre audiences, constituted a distinctive model of late Victorian emotion and visuality, in which communities of spectators were also spectators of themselves.     

Building blocks of polycentric governance

Success or failure of a polycentric system is a function of complex political and social processes, such as coordination between actors and venues to solve specialized policy problems. Yet there is currently no accepted method for isolating distinct processes of coordination, nor to understand how their variance affects polycentric governance performance. We develop and test a building-blocks approach that uses different patterns or “motifs” for measuring and comparing coordination longitudinally on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Our approach confirms that polycentric governance comprises an evolving substrate of interdependent venues and actors over time. However, while issue specialization and actor participation can be improved through the mobilization of venues, such a strategy can also fragment overall polycentric capacity to resolve conflict and adapt to new problems. A building-blocks approach advances understanding and practice of polycentric governance by enabling sharper diagnosis of internal dynamics in complex environmental governance systems.     

Canadian feminist geography in the 21st century

Abstract

In this country report, I offer a resident-outsider’s perspective on the recent history and current landscape of Canadian feminist geography. I highlight the institutional framework that showcases Canadian feminist geography: the Suzanne Mackenzie Memorial Lectures, the biennial events put on at the Canadian Association of Geographers meeting with the support of the Canadian Women and Geography Study Group/Groupe d'étude sur les femmes et la géographie (CWAG). I discuss recent community-building efforts, including the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective, and scholarly workshops, and point to the creative outputs that have emerged from these collective workspaces. I point to a variety of Canadian feminist geographers who have laid the groundwork for the diverse field that exists today, as well as some who are re-making the field through the use of other ontological and methodological frameworks. I conclude with a commentary on the importance of community- and alliance-building, especially in the face of challenges like structural injustice, generational transition, and even physical distance.