Moving Mountains: Community and Resistance in the Isle of Harris, Scotland, and Cape Breton, Canada

Drawing on poststructuralist political ecology, the narratives of two struggles about siting a superquarry are examined to elucidate the complex articulations of community, nature, resistance and identity in play in public debates. Focusing on the discursive formulations of the quarry in the expert language, as well as in the arguments of both local proponents and opponents of the quarries, shows the importance of ontological categories in "environmental" siting disputes. In Harris, these themes rearticulate the histories of dispossession, crofting and religion, as well as complex layers of geographical identity in the various claims to community. In Cape Breton, the rethinking of aboriginal Mi'kmaq identity was stimulated by revived interest in the religious traditions linked to the sacred site near the proposed quarry. In light of these findings, the complexity and active rearticulation of local "community" as political resistance are emphasised and the difficulties of thinking about sustainability highlighted.     

Contesting land,creating community,in the Highlands and Islands,Scotland

This paper draws on research in four communities in the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, to explore how the notion of community and community identity are re‐worked in the political spaces created as communities claim collective rights to land. In the cases of the Assynt Crofters’ Trust, the Bhaltos Community Trust, and Laid, this has concerned land under crofting tenure; in the case of the claim of the North Sutherland Community Forestry Trust, the land on which the Naver Forests stand is the responsibility of the Scottish Ministers and is managed by Forest Enterprise. The four case studies differ with respect to membership and institutional practices and thus provide fertile ground on which to examine, comparatively, collective struggles for the land and the search for sustainable futures.     

Reimagining sustainable cultures: constitutions, land and art

Globalisation is about the interconnection of peoples and places in accelerated ways, but it is also about resistance and adaptation in the face of change. Discussions of sustainability now incorporate both dynamic understandings of culture and the recognition that place matters because the practices that are in need of sustaining, as well as those that pose threats, happen in particular communities and in specific geographic contexts. Culture is codified not only in property rights and legislation, but also in the public artistic expressions of peoples and places. Case studies from Nunavut and Scotland show the interrelationships of sovereignty and claims to identity and community. Art, as a result of creative action in the case of Cape Dorset Inuit printmakers and carvers on Baffin Island, and a millennium tapestry telling the stories of the Isle of Harris, complement matters of property rights. Both discussions show that identity is about material culture and property relations in respect of land. Serious discussions of sustainability, in contrast to the technical practices frequently invoked using the term sustainable development, require considerations of the dynamics of complex cultural arrangements in particular places, rather than assumptions of stability of either peoples or their ecological contexts.     

Policy entrepreneurship in Australia: a conceptual review and application

This article adapts the theoretical construct of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ in political science to an analysis of one important initiative in policy‐making in Australia between 1992 and 1994, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy (NALSAS). Originally an initiative of the Queensland Government, NALSAS sought to advance the teaching of Asian languages and studies of Asia in Australian schools. The then Director General of the Queensland Office of the Cabinet, Mr Kevin Rudd, was its key protagonist. The article identifies and analyses Rudd's adroit policy entrepreneurship that was needed to overcome significant resistance and deliver the subsequent policy outcomes. It does this by carrying out a two‐level analysis that considers individual and contextual factors and concludes that, even though Rudd displayed many of the individual characteristics of a policy entrepreneur, his actions were heavily mediated by contextual factors. The article also demonstrates how a concept developed elsewhere, in this case North America, can be applied in other contexts, and calls for more scholarship on policy entrepreneurship in contemporary Australia.     

Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.