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Amidst mounting alarm over plastic waste’s impact on ecosystems and health, Thailand has gained global attention as one of the top six contributors to marine plastic debris. Narratives that Thai people are ‘addicted to plastic’ circulate widely in local and international media. This article unpacks this and related tropes by investigating their historical development and everyday usage. Based on ethnographic research among regulators, activists, plastic industry members, and recyclers in Bangkok, and a media analysis, I demonstrate how co-constructed civic epistemologies frame plastic waste solutions in Thailand. As public knowledge-ways that inform decision-making, these epistemologies drive plastic pollution by perpetuating neoliberal ideologies of personal responsibility and deregulation. In doing so, they reframe Thailand’s plastic waste challenges as a question of individual morality that requires consumer-based solutions rather than a question of structural production that requires a regulatory response. While scholars have addressed plastic pollution from technical, governance, and new materialist perspectives, this article offers a socio-cultural geography approach that accounts for the cultural narratives that mediate plastic pollution debates and drive plastic production and policy in Thailand and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For rural regions of British Columbia (BC) with a legacy of cannabis production, legalization brings insights into the dynamics of these rural communities, shedding light on the extent to which local residents are actively engaged in shaping their futures. Drawing on 56 interviews with government representatives and legacy cannabis participants from BC’s Kootenay region, a qualitative thematic analysis based on the underpinnings of transitioning economies and stakeholder participation highlights the necessity of building trust for successful legalization in the Kootenays. Three main issues, rooted in prohibition and centred around distrust, emerge as findings. First, federal government participants exhibited skepticism towards cannabis participants, which affected cannabis participants’ input during policy formulation due to a perceived criminal past and ties to organized crime. Second, cannabis participants largely reciprocated this distrust towards the federal government, understanding their believed past criminality led to exclusion from policymaking, and voicing their suspicion of government motives that favoured government participation, corporate interests, and taxation. Third, local government representatives expressed sentiments of exclusion from federal decision-making and dissatisfaction with Health Canada's management of personal medical license complaints during prohibition, revealing inter-government distrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue de Synthèse is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article delves into the everyday dynamics of colonial rule to outline a novel way of understanding colonized–colonizer interactions. It conceives colonial management as a social field in which both the colonized and colonizers negotiate and exchange resources, despite their decidedly unequal positions within a racial hierarchy. Drawing their example from the West Bank, the authors argue that a Palestinian economic elite has proactively participated in the co-production of the colonial management of spatial mobility, a central component of Israeli colonial rule. The study employs interviews and document analysis to investigate how the nexus between Palestine's commercial-logistical needs and Israel's security complex induced large-scale Palestinian producers to exert agency and reorder commercial mobility. The authors describe and explain the evolution of a 'Door-to-Door' logistical arrangement, in which large-scale Palestinian traders participate in extending Israeli's system of spatial control in exchange for facilitating logistical mobility. This horizontal social encounter that entails pay-offs is conditioned, but not fully determined, by vertical relations of domination and subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that public debt financing facilitated the appropriation of the territories of Indigenous nations in the British settler colonies and does so through a detailed examination of Prince Edward Island's public debt. The island's government used public debt financing as a technique to direct capital into the colony, but to receive loans, the colonial government first needed credit. Settler-colonial credit derived from colonial governments' claiming the territories of Indigenous nations as government assets. This history highlights the deeply racial characteristics embedded in the expansion of global public debt financing that characterized finance capitalism beginning in the 1820s. In this way, the unique history of the island and its "land question" can be placed into the broader global context of debt markets and processes of racial capital. Specifically, the 1853 Land Purchase Act used public borrowing to purchase lands from British landowners so that the island's government could hold the land title. British landowners had their ownership rights secured despite the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship Treaties that guaranteed the Mi'kmaq nation rights to their territory, which included Epekwitk, what the British named Prince Edward Island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of research has documented how extractive resources are governed once their exploitation has begun, how transnational actors and factors play a role in extractive industries, and how states stick to a path of dependency towards fossil fuel exploitation. However, most of this previous research has not taken sufficiently seriously domestic politics. Furthermore, there has been little work on how dependency is constructed before exploiting these resources. This article fills that gap by showing how oil exploitation has been constructed as an economic imperative in Uganda. Building on a research design with a broad range of empirical fingerprints, this article shows that construction of oil as an economic imperative in Uganda is based on two processes: 1) embedding the meso level within the macro level through a long-term horizon; and 2) rendering the contingent necessary through a combination of material and immaterial strategies of state political control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bac kground: The Government of Canada's Online Streaming Act attempts to incorporate online streaming services into the "single system" of the Broadcasting Act. The legislation has been heavily criticized for a variety of reasons, and constructive debate has been hampered by the lack of a clearly defined policy rationale or public interest objective--in large part because the term "broadcasting" is ill-defined in the internet context. Analysis : This article applies Georgist political economy to reinterpret Dallas Smythe's concept of the "audience commodity" for the purpose of integrating emergent theories about the economics of attention and freedom of speech in the context of broadcasting and online media regulation. The principal argument is that a resource-centric view of human attention creates a technology-neutral conceptual basis for determining the scope of what is and is not media broadcasting. Conclusions and implications : The conceptual framework developed aligns the audience commodity concept with the contemporary business reality of content creators and helps draw some defining lines around the concept of "broadcasting" in the era of Internet platforms. Transitioning the fundamental basis for the definition of "broadcasting" from one of transmission methods to one of controlling the bottlenecks of attention would make it far easier to construct meaningful legislation in the public interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deindustrialization became a pressing political issue and an object of research almost simultaneously in North America. This article inquires into the intellectual origins and radical roots of the deindustrialization thesis in Canada and the United States. Though the two countries share much in common, their distinctive formulations of the deindustrial problem in the 1970s and 1980s reflected key economic and political differences between them. Radical political economists in Canada and the United States turned to dependency theory and capital flight, respectively, in their theorization of deindustrialization. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's 1982 book, The Deindustrialization of America , in particular, is a founding text for the burgeoning field of deindustrialization studies. We can learn much from re-engaging with this early scholarship. In doing so, however, we need to bridge the continuing analytical divide between micro-level labour histories of working-class communities and macro-level studies of political economy and the international division of labour. La désindustrialisation est devenue un enjeu politique pressant et un objet de recherche presque simultanément en Amérique du Nord. Cet article interroge les origines intellectuelles et les racines radicales de la thèse de la désindustrialisation au Canada et aux États-Unis. Bien que les deux pays partagent beaucoup de points communs, leurs formulations distinctes du problème désindustriel dans les années 1970 et 1980 reflétaient des différences économiques et politiques essentielles entre eux. Les économistes politiques radicaux du Canada et des États-Unis se sont tournés vers la théorie de la dépendance et la fuite des capitaux, respectivement, dans leur théorisation de la désindustrialisation. Le livre de Barry Bluestone et Bennett Harrison de 1982, The Deindustrialization of America , en particulier, est un texte fondateur pour le domaine en plein essor des études sur la désindustrialisation. Nous pouvons apprendre beaucoup en renouant avec cette première bourse. Ce faisant, cependant, nous devons combler le fossé analytique persistant entre les histoires de travail au niveau micro des communautés ouvrières et les études au niveau macro de l'économie politique et de la division internationale du travail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A great deal of research has documented how extractive resources are governed once their exploitation has begun, how transnational actors and factors play a role in extractive industries, and how states stick to a path of dependency towards fossil fuel exploitation. However, most of this previous research has not taken sufficiently seriously domestic politics. Furthermore, there has been little work on how dependency is constructed before exploiting these resources. This article fills that gap by showing how oil exploitation has been constructed as an economic imperative in Uganda. Building on a research design with a broad range of empirical fingerprints, this article shows that construction of oil as an economic imperative in Uganda is based on two processes: 1) embedding the meso level within the macro level through a long-term horizon; and 2) rendering the contingent necessary through a combination of material and immaterial strategies of state political control.

Copyright of Ileti-s-im is the property of Universite Galatasaray, Faculty of Communication and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Large scale agricultural projects driven by a high modernist ideology have been closely interlinked with the process of state building at the Ethiopian lowland frontier since the second half of the twentieth century. This paper provides a diachronic analysis of the political economy of agricultural development and the associated frontier effect in the western and north-eastern lowlands of the country across three different political regimes. A comparative assessment of these patterns suggests that the high modernist paradigm should be applied with some qualification to the agenda of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition that ruled Ethiopia from 1994 to 2019. The EPRDF was far more pragmatic than its predecessors; the oscillation between different degrees of state intervention was based upon past experiences of success and failure in the territorialization of state power in contested borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, and especially in Africa, twentieth-century dams were typically imagined through high modernist ideology as the premier development project, but this ended with the decade-long hiatus in dam construction from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. However, dam-building is back. Does this mark the resurgence of a modernising ideology, of grand plans of mega-infrastructures implemented from an enlightened vanguard? This article analyses this question using Rwanda and Tanzania as case studies. It makes a twofold contribution. The first, to the literature on why the resurgence of dams is happening. Using theory, it shows how to understand the influence of ideology alongside other strategic factors and conceptualises the application of high modernism to dam building. This allows a more precise assessment of the influence of ideology on dam resurgence, with the cases of Rwanda and Tanzania demonstrating significant contrasts with past tendencies to aggrandise the infrastructure itself as the harbinger of progress. The second contribution to this special issue is on the ideology influencing a raft of 21st century illiberal states in Africa that have embarked on grand development missions. The article compliments other texts in this issue, demonstrating the presence of an evolved illiberal modernisers ideology that combines tenants of the past with more recent norms. Thus, an assumption of technologies' ability to linearly generate development is combined with contrasting ideas about sustainability, the importance of the private sector's role and hydropower's limitations. This demonstrates the way today's illiberal modernisers, engaged in global debates, adapt and update development ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Review of Social Policy / Revue Canadienne de Politique Sociale is the property of York University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Africa Journal of Public Sector Development & Governance (AJPSDG) is the property of African Management Development Institute Network (AMDIN) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Theories of the environmental state – treadmill of production and ecological modernization – have dominated discussion of the political economy of environmental change. While the former contends that the state's mitigation of labor–capital relations engenders ecological instability, the latter posits that the state's use of business-friendly incentives can goad producers and consumers to adopt sustainable practices. However, these theories largely focus on dynamics related to class, labor, and markets, and thus overlook the role that race and racism play in the political economy. In contrast, this article argues that racial politics are not peripheral influences, but rather are central to the political economy in which environmental policy formation occurs. The author advances the argument with the concept of the racial fix, which refers to the idea that race and racism are mechanisms for circumventing barriers that slow the treadmill of production. Synthesizing long-standing and emerging research, the author outlines three dimensions – spatial, political, and cognitive – that constitute the racial fix. Overall, this article not only shows how race and racism serve as building blocks for environmental state formation, but also articulates new theoretical paths for studying the relationship between race and environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incarcerated workers across Canadian prisons have organized and conducted strike actions. These actions, however, have been rejected by the Canadian state, on the basis that the incarcerated workers are not legally employees. The court ruling (Guérin et al. v. Canada 2018), while accepting evidence of the prisoners' material hardships from their low pay and from reprisals for striking, excluded them from the legal protections of employees and thus devalued the prisoners' labour. The selforganizing efforts reveal the levels of inequality experienced by incarcerated workers in the ruling order of global apartheid, "in which race and mobility feature as primary variables for which heightened security and militarization are the answer" (Besteman 2020, 1). This article discusses the effects of prisoners' organizing in the larger context of social justice. In so doing it examines cultural texts that document interactions between organizers inside and outside prisons and their contribution toward alternatives to carceral cultures. This article argues that the cultural production by prisoners and their supporters express the conditions in which prisoner selforganizing is necessary for larger social transformation. The creation and nurturing of collective relationships with one another, both within and across prison walls, clarify common grounds for liberation struggles, and connect envisioned freedoms to overthrow the various forces that enclose communities and hold significant numbers of us captive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of French Journal of British Studies / Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique is the property of Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes en Civilisation Britannique and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A growing concern worldwide is whether or not urban sustainability policies promote social equity. In Western countries, sustainability policies are at the forefront of an emerging regime of urban governance. While some researchers have shown how such policies support, counter or ride along with predominant neoliberal trends, others suggest that they may form a beacon for progressive politics. However, these studies do not investigate whether the political economy of urban sustainability policies promotes equity on a national scale. The present article addresses this gap by investigating 'sustainable city' discourses in 11 Canadian municipalities. Contrary to recurring hopes, these policies do not fully embrace a return to social equity. Instead, they overwhelmingly privilege a form of 'environmental neoliberalism' by focusing on a creative, educated and professionalized urban community. The article examines how these policy discourses conceive social equity around the themes of economic growth, housing, income and democratic participation. Today's urban compromise leaves little room for social equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many men, their trauma exacerbated by decades of falling fertility rates and related sociospatial attenuation. The crisis disrupted a range of heteronormative practices that had stabilized post-war gendered identities, especially marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Some men consequently began seeking comfort in the company of youthful-looking, large-format, hyper-feminized commodity-dolls of which there are two psychical kinds: 'infantile' dolls used largely by precariously positioned young men for comfort and play; and expensive 'Oedipal' silicone sex dolls associated with Japanese salarymen whose jobs had become less secure. Both have worked emotionally for two reasons: dolls are evocative of the maternal - the basis of intersubjective (be) longing/Eros; and the dolls are owned, ownership allowing pleasure and control more securely to intertwine. Following the oil crisis and the de-industrialization that followed, men in racially and economically privileged terrain across the US and Europe turned to similar kinds of commodity dolls for comfort, if for differently sexed and racialized reasons. Japanese men's doll markets therefore speak to certain particular and general conditions of masculinity and geopolitical economic trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais is the property of Centro de Estudos Sociais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the political character of debt relations, focusing in particular on the increasingly important phenomenon of personal indebtedness. Following Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, it distinguishes between three forms of 'rationality' that explain the various power dynamics at play beneath the formal and seemingly voluntary loan contract. Debt first exemplifies the open-ended flows of power that circulate in the networked structures of the 'societies of control' described by Deleuze. Far from signaling the demise of the modern disciplines analyzed by Foucault, credit relations are, on the contrary, shown to depend on some of the normalizing procedures that constituted the common core of disciplinary institutions. Arguing for a synchronic approach to historical political rationalities, this article highlights the relationship between debt and sovereignty, showing the intrication of contemporary, financialized forms of capitalist exploitation and the state's ancient pretension to exact from its citizens an infinite debt of existence. Debt thus combines the respective effects of control, discipline and sovereignty and constitutes as such a powerful technology for the governing of individuals and populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Sociology is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cahiers d'Études Africaines is the property of Editions EHESS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores what globalization means for the relationship between Medicare and Canadian identity. Typical accounts of this relationship explain it as either the result of deep-seated Canadian values, or as the result of government action in the postwar era. Starting from where the second group leaves off, this article explores how the Medicare identity was the result of very specific capitalist property relations that are now fading. The article begins with an analysis of the origins of modern national identities, linking them to the transformation of property relations that characterized the transition to capitalism. It then focuses on the rise of social rights and how these were used to craft social solidarity among disparate individuals and groups in Canada. The next section focuses on globalization and the shift to neoliberalism. The article concludes with a reflection on what the demise of Medicare might mean for Canadian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pour améliorer la protection sociale de sa population, le Burkina Faso a adopté une politique nationale en 2012. Cet article analyse le processus de formulation de cette politique en s’appuyant sur la perspective du « policy design » (Howlett et Mukherjee, 2014). Menées conformément à la démarche qualitative inductive, la collecte et l’analyse des données montrent que ce processus de formulation n’a permis ni de mener une réflexion sur le problème à résoudre, ni d’identifier les besoins spécifiques des bénéficiaires, ni d’évaluer les résultats potentiels des solutions proposées dans le but de choisir les plus appropriées. Les auteurs aboutissent donc à un constat empirique de « non-design ». Cette politique se résume à un document dont le contenu tous azimuts rassemble toutes les actions envisageables de protection sociale, sans aucun arbitrage. Trois facteurs ont favorisé cette non-formulation : (1) le manque d’orientations gouvernementales claires pour guider les discussions ; (2) la faiblesse du soutien et de volonté politique – se traduisant par la faible implication des décideurs de haut niveau dans le processus ; et (3) les méconnaissances conceptuelle et technique des acteurs nationaux en matière de protection sociale – si bien qu’ils se sont contentés d’avoir recours aux conseils des organismes internationaux. Le gouvernement a annoncé son intention de jouer un rôle prépondérant dans le processus de formulation de cette politique mais il s’est agit d’une déclaration rhétorique. L’étude a en effet montré que le leadership et la volonté politique ont manqué, notamment pour canaliser les intérêts respectifs des acteurs et gérer les contradictions qui font obstacle à la formulation d’une politique cohérente et adaptée aux besoins de la population.

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A comment by Doyon, Bergeron, and Tamini (2018) criticizes the approach and the results of a study by Cardwell, Lawley, and Xiang (2015) that quantifies the distributional effects that Canada's supply management regime imposes on consumers. In this reply, we show that the main empirical result of Cardwell et al.—the degree of regressive distributional effects—is robust to alternative modelling choices and to alternative counterfactual price scenarios. We present new food price comparisons between Canada and the United States, showing that significant price premiums for supply-managed products persist under different exchange rates. Contrary to the results in Doyon et al., we find no evidence of systematic price premiums for non-supply-managed food products. Our new price comparisons highlight the shortcomings in the price comparisons in Doyon et al. and corroborate the results in Cardwell et al. Finally, we reject suggestions by Doyon et al. that our results are affected by research bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the 2015 defeat of Nigeria's ruling party by a new party less than two years old? Despite a spike in terrorism and widespread public complaints about government waste, the authors find that neither violence nor patronage systematically explains voting patterns. Instead, statistical evidence points to state-level economic performance and perceptions of national economy. Using surveys, original variables measuring economic performance and - for the first time - presidential election results at the local government level, the authors demonstrate that ‘economic voting’ helped the opposition. They attribute opposition success to a ‘talakawa effect’ rooted in a class-based coalition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: New technologies enable high‐resolution monitoring techniques and the generation of big data and have been heralded as increasing the depth of our understanding of geomorphic phenomena. These technologies, however, also provide us with a convenient entry point into the increasingly constraining political economy of geomorphology. Building on the work of Stuart Lane and of critical physical geographers, this paper traces and examines the multiple roles that new technologies have played in constraining research questions and directing resources. Using the activity sphere framework outlined by David Harvey, the influence of new technologies can be traced around the spheres and their constraining of existing relations within academia and explanation identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale is the property of Berghahn Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the past several decades, GISystems and GIScience have become established and valorized within the field of geography and geographic education. With the recent explosion in daily use of devices producing spatial data, such as smartphones, has come a renewed call to broaden the purview of Critical GIS beyond the desktop and towards these new systems of capitalist accumulation. In this viewpoint, we argue that any re‐examination of the role of Critical GIS must also consider the political economy of geography and geographic education in which GISystems are used for research and taught. We explicate three registers at which GISystems function within geography: that of the individual educator, that of the GIS user, and that of the military‐industrial complex in which GISystems were and are developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Japan’s 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many men, their trauma exacerbated by decades of falling fertility rates and related sociospatial attenuation. The crisis disrupted a range of heteronormative practices that had stabilized post-war gendered identities, especially marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Some men consequently began seeking comfort in the company of youthful-looking, large-format, hyper-feminized commodity-dolls of which there are two psychical kinds: ‘infantile’ dolls used largely by precariously positioned young men for comfort and play; and expensive ‘Oedipal’ silicone sex dolls associated with Japanese salarymen whose jobs had become less secure. Both have worked emotionally for two reasons: dolls are evocative of the maternal – the basis of intersubjective (be) longing/Eros; and the dolls are owned, ownership allowing pleasure and control more securely to intertwine. Following the oil crisis and the de-industrialization that followed, men in racially and economically privileged terrain across the US and Europe turned to similar kinds of commodity dolls for comfort, if for differently sexed and racialized reasons. Japanese men’s doll markets therefore speak to certain particularandgeneral conditions of masculinity and geopolitical economic trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the contributions of the late John Urry to sociology and to its spatial turn especially by developing the new mobilities paradigm. The proposition of this monograph issue of Current Sociology is that space has not yet been appropriately incorporated into sociology. But although partially true, Urry argued that this misses the significance of ‘the mobilities turn’ that swept through and incorporated the spatial turn within sociology but also within other disciplines. Tracing the spatial turn back to the 1980s, the article describes how the new mobilities paradigm grew out of and extended emerging theorizations of space. It argues that Urry’s work advanced a sociology of space though his focus on mobile spatializations and relational space. This included the distribution of agency between people, places, and material assemblages of connectivity; a broader shift in the spatial imagination of mobilities towards ‘non-representational’ social theory; the emergence of new methodologies that were more eclectic, experimental, creative, and linked to arts, design, and public policy; and lastly a renewed interest in geo-ecologies, the political economy of resource flows, and the global mobilities of energy, capital, and material objects as constitutive of spatial complexity. The new mobilities paradigm furthered the spatial turn in social sciences in many crucial ways, and John Urry’s body of work on mobilities and its influence on countless adjacent research areas have spread that spatial thinking far and wide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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La transition économique est un enjeu majeur au Canada : initialement une colonie construite sur l’exploitation des ressources naturelles, il a depuis connu une évolution rapide, au point d’être considéré comme une puissance économique de premier plan. Toutefois, les évolutions récentes sont ambiguës et animent un débat lourd : pour certains, l’économie canadienne est appelée à dépasser le stade d’une économie centrée sur les ressources primaires pour s’inscrire dans l’économie du savoir ; pour d’autres, la période actuelle conduit plutôt à l’exacerbation de la vieille exploitation des ressources naturelles, mais sous des formes relativement nouvelles. Pour expliquer cette tension, nous examinons l’hypothèse du passage de l'économie canadienne d'un stade de maturation de l’exploitation traditionnelle (dit mature-staples) à un stade nouveau (dit « post-staples »). Cela permet de mettre à jour la variété et la profondeur des évolutions actuelles (économiques et productives, politiques et symboliques, sociales et territoriales) et de souligner qu’elles sont sans doute mieux abordées en termes de gouvernance et de jeu politique autour des ressources qu’en termes de « virage » objectif et structurel de l’économie politique des ressources. La transition de l’économie des ressources naturelles au Canada apparaît si hétérogène et inégale qu’elle pousse à questionner l’existence même d’un bouleversement structurel de ses bases.

Depuis presque quarante années, on annonce une crise de l'Etat Providence envisageant son retrait ou même sa fin proche. Dans cet article on examine cette proposition à partir d'une définition opérationnelle de l'Etat Providence, de significations attribuées à sa crise et de la réunion des preuves dont on dispose, pour conclure que, tandis que des scénarios de retrait et de fin proche peuvent être écartés, d'autres dangers tels que la privatisation des politiques sociales, semblent plus menaçants. On suggère, pour conclure, que l'étendue de ces dangers visant une négociation de l'âme de l'Etat Providence doit être évaluée non seulement selon des critères économiques et financiers, mais aussi par des considérations normatives.

Cet article étudie les effets du gouvernement colonial et de l’action des Africains pendant la période coloniale sur le contexte institutionnel et la situation en matière de ressources qui ont posé le cadre du futur développement économique au sud du Sahara. Cette question est placée dans la perspective de la dynamique du développement dans une région qui était, en 1900, extrêmement riche en terres et caractérisée par un manque de main-d’œuvre et de capital, par des activités marchandes indigènes dont l’ampleur peut étonner et par des degrés variables mais souvent peu élevés de centralisation politique. L’article explore la différence entre les effets des gouvernements français et britannique, mais il affirme que la différence visible dans l’évolution de la pauvreté, du bien-être et du changement structurel a davantage été déterminée par l’opposition entre économies « de peuplement » et « d’exploitation ».