Participative critical enquiry in graduate field-based learning

This paper outlines a critical pedagogic approach to field-based learning (FBL) at graduate level. Drawing on student experience stemming from a FBL module and as part of an MA programme in Environment, Society and Development, the paper addresses the complexities associated with student-led, participative critical enquiry during fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The paper examines emerging student discourses through a group assessment and a series of individual reflective journals. Both are contextualised in relation to FBL module learning outcomes. Finally, aspects of fieldwork influencing the feasibility and effectiveness of participative critical enquiry as a field-based pedagogic endeavour are considered.     

PROBLEMS OF PASSENGER MOBILITY AND ROAD TRANSPORT IN THE SOUTHERN FAR EAST REGION

Dimensions of the road transport problem in the southern Far East Economic Region (Primorskiy Kray, Amur Oblast, and Khabarovsk Kray) are outlined and some of its social and economic impacts described (for example, the inadequate levels of services provision addressed in the preceding paper). Road connectivity and passenger mobility trends are analyzed before coverage shifts to more specific challenges confronting planners: the need to (a) separate inter-city from intra-city flows in cities along major transport corridors, (b) improve road surfaces, (c) reduce travel times and regulate seasonal fluctuations in service, and (d) provide a more favorable environment for growing private automobile use (translated by H. L. Haslett, Leamington Spa, UK).     

Is Bosnia-Herzegovina Unsustainable? Implications for the Balkans and European Union

Two U.S.-based political geographers survey the current state of affairs in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), characterized by increasing political tensions between its two constituent entities—the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska (RS). The authors examine ways in which recurrent calls for a referendum on RS's self-determination/independence (from BiH) have charged the political atmosphere in both entities, delayed the formation of a central government in the aftermath of inter-entity elections in October 2010, and thus precipitated claims of BiH's unsustainability. In a concluding section, they explore the broader implications of renewed conflict and territorial fragmentation in BiH, which include the mobilization of seccessionist movements (and possible ethnic cleansing) in other contested regions in the Balkans and the former USSR and the possibility of renewed EU/NATO military engagement, with the attendant risks involving the EU's relations with Russia and member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. 1 figure, 2 tables, 38 references.     

AN ASSESSMENT OF A. W. KÜCHLER'S WORK IN THE CLASSIFICATION AND MAPPING OF VEGETATION

An attempt is made to use the Gorczynski index of continentality to trace changes in the continentality of climate in Central Russia through space and time. The index turns out to be sufficiently sensitive to investigate changes in continentality within a limited area such as the Central economic region of the USSR, but not sensitive enough to identify the effect of a large city (Moscow) on continentality. Changes in continentality over time are found to be in good agreement with the types of atmospheric circulation patterns that have been identified by Soviet climatologists. The continentality of Moscow was less pronounced during the first two decades of the 20th century, when atmospheric circulation was dominated by the so-called zonal pattern. It was more pronounced in the 1930s and 1940s, when the meridional and eastern forms of circulation predominated.     

An archive to build a future: The recovery and rediscovery of the history of socialist associations in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

This paper chronicles the ongoing efforts of several groups of Bosnian activists, artists and academics, to create archives of the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Postsocialist archives in other parts of Eastern Europe have typically been motivated by the need to ‘settle accounts’ with communism, understood in this context to be a totalitarian project. By contrast, these ongoing archiving efforts in the postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, are created in order to recuperate and repurpose the unrealized potentials of Yugoslav socialism, and to use this history to reseed contemporary political imaginaries. I show how these post-Yugoslav activist-archives are working to recover a form of transformational historical subjectivity which seems profoundly necessary in the current political moment, marked by political disenchantment and the devastating effects of the postsocialist transition.