As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

Indigenous peoples,local communities,and Payments for Ecosystem Services

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs are reshaping the governance of ecosystems and natural resources around the world. These programs often occur in spaces that are unceded, contested, or otherwise not legally recognized as Indigenous homelands, customary areas, and territories. Building on the discourses of Indigenous self‐determination, nationhood, and cultural responsibilities, this paper examines how PES programs produce unique outcomes for Indigenous peoples as ecosystem services providers. Our findings demonstrate and substantiate three themes that impact Indigenous ecosystem services providers uniquely: (1) the internationally recognized right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous peoples; (2) the reinforcement of settler colonial jurisdiction; and (3) mismatches between Indigenous knowledges and PES‐type approaches. The ways that PES programs run the risk of reifying and reducing Indigenous knowledges have not yet been adequately considered within current PES approaches. Our findings enable a conceptualization of PES as a new conservation tool within ongoing histories of land management and dispossession by settler colonial governments. We assess the strengths and challenges of PES programs as a departure from previous conservation modalities.     

Measuring park visitation vulnerability to climate extremes in U.S. Rockies National Parks tourism

ABSTRACT

Changes in temperature and precipitation can affect tourist experiences. This study examines how summer park visitation has changed in response to temperature and precipitation extremes. The study goals were two-fold. The first is to introduce a framework and the second is to test it in a pilot region with four mountainous National Parks. The framework is designed to compare the vulnerability of seasonal park visitation to shifts in a combined indicator of temperature and precipitation. It uniquely considers needed measurements, and the data required to conduct an analysis. The second goal is to test it in four destinations in the U.S. Northern Rockies, including Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. The preliminary test reveals outlier cases of visitation under wet and dry extremes. The analysis connects time series climate and visitation data for the peak summer season from 1991–2012. Outlier analysis illustrates more change in extremely dry conditions, with four out of the six dry-year outliers resulting in a visitation decline. Whether this decline in park tourism is attributable to climate features, economic factors, or conscious management decisions, these drops have significant economic impacts: estimates of changes in visitor spending during dry years are between roughly 9 and 90 million USD. These differences may be connected to the popular activities in each park, and the extent they are dependent on weather conditions. This framework can be used to test the relationship between climate and tourism visitation in other regions, in various seasons and time frames. The work may inform the tourist sector in adjusting and planning for a range of conditions. We discuss opportunities and conclude with additional needs for understanding the mechanisms behind risk in mountain park tourism under climate extremes.     

The Knowledge Gap: A Perspective on Trade,Industry, Technology and Policy from Pre-war Australian Music Technology Manufacturing (1903-30)

Australia struggles to achieve economic competitiveness, prevent expansion of the trade deficit and develop value-added production despite applications of policy strategies from protectionism to trade liberalisation. This article argues that these problems were emerging at the turn of the century, and that an investigation of music technology manufacturing in the first two decades of this century reveals fundamental problems in the conduct of relevant policy analysis. Analysis has focused on the trade or technology gap which is only symptomatic of an underlying knowledge gap. The article calls for a knowledge policy approach which can allow protection without the negative effects of isolation from global markets and without having to resort to unworkable utopian free-trade dogma. A shift of focus from a 'goods traded' view to a knowledge transaction (or diffusion) perspective is advocated.     

An ethnopalynological test of task-specific area analysis: Bay View Stable,Cataumet, Massachusetts

Palynologists seeking evidence of patterns in human plant use among the pollen spectra of archaeological site floors operate on the assumption that the pollen of economic plants is deposited at the locations of undertakings involving these plants in quantities significantly exceeding the amounts of the same pollen types in the background pollen component. This assumption has never been questioned in the literature, even though it has not been tested. Researchers are, however, uncertain about the extent to which floor deposits of economic pollen are affected by later human activities. Pollen profiles from three functionally distinct bays in the cellar of a New England livestock barn that was actively used for at least 40 years were analyzed to examine economic pollen deposition and dispersal. The data from this test indicate that the pollen of economic plants is deposited in distinctive quantities where the plants were used and that these pollen deposits are not significantly diffused by subsequent human activity. The data also suggest that pollen concentrations per unit of matrix will assist in defining active surfaces within archaeological floor zones.     

Sharing What Can Be Sold: Women Haus Maket Vendors in Port Moresby's Settlements

Dominant narratives of the economy, as well as policy discourses in Papua New Guinea (PNG), tend to separate the ‘formal’ from the ‘informal’ economy. Concurrently, there is a development policy emphasis on women's economic empowerment. In urban areas this has meant a policy focus on larger market places as sites where women need support for economic engagement. Within these policy discourses, one activity in urban areas usually relegated to the ‘informal’ economy is small home‐based market stalls, referred to in this paper as haus maket. Located at homes or on nearby roads, haus maket are prolific and available to the public, and as such provide a similar function to public market places as spaces to make money. This paper considers these public yet intimate spaces as sites where vendors, usually women, embody and lead contestations between money and moral value spheres. At a time when the policy emphasis is on the formal economy and larger market places in PNG, why do such small market places persist? The first aim of this paper is to establish the role of haus maket as a site where spheres of value intersect. Rather than being ‘informal’ and peripheral, I seek to foreground its centrality to the economy but also as a site where economic and social moral values conflate. The second aim of the paper is to examine the role of sharing as a form of transaction in its own right distinct from exchange as a transaction between two actors. Haus maket stalls are sites of sharing and of moral action and value where forms of value in the settlement are shaped and negotiated.     

Weathering time: walking with young children in a changing climate

ABSTRACT

Children growing up today face a multitude of climate-related challenges, requiring a capacity for creative and ethical modes of attending to both the known and unknown effects of a changing climate. In response to these challenges, I explore the potential in children’s weathering encounters, as observed during an ethnographic research project titled Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times. In particular, I consider the various ways children engage with the weather and what this reveals about our (human) interconnections and minglings with the weather world. In this paper, I focus specifically on the temporal dimensions of child/weather encounters. My aim is to show that taking the time with children to slow down and attend to the elemental affects in the world, can reveal a weathered entanglement of past, present and future and a foundation for a curious and open attentiveness in responding to the climate challenges ahead.     

Mentoring with: reimagining mentoring across the university

Abstract

Traditional, formal mentoring structures established within the space of the university can be rooted in patriarchal systems of power, hierarchy, and exclusion that perpetuate neoliberal and capitalist understandings of individualism and exceptionalism. This model privileges certain forms of knowledge and expertise, often that of senior, tenured faculty rather than those who are ignored or overlooked as ‘experts’ such as historically underrepresented tenured and untenured faculty, contingent faculty, and staff. In this paper, we seek to reimagine the concept of the traditional mentoring relationship rooted in power and hierarchy into a more democratic, empowering model across the space of the university. We do this by expanding upon the concept of power mentoring which emphasizes mentoring networks rather than individual relationships. Power mentoring centers reciprocal support and mutual benefit, infusing a feminist ethics of care into the spaces and structures of the neoliberal university. We draw on Joan Tronto’s caring with to frame mentoring as collective, collaborative, and democratic: mentoring with. Based upon a collective reading of Ensher and Murphy ’s Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Protégés Get the Most Out of their Relationships and conversations from our faculty learning community about mentoring, we argue that mentoring relationships within the spaces of the university should emphasize the role of dynamic networks between faculty, staff, and administrators to build upon existing feminist praxis to develop a more inclusive, geographic system of mentoring, which enables participants to grow, develop, and learn with one another.