Building More Inclusive Solidarities for Socio‐Environmental Change: Lessons in Resistance from Southern Appalachia

It is increasingly recognized that socio‐environmental justice will not be achieved through liberal and cosmopolitical forms of activism alone. Instead, more diverse and inclusive solidarities must be achieved across political ideologies for transformative change. By engaging with one constituency often overlooked by mainstream environmentalists—rural, conservative Americans—we argue for a situated solidarity that can be forged among people whose views of nature, community, and politics differ significantly. This framework rejects totalizing expressions of global ambition that erase important place‐based differences. To explore this ethic, we examine a localized anti‐fracking campaign in western North Carolina to determine how place‐based forms of environmental resistance can be brought in closer connection with the cosmopolitical movement for climate and energy justice. This requires that cosmopolitical movements make room for more customary forms of cultural politics, while conservative movements look beyond their own place‐based struggles to resist mutually experienced forms of oppression.     

“I found the truth in Foot Locker”: London 2011, Urban Culture,and the Post‐Political City

The article begins with an overview of what is implied in the notion of the “post‐political” before looking closely at post‐political interpretations of the 2011 London riots. It presents a critique of the restricted sense of political subjectivity in such accounts. It demonstrates how participation in the riots and their aftermath may be seen as indicative of an embryonic form of urban politics that works with and against the post‐political city. This discussion is illuminated by an analysis of the discursive space of London hip‐hop which reveals an ironic, complex and reflexive dialogue about identity, justice and politics that is far removed from the caricature offered by “strong” interpretations of the post‐political subject. This is then linked to readings of the post‐political city that place a welcome stress not only on the evacuation of the political dimension from the city, but also on the opportunities for the re‐emergence of the proto‐political.     

On the Origins of Pottery

Renewed research interest in the origins of pottery has illuminated an array of possible precipitating causes and environmental contexts in which pottery began to be made and used. This article is an attempt at synthesizing some of these data in hopes of stimulating further research into this intriguing topic. Following a review of theories on the origins of pottery, discussion proceeds to a survey of geographic and cultural contexts of low-fired or unfired pottery, highlighting the role(s) of pottery among contemporary hunter-gatherers and summarizing data pertaining to varied uses of pottery containers. It is argued that objects of unfired and low-fired clay were created as part of early prestige technologies of material representations beginning in the Upper Paleolithic and are part of an early software horizon. Clay began to be more widely manipulated by nonsedentary, complex hunter-gatherers in the very Late Pleistocene and early Holocene in areas of resource abundance, especially in tropical/subtropical coastal/riverine zones, as part of more general processes of resource and social intensification (such as competitive feasting or communal ritual). Knowledge of making and using pottery containers spread widely as prestige technology and as practical technology, the kind and timing of its adoption or reinvention varying from location to location depending on specific needs and circumstances.     

‘A matter of commonsense’: the Coventry poliomyelitis epidemic 1957 and the British public

In 1956, the British Ministry of Health instituted a vaccination programme against poliomyelitis, but run into myriad supply and administrative issues. When Coventry experienced an epidemic in 1957, it came to symbolise these problems. Throughout, it was claimed that the government lacked ‘common sense’. This article explores how and why ‘common sense’ was used as a rhetorical weapon in the debates over policy at the local and national level. While those claiming ‘common sense’ were often at odds with medical and administrative authorities, the arguments were often informed by deeply held beliefs about vaccination and disease.     

Anglican Evangelical Theology,c. 1820–1850: The Case of Edward Bickersteth

The period between the 1780s and the 1830s is widely acknowledged to be a formative one for Anglican Evangelical identity. It was the age of Simeon, Wilberforce, and the Clapham Sect, a time when polite culture became imbued with moral seriousness, and when pious causes came to the centre of the political stage. Yet while it is equally well known that the late 1820s witnessed a significant change in mood and direction, prompted by the passing of an earlier generation of leaders, missionary failure and theological fragmentation, the Anglican Evangelical movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century has received comparatively little attention. Evangelicals appear frequently in work on the Oxford Movement and Broad Church, but often only as two‐dimensional reactionaries ripe for the protagonists to trample. Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850) is therefore a particularly interesting figure, having risen to prominence in the 1810s and 1820s but in the 1830s and 1840s becoming one of the movement's acknowledged leaders. By showing how the coming man of the earlier period negotiated rockier territory later on, this article seeks to explore not just the changes but also the striking continuities in Evangelical thought. For even if, as Grayson Carter has argued in an excellent recent study, the ecclesiastical changes of the 1820s and 1830s forced Anglican Evangelicals, like others, to reconsider their place in the Church of England, Bickersteth was among the most prominent of the majority who, while unhappy with developments in politics and theology, remained loyal to their Church.     

A place to remember: scaling the walls of Angel Island immigration station

This paper considers the restoration and presentation of Angel Island Immigration Station, a federal facility in the San Francisco Bay that between 1910 and 1940 worked to prevent the arrival of Chinese laborers to the United States in accordance with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The production of Angel Island Immigration Station as a national historic landmark is delineated through the social construction of scale. I discuss efforts to achieve a leap in the scale of the site's significance and how this brings forth new management regimes that change the format of the interpretation there. In particular, narrative construction, landscape design, and revised tours, insert a standardized story of Chinese exclusion into the national memory. This paper shows how the imperative to increase the scope of recognition—to petition nationally for status and funds—requires a repackaging of stories to affirm popular American ideals of freedom over those that challenge the nation's persecution of Chinese immigrants.     

Yellowstone embodied: Truman Everts' ‘Thirty-seven days of peril’

In September 1870, explorer Truman C. Everts, a member of the Washburn-Doane expedition to the then little-known region of the Upper Valley of the Yellowstone River, became separated from the main party and found himself without his horse and supplies alone in the ‘wilderness’. Everts spent 37 days struggling to effect his escape from his life-threatening predicament before being rescued by a two-man search party. The news of his separation, conjecture as to his possible fate, and reports of his subsequent rescue caused a sensation both locally and nationally and consequently earned celebrity for Everts and, crucially, for the place where the calamity occurred. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and non-representational work in cultural geography which explores the relation between self and world, body and landscape, this article revisits Everts' 1871 account of his ‘perilous’ misadventure to consider how his encounter with Yellowstone was embodied and, through its retelling, ultimately became inscribed on the place itself.     

The Protestant working class in Belfast: education and civic erosion – an alternative analysis

This paper explores and reassesses the issues of social decline, educational underachievement and civic erosion in relation to the Protestant working class in Belfast. Prior to the ‘Troubles’ the Protestant working class in Belfast had at its heart a civic-mindedness which was in tune with working-class communities across the UK at the time. This civic-mindedness encouraged the growth of extended communities and placed an importance on church attendance and educational achievement; something which has been conveniently ignored in most analyses. Owing to population movements in Greater Belfast which followed the violence that followed the introduction of internment without trial in August 1971 Protestant church congregations dwindled and school attendances dropped significantly. The paper ultimately seeks to provide a ‘long view’ of the Protestant working-class experience in order to assist those who are concerned with the problems facing it in the current era.