Java's forgotten pearls: the history and disappearance of pearl fishing in the Segara Anakan lagoon, South Java, Indonesia

Pearls have been a valued resource in most cultures that had access to them. A number of historically important pearling grounds were situated in the waters around today's Indonesia. One of these areas, now largely forgotten, was the Segara Anakan lagoon in South Java. In the seventeenth century, Dutch colonists exploited the lagoon's pearls. Afterwards, the lagoon's oysters were locally exploited as a food item until the late 1970s. While the pearl fishery attracted considerable attention in the colonial literature, its disappearance, by contrast, went largely undocumented. Nowadays, the oysters no longer are found in the lagoon as a result of extensive sedimentation processes. Their former existence is only preserved in the memory of local people. This article examines the history and fate of the pearls of Segara Anakan, providing an example of a formerly valued species whose existence simply became forgotten outside the area.     

四川区域中心馆藏文物保存环境监测平台常见故障分析与改进措施

四川省馆藏文物保存环境监测区域中心(简称四川区域中心)平台,经过两年多的运行实践,实现了12家博物馆监测站的集成联网。本研究分析了区域中心监测平台运行中常见故障现象的表现形式、故障原因及故障率。结果表明:监测平台的主要故障现象为传输异常和数据异常;除温湿度外的其他监测终端故障率较高;软件平台建设也不够完善,导致数据利用率低,尚不能实现风险评估、预测预警和预防调控等管理功能。针对分析发现的问题,提出一些相应的技术措施和管理措施,为有效降低故障的发生率,提升国内区域中心平台建设提供一定的指导和参考。     

Connected feminists: foregrounding the interpersonal in connective action

New social movement theories have been developed to address the organisational structures of activism in the age of digital platforms, but have tended to focus on structural questions rather than interpersonal dynamics. This paper engages with Bennett and Segerberg’s theory of connective action but uses a feminist lens to foreground the interpersonal dynamics between digitally equipped activists to develop a uniquely feminist account of connective action. It draws on Jo Freeman’s ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ to illustrate how informal organisation pervades new forms of connective action and continues to hamper the feminist movement. However, it also introduces and identifies the ‘feminist manager’ as an attempt to address the problematic practices of structurelessness and informality, and paves the way for consciously recognising the organisational structures required to advance the movement beyond consciousness-raising initiatives.     

Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

Asylum seekers,Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.     

Hedwig revisited

The mainstream success of the 2014 Broadway revival of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch is in stark contrast to the precarity of the central protagonist’s life and the communities out of which the original Hedwig production emerged. While these tensions reveal some of the complicities between homonormativity, gentrification, and neoliberalism, by tracing Hedwig’s other genealogies, a more complicated vision of queer possibility emerges.     

Precious work: white anti-racist pedagogies in Southern Arizona

Social justice activists come to Southern Arizona to involve themselves in humanitarian aid projects that address human rights issues emerging from border securitization processes. Over time, many of these activists connect with other social justice projects, leading to the existence of rich and dedicated networks of activists in Tucson, Southern Arizona’s largest city. Subsequently, we see the development of activist ventures orienting themselves around racial justice, through which white people work to educate other whites about white supremacist society. This paper explores the ways that white activists negotiate whiteness and privilege within Tucson’s activist networks by employing deliberately anti-racist critical pedagogies. Through excerpts from interviews and reflections on experiences as a participant observer from 2013 to 2015, I discuss the figure of the white anti-racist activist. In particular, I examine the paradoxical process of becoming anti-racist, through which white activists work to address problematic aspects of their own and others’ socialization as white subjects within the hierarchy of white supremacist society, a process that necessarily coexists with the knowledge that one cannot ‘unwhiten’ oneself, and many problematic behaviors remain.     

Playing with Infrastructure like a Carishina: Feminist Cycling in an Era of Democratic Politics

This article discusses transit infrastructure as a site of radical possibility and limitation in an age of participatory democracy across Latin America. I focus on multiple spaces of participation in Quito, Ecuador to elucidate how citizenship and infrastructure are co‐produced through gendered processes. I first analyse city space of Quito from a gendered and infrastructural lens to consider how urban environments are dictated by violence and insecurity. Then, against this backdrop, I explore the spatial strategies of the feminist bicycle collective, Carishina en Bici, which translates from Quechua to “bad housewives that cycle”. Here, I draw on the concept of “deep play” to reveal how public practices in Quito question the equitable impacts of local democratic experimentation. To examine Carishinas’ spatial practices, I focus on an urban alleycat race, the Carishina Race, to show how strategic practices of solidarity reinsert feminist possibilities in urban space.     

Adaptive strategies or ideological innovations? Interpreting sociopolitical developments in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru during the Late Moche Period

Environmental perturbations and social unrest are thought to have led to the reconstitution of traditional belief systems and hierarchical political relations on Peru’s North Coast during the Late Moche Period (550–800 AD). Ideological transformations are thus commonly interpreted as adaptive or reactive responses to social, political, and ecological disruptions. Nevertheless, religious practices directly shaped the formation of alternative power structures and ecological systems on the North Coast during the Late Moche Period. This is especially evident in Late Moche Jequetepeque, which witnessed the proliferation of non-elite ceremonial sites and small-scale agricultural facilities throughout the rural hinterland of the valley. Moche-inspired ritual performances orchestrated in the countryside created distinctive new forms of political order which structured economic activities and ecological behavior. In this article, the Jequetepeque case study is mobilized to reassess normative interpretations of the role of religious ideology in cultural adaptation and sociopolitical realignment.     

马家浜文化区的地理景观

马家浜文化区的环境研究,以往都以1000年左右为尺度,即把马家浜文化作为一个基本时间单元来分析,所得结论是粗线条或大趋势性的。在马家浜文化研究近半个世纪的今天,我们已经有条件提取更多信息,变趋势性考察为过程性研究,进而描绘这一时期更加细微的演化曲线,构建人地关系景观。