About time: age,period, and cohort effects on support for Quebec sovereignty

Can age, period and cohort effects help explain support for Quebec sovereignty? Previous work on this question has focused mostly on the effects of age and cohort. We contribute to this debate by adding a period perspective. As such, our study is the first to investigate the impact of age, cohort and period effects in a single study of opinion towards sovereignty in Quebec. We take advantage of an original dataset that includes survey data collected between 1985 and 2012. We use these data to examine the impact of age, birth year and survey year on support for this constitutional option among francophone Quebeckers. Our results are in line with previous work: we show that younger Quebeckers are more likely to support sovereignty, and that some cohorts – namely, respondents born between 1945 and 1959 – are also more likely to favour this option. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find that specific events are comparatively the most important factor to explain fluctuations in Quebeckers' attitudes towards sovereignty.     

French geography, cartography and colonialism: introduction

This paper provides an introduction to a special feature of the Journal of Historical Geography devoted to recent research, by French scholars, on the relations between French geography, colonialism and the mapping of colonial boundaries, with particular reference to Africa between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.     

Some observations on theObservations the decline of the French Jesuit scientific mission in China

In the late seventeenth century, French Jesuit missionaries in China transplanted a distinctively French and distinctively academic brand of scientific work from Paris to Beijing. This auspicious inauguration has obscured the later trajectory of the mission’s scientific ambitions within Old Regime arenas of scientific activity. In this paper, I argue that significant differences distinguish the French Jesuit scientific mission in its late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century incarnations. By examining the various Parisian editions of French Jesuit scientific work carried out on the China mission, theObservations (1688, 1692, 1729), I trace the declining fortunes of the French Jesuit scientific mission to the dissolution of its alliance with the Académie des sciences and to its difficulties in sustaining a corporate identity and collective vision as investigators of natural phenomena.     

Evaluating the geographic concentration of industries using distance-based methods

We propose new methods for evaluating the spatial distributionof firms. To assess whether firms are concentrated or dispersed,economists have tradi-tionally used indices that analyse theheterogeneity of a spatial structure at a single geographiclevel. We introduce distance-based methods, Besag's L function(derived from Ripley's K function) and Diggle and Chetwynd'sD function to describe simultaneously spatial distribution atdifferent geographical scales. Our empirical applications considerthe distribution of French manufacturing firms in the Parisarea and in France generally. For some geographic levels, resultsshow significant concentration or dispersion of firms accordingto their sector of activity.     

CROSSING THE RIVER: HOW LOCAL STRUGGLES BUILD A BROADER MOVEMENT

A case study of environmental justice organizing in South Carolina explores how local activists can build an oppositional ideology that connects to a broader agenda for social justice. A multi-issue, state-wide workers' rights organization provided ideological context and strategic experience that enabled residents fighting to clean up a polluted pond to connect their concern to a wider effort for economic justice and undoing racism. The organization's worker-centered, multi-racial identity and an organizing strategy that exposes contradictions of the dominant ideology are seen as enabling these wider connections.