Neighbourhood food environments revisited: When food deserts meet food swamps

This study uses service area–based coverage and various count regression methods to assess neighbourhood-level healthy and unhealthy food environments, and food access associated with different socio-economic groups in Edmonton, Canada. We identify three types of vulnerable neighbourhoods according to different food environments: food deserts (i.e., neighbourhoods lack sufficient access to healthy foods); food swamps (i.e., neighbourhoods have excess access to unhealthy foods); and those with overlaps of food swamps and food deserts. We also identify neighbourhoods with superior access to healthy foods (i.e., food oases). Additionally, our results from regression analyses indicate: (1) child population is negatively associated with both healthy and unhealthy food resources; (2) good access to public transportation is associated with good coverage of all healthy food outlets and convenience stores; and (3) deprived neighbourhoods with higher percentages of minority populations have better coverage of both healthy and unhealthy foods in general. The results from this study can help the City of Edmonton identify the key neighbourhoods with high potential for local business and the hotspot neighbourhoods that require particular support. Tailored strategies are proposed to effectively and efficiently improve food environments with limited resources.     

福建省投资环境竞争力空间过程与驱动因素分析

构建福建省地级市投资环境竞争力评价指标体系,为GIS环境地级市多边形的主要属性,以2000-2007年福建统计年鉴为主要数据源,建立时态空间数据库。通过"时空同时归一"的指标变换方法定义投资环境相对竞争力,使不同指标"等价"与引入时空统一标准,选择时间序列、截面权变显著的经因子分析确定权矩阵,进行变权法三维评价,利用序列快照模型表达、逼近福建省投资环境竞争力空间过程,通过基于数据的空间过程因子识别技术,进行驱动因素分析,为优化福建省投资环境提供调控依据。     

The Science of Empire: Darwinism,Human Diversity,and Russian Physical Anthropology

Summary : The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.     

Advancing culture’s role in sustainable development: social change through cultural policy

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the potential for cultural policy to shape sustainable development in the context of expectations arising from research and policy work on development. We use, as the basis of a critique, the categorisation of the relationship between culture and sustainable development proposed by a major study funded by the European Union, being emblematical of how researchers and policymakers understand this relationship. The critique highlights a need for multiscalar social change, towards revaluing relations with the natural world, and reforming social relations between producers and consumers. This paper locates cultural policy as an arm of governance, with the capacity to lead social change across several interdependent pathways (revaluing technological change; fostering an aesthetic appreciation and environmental ethical consciousness; and pro-social behaviour) alongside the development of more sophisticated governance frameworks. The paper further proposes that through (re)education, cultural policy can and should play a more active role in shaping social change.     

The quest for a traditional style: architecture and heritage processes in a Pyrenean valley

In this article, I focus on the construction and restoration of houses in the Catalan Pyrenees, on their materiality, and specifically on the relationship between architectural and heritage processes that shapes them. I provide an analysis of how architectural forms, norms and regulations, as well as building aesthetics and materials, were transformed in the past decades following a parallel process of changes in the region. The aim is to explore the relationship between the built environment and the cultural and economic shift of the area in recent times. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted in a valley of the Catalan Pyrenees, I show how the material culture, architecture and built environment evolved in close relationship to the spread of heritage discourses leading to a mutually constituting association that helped shape the elements of the new social realities.     

A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.     

‘Culture’, ‘sustainable development’ and cultural policy: a contrarian view

Abstract

This essay offers a critical analysis of the ‘culture and sustainable development’ discourse, notably among cultural activists and in actually existing cultural policy. It interrogates the utility of the narrative, seeks to uncover the semantic manoeuvres it employs and challenges the conventional wisdom it represents. The essay first explores the itinerary of the ductile notion of ‘sustainability’, the ways in which it has been stretched far beyond the original intent of those who coined the term, and identifies the conceptual discontents that this semantic multiplication has entailed. It hypothesizes that precisely because the term ‘sustainable’ and its derivatives are so acceptable and malleable at the same time, they have been easy to yoke to the bandwagon of the many-faceted and totalizing process that is ‘development’, allowing many different actors to project their interests, hopes, and aspirations under this composite banner. The essay then analyses the campaign to make culture ‘the fourth pillar of sustainability’ under the banner of the movement called ‘Agenda 21 for Culture’. It concludes with a plea for a return to the original ecological focus of the term ‘sustainability’ – notably as regards climate change – and outlines some cultural policy responses such a focus can and should generate.     

A third road to the past? Historical scholarship in the age of big data

Is a third passage to the past possible, beyond Elton's and Fogel's two roads of narrative history and scientific/quantitative history? One that would combine narrative history's focus on the event, on individuals and their actions, at a particular time and place, to scientific/quantitative history's emphasis on explicit behavioral models based on social-science theories? That is the question this article addresses. It illustrates a computer-assisted methodology for the study of narrative—quantitative narrative analysis (QNA)—that does just that. Based on the 5 Ws + H of narrative—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—QNA quantifies events without losing the event itself, without losing people behind numbers, diachronic time behind synchronic statistical coefficients. When used in conjunction with dynamic and interactive data visualization tools (and new natural language processing tools), QNA may provide a third unforeseen road to the past.     

Queering disasters: on the need to account for LGBTI experiences in natural disaster contexts

This article seeks a queering of research and policy in relation to natural disasters, their human impacts, management and response. The human impacts of natural disasters vary across different social groups. We contend that one group largely absent from scholarly and policy agendas is sexual and gender minorities, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) populations. To demonstrate that these minorities have particular experiences that need to be addressed, we critically review five case studies that comprise the limited scholarly and policy research on LGBTI populations in disasters to date. Building on this, we offer some specific ways forward for queer disaster research that accounts for the vulnerabilities, needs and resilient capacities of LGBTI populations. In doing so, we recognise and urge researchers, policy-makers and aid agencies to acknowledge that LGBTI populations are not homogeneous and have different needs wrought by intersections of socio-economic resources, gender, race/ethnicity, age and regional or national location.     

故宫古建筑内温湿度问题初探

博物馆的环境应当相对稳定且有益于文物的保存。故宫博物院作为古建筑博物馆,其特殊性在于古建筑本身也是文物,虽然自身条件较差,但又不能随意改变其外观和结构,导致其保存环境往往不够理想。在研究中论述了故宫古建筑的环境特点,结合在古建筑内文物环境监测和控制方面的若干问题进行有益的探讨,对原状陈列的古建筑温湿度调控的应用效果进行了分析和评估,指出了存在的问题,并提出了对古建筑中环境控制的思考。采用密封性能优良的展柜配合适当的调湿材料可以很好地稳定相对湿度,减少温度变化对相对湿度造成的影响,这是当前国际上文物微环境控制的一个发展方向。