scholarly journals The Production and Destruction of Forests through the Lens of Landesque Capital Accumulation

Human Ecology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowe Börjeson ◽  
Tola Gemechu Ango
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Forest Ecosystems ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Annual Crops ◽  
Southwestern Ethiopia ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Landscape Legacies

AbstractWe discuss the management of trees and forests through the lens of “landesque capital.” A theoretical point of departure is how landesque capital accumulates through a process that relies on both the ‘work of nature’ and the ‘work of people.’ This approach highlights the importance of undertaking a critical analysis of labor investment and its landscape legacies in relation to ecological processes, social dynamics, and political economy. Empirically we draw on the case of smallholder production of coffee and annual crops in southwestern Ethiopia. We show how both the production (generation and maintenance) and destruction of forests in the study area are largely shaped by processes of landesque capital accumulation and discuss the importance of analyzing how people contribute to produce forests to meet production goals in contrast to the ubiquitous notion of humans as a solely destructive force of change in forest ecosystems.

Towards evolutionary agroecology

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (14) ◽  
pp. 51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin L. Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Agricultural Systems ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Genetic Analyses ◽  
Holistic Perspective ◽  
Evolutionary Study ◽  
Quantitative Genetic ◽  
Field Evolution

Agroecology derives much of its strength from interactions between disciplines that produce a holistic perspective on agricultural systems and issues.  Although ongoing integration of social dynamics into agroecology has strengthened the field, evolution and genetics have not been embraced to the same degree, despite the fact that they have been are discussed in some common agroecology texts.  I argue that the field of agroecology could extend its reach and depth by embracing the evolutionary study of agroecosystems.  Areas of evolutionary inquiry with relevance to agriculture focus on long or short term processes, encompass a range of scales, incorporate molecular or quantitative genetic analyses, and explore ecological processes to differing degrees.

scholarly journals Rising tides? Data capture, platform accumulation, and new monopolies in the digital music economy

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie M Meier ◽  
Vincent R Manzerolle
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Attention Capture ◽  
Data Capture ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
Business Strategies ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Consumer Privacy ◽  
User Data ◽  
Jay Z

This article examines the roles of platform-based distribution and user data in the digital music economy. Drawing on trade press, newspaper coverage, and a consumer privacy complaint, we offer a critical analysis of tech-music partnerships forged between Samsung and Jay-Z (2013), Apple iTunes Store and U2 (2014), Tidal and Kanye West (2016), and Apple Music and Drake (2017). In these cases, information technology (IT) companies supported album releases, and music was used to generate user data and attention: logics of data and attention capture were interwoven. The IT and music industries have adapted their business strategies to what we conceptualize as platform-based capital accumulation or ‘platform accumulation’, and models centred on controlling access and extracting rent have enabled the emergence of new monopolies and IT gatekeepers.

scholarly journals THE FEMINIST AGENDA, A FALL OF HIERARCHAL REDRESS OR AN ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISHING AN ‘EQUAL’ SOCIETY GONE WRONG: AN INTERNAL CRITIQUE TO FEMINIST THEORIES

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Motshweni
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
South African ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Critical Race Feminism ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Point Of Departure

The aim of this paper is to interrogate the post-1994 feminist approaches to jurisprudential discourse. This interrogation will include a consideration as to whether critical instead of ‘traditional’ feminist theories contribute in transforming or decolonising South African law and jurisprudence. It is my suggestion that the inquiry to address ‘gender equality’ before and without addressing issues of racism and racial classism simultaneously in South Africa contributes effectively to the continued marginalisation of black women. As such, my position attempts to engage with the critical feminist approaches in order to address the prejudices that traditional feminist approaches impose on black women. The focal theoretical point of departure for this interrogation is critical race feminism.2 Critical race feminism proposes a progressive initiative for addressing the inconsistencies embodied within the traditional feminist approaches and is thus suitable for the South African post-apartheid context as it may trigger ‘transformative possibilities’.3 It is my contention that in order to address the marginalisation of black women, the traditional feminist approaches (such as the dominant feminist approaches) must be done away with for they are a hindrance to legal reform, as they prejudice the very structure they claim to protect.

scholarly journals Metaphysical Anthropocentrism, Limitrophy, and Responsibility: An Explication of the Subject of Animal Rights

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Jan-Harm De Villiers
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article undertakes a critical analysis of subjectivity and exposes the metaphysical and anthropocentric quasi-transcendental conditions that give rise to the construct(ion) of the Subject. I locate a critical moment for the metaphysical Subject in the work of Martin Heidegger which, whilst sadly not sustained in his later writings, provides a point of departure for an examination of the significance that animality plays in the metaphysical tradition and its constitutive relation to the construct of subjectivity. I discern this relation to be violent and sacrificial and draw on Jacques Derrida's nonanthropocentric ethics against the background of Drucilla Cornell's ethical reading of deconstruction to construct a critique of approaches that assimilate animals to the traditional model of subjectivity in order to represent their identity and interests in the legal paradigm. The main argument that I seek to advance is that such an approach paradoxically re-constructs the classical humanist subject of metaphysics and re-establishes the subject-centred system that silences the call of the animal Other, thereby solidifying and extending the legitimacy of a discourse and mode of social regulation that is fundamentally anthropocentric. I examine how we can address, incapacitate and move beyond this schemata of power through a rigorous deconstruction of the partitions that institute the Subject and how deconstruction clears a space for a de novo determination of the animal "subject" that can proceed from different sites of nonanthropocentric interruption. What follows is a call to refuse the mechanical utilisation of traditional legal constructs and I argue in favour of an approach to the question of the animal (in law) that identifies and challenges anthropocentrism as its critical target. I ultimately propose a critical engagement with the underlying metaphysical support of animal rights at a conceptual level, rather than simply utilising the law pragmatically as an instrument of immediate resolution.    

scholarly journals Relational Work in Lifestyle Enterprising: Sustaining the Tension between the Personal and the Commercial

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Erika Andersson Cederholm
Keyword(s):  
Small Businesses ◽  
Business Owners ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Southern Sweden ◽  
Work Identity ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
Tourism And Hospitality ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article focuses on the negotiated distinction between commercial and non-commercial spheres of life through the phenomenon of lifestyle entrepreneurship. Lifestyle entrepreneurship is a concept used for a form of self-employment, based on the business owner’s own hobby or lifestyle. The article is based on a study of lifestyle enterprising in the tourism and hospitality industries in southern Sweden. The study comprises ethnographic interviews, field observations, and go-alongs with owners of small businesses that can be described as commercial homes, such as bed & breakfast and farm stay. The article uses the context of lifestyle entrepreneurs to theorize and discuss the dynamics of blurring and/or marking the distinction between personal and commercial relations. The theoretical point of departure is the notion of relational work in combination with the notion of sociological ambivalence. By combining these two strands of literature it is argued that the business owners’ narrative practices sustain ambiguity and blurred boundaries, rather than draw lines, between commercial and non-commercial spheres. It is also argued that lifestyle-oriented work identity constructs a friendship-oriented form of service encounter, reinforced by a market where emotional closeness emerges as an experience product.

A Critical Analysis of Capitalism, Capital Accumulation and Crisis Theory in David Harvey

2020 ◽  
pp. 097674792095300
Author(s):  
Tanaya Majumder
Keyword(s):  
Business Cycles ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Crisis Theory ◽  
Surplus Labour ◽  
The One ◽  
Rate Of Profit ◽  
Marxist Tradition

This article is a critical review of David Harvey’s essentialist theorisation of a capitalist economy and its crisis from a class focused Marxist perspective. The first part examines Harvey’s immense contribution to the understanding of space and spatiality of capitalism within the Marxist tradition. Capital accumulation in his theorisation serves as the impresario of space and spatiality and the harbinger of capitalist crisis in general. Expanding on a class focused approach, the second part provides a critique of Harvey’s methodology and crisis theory in which the law of capital accumulation reigns supreme. Specifically, using an anti-essentialist methodology of overdetermination with class process of surplus labour as the theoretical entry point, as developed by Resnick and Wolff, I argue that no correspondence of the rate of capital accumulation with those of rate of profit and rate of class distribution can be drawn. This unpredictability renders capitalism inherently unstable, prone to business cycles whose cause cannot be reduced to any chosen causal factor such as the one reducible to capital accumulation.

scholarly journals Ideology and intertextuality: Intertextual allusions in Judith 16

2011 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Philip Nolte ◽  
Pierre J. Jordaan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

This article utilised the theory of intertextuality to investigate the way in which religious texts, specifically Judith 16, generate meaning in the act of the production of texts. The groundbreaking work on intertextuality done by Julia Kristeva served as the theoretical point of departure. Kristeva utilised Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory to develop her own views on intertextuality. According to the theory of intertextuality, all texts are intersections of different texts and are therefore polyvalent. The article argued that the ideology (or ideologies) of author(s) of texts underpin the ways in which other texts are used and alluded to. The purpose of the investigation was to illustrate how intertextual allusions in Judith 16 are used to describe ‘God/the Lord’ as a God of war and, thereby, to maintain an already existing ideology of war:We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (Barthes, cited in Beal 1992:27)

Understanding Capitalism: Crises and Passive Revolutions

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xing Li ◽  
Jacques Hersh
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
Economic Level ◽  
Restructuring Strategy ◽  
Production Relations ◽  
Democratic Principles

This article has two objectives: First, it attempts to provide a framework for understanding capitalism's resilient adaptability through analysing the roles of liberal democracy and ecological environmentalism. Both are conceptualised as capitalism's passive revolutions in response to emerging crises – processes of constituting and reconstituting conditions for production and reproduction. Liberal democracy is seen as a political restructuring strategy aimed at producing social control with less coercive measures as well as depolitising social contradictions and economic crises. Ecological environmentalism is argued to be capitalism's ecological restructuring attempt at the economic level in order to rescue an economic system at an impasse and to resolve the contradictions between production relations/forces and the externalities of production. Second, the article aims to conduct a critical analysis of what are considered to be passive revolutions taking place within capitalism in order to uncover their hidden mystifications, contradictions and distortions in the promotion of certain policies, practices, values, cognitions and symbols which are considered to be supportive of the existing capitalist political and economic system. The working assumption is that, due to capitalism's modus operandi which is primarily based on capital accumulation, democratic principles and environmental concerns will eventually have to submit to this inherent imperative.

scholarly journals Forensic evidence: Materializing bodies, materializing crimes

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinna Kruse
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Forensic Evidence ◽  
Dna Evidence ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Point Of Departure

Based on an ethnographic study of fingerprint and DNA evidence practices in the Swedish judicial system, this article analyses the materialization of forensic evidence. It argues that forensic evidence, while popularly understood as firmly rooted in materiality, is inseparably technoscientific and cultural. Its roots in the material world are entangled threads of matter, technoscience and culture that produce particular bodily constellations within and together with a particular sociocultural context. Forensic evidence, it argues further, is co-materialized with crimes as well as with particular bodily and social constellations. Consequently, the article suggests that an analysis of how forensic evidence is produced can contribute to feminist understandings of the inseparability of sex and gender: understanding bodies as ongoing technoscientific-material-cultural practices of materialization may be a fruitful approach to analysing their complexity, and the relationships in which they are placed, without surrendering to either cultural or biological determinism. Taking a theoretical point of departure not only in an STS-informed approach, but also in material feminist theorizations, the article also underlines that the suggested theoretical conversations across borders of feminist theory and STS should be understood as a two-way-communication where the two fields contribute mutually to each other.

Analysis of forest types and estimates of biomass in the Sierra de La Laguna Reserve, Baja California Sur, Mexico

2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 2059-2068 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis León-de la Luz ◽  
Raymundo Domínguez-Cadena
Keyword(s):  
Forest Ecosystems ◽  
Baja California ◽  
Forest Type ◽  
Forest Types ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Living Tree ◽  
Tree Diameter ◽  
Anthropogenic Stressors ◽  
Natural Factors ◽  
Ecological Changes

Understanding of the natural factors that lead to complex changes in forest ecosystems is limited. Worldwide, there are only a few forests as pristine and isolated as the Sierra de La Laguna in the southernmost range of the arid Baja California, Mexico. Its outstanding trait as a model system is that anthropogenic stressors are notably absent, which facilitates the study of natural ecological processes of the forest because separating human-induced ecological changes from natural ones is not a simple matter. In this study, we sampled sites and defined vegetation units on the basis of dominance of the canopy by the main tree species. We identified three forest types: the pine and encino forests that occupy the higher areas and the roble forest at lower elevations. For each living tree in the sampling plots, we measured height, canopy coverage per tree, diameter at breast height, as well as the amount of deadwood, leaf litter, and abundance of young trees. A succesional competition occurs between Pinus and Quercus sensu lato; we conclude that the encino forest represents a climax condition, the pine type represents an early succesional stage, and the roble forest type is a simple climax community.

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