Being genealogical in digital geographies

In this intervention, I trace the genealogies of the recent heralding of digital geographies as a boundary object for scholarship and scholars foregrounding the digital in geography. Building off of previous efforts to be technopositional in digital geographies, I make an entreaty for further being genealogical by attuning to the insider/outsider positionalities that have informed this particular endeavour of intellectual community‐making in Anglo‐American geography. While genealogy is not an exercise in historical narration, it works against dehistorical narratives of digital technologies and of the disciplinary frameworks within which they are engaged, destabilizes technopositional privileges, and has the potential to engender more inclusive digital geography futures.     

Feminist digital geographies

At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the resounding whiteness and heteronormativity of these theoretical origins. In the second half of the article, we trace new horizons of contemporary digital geographies scholarship that engage queer and critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, and black and queer code studies. These theoretical moves give voice to longstanding silences and are indispensable to a political and ethical digital geographic scholarship and praxis, as well as to re-making our technologies and ourselves as digital subjects.     

How to deal with migrants and the State’s backlash – Polish cities’ experience

Over the last decades, Poland has witnessed a relatively dynamic increase in the number of immigrants. At the same time, current Polish central authorities, politicians of the ruling party and the majority of the population perceive migrants mostly as a threat and a challenge. Municipal authorities lack complex support from central authorities. However, the situation is slowly changing. Some Polish cities are adopting migration policies or including migration issues in the local development strategies. Considering this, the article aims to examine migrants’ integration policies in selected Polish cites considered leaders in this field: Lublin, Gdańsk, Kraków and Wroc?aw. The main research question is: how do Polish cities deal with the backlash from the national government and absence of clear legal regulations on their role and competences in the area of migrant integration? The research method is that of a legal-institutional analysis and case study. The former is used to interpret the legal acts and other documents. Its application is justified by the fact that this paper examines strategic documents adopted at the level of urban governments regarding the integration of migrants. Case study methods made it possible to examine the migrants’ integration policy in four Polish cities.     

Measuring or Creating Attitudes? Seventy Years of Australian Public Opinion Polling about Indonesia

This article critically evaluates the relationship between public opinion polling and foreign affairs. It plots key trends in public opinion polls of Australian attitudes towards Indonesia from the 1940s to the present day. Despite variations in polling companies and questions, Australian attitudes to Indonesia appear surprisingly stable, especially since the 1970s. Reading across multiple polls over this period reveals that, both as a mass and among individuals, Australians held complex views in which positive appraisals of Indonesian people and culture co-existed with an underlying fear of Indonesia as a potential military threat. Yet rather than accepting these findings at face value, this article calls for nuanced scrutiny of the role played by polling companies and the media in the construction and representation of so-called “public” opinion. Sensitive to recent developments in the historiography of public opinion polling, it suggests that public opinion polls not only attempted to measure Australian attitudes towards Indonesia, but also helped construct Indonesia as an object of popular and political concern.     

Climate influence on radial increment of oak (Quercus SP.) in central Poland

The study investigates the influence of climate conditions on radial increment of oak, with special concern to the situations when analysed trees formed conspicuously wider or narrower tree-rings. The research material was collected in four locations in central Poland within natural range of pedunculate and sessile oaks. The elaborated residual chronologies were correlated with CRUTS 2.1 climate data. The analyses included thermal and pluvial conditions spanning from April of the year prior to ring formation to September of the current growth year. Special interest was paid to simple water ability index that combined both temperature and precipitation during the vegetation season. Additionally, pointer year analysis was carried out to determine situations when conspicuously smaller or larger increment was formed. Investigated chronologies cover the period of 1927?C1992 (?ochów), 1845?C1992 (P?o??sk), 1868?C1992 (Pu?tusk), and 1796?C1992 (Soko?ów). The analysed oaks from sites in central Poland exhibit growth patterns comparable with those known form previous studies concerning that species, where influence of precipitation (higher and positive) and temperature (negative) have been observed. Extreme growth reactions expressed by negative and positive pointer years turned to present high dependence of analysed oak?? growth on water availability during vegetation season.     

Multi-proxy reconstruction of mire development in the Poręby Wojsławskie ecosystem (Sandomierz Basin, southeastern Poland)

Multi-proxy analysis (sedimentological, palaeobotanical, geochemical data and results of radiocarbon dating) of the biogenic sediments from a small mire ecosystem in the Sandomierz Basin (SE Poland) is presented. The ecosystem contains a full hydroseral sequence from minerotrophic to ombrotrophic wetland. It is one of the few sites in this region which is so thoroughly investigated in terms of the palaeoenvironmental record. Changes in the water supply of the mire area, and consequently the changes in the plant and sediment succession, were well correlated with the regional tendencies in precipitation and temperature during the Late Glacial/Holocene transition and in the Holocene. Human impact is very well recorded in pollen diagram from the Subboreal period.     

Failaka Island in the Late Islamic Period. Investigations at the fishing village of Kharaib al-Dasht

The aim of the paper is to present the architectural remains and spatial organisation of the site of Kharaib al-Dasht, a Late Islamic fishing village dating from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In the course of six seasons of excavation, which started in 2013, there was uncovered a part of this extensive site, revealing remnants of a fish processing area, residential architecture and a mosque. The findings from Kharaib al-Dasht serve here as a starting point for a discussion on the character of settlement activity on Failaka in the Late Islamic period, which was a time of dynamic change in the political and economic landscape of the region as evidenced by the available written sources.     

Internationalization as a challenge for geographical education in Poland: experience of a new postgraduate study “cultural industries in the development policies of cities and regions”

For many years internationalization has not been a strong point of geographical education in post-socialist countries, including Poland. Therefore, all attempts at intensifying it are a real challenge and good practices deserve dissemination. This paper seeks to present the organizational and programme assumptions of a new field of postgraduate study called Cultural industries in the development policies of cities and regions, (Project supported by the European Social Fund under the Human Capital Operational Programme in the years 2013–2015 (Priority IV: Tertiary Education and Science, Measure 4.3: Enhancing the didactic potential of universities in areas of key importance for the Europe 2020 Strategy. UDA-POKL.04.03.00–00-152/12–00).) developed by the staff of the Institute of Socio-Economic Geography and Spatial Management of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland) as a didactic innovation, based on a modular system of education offering wide internationalization possibilities. The analysis focuses on experiences connected with this process. They include classes prepared in cooperation with visiting professors and practitioners from eight universities and European institutions as well as week-long practical placements in Brussels, arranged thanks to a network of experts and institutions specifically established for this purpose. The results obtained help to formulate conclusions and recommendations for higher schools interested in adopting this kind of good practices connected with the development of geographical education.     

Gebel Ramlah—a Unique Newborns’ Cemetery of the Neolithic Sahara

Post-Pleistocene climatic improvement in the Northern Hemisphere after ca. 9550 BC allowed human populations to recolonize large parts of North Africa in what is today the Sahara Desert. In the Egyptian Western Desert, the beginnings of human occupation date as early as ca. 9300 BC. Occupation continued until the middle of the third millennium BC when final desertification of the area no longer afforded human occupation. The settlement of the Neolithic cattle and sheep/goat herders developed along with the rhythm of alternating wet and dry climatic oscillations. One of the areas occupied intensively during the early and middle Holocene was Gebel Ramlah. Pastoral populations established their settlements around the shores of a paleo-lake adjacent to a rocky massif, to exploit the local savannah environment. During most of the Neolithic, they buried their dead dispersed outside of their settlements. Only during the Final Neolithic (after ca. 4600 BC) did they place them exclusively in cemeteries. Of six Final Neolithic cemeteries investigated at Gebel Ramlah to date, one is entirely unprecedented, not only in North Africa but also globally at such an early date. For just under 200 years (ca. 4500–4300 BC), it served exclusively for the inhumation of infants who died around (perinate) or shortly after the time of birth (neonate). Thirty-two burial pits contained skeletal remains of 39 individuals, not only infants but also at least two adult females accompanied by perinates/neonates. Older children (>?3 years) were interred at a nearby cemetery that primarily comprised adults.