Limits to climate action - Narratives of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

In recent years, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been awarded a key role in climate mitigation scenarios explored by integrated assessment models and referenced in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because a majority of scenarios limiting global warming to 2 °C or 1,5 °C include vast deployment of BECCS, a critical discussion has emerged among experts about the moral implications of thus introducing an unproven technology into the policy realm.In this paper, we analyse this discussion as it has played out between 2013 and 2019, with a focus on how expert narratives are constructed in the mass media about the possibilities for decarbonisation within the current political-economic order. We find there are almost no narratives that support massive deployment of BECCS, and that all narratives presuppose limits to decarbonisation imposed by the current political-economic system. The perception of such limits lead some to argue, through deterministic and apolitical narratives, for the necessity of negative emissions technologies, while others argue instead that “degrowth” is the only solution. Thus, there is a distinct lack of positive narratives about how capitalism can bring about decarbonisation.     

What's the grand story? A macro-narrative analytical model and the case of Swiss child and adult protection policy

This paper expands on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by adding a theoretical and empirical exploration into macrolevel narratives. Existing NPF research largely neglects macrolevel narratives, which prevents the NPF from developing its full power. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) It provides a definition of macrolevel narratives by conceptualizing them as the “story form” of a policy paradigm. (2) It proposes a model and an empirical approach, which may lay the foundation for a standard macrolevel NPF approach. (3) It contributes to the NPF's aim of connecting the macro and meso level. The paper tests the model in a comparative multi-method design applied to the Swiss child and adult protection policy. The findings show that macrolevel NPF analysis helps understand where mesolevel policy debates come from, namely from an underlying paradigm and its effects on institutions and culture that enable and constrain macrolevel narratives.     

Performing a different narrative: museum theater and the memory-work of producing and managing slavery heritage at southern plantation museums

In the southeastern United States, operators of plantation museums have traditionally engaged in a selective and romanticised remembrance of the antebellum past that has regrettably silenced and marginalised the historical experiences and struggles of enslaved African people. More recently, some plantation managers have sought to engage in the ‘memory-work’ using artistic practices to reconstruct and interpret slavery heritage for visitors. Our study explores museum theatre as a form of memory-work and suggests that theatrical performances of the memories of enslavement are an increasingly important but not yet fully understood strategy for recovering, embodying, and representing a different and hopefully more just narrative about enslaved Africans. We visit three plantation museums where managers hosted a theatrical performance of enslaved oral histories and explore the motivations and experiences of managers and the director of the slave performance. Realising the power and efficacy of theatrical performance as memory-work practice requires understanding how the management of the interpretation process can be difficult. We delve into the emotion-laden challenges confronting slavery-related museum theatre development at the North Carolina plantations and discuss the creative response formulated at the sites to help visitors work through unexpected feelings and understandings about the past.     

Conversion Narratives and the Roman Inquisition in Malta, 1650–1700

This article analyses the conversion narratives which Christian renegades to Islam narrated to the inquisitor on their arrival in Malta in the second half of the seventeenth century. A few of them really believed in their new faith and were declared formal heretics, but the great majority had either been brought up as Muslims since a tender age or else were only suspected of believing that one can save oneself as a Muslim. The inquisitors were very indulgent with them and believed them when they said that they preserved the Christian religion in their hearts and were Muslims only on the outside.     

Vacuums and Veils: Engaging with Statistically ‘Invisible’ Indigenous Population Dynamics in Yamatji Country,Western Australia

Although much is known about broad trends in Australian Indigenous geographies, particular aspects of Indigenous spatiality continue to be rendered invisible by standard statistical measures. The national census, for example, only registers moves at one and five year intervals. Any mobilities enacted within these timeframes are not measured. Yet these statistically ‘un‐captured’ mobility processes are often integral to Indigenous lived experiences and have a significant dialectical relationship to government service delivery processes. Understanding these population dynamics is therefore a critical, though underdeveloped, consideration within geographic enquiry and contemporary debates about State and Federal Indigenous policy directions and initiatives. This paper presents qualitative research findings regarding local experiences and perceptions of Indigenous spatiality in Yamatji country, Western Australia. Within this grounded framework, the paper builds on existing literature by drawing out some of the common spatial, temporal and demographic characteristics, or dimensions, of statistically un‐captured Indigenous mobility processes. With this discursive, albeit generalised and malleable, typology established, the analysis turns to a reflection on some of the methodological and conceptual complexities of measurement, interpretation, and translation of these mobility processes across the policy‐research nexus.     

Migration in childhood and its impact on national identity construction among migrants from Northern Ireland

While there is currently only a tiny literature available on Northern Ireland migration, nothing at all has as yet been published relating to the subject of the province's child migrants. This paper focuses on the migration experiences of individuals who migrated as children to and from Northern Ireland, based on interview narratives collected during the course of two studies on contemporary migration from Ireland, North and South, conducted from 2004 to 2008. In all cases, these experiences triggered identity issues for the individuals which have played out subsequently in their lives in different ways. In particular, the author seeks to understand how the memory of these events continues to construct present realities for these individuals. What awareness did these children have of sectarianism, of the Northern Ireland conflict? What was their reception in the host country and upon return to Northern Ireland? How have these experiences contributed to their identities in the present and their sense of belonging to Ireland, North and South?     

Forging the nation as an imagined community

This article examines the ways in which young Canadians represent the ‘the War on Terror’ in their narratives. I explore how a hegemonic nationalist narrative enters into this representation in different ways and positions itself in a dynamic tension with the USA, at times eliding the difference and at times affirming it. I illustrate that these students do not simply tell the narrative of the war, but use the deixis of ‘we/us/our’ or ‘them/they/their’ in a way that constructs multiple imagined communities. I argue that these presumably benign representations of Canadian involvement in the war produce banal nationalism that excludes ‘others’, and binds human imagination into a framework that works against critical thinking.     

The Conflict between Traditional Christian Churches in Ukraine as a Conflict of Identities: Where to Search for the Prospects of Reconciliation? A Reflection in the Light of the Theories of Paul Ricoeur and John Paul Lederach

Abstract

After the independence of Ukraine in 1991 there emerged or re-emerged four churches that derive their roots from ancient Kyiv Christianity. Those churches conflict with each other, the main cause of the split and tensions being the issue of cultural and social–political identities in the country. Such conflicting narrative identities have to be reconciled by the mutual recognition of their diversity when churches in Ukraine want to become a real force for transformation in society. Among the different models of the search for rapprochement in this article I refer to the theories of Paul Ricoeur and John Paul Lederach. According to the ethics of memory of Paul Ricoeur, traditional Ukrainian churches should abandon endless circles of melancholia about their losses and create new identities through the process of mourning. Because the tensions among traditional Christian denominations in Ukraine are not likely to be solved by institutional measures as history proves, churches should concentrate their efforts on working on social and relational platforms. Here I refer to the ethics of moral imagination of John Paul Lederach that envisions focusing the reconciliatory activities on locations of interaction between people that should finally contribute to the rapprochement.     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.