Architects Creating a Landscape

This article is derived from a research project designed to establish a better understanding of the nature of professional architectural activity in the State of Victoria, Australia, in the second half of the 19th century. It posed the following question: why is the activity in rural areas not acknowledged by the traditional approaches to studying architectural history? Part of the conclusion is that our understanding of urban cultural landscapes/townscapes will be improved if we look beyond the limitations of separate disciplines such as architectural and social history or historical geography. The landscape is built from many layers and they all need to be acknowledged if we are to understand what we find important about it. The reasons for seeking the conservation of our urban environment cannot be related solely to the peculiar interests of one discipline alone. Over the past 30 years the Australian community has developed a substantial interest and appetite for heritage conservation and along with that has grown a broadening interest in how the importance of the urban environment is defined.     

Women of Steel: Constructing and Contesting New Gendered Geographies of Work in the Australian Steel Industry

The article argues that although structuralist-inspired approaches to steel restructuring have provided significant insights and recognised the role of "labour" in sectoral change, such studies have predominantly equated labour politics with unionism, downplaying the impact of other forms of workers' politics. This has created a problematic disjunction between "real world" events and academic research, with ensuing issues for policy development and delivery. In response to this difficulty, the paper builds on Herod's concept of a labour geography to develop multiple labour geographies of power, an approach that describes different forms of workers' politics. To illustrate this approach, the paper presents female steelworkers' politics of restructuring. It details the Jobs for Women Campaign in Wollongong, Australia, a 1980s place-based initiative that sought to gain blue-collar employment for women in the local steelworks. The study demonstrates how female steelworkers developed restructuring politics addressing gender and employment discrimination, issues not normally associated with labour politics. The paper concludes that such workers' struggles need to be analysed as they affect restructuring impacts and processes.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Mesolore</Emphasis>: Learning to think critically

Los autores son los creadores de Mesolore, un programa educacional multidisciplinario e interactivo dise?ado para instruir a los estudiantes sobre las culturas de Mesoamérica, en el pasado y presente. Ellos describen la estructura e intento de su proyecto multidisciplinario y multivocal con la arqueología.

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Résumé Les auteurs sont les créateurs de Mesolore, un programme éducatif, multidisciplinaire et interactif, con?u pour enseigner aux étudiants les cultures Mésoaméricaines, anciennes et présentes. Ils décrivent la structure et l'intention de leur engagement pluridisciplinaire et non univoque dans l'archéologie.

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The oppressors...react almost instinctively to any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but which always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another. (Freire, 1970 [1968]:60)     

On Equality

Locke builds a world that has benefits and costs. While economics has illustrated the benefits, this work illustrates the costs, by contrasting Two Treatises of Civil Government to the work of Aristotle. Generally, the cost one must bear from entering the world that Locke built is a compression of human experience, where qualitative equality of all things is asserted to exist. More importantly, a trivialization of all the outcomes, which emanate from all human decisions, must accompany the equality that Locke asserts. Even though Locke provides the elementary operating system for modern economics, through his proposition of the principle of qualitative equality, this operating system effectively divorces man, not only from nature but also from the very thing with which man has always used to interpret the natural world; works of great literature. While great literature has little patience for the trivial outcomes of human existence, except to highlight the importance of non-trivial outcomes, this work suggests that economics, under the influence of Locke, is permanently incapacitated from ever considering non-trivial outcomes.     

Ceramic Production and Dietary Changes at Juffure,Gambia

This paper explores the connection between ceramic production and dietary changes immediately before, during, and through the decline of the Atlantic trade at Juffure on the Gambia River. The height of the Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century was a period of increased ceramic production and technical experimentation. Simultaneously, there is increase in the diversity of consumption evident in the faunal and botanical remains recovered. This diversity, in both ceramic manufacture and diet, all but disappears with the decline of the Atlantic trade on the river. It is argued that the greater variety observed in ceramic manufacture during the height of the Atlantic trade is related to social practices of display associated with food. This is accomplished through a comparison of everyday and special events composed of displays of food and wealth across ethnic boundaries. These are indicative of different traditions of consumption and discard rather than signaling ethnic differentiation.     

On “Natural” Uncertainty: The Philosophical Underpinnings of Uncertainty in Economics,with Special Reference to Knight and Strauss

Abstract

While current discourse has failed and will continue to fail to adequately integrate uncertainty into economic theory, this work explores how political philosophy can provide a better understanding of uncertainty. Specifically, political philosophy can answer most of the questions posed by Frank Knight's proposition of uncertainty in economic theory. In elaborating on Knight's reservations relating to Pragmatism, this work suggests that Knight's approach might well be revised to more adequately embrace the recent developments in American philosophy, especially those suggested by Leo Strauss. Significantly, it can be argued that Strauss provides a stronger foundation for the proposition of uncertainty in economic theory than Knight's application of Pragmatism around 1921. An understanding of uncertainty, which is based on Strauss, might be referred to as “natural” uncertainty, and this form of uncertainty may provide a point where political philosophy might begin to gain some traction within economic theory.