What Use Are Units? Critical Geographies of Alcohol Policy

Abstract: This paper interrogates the multiple spatialities bound up with the consumption of units as the dominant means of diagnosing “health‐related” alcohol problems and measuring “drunkenness” in international alcohol policy and research. In order to question the power afforded to units, we work at the intersection of theoretical debates concerning biopower and governmentality; emotional, embodied and affective geographies and actor network theory. Presenting empirical research from the UK we contribute to geographical agendas that seek to consider the ontological and epistemological understandings of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. The paper concludes by calling for dialogue between social, health and medical scientists in order to develop more pertinent ways of understanding and representing the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption.     

A Lithic Provisioning Model as a Proxy for Landscape Mobility in the Southern and Middle Kalahari

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Humans occupy a wide range of environments, including those that experience water stress. Our species has a long history of mitigating arid and...     

‘The Dirty Vat’: European Migration to Australia from Shanghai, 1946–47

At the end of World War II, European residents of Shanghai included Jewish displaced persons and ‘White’ émigrés. While the Jewish refugees were initially viewed by Australia as a humanitarian crisis, they then became a controversial sideshow to a planned mass resettlement of displaced persons from Europe. This article contextualises the actual and proposed Jewish and Russian migration from Shanghai with regard to Australian attitudes towards postwar European migrations from the East. This argument traces the anti-Semitic and anti-Russian sentiments that pressured Calwell into ultimately blocking Russian migration from Shanghai as well as placing a tight curb on the migration of Jewish displaced persons from both Asia and Europe.     

Mayors and urban governance: discursive power,identity and local politics

This article combines political and economic geographies with social and cultural theory by reviewing structural and actor-centred approaches to urban governance alongside work on identity, community, masculinity and ‘rights to the city’. The article seeks to bring these literatures into dialogue via an analysis of mayoral politics, presenting empirical research from a UK city in order to highlight the influence of class, sexuality and racism on urban politics. It shows how theoretical and empirical engagement with unequal social relations and their discursive construction through cultural forms and practices offers fruitful avenues for geographical understanding of territorial and relational urban governance.     

Simone de Beauvoir: Problems of (self‐)definition

Beauvoir, S. de, Letters to Sartre, translated by Hoare, Q. (Radius, 1991), 531pp., £20, ISBN 0 09 174774 0

Moi, T., Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Blackwell, 1994), 324pp., £12.95, ISBN 9 631 19181 X     

People and Their Buildings in the Working-Class Neighborhood of Hungate,York

The study of structures plays an important role in the global investigation of the archaeology of urban poverty. At Hungate, the built environment is central to our analysis of this “slum” neighborhood. By piecing together the long-term details for the construction, ownership, occupation, and adaptation of domestic structures in the form of sophisticated interdisciplinary plot histories, we can provide depth to the development of neighborhoods which came under the scrutiny of reformers such as Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Between Memory and Desire: Gender and the remembrance of war in doi moi Vietnam

This article explores how memory and desire narrate the remembrance of war in doi moi Vietnam through gendered representations. Based on a reading of texts, including fiction and a film shown on television, I argue that memory in wartime texts evokes a landscape of gendered desire and longing. Using Judith Butler's theory of gender melancholy, the article looks at how these texts serve a political project cultivated by the state to displace its own ideal authority.

Entre la memoria y el deseo: género y la remembranza de la guerra en Doi Moi Vietnam

Este artículo explora cómo la memoria y el deseo relata la remembranza de la guerra en ‘doi moi’ Vietnam a través de representaciones de género. Haciendo uso de textos que incluyen literatura y una tele-película, argumento que la memoria en los textos de la época de la guerra evoca un paisaje de deseo y añoranza de género. Utilizando la teoría de Judith Butler de melancólico del género, el artículo examina cómo le sirvan los textos a un proyecto político que es cultivado por el estado para desplazar su propia idea de autoridad.