Love your neighbor: Nazi soldiers and Femmes Fatales in Czech cinema

Analysis of popular culture can offer a better understanding of spatial representations prevailing in the everyday discourse than the insights inferred from official statements or mainstream scientific textbooks. Our everyday thinking about Central European space might be significantly different from representations outlined in texts written by intellectuals and politicians. In fact, there is a telling absence of common features among representations of different Central European countries in Czech films. These representations shape the process of meaning-making and they can help us better grasp the position of a country in relation to its neighbors too. Except for Germany and Slovakia, other actors from the immediate vicinity are virtually non-existent in Czech visual popular culture. While Germans are mostly male Nazi soldiers, Slovakia is described as an underdeveloped, mountainous territory with oversupply of beautiful, vivacious women. Data from 50 box-office hits and critically acclaimed movies produced during the last 20 years illustrate this argument. Such a systematic study of popular culture is not only more revealing than a simple focus on a few illustrative artworks, but it also increases the added value of discourse analysis that pays attention to predication and membership categories.     

Science,Badgers, Politics: Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Change in Bovine Tuberculosis Policy in Britain

Badgers represent one of the most controversial and hotly debated environmental issues in modern Britain. This paper advances the study of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) by examining the limited extent to which extensive scientific research over a 15‐year period changed the basic composition and argumentation of different advocacy coalitions in a highly adversarial setting. Based on coding of the media coverage over the period 1986–2013, this paper analyzes the composition of the advocacy coalitions, their stability over time, and the limited extent to which learning took place in response to scientific disputes. It also highlights how coalitions between actors with similar policy beliefs did not form, highlighting the importance of the ACF and other policy processes to consider dynamics that go beyond the individual subsystem under investigation.     

Preliminary U-series and Thermoluminescence dating of excavated deposits in Liang Bua sub-chamber,Flores, Indonesia

We report the results of a test excavation of deposits in a limestone cave sub-chamber located beneath the main chamber of Liang Bua, Flores, Indonesia; the discovery site of the small hominin species, Homo floresiensis. Well-preserved remains of extinct Pleistocene fauna and stone artefacts have previously been identified on the surface of a sediment cone within the sub-chamber. Our excavation of the deposits, at the base of the sediment cone in the sub-chamber (to 130 cm depth) yielded only a few fragmentary bones of extant fauna. Uranium/Thorium (U-series or U/Th) dating of soda straw stalactites excavated from 20 to 130 cm in depth demonstrates that the excavated sediments were deposited during the Holocene. Red Thermoluminescence (TL) dating of the sediments at the base of the excavation (130 cm depth) indicates these sediments were last exposed to sunlight at 84 ± 15 ka (thousand years), similar to red TL ages of cave sediments from the main chamber. Together, these results indicate that the surface faunal remains, which are morphologically analogous to Pleistocene finds from the main chamber excavations, were transported to the sub-chamber relatively recently from the main chamber of Liang Bua and probably originated from conglomerate deposits at the rear of the cave and from deposits around the front entrance. There is no evidence for hominin occupation of the sub-chamber, instead it seems to have acted as a sink for cultural materials and fossil remains transported from the surface via sinkholes. Despite the small number of finds from the test excavation, it is possible that more extensive excavations may yield additional transported cultural and faunal evidence at greater depths.     

Confusing the grid: spatiotemporalities,queer imaginaries,and movement

Mediating between queer theory's privileging of time as actor and geographic emphases on material spaces and identities, this article engages feminist geographies and the work of Deleuze and Guattari to understand the implications of time and space as imagined, or actors' spatiotemporal imaginaries. We draw on Massumi's metaphor of the ‘grid,’ which sediments ways of seeing self and other and logics for action and interaction. The grid incites imaginaries of time as active and space as passive, which evoke past, present, and future, offering coordinates for locating identities. Focusing on spatiotemporality, we conduct a discourse analysis of interviews with two Chilean lesbian-feminist activists, focusing on (1) overtly spatial and temporal dimensions (nation, region, history), (2) the constitution of lesbian space and identity (identity, visibility, consciousness, and community), and (3) oppositional entities that stabilize lesbian identity and space (men, gay men, feminists, universities, and queer). We demonstrate how the activists' imagining of Chile as a space with a linear history with a fixed past and present directs their actions to a particular future of pre-given positions. Nonetheless, we point to moments of disidentificatory movement that returns analytic attention to process, creation, and the open potentiality of movement. The politics of spatiotemporal imaginaries offers activists, geographers, and queer theorists ways of narrating sexualized subjects and politics that are not repetitive of identitarian debates, history as necessary sequence, or spaces as material.