Maris Gillette’s groundbreaking study tells the story of Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital, from its origins in 1004 in Song dynasty China to the present day. Gillette explores how Jingdezhen has ...been affected by state involvement in porcelain production, particularly during the long 20th century. She considers how the Chinese government has consumed, invested in, taxed and managed the local ceramics industry, and the effects of this state intervention on ceramists’ lives, their local environment and the nature of the goods they produce. Gillette traces how Jingdezhen experienced the transition from imperial rule to state ownership under communism, the changing fortunes of the ceramics industry in the early 21st century, the decay and decline that accompanied privatisation, and a revival brought about by an entrepreneurial culture focusing on the manufacture of highly-prized ‘art porcelain’.
Fisheries' supply of ecosystem services depends on recruiting, maintaining and-in cases of overfishing-preventing fishers' participation. Participation is influenced by fishers' levels of job ...satisfaction and a variety of motivations that cannot be reduced to income size. Previous research on fishers' job satisfaction has applied Maslow's hierarchy of basic, socio-psychological and self-actualization needs. Using these as three categories of co-existing rather than hierarchical needs, we investigate Swedish fishers' motivations for considering fisheries exit. Our results suggest that more than half of fishers are considering exiting and that they identify conflicts with seals (31%), environmental policies (17%) and performance of government agencies (16%) as their main reasons. These motivations, we argue, impact simultaneously basic, socio-psychological and self-actualization needs. Accordingly, fishers' motivations for participation-exit decisions are not solely, and may not be primarily, monetary. A better understanding of fishers' motivations, particularly non-monetary ones, would improve fisheries management.
Mine parks and industrial heritage are relatively recent tourism phenomena, emerging in Europe and North America during the mid-twentieth century. In the People's Republic of China, government ...officials undertook large-scale promotion of mining heritage between 2005 and 2021, when 88 former state-sector mines were designated national parks. From an official vantage point, transforming former extractive industries into heritage sites helped communities negatively affected by the social and environmental legacies of mining and mine closure to pursue a future in China's lucrative tourism sector. To date, this endeavour has been little studied, with research on visitors' experiences particularly limited. In this article, we interrogate Chinese tourists' responses to national mining heritage by analysing online user-generated content (tourist reviews) from three coal-mines-turned-heritage parks. We ask how visitors made meaning at these sites, and whether and how the mining tourism imaginaries they co-constructed in online reviews resembled visitor experiences of mining heritage elsewhere. How Chinese tourists respond to the parks not only affects the state's ability to achieve its development goals, but also informs perceptions of mining, energy production, and tourism more broadly. Such perceptions have implications for sustainable resource and energy use.
Recent decades have witnessed the proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) in the US and Europe. While social scientists classify heterogenous practices as AFNs, their participants share the ...desire to work against the existing food system, and efforts to access food from outside this system. Many analysts have captured these features of AFNs by using concepts from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Yet while Polanyi's framework has been productive, it has also contributed to binary representations of alternative food movements as either advancing non‐market values or in service to commodification and hegemony. We scrutinize San Francisco‐based independent contractors who sell food alternatives and health supplements produced by a multi‐level marketing company we call NatureRise. The marketers of NatureRise products are committed to working against an industrial food system that they consider corrupt. They promote food alternatives that they regard as more natural than food in the conventional system, and embed sales in face‐to‐face relations in which a family‐like concern for human wellbeing is expressed. Yet, they also engage in sales for what Polanyi calls “the motive of gain.” Our case highlights a shortcoming in Polanyi's thought, one that characterizes many social analyses, while supporting the continued relevance of his work.
Between February 2002 and November 2018, Swedish politicians from the Centre, Christian Democrat, Moderate, Liberal and Sweden Democrat parties proposed policies to ban clothing variously referred to ...as the "burka," "full-covering veil," "face veil" and "niqab" (Arabic for face veil) at least 38 times, six at the national level and thirty-two at the municipal. Research suggests that circa 100 women in Sweden wear a "burka"; clearly these policy proposals have little to do with the burka's prevalence. What, then, do these policy proposals attempt to govern? In this text we adopt feminist political scientist Carol Bacchi's "what is the problem represented to be?" approach to analyse Swedish bills to regulate the burka. These policy proposals, we contend, have more to do with conceptualizing Swedishness than addressing an existing "problem" of women who wear burka.
For universities around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid transition to online (remote, distance) education as authorities implemented measures to reduce infection rates. In ...Sweden, universities witnessed roughly 18 months of continuous online education, followed by a period of mixed and campus-based learning environments in the autumn of 2021, and a return to online education in early 2022 as infection rates increased. The Swedish government’s removal of restrictions and plans to remove Covid-19’s classification as a disease dangerous to society (samhällsfarlig sjukdom), however, suggest that universities will no longer be required to offer online instruction. In response to this shift, and in the spirit of Winston Churchill’s call to “never let a good crisis go to waste,” we investigate some changes in teaching and learning caused by the Covid transition. Findings in international studies about university adaptations to Covid and quantitative and qualitative data from our home institution indicate that distance education catalysed new technological engagements for students and teachers, while also reinforcing pedagogical and didactical developments discussed in the literature on teaching and learning in higher education. In other words, the Covid crisis encouraged instructors to (re)learn to teach – not merely by adopting new technologies, but also by implementing student-centred learning. To illustrate this claim, we examine key changes made by teachers in our department, which include pre-recorded minilectures, student-response technologies, and other practices loosely classifiable as interactive learning. These adaptations could facilitate teaching and learning on campus, should teachers choose to continue using them.
For universities around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid transition to online (remote, distance) education as authorities implemented measures to reduce infection rates. In ...Sweden, universities witnessed roughly 18 months of continuous online education, followed by a period of mixed and campus-based learning environments in the autumn of 2021, and a return to online education in early 2022 as infection rates increased. The Swedish government’s removal of restrictions and plans to remove Covid-19’s classification as a disease dangerous to society (samhällsfarlig sjukdom), however, suggest that universities will no longer be required to offer online instruction. In response to this shift, and in the spirit of Winston Churchill’s call to “never let a good crisis go to waste,” we investigate some changes in teaching and learning caused by the Covid transition. Findings in international studies about university adaptations to Covid and quantitative and qualitative data from our home institution indicate that distance education catalysed new technological engagements for students and teachers, while also reinforcing pedagogical and didactical developments discussed in the literature on teaching and learning in higher education. In other words, the Covid crisis encouraged instructors to (re)learn to teach – not merely by adopting new technologies, but also by implementing student-centred learning. To illustrate this claim, we examine key changes made by teachers in our department, which include pre-recorded mini-lectures, student-response technologies, and other practices loosely classifiable as interactive learning. These adaptations could facilitate teaching and learning on campus, should teachers choose to continue using them.
Many conservation researchers and practitioners argue that knowledges traditionally conceptualized as nonacademic are useful for guiding environmental decision-making and stewardship. As demonstrated ...by the articles in this special issue, bringing Indigenous and local knowledges to bear on environmental conservation requires forging new relationships and, de facto, new political arrangements. In this article, we seek to clarify what is at stake in such efforts to change (or maintain) what counts as knowledge by applying rubbish theory to the volume’s case studies. Redrawing the boundaries of what counts as conservation knowledge in engagements between academic researchers and practitioners trained to “do conservation” according to western science traditions, on the one hand, and Indigenous peoples and local communities who possess knowledge generated in non-academic contexts, on the other, effects demarcations of expertise and so challenges existing social hierarchies. Unsurprisingly, tension emerges about how far such changes should go. By increasing awareness of the relationship between (re)defining knowledge and (re)configuring social and political hierarchies, we hope to make it easier for participants to manage such collaborations.
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