Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming,Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement

Over the past 15 years social movements for community food security, food sovereignty, and food justice have organized to address the failures of the multinational, industrial food system to fairly and equitably distribute healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate real food. At the same time, these social movements, and research about them, re‐inscribe white, patriarchal systems of power and privilege. We argue that in order to correct this pattern we must relocate our social movement goals and practices within a decolonizing and feminist leadership framework. This framework challenges movement leadership and scholarship by white people who uncritically assume a natural order of leadership based on academic achievement. We analyze critical points in our collaboration over the last four years using these frameworks. Doing so highlights the challenges and possibilities for a more inclusive food justice movement and more just scholarship.     

Compared to What? Changes in Interest Group Resources and the Proposal and Adoption of State Teacher Policy

What is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state policy? Using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative and absolute resource strength, I estimate a series of within-state fixed effects models that gain identification from changes in interest group resources and teacher policy over time. I find that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers' unions in states where teachers' union opposition interest groups are expending more election (but not lobbying) resources over time. Further, I find that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers' union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. Expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing interest group resource dynamics over time.     

The aeromobile tourist gaze: understanding tourism ‘from above’

ABSTRACT

While the impact of aeromobility on the growth of tourism and its destinations is well documented, the role of aeromobility in the process of experiencing and shaping place with specific regard to tourist destinations has received little attention from scholars. With the growth of commercial aviation and the increasingly mundane nature of the experience within mass tourism, I draw attention to the touristic experience of flying as the activity beyond its role in arriving at the destination. After a brief review of the genealogy of aeromobility and tourism, I reflect on examples of tourist aeromobility in Cape Town, South Africa in order to theorise the aeromobile tourist gaze. This paper analyses mobile testimonies from online travel reviews from airborne tourists performing helicopter ‘flips’ over Cape Town. Results highlight the need to focus on flying as tourism itself while they illustrate the role it plays in the aeromobile tourist gaze, a unique perspective and experience of the tourism destination as ‘tourism from above’ that emerges from the touristic dimensions of flight including the destination, the flying device and flight route. The findings underscore the role of flying-as-tourism. The aeromobile tourist gaze thus spectacularises the destination and disrupts the relationship between tourists and place.     

The Placing of Early Bronze Age Metalwork Deposits: New Evidence from Scotland

This paper considers the earliest metalwork hoards in Scotland, most of which have been found at conspicuous points in the landscape. The treatment of individual objects suggests that they had been carefully selected before they were deposited. Fieldwork, combined with computer reconstruction, shows that half the collections with adequate provenances come from places with direct views of the rising and setting sun at the solstices. The main emphasis seems to have been on midwinter.     

Bayesian Areal Wombling for Geographical Boundary Analysis

In the analysis of spatially referenced data, interest often focuses not on prediction of the spatially indexed variable itself, but on boundary analysis , that is, the determination of boundaries on the map that separate areas of higher and lower values. Existing boundary analysis methods are sometimes generically referred to as wombling , after a foundational article by Womble (1951). When data are available at point level (e.g., exact latitude and longitude of disease cases), such boundaries are most naturally obtained by locating the points of steepest ascent or descent on the fitted spatial surface (Banerjee, Gelfand, and Sirmans 2003). In this article, we propose related methods for areal data (i.e., data which consist only of sums or averages over geopolitical regions). Such methods are valuable in determining boundaries for data sets that, perhaps due to confidentiality concerns, are available only in ecological (aggregated) format, or are only collected this way (e.g., delivery of health-care or cost information). After a brief review of existing algorithmic techniques (including that implemented in the commercial software BoundarySeer), we propose a fully model-based framework for areal wombling, using Bayesian hierarchical models with posterior summaries computed using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We explore the suitability of various existing hierarchical and spatial software packages (notably S-plus and WinBUGS) to the task, and show the approach's superiority over existing nonstochastic alternatives, both in terms of utility and average mean square error behavior. We also illustrate our methods (as well as the solution of advanced modeling issues such as simultaneous inference) using colorectal cancer late detection data collected at the county level in the state of Minnesota.