Colonising geology: Volcanic politics and geopower

This paper discusses the experiences of Christian Montserratian residents through the 1995-present eruptions of the Soufrière Hills Volcano, highlighting that while the earthly powers of the volcano are fundamentally nonhuman, they are known and understood in a diversity of ways by different actors – and they interfere in politics and the production of knowledge. Montserrat, as a UK Overseas Territory, is a non-sovereign territory with a strong Christian identity that has been enhanced by its geological experience. At the same time, the UK has used the eruption to hold greater legislative control over the island. A final group of stakeholders in the eruption is the volcanologists, mainly from the UK until 2010, whose terminology and knowledge-world has had significant impact on the island, but has also been significantly extended by it. The paper ultimately uses this example to suggest that while there are useful and important insights from the “ontological turn” (incorporating vitalism, materialism, speculative realism) in thinking about the “lively earth”, the enactment of volcanic risk management at the governmental level also constitutes a knowledge-practice that must be approached critically to avoid the pitfalls of modernist science and ensure meaningful political change.     

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.     

季节时空交互视角下老年人公交移动性的影响因素研究——以芜湖市为例

公共交通是我国老年人出行的主要交通方式之一,公交移动性是衡量老年人生活质量和幸福感的重要指标。从季节和空间双重维度分析老年人公交移动性的影响因素有助于深入理解老年人出行行为机制。利用公交刷卡数据和地理探测器方法分析了季节时空因子对老年人公交移动性的影响。研究发现：①不同季节中空间因子对老年人移动频率、移动半径和移动熵的解释力和显著性存在明显差异,对老年人移动性影响机制的分析应考虑时空变化的双重影响;②不同空间因子之间以及季节与空间因子之间的交互作用可以显著增强对老年人移动性空间分异的解释力,考虑多个因素的协同效应对深入理解老年人行为有一定帮助。研究试图拓宽老年人移动性影响因素的分析思路,为老年宜居城市建设和城市移动性规划提供重要支撑。     

广西玉林市博物馆馆藏七件铜鼓的初步分析研究

迄今已有2 700多年历史的铜鼓,是南方少数民族地区节日、喜庆、兵事、婚丧、祭祀、礼乐等场合使用的一种重器。为了对锈蚀状况做出科学的现状评估,为器物保护修复技术路线的制定和修复工作的开展提供科学指导,对玉林市博物馆馆藏7件铜鼓综合运用了体视显微镜、金相显微镜、激光显微拉曼光谱仪(RS)和环境扫描电镜及能谱仪(ESEM-EDAX)等仪器进行了金相组织和合金成分分析以及锈蚀产物的分析。分析结果显示:7件器物皆为泥范铸造成型,未见热、冷加工处理现象。7件铜鼓皆为铅锡青铜合金,总体呈低锡高铅的特点。组织形态呈典型α固溶体树枝晶偏析,锡含量处于6.0%～12.2%,分布较为集中,处于中等含量水平(5%≤Sn15%);铅含量处于14.4%～28.2%,铅含量普遍较高且分布较为集中,处于中高铅(10%≤Pb15%)和高铅含量(Pb≥15%)水平,合金中高铅含量配比应为工匠有意合金配比选择;铜鼓的腐蚀类型为α固溶体富铜相优先腐蚀,保存环境主要是富氧、少氯,铜鼓表面锈蚀产物主要为绿色孔雀石和蓝色蓝铜矿以及氧化物,有少量白色白铅矿。在保护修复工作中对于这些无害锈可保留,不予处理,并注重防氧。对于铜鼓表面夹杂泥土,需进行清洗去除。研究结果可为器物保护修复技术路线的制定和修复工作的开展提供科学指导。     

A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

HISTORY MAKING AND ETHICS—AN INTEGRAL RELATIONSHIP?

In this review essay, I examine the arguments made by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, with Anne Martin, in Big and Little Histories: Sizing Up Ethics in Historiography. While I find much to praise in this history, I also ask critical questions about the impact of non-Western ethics on historical writing, the role of ethics in historical writing generally, the need to further investigate the everyday lifeworlds of history makers in order to fully understand their ethical dispositions, and the relationship between the ethics of history making and engaged forms of historical writing. I conclude this review essay by offering some reflections on the interrelationship between history and memory and the ethics involved in both.     

Inter- and intraregional inequality in a spatial economy

In this paper, we develop a three-region economic geography model with workers of heterogeneous skills and mobility rates to consider how first-nature, regional differences impact both inter- and intraregional inequality. In our model, the skill premium within a region summarizes both the degree of intraregional inequality between mobile, skilled workers and immobile, unskilled workers and the interregional inequality through differences in the welfare of unskilled workers across regions. Regions with the highest skill premium have the greatest degree of intraregional inequality and provide the lowest level of welfare to unskilled workers, relative to other regions. We find that the skill premium will be higher in regions with a greater supply of unskilled labor, lower supply of housing, or are more remote. An increase in a region's housing supply or centrality will lower intraregional inequality and raise the welfare of the local, unskilled workforce. However, the magnitude of these changes are declining in the initial number of skilled workers in the region. The model is extended to consider imperfectly elastic housing supply. The larger the price elasticity of housing, the larger the range of values, such that more populated regions will host a disproportionate share of skilled workers, have lower levels of intraregional inequality, and provide higher levels of welfare for unskilled workers.     

Improvised Hybridity in the “Fixing” of Chinese Infrastructure Capital: The Case of Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway

The article explores the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio-political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.     

What's the grand story? A macro-narrative analytical model and the case of Swiss child and adult protection policy

This paper expands on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by adding a theoretical and empirical exploration into macrolevel narratives. Existing NPF research largely neglects macrolevel narratives, which prevents the NPF from developing its full power. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) It provides a definition of macrolevel narratives by conceptualizing them as the “story form” of a policy paradigm. (2) It proposes a model and an empirical approach, which may lay the foundation for a standard macrolevel NPF approach. (3) It contributes to the NPF's aim of connecting the macro and meso level. The paper tests the model in a comparative multi-method design applied to the Swiss child and adult protection policy. The findings show that macrolevel NPF analysis helps understand where mesolevel policy debates come from, namely from an underlying paradigm and its effects on institutions and culture that enable and constrain macrolevel narratives.     

The prehistory of Cyprus: Problems and prospects

The archaeological record of prehistoric Cyprus is rich, diverse, well-published, and frequently enigmatic. Regarded by many as a bridge between western Asia and the Aegean, Cyprus and its past are frequently seen from scholarly perspectives prevalent in one of those two cultural areas. Its material culture, however, differs radically from that of either area. Apart from the early colonization episodes on the island (perhaps three during the pre-Neolithic and Neolithic), evidence of foreign contact remains limited until the Bronze Age (post-2500 B. C.). This study seeks to present the prehistory of Cyprus from an indigenous perspective, and to examine a series of archaeological problems that foreground Cyprus within its eastern Mediterranean context. The study begins with an overview of time, place, and the nature of fieldwork on the island, continues with a presentation and discussion of several significant issues in Cypriot prehistory (e.g., insularity, colonization, subsistence, regionalism, interaction, social complexity, economic diversity), and concludes with a brief discussion of prospects for the archaeology of Cyprus up to and beyond 2000.