bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gender, Class, and Space
Authors: Pratt G , Hanson S
Published: October 2006

The social area analyses and factorial ecologies of the 1950s and 1960s have constrained the way in which scholars conceptualize urban space; in particular, one can trace contemporary arguments regarding the social reproduction of class to the notion of homogeneous neighborhoods that emerges from social area analyses and factorial ecology. It is argued that the growth in female labor-force participation, the fact of occupational sex segregation, and other recent demographic trends have important implications for the social geography of the North American city. With 1980 Census data from the Worcester, MA Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, the impact of the gender division of labor on urban social space is described; in particular it is shown that occupational segregation is an important source of intraneighborhood class heterogeneity. The final section of the paper is an exploration of the implications of the findings for theories of social reproduction and for class-based urban politics.
Industrial Restructuring, Local Politics and the Reproduction of Labour Power: Some Theoretical Considerations
Authors: Warde A
Published: October 2006

The industrial restructuring thesis is criticised for offering too limited an explanation of local political consequences. A more elaborate model is developed to connect industrial change and local political behaviour. Burawoy's concept of factory regime and Castells' analysis of collective consumption are scrutinised to establish connections between production processes, labour-market conditions, patterns in the reproduction of labour power, and local political practices. These links are illustrated empirically by reference to a local case-study of a town in northwest England. The model is developed in terms of the operation of three mechanisms which underlie local political practices: factory regime, local labour-market, and mode of the provision of services.
Street Life: The Politics of Carnival
Authors: Jackson P
Published: October 2006

The notion is developed of Carnival as a contested social event whose political significance is inscribed in the landscape. Some themes from Caribbean history and social anthropology are brought together with some recent ideas from social geography concerning the territorial basis of British racism. The focus is on London's Notting Hill Carnival but it is argued that the significance of this contemporary British event can only be understood against the background of Britain's colonial interests in the Caribbean. In the empirical part of the paper an analysis of media representations of the Notting Hill Carnival is developed, concentrating on the disturbances associated with Carnival in 1976. Press reports of the Carnival riots signalled a significant shift in British ‘racial’ discourse and a marked deterioration in relations between black people and the police, involving a ‘criminalization’ of black people in general. The spatial constitution of symbolic resistance is described and the paper concludes with a discussion of the ‘carnivalization’ of society, challenging the conventional distinction between culture and politics.
Production Confronts Consumption: Landscape Perception and Social Conflict in the Hudson Valley
Authors: Heiman M K
Published: October 2006

With the Hudson River Valley for a setting, I examine in this paper the use of nature as a resource for production, and the employment of nature as a refuge from the negative social and environmental externalities accompanying production, As expressed through landscape art and design, the Valley was significant for development of a landscape ideology which, at first, ignored productive intrusion into areas used for leisure and residential consumption. However, given their dialectic relationship, tension between production and consumption in the landscape remained. Eventually the state was called on to attempt a spatial balance, when private efforts to defend nature as personal consumption space were no longer effective. Today, as in the past, individuals, in their defense of nature as consumption space, continue to be driven toward private positions which may be antagonistic to a collective class interest in capital accumulation. Acknowledgement of this possibility is important to realize new class alliances and the revolutionary potential of consumption-based social movements.
Locality and Small Firms: Some Reflections from the Franco-British Project, “Industrial Systems, Technical Change and Locality”
Authors: McArthur R
Published: October 2006

Research carried out as part of the Franco-British project “Industrial Systems, Technical Change and Locality” has highlighted weaknesses in current work on locality. In particular, it has been found that examination of the role of small and medium sized firms, recognition of the role of cooperation in capitalist relations of production, and identification of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ notions of locality all help to produce a more robust understanding of social and economic change at the restricted scale of the locality.
Survey 14: The Locally Spoken Word and Local Struggles
Authors: Prod A
Published: October 2006

Local language usage is embedded in situated practices and power relations. Despite arguments to the contrary, the distinctive locally spoken word is not on the way out. The locally spoken word may serve as a weapon of the weak or as a site of ideological contestation and struggles over meaning. Seen in this light, a recent spate of literature on geographical variations in language usage is quite disappointing. A vast terrain of inquiry lies open.
The ‘New’ Regional Geography and Problems of Narrative
Authors: Sayer A
Published: October 2006

The growth of interest in a ‘new’ or reconstructed regional geography is discussed and some of the methodological issues which it raises are examined. The movement originated in radical geography and involves an ‘empirical turn’ towards works of geohistorical synthesis. Scales of interest range from the global down to the microsociological, with locality studies being prominent. The methodological issues include the problem of the role of theory where explanations tend to be contextual in character, and the need for integrating ethnographic and political economic accounts. Although there are echoes of the old idiographic–nomothetic polarity in the controversy over the ‘empirical turn’, this traditional way of interpreting the debate is shown to have been undermined by realist philosophy. Yet problems remain in a different form, most importantly, concerning narrative. Two key aspects of narrative are discussed: first, the general problem of the construction of texts and their understanding, especially where they involve the kind of ambitious attempts at geohistorical synthesis which the new regional geography implies; second, there is the more specific problem of the advantages and disadvantages of narrative as opposed to analysis. The paper concludes with some speculations on the kinds of text required by a new, critical regional geography.
Race and the Reproduction of Factory Labor in Malaysia
Authors: Eden J A
Published: October 2006

Eager for a rapid increase in labor productivity, the governments of the Third World are turning increasingly to capitalist models of development and to Western and Japanese multinational firms for investment. The recent branch plant industrialization of Malaysia exemplifies a program of statist capitalism intended, among other things, to resolve internal political and social crises. Malaysia's New Economic Policy (NEP) encourages industrial investment in large-scale labor-intensive enterprises as a principal means of providing jobs for the urban poor while bolstering the economy in general. Although the NEP purportedly strives to achieve racial integration and equality at the modern industrial workplace, data from a rapidly urbanizing area suggest that the reality is one of increasing spatial and structural segregation of groups among various large and small-scale activities. The restructured local economy, on the one hand, conserves established sectors dominated by Chinese capital and labor, while, on the other hand, mobilizing migrant Malay labor for employment by large foreign-owned factories.
Medical Care, Welfare State, and Deindustrialization in the Southern Cone
Authors: Scarpaci J L
Published: October 2006

The Spanish-speaking countries of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) have long been characterized as the welfare states of Latin America. This myth is challenged by reviewing the role of the state in the financing of medical care. The Bismarkian model of medical-care financing is reexamined through the theoretical insights derived from bureaucratic authoritarianism. State concessions to the labor force in the form of medical-care benefits are now less crucial to labor's relationship with the state than they have been at any other time in the postwar period, and they remain independent of whether the military remain in power. Comparative aspects of medical-care financing, industrialization policies, and state–labor relations indicate that structural constraints—in the form of securing export-product niches, labor costs, and the threat of military intervention—have cast medical-care benefits in a relatively inferior position when the labor force bargains with management or with the state. Deindustrialization has forced thousands of workers into jobs that lack the comprehensive medical benefits that once characterized the traditional industrial sector. The welfare-state concept has given way to a new ideology that emphasizes individual choices in life-style and encourages medical-program affiliation according to income levels.
Boys Town
Authors: Deutsche R
Published: October 2006

Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity combines urban and cultural discourses in order to defend a foundationalist social theory against the challenges raised by new social movements, political philosophies, and cultural practices. Adopting Jameson's definition of postmodernism as an embracing historical condition in which the valorization of fragmentation and difference conceals the spatioeconomic relations that underlie the totality of late capitalist society, Harvey contends that intellectual and aesthetic currents which insist on different starting points of social analysis or identify new objects of political analysis are necessarily complicit with advanced capitalism's concealment of social reality. It is no accident that Harvey's claim to perceive an objective basis of totality entails a refusal of feminist theories of representation, for feminists have analyzed such totalizing visions as the fictions of subjects driven by the desire to disavow their own partial and fragmented condition through the refusal of difference.
Gilding the Smokestacks: The New Symbolic Representations of Deindustrialised Regions
Authors: Watson S
Published: October 2006

Central to attempts to restructure the economic and industrial base of deindustrialised regions is the redefinition of image and the creation of new forms of identity. It is argued that this cultural focus is often absent from analyses of industrial change and the regeneration of localities. With a focus on two deindustrialised areas in Australia which have faced significant job loss in recent years, the local promotional texts are analysed to investigate how important the production of a revitalised image has been to the regeneration of these areas. The author looks at what elements in the texts drew on specifically local or national myths and culture and what elements drew on more universal symbolic discourses and realities, in particular dominant Western notions of masculinity. The concern was to see if the form of representation of the dominant discourses varied spatially or in the process of change.
Mrs Thatcher's Vision of the ‘New Britain’ and the other Sides of the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’
Authors: Crang P , Martin R L
Published: October 2006

Over the past decade, the city of Cambridge has been used increasingly by academics and the media as an exemplar of the role that entrepreneurial high-technology development can play in local and national economic growth. Politically, this symbolism has found a ready resonance with the Thatcher government's vision of the ‘new Britain’. In this paper the reality and rhetoric behind this use of Cambridge is critically examined. First, the politics and polemics of locality under Thatcherism are highlighted. Second, the dominant account of the much-celebrated ‘Cambridge phenomenon’ is outlined to reveal its ideological leitmotivs of entrepreneurship, high-technology, postindustrialism, the small firm, and the union of academic science and business. Third, it is shown how these rhetorical constructions of a ‘boomtown’ locality are in reality weakened by a number of tensions within the ‘phenomenon’ itself. Moreover, it is then shown that there are important silences in the dominant view of Cambridge, certain ‘other sides’ to the city that portray a rather different set of meanings, both about Cambridge as a success story and about high-technology development as the basis of economic prosperity. These other sides of Cambridge provide a much more complex and, in some important respects, a very different expression of the socioeconomic renewal championed by Thatcherism.
Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism and Geography
Authors: Bondi L , Domosh M
Published: October 2006

In a recent paper entitled “Travels in the postmodern”, Elspeth Probyn uses the metaphors of local, locale, and location to open up a political dialogue between feminism and postmodernism, providing a particularly explicit example of a more general use of spatial figures in contemporary theoretical debate. These spatial references are not entirely figurative, but allude to our positioning within particular contexts, which both frame and are constructed by our texts. Thus, Probyn's dialogue inevitably raises geographical questions. Moreover, geography is not merely a passive, unnamed party through which Probyn's dialogue is conducted; it is not immune from or in any way ‘outside’ the situatedness its terminology is employed to articulate. In this context, the metaphorical maps Probyn uses to find her way between the differing terrains of feminism and postmodernism are far from neutral, truthful, transparent representations. In this paper an extension of Probyn's travels at the boundaries between feminism and postmodernism is sought by introducing a more active, self-critical geographical voice. The often hidden tensions underlying the linkages between geography, postmodernism, and feminism are explored, and key issues at the interface between critical human geography and feminist deconstruction are brought to the fore.
All the World is Staged: Intellectuals and the Projects of Ethnography
Authors: Katz C
Published: October 2006

Feminism, decolonization, and ‘new social movements’ have decentered the geopolitical power of the ‘First World’ and ruptured the relations of exploitation, domination, and imperialism that undergird it and the authority of the white, male, ruling class, Western subject. The tensions and reorientations in the macrological sphere resonate in social and cultural discourse where feminist theory, poststructuralism, and subaltern studies have called into question the subject positions associated with these relations of power. Rather than making clear that all observers and commentators stand someplace, this ‘sea change’ left many intellectuals adrift, flirting with disabling relativism. Given the projects of representing how others stand and understanding the ground on which they stand, ethnographers have been late to recognize their complicity in masking their own positions as they construct the objects of their inquiry. As intellectuals operating in a postcolonial world, we must take seriously Spivak's admonition about representation as a staging of the world in a political context and begin to connect the ‘micrological textures of power’ with larger political-economic relations. In this expanded field, we can no longer valorize the concrete experience of oppressed peoples while remaining uncritical of our role as intellectuals. Neither can we presume to speak for or about peoples and nations as if they were outside of the contemporary world system, refusing to recognize that our ability to construct them as such is rooted in a larger system of domination. In this paper the author develops these themes by offering a critique of familiar modes and practices of representation and draws on ethnographic research in New York City and rural Sudan to argue that by interrogating the subject positions of ourselves as intellectuals as well as the objects of our inquiry we can excavate a ‘space of betweenness’ wherein the multiple determinations of a decentered world are connected. Appropriating this knowledge we may develop enabling analyses of power and difference to find collective paths toward change.
Angry Writing: (Re)Presenting the Unethical World of the Ethnographer
Authors: Keith M
Published: October 2006

The manner in which academic protocols fraudulently prohibit certain textual strategies whilst celebrating others is addressed. In particular it is suggested that, in focusing on aesthetics, reflexive anthropologists evade rather than resolve questions both of ethics and of epistemology. This contention can be understood in terms of the responsibility of the author/scriptor with reference to the presence of anger in academic prose and to The Satanic Verses controversy.

This paper questions the manner in which anger routinely disqualifies writing from academic status. In talking theoretically about presentational style, I want to address substantively issues of research ethics. What angers me about ethnographic work generally is that a sustained vogue for reflexivity so commonly casts a crisis of representation in terms of the relation between subject matter and narrative to the cost of consideration of the relation between representation and audience. The smugness of the academy sits comfortably beside ostentatious angst over the academic method. Reflexivity decays into narcissism. What angers me specifically about ethnography in geography is that in the identity crises of everyday rites of credentialism geographers cast themselves as an ‘Other’, pursuing an elusive vogue in social theory, sociology, or, perhaps this week, anthropology. Yet ethnography is neither a passport to a ringside view of the exotic nor a form of methodological avant gardeism. Such issues are discussed here in the context of my own participant observation work with the police; research that was arguably deceitful, unrepresentative, undemocratic, and perhaps indefensible. Reflexively so.
A Modern Stream: Water, Landscape, Modernism, and Geography
Authors: Matless D
Published: October 2006

In this paper a conjunction of geography, environmental thought, and modernism in the early twentieth century is discussed, around the metaphor of ‘a modern stream’. It is focused on the work of Patrick Geddes and Vaughan Cornish. After an outline of Geddes's conceptions of human and environmental evolution and progress, the focus is on the writings of Geddes, Cornish, and Lewis Mumford on nature, technology, and electricity are discussed. Cornish's accounts of the Panama Canal, with their emphases on energy, science, hygiene, race, and beauty, are then considered in detail in order to bring together these wider arguments around a particular landscape. The paper ends with the suggestion that the ‘modern stream’ metaphor contains within it many of the key themes of modern geography.
Red River Valley: Geographical Studies in the Landscape of Language
Authors: Jensen O M
Published: October 2006

A handful of plain maps are presented, each one representing certain features of the landscape of language. Through the use of conventional mapping techniques, what is invisible becomes visible. A morphological map shows a plain of speech hemmed in by two mountain ranges of silence and cut through by a silent stream of perfect representation. A topological map depicts this landscape in terms of the three fields originally defined by Charles Sander Peirce as iconic, indexical, and symbolic. An anthropological map explains how the landscape is being settled by Homo significator, who first lives in Ferdinand Tonnics's realm of Gcmeinschaft and then moves across the river into the realm of Gescllschaft. Finally a map of the genesis of landscape is drawn based on principles borrowed from Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire.
Public Space and the Public Sphere: Political Theory and the Historical Geography of Modernity
Authors: Howell P
Published: October 2006

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the historical geography of modernity. It is argued that the exclusive focus on social theory has detrimental effects on the appreciation of normative political concerns and that it ignores the resurgence of normative political theory. Habermas's concept of the public sphere, and its place within his theoretical and empirical studies, is, by contrast, commendably concerned with linking the social and historical work with normative political theorising, and its usefulness for geographical investigation is applauded. However, the criticisms directed from, in particular, communitarian political theorists and contextualist social researchers would seem to make his attempt to bring a ‘strong’ theory of public political life back within the remit of a reconstructed social theory less plausible. One set of responses to this criticism comes in the form of the attempt to build geography into this normative political theory, turning public spheres into public spaces; Arcndt's political theory, in conclusion, is thus held to be a significant contribution to the historical geography of modernity.
Situating Cultural Politics: Fringe Festivals and the Production of Spaces of Intersubjectivity
Authors: Willems-Braun Bruce
Published: October 2006

Canada's fringe festivals are important interventions in the discourses and institutions framing Canadian theatre, leading some to recognize them as sites of a radical cultural politics. Most commentators have placed their attention on performance at these events, but in this paper, the focus is on the manner in which these events reorganize urban spaces into festival spaces, constructing informal discursive arenas within which the interaction of patrons, artists, and organizers is encouraged, and which situates performance, display, and the negotiation of social identities within an intersubjective field less influenced by certain constraints in traditional theatre. What is often overlooked, however, is that these discursive arenas are constructed within, at the same time as they engage, the social and spatial organization of the city, and are therefore marked by certain exclusions and inclusions. By refusing to abstract these festivals, as ‘artistic events’, attention can be paid to their ‘topography’, to explore the relations between cultural practice, social identity, and the organization of the city.
Escaping the Herbarium: A Critique of Gunnar Olsson's “Chiasm of Thought-and-Action”
Authors: Sparke Matthew
Published: October 2006

Olsson's recent paper “Chiasm of thought-and-action” represents a patriarchal form of ‘thought-and-action’. It provides a clear illustration of Rose's argument that masculinist geographical knowledge remains held in tension between voyeurism and narcissism. Although it would seem to cast itself as a bold Nietschzean struggle against the norms of bourgeois culture, Olsson's writing effectively reaffirms the masculinist imperialism upon which such culture is predicated. It exemplifies how the libertine's rebellion remains limited within certain phallogocentric battlements that it only succeeds to further entrench. This critical argument—borrowed in part from the critique of Lacan by the French feminist Irigaray—introduces other questions about Lacan also applicable to Olsson's writing concerning the work of the French psychoanalyst. In particular, the way in which Lacan's account of subjectivity seems to dehistoricise and fix the fate of a universalised ‘subject’ within a world stilled by symbolicism would appear to find a reflection jubilantly seized and extended in the insubstantial shape of Olsson's diagrams of human action. These reified spatial abstractions are nonetheless open to critical receding as recent feminist, lesbian and gay theories have shown. Such recoding indicates how critical theory—despite a widespread antitheoreticism that is vindicated by papers like Olsson's—might still assist any project to escape the dessicated and dead ends collected together in something like the herbarium dreamt as the “Chiasm of thought-and-action”.
The ‘Right of Thirst’ for Animals in Islamic Law: A Comparative Approach
Authors: Wescoat James L
Published: October 2006

Little attention has been given to animals' access to water in different cultural and legal contexts. The ‘right of thirst’ in Islamic law constitutes an important exception. In the first section of this paper I outline the doctrinal bases for the ‘right of thirst’, and clarify the sense in which it is a ‘right’ and is ‘Islamic’. In the second section of the paper I assess the relevance of Islamic water law in two geographic contexts, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the American West. Comparison of the two cases indicated that direct relevance for Pakistan is more complex than expected, and indirect relevance for the USA is less remote and more stimulating than might be expected.
Lean and Mean: US Meat-Packing in an Era of Agro-Industrial Restructuring
Authors: Ufkes Frances M
Published: October 2006

A new wave of agro-industrialization has taken place in the US pork sector since the mid-1980s, Driven by changes in consumer demand and by restructuring in US meat-packing, agro-industrialization is centered around lean-meat production and involves alterations in genetics, feeding regimes, facilities construction, and management practices ‘down on the farm’, Two main expressions of intensive accumulation in US meat-packing are evident, but the lean-meat imperative is integral to both, There is a movement towards an increased scale and standardization of production as major meat-packing firms develop value-added meats for general consumption. Counter to this is the manufacture of boutique meats by firms that are poised to exploit health and food safety-related challenges to energy-intensive and capital-intensive ‘productivist’ agriculture, In this paper the current thrust of agro-industrialization in the US pork sector is examined in historical perspective, within the rise, decline, and recomposition of the postwar livestock–feed–meat complex. Attention is given to value-based marketing and pricing systems that many meat-packers have recently instituted to insure adequate supplies of lean hogs. In this paper it is argued that value-based pricing results in highly differentiated payments to producers, thus spurring demand by feeder-farmers for an array of new, commercial inputs—lean genetics, partitioning agents, medications—in hopes of refashioning the interior geography of the pig for profit.
Are You Man Enough, Big and Bad Enough? Ecofeminism and Wolf Eradication in the USA
Authors: Emel Jody
Published: October 2006

There is much to be gained and little to be lost by understanding and articulating our thinking about who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are. In this regard, the usual pattern of labeling, judging, and acting nearly always leads to taxonomizing or classification of people or things—sometimes resulting in benefits for the classified ‘other’, sometimes just the opposite. In this paper, the representations of the wolf in the USA during the historical period of its near extinction at the hands of private citizens and government hunters are examined. From an ecofeminist position, it is argued that indulgence in the practices of representation in those particular forms exhibited during that historical period were not only devastating to the wolf and other animals but also the same practices that perpetuated racism and sadism in the treatment of other people who were purportedly below European-American males on the hierarchy of beings. The argument contained within this paper cautions us to beware of admonitions of ‘necessity’ that creep into our thinking about the way the world must be (that is, there is no way to coexist with ‘savagery’) and encourages the examination of both cultural and economic determination of human and nonhuman animal relations.
Distance, Surface, Elsewhere: A Feminist Critique of the Space of Phallocentric Self/Knowledge
Authors: Rose Gillian
Published: October 2006

In this paper I focus on a particular subjectivity and a particular spatiality. The subjectivity is that of dominant Western masculinities. The spatiality is the specific organisation of space through which that subjectivity is constituted and through which it sees the world, a problematic described here as a space of self/knowledge. The importance of a particular organisation of space to this particular subjectivity is introduced through the work of Irigaray, and elaborated with reference to Mulvey's account of the Lacanian mirror stage. Both Mulvey and Irigaray emphasise the importance of a distancing, visualised space to dominant masculinities. However, Mulvey and Irigaray have both been criticised for conceptualising this dominant subjectivity and his visual space in ways which leave little possibility for feminist disruption. These criticisms have been made from a diverse range of theoretical-political positions. In this paper, however, I engage specifically with the visual space of phallocentric space/knowledge, and therefore only explore the critical possibilities offered by other, more recent feminist appropriations of Lacan because these have centred precisely on questions of visuality, spatiality, and subjectivity. In particular, interpretations of Lacan's distinction between a certain organisation of space and what Lacan calls ‘the gaze’ arc drawn upon here in order to theorise both the fragilities of dominant masculinities and the existence of other visualised spaces of self/knowledge. It is thus argued that certain psychoanalytic feminisms can offer a critical account of phallocentric self/knowledge, which is also a critical account of the production of visual spatialities.
Technology, Power, and Space—The Means and Ends of Geographies of Technology
Authors: Hinchliffe Steve
Published: October 2006

This paper is about the means and ends of geographical inquiries into technology and technoscience. In working through a body of literature commonly grouped together under the collective phrase ‘science, technology, and society’, and in seeking to work upon empirical research on electricity networks, the author draws attention to the ontological and representational issues that are confronted when thinking through geographies of technology and geographies of techno-scientific knowledge. In the first part of the paper the ontological status of nonhumans and the politics of representation are discussed as a consequence of a rejection of technical and social determinisms. In the second part, the author turns to review some of the analytical metaphors that are conjured with in order to address the issues raised in the first part. In the third part of the paper the more overtly spatial metaphors of the literature of science, technology, and society are confronted and the move from a measured and ordered managerialist approach to the spatiality of technologies and technoscience is reviewed. In the fourth section, some lessons for the politics of a reconfigured geographical engagement with technology and technoscience are raised.
Geographies of Consumption: A Commodity-Chain Approach
Authors: Hartwick Elaine
Published: October 2006

Recent media and political events illustrate some links between consumption and production. The author explores these links through the concept of commodity chains. This concept has been partially developed in the literature, and an attempt is made to specify this further by means of the illustration of gold. The message is that the ‘geographies of consumption’ literature is insufficient by itself but becomes stronger when joined with a materialist commodity-chain analysis. The author moves from a deconstruction of the images of men and women in gold advertisements, at the consumption end, to the various places of production, beginning with Italian gold jewelry factories, then South African gold mines and apartheid, and third Lesotho, where Basotho men migrate to South African gold mines leaving behind ‘gold widows‘. The material reality of these gold widows stands in contrast to the ‘gold windows' of Tiffany's and the images of women and men in advertisements for gold. The author opines that this sort of analysis necessitates a politics of consumption in which the two ends are reconnected; and that this could lead to a new ‘commercial geography‘.
Women's Work, Men's Work: Gender, Labor Organization, and Technology Acquisition in a Oaxacan Village
Authors: Mutersbaugh Tad
Published: October 2006

Research undertaken in the Oaxacan (Mexican) indigenous community of Santa Cruz indicates that gender differences in technology acquisition derive in part from locally unique gendered patterns of labor participation. Previous studies have identified constraints on women's adoption of technology which stem from women's relative resource poverty and mode of insertion into the labor process. In the present comparative gender analysis labor-process theory is extended to argue that Santa Cruz men's engagement with communal labor (from which women are spatially and socially excluded) provides men with: (1) gender-specific sociocultural tools transferable to value-added-commodity production, and (2) a social space for discourse on labor-organization technology. Santa Cruz women's (socially constructed) involvement with household production, by contrast, isolates women, fragmenting the social space necessary for reworking labor-organization technologies. Women, however, contest men's advantages: the social organization of production which excludes women also empowers. Over the eight-year course of a men's cooperative production project, women creatively and successfully utilized their control over key steps in the household labor process to exact concessions collectively from men and to create a separate space for a women's production co-op. Nevertheless, women continued to confront workplace-organizational problems as a result of their village-structured experience. Initiatives designed to promote women's technology acquisition must not depend on the assumption of workplace-organizational tools in either men or women, but must identify and address gender disparities in workplace-organizational technology.
Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation, Territorial Organization and the Historical Geography of Spatial Scales
Authors: Brenner Neil
Published: October 2006

During the last decade, discussions of geographical scale and its social production have proliferated. Building upon this literature, in particular the writings of Lefebvre and Harvey, I investigate the implications of the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital—between capital's necessary dependence on territory or place and its space-annihilating tendencies—for the production of spatial scale under capitalism. I elaborate the notion of a ‘scalar fix’ to theorize the multiscalar configurations of territorial organization within, upon, and through which each round of capital circulation is successively territorialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized. These multiscalar configurations of territorial organization position geographical scales within determinate, hierarchical patterns of interdependence and thereby constitute a relatively fixed and immobile geographical infrastructure for each round of capital circulation. Drawing upon Lefebvre's neglected work De l'État, I argue that the scalar structures both of cities and of territorial states have been molded ever more directly by the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital since the late 19th century, when a ‘second nature’ of socially produced sociospatial configurations was consolidated on a world scale. On this basis a schematic historical geography of scalar fixes since the late 19th century is elaborated that highlights the key role of the territorial state at once as a form of territorialization for capital and as an institutional mediator of uneven geographical development on differential, overlapping spatial scales. From this perspective, the current round of globalization can be interpreted as a multidimensional process of re-scaling in which both cities and states are being reterritorialized in the conflictual search for ‘glocal’ scalar fixes.
The Dissemination of Development
Authors: Power Marcus
Published: October 2006

In this paper I consider the ways in which discourses of development enframe postcolonial Africa. The dissemination of development is discussed in three principal ways. First, constructions of national identities and of the nation-state and their dissemination through development discourse is considered. Second, the textual dissemination of meaning through the process of writing development is explored with specific reference to Hegel's writings on the principle of development. Third, the dissemination of historical and geographical worlds through discourses of development is considered with the continued durability of the idea of three worlds as the key focal point of discussion. I formulate an antidevelopment incite which attempts to disrupt the enframing of postcolonial Africa through ‘Western’ discourses of development. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the worlds of development have proven so persistent, and of the implications for a more radical ‘post-colonial’ development geography.
A century later - a total evidence re-evaluation of the phylogeny of scutigeromorph centipedes (Myriapoda:Chilopoda)
Authors: Edgecombe Gregory D. , Giribet Gonzalo
Published: October 2006

Scutigeromorpha (‘house centipedes’) play a pivotal role in myriapod systematics in being the sister group to all other chilopods, but their internal phylogeny has not been comprehensively appraised since K. W. Verhoeff’s morphological investigations a century ago. Relationships between the three families of Scutigeromorpha are inferred based on a combined analysis of approximately 5.5 Kb of sequence data from five molecular markers (complete 18S rRNA, a 2.2-Kb fragment of 28S rRNA, 16S rRNA, cytochrome c oxidase subunit I, histone H3) and 33 ingroup morphological characters. Molecular data are available for 19 ingroup terminals representing 14 morphospecies that include the genera Scutigerina, Madagassophora (family Scutigerinidae), Sphendononema (family Pselliodidae), Scutigera, Thereuopoda, Thereuopodina, Thereuonema, Allothereua and Parascutigera (family Scutigeridae). Morphology resolves the southern African–Malagasy Scutigerinidae as sister to all other Scutigeromorpha, whereas rival sister-group relationships between the Neotropical–Afrotropical Pselliodidae and Scutigerinidae + Scutigeridae or Pselliodidae + Scutigerinidae and Scutigeridae are resolved by the molecular and combined analyses. Monophyly of Scutigeridae and Thereuoneminae are stable across a broad range of analytical parameters. Thereuoneminae is composed of two stable clades: an Allothereua + Parascutigera group, and a grouping of Thereuopoda, Thereuonema and Thereuopodina. Molecular and combined analyses resolve the genus Scutigerina and the morphospecies Scutigerina weberi as paraphyletic, in both cases with a Malagasy clade excluding populations from southern Africa.
The distance that kinesin-1 holds its cargo from the microtubule surface measured by fluorescence interference contrast microscopy
Authors: Kerssemakers Jacob , Howard Jonathon , Hess Henry , Diez Stefan
Published: October 2006

Kinesin-1 is a motor protein that carries cellular cargo such as membrane-bounded organelles along microtubules (MTs). The homodimeric motor molecule contains two N-terminal motor domains (the motor “heads”), a long coiled-coil domain (the “rod” or “stalk”), and two small globular “tail” domains. Much has been learned about how kinesin's heads step along a MT and how the tail is involved in cargo binding and autoinhibition. However, little is known about the role of the rod. Here, we investigate the extension of the rod during active transport by measuring the height at which MTs glide over a kinesin-coated surface in the presence of ATP. To perform height measurements with nanometer precision, we used fluorescence interference contrast microscopy, which is based on the self-interference of fluorescent light from objects near a reflecting surface. Using an
in situ
calibrating method, we determined that kinesin-1 molecules elevate gliding MTs 17 ± 2 nm (mean ± SEM) above the surface. When varying the composition of the surrounding nucleotides or removing the negatively charged -COOH termini of the MTs by subtilisin digestion, we found no significant changes in the measured distance. Even though this distance is significantly shorter than the contour length of the motor molecule (≈60 nm), it may be sufficient to prevent proteins bound to the MTs or prevent the organelles from interfering with transport.
Sampling the multiple folding mechanisms of Trp-cage in explicit solvent
Authors: Juraszek J. , Bolhuis P. G.
Published: October 2006

We investigate the kinetic pathways of folding and unfolding of the designed miniprotein Trp- cage in explicit solvent. Straightforward molecular dynamics and replica exchange methods both have severe convergence problems, whereas transition path sampling allows us to sample unbiased dynamical pathways between folded and unfolded states and leads to deeper understanding of the mechanisms of (un)folding. In contrast to previous predictions employing an implicit solvent, we find that Trp-cage folds primarily (80% of the paths) via a pathway forming the tertiary contacts and the salt bridge, before helix formation. The remaining 20% of the paths occur in the opposite order, by first forming the helix. The transition states of the rate-limiting steps are solvated native-like structures. Water expulsion is found to be the last step upon folding for each route. Committor analysis suggests that the dynamics of the solvent is not part of the reaction coordinate. Nevertheless, during the transition, specific water molecules are strongly bound and can play a structural role in the folding.
The Spatial Pattern of Black-White Segregation in US Metropolitan Areas: An Exploratory Analysis
Authors: Dawkins Casey
Published: October 2006

This paper extends the discussion of the spatial Gini index proposed by Dawkins. Two spatial Gini indices, a nearest neighbour index and a monocentric index, are calculated for a sample of 237 US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). For this sample of MSAs, an exploratory analysis is conducted to determine the relationship between the two spatial Gini indices and other traditional measures of residential segregation. Spatial segregation patterns across US census regions and selected US metropolitan areas are also examined. The analysis suggests that the Gini index provides a useful basis for a multidimensional investigation of residential segregation.
The Changing Intrametropolitan Location of High-poverty Neighbourhoods in the US, 1990-2000
Authors: Cooke Thomas , Marchant Sarah
Published: October 2006

The purpose of this research is to explore the changing geographical distribution of high-poverty neighbourhoods both between and within American metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000. Of particular concern is the relative shift in the number of high-poverty neighbourhoods between central-city, inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs. A classification scheme is developed for identifying these three types of area. The results indicate that there has been an increase in the number of high-poverty neighbourhoods in the urban cores of economically stagnant old industrial cities of the Northeast and an increase in the number of high-poverty inner-ring neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, metropolitan areas in California's Central Valley and a few selected rapidly growing Sunbelt metropolitan areas. The analysis indicates that an increase in the number of urban core high-poverty neighbourhoods is linked to the general health of a metropolitan area's economy and that an increase in the number of inner-ring high-poverty neighbourhoods is linked to rapid population growth.
Area-based Urban Interventions: Rationale and Outcomes: The New Deal for Communities Programme in England
Authors: Lawless Paul
Published: October 2006

It is now 40 years since the first area-based initiative (ABI) was launched in England. New Deal for Communities (NDC), announced in 1998, is one of the most ambitious of English ABIs in that it aims, over a period of 10 years, to reduce the gaps between 39 deprived areas and national standards in five outcome areas: crime, education, health, worklessness, and housing and the physical environment. Change data from the 2001-05 national evaluation are used to explore three considerations: change across the programme; drivers of mobility; and change at the partnership level. Barriers operating at the neighbourhood, city-wide and national levels have impacted on the implementation of the programme.
Equilibrium point of Green’s function for the annulus and Eisenstein series
Authors: Sebbar Ahmed , Falliero Thérèse
Published: October 2006

We study the motion of the equilibrium point of Green’s function and give an explicit parametrization of the unique zero of the Bergman kernel of the annulus. This problem is reduced to solving the equation

℘
(
z
,
τ
)
=
−

π
2

3

E
2

(
τ
)

\wp (z,\tau )= -\frac {\pi ^2}{3}E_2(\tau )

, where

E
2

(
τ
)

E_2(\tau )

is the usual Eisenstein series.
Asymptotic behavior of solutions to semilinear elliptic equations with Hardy potential
Authors: Han Pigong
Published: October 2006

Let

Ω
\Omega

be an open bounded domain in

R

N

(
N
≥
3
)

\mathbb {R}^N (N\geq 3)

with smooth boundary

∂
Ω

\partial \Omega

,

0

∈

Ω

0\!\in \!\Omega

. We are concerned with the asymptotic behavior of solutions for the elliptic problem:
<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="left-parenthesis asterisk right-parenthesis minus normal upper Delta u minus StartFraction mu u Over StartAbsoluteValue x EndAbsoluteValue squared EndFraction equals f left-parenthesis x comma u right-parenthesis comma u element-of upper H 0 Superscript 1 Baseline left-parenthesis normal upper Omega right-parenthesis comma">

(
∗
)

 
−
Δ
u
−

μ
u

|

x

|

2

=
f
(
x
,
u
)
,

u
∈

H
0
1

(
Ω
)
,

 
 

\begin{equation*} (*)\qquad \qquad \qquad \ -\Delta u-\frac {\mu u}{|x|^2}=f(x, u),\qquad \,\,u\in H^1_0(\Omega ),\qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \ \ \end{equation*}

where

0
≤
μ
>

(

N
−
2

2

)

2

0\leq \mu >\big (\frac {N-2}{2}\big )^2

and

f
(
x
,
u
)

f(x, u)

satisfies suitable growth conditions. By Moser iteration, we characterize the asymptotic behavior of nontrivial solutions for problem

(
∗
)

(*)

. In particular, we point out that the proof of Proposition 2.1 in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 132 (2004), 3225–3229, is wrong.
Subordinating the killed process versus killing the subordinate process
Authors: He Ping , Ying Jiangang
Published: October 2006

In this paper we shall prove that the process obtained by killing first and subordinating next is a subprocess of the process obtained by subordinating first and killing next.