In this lecture I redefine the financial crisis as a crisis of governance rather than as a primarily economic one conforming to the typical state-by-state framing of macroeconomics. I begin with a brief account of the mismatch between the geographical activities of major financial actors, on the one hand, and the geographical scope of state regulators, on the other. I then address three geographical dimensions of the mismatch and their consequences for territorial politics at different scales: what I term “low geopolitics” or the increased importance of economic matters involving non-state actors (credit-rating agencies, large law firms, producer-service organizations, etc.) often beyond the regulatory competence of particular states or international organizations for world politics; the increased political tensions between so-called world cities, on the one hand, and their surrounding hinterlands, on the other, particularly when national government fiscal and monetary policies favor the biggest cities over the rest of their territories; and the difficulties of “devolution” to local and regional governments when expenditures are devolved but revenue-raising and regulatory powers are not. I wish to question two developing narratives about territorial politics in the aftermath of the financial crisis: that which sees an “inevitable” return to a state-based world of finance and associated regulation and that which sees a decline in the possibilities of political devolution as a result of the crisis.

In 1988 few serious commentators believed that the politics of climate change would be anything other than tortuous. Yet the assumption has remained through the period since that human-induced climate change is an important, urgent and discrete problem which at least in principle lends itself to policy solutions. Optimism has waxed and waned, but the belief has been maintained that at least some forms of policy intervention will yield tangible public benefits. [[Yes, the climatic side-effects of large-scale combustion of fossil fuels were an unforeseen and undesirable outcome of Western and then global industrialisation. But putting this causal chain into reverse—arresting some of these unwanted side-effects—was believed to be in the reach of an intelligent, purposeful and ingenious humanity]]. This presumption must now be questioned. Maybe the climate system cannot be managed by humans. This brief survey of climate change over 25 years suggests at least two reasons why. First, there is no ‘plan’, no self-evidently correct way of framing and tackling the phenomenon of climate change which will over-ride different legitimate interests and force convergence of political action. Second, climate science keeps on generating different forms of knowledge about climate—different handles on climate change—which are suggestive of different forms of political and institutional response to climate change. Or put more generally, science asa form of creative inquiry into the physical world co-evolves with the physical phenomena it is seeking to understand. Taken together these two lessons suggest other ways of engaging with the idea of climate change, not as a discrete environmental phenomenon to prevent, control or manage, but as a forceful idea which carries creative potential.

This paper will present an analysis of the ways in which mobilities are assembled into various sociotechnical systems, how those systems come to be path-dependent structuring practices and habits, how such paths are almost all oil-dependent, and how oil is just such a problem in the contemporary world. The paper will draw upon John Urry’s ‘Societies beyond Oil’ (Zed, 2013) which demonstrates the extraordinary ‘oiling’ of society in the last century and the many problems oil generates within the present.

Steve’s talk will cover the various reasons to try and assess research wider impacts of research (Advocacy, Accountability, Analysis and Allocation) and why it might (or might not) be worthwhile. He will focus primarily on biomedical research presenting a range of research evaluation studies that use a variety of different tools, however, the reasons for assessment and some of the tools could be similar across disciplines.

This paper uses research in India to highlight the possibilities of youth politics and vitality of civil society in the global South. We also develop a new theory of generative politics. Generative politics is to be understood as forms of everyday political action that are not primarily about the allocation of scarce resources or competition for goods. More specifically, generative politics refers to practices that entail navigating conflict and building consensus with a view to creating resources for the poor, where “resources” are understood broadly to include social networks, information and confidence as well as jobs, assets and money. The scholarly and public implications of being able to show that young people are involved in generative politics – and also of charting the limits of generative politics and its contradictions – are very significant indeed, enhancing scholarly and public understanding of possibilities for youth mobilization and encouraging powerful institutions to view young people not simply as problems, potentials, voters, or volunteers, but co-creators of democracy.

Abstract to follow shortly.

This talk will discuss the role of data and modelling in policy support around food and water through a discussion of the approaches pioneered by the Challenge Programme on Water and Food projects in the Andes system of basins. I will focus on the role of modelling, alongside theoretical developments and field science, in providing policy-relevant understanding and also highlight the challenges of modelling in data-poor but problem-rich developing country environments. I will discuss the development of the WaterWorld Policy Support System (www.policysupport.org/waterworld), its biophysical basis and innovations as well as the role it plays in the understanding of hydrological ecosystem services and the negotiation of benefit sharing mechanisms for water (such as payments for ecosystem services schemes) at sites throughout the tropics. Though there are risks to making models like WaterWorld available and accessible for non-hydrologists and non-modellers to use in such policy contexts, there are also considerable benefits in bridging science with application and filling some of the informational vacuums in which policies or management decisions sometimes have to be made.

Like archaeology and anthropology, the range of research and pedagogy undertaken in the name of geography spans subject matter and approaches to it found across the spectrum of the humanities, social and natural sciences. Suspended between the magnetic poles of ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geography, the diversity of the geographical project is a source of both strength and weakness. At its best, it equips scholars to tack between radically different knowledge practices, fostering an inventive inter-disciplinarity rather than a prescribed path to some transcendent integration. However, geography’s identity as an inter-discipline that works across the division of social and natural sciences can be argued to be realised more effectively today in the co-habitation of ‘physical’ and ‘human’ geographers in shared buildings and curricula, than in research practice. As the contents of disciplinary journals and the publication habits of those working in the two wings of the discipline attest, both are commonly more conversant with work in cognate disciplines through common fields of interest (such as urban studies or glaciology) than with each other’s. In this, as historians of geography have argued, geographical practice has always been exercised through different sites, techniques and materials which have kept it a heterogeneous and contested enterprise. Yet these features – heterogeneity and contestation – are surely characteristic of all disciplines, and would be unremarkable were it not for the weight attached in the geographical tradition to integrating natural and social worlds.

Up until recently the HIV pandemic in Africa has been viewed as one overwhelmingly defined by heterosexual transmission. Left relatively unacknowledged has been the fact that at the same time as heterosexual transmission Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) have continued to be infected with the virus and continued to infect each other. Simultaneously recent developments in HIV prevention strategies have attempted to move beyond ‘individualistic’ programmes focused primarily on information dissemination and condom provision towards more ‘structural’ approaches that take into account social circumstances that can hinder individual ability to practice safer-sex. This talk will discuss the first attempt at a structural HIV prevention initiative aimed at MSM in Africa – The Ukwazana (‘brining people together’) programme. It will summaries the innovative strategies designed through a collaborative effort between the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and the South African Anova Health Institute to have a lasting impact on HIV prevalence and incidence among MSM in the townships of Cape Town. It will also explore some of the barriers that needed to be overcome in developing such a programme, including township homophobia and an historical lack of appreciation among diverse actors as to the seriousness of MSM HIV infection in the region.

While carrying out environmental surveys in Songkhla Province, South Thailand in the 1980s, my research group and I identified a number of ancient canals and storage tanks on aerial photographs. Their existence was verified by ground truthing and further research uncovered an extensive irrigation system covering some 800 sq. km. Most of these works were heavily sedimented and no longer functional, exceptions being small areas of the storage tanks which were being exploited as beds for rice seedlings. Eventually my group cored all parts of this system so as to establish the original profiles of depth, breadth and, where possible, significant stages of their history of maintenance and neglect. This work included measurements of slope, rainfall and calculations of probable water movement. We prepared new maps of this area with corrections to place names, topography and representing the ancient irrigation system. These maps were immediately adopted by the Royal Thai Ordinance Survey Department and attracted the attention of the King of Thailand. He provided funds for the initial reconstruction of a segment of the irrigation system; the work was completed recently by the Irrigation Department of the Ministry of Agriculture in cooperation with myself. Its resurrection has had a major impact on the harvests obtained by the farming families of these districts.

Measurements of sulphur emissions from volcanoes underpin eruption forecasting. They are also crucial to understanding natural variability in contemporary global climate. Means for accurate measurement of volcanic sulphur emissions are thus of tremendous significance. Since 2001, the means for collecting and analysing such data have advanced substantially thanks to the availability of a new generation of cheap and versatile ultraviolet spectrometers. I’ll review the underpinning research that enabled these instruments to be used reliably (focussing on the contributions made by the Cambridge Volcanology Group), and the impacts that the new technologies have had on volcanic hazard assessment and risk management. Serendipity played as much of a role in the research progress and outcomes as did hypothesis testing and planning. I’ll discuss and reflect on the background to our work in this area and its wider significance, and the remaining challenges to full exploitation of the technology.

From a vast sea of rain forest in southern Venezuela emerge a set of mountains like no others on earth. These mountains – known as Tepuis — of relatively flat summits and vertical walls, rising several thousand feet over the forest floor, are the remnants of a gigantic plateau that once covered the Guayana shield, and represent today one of the most spectacular, and for the most part unknown, landscapes on the planet. Tepuis can be considered as a living laboratory of evolution, similar to the Galápagos Islands that inspired Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Since the first ascent of Roraima-tepuy in 1884 by Im Thurn and Perkins, these mountains, sacred to the region’s indigenous inhabitants, have fascinated scientists and adventurers alike, yet essential questions regarding the origin of tepuy flora and fauna remain to date unsolved. Tepuis are now protected under the Venezuelan National Park System, but numerous threats to its preservation remain. The seminar will draw out the issues of biodiversity, conservation and the context of the new geopolitics.

The rocks that constitute this formation are mostly sandstones dating back several billion years and that were laid upon the shield at the very origin of the earth’s crust. Fragmentation of the plateau and the subsequent erosion over several hundred million years gave rise to the mountain system we know today. Some fifty summits witness these geological processes. The isolation in space and time originated a rich and peculiar flora and fauna that evolved separately and parallel to give rise to a very high degree of endemism. The geography and topography of this “island system” has a tremendous influence on the local and regional climate and this, on the other hand, on the evolutionary processes that took and are still taking place.

The “collaborative turn” in environmental policy has been a major theme in the United States over the past two decades. Collaboration and stakeholder participation are seen as important ways to address environmental issues, such as water pollution, that cross existing government boundaries. Along with changes in policy and management have come research studies focusing on these phenomena. This presentation discusses the evolution of social science research on collaborative watershed management (CWM) in the U.S. Scholars have developed multiple streams of inquiry stemming from basic questions about how CWM effort operate and what they accomplish, who participates and why, the impacts of collaboration on individuals and communities, and links to natural science and multiple scales. Findings suggest important areas for future research.

From the colonial period to the present governing authorities, experts and self-appointed “trustees” have diagnosed deficiencies in landscapes and populations, and devised technical schemes to bring about improvement. They set out to alleviate poverty, but exclude key political-economic relations from their technical domain. Yet there are conjunctures at which the question of poverty is understood in terms that clearly demand political settlements, and we may see signs of this in the distributive welfare regimes currently emerging in parts of the global south.

The arrival of web-based mapping from Google and others has revolutionised, in the space of only five years, the way many people interact with maps and map data. And the success of projects such as Wikipedia highlight how collation of small amounts of information from large numbers of people – an approach called ‘crowdsourcing’ – can challenge traditional models of data collection and ownership. Bringing these concepts together is OpenStreetMap, a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Well-established enterprises such as the Ordnance Survey are coming under increased pressure from this new model, and large companies such as MapQuest and Microsoft are starting to use and invest in it. Martin Lucas-Smith, Webmaster in the Department, and one of two main developers of the leading UK-wide cycle journey planner website, CycleStreets, will discuss OpenStreetMap, its use within a wide range of systems (from cartography, routing, and even its central role helping deal with the Haiti disaster) and discuss the challenges it poses to traditional forms of cartography and data collection.

Slides and resources from this talk are now available at
http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/seminars/110224openstreetmap/

There is much talk of a ‘nuclear renaissance’. What is motivating such expectations and what might such a renaissance look like? These are the questions to be tackled in Dr Nuttall’s presentation. He will argue that the main drivers for nuclear energy are those that drive all current major decisions in electricity generation; namely concerns for energy economics, energy security and climate change. The attributes of nuclear energy will be considered in such respects, but Dr Nuttall will argue that nuclear energy brings with it some additional considerations, some of which have proven very tricky for policy makers.

Compared with cultural industries, cultural workers are understudied in economic geography and regional science, reflecting in general a misplaced emphasis on industries at the expense of occupations. Artists (including musicians, actors, dancers, writers, designers) are unique in their high rates of high self-employment, propensity to relocate inter-regionally, and ability to work across commercial, non-profit and community sectors. Markusen offers a number of hypotheses about how self-employed artists choose to locate among regions and neighborhoods and how this varies across career cycles. She also contends that the occupational structure of a cultural industry in one place will not necessarily resemble that in another. Using US Census data (a one in five sample of the entire US population), Markusen provides evidence for these propositions and explores how arts and cultural workers are distributed among cultural and other industries and across major US metros. The talk also explores artists’ roles in creative placemaking—the deliberate shaping of regions, neighborhoods and small towns through cultural initiatives—and how these can be evaluated. The analysis demonstrates the use of occupations to conceptualize the regional workforce and to study urban and regional economies comparatively.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1, a disease associated with high rates of mortality in infected human populations, poses a serious threat to public health in many parts of the world. This article reports findings from a study aimed at improving our understanding of the spatial pattern of avian influenza risk in East-Southeast Asia where the disease is both persistent and devastating. It is recognized that many different disciplines have made and continue to make important contributions to our understanding of HPAI H5N1. However, it remains a challenge to integrate knowledge from different disciplines. This article reports the findings from a study that applies genetic analysis that identifies the evolution of the H5N1 virus in space and time, epidemiological analysis that determines socio-ecological factors associated with H5N1 occurrence and statistical cluster analysis that identifies outbreak clusters, and then applies a methodology to formally integrate the three sets of findings. The present study is novel in two respects. First it uses genetic sequences and space-time data to create a phylogenetic tree to estimate the virus’ ability to spread. This is the first attempt to provide a mapping of the H5N1 virus derived from the phylogenetic tree. Second, by integrating the results obtained from the three methodologies we are able to generate insights into the occurrence and space-time spread of H5N1 that we believe have a higher level of corroboration than is possible when analysis is based on only one methodology. Our research identifies links between the occurrence of H5N1 by area and a set of socio-ecological factors including altitude, population density, poultry density, as well as the shortest path distances to inland water, coastlines, routes followed by migrating birds, railways, and roads. This study seeks to lay a solid foundation for the inter-disciplinary study of this and other influenza outbreaks. It will provide substantive information for public health bodies with responsibility for containing H5N1 outbreaks.

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

The climate change debate has resulted in a greater focus on sustainable transport and initiatives that are being introduced to encourage more people to use public transport, cycling and walking as their mode of transport. However, in New Zealand (and many other lower traffic, lower population density countries) we know virtually nothing of the public health implications of doing this, and globally research produces conflicting results. This paper will present the findings of some New Zealand research that assessed the comparative risk associated with exposure to traffic pollution when travelling on different transport modes including car, bike, bus and train. Data for ultrafine particles, PM10, PM2.5, PM1 and carbon monoxide were collected in Auckland and Christchruch, New Zealand. In addition time activity data was collected using a combination of GPS data, sounds and photos. Results show that the choice of mode has significant implications for personal pollution exposure. In addition individual events on journeys can result in significantly raised spikes in exposure.

The uneven, and increasingly unstable integration of housing, mortgage and financial markets tied households’ budgets to global financial flows to an unprecedented extent. This volatile mix, in turn, sparked the origins, and shaped the consequences, of unimaginable economic disarray. Accounting for this is nevertheless hampered by an ‘elephant in the room’ in the shape of home price dynamics. Few concepts so critical to the workings of the housing economy – so implicated in the accumulation and disintegration of global and local financial fortunes – are so widely aired, so assiduously analysed, and so little understood. In this presentation I argue that, notwithstanding significant achievements, economics has struggled to account for the history, geography and trajectory of home prices using tried and tested tools. At the same time, other disciplines, ostensibly well-placed to contribute, have tended to stand back. As the analytical task becomes more urgent, this paper assesses the scope for rapprochement. Can cross-disciplinary alliances – the kind that geography so often helps anchor – establish whether housing markets are driven by hidden hands, animal spirits or some other financial intelligence? And what does this have to do with creating more sustainable financial futures?

Abstract not available

This paper reviews the development of models of glacier mass and energy balance and hydrology currently underway by members of the Scott Polar Research Institute, in collaboration with other research institutes, including the Norsk PolarInstitutt, Norway, and GEUS, Denmark.
The modelling strategy builds on the pioneering ‘Arolla’ projects based in the Department of Geography in the 1990s through to the early 2000s. This work saw the development of a physically-based, distributed model that could track the production of melt (using an energy balance approach), the supraglacial flow of water, and its entry and subsequent routing in an evolving subglacial hydrological system. The energy balance model component has now been successfully applied to model the long-term mass balance of a Svalbard glacier, Midre Lovenbreen, over the previous 30 years. The current generation of this model uses ERA40 reanalysis data to drive the model, and it includes accumulation and a detailed treatment of the subsurface processes, including re-freezing of meltwater within the snow pack. We hope to expand this model to encompass the whole of Svalbard, and eventually, the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The subglacial hydrological component is also now being used to model the flow of water beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. Many studies have shown acceleration of flow of the GrIS, driven in some areas by increased inputs of surface water through the body of the ice sheet. Theory would suggest that this will raise subglacial water pressure, and increase flow velocity, and a model-based approach can help to understand the nature and consequences of these changes in water availability. The large ice thicknesses mean that the behaviour of the model drainage system is quite different to that in small glaciers, however; large ice thicknesses lead to rapid collapse of any tunnel-based drainage system, unlike for valley glaciers where the tunnels are relatively stable over a summer season. Ultimately, we aim to link the mass/energy balance model to the hydrology model in order to better predict the possible response of the ice sheet to climatic change.

Full information at
http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/ses/events/

Literature indicates that contact with nature significantly contributes to psychological, physiological and social benefits for humans. At the same time relatively little is known about the intangible benefits that come from the nature experience and what aspects of the experience contribute to these benefits. These issues are poorly understood especially in respect to Australia’s Indigenous populations. Thus, the focus of my PhD is to explore the intangible benefits that relate to nature and their role in health, well-being and social capital, with a particular focus on Indigenous people.

The goal of the work is to gain a deeper understanding of the intangible benefits that nature affords. This study focuses on three separate nature experiences; 1. Community gardening. 2. Indigenous land management in Victoria, Australia. 3. Development of a well-being tool measuring the benefit of contact with nature with people in the UK compared to Australia.

The largest colemanite reserves occur around the Emet Town which is located in the midwest of the Anatolia. Two natural spring water sources (Malı 1 and Malı 2) were supplied to the town (population of 20 000) about 18 years ago.

Arsenic Levels (microgram/L)

The above results indicated that these two natural water sources contained much higher levels of arsenic than MCL set in Turkey. In 1997 the MCL was lowered to 10 microgram/L, from the 50 microgram/L, standard established in 1984. Hence, use of these waters was prohibited on Oct. 2001. It was reported in the literature that geochemical examinations of the Emet borate deposits contained As and S bearing minerals such as: realgar (AsS) and orpiment (As2S3) as scattered nodules in the colemanite formations. Consequently high levels of As in the natural waters were considered to be associated with the dissolution of these minerals occurring in the Emet water catchment area.

Most of the world’s territorial boundaries have long been determined as the delimitors of State sovereignty. Few ethno-territorial conflicts of the contemporary era are focused around positional and legal disputes over the location of land borders. While the “borderless world” thesis is not relevant to large parts of the world, one cannot escape the fact that borders have become (at least until the events of 9/11) easier to cross and, in some cases (such as in Western Europe) have opened up altogether.

Only two of Israel’s land borders, with Egypt and Jordan, are recognised as constituting internationally recognized boundaries. The borders with Syria, Lebanon and a future Palestinian State have yet to be determined through future bilateral agreements which will be acceptable to both sides and will be sanctioned by the international community. The ultimate demarcation and delimitation of these borders will have major implications, not only for the physical security and sovereignty of the respective countries, but also for the verify nature of the State and the way in which its national ethos and identity is determined.

This is particularly the case regarding the Israel – Palestine border. The Green Line, separating Israel from the West Bank since 1948, has only ever had the status of an armistice line, although some commentators would argue that the de facto recognition of this line by the international community, affords it with legally binding status. An alternative line, the course of the Separation Barrier which has been constructed by successive Israeli governments during the past four years, is problematic from a legal and ethical standpoint. In the first instance it has been unilaterally superimposed upon the landscape by the Israeli government, with no consultation with the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, it has resulted in the de facto annexation of West Bank land to the Israeli side of the boundary, including areas which contain Israeli settlements. Ultimate demarcation of an Israeli-Palestinian boundary must be undertaken on a bilateral basis resulting in an agreement between the two sides, and must take into account a myriad of security, demographic, economic and landuse factors, including the possible exchange of land between the two sides, if the final border is to deviate from the course of the Green Line.

After 1917, the new Soviet leadership attributed an unprecedented importance to space as a factor which could make or break the new post-revolutionary state, and correspondingly to the role of spatial knowledge, planning and representation in the project of constructing socialism within Russia and, ultimately, across the borderless expanse of a single global polity. Firstly, the Bolshevik regime understood the power of cartography to affirm and propagate the ‘world-view’ and corresponding spatial visions in which it grounded its claims to legitimacy. Maps were to serve propaganda purposes: Walter Benjamin visiting Moscow in the winter of 1926 remarked that “the map is almost as close to becoming the centre of the new Russian iconic cult as Lenin’s portrait”. Secondly, the party and government leaderships recognized the crucial role that accurate spatial data played in the practical tasks of state-building and economic development. Maps were also to serve utilitarian purposes. As a consequence of its dual function, Soviet cartography bifurcated into two spheres: one concerned with spatial ‘myth-making’, the other with constructing a ‘scientific’ account of space. This paper explores the tensions which this duality produced within Soviet cartographic policy-making and practice during the 1920s and 1930s, and its fatal consequences for the civilian cartographic establishment during the 1937-38 ‘Great Terror’.

A common myth about globalization is that ideas and knowledge, like money, can now circulate freely. This is not always the case. Knowledge and ideas are embedded in particular places and societies and do not lend themselves straightforwardly to export. In this presentation, I examine how governance knowledge was moved across cultural and political boundaries during a development project designed to promote Canadian-style natural resource management and economic development models in the Russian North. This project, one of many cooperative endeavors involving Arctic indigenous peoples and governments, was based in the belief that relevant knowledge should be shared across the state boundaries that transect the Circumpolar North. In order to legitimate the transfer of knowledge from the Canadian North to the Russian one and to overcome historical, cultural, and political differences between Canada and Russia, the Canadian development team relied upon ‘strategies of similarity,’ namely assumptions about 1) a common Arctic space and 2) a shared Arctic indigenous identity. Drawing upon over thirty qualitative interviews and my participation in the project itself, I demonstrate how and why rhetoric about Arctic region building and discourses of indigenous unity, which often resonate well in the realm of international politics, did not serve as unproblematic mechanisms for knowledge transfer on a level closer to home. The limited reach and efficacy of these strategies of sameness indicate that the movement of knowledge cannot rely upon the real or imagined imposition of commensurability between peoples and places.

This seminar explores the role of the criminal law in protecting the environment. Practical examples will be used to explore substantive, procedural and sentencing challenges created by domestic legislation. The seminar will then move on to explore the role of the European Union, raising in particular the constitutional issues raised by the important case decided last year, Commission of the European Communities v Council of the European Union (Case C-176/03), 13 September 2005, in which the European Court of Justice annulled Council Framework Decision 2003/80 on the protection of the environment through criminal law. The conclusion will emphasise the need for a principled and wide-ranging debate.

This paper addresses the English Riots of August 2011. It is divided into three parts: in the first, it examines elite and popular discourse on the riots, which illustrates well the tensions associated with an increasingly socially-divided British society. The second part challenges the attempt by the state and the conservative media to de-contextualise the riots, by demonstrating how the discourse supports particular policy prescriptions of a neo-liberal British government, seeking to reduce its commitment to the poorer sections of its society, in a context of excessive policing, institutional racism, high unemployment, and cut-backs in social welfare expenditure. The arguments are supported by empirical (some anecdotal and subjective) evidence from London, mainly the London borough of Hackney. In the final section, the paper suggests that by reading the lived experiences of the youth and communities, scholars and activists (working collectively) can be directed to forms of action-oriented research that may lead to more transformative and non-violent solutions in Britain.

In this special seminar, Cindi Katz has kindly agreed to discuss her seminal paper “On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement.” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26(4) (2001): 1213-1234. Revisiting this paper, 10 years on, is an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which Cindi’s conceptualisation of countertopography – a perspective and a methodology capable of making links and connections between places undergoing a common set of processes, and enabling a grounded but translocal politics of resistance – has been and may be taken up by other scholars.

Please note that this paper is available at the following address: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Psychology/environmental/ckatz/ckatz_index.html.

In this paper I examine the sensations, criticisms and prejudices which gathered around the spatial practices of women who began to motor and drive in increasing numbers in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. I suggest that while some women positioned their actions as socially and politically progressive, many women distanced themselves from the radical actions and feminist politics of groups such as the suffragettes. Indeed, motoring could be presented as both progressive and conservative, being labelled as a more practical, comfortable and becoming sport for ladies than pastimes such as bicycling, horse-riding or golf. The paper examines how debates erupted about the social acceptability of women driving motor-cars, the effect of the pastime on women’s beauty, and the desirable qualities for a lady’s car. I will discuss the commentaries which gathered around women racing drivers, as well as identifying the social spaces and networks which emerged for women motorists, ranging from the motoring columns and guidebooks for Britain’s ‘motoristes’ and ‘les chauffeuses’, to the West End consumption spaces of the Ladies’ Automobile Club and motoring outfitters, which catered for the desires and fashions of the aristocratic lady motorist.

With the split mandate of continuing the struggle for the homeland and dealing with the immediate needs of a refugee community, exile polities have a very particular sense of political temporality. Based on ethnographic research on the Tibetan Government-in-Exile based in India, this paper investigates this active state-in-waiting; a set of institutions, practices and actors through which this exiled community is experimenting, modifying and rehearsing statehood in order to employ it ‘for real’ back in the homeland. Bringing critical theories of the state into dialogue with geographies of temporality the paper focuses on the idea of rehearsal, and four cuts at rehearsing exile Tibetan stateness will be explored: rehearsal spaces in terms of the function of exile settlements; the various roles adopted and prescribed within the exile community; scripts developed for planning the present and imagining the future; and the role of audiences for these performances of statecraft. In setting the means through which futures are made present alongside issues of prolonged waiting, the paper explores how futures are anticipated and acted upon at the scale of the nation, and examine what happens to these anticipatory logics when the time frame is extended indefinitely. More generally, it will be argued that this case challenges both teleological assumptions about state-building and the presumed correlation between statehood and permanence, and statelessness and temporariness.

In July 1825, the Supreme Criminal Court for Bengal, known as the Nizamat Adalat, reviewed the case of Chait Ram, a man who had been charged at the Bareilly sessions with the murder of his wife, Mussumaut Dhunkeeah. Ram freely admitted killing her and even identified the weapon he had used, but claimed the murder was the result of his wife’s adultery with a neighbour. Since the killing of a wife caught in the act of adultery was not a crime under Islamic law, the qadis (Islamic judges) of the Nizamat Adalat recommended he be released from custody at once. While one of the three officiating British judges argued that Ram had not sufficiently proven that his wife had indeed been conducting an affair, and suggested that a sentence of life imprisonment would be appropriate given the circumstances, his two colleagues disagreed and upheld the qadis ruling. Ram was freed immediately ‘without further punishment.’ At one level, the case of Chait Ram and the decision of the British officials to follow the recommendation of the Muslim legal scholars who reviewed it can perhaps be seen as part of the wider policy of early colonial rulers to attempt to maintain the appearance of benevolent rule by not interfering overtly with established legal practice. Yet British judges had few qualms dismissing reports by the qadis when they disagreed with what had been said. Moreover, an approach which focuses exclusively on what such verdicts meant in terms of the perception of violence in India ignores the fact that remarkably similar cases – and remarkably similar outcomes – were by no means unusual back in Britain.

Biotechnology has recently become populated with all manner of ‘queer’ assemblages: the stem cell line, chimeras, technologically enhanced human beings and the subject of this paper – model mice. These mice, which are central to the performance of contemporary bioscience, are distinct from their historical precursors in several ways. Rather than being constructed as a finished ‘product’ to be covetously controlled as a single piece of tangible intellectual property, the engineered mouse and mouse model colonies from which they are drawn are now conceived of, and operate as, a vital research space or laboratory within which to continually experiment on the ‘software’ of mammalian genetics and phonotypical associations. In this paper I consider how protection of these assemblages is now and could be effected through the application of alternative forms of IPR to the patent including by branding and trademarking and sharewaring. In so doing I compare how such instruments have been applied in other industrial sectors and reflect on the implications that these developments could have for the re-valorization of the commons in the realm of biological resource use.

This paper traces the legal and medical geographies of residential care for inebriates in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scotland. Legislation enabled the creation of private and later public institutions. Local authorities were never formally required to construct such institutions, however. The permissive nature of the legislation created an uneven geography of treatment which I have previously examined using a framework of liberty and control, emphasising that place played a significant part in responses to inebriety. Put simply, the magistrates in one town might sentence an inebriate to five days in prison, whereas those elsewhere might refer an inebriate to a reformatory for up to three years. Formal inebriate care relied on the criminal justice system for its inmates – itself shaped by concerns of class and gender – but was also affected by debates about the relationship between inebriety and insanity, whose sufferers could be subjected to permanent detention for the good of themselves and of society. Against that broader landscape of police cell, court, prison and asylum, I argue that to understand inebriate care – and its failure – we have to grasp the movement of individuals between institutions as much as we do the treatment or otherwise that was provided within them.

During her post-doctoral fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rachel Poliquin delved into the strangely alluring world of taxidermy with a book, a blog, and an exhibition.  Her book Taxidermy and Longing (Penn State Press 2012) explores the cultural history and poetic resonance of taxidermy from its rudimentary beginnings in cabinets of wonder to its revival in contemporary art.  From hunting trophies to extinct species and kitten weddings to perpetual pets, Taxidermy and Longing examines the meaning and matter of preserved animal-things and why anyone would want them to exist.

With a background in visual arts and the cultural history of science, Rachel Poliquin is a writer and curator dedicated to exploring all things orderly and disorderly in the natural world.  Her recent projects have focussed on the cultural history of taxidermy.  In 2009, Poliquin curated the exhibition “Ravishing Beasts: The Strangely Alluring World of Taxidermy” at the Museum of Vancouver, and in 2010, she wrote and designed the vertebrate exhibits for the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia. Poliquin also maintains the taxidermy blog www.ravishingbeasts.com.
 

This paper aims to draw attention to significant shifts in the nature of humane governance during the nineteenth century and to open up a theoretical intersection between life geography, colonial discourse analysis and assemblage theory. It focuses on the career in British colonial governance of George Arthur, successively Aide de Camp in Jersey, Quarter Master General in Jamaica, Superintendent of Honduras, Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, and Governor of the Bombay Presidency. Situating Arthur as an individual component within emergent colonial governmental assemblages, the paper examines the ways that an individual like Arthur could effect and be affected by shifts in humanitarian and governmental discourse and practice. The geographies of Arthur’s entanglements in colonial discourses were paramount in affecting the nature and extent of his capacity to effect reformulation of those discourses. Arthur’s personal performances and expressions of colonial government in different sites of empire and through specific episodes of contestation assisted in the deterritorialization of certain kinds of colonial governmentality and the reterritorialization of others. As Arthur moved from the West Indies to Van Diemen’s Land to Upper Canada to India, so his person discernibly effected shifts from ameliorative through conservative humanitarian, to developmental forms of imperial governance.

Ha-Joon Chang, a Korean national, has taught at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, since 1990. In addition to numerous articles in journals and edited volumes, Ha-Joon Chang has published 13 authored books (four of them co-authored) and 9 edited books (six of them co-edited). His most recent books include Reclaiming Development – An Alternative Economic Policy Manual (with Ilene Grabel; Zed Press, 2004), The East Asian Development Experience – The Miracle, the Crisis, and the Future (Zed Press, 2006), and Bad Samaritans (Random House, UK, 2007, and Bloomsbury USA, 2008), and 23 Things That They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (Penguin, 2010, and Bloomsbury USA, 2011). By 2011, his writings will have been translated into 20 languages. Apart from his academic activities, Ha-Joon Chang has worked as a consultant for numerous international organisations, including various UN agencies (UNCTAD, WIDER, UNDP, UNIDO, UNRISD, INTECH, FAO, and ILO), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. He has also worked as a consultant for a number of governments (such as Canada, Japan, South Africa, the UK, and Venezuela) and various NGOs (such as ActionAid, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam). Ha-Joon Chang is the winner of the 2003 Myrdal Prize, awarded to his book, Kicking Away the Ladder, by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE). He is also the winner (jointly with Richard Nelson of Columbia University) of the 2005 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought awarded by Tufts University. Previous winners of the Prize include the Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Daniel Kahnemann as well as John Kenneth Galbraith

From the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of parks was promoted as a means to alleviate the problems of disease, crime and immorality that beset the American city, to improve its appearance and increase property values; that the South engaged later and more modestly in this movement has been taken as evidence of a broader lack of interest in reforming the city. This paper examines the development of park systems in three southern cities, arguing that it was the structures of municipal government – and particularly, the powers wielded by the park commission – rather than the extent to which citizens and authorities subscribed to the ideals of the park movement, that determined the effectiveness with which they provided for the recreation of their citizens.

This paper looks at the impact of the First World War upon the institutions of dog breeding and showing in Britain. Some have suggested that dogs had a ‘good war’, but it is demonstrable not only that particular breeds suffered – the dachshund, inevitably – but also the business and culture of pedigree dogs. Such suspicion was heaped upon dog owners, breeders and showers, particularly under the food shortages of 1916-1918, that their patriotism and Britishness was called into question. The leadership of the Kennel Club was challenged, as was the survival of the business of pedigree breeding. Whilst dog breeding has been understood principally in terms of class relations, this study thus concentrates on questions of politics and even biopolitics. It extends the study of the cultural ‘domestication’ of the pet dog by looking at the exclusion and abjection of animals and their owners from the national community.

This presentation offers a conceptualisation of assemblage as a basis for a distinct form of analysis and orientation to critical urbanism. In particular, it outlines three sets of contributions that assemblage affords for thinking politically and normatively of the city. First, agency: the particular purchase that the distributive and multiple nature of agency within assemblage brings to critical urbanism. There are three concerns here that the agency of assemblage calls forth: distribution, capacities, and power. Second, production: the emphasis assemblage brings to emergence and to the labour of maintenance, which casts light on the contingent ways in which particular urban assemblages are invested in to the exclusion of alternative ways of imagining and living in the city. The concern with production entails consideration of a key element in the constitution of contemporary cities: mobilities, the increasingly rapid production of urbanism through travelling policies, ideas, goods, money and people, and their attendant inclusions and exclusions. Third, imaginary: the politics at work through the imaginary of assemblage itself, as collage, composition, and gathering. I examine two registers of urban imaginary that assemblage sets to work: first, the image of the cosmopolitan city, as the closest approximation in the social sciences to the assemblage idea; and, second, the concern with gathering as a particular form of generative critique, i.e. the production of the city through multiple constituencies, knowledges and voices.

Not everywhere in Europe can marriage be regarded as a cornerstone of the social order, or the basis around which new households are created. Michael Mitterauer illustrated back in 1977 how in eighteenth century Carinthia, Austria’s most southerly province, marriages amongst the landless poor did not necessarily result in household formation or even cohabitation. In many more cases, legal restrictions on peasant marriage resulted in children outside wedlock, either borne of a fleeting encounter or a stable relationship forbidden its ceremonial and legal legitimisation. Yet strangely, even after the Austrian state’s concern was piqued by the extremity of extra-marital fertility in some rural districts, the abolition of legal restrictions of peasant marriage in 1868 did not result in increased take-up of marriage in all parts of the monarchy. In rural Carinthia in fact, births outside wedlock continued to rise, and sustained their plateau well into the twentieth century at level of up to 90% in some parishes. What meaning does a marriage ceremony have in such circumstances where its absence was first enforced by law, and then made irrelevant by the evolution of practices of fertility, sexuality and courtship that seemed to thrive on its very absence? In this paper I explore the reasons behind the preferred option for the overwhelming majority of the population of the Gurk valley in Carinthia, prior to 1938: non-marriage.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of parks was promoted as a means to alleviate the problems of disease, crime and immorality that beset the American city, to improve its appearance and increase property values; that the South engaged later and more modestly in this movement has been taken as evidence of a broader lack of interest in reforming the city. This paper examines the development of park systems in three southern cities, arguing that it was the structures of municipal government – and particularly, the powers wielded by the park commission – rather than the extent to which citizens and authorities subscribed to the ideals of the park movement, that determined the effectiveness with which they provided for the recreation of their citizens.

Jennifer Gold is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, Cambridge University and was a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University between January and April 2009. Her research examines the formulation and implementation of the UK government’s resettlement policy for former colonial scientists, with particular reference to forestry science. This paper examines the interconnections between decolonization and post-war ‘manpower resource’ concerns, situating resettlement within domestic debates on knowledge economy formation and Cold War geopolitics.

David Slater is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Loughborough University. His recent publications include – Imperial Geopolitics and the Promise of Democracy (Development and Change, Nov 2007), Imperial Powers and Democratic Imaginations (Third World Quarterly Dec 2006) and Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial, 2004, Blackwell, Oxford. He is currently writing on the geopolitics of knowledge and imperial power.

Dr Bialasiewicz is interested in the political geography of Europe, and in particular is concerned with the relations between national/regional cultures and the development of the Idea of Europe.

Recent literature on the mobility patterns of a so-called ‘global elite’ or ‘transnational capitalist class’ has focused on their ease of cross-border movement and the ability to operate in a range of national settings due to the increased homogenisation of ‘global business space’. This representation fails, however, to recognise the ways in which the practices of individuals are implicated in the construction of this global space.

This paper uses the example of British expatriates in China to examine these debates in relation to particular spaces and scales. While many ‘career expatriates’ argue that they no longer possess a particular ‘national’ identity, it is clear that their abilities to be ‘global citizens’ in terms of where they are able to live and work are a reflection of practices at a range of smaller scales. This paper will focus on the gender dimensions of these processes and will focus on the scales of the body and the household to examine how the ‘national’ space of China is experienced and negotiated by men and women. The paper is based on 120 interviews with Britons in China, the UK and Singapore.

This paper explores how an ethos of mutualism formed and was expressed through spatial relationships (agreements about competitive recruitment of subscribers, for example) – it has lessons for the new mutualism beloved of Milburn, Reid etc. It will be based on the book Professor Mohan recently published with Martin Gorsky (Mutualism and health care, Manchester University Press, 2006)

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Exploring how sustainability is inextricably linked to conservation and biodiversity.

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