Unsafe drinking water quality in remote Western Australian Aboriginal communities

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is important in the fields of public health and health geography because of its heavy burden on the health system and high cost of treatment in its advanced stages. The causes of CKD are associated with diabetes and hypertension, but in some parts of the world, the disease occurs in the absence of these factors. Researchers identify this condition as CKD of “unknown” causes (CKDu). CKDu is a multi‐factored health problem and one suspected causal factor is contaminated drinking water. The disease occurs globally but is found in particularly high concentrations among people of certain ethnic and disadvantaged social groups living in very different locations around the world. CKD has become endemic in Western Australia where hospital admissions for Aboriginal people requiring renal dialysis or treatment for diabetes are much higher than for the general population. The possible proportions of CKDu cases among the CKD patients are unknown. This study examines the drinking water quality among communities such as these. Water chemistry analysis in these areas indicates that the nitrate and uranium content greatly exceed officially recommended levels. Most of these communities rely on raw groundwater to supply their domestic needs, and it is very likely that the people are unwittingly ingesting high levels of nitrates and uranium, probably including uranyl nitrates. Very few such remote communities have access to treated drinking water, and cost‐effective water treatment systems are required to provide potable water at the local scale.     

Homeland Heroes: Migrants and Soldiers in the Neoliberal Era

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between neoliberalism and nationalism through the counterintuitive comparison of journeys travelled by US citizens as they enlist in the military and by unauthorized Central Americans as they migrate to the United States. We argue that, however different the context and content of their decisions and their lives, Central American migrants and US soldiers are both connected within a larger political economy. We complicate the idea of migrants and soldiers as purely rational economic actors, but we also reject the idea, imputed onto migrants and soldiers by neoliberal states, that they are naturally nationalistic actors. Migrants and soldiers embody a neoliberal subjectivity produced through processes of violence, capital accumulation and militarization. Yet, as we examine throughout this paper, their construction as homeland heroes within the national imaginary masks the ways their labor and their mobility serve the institutionalization of neoliberal statecraft.     

Land-beach-risk-scape: deciphering the motivators of risk-taking at the beach in Australia

Abstract

This article considers risk-taking associated with the popular leisure activity of beach going in Australia. It investigates the risk-taking proclivities and cultural protocols in Australian beach use which, to date, have received little research attention. Drawing on the testimonies of beachgoers, we provide a discussion on how risk can be both voluntary as well as accidental at the Australian beach. While accidental risk-taking can be attributed to a lack of beachscape safety or lack of hazard knowledge, it is often the result of peer, sociocultural and psychodynamic influences that result in the production and reproduction of a pervasive culture of risk-taking. This culture is explored via the influence of the enculturation of risk into Australian beach practices, the attenuation of safety perceptions among beachgoers, and the attraction to risky behaviours that affect those in the beach space. The reproduction of risk in Australian beach use and the feeling of attachment observed among research participants have been conceptualised as the embodied societal subject, as identified through geographic psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic geographic interpretation of participant attitudes and beliefs concerning risk-taking and beach use has been used to theorise how the prevailing discourses and fantasies of Australian beach use shape this site-specific culture of risk.     

Ritual Brotherhood Across Frontiers in the Eastern Adriatic Hinterland,Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Ritual brotherhood, or pobratimstvo, is attested by a range of sources dealing with the Adriatic hinterland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Read one way, pobratimstvo shows us a border society characterized by cohesion and tolerance, where Christian and Muslim frontiersmen find ways to overcome religious and political boundaries, recognizing their common interests and shared values. Read another way, however, the same institution (and sometimes even the same documents) also offers an insight into the persistence of frontier conflict and the pervasiveness of its violence, drawing attention to other, no less bloody divisions between predators and victims. In teasing out some of the possible meanings and uses of ritual sworn brotherhood on this early modern frontier, I attempt to give due weight to the complexities of a specific place and culture. But the problems highlighted by the institution of pobratimstvo are more widespread: the troubling ambiguities of friendship, with its quality of simultaneously including and excluding; the boundaries between affection and interest, or between camaraderie and desire; the obligations (and the potential resentment) conferred by gifts; the moral dilemmas posed by cross-cutting obligations.