GROWTH AND TRENDS IN GÉOGRAPHY IN CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES

Summary. The development of academic géography in Canada was somewhat similar to that in the United States. At the turn of the century géography was probably stronger in the schools in most provinces than it was in most states, but in both countries it seemed to be mainly an uninspired collection of facts about particular places in the world. There was no leadership from Canadian universities to improve the quality of géography nor to change its content or philosophy. As in the United States, but on a smaller scale, géography was known in a few Canadian universities prior to World War I. Its real beginnings, however, were in the latter part of the 1930s.     

Legal Geographies of Intellectual Property, ‘Traditional’ Knowledge and Biodiversity: Experiencing Conventions,Laws, Customary Law,and Karma in Thailand

This article explores the existence of customary laws relating to ‘traditional’ knowledge of plants in Thailand through micro‐ethnographic case studies. This is juxtaposed against global and national frameworks of intellectual property laws that have a privatising effect on knowledge under the rubric of discovery or ‘invention’, as well as liability rights approaches of compensation and benefit‐sharing for research access. By understanding scale and legal jurisdiction as socially and politically constructed phenomena, we explore how laws at different scales and in different jurisdictions may override each other, discriminate against foreign laws and practices, and ignore customary laws. In doing so, the paper presents complex legal geographies of plants and associated knowledge, which suggest that the customary laws and norms of Indigenous groups and traditional healers are often ignored by ‘outsiders’. The paper notes that the possibility of ‘injury’ to traditional healers remains considerable without appropriate consent and given the discriminations surrounding knowledge made by patent laws. However, the ethnographies also point to the possibility of local remedies to these injuries through ritual processes, and we note resistant co‐constitutions of law and scale through the Nagoya Protocol.     

Continuity of Ideas and the Politics of Higher Education Expansion in Britain from Robbins to Dearing

This article examines the politics of higher education expansionin Britain between the 1960s and 1990s, bookmarked by the Robbinsand Deanng reports respectively. We argue that throughout thisperiod higher education expansion has been employed, by allpolitical parties, as an instrument of economic growth thoughthis justification has been dressed up to satisfy transientideological preferences. We first present a detailed account,based on archival and primary sources, of the three major reformsto higher education since the 1950s—Robbins, Thatcherism,and Dearing; and second, develop an argument about how the dominantideas about the rationale for higher education constitute aform of path dependency for policy choices once these institutionsare publicly funded and explicitly linked to economic needs.     

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PROVENANCE OF THE ROMAN AMPHORA CARGO FROM THE PLEMMIRIO B SHIPWRECK

Eighty-six Roman amphora sherds from the Plemmirio B shipwreck, off Sicily, have been analysed by neutron activation analysis. A large group representative of the amphora cargo, mainly of forms Africana 1 and Africana 2A (from the area of modern Tunisia), was subsequently defined. No differences between Africana 1 and Africana 2A samples were observed, thus implying a similar origin for both forms. The provenance of this cargo group was then investigated by comparison with a Roman amphora kiln data base. After elimination of the more mobile elements it was shown that the cargo amphorae were more likely to have been manufactured at kilns around Sullecthum rather than Leptis Minor. The analytical conclusions are thoroughly consistent with the known archaeological information.