The $15 Wage Movement Moves South: Politics of Region in Labor Union Campaigns

The North American labor movement continues to wrestle with the challenges of organizing workers in the US South. This article explores the contradictory position of the South in the contemporary labor movement, using the circulation of the $15 minimum wage to ground the analysis. By problematizing the place of the South in US labor, this article contributes to efforts to complicate the geographic imaginaries of the South and to our understanding of the contemporary labor movement's expansionary projects. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation in Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, I trace the abstract circulation of organizational resources, strategies, and tactics of the $15 wage movement into, throughout, and back out of the South.     

Investigating Human Migration and Horse‐Trading in Yelang (夜郎) Through Strontium Isotope Analysis of Skeletons from Zhougshui Sites,South‐West China (1300 bc – ad 25)

Yelang (夜郎), a mysterious state located in the south‐western area of early China and dating from the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age (1300 bc – ad 25), is a cultural interactive junction between the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau and the Yangtze River Basin. The Zhongshui Basin in Weining County, Guizhou Province, was one of the important distribution areas of the Yelang civilization. This area, which includes sites at Jigongshan (鸡公山; 1300 – 800 bc ), Hongyingpan (红营盘; 700 – 400 bc ) and Yinzitan (银子坛; 400 bc – ad 25), has provided a very integrated chronology, spanning from the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age in the eastern Yunnan – western Guizhou area. To investigate human migration and horse‐trading at these Yelang sites, we conducted a strontium isotopic analysis on the teeth enamel of humans and horses unearthed from these three sites. The results indicated the following: (1) people at the earlier sites (Jigongshan and Hongyingpan) were all indigenous, whereas in the Yinzitan cemetery, there was a more immigrant population, and all the people who were buried in an upper limb flexed supine position were non‐local; and (2) most of the horses found at the Jigongshan and Yinzitan sites show different provenances, probably related to the famous Dian (滇) and Zuo (筰) horses recorded in historical documents, providing more clues for further study on horse‐trading in South‐West China during the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.     

New technologies and the political economy of geomorphology

New technologies enable high‐resolution monitoring techniques and the generation of big data and have been heralded as increasing the depth of our understanding of geomorphic phenomena. These technologies, however, also provide us with a convenient entry point into the increasingly constraining political economy of geomorphology. Building on the work of Stuart Lane and of critical physical geographers, this paper traces and examines the multiple roles that new technologies have played in constraining research questions and directing resources. Using the activity sphere framework outlined by David Harvey, the influence of new technologies can be traced around the spheres and their constraining of existing relations within academia and explanation identified.     

GIS Methods in Time-Geographic Research: Geocomputation and Geovisualization of Human Activity Patterns

Over the past 40 years or so, human activities and movements in space‐time have attracted considerable research interest in geography. One of the earliest analytical perspectives for the analysis of human activity patterns and movements in space‐time is time geography. Despite the usefulness of time geography in many areas of geographical research, there are very few studies that actually implemented its constructs as analytical methods up to the mid‐1990s. With increasing availability of geo‐referenced individual‐level data and improvement in the geo‐computational capabilities of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), it is now more feasible than ever before to operationalize and implement time‐geographic constructs. This paper discusses recent applications of GIS‐based geo‐computation and three‐dimensional (3‐D) geo‐visualization methods in time‐geographic research. The usefulness of these methods is illustrated through examples drawn from the author's recent studies. The paper attempts to show that GIS provides an effective environment for implementing time‐geographic constructs and for the future development of operational methods in time‐geographic research.     

Unruly topographies: unemployment, citizenship and land settlement in inter-war Wales

Between 1934 and 1939, over 5000 people, mainly ex-miners and their families, were settled in government-owned land settlements in England and Wales. This policy emerged as a response to mass unemployment, and complemented other schemes for the unemployed developed by the inter-war National Government. This paper will consider the geographical conditions that were imagined, realized and contested in these settlements. Acknowledging the hybrid and liminal nature of these spaces, the paper mobilizes new work in cultural and historical geography and draws out the heterotopic potential of the settlement programme.     

区域人类社会与自然环境相互作用的类型分析及其实践意义

本文先论述了人类社会和自然环境相互作用的逻辑关系;接着对自然环境和人类社会在相互作用过程中的变化进行组合,用来反映不同的区域发展类型,根据可持续发展原理将这些类型划分成五大类,逐个分析各大类的特征;最后就这些类型进行区域性分析,按照各种不同类型在区域发展过程中可能会出现的先后次序进行组合,揭示不同区域发展现象的本质,从而为实现区域可持续发展提供理论依据和实践途径。     

Law and the historical geography of the Galilee: Israel's litigatory advantages during the special operation of land settlement

This article contributes to a re-evaluation of the role of law in historical geography. It focuses on Israeli officials' application of the complex legal process of ‘settlement of title’ to land in the all-Arab central Galilee during the 1950s and 1960s, which was aimed at transforming Jewish–Arab socio-spatial power relations in the region. Expanding Israeli conceptions of state land and the government's focus on contesting land claims of Arab citizens transformed the process into an overwhelmingly litigatory one, triggering thousands of legal disputes between state agencies and Galilee Arabs. Drawing on Galanter's work on repeat player advantage and Kritzer's work on government litigants, this article characterizes the state as a ‘government compound repeat player’, enjoying advantages that not only won cases in the Haifa District Court but that also had direct impact on the subsequent geographical transformation of the region. On a more general level, this article argues that law has played a greater role in shaping historical geographies than the literature might suggest and encourages additional work on the subject.     

Human Technical Behavior in the African Middle Stone Age: The Lithic Assemblage of Porc-Epic Cave (Dire Dawa,Ethiopia)

The African origin of modern humans is the center of a large debate. Discoveries of anatomically modern human fossils in Sub-Saharan Africa correlated to lithic and faunal artifacts show that a “modern Behavior” is associated with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Even though the traits to define this modernity are sometimes difficult to apprehend, the study of the Middle Stone Age cultural phase is important for understanding the origin and evolution of the cognitive capacity of modern humans. Porc-Epic Cave in Ethiopia has a long sequence of Upper Pleistocene occupation. Several thousand bone and lithic artifacts were excavated during three major field excavations (1933, 1974, 1975–76). The lithic assemblage reveals that the relationship between humans and their environment is well organized and that the African terminology is sometimes difficult to apply. This paper proposes a synthesis of all the data, studies and conclusions I have made from the analysis of lithic materials from the 1933 and 1975–76 excavations in order to integrate Porc-Epic into the current debate of MSA and modern human Behavior.L'origine de l'Homme moderne en Afrique fait l'objet actuellement d'un large débat. Les décourvertes de fossiles d'Homo sapiens en Afrique sub-saharienne associés à des industries lithiques montrent que, en parallèle à l'émergence de cette nouvelle espèce humaine, un comportement dit moderne s'est développé. Le Middle Stone Age est donc une période culturelle charnière dans l'évolution comportementale de l'homme. La grotte du Porc-épic, en éthiopie, est un témoignage de cette ère avec un remplissage pléistocène supérieur contenant des dizaines de milliers de restes fauniques et lithiques. L'étude de son important assemblage lithique révèle que le rapport de l'homme à la matière et à son environnement est très organisé et que le terminologie culturelle africaine est parfois difficile à utiliser.     

试论塞瑟尔的"新君主制"学说

在文艺复兴时期的西欧,法国的宫廷大臣、著名的政治思想家克劳德·得·塞瑟尔根据现实社会的变动,提出了系统的"新君主制"学说.在肯定君主制的价值时,他鼓吹"王权神授",但却着重于从人性的角度来强调君主制的优越性.在对"明君政治"的憧憬中,他界定了一些君主应当遵循的政治行为规范,特别强调君主实施仁政,建立各等级之间的"和谐"秩序,并提出了等级变动的合理性.同时,塞瑟尔主张君主让各等级代表参政议政,建立"君主咨政会议制".他还提出"有限君权"的主张,力图以教会、"正义"与国家法令来遏止君主的暴政.此外,他还要求君主灵活地进行外交,积极进行殖民扩张.塞氏的政治学说充满着"过渡时期"社会所赋予的复杂性与矛盾性,但受时代变迁的感召与人文主义的熏陶,他突破传统的藩篱,提出了适应民族国家发展与新兴资产阶级成长之需要的"新君主制"学说.他的政治理想,反映了西方政治思想从中世纪向近代转型的历史趋势.     

Dreaming of a Golden Bengal: Discontinuities of Place and Identity in South Asia

This article analyses five different representations of the homeland category “Bengal”. The region of Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century and imagined in a multitude of forms at different historical moments. The article describes the conditions that allowed different territories and peoples to crystallise as “Bengal” and “the Bengalis”, and investigates why some versions of the Bengali homeland proved durable as others faded away. Rather than asking who is the real Bengali and where is the real Bengal, it investigates how particular identity categories become popularly practised and why particular images of the homeland come to be perceived as true, legitimate and authentic. It concludes that homeland categories are never fixed and finalised, but are rather always in a process of becoming, and are contested, reimagined and redefined as socio-political contexts change.