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Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (HICs) which resonates with existing scholarship on Southern urbanism. Second, we argue that thinking through HICs helps us to move beyond technological and performative accounts of actually existing infrastructures to provide an analytical lens through which to compare different configurations. Our approach enables a clearer analysis of infrastructural artefacts not as individual objects but as parts of geographically spread socio-technological configurations: configurations which might involve many different kinds of technologies, relations, capacities and operations, entailing different risks and power relationships. We use examples from ongoing research on sanitation and waste in Kampala, Uganda – a city in which service delivery is characterised by multiplicity, overlap, disruption and inequality – to demonstrate the kinds of research questions that emerge when thinking through the notion of HICs.
基础设施研究证明了南北半球的城市之间有着广泛的差异，也瓦解了根据北半球城市圈的经验发展起来的城市理论。以历史和文化为根基，北半球发展了普遍、统一基础设施的标准理想；基础设施研究批判了这一理想的普世化。在本评论中，我们首先引入了“异质基础设施配置”(HIC) 的概念，这一概念与现有的南半球城市研究相呼应。其次，我们指出，按照 HIC 的概念思考，有助于我们不仅限于从技术和性能的角度解释实际现存的基础设施，在此之外提供了比较不同配置的一个分析框架。按照我们的方式，就能更清晰地分析基础设施物，不仅将其作为个物，也作为具有地理广度的社会技术配置之一部分：这些配置可能涉及许多不同类型的技术、关系、能力和操作，随之而来的是不同的风险和权力关系。我们使用的例子来自对乌干达坎帕拉市卫生和废弃物的持续研究——这座城市的服务交付以多重性、重叠、分裂和不平等为特征。我们用这些例子来说明以 HIC 的概念思考时涌现出的研究问题。
Journal Article
Nature and empire in Ottoman Egypt : an environmental history
\"In the first ever environmental history of Ottoman Egypt, Alan Mikhail brings to life the complex relationships between Egyptians, their rural world along the Nile, and the Ottoman Empire. This detailed account of irrigation, grain cultivation, the movement of wood, disease, and labor challenges many longstanding ideas in both Ottoman and Egyptian history while at the same time demonstrating how environmental history offers new ways of thinking about the Middle East. This path braking book should be read by all those with interests in the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, environmental history, and early modern history\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The meaning of the Anthropocene: why it matters even without a formal geological definition
Even though geologists have rejected the designation of an Anthropocene epoch, the idea of a major planetary transition in the mid-twentieth century remains useful across physical and social sciences, the humanities and policy.
Journal Article
Co-existing Notions of Research Quality
Notions of research quality are contextual in many respects: they vary between fields of research, between review contexts and between policy contexts. Yet, the role of these co-existing notions in research, and in research policy, is poorly understood. In this paper we offer a novel framework to study and understand research quality across three key dimensions. First, we distinguish between quality notions that originate in research fields (Field-type) and in research policy spaces (Space-type). Second, drawing on existing studies, we identify three attributes (often) considered important for 'good research': its originality/novelty, plausibility/reliability, and value or usefulness. Third, we identify five different sites where notions of research quality emerge, are contested and institutionalised: researchers themselves, knowledge communities, research organisations, funding agencies and national policy arenas. We argue that the framework helps us understand processes and mechanisms through which 'good research' is recognised as well as tensions arising from the co-existence of (potentially) conflicting quality notions. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
Journal Article
Evidence of the impacts of metal mining and the effectiveness of mining mitigation measures on social–ecological systems in Arctic and boreal regions: a systematic map protocol
Background
Mining activities, including prospecting, exploration, construction, operation, maintenance, expansion, abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing of a mine can impact social and environmental systems in a range of positive and negative, and direct and indirect ways. Mining can yield a range of benefits to societies, but it may also cause conflict, not least in relation to above-ground and sub-surface land use. Similarly, mining can alter environments, but remediation and mitigation can restore systems. Boreal and Arctic regions are sensitive to impacts from development, both on social and environmental systems. Native ecosystems and aboriginal human communities are typically affected by multiple stressors, including climate change and pollution, for example.
Methods
We will search a suite of bibliographic databases, online search engines and organisational websites for relevant research literature using a tested search strategy. We will also make a call for evidence to stakeholders that have been identified in the wider 3MK project (
https://osf.io/cvh3u/
). We will screen identified and retrieved articles at two distinct stages (title and abstract, and full text) according to a predetermined set of inclusion criteria, with consistency checks at each level to ensure criteria can be made operational. We will then extract detailed information relating to causal linkages between actions or impacts and measured outcomes, along with descriptive information about the articles and studies and enter data into an interactive systematic map database. We will visualise this database on an Evidence Atlas (an interactive, cartographic map) and identify knowledge gaps and clusters using Heat Maps (cross-tabulations of important variables, such as mineral type and studied impacts). We will identify good research practices that may support researchers in selecting the best study designs where these are clear in the evidence base.
Journal Article
Making Regional Sense of Global Sustainable Development Indicators for the Arctic
Since the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015, efforts are underway to identify indicators for monitoring progress. However, perceptions of sustainability are scale and place specific, and there has also been a call for Sustainable Development Goals and indicators that are more relevant for the Arctic than the global perspectives. Based on earlier and ongoing efforts to identify Arctic Social Indicators for monitoring human development, insights from scenario workshops and interviews at various locations in the Barents region and Greenland and on studies of adaptive capacity and resilience in the Arctic, we provide an exploratory assessment of the global SDGs and indicators from an Arctic perspective. We especially highlight a need for additional attention to demography, including outmigration; indigenous rights; Arctic-relevant measures of economic development; and social capital and institutions that can support adaptation and transformation in this rapidly changing region. Issues brought up by the SDG framework that need more attention in Arctic monitoring include gender, and food and energy security. We furthermore highlight a need for initiatives that can support bottom–up processes for identifying locally relevant indicators for sustainable development that could serve as a way to engage Arctic residents and other regional and local actors in shaping the future of the region and local communities, within a global sustainability context.
Journal Article
Historicizing climate change—engaging new approaches to climate and history
This introduction to a special issue of Climatic Change argues that it is timely and welcome to intensify historical research into climate change and climate as factors of history. This is also already an ongoing trend in many disciplines. The article identifies two main strands in historical work on climate change, both multi-disciplinary: one that looks for it as a driver of historical change in human societies, the other that analyzes the intellectual and scientific roots of the climate system and its changes. In presenting the five papers in this special issue the introduction argues that it is becoming increasingly important to also situate “historicizing climate change” within the history of thought and practice in wider fields, as a matter of intellectual, political, and social history and theory. The five papers all serve as examples of intellectual, political, and social responses to climate-related phenomena and their consequences (ones that have manifested themselves relatively recently and are predominantly attributable to anthropogenic climate change). The historicizing work that these papers perform lies in the analysis of issues that are rising in societies related to climate change in its modern anthropogenic version. The history here is not so much about past climates, although climate change itself is always directly or indirectly present in the story, but rather about history as the social space where encounters take place and where new conditions for humans and societies and their companion species and their life worlds in natures and environments are unfolding and negotiated. With climate change as a growing phenomenon historicizing climate change in this version will become increasingly relevant.
Journal Article