Spatial media/tion Leszczynski, Agnieszka
Progress in human geography,
12/2015, Letnik:
39, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as ‘spatial media’ to advance media as an epistemology ...for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives of ‘virtual’–‘real’ spatial hybrids by instead understanding spatiality (as the nexus of material socio-spatio-technical relations) as always-already mediated – i.e. as the ontogenetic effects of the contingent, necessarily incomplete comings-together of technical presences, persons, and space/place.
Taxation in general and tax evasion in particular are inherently geographical in nature, but only a small number of geographers have focused on them. In this progress report I present geographers’ ...research on offshore financial centres alongside the work of researchers from other disciplines to present an overview of what we know about the geographies of tax evasion and avoidance. It is argued that not only much regulatory work but also much research remains to be done on tax havens.
South Africa's smallholders have progressively become disengaged from farming despite their lack of alternative livelihood options, resulting in the deepening of rural poverty. Farming's reduced role ...in rural livelihoods represents a wider trend of deagrarianisation seen across contexts and geographies. While most literature on deagrarianisation focuses on its economic dimensions, this paper places the social and cultural dimensions of farming at the centre of its analysis to understand why smallholders are becoming less engaged in agriculture. Drawing on Habermas's concept of the colonisation of the lifeworld and on ethnographic fieldwork in four villages in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, we show how local social cohesion in farming has been undermined by a series of oppressive state policies. Recent agricultural development interventions have not managed to break with this trend, but instead continue to undermine social cohesion and reciprocity. The impacts of this loss of social cohesion in farming have been most severe for the poorest households who seldom plant their fields today. Based on our findings, we suggest that agricultural development programmes should aim to build on smallholders' appreciation of agriculture, their remaining connections to the land and their sense of solidarity, rather than focusing exclusively on stimulating the development of individual entrepreneurs.
•South African smallholders are becoming disengaged from farming.•We analyse the changing role of farming in four villages in the Eastern Cape.•Past and contemporary policies have negatively impacted social cohesion in farming.•This has led to farmers being more dependent on money and/or government support.•The individualisation of farming has been particularly challenging for the poorest.
Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set ...of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption narratives become politicized and yoked to symbolic, material, and territorial regimes of power. We suggest that recent theories of urban informality provide a revealing lens into the ethico-politics and territorial struggles of contemporary capitalism across the North and South.
This paper develops a rigorous concept of institutions to investigate the interrelationships between institutional and economic change from the perspective of economic geography. We view institutions ...neither as behavioural regularities nor as organizations or rules, but conceive institutions as stabilizations of mutual expectations and correlated interaction. The paper discusses how economic interaction in space is shaped by existing institutions, how this leads to economic decisions and new rounds of action, and how their intended and unintended consequences impact or enact new/existing institutions. The paper explores three modes of institutional change – hysteresis, emergent change, and institutional entrepreneurship.
Community tutelary shrines in Taiwan have been identified as excellent resources for grassroots-level heritage. As community ritual assemblages, they are able to encode data about a settlement’s ...social, political and economic history in their material composition, aesthetic choices, artefacts, displays and orientations. This data paper previews a first edition dataset related to 752 such shrines found throughout the greater Taipei area in northern Taiwan. It explores the basis for such a dataset, how it can be used and what has been produced. This dataset is available on the depositar research data repository, operated out of the Institute of Information Sciences at Academia Sinica in Taipei and is publicly available for download.
This study examines the dynamic impact of financial development, energy consumption, trade openness, and economic growth on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in Nigeria. We applied autoregressive ...distributed lag bound testing technique for the period of 1971–2010. The empirical result shows a long-run cointegration relationship among the variables. The long-run estimation result, however, reveals that, economic growth, development of the financial sector and energy consumption have a positive and significant impact on carbon dioxide emissions, whereas trade openness has negative and significant impact on carbon dioxide emissions. The finding suggest that the government should emphasize programs and policies that reduce carbon dioxide emissions by opening the trade sector considering the roles such openness plays in reducing environmental degradation in the country, which directly enhances environmental quality.
Current conceptualizations of vulnerability have so far served to describe—and reproduce—social difference, setting people apart at local and global scales. Yet vulnerability is fundamental to the ...connectedness in social relations critical to understanding and acting on climate change. A more compassionate type of research is urgently required; that is, one that goes beyond the material and political dimensions to investigate the deeply personal. Drawing on politics of adaptation, emotional geographies, sustainability science and psychology literatures, the paper reconceptualizes vulnerability as co-suffering, linking lived experiences with a shared humanity.
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