We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust ...indicators of early development so that they reflect the history of a population's ancestors rather than the history of the place they live today greatly improves the ability of those indicators to predict current GDP. The variance of the early development history of a country's inhabitants is a good predictor for current inequality, with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country's income distribution.
The problems of formation of regional policy and stages of formation and growth of geodemography as modern scientific field of population geography were reviewed in details in the article. In the ...first stage, a central place in the system of knowledge of the population belongs to the demographics. The second stage are increased by interaction of demography with other sciences, including geography. At their junction, a new discipline - population geography. In the third stage are forming the new direction of population geography - geodemography which orientated to the study of regional differences of population and resettlement and development of a regional demographic policy.
Quantifying patterns of population structure in Africans and African Americans illuminates the history of human populations and is critical for undertaking medical genomic studies on a global scale. ...To obtain a fine-scale genome-wide perspective of ancestry, we analyze Affymetrix GeneChip 500K genotype data from African Americans (n = 365) and individuals with ancestry from West Africa (n = 203 from 12 populations) and Europe (n = 400 from 42 countries). We find that population structure within the West African sample reflects primarily language and secondarily geographical distance, echoing the Bantu expansion. Among African Americans, analysis of genomic admixture by a principal component-based approach indicates that the median proportion of European ancestry is 18.5% (25th-75th percentiles: 11.6-27.7%), with very large variation among individuals. In the African-American sample as a whole, few autosomal regions showed exceptionally high or low mean African ancestry, but the X chromosome showed elevated levels of African ancestry, consistent with a sex-biased pattern of gene flow with an excess of European male and African female ancestry. We also find that genomic profiles of individual African Americans afford personalized ancestry reconstructions differentiating ancient vs. recent European and African ancestry. Finally, patterns of genetic similarity among inferred African segments of African-American genomes and genomes of contemporary African populations included in this study suggest African ancestry is most similar to non-Bantu Niger-Kordofanian-speaking populations, consistent with historical documents of the African Diaspora and trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Over the last decade, a growing body of literature has emerged which is concerned with the question of what form a promising concept of social resilience might take. In this article we argue that ...social resilience has the potential to be crafted into a coherent analytic framework that can build on scientific knowledge from the established concept of social vulnerability, and offer a fresh perspective on today's challenges of global change. Based on a critical review of recently published literature on the issue, we propose to define social resilience as being comprised of three dimensions: 1. Coping capacities —the ability of social actors to cope with and overcome all kinds of adversities; 2. Adaptive capacities — their ability to learn from past experiences and adjust themselves to future challenges in their everyday lives; 3. Transformative capacities — their ability to craft sets of institutions that foster individual welfare and sustainable societal robustness towards future crises. Viewed in this way, the search for ways to build social resilience — especially in the livelihoods of the poor and marginalized — is revealed to be not only a technical, but also a political issue. Innerhalb der vergangenen Dekade ist eine Vielzahl von Artikeln erschienen, die sich mit der Frage beschäftigen, wie ein der Forschung dienliches Konzept von sozialer Resilienz aussehen könnte. Wir argumentieren, dass ein in sich kohärentes Forschungsprogramm erstellt werden kann, welches nicht nur in der Lage ist, Ergebnisse aus der Verwundbarkeitsforschung aufzunehmen, sondern gleichsam neue Wege für die Erforschung aktueller Problemlagen aufzuzeigen vermag. Vor dem Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen Literaturlage schlagen wir eine Definition sozialer Resilienz vor, welche drei Dimensionen umfasst: 1. Die Fähigkeit sozialer Akteure zur Bewältigung von Krisen. 2. Das Vermögen, aus vergangenen Erfahrungen zu lernen und sich an zukünftige Entwicklungen anzupassen. 3. Die Befähigung zur sozialen und ökologischen Transformation, welche das individuelle Wohlergehen fördern und einer nachhaltigen gesellschaftlichen Stärkung im Umgang mit zukünftigen Krisen dienlich sind. In dieser Betrachtungsweise erscheint die Suche nach Resilienz — insbesondere für die Lebenshaltung der Armen und Ausgegrenzten — nicht als technische, sondern primär als politische Aufgabe.
Over the past two decades, geographers’ attentions to the ‘visual’ arts have broadened considerably. From a tightly focused study of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings this engagement now ...encompasses: a temporal reorientation towards 20th-century art practices; an opening out of concerns beyond the thematic frame of landscape; the embrace of a wider variety of artistic media beyond painting practices; and a shift in modes of engagement that sees geographers taking up a range of creative practices. In this paper I do not want to further expand the field, but rather to draw attention to how and with what effect these engagements have proceeded. Discussion is framed by Rosalind Krauss’ influential exploration of art’s ‘expanded field’, itself an attempt to rethink art as an analytic object in the face of a multiplication of artistic practices, materials, operations and sites. The body of the paper explores three analytics that mark intersections of art’s expanding field of theory and practice, and geography’s own expanding field of operations: these are, artists’ changing orientations towards ‘site’, a phenomenological critique of the ‘body’, and the ‘materialities’ and ‘practices’ of making (keywords that have usually been articulated as intrinsically geographic, and applied to the art world). Synthesizing these perspectives with current geographical engagements with art and broader disciplinary debates is, I suggest, to affirm the place and value of the study and practice of art within key disciplinary concerns.
: This article takes on the challenge of what Robert Proctor calls “agnotology” (the study of ignorance) to analyse the current assault on the British welfare state by think tanks, policy elites and ...conservative politicians. The assault is traced back to the emergence of the Centre for Social Justice think tank, founded in 2004 by the current Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan‐Smith. I argue that a familiar litany of social pathologies (family breakdown, worklessness, antisocial behaviour, personal responsibility, out‐of‐wedlock childbirth, dependency) is repeatedly invoked by the architects of welfare reform to manufacture ignorance of alternative ways of addressing poverty and social injustice. Structural causes of poverty have been strategically ignored in favour of a single behavioural explanation—“Broken Britain”—where “family breakdown” has become the central problem to be tackled by the philanthropic fantasy of a “Big Society”. My agnotological approach critically explores the troubling relationship between (mis)information and state power.
The history of click-speaking Khoe-San, and African populations in general, remains poorly understood. We genotyped ~2.3 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms in 220 southern Africans and found ...that the Khoe-San diverged from other populations ≥100,000 years ago, but population structure within the Khoe-San dated back to about 35,000 years ago. Genetic variation in various sub-Saharan populations did not localize the origin of modern humans to a single geographic region within Africa; instead, it indicated a history of admixture and stratification. We found evidence of adaptation targeting muscle function and immune response; potential adaptive introgression of protection from ultraviolet light; and selection predating modern human diversification, involving skeletal and neurological development. These new findings illustrate the importance of African genomic diversity in understanding human evolutionary history.
With increases in the availability of geo‐referenced data, there has been a push for developing better methods to study demographic processes across space. This paper reviews the recent developments ...in “spatial demography” and argues that an important aspect has been neglected, namely, the focus on the dynamics and interactions of population change across space, which is an area that should be central to the field. Frameworks for analysing spatial demography were first proposed in multiregional demography. This paper revisits these methods and then describes how methods developed by geographers, economists, and other social scientists for analysing spatial data may be better integrated to study spatial population dynamics.
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