Dithering while the planet burns: Anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene

This review article argues that styles of thinking and writing recently encouraged in the environmental humanities are not conducive to analytical clarity, theoretical rigor, or effective critique of the practices and discourses that generate global inequalities and unsustainability. Critically discussing how global environmental change is being approached in anthropology and other human sciences, it concludes that the haziness, inconsistency, and inaccessibility of so-called posthuman deliberations on the Anthropocene ultimately serve to promote the destructive economic forces that are responsible for such change. A recent attempt to bring together approaches from posthumanism and Marxism is also deeply flawed, failing to present a coherent theoretical outlook on the environmental history of capitalism. The article argues for more responsible efforts to build interdisciplinary theory of the Anthropocene.     

Food,feeding and the material everyday geographies of infants: possibilities and potentials

This paper forges an agenda for researching geographies of infants. Scholars have tended to overlook the everyday geographies of very young children. However, outside of geography, infancy is seen as a specifically dynamic period of life, and is subject to sustained research and policy intervention. In particular, early childhood is viewed as a key point in which to intervene to transform enduring, interconnected, societal, educational, and health-based inequalities. Food and feeding are seen as critical both to the health of infants now and of the children and adults they become . However, much policy and research under-theorizes the importance of socio-spatial contexts and the subjectivity/agency of infants. There is, then, an urgent need for geographers to put infants onto the agenda, to inform and challenge these dominant accounts. Researching with infants necessitates not just critiquing modern, liberal notions of an autonomous subject/agent, but developing a new way of understanding subjectivity and agency. Drawing upon Lupton’s (2013) notion of infant–carer interembodiment, I suggest a way forward with reference to the material geographies of infant feeding.     

Introduction: stretching the boundaries of care

Over the past few decades, geographies of care have flourished, and have offered important insights into the importance of care in our worlds. This introduction provides a broad review of the literature on care ethics and introduces the key themes evident in this special issue that stretch the empirical and theoretical boundaries of care. In particular, the four papers in this special issue de-emphasize the role of the conventional dyadic care-giving relationships in the home and focus on wider structural power relations within which individual care relations are often formed. Such analysis reveals the workings of hegemonic white masculinity in perpetuating unequal caring and uncaring relations and reminds us that care is not always good or positive; rather care can cause harm and exacerbate violence. While ‘care’ is often seen as the antidote to resolve the vastly uncaring practices and politics evident across time and scale, this special issue acknowledges that more critical engagement with care ethics and the politics of care are necessary to achieve such a goal.     

Geographic accessibility to primary care providers: Comparing rural and urban areas in Southwestern Ontario

This research examines geographical accessibility to primary care providers (PCPs) across urban and rural areas of Southwestern Ontario and examines variations in the distribution of PCPs in relation to the senior population (aged 65 years and older). Information about PCP practices was provided by the HealthForceOntario Marketing and Recruitment Agency. Population data were obtained from the 2016 Census of Canada. To calculate scores for accessibility to PCPs (i.e., PCPs/10,000 population), we applied the enhanced 2-step floating catchment area method with distance decay effect within a global service catchment of 30-minute drive time. A geospatial mapping approach revealed disparities in the distribution of PCPs with a pattern of higher spatial accessibility in or around major urban areas in Southwestern Ontario. Comparative analyses were performed in association with the seniors’ population to identify how accessibility scores were mismatched with the population needs. The outcome of this study will assist researchers and health service planners to better understand the distribution of existing PCPs to address inequalities, particularly in rural areas.     

Traditional undeveloped municipalities in Serbia as a result of regional inequality

This paper examines the issue of traditionally underdeveloped areas of Serbia, with special emphasis on development trends of the south, south-east and south-west areas of Central Serbia. The observed area is represented through a continuous time and space zone which includes rural, hilly-mountainous, border areas and the contact zone with the AP Kosovo and Metohija, including 22 municipalities, the majority of which belong to the so-called traditionally underdeveloped municipalities, that is, those that have had this status for a few decades. For the purpose of monitoring development trends, the indicators of the settlement structure, demographic and socio-economic characteristics and the level of development of the observed municipalities were used. Then, an evaluation and comparison to the national average were carried out. The presented results show a deviation and significant lagging behind of almost all parameters for the analysed municipalities in the period since 2002 until the present day, which indicates that the several-decade-long gap is still being intensified. A cluster analysis was performed for the typology of observed municipalities in order to determine the level of undevelopment and socio-economic marginalization.     

Changing Regional Inequalities in United Germany

An American geographer and specialist on Germany analyzes temporal patterns of regional socioeconomic inequalities within Germany since unification. The results, based on analysis of changing distributional characteristics of GDP per capita, infant mortality, and unemployment, indicate a lack of progress in reducing regional inequalities within the country. Although the inequalities are not particularly severe by EU standards, promises made at the time of unification and the German constitution's requirement that regional equality be achieved are among pressures confronting German politicians and regional policy makers in achieving equality across the country. The author notes a number of domestic and international conditions that complicate and impede regional equality. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, O52, R11, R12. 2 figures, 6 tables, 70 references.     

Parental smoking and children's anxieties: an appropriate strategy for health education?

While the prevalence of smoking has declined in the UK in recent years, class differentials in smoking behaviour have become more marked and smoking is increasingly recognised as a causal factor in inequalities in health. Health education initiatives to support both smoking cessation and to teach children about the health risks of smoking remain key initiatives in reducing health inequalities. However, teaching children about the risks of smoking and the impact of parental smoking on their health is not straightforward for children from backgrounds who are more likely to encounter smoking at home and in their local communities. These children have to reconcile the key messages taught at school and reinforced in smoking cessation campaigns with the knowledge that their parents and other family members smoke. In this article we consider how children from smoking homes make sense of these education and health campaigns as observed by their parents, and the impact that this has on both parental smoking and relationships within the home. The article thus seeks to challenge assumptions about the delivery of health education and the need to acknowledge family diversity.     

Hope’s Work

This article, given as the Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture on 28 August 2019, argues that hope can be found through training an attentiveness to the social world in troubled times. Hope then is an empirical question and a matter of documenting hopeful possibilities that often otherwise remain unremarked upon. In this sense “worldly hope” draws possibilities that are manifested in the social world and stands in contrast to cruel forms of optimism or an unrealistic faith in future progress. An argument for such an approach to hope and trouble is developed through two examples drawn from contemporary London life, namely, the silent walks at Grenfell Tower in West London and a community arts project in Bellingham, South East London.     

Not a zero-sum game: inequalities and resilience in Sumner,Missouri, the Gooseless Goose Capital of the World

Recent works on socio-ecological resilience stress the need to integrate inequalities and power into considerations of how communities are reorganized in response to socio-ecological transformations such as climate change. These works have often approached inequalities and power as zero-sum games, with scholars framing individuals and groups within communities as either empowered or marginalized. Drawing from 20 months of fieldwork in a rural community in the central United States that was being rearranged in response to shifts in trans-national goose migration patterns, the author shows inequalities and power do not work in such dichotomous manners because different dimensions of inequality intersect and transform each other in reciprocal manners. Gender, class, and sexuality intersected to inform how individuals sustained their community, and particular men and women were simultaneously (dis)advantaged because of how their relationships with each other were rearranged in response to shifting goose migration patterns. These findings suggest scholars and policy makers working on issues related to socio-ecological resilience can better account for inequalities and power by utilizing the theoretical framework of intersectionality.     

First year on the faculty: the quality of their teaching

Abstract

This article considers the arguments being advanced in the USA for an expansion of academic programmes incorporating service‐learning, in which students undertake, as part of their studies, community service, and engage in academic activities designed to provide a context for reflection on their experience in doing so. Three arguments are usually advanced for this: the merits of experiential education, the value of service‐learning in education for citizenship, and its significance in promoting a sense of ‘community’. Some examples are given and the issues raised by these programmes are explored briefly. It is suggested that geography could profit from incorporating elements of service‐learning in order to enhance its treatment of moral and political issues.