Girls on film: Affective politics and the creation of an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore through film screenings

The interstices between film and politics occupy a prominent place in recent scholarship in political geography and cognate disciplines, focusing on the ways film establishes relations between viewers and characters. Such processes often utilise affective referents to create ‘intimate publics’. This paper focuses on the relations human trafficking films establish between ‘victims’, viewers and anti-trafficking stakeholders in creating an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore. I argue that the third world girl is rendered a moral object of sympathy both through trafficking film and performances by anti-trafficking stakeholders in the cinema. However, in comparison to both film viewers and anti-trafficking stakeholders she is cast as muted and lacking agency. Intimate anti-trafficking publics can emerge through the harnessing of negative emotions that, in this case, privilege the plight- but not the agency – of the female child trafficking victim and are inculcated through film storylines and cinematic performances.     

Limits to climate action - Narratives of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

In recent years, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been awarded a key role in climate mitigation scenarios explored by integrated assessment models and referenced in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because a majority of scenarios limiting global warming to 2 °C or 1,5 °C include vast deployment of BECCS, a critical discussion has emerged among experts about the moral implications of thus introducing an unproven technology into the policy realm.In this paper, we analyse this discussion as it has played out between 2013 and 2019, with a focus on how expert narratives are constructed in the mass media about the possibilities for decarbonisation within the current political-economic order. We find there are almost no narratives that support massive deployment of BECCS, and that all narratives presuppose limits to decarbonisation imposed by the current political-economic system. The perception of such limits lead some to argue, through deterministic and apolitical narratives, for the necessity of negative emissions technologies, while others argue instead that “degrowth” is the only solution. Thus, there is a distinct lack of positive narratives about how capitalism can bring about decarbonisation.     

Teaching Indigenous geography in a neo-colonial world

Australian universities are increasingly embedding Indigenous content and perspectives within curriculum to promote Indigenous cultural competency. We present teaching challenges in an Indigenous geography course designed to present an engaged, intercultural learning experience. We critically reflect on student evaluations, informal discussions and observations to complement scholarly debates. Course design and delivery was seen as stimulating and illuminating in terms of course content. While diversity of student cohorts, backgrounds and learning styles remain challenging, the romanticism of some students can override critical engagement with the geographical context of the course material and their positionality. There remains a tendency in both student constructions and the geographical literature to create an Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary that not only essentializes both, but can be culturally unsafe for Indigenous students. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students may share a sense of pessimism in confronting apparently unstoppable development and environmental destruction. We argue for scholarship around the fundamentally intercultural nature of coexistence to contextualize the spatial diversity of Indigenous lives in landscapes, currently obscured by dominant constructions of Indigeneity. Critical reflection on settler educators’ and learners’ positionalities with respect to neocolonial structures will help to transcend both essentialism and pessimism.     

大数据背景下国内人文地理研究进展与方法审视

通过梳理人文地理领域杂志近年大数据文章解释其与大数据应用的关系，强调其应用给人文地理学研究带来机遇和挑战：①大数据作为研究方法，不能代替传统人文地理研究范式，而是对现研究方法的补充。大数据和小数据需对话交流；②大数据本身是一种话语权，嵌入人文地理研究系统。保证人文地理学多样性，避免过度依赖大数据，需在批判角度审视和运用；③需关注大数据对于人文地理学研究方法和思想的影响；④运用大数据解读地理和空间过程复杂性的同时，应看到大数据应用对公共服务的潜力，思考其结果如何更好的服务社会。     

Anti-Prostitution Politics and Militarised Urban Prosperity in the US Military Camptown in Korea

Camptowns (kijich'on) are neighbourhoods located near US military bases in Korea that are organised around the military service economy, especially the sex industry. While most studies of Korean camptowns point to the US military's involvement with the camptown sex industry as evidence of US military imperialism, this article argues that since 2004 anti-prostitution polices have been essential to stabilising American militarisation in Korea's urban realm. Focusing on Anjeong-ri, a camptown located adjacent to Camp Humphreys, the largest overseas US military base on the planet, the article examines how Korean development actors invoke hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class to distance the camptown from the sex industry and to construct the camptown as a space of militarised urban prosperity. By showing emerging ways in which US military empire works through anti-prostitution policies and through the urban system in Korea, the argument poses a challenge to anti-prostitution feminists who have long located evidence of American empire in the sex industry itself.     

Talking class,talking race: language,class, and race in the call center industry in South Africa

Against a backdrop of declining manufacturing employment, this article uses a study of the call center industry to argue that English language proficiency is central to new service jobs in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on research in Durban, we in this study show that access to call center work—especially the highest paid niches—is heavily mediated by English language skills generally attainable only at the most elite high schools. In doing so, we argue that access to English-medium education can challenge racial disadvantage, but simultaneously that English can help to consolidate white privilege through the continued association of a ‘prestigious’ accent with whiteness. The study accordingly reveals the importance of language in the changing intersectionality of race and class and, in doing so, underlines the value of social and cultural perspectives in labor geography.     

锶同位素分析技术在考古学中的应用研究

在考古化学这个新领域内,考古学家们经过努力,成功地将锶同位素分析技术运用于考古学领域,通过对遗址中人类骨骼的锶同位素分析来对古代人类的迁移情况进行研究。由于考古材料间存在着差别,各个实验室所采用的方法和实验步骤间也存在一些差异,因此还没有统一的分析方法和步骤,至今仍处于进一步的探索之中。在我国的考古学研究中,这项技术还处于起步阶段,迄今为止还未见到相关的研究成果。本文主要对这项技术在考古学上应用的原理及研究中注意事项进行了较为详细的论述,并且计划今后进行这方面的实验研究,希望能为国内同仁进行这方面的研究时提供些许借鉴。     

Of “madness,” against Babylon: A story of resistance, (mis)representation,and paradox in the Caribbean

This article provides a postcolonial feminist account of the complex politics of the Earth People, an anti-systemic movement in Trinidad and Tobago who organised against the post-independence status quo during the 1970–1980s. The purpose of the piece is twofold. Firstly, on a scholarly level, it endeavours to (re)tell a theoretically-driven empirically-based story of the nuances that surfaced during the Earth People's resistance to “Babylon” (i.e. racial capitalism, Western institutions, rise of a post-colonial nationalist bourgeoisie). Secondly, on a political-epistemological level, we are countering conventional ways Caribbean people, histories, social movements, and the region at large are documented, studied, and ultimately written about within mainstream academia. To do so, we outline the fraught politics of (mis)representation that arise in established ethnography, with specific care afforded to the perspectives and political agency of participants from the movement. Our analysis emerges out of fieldwork guided by critical race theories, decolonial critique, feminist ethics, and community collaboration. Our methods included archival research, focus groups, oral histories, go-along interviews, and narrative inquiry with former members of the group. In general, the piece historicises the Earth People's efforts to evade and defy colonial norms, capitalist logics, and Westminster state power by “returning to nature.” Further, we offer a synopsis of movement's worldviews, social relations, and ideological standpoints, which despite being episodically paradoxical and not adopted widely throughout the Caribbean, merit further respective attention and critical scrutiny apropos regional posterity and orthodox academic knowledge production.     

Monkey business: human–animal conflicts in urban Singapore

Ongoing human–long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) conflicts in Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Singapore, have seen native macaques significantly affected, as residential development encroaches into animals' habitat, destroying important wildlife corridors. The search for a more humane treatment of these transgressive animals can be seen as an attempt to extend and include non-human animals within humanistic notions of ethics and care, in the process destabilizing the assumed divide between human/animal. Yet, a feasible solution is difficult to reach as National Parks Board (NParks), the state agency overseeing the conservation of reserves and wildlife, has to negotiate constantly between their goal of maintaining biodiversity and appeasing the complaining residents. The paper seek to understand urban–wilderness conflicts between human–macaque, showing that the divide between tamed/wild is multi-sited, ambiguous and constantly shifting. In this regard, we are especially interested in the role of intermediaries in initiating actions to ‘make discursive as well as material space’ for macaques in the reserve. Intermediaries, here referring to NParks and animal activists, are actors who do not reside near the reserve thus having no frequent encounters with wildlife, yet are enrolled as mitigators during instances of human–animal conflicts.