Urban homesteading and intensive mothering: (re) gendering care and environmental responsibility in Boston and Chicago

In this article, we explore how normative ideologies of good mothering are being reproduced and contested through urban homesteading, a sustainable lifestyle that emphasizes household self-provisioning. Urban homesteading practices may include gardening and urban agriculture, canning, and pickling, and a variety of do-it-yourself and craft projects. Based on qualitative research with 19 urban homesteading households with children in the Boston and Chicago Metropolitan areas, we argue that urban homesteading discourses and practices reflect and align with intensive mothering ideologies in the United States. Intensive mothering ideologies encourage a selfless devotion of physical, emotional, and mental energy to childrearing, and are often associated with individualized, privileged, and gendered subjectivities. We find these intensive mothering ideologies especially visible in the ways that mothers perceive and respond to environmental risk by adopting and enacting urban homesteading labors. We also note that the choice to respond to risk by homesteading is often, but not always, mediated and animated by economic, temporal, and social privilege. In this way, urban homesteading and surrounding discourses may inadvertently raise the bar of ‘good’ motherhood in ways that demand more of women and marginalize or burden mothers with less resources and privilege. However, rather than dismiss homesteading entirely on these grounds, we suggest that it may be possible to harvest impulses of care, connection, and collectivity associated with homesteading in ways that benefit rather than burden all mothers.     

Sociability and Hugo Grotius

Summary

Grotius has a rudimentary theory of sociability. Only with hindsight has a remark about appetitus societatis been promoted to the starting point of a theory that flourished in the writings of later natural jurists. In this article, I address the issue of the appearance in Grotius's natural law of sociability [as the 1715/38 English translation of John Morrice renders appetitus societatis, following Barbeyrac's sociabilité]. Writing in the just war tradition, Grotius is first of all interested in finding out the conditions for peace, and although injustice is a condition of war, it is not per se true that injustice is a perversion of society. Apparently, not all societies are perfect and the violence of war and the legal actions of peace are both instruments for achieving a greater modicum of justice in this world. Yet appetitus et custodia societatis is called the foundation of justice. Grotius achieved this context for sociability in phases, through a series of writings from c. 1600 until De iure belli ac pacis of 1625, and its revision of 1631. In this development the notion of fides plays an intriguing role, through which we can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of appetitus societatis in the later work. The present article is a sequel to a previous publication, on fides in De iure praedae (Ms. 1604/5). Analysing the genesis of appetitus societatis in De iure belli ac pacis, I argue that Grotius was changing his strategy over the years, without however arriving at a definitive solution to the question of what commits men to the pursuit of justice.     

Unsociable Sociability and the Crisis of Natural Law: Michael Hissmann (1752–1784) on the State of Nature

Summary

This article studies the impact of the debate about human sociability on the crisis of natural law in the later eighteenth century examining the Untersuchungen über den Stand der Natur of 1780 by the Göttingen scholar Michael Hissmann. It makes the case that this crisis ensued from Rousseau's Discours sur l‘inégalité and a revival of neo-Epicurean trends in moral philosophy more generally. The sociability debate revolved around the question to what extent society was natural or artificial to man. This had important implications for the problem of whether distinctions between right and wrong or just and unjust were natural and inborn, or had developed at a much later stage of mankind's history, reflecting merely the respective needs and utility of different societies and cultures. Hissmann's essay summarises this European debate concisely. His point of departure is Rousseauian premises, yet his political conclusions turn Rousseau upside down. Here, Hissmann's essay opens up several questions regarding the allegedly radical political character of one-substance theories in philosophy.     

‘Born in an atomic test tube’: landscapes of cyclonic development at Uranium City,Saskatchewan

Drawing together insights from neo‐Innisian geography and environmental history, this paper explores the landscape and environmental changes engendered by ‘cyclonic’ patterns of development associated with uranium production at Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Strong postwar demand for uranium led to the establishment and rapid expansion of Uranium City on the north shore of Lake Athabasca as a ‘yellowcake town’, dedicated to producing uranium oxide concentrate to supply federal government contracts with the US military. In spite of optimistic assessments for the region's industrial future, the new settlement remained inherently unstable, tied to shifting institutional arrangements and external markets, and haunted by the spectre of resource depletion. The planning and development of the townsite at Uranium City reflected both neocolonial desires to open the north to Euro‐Canadian settlement and efforts by the state to buffer the stormy effects of resource dependency. Ultimately, however, quixotic government efforts to implant an outpost of industrial modernity in the Athabasca Region failed to forestall the inevitable winds of change, which left in their wake destructive legacies of social dislocation and environmental degradation, already evident with the near‐collapse of the uranium export market by the early 1960s.     

Palaeolithic engravings and sedimentary environments in the Côa River Valley (Portugal): implications for the detection,interpretation and dating of open-air rock art

The pre-Magdalenian phase of the Côa River Valley open-air rock art is mostly distributed at the boundary between the rocky valley slopes and the floodplain that correspond to the most favourable geomorphological setting for the preservation of pecked and deeply superposed engravings of the most famous artistic phase of the area. The natural vertical panels of the engraved art located at this geomorphological interface have suffered weathering during two cold events of the Lateglacial. They were buried by several colluvial and alluvial deposits. The reconstruction of the sedimentary and archaeological context of the CôaRiver Valley engraving permits a better assessment of the preservation processes and interpretation of Palaeolithic open-air rock art.     

被边缘化的群体和被边缘化的法律——对富士康“跳楼门”事件的法律思考

富士康＂跳楼门＂事件属于社会转型时期被边缘化的劳动者极端地反映自身利益诉求的方式。该事件不仅暴露出劳动密集型企业管理模式的弊端,也折射出我国现行的法律体系对于劳动者权益保障的缺位。同时,富士康在对＂跳楼门＂事件的处理中也存在着与法治精神和现行法律规定相违背的地方。本文就富士康＂跳楼门＂事件所涉及的相关法律问题进行初步探讨。     

领导干部要注重提高自身媒体执政力

随着经济社会发展及新技术的广泛应用,媒体在现实社会生活中的作用日显重要,但领导干部在如何对待媒体和运用媒体方面却存在着明显的不足。为此,如何正确对待媒体和善于运用媒体,提高自身的媒体执政力,是当代领导干部所面临的一个崭新课题。     

关于新石器时代的三次“革命”

在新石器时代文化研究中,农业革命和城市革命的理论认识早就普遍接受。但把农业革命作为新石器时代革命的基本内容,仍不能充分解释旧石器时代向新石器时代的过渡问题。在农业革命之前,还应存在着以资源开发为目的、以居住方式变革为重要途径的居住革命,即发达的新石器时代文化曾经历过的三次革命性变化。     

古墨保存自然老化问题的调查研究

为探讨研究博物馆古墨保存方法、损坏机理和修复技术,做好古墨保存工作,尽可能延长古墨的保存寿命,走访调查了6家传统制墨企业及其技术人员,基本了解了我国传统制墨业的传承发展情况,进一步了解了墨的传统制作工艺和保存方法。调查结果摸清了古墨发生严重粉碎性酥解的主要原因是受潮和干燥不当,收集了多种修复墨表面所产生的“墨霜”、细小裂纹和断裂墨的常用工艺,揭示了古墨保存质量与制墨材料、加工工艺、保存环境、日常养护等的关系,明确指出良好保存古墨的关键在于控制保存环境和做好日常养护工作,为进一步开展古墨保存综合性科学研究提供了经验和思路。     

中日实现经贸合作战略升级的区域环境

尽管中日两国关系内部的经贸合作关系与政治协作关系,在发展上长期处于不平衡、不协调的亚健康状态,但是中国从双边经贸合作的大局出发,一直在积极促进两国经贸关系与政治关系协调发展。这不仅是中国经济发展的内在需要,而且也是区域性外在作用的促进结果。值得一提的是,中日两国在亚太经济合作组织、东亚“10 3”合作机制、中日韩三国合作框架、中日俄三国利益关系的推进上,都有着广泛的合作基础与广阔的合作前景,从而在外部形成了中日两国经贸合作实现战略升级目标的区域促进环境,有利于双方在2008￣2010年间达到2 000亿美圆的经贸合作额度。