Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes: Critical localism with planetary scope

2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110319
Author(s):  
Kim Fortun ◽  
James Adams ◽  
Tim Schütz ◽  
Scott Gabriel Knowles

The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we describe one such approach to Anthropocene knowledge production, centered in short-term Field Campuses that bring together community actors in cultural institutions, media, and government agencies with external academic researchers, bringing cultural analysis into the work of characterizing and responding to the Anthropocene. We argue that it is important to build public knowledge infrastructure that allows people to visualize and address many intersecting scales and systems (ecological, atmospheric, economic, technological, social, cultural, etc.) that shape the Anthropocene at the local level.

Author(s):  
Billy Ehn

Artistic research suggests alternative methods for producing various kinds of knowledge, whether within or without the confines of academe. These methods may involve either the production of investigative artworks or the writing by the artist of a doctoral dissertation about his or her own work. For cultural researchers, the methods employed by artists engaged in these processes are both familiar and challenging, as conventional ethnography is mixed with more unpredictable experiments. This article presents several contemporary artworks, including sculpture, film, dance, installation and performance that explore various aspects of reality. What can be learnt from these works? And what could be achieved by an open exchange between artists and academic researchers? Four methodological approaches are highlighted as being of particular interest. The first relates to artists’ tendency to live experimentally, using themselves both as actors and as research objects. The second arises from the very tangible ways in which contemporary artworks approach the theme of materiality. The third relates to the emotional nature of much of contemporary art – even when it is categorised as conceptual – in its creation, forms of presentation, and influence on the spectator. Finally, many artists are gifted with the ability to find and communicate surprising meanings in ordinary life. How do they do this? Part of the answer seems to be that although artists are open to the implementation of “wild whims”, they exploit their spontaneity in a highly professional manner.


e-Finanse ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Adam Mateusz Suchecki

AbstractFollowing the completion of the process of decentralisation of public administration in Poland in 2003, a number of tasks implemented previously by the state authorities were transferred to the local level. One of the most significant changes to the financing and management methods of the local authorities was the transfer of tasks related to culture and national heritage to the set of tasks implemented by local governments. As a result of the decentralisation process, the local government units in Poland were given significant autonomy in determining the purposes of their budgetary expenditures on culture. At the same time, they were obliged to cover these expenses from their own revenues.This paper focuses on the analysis of expenditures on culture covered by the voivodship budgets, taking into consideration the structure of cultural institutions by their types, between 2003-2015. The location quotient (LQ) was applied to two selected years (2006 and 2015) to illustrate the diversity of expenditures on culture in individual voivodships.


Author(s):  
Tomas Balkelis

This chapter, by following the course of military actions in Lithuania in 1919, explores the emergence of various military and paramilitary groups that engaged in different types of violence. The focus here is on the entanglement of three types of actors: those that performed state-sanctioned violence; those that acted as semi-independent paramilitary agents, and those that engaged in ethnically or socially motivated violence on a local level. The ability of the Lithuanian government to survive the series of military engagements in 1919 enhanced its legitimacy among the local population, and laid the foundation for a modern Lithuanian identity among the masses. Yet the new state and national identity were shaped in a continuous cycle of violence, social strife, mobilization, and militarization of society.


Author(s):  
Olukorede Abiona

Abstract This paper evaluates the short-term health effects of in utero drought shock using repeated cross-section household data on Malawi. The main finding reveals that the effects of in utero harvest variability caused by rainfall shocks on child growth indices are driven by the deleterious effects of negative rainfall deviations, namely droughts. Negative rainfall deviation during the agricultural season prior to the gestational period of a child leads to a 21.8 per cent average local level reduction in age-standardized height scores, with the counterpart positive rainfall deviation having no apparent effect. The paper also uses harvest and consumption patterns to establish an important link between early-life malnutrition and growth serving as a precursor for the fetal period programming hypothesis in the literature. The direct impact of embryonic period shocks on growth provides supportive evidence on potential interaction between nutritional and environmental pathways.


2021 ◽  
pp. 193896552110335
Author(s):  
John W. O’Neill ◽  
Jihwan Yeon

In recent years, short-term rental platforms in the lodging sector, including Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway, have received extensive attention and emerged as potentially alternative suppliers of services traditionally provided by established commercial accommodation providers, that is, hotels. Short-term rentals have dramatically increased the available supply of rooms for visitors to multiple international destinations, potentially siphoning demand away from hotels to short-term rental businesses. In a competitive market, an increase in supply with constant demand would negatively influence incumbent service providers. In this article, we examine the substitution effects of short-term rental supply on hotel performance in different cities around the world. Specifically, we comprehensively investigate the substitution effects of short-term rental supply on hotel performance based on hotel class, location type, and region. Furthermore, we segment the short-term rental supply based on its types of accommodations, that is, shared rooms, private rooms, and entire homes, and both examine and quantify the differential effects of these types of short-term rentals on different types of hotels. This study offers a comprehensive analysis regarding the impact of multiple short-term rental platforms on hotel performance and offers both conceptual and practical insights regarding the nature and extent of the effects that were identified.


J ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-192
Author(s):  
Dianna M. Smith ◽  
Alison Heppenstall ◽  
Monique Campbell

There is an ongoing demand for data on population health, for reasons of resource allocation, future planning and crucially to address inequalities in health between people and between populations. Although there are regular sources of data at coarse spatial scales, such as countries or large sub-national units such as states, there is often a lack of good quality health data at the local level. One method to develop reliable estimates of population health outcomes is spatial microsimulation, an approach that has its roots in economic studies. Here, we share a review of this method for estimating health in populations, explaining the different approaches available and examples where the method is applied successfully for creating both static and dynamic populations. Recent notable advances in the method that allow uncertainty to be represented are highlighted, along with the evolving approaches to validation that are an ongoing challenge in small-area estimation. The summary serves as a primer for academics new to the area of research as well as an overview for non-academic researchers who consider using these models for policy evaluations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 589-592
Author(s):  
Katsuyuki KATOU ◽  
Hitoshi MARUYAMA

Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslav Popper

AbstractThe article approaches the topic of social trust from an evolutionary perspective. It begins by summarising the most influential approaches that have defined specific and social trust and ascertains what causes differences in degrees of trust and how the potential risk of deception might be lowered. It then notes that the basis of morality had already been formed during the era of prehistoric man, who was able to create coalitions against aggressors and to socially control the behaviour of deviants. It points out, however, that having a certain predisposition to behaving cooperatively or an increased sensitivity to recognising and not tolerating behaviour aimed at abusing cooperation is not a sufficient guarantee of the fact that people will always (or at least in the majority of situations) favour cooperation over deception. One of the reasons for this is a tendency to favour short-term gains over long-term ones. The article argues that establishing norms (moral, social and legal) produces a higher level of social trust because it not only “encourages” individuals to behave in certain ways in particular situations but also works as a sanction which “discourages” the individual from socially deviant behaviour. The article then focuses on a debate about the causal relationship between social trust and social capital. It discusses the suggestion that political institutions, government and the judiciary may reduce rather than raise levels of social capital and consequently also the level of social trust. This is partly because of their powerful position and the consequent scope for corruption and partly because of the fact that even when attempting to act honestly, representatives of these institutions cannot sufficiently reflect upon dynamic change at the local level. Finally, the article ends by adopting the position that social trust is built primarily from bottom up and so it is risky to continually doubt the very existence and usefulness of social norms and morality and to be governed simply by legal norms.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1845-1870 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Lübcke ◽  
N. Bobrowski ◽  
S. Arellano ◽  
B. Galle ◽  
G. Garzón ◽  
...  

Abstract. The molar ratio of BrO to SO2 is, like other halogen/sulphur ratios, a~possible precursor for dynamic changes in the shallow part of a volcanic system. While the predictive significance of the BrO/SO2 ratio has not been well constrained yet, it has the major advantage that this ratio can be readily measured using the remote-sensing technique Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) in the UV. While BrO/SO2 ratios have been measured during several short-term field campaigns this article presents an algorithm that can be used to obtain long-term time series of BrO/SO2 ratios from the scanning DOAS instruments of the Network for Observation of Volcanic and Atmospheric Change (NOVAC) or comparable networks. Parameters of the DOAS retrieval of both trace gases are given and the influence of co-adding spectra on the retrieval error will be investigated. Difficulties in the evaluation of spectroscopic data from monitoring instruments in volcanic environments and possible solutions are discussed. The new algorithm is demonstrated by evaluating data from the NOVAC scanning DOAS systems at Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia encompassing almost four years of measurements between November 2009 and end of June 2013. This dataset shows variations of the BrO/SO2 ratio several weeks prior to the eruption on 30 June 2012.


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