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This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called 'clean' energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article uses mixed methods to explore the politics of memory surrounding the Stalin monument in Gori, Georgia, which was removed by the government in 2010. We employ bivariate and multivariate statistics to analyze people's preferences in Georgia concerning the monument's fate using socio-demographic, socio-economic, spatial, and political variables, identifying six factors as offering explanatory power: gender, age, place, socialization, education, and attitudes toward Vladimir Putin. We identify three main narratives in the qualitative data analysis: the desire to continue displaying the monument somewhere; the futility of monument battles; and the appeal to democratic principles in deciding these cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we explore the spatial variation of support for former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in his home country, Georgia. This research contributes to the literature on reputational politics by highlighting the role of spatial, rather than only social, factors in the construction of public opinion about Stalin. We illustrate how geographic factors impact Georgians' perceptions of the Soviet dictator by examining various aspects of place at various scales--including distance to Gori, Stalin's birthplace, the history of urbanization, and economic and political indices. To this end we map attitudes toward the Soviet dictator and use a multilevel spatial regression technique to explain variance in support for Stalin across forty-seven districts of Georgia. This enables us to explore the impact of place on people's attitudes by examining (1) whether there are local and regional hotspots of Stalin admiration and, if so, (2) what the contextual explanations of these attitudes are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-Soviet memory, including the rekindling of debate on contemporary perspectives of Josef Stalin. Most notably, the publication of The Stalin Puzzle has helped bring attention to the persistence of positive accounts and admiration, along with ambivalent and contested images, of the former dictator of the Soviet Union. Using survey data and multivariate statistical methods, we test five broad hypotheses - socialization, structural, ideological, nationalist, and gender - to ascertain what factors might shape people's attitudes toward Stalin in Georgia. Our analysis reveals that elderly, poor men from rural areas have the most positive associations of Stalin, whereas young, wealthier women from cities, those who are open to privatization, and perceive Russia as Georgia's biggest threat judge Stalin negatively. Counterintuitively, non-Georgian minorities show higher esteem for Stalin than Georgians. We envision that the effects of cohort replacement, economic development, and urbanization will decrease positive perceptions of Stalin in years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on the displaced have begun to examine the critical role of place and home. We seek to illustrate how Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia conceptualize home. Georgian IDPs are experiencing what we term a ‘double displacement’, spatially and temporally. We identify ‘home as journey’ as the dominant way they imagine home, as they situate home in the past and the future. However, IDPs construct and reproduce the past and future senses of home through various home-making practices that occur within the context of the current places where they reside. By drawing from 118 in-depth interviews with IDPs, conducted in 2007, we are able to provide insight into how home is imagined and re-imagined under conditions of displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]