This essay is a fictocritical meditation upon the contemporary transformation of temporal experience as we find ourselves embarked upon an accelerating process of climate change and species extinction, including possibly that of the human species. The essay offers an extended reading of a recent villanelle published in John Kinsella’s Book of Villanelles that in turn responds to a controversial project by the Adani mining consortium to begin extracting coal over a large swathe of Wangan and Jagalingou country in the Central (...) Queensland Galilee Basin. The essay is an extract from a collaborative work in progress by John Kinsella and myself, Per Se: On the Imperatives of Place II, that will appear in early 2021 with Narr, building upon ˈtεmprərɪnəs: On the Imperatives of Place. (shrink)

The simultaneous publication in 1992 of two texts dealing with a global decline in sperm potency, P. D. James’s The Children of Men and Elisabeth Carlsen’s “Evidence for Decreasing Quality of Semen during the Past 50 Years,” inaugurates the exploration of another kind of sterility: the failure of feminist literary criticism and feminist science studies to converge as a fertile zone of inquiry and analysis. This article considers the modern discipline of literary studies, as well as feminist literary criticism and (...) feminist science studies, and suggests how Latour’s seven rules of method might be adapted to produce cross-fertilization between these fields... (shrink)

This dissertation is based around conceptual conflicts introduced by the notion of rewilding and the challenges rewilding poses to place and cultural landscapes. Rewilding is a recent conservation strategy interested in the return of wilder, less human-managed environments. Often presented as an antidote to increasingly homogenized, organized, and managed environments, rewilding deliberately opens up space for the return of wild nature, typically by removing human elements that have obstructed or diminished its free reign or by reintroducing locally extinct species to (...) re-activate trophic cascades. There is, however, an increasing awareness that rewilding in many places will threaten cultural landscapes that are prized for their human meanings and histories. This dissertation does not attempt to resolve this conflict but instead takes a hermeneutic interest in it and tries to understand better what is at stake in such a conflict. This is attempted by means of a hermeneutic detour through the concepts of place and of wilderness, and ultimately the dissertation argues that instead of understanding rewilding simply as undermining notions of place, we should understand rewilding itself as placemaking. This conceptual work is informed by actual cases of rewilding and an examination of the conflicts arising out of the various modes of placemaking rewilding performs. Three modes of placemaking are demonstrated: wilderness placemaking, experimental placemaking, and place-regenerative placemaking. Taken in total, these reveal ways in which rewilding confronts us with relations with nonhuman others and with questions of belonging and not belonging that are increasingly at issue. (shrink)

Sociologists generally agree that history affects or conditions moral belief, but the relationship is still only vaguely understood. Using a case study of the appearance of social justice beliefs in Victorian-era Britain, this article develops an explanation of the link between history and morality by applying field theory to capture the historical genesis of a field. A moral way of evaluating poverty and inequality developed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century in Britain, with a trajectory extending back to (...) Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and moving forward to the Fabians, the Settlement Movement, and other social reformers at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing from field theory, I argue that social justice beliefs emerged during this time through the genesis of moral universalism as a distinct mode of experience. Several recognizable moral beliefs appeared in the process, including “equality of opportunity,” “equality of reward,” “character,” and “effort,” “ability,” and “duty” as forms of merit (among others). I argue for treating moral beliefs as historical and relational entities that are situated and dated by the conditions marking their appearance in a field. As I conclude, this lends the sociology of morality to a critical moral reflexivity instead of moral relativism or moral realism. (shrink)

Social preservation is a bundle of ethics and practices rooted in the desire of some people to live near old-timers, whom they associate with “authentic” community. To preserve authentic community, social preservationists, who tend to be highly educated and residentially mobile, work to limit old-timers’ displacement by gentrification. However, they do not consider all original residents authentic. They work to preserve those they believe embody three claims to authentic community: independence, tradition, and a close relationship to place. Underlining their attraction (...) to these characteristics are resistance to the evolution of neighborhoods and towns, and the notion that certain groups have a greater claim to authentic community than others. These beliefs, and, secondarily, local institutions and boosters, influence their preservation of certain groups. While the quest for the authentic is typically viewed as affirming the authenticity of its seekers, social preservationists measure the authenticity of others’ communities against their own in authenticity. That is, they are committed to virtuous marginality, which exists when people associate authenticity with, and highly value, characteristics they do not share, and consequently, out of a desire to preserve the authentic, come to regard their distance from it – their marginality – as virtuous. This article reveals the consequences of definitions of authenticity, and more generally of ideology, by demonstrating how they shape preservationists’ lives, particularly their experience of community. (shrink)

By considering the experience of historians in national and regional archives, the relationship of memory to history and historical practice is discussed. The professional experience of historians is connected to wider social and psychological uses of the past, and of history in Euro pean societies, over the 200 years since official archives were inaugur ated.

Intellectual history in the United States has long borne a peculiarly close kinship to social history. The twin fields rose together a century ago in a filial revolt against the cloistered, conservative study of political institutions. Sharing a progressive interest in social thought and social reform, they joined in the self-styled “social and intellectual history” of the interwar decades. After mid-century, however, they moved in divergent directions. Many social historians adopted the quantitative methods of the social sciences, documenting the diverse (...) experiences of workers, women, immigrants, slaves, native peoples, and others often marginalized in the textual record as well as the property regimes, modes of production, patterns of inheritance and mobility, and large-scale demographic and environmental forces that governed their lives. Intellectual historians tended to favor the qualitative evidence gleaned from the more cohesive letters and libraries of traditional elites, specializing in close readings of the intricate discursive, aesthetic, and spiritual templates of social experience found in religion, science, philosophy, political theory, and art and literature. Both subdisciplines had come into parallel crises by the 1980s, chastened by postmodern attacks on “master narratives” of any kind, whether idealist or materialist. In the decades since, social historians have sought a more nuanced consideration of thought and culture, while intellectual historians have at once broadened the range of their subjects and sources and limited more carefully the claims they make for them. (shrink)

The learning disability construct gained scientific and political legitimacy in the United States in the 1960s as an explanation for some forms of childhood learning difficulties. In 1975, federal law incorporated learning disability into the categorical system of special education. The historical and scientific roots of the disorder involved a neuropsychological discourse that often conflated lower social class identity and learning disability. Lower class, often urban, families were viewed as providing insufficient intellectual stimulation for their young children, thereby causing learning (...) problems. This paper undertakes a historical analysis of a particular form of this class-based political discourse—romantic agrarianism—developed by leading learning disability researchers Newell Kephart and Marianne Frostig in the 1960s. (shrink)

Romanticism is recognized as a wellspring of modern-day environmental thought and enthusiasm for nature-preservation, but the character of the affinities between the two is less well understood. Essentially, the Romantics realised that nature only becomes a matter for ethical concern, inspiration and love when the mind and sensibility of the human observer/agent are properly attuned and receptive to its meaning. That attunement involves several factors: a more appropriate scientific paradigm, a subtler appreciation of the impact that the setting of human (...) dwelling, especially landscape, may have on character; the discovery of 'life' and spontaneity as a motif in science and art; a deeper and more complex sense of time; and a feel for place drawn from the life-world rather than physics or economics. Romanticism invented a new language and set of descriptions to illuminate all of these things, one we neglect or forget at our peril. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, (...) Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine. (shrink)

While there has been extensive work on the textual realizations of climate change in the media, there has been little on the way such discourses are realized and promoted visually. This article addresses this using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to examine a new collection of images from the globally operating Getty Images intended for use in promotions, advertisements and editorials. Getty is promoting this collection in terms of Green Issues being a `marketing opportunity'. In this article we consider the results (...) of these issues being recontextualized through this process, where they are shaped to fit the culture of branding. Analysis is of the images and the search terms where Getty lay out what can be said with the images. (shrink)

Ireland has struggled with its ‘feminine’ identity throughout its history. The so-called ‘chasmic dichotomy of male and female' is embedded in colonial and postcolonial constructions of Irishness and it continues to manifest itself in contemporary cultural representations of Ireland and Irishness. This study explores issues of gender and nationality via a reading of a 70-second television advertisement for Caffrey's Irish Ale, titled ‘New York’. The article suggests that, although colonial and postcolonial discourse on Ireland continues to perceive the ‘feminine’ in (...) problematic terms, this is gradually changing as Irish women increasingly, in poet Eavan Boland's words, ‘open a window on those silences, those false pastorals, those ornamental reductions’ that have confined us. (shrink)

This article critiques the way in which three feminist authors reinscribe traditional liberal values when seeking new ways of thinking about the nation. It suggests that in rejecting affective or embodied metaphors, such as community or kinship, the authors fall into the trap of reinscribing values which have historically excluded women and ethnic or racial minorities from full participation in the polity. The article argues for a rejection of the affect/rationality model which underpins these arguments and suggests that new metaphors (...) for the nation will emerge as those who have been excluded claim a place in the polity. (shrink)

This article provides a sociological explanation for urban “greening,” the normative practice of using everyday signifiers of nature to fix problems with urbanism. Although greening is commonly understood as a reaction against the pathologies of the industrial metropolis, such explanations cannot account for greening’s recurrence across varied social and historical contexts. Through a study of greening in Germany’s Ruhr region, a polycentric urban region that has repeatedly greened in the absence of a traditional city, I argue that greening is made (...) possible by a social imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, which I call urbanized nature, that is an outcome of, and subsequently becomes a variable in, urbanization. I draw on processual accounts of urbanization and the sociology of morality to explain urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its use to fulfill two competing visions of urban democracy in the postwar period. I find that rather than an ideological reaction against cities, greening is an aspirational practice that can be mobilized by a range of actors in a variety of places and times. By showing how a new social imaginary made new forms of moral action possible and how those ideals were then materialized in urban space, this article draws attention to the role of cultural imaginaries in urban change and to the material consequences of moral beliefs. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

Much recent literature plumbs the question of the origins and trajectories of “place,” or the cultural development of space-specific repertoires of action and meaning. This article examines divergence in two “places” that were once quite similar but are now quite far apart, culturally and politically speaking. Vermont, once considered the “most Republican” state in the United States, is now generally considered one of its most politically and culturally liberal. New Hampshire, by contrast, has remained politically and socially quite conservative. Contrasting (...) legacies of tourist promotion, political mobilization, and public policy help explain the divergence between states. We hypothesize that emerging stereotypes about a “place” serve to draw sympathetic residents and visitors to that place, thus reinforcing the salience of those stereotypes and contributing to their reality over time. We term this latter process idio-cultural migration and argue its centrality to ongoing debates about the accomplishment of place. We also elaborate on several means by which such place “reputations” are created, transmitted, and maintained. (shrink)

Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. £8.95, 260 pp. Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. £35.00/£10.99, 259 pp.

This article will examine the emergence of a distinct bourgeois identity in modernity which differentiated itself from comparable social groups through its desire to exert 'virtuous' control through engagement with reform and philanthropy, and through the symbolic construction of a transgressive, socially marginal but redeemable other as subject of this reform. The ontological insecurities of late modernity had a profound impact on the sources of bourgeois identity, and this article will explore the emergence of the cultural omnivore as a new (...) form of social distinction which is no longer virtuous, but is still a manifestation of the desire to express identity through demonstrating control. It will outline the impact of the emerging omnivore on relationships between the bourgeois self and the marginal/deviant other, particularly in terms of the extent to which the reconceptualisation of 'other' as cultural univore exacerbates the exclusion and criminalisation of the marginalized other. (shrink)

The speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead offers critical social and cultural theory an unusual way of rethinking the place and value of experience in its concerns. This article explores the challenges that Whitehead's approach to experience, deliberately contrasted with the subject-object thinking of modernity, creates. The article seeks to provide an account of the importance of Whitehead's appeal to naïve experience and of how this appeal counters some of the problems of more recent and more familiar accounts of the (...) fate of experience which draw on some of the same historical points of reference — especially Romantic poetry. In particular, the article suggests that Whitehead's broadly impersonal conception of the open structure of experience as constructive process mitigates the `pathos of finitude' attendant upon critical accounts which presume the unity of experience and then ask how this unity is shattered under modernity. Whitehead's work is situated transversally to analysis and phenomenology and is argued to accord a value to and role for abstraction which calls for a more experimental approach to the topic. While `naïve experience' clearly differs from the understanding of experience evident in other accounts, the article also suggests that it is not incompatible with a more Foucauldian kind of singular history. (shrink)

This study addresses the question of the nature of indigenous people's connection to the land, and the implications of this for articulating these connections in legal arenas where questions of Aboriginal title and land claims are at issue. The idea of 'place' is developed, based in a phenomenology of dwelling which takes profound attachments to home places as shaping and being shaped by ontological orientation and social organization. In this theory of the 'senses of place', the author emphasizes the relationships (...) between meaning and power experienced and embodied in place, and the social systems of property and territory that forms indigenous land tenure systems. To explore this theoretical notion of senses of place, the study develops a detailed ethnography of a Coast Salish Aboriginal community on southeast Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Through this ethnography of dwelling, the ways in which places become richly imbued with meanings and how they shape social organization and generate social action are examined. Narratives with Coast Salish community members, set in a broad context of discussing land claims, provide context for understanding senses of place imbued with ancestors, myth, spirit, power, language, history, property, territory and boundaries. The author concludes in arguing that by attending to a theorized understanding of highly local senses of place, nuanced conceptions of indigenous relationships to land which appreciate indigenous relations to land in their own terms can be articulated. (shrink)

This paper explores the claims of recent research that suggests that more affective forms of environmental education, drawing upon the contributions of the arts (e.g. creative writing, poetry, art, music and photography), can engage with children's emotions more directly than can approaches based on scientific knowledge. This, in turn, may provide a better route for encouraging individuals to engage in more environmentally sustainable behaviours. The paper challenges some of these claims by considering the ways in which they draw upon socially (...) constructed notions of childhood and nature. The development of environmental education in the UK provides the primary context within which the influence of these social constructions on affective approaches to environmental education is illustrated. These findings suggest that further research and practice are required to develop approaches to environmental education that better reflect a range of children's own environmental experiences. (shrink)

Since at least the 1970s, the countryside of Western Europe has been the site of a myriad of “new” communal initiatives. Rural areas that were abandoned during the last century have witnessed the arrival of new inhabitants. These newcomers often flock to the mountains escaping urban lifestyles characterized by individualism, mass-oriented livelihoods, and isolation. Many of these individuals move to areas like the Catalan Pyrenees, where common property and communal institutions have had a strong historical presence. In embracing rural life, (...) these new inhabitants are looking for a more integrated social life in which the commons are, on the one hand, a form of collective private property, and, on the other, represent a more egalitarian way of life in which contributing to the collective effort is not only an efficient way of dealing with particularly harsh ecological conditions, but also an ideological statement that defines the community as something different: an alternative to urban capitalism. Two definitions of the commons are colliding in these mountains; two longstanding lines of political thought are converging and establishing a dialogue that is not always easy: (1) traditional ideologies of land ownership that defined common property over the centuries, not based on economic equality, but on private property and locally shared responsibility on the economic base of the community; and (2) utopian anti-capitalism that views the commons as an alternative mode of social organization and ownership based on egalitarianism. (shrink)

Ecologists, particularly those who consider socially generated effects in the environment, grapple with complex, changing situations. Historians, sociologists and philosophers studying the construction of science likewise attempt to account for (or discount) a wide variety of influences, which make up what historian Charles Rosenberg has called “ecologies of knowledge” (Rosenberg 1988). This paper introduces a graphic methodology, mapping, designed to assist researchers at both levels—in science and in science studies—to work with the complexity of their material. By analyzing the implications (...) and limitations of mapping, I aim to contribute to an ecological approach to the philosophy of science. Let me start with two diagrams to open up the territory I will be exploring.Dansereau’s diagram (Fig. 1) conveys a dynamic equilibrium of energy and resource import, export, flows up a trophic hierarchy, and down again to exert control over lower levels in an ecosystem (Dansereau 1973). (shrink)

English women's drama was crucially shaped by the city between 1660 and 1705, the period when female actors and playwrights first entered the professional theatre. This article uses selected scenes from the comedies of Elizabeth Polwhele, Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre to examine how women coped with the high-risk strategy of participating in commercial theatre and the vast circulation of trade which grew up around the City, a flamboyant sign of high capitalism. On one hand, the city represents movement, a (...) crossroads of possibilities in which to redefine female agency. In plays such as The Rover, The Frolicks and The Gamester, female dramatists script movement across the city in a way that pre-empts De Certeau's model of ‘walking the city’ as a way for female characters and actors to inhabit public spaces of their own. On the other hand, scenes in these plays critically interrogate Raymond Williams’ classic distinction between discursive constructions of the city and the countryside in which the city's blatant expose of social and economic processes is associated with dirt. The contaminating pollution is feminised in the trope of actress, playwright and whore. Actresses and playwrights were ‘playing for all’ in more than one sense, and gambling exemplifies the risks involved for women attempting to manipulate the urban and theatrical locations that attempted to commodify them. (shrink)

The “problem of emotions,” that is, that many of them are both meaningful and corporeal, has yet to be resolved. Western thinkers, from Augustine to Descartes to Zajonc, have handled this problem by employing various forms of mind–body dualism. Some psychologists and neuroscientists since the 1970s have avoided it by talking about cognitive and emotional “processing,” using a terminology borrowed from computer science that nullifies the meaningful or intentional character of both thought and emotion. Outside the Western-influenced contexts, emotion and (...) thought are not seen as distinct kinds of things. Here a solution of sorts is proposed by thinking of emotional expression as a dynamic activity that declares and stirs emotions at the same time. As such, its dynamism may help historians to understand the dramatic changes and trends they investigate. (shrink)

Research on ethical issues within food systems is often human-centric. As a consequence, animal-centric policy debates where regulatory decisions about food are being made tend to be overlooked by food scholars and activists. This absence was notable in the recent debates around Australia’s animal live export industry. Using Foucault’s tools, we explore how ‘food security’ is conceptualised and governed within animal cruelty policy debates about the live export trade. The problem of food security produced in these debates shaped Indonesians as (...) ‘victims’ of food insecurity due to the nation’s inability to produce sufficient quantities of protein. This understanding of the problem reproduced the dominant framing of food security as a problem for developing countries addressed by increasing global food production. The underlying premise uncritically accepted in Australia’s debates on live export trade was that intensive animal agriculture, and Australia’s live export trade specifically, were essential to alleviating global food insecurity. Drawing on our findings, we show how dominant representations of ‘food security’, and related regulatory and technological trajectories, flourish where alliances between animal and food activists, scholarship, and movements are weak. Accordingly, we argue for agri-food scholars to take up opportunities to contribute to the policy discussions about the treatment of animals to effectively expand the kinds of problems, solutions, and strategies of resistance produced in the discourses surrounding food system issues. (shrink)

The city has featured as a central image in utopian thought. In planning the foundation of the new and ideal city there is a close interconnection between ideas about urban form and the vision of the moral good. The spatial structure of the ideal city in these visions is a framing device that embodies and articulates not only political philosophy but is itself an articulation of moral and cosmological systems. This paper analyses three different utopian moments in three different historical (...) epochs – Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), the Choson dynasty foundation of the city of Seoul (1395) and the modernist utopian urbanism of the controversial Le Corbusier (1887–1965). In this analysis attention is drawn to the cosmological and moral visions articulated in these three ‘images of the city’ (Lynch). The opposition between rationalistic/mechanistic and religious/traditional urban design can prove to be an oversimplification that obscures the complex interrelations between the moral geometry and the natural alignments of the ideal urban form. (shrink)

In 2011, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District’s proposed to release a genetically engineered Aedes aegypti mosquito to fight the spread of dengue fever and chikungunya. This would be the first release of a genetically engineered insect into the open environment in the US, and the proposal has sparked heated opposition in Key West. We address this controversy through Beck’s concept of reflexive modernity, tracing the way the FKMCD and Oxitec interpret the risk involved in the situation and how citizens (...) opposing the release construct their very different interpretation. We use theories of space and place and Rickert’s theory of ambient rhetoric to argue that the contrasting interpretations of risk in this case stem, at least in part, from the different construction of space and place embraced by the FKMCD and Oxitec and by many in the community. The authority of nature invoked by FKMCD and Oxitec’s scientific discourse frames the public forum in ways that exclude full deliberation and affective argumentative grounds that emerge from the materiality of place. While the public forum privileges what Latour calls matters of fact, the controversy emerges from different understanding of what Latour calls matters of concern. (shrink)

The bigness of cities has attracted much attention from urban academics and professionals whose perspective may be divided into two camps: productive science using agglomeration-based analysis or impact science using anxiety-based analysis. The two approaches need to be joined in order to resolve issues of urban ‘bigness’, and in this article the growth of Perth is used to illustrate the potential and challenges of this integration.

In now classic article, James Clifford offers a novel perspective on ethnographic texts. Inspired by literary studies he uses contemporary ethnographic works to question ethnography’s claims of scientific objectivity and a clear distinction between allegorical and factual. If ethnography aims to keep its contemporary relevance, it should specifically focus on allegory as an intrinsic quality of ethnographic texts This kind of analysis may assume that any ethnographic text accounts for facts and events but at the same time it tackles the (...) moral, ideological or even cosmological issues. According to Clifford, ethnography has been dominated by a “pastoral” allegorical register which allowed an ethnographer to occupy a privileged position to interpret other, non-writing cultures. Clifford notices that this register is loosing support in the modern world since the difference between illiterate and literate cultures is not relevant anymore. Ethnographic pastoral is now replaced with self-reflexive and dialogical forms of ethnographic writing, analyzed by Clifford by the example of Marjorie Shostak’s book Nisa: The Life and Words of a!Kung Woman. (shrink)

This Symposium provides an important opportunity to reflect on the current state of scholarship positioning alternative foods against mainstream agri-food systems. Symposia of this kind have a long tradition as marking particular turning points in agrifood debates. This collection provides an opportunity to examine the current positioning of scholarship around the theoretical and methodological fracture line between successor theories to classical political economy and more post-structuralist approaches to alternative economic activities around food and agriculture. In the current collection, despite clear (...) evidence of theoretical positioning around the structural: post-structural divide, I argue that both aspects of agri-food theorizing share similar political intent and are positioned within the same wider political project of agrifood critique. Therefore, despite theoretical fracture, there is a unity of political intention that continues to bind together this particular field of research and practice. (shrink)

Social scientists have long examined the changing role of the individual, and the influence of individualism in social and economic arrangements as well as behavioral decisions. With respect to co-operative behavior among farmers, however, the ideology of individualism has been little theorized in terms of its relationship to the longstanding virtue of independence. This paper explores this relationship by combining analysis of historical literature on the agricultural cooperative movement with the accounts of contemporary English farmers. I show that the virtue (...) of independence is deployed to justify a variety of cooperative (formal and informal) and non-cooperative practices and that, despite apparently alternative interpretations, independence is most often conflated with individualistic premises. That conflation, I argue, leads farmers to see their neighbors as natural competitors: as those from whom which independence must be sought. This has the effect of masking the structural dependencies which farmers face (such as lenders and large purchasers) and limits the alternatives available to them to realize a view of independence that is maintained, rather than opposed, by interdependent collective action. Thus perceived, individualism is an ideological doctrine that succeeds by appealing to the virtue of independence, while simultaneously denying its actual realization. (shrink)

This article begins with a consideration of the `pure' unmediated relation between the human body and nature, exemplified, in different ways, by environmental expressivism, and Ingold's subtle analysis of affordance and the taskscape. It is argued that perspectives fail properly to incorporate the role of mundane technology in the mediation of human-nature relations. Drawing upon the work of Michael Serres, and, in particular, his concept of the parasite, I explore how these mundane technological artefacts - specifically, walking boots - intervene (...) in the circuits of communication between humans and the natural environment. This re-orientation traces how the local relation between bodies and environments is a complex movement between the material and semiotic, the local and the global. In the process, I draw upon four aspects of walking boots: first, there is the role of boots as mechanical technologies that can cause pain, dissolving identity and the relation between humans and nature; second, there is the role of boots as signifying style and identity; third, there is the role of boots as embodiments of procedures of standardization and objectification; and fourth, there is the role of boots as technological means of damage to nature. Finally, in concluding, I tentatively consider some of the political implications of this way of theorizing the relation between bodies and environments. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concept of soap-opera realism, as developed in some of the recent critical writing on soap opera, is central to the understanding of this form of television drama. However, in its present form, this concept is insufficiently nuanced. In developing the concept, the work of Raymond Williams is drawn upon to delineate three sub-types of soap-opera realism: soap-opera realism in the subjunctive mode, soap-opera realism in the indicative mode, and soap-opera naturalism. The latter is then discussed (...) in detail with particular attention being paid to Coronation Street. In the course of this analysis, two key naturalistic elements in Coronation Street are considered: the nature of living spaces and the connection of character to environment. (shrink)