A toolkit to implement graduate attributes in geography curricula

This article uses findings from a project on engagement with graduate outcomes across higher education institutions in New Zealand to produce a toolkit for implementing graduate attributes in geography curricula. Key facets include strong leadership; academic developers to facilitate conversations about graduate attributes and teaching towards them; ownership of the process by the teachers; the development of a contextualized set of graduate attributes for the geography degree; curriculum mapping to promote alignment between graduate attributes, learning outcomes and assessment tasks; incorporating high-impact educational experiences and signature pedagogies to foster graduate attributes; the use of evaluative data to inform continual enhancements; and allowing at least five years for curriculum renewal to occur.     

When regional innovation policies meet policy rationales and evidence: a plea for policy analysis

In spite of recent advancements regarding regional innovation policy rationales and evidence, there are few analyses about the actual features of existing regional innovation policies. Nevertheless, a policy analysis perspective is important in order to recognize their distinctive patterns across regions, and to understand how rationales and evidence can be translated into policy-making. To this purpose, this paper develops a framework to study the extent to which regional innovation policies have changed during the past few years. Since the mid-2000s, there has been an important development of innovation policy rationales, advocating for more specialization; likewise, greater data availability at the regional level has allowed more sophisticated assessment of innovation performance. Finally, the crisis since 2008 has had ravaging effects in some regions, with job losses and severe economic sluggishness. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect transforming dynamics in regional innovation policies. Against this backdrop, the paper compares the institutional frameworks and budgetary priorities of four Spanish regions during the period 2001–2014: Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia. In so doing, it aims at studying the extent to which regional governments have readily addressed past and new challenges related to their regional innovation system, and if so, how.     

Too few nutrients and too many calories: climate change and the double burden of malnutrition in Asia

About half of children age under five worldwide who are classified as undernourished (84 million out of 151 million) or overweight or obese (17.5 million out of 38 million) live in Asia. Tackling malnutrition in Asia is however fairly complex since the nutritional transition, a consequence of rapid economic development and globalisation, made many Asian nations undergo the simultaneous burdens of under- and over-nutrition. The dual burden of malnutrition is characterised by a concurrence of undernutrition along with overweight and obesity within the same individual, household, community, region and/or country. Providing that household food security is closely linked to malnutrition, this raises questions about the implications of climate change on the dual burden of malnutrition. That climate change affects food availability, access, utilisation and stability is evident. Accordingly, households facing food insecurity due to climatic shocks may allocate food differentially. Adult members may receive low-cost high-calorie food inducing obesity, whilst children receive nutrient-poor foods leading to undernutrition. Little is known about the climate impacts on the double burden of malnutrition and how this affects population subgroups differentially. This Editorial discusses the potential impacts of climate change on the double burden of malnutrition and concludes with the recommendation of strategies to tackle the issue.     

Maritime Culture in the Netherlands: accessing the late medieval maritime cultural landscapes of the north‐eastern Zuiderzee

This paper examines the theory and practice of the maritime cultural landscape in general, and projects the theoretical concepts and aspects involved on the highly dynamic late medieval north‐eastern Zuiderzee region in the Netherlands. The cultivation of land and marine erosion (floods and rising sea level) are considered as the main factors that caused the transformation of the physical landscape of this region from peatlands with freshwater basins into a tidal lagoon. As a consequence, multiple settlements drowned, large areas of land submerged, and culture and the landscape gradually became more maritime, giving the research area a cultural identity and dimension.     

Canadian Philosophy: A Dialectical Exploration

This article inquires into the difference between philosophy as a universal practice and philosophy as a cultural product; its aim is to establish a case for there being Canadian philosophy. Philosophy as a practice can exhibit a dialectical framework. The practice can pursue both universal truths and cultural variations in expressions of those truths. Each philosophical endeavor requires the other to be meaningful. No matter how abstract a “truth” may be, an example always creates cultural relevance. The article introduces the example of an early Canadian philosopher, whose work is documented in the book by Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950. John Watson (1847–1939) was the most prolific and well-known contributor to philosophy in early Canada, pursuing universal questions and yet responding to the circumstances of his new home in developing Canada and, in doing so, contributing to Canadian cultural interpretations of philosophical questions. This article uses his example to conclude that the study of philosophy in Canada must include Canadian philosophy.     

Canadian geopolitical culture: Climate change and sustainability

Considering recent formulations of geopolitical culture in combination with concerns that environmental change be included in contemporary geopolitical analysis, this paper examines the implicit geopolitical formulations in recent Canadian federal political discourse both in Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal administration. Contrasting earth system science ideas about global transformations with Canadian nationalist rhetoric concerning petroleum production and notions of unlimited resource extraction as parts of national identity sharply highlights the contours of Canadian identity. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, the official nationalist formulation will have to be drastically changed, but as the widespread rejection of the LEAP manifesto suggests, such ideas of a sustainable mode of globalization have yet to substantially influence Canadian political discourse, despite the rhetorical support offered to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.     

The Thomas Souls Ministry – Onto‐praxis,Dividualism, and Charismatic Catholicism at Lake Chambri,Papua New Guinea

The Thomas Souls Ministry is a prayer group founded by Catholics from the middle Sepik. It is led by a spirit of the dead called Thomas who takes possession of a Nyaura (West Iatmul) woman to preach, prophesy, counsel, and heal. While a prominent debate within the Anthropology of Christianity argues for radical change and rupture with the pre‐Christian self and society, I suggest that continuity within change is found in the way my interlocutors have made Christianity their own. I argue that the local concept of the person defined by aspects of dividualism and reflecting ontological premises of people's lifeworld has strongly influenced the way Christianity was appropriated. In current religious practices people put these premises into action and reinforce them in intersubjective encounters with the divine other. Analysing people's ‘onto‐praxis’, I argue that the Thomas Souls Ministry can be understood as part of a re‐empowerment process that re‐appropriates local meanings, spirits, and practices despite, and in fact against, the influence of the Catholic mission proselytizing in the region.     

BOSERUP BACKWARDS? AGRICULTURAL INTENSIFICATION AS ‘ITS OWN DRIVING FORCE’ IN THE MBULU HIGHLANDS,TANZANIA

Why do farmers intensify their agricultural practices? Recent revisions of African environmental historiographies have greatly enriched our understanding of human–environmental interactions. To simply point at poor farming practices as the main cause of deforestation, desertification and other processes of land degradation is, for example, no longer possible. The contemporary analytical focus is instead on the complex and often unpredictable set of causal relations between societal, ecological and climatic factors. In the literature on agricultural intensification, conventionally defined driving forces, such as population pressure and market demand, remain important explanatory factors despite a growing body of research that suggests more dynamic scenarios of agricultural development and landscape change. This article reports on a case where the common‐sense logic of population pressure theory has dominated the historical narrative of a local process of agricultural intensification among an agro‐pastoral people in north‐central Tanzania. By way of a ‘detailed participatory landscape analyses’ a more complex and dynamic historical process of intensification is suggested, in which the landscape and the process of agricultural intensification itself are in focus. It is concluded that the accumulation of landesque capital has been incremental in character, and that the process of agricultural intensification in the study area has largely been its own driving force based on self‐reinforcing processes of change, and not a consequence of land scarcity and population pressure. This result demonstrates the possibility and usefulness of reversing the Bose‐rupian argument in analyses of agricultural intensification.     

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE AS A FUTURE CHALLENGE FOR CITIES IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE

Contemporary cities in East Central Europe (ECE) represent a hybrid type of urban development which is still generally considered to be a special case and is only exceptionally referred to in the recently intensified debate over the European city. Our paper argues that such exclusion is short‐sighted because ECE cities face structural problems similar to those of their Western pendants. Therefore, the contextual frame of urban research needs to be widened and can no longer be restricted to post‐socialist transition. In this regard, one of the main challenges for future urban development will be the consequences of demographic change. Ageing, new patterns of fertility behaviour and more diversified household structures in line with the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) will have significant implications for urban structures and housing markets, as already known for Western Europe. The purpose of this paper is to work out new questions and hypotheses for future urban research with special respect to Polish and Czech cities. Besides West European experience, recent developments in eastern Germany are taken as a frame of reference, assuming that this specific transition case may, in many respects, be regarded as a forerunner for similar developments in its neighbouring countries.     

Modern humans in Sarawak,Malaysian Borneo,during Oxygen Isotope Stage 3: palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Great Cave of Niah

During recent reinvestigations in the Great Cave of Niah in Borneo, the ‘Hell Trench’ sedimentary sequence seen by earlier excavators was re-exposed. Early excavations here yielded the earliest anatomically-modern human remains in island Southeast Asia. Calibrated radiocarbon dates, pollen, algal microfossils, palynofacies, granulometry and geochemistry of the ‘Hell Trench’ sequence provide information about environmental and vegetational changes, elements of geomorphic history and information about human activity. The ‘Hell’ sediments were laid down episodically in an ephemeral stream or pool. The pollen suggests cyclically changing vegetation with forest habitats alternating with more open environments; indicating that phases with both temperatures and precipitation reduced compared with the present. These events can be correlated with global climate change sequences to produce a provisional dating framework. During some forest phases, high counts of Justicia, a plant which today colonises recently burnt forest areas, point to fire in the landscape. This may be evidence for biomass burning by humans, presumably to maintain forest-edge habitats. There is evidence from palynofacies for fire on the cave floor in the ‘Hell’ area. Since the area sampled is beyond the limit of plant growth, this is evidence for human activity. The first such evidence is during an episode with significant grassland indicators, suggesting that people may have reached the site during a climatic phase characterised by relatively open habitats ∼50 ka. Thereafter, people were able to maintain a relatively consistent presence at Niah. The human use of the ‘Hell’ area seems to have intensified through time, probably because changes in the local hydrological regime made the area dryer and more suitable for human use.