Building economies from the bottom up: (mis)representations of poverty in the rural American Northwest

This paper examines interconnected processes of economic restructuring and representations of poor subjects that rely on imaginaries of race, ethnicity, class and rural space. We argue that poverty and privilege are mutually produced and so we focus on the representational practices of White leaders in persistently poor counties across the American Northwest. We draw from case study research to understand region-wide material and discursive processes that are contributing to economic distress and social marginalization. We interrogate the range of representational practices that White leaders employ to explain, deny and/or racialize poverty in their communities. We also draw attention to how poverty emerges from the intersection of political, economic and cultural processes operating across a range of scales and sites. We further analyze how representations of the poor and poverty rest on a host of imaginary landscapes about who belongs, who is an outsider and who has a right to a place and its services. We argue that these representations serve to invigorate neoliberal policies and silence a more critical debate about poverty in the USA.     

Criminalized crops: Environmentally-justified illicit crop interventions and the cyclical marginalization of smallholders

Despite decades of efforts to curb the global supply of illicit drugs and significant shifts in how those efforts are designed and implemented, illicit crop cultivation persists. In this paper, we examine state and international development efforts to eradicate coca in Peru, opium poppies in Laos, and cannabis in California, USA and the ever-changing discourses used to justify and design these interventions. Scholarship in political geography frames eradication interventions as serving ongoing efforts to extend state and market power into the regions in which illicit crops are grown and to marginalize the people growing them. We find that environmental discourses are increasingly used to assert the need for continued illicit crop interventions, and that these discourses articulate with historical and ongoing portrayals of smallholders as environmentally destructive. Environmental harm narratives that justify enforcement and eradication efforts under the guise of protecting ecosystems from illicit crop farmers can become self-fulfilling prophecies when they disproportionately impact smallholders and push them into marginal geographic and economic positions. Our cases illustrate that environmentally-justified interventions drive cycles of marginalization for illicit crop smallholders, often conditioned by race or ethnicity, who are then portrayed as environmental criminals. Meanwhile, new state-sanctioned spaces of opportunity and profit are created for more powerful actors who are able to capitalize on the removal of illicit crop growers from the land.     

Pakistan,militancy and identity: parallel struggles

This article focuses on the dominant and parallel struggles that have been carried out in Pakistan in terms of its Islamic identity since 9/11. It argues that the Pakistan government has legitimised and explained its partnership with the US government in countering terrorism through a discourse that makes use of Islamic symbols. The Islamists have engaged in a similar process, arguing for jihad against the enemies of Islam. Simultaneously, a tension has persisted between liberal/progressive and orthodox notions of being a Pakistani Muslim, which has been reflected in, for example, the debate on the blasphemy law in Pakistan. It is important that strategies to strengthen Pakistan also creatively empower groups subscribing to liberal/progressive ideas so as to succeed in the struggle against militancy in the long term. The argument is developed in three parts, starting with a discussion of opposing views on Pakistan's identity and the place of Islam as the context for the Pakistan government's participation in the War on Terror. The second part explores features of the opposing discourses adopted by Islamabad and jihadi groups. The third part discusses the parallel tensions between alternative understandings of Pakistan's Islamic identity at the societal level with reference to the blasphemy law. The concluding section suggests a carefully crafted approach to assisting Pakistan at this stage in its history that could also respond to the subordinate tensions.     

'Something Happened': The Relevance of the Risk Society for Describing the Siting Process for a Municipal Landfill

This paper investigates reactions to a proposed municipal solid waste facility in Southern Ontario supposed to be a low-level, low probability risk using the risk society framework, developed independently by Beck (1992a, 1992b) and Giddens (1990, 1991). Residents often view risk from environmental hazards as high despite expert assurances that risks are low. The appeal of risk society as a general framework is that it connects quantitative risk assessment (QRA) and the social construction of risk (SCR) to show how individuals and social structures reflexively alter and are altered by conflicts over (actual/potential) technological hazards. The analysis involves 30 in-depth face-to-face interviews with residents in Caledon, Ontario, contextualized by interviews with proponent experts (n=4) from the government organization responsible for conducting the siting process. The risk society framework, although developed primarily to describe the effects of high-consequence global hazards, seems well suited to describing local level, low-consequence hazards. The siting process involved a series of fateful moments which upset people's security in particular ways of life. The proposed landfill and the process itself threatened the very nature of what people valued and expected from their community. However, this study raises a concern that the risk society played out at the local/regional level may exacerbate inequalities in the distribution of risks relative to benefits from technological environmental hazards. This stands in contrast with Beck's (1992a) notion that the risks from hazards are equitably distributed within the risk society.     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students from a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

《重修七帝寺碑记》释解

七帝寺为定州著名寺院,它与皇室、高官富绅有着千丝万缕的联系。《重修七帝寺碑记》不仅反映了这一历史史实,同时也为研究寺院僧俗组织结构提供了例证。北魏至隋的定州,胡汉并居,信仰杂糅。作为粟特商人的何永康,出资赎寺,成为俗寺主,透露出宗教信仰的复杂性。     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students form a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

‘In the best interests of the child’: juggling the geography of children's gardens (between adult agendas and children's needs)

This review paper presents literature, particularly in children's geographies, in support of the proposition that the rationales for the current children's garden movement flourishing particularly in the United States, albeit well-intentioned, continue to be dominated by adult discourses acting ‘in the best interests of the child’. The paper concludes that broadening the debate on ‘children and gardens’ through inclusion of research that focuses on children's competence and empowerment offers a different perspective of what children might want from these spaces. This highlights new directions for research on children's gardens which would focus this garden typology more on children's needs than adult agendas, and therefore contribute positively to development of these gardens as sustainable environments for children's learning and enjoyment of nature.     

Competing discourses of built heritage: lay values in Irish conservation planning

Built heritage conservation has traditionally been shaped by professionals through an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, emphasising expert knowledge and skills, universal value, a hierarchy of significance, and protecting the authenticity of tangible assets. However, while the purpose of built heritage conservation is widely recognised to be broad, encompassing cultural, social and economic benefits, it takes place in the presence, and on behalf, of a wider public whose values and priorities may differ starkly from those of heritage power-players. Drawing on the perspectives of a range of built heritage actors in three small towns in Ireland, this paper contributes to these debates, exploring the competing values and priorities embedded within lay discourses of heritage. Based on critical discourse analysis of interviews with local actors, the paper identifies that collected memory and local place distinctiveness, contributing to a sense of local identity, are of central importance in how non-experts construct their understanding of built heritage. In the Irish context, this is particularly important in understanding social and cultural statutory categories of heritage interest. The paper concludes on the implications for policy and practice and, in particular, the need to more effectively take account of non-expert values and priorities in heritage and conservation decision-making.     

Bioprospecting: from theory to practice (and back again)

This paper critically assesses the theory and practice of biodiversity prospecting in the developing world. Taking the case of perhaps the most famous bioprospecting broker – Costa Rica's National Institute of Biodiversity – rival theoretical discourses on the 'selling nature to save it' approach to environmental conservation are unpacked. This approach, currently de rigueur in mainstream global environmental organizations, is touted by its advocates in the academic and policy world as an effective tool for 'green developmentalism'. For a cohort of university-based left critics, however, bioprospecting is one more troubling example of 'post-modern ecological capital' in action, representing the further commodification of nature for profit purposes. By treating the rival theoretical discourses on bioprospecting produced by differently situated knowledge communities as objects of analysis, the paper asks fundamental questions about the grounds on which evaluations of bioprospecting might be made. It is argued that the radical critique buys its logical and moral power at the expense of its practical relevance, while advocates of selling biodiversity have made their case with only limited empirical persuasiveness. On the basis of a heuristic distinction between immanent and external critique, the paper seeks to put the evaluation of bioprospecting in particular, and green developmentalism more generally, on a new cognitive and normative footing. In so doing it impinges on recent debates over the wider relevance of 'critical' thinking in human geography and cognate fields in the current conjuncture.