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The environment consists of natural elements (e.g., wildlife, air, and water) and social elements (e.g., humans and social institutions). While these two elements should be in a state of harmony, t...

City dwellers experience urban nature as controlled, romanticized, healthy, and disconnected from the global ecological crisis. The landscape aesthetics of ecological urbanism convey the message th...

Objective: Climate change is a vital environmental issue that every citizen in the world needs to be concerned about. Individually and collectively, regionally and globally, citizens should make in...

The revitalization of cultural burning is a priority for many Native American tribes and for agencies and organizations that recognize the cultural and ecological importance of this practice. Tradi...

The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a ...

The Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese text, is optimistic about life unrestrained by entrenched values. This paper contributes to existing debates on Zhuangzian freedom in three ways. First, it r...

In this short commentary, I reflect on the situated perspective that grounds data colonialism as a critique of the nature of control embedded in contemporary data-driven practices. I argue that dat...

Local planning conflicts can stem from perceived inherent landscape injustice. This article explores how conflicting community perceptions of such injustice can be analysed through local collaborat...

Eristic and dialectics are used in their original meaning in Greek to describe conflicting relations between man and water (eristic) and their logical reconciliation (dialectics). A historic peregr...

Future communities have been imagined. When such communities confront us, we respond not by imagining but re-imagining the emerging communities so that we can cope with the new reality. But are there new realities, or is what we imagine as new a case and curse of historical recurrence? The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted communities as we have known them. Disruptions enable transformation through creativity. Disruptions introduce a semblance of newness that requires new ways of doing, seeing, reading and telling reality. This paper discusses how, in the face of global lockdown, quarantine and social distancing rules–the new normal ‒ the creative impulse of humans has responded and adapted to COVID-19 pandemic-induced change. © 2021 University of the Witwatersrand.

This paper examines games during the COVID-19 pandemic as ontological barriers or barzakhs (singular: barzakh). The traditional meaning of barrier as separation is coupled with the Greek meaning of play as Poiesis (which may also be understood as describing acts of creation). We expand the semantics of ‘barrier’ so as to describe pandemic phenomena that exist at the points at which opposites meet: synthetic game and the world of real game;the infected and the healthy;the player and the character being played;life and death. Our perception of both home and the exterior world has changed significantly in the time of the plague. At-home gaming, far from signalling our modern confinement, enables moments in which we may challenge our imprisonment. To bring this idea home, we deploy barzakh as a moral imperative, a site of both necessary isolation and opportunities of engagement, proof of our need for both interaction and distance, a place for the enactment of our knowing and strategic waiting in relation to the pandemic. Through the term, we theorize the link between barrier and other similar categorical divides (distances, masks, gloves, borders and quarantines) which we activate during lockdown to work through our puzzlement, win the social game of civil goodness and to downplay, and ultimately survive, the pandemic of our times. © 2021 University of the Witwatersrand.

Ideas about regulatory pluralism provided an intellectual foundation for the post-1980s transformation in regulatory frameworks from predominantly state-centric regulation to a growing emphasis on ...

The destruction of grand narratives has been followed by a wary attitude towards tying scientific knowledge to a particular epistemic authority. However, science retained its status because it unde...

Although terrorism has a complex genealogy as a political concept, contemporary discussions on “new terrorism” use a reductionist discourse on the legitimacy of violence. In this article, I discuss...

This article explores discursive struggles between ideologies of nature development and nature conservation in the context of the Murchison Falls Conservation Area (MFCA) in Uganda. Based on the concepts of critical discourse moments and discourse coalitions, the article offers a nuanced perspective on nature policy in a specific, though not unique, context. The purpose of studying tensions between different positions in nature policy from a critical discourse perspective is to increase the awareness of the role of language use in the struggles. Moreover, the study aims at enhancing the understanding of different interests and thus reducing the conflict potential regarding the MFCA. This article explores discursive struggles between ideologies of nature development and nature conservation discourses in the context of the Murchison Falls Conservation Area (MFCA) in Uganda. Based on the concepts of critical discourse moments and discourse coalitions, the article offers a nuanced perspective on nature policy in a specific, though not unique, context. The purpose of studying tensions between different positions in nature policy from a critical discourse perspective is to increase the awareness of the role of discourse coalitions in the struggles. Thus, the study aims at enhancing the understanding of different interests by creating awareness about the conflict potential regarding the MFCA.

Long distance trails offer distinctive opportunities for people to connect with natural and cultural heritage through recreation, tourism, and stewardship. Such connections can lead to broad suppor...

In this extended book review, Winston C. Thompson engages with Larry Nucci’s and Robyn Ilten-Gee’s Moral education for social justice. Following summary of a few conceptual foundations of the proje...

The transition away from the highly intolerant and persecutory regimes of late-medieval and early-modern Europe was facilitated by four important developments. First, Europeans learned that social ...

This paper argues that metaphorical formulations around genetic categories have important implications for individuals’ experiences of their at-genetic-risk bodies vis-à-vis the market for prevention. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of usure, our findings unpack three central biomedical metaphors that shape the ways in which ‘previvor’ women with the BRCA gene mutation manage and experience their (risky) body-in-transition against the market for prevention. These are the metaphors of: the container, the omnipresent danger, and battle and journey. Our discussion unravels the processes of de/re-stabilisation of the (risky) body-in-transition, as well as the reconfiguration of their rights and duties in the market for prevention to become a good genetic citizen. Moving beyond a discussion of ‘consumer sovereignty’, we contribute to developing a contextually nuanced understanding of the complex relations between the lived experiences of ‘losing control’ and the consumption of prevention.

In the context of a world where viruses, climate change, and ideas, both insightful and corrupt, are no respecters of borders, there is an urgent need to consider how contemporary students are bein...

Shifting an individual’s belief toward sustainability issues will need changes in perception. A collective modification in perception will be successful when a sufficient number of people understan...

In recent years, there has been a growing jurisprudential and philosophical literature on the concept of harm, in particular, what it means to suffer harm. This paper defends the most unpopular acc...

Shanghai, Zhejiang Province, China.The Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity1 brings into focus the enormous economic values of nature. All people—whether living in ancient or modern tim...

Illustration by Amazonian artist Rakel Caminha.The Dasgupta Review is a remarkable call to action aimed at financiers, businesses, and policymakers, but can also reach a wide range of receptive cit...

Assessments of the impact of automation often emphasize the need to “denaturalize” work. To what extent is denaturalization successful in separating proposals regarding the future of work from exis...

Amidst so many recent contemplations of the end of life as we know it—from climate change to biopolitics to the ongoing pandemic—I would like to pursue not final, but unfinished thought. I do so by...

Fisheries and aquaculture have been the subject of feminist research and activism globally for decades. The result is a rapidly expanding body of literature examining women and fisheries and gender relations from oceans to plate. This body encompasses diverse and substantive critiques of mainstream fisheries research, policy and practice that ignore women’s contributions showing how local practices, political economies and state policies (re)produce gender inequalities around access to fisheries resources and related wealth. Their work has had positive results. Some fishy feminist work draws on ecofeminism and feminist political ecology to explore links between resource degradation, neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy, but more needs to be done. This paper places existing North Atlantic feminist fisheries research in conversation with an emerging body of feminist scholarship interrogating human-fish relations. It makes the case for applying an ecofeminist lens in future work foregrounding how relations among humans, fisheries and fish are shaped by intersecting capitalist, colonial, speciesist and patriarchal systems of oppression. This lens would highlight the multiple oppressions that arise from altered fishery and aquaculture arrangements and dynamics in the age of the Anthropocene. Putting these bodies of work into lively conversation contributes to both the feminist fisheries/aquaculture and the more-than-human literatures.

This commentary will outline the circumstances leading to the destruction of the Juukan Caves by Rio Tinto in May 2020. Secondly, it explains how the existing complexities of the legal framework de...

Sustainable domestic aquaculture development is a critical component to achieving greater U.S. seafood security in the future, yet detrimental allegations have corrupted public support. A variety o...

In light of the lessons learned both from COVID-19 response and now over 20 years of research on religious engagement, this essay lays out the flaws in current religious engagement in humanitarian and development work. Religious engagement can be seen as unknown, unevidenced, and unacknowledged by development agencies. Now knowing more than ever about religious engagement, there are mistakes that can be avoided by understanding the previous religious engagements, challenging secular-religious dynamics, and purposefully using the evidence. Overall, the essay argues that current religious engagement is not strategic, but suggests how each of these flaws can be counteracted.

The life cycle pattern is pervasive for both natural and social sciences, from human behaviors to social systems. Based on the life cycle model of collective actions, the man–land relationship gove...

In this paper, we explore narratives of sustainability in housing and everyday life, positing the home as an ‘opportunity space’ for sustainability transitions. Case studies of three Swedish housin...

Anthropologist, Tim Ingold, recounts that humans inhabit a familiar, yet evolving world – stretched between ‘the happened’ and ‘the not yet’. Despite efforts to the contrary, we can never fully be ...

Documentaries have become an important avenue for climate change communication due to their ability to galvanize social change. Environmental documentaries have traditionally sought to motivate aud...

The genocide–ecocide nexus has become the topic of a small but growing body of scholarly literature. This literature has largely relied on the original concept of genocide as developed by Raphael L...

This study examines the development of the concept of the ecological niche among 10–11-year-old students and their ability to use this concept to give their opinions on the socially relevant and co...

In the context of England, secondary biology education is dominated by sub-organismal systems, such as physiology, often to the detriment of evolution & ecology and impeding an integrated understan...

This article investigates discipleship in Canada, with a focus on spiritual and discipleship practices and processes that help to facilitate spiritual growth among congregants. The study draws on s...

This article analyses the implications of the qualification of ‘populism’, which has spread massively in contemporary social sciences. Through an archaeology of the concept in political science sin...