Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

This book engages with the politics of social and environmental justice, and seeks new ways to think about the future of urbanization in the twenty-first century. It establishes foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature the material frames of daily life are constituted and represented through social practices, not as separate elements but in relation to each other. It describes how geographical differences are produced, and shows how they then become fundamental to the exploration of political, economic and ecological alternatives to contemporary life.

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference

Human interaction with the environment, particularly when the latter is conceived as nature, is often measured against moral standards for ‘appropriate behaviour’. Different, and frequently conflicting, ways of being-in-the-world are the theme of moral geographies. This paper seeks to elucidate the relation between morality, landscape and environmental practice by focusing upon a particular Scandinavian case. The Jaeren district on the south-western coast of Norway has become one of the most intensively farmed areas in the country, undergoing radical changes causing contemporary farmers to become subject to moral condemnation from a wide range of bodies and people. The paper argues that in order to understand how the culture-nature relationship reflects and produces moral judgements there is a need to investigate how the production and meaning of a lived landscape becomes a moral landscape. Two questions are addressed: What is the ‘nature’ of the moral geographies in the area? How do differing ‘moral geogr...

The habitus, the rule and the moral landscape:

Contributing Authors Preface The Permanence of Persistence and Change.- The Languages of Rural Landscapes.- 'This Is Not a Landscape': Circulating Reference and Land Shaping.- Naming and Claiming Discourse.- Between Insideness and Outsideness - Studying Locals' Perceptions of Landscape.- Landscape Consumption in Otepaa, Estonia.- Countryside Imagery in Finnish National Discourse.- Religious Places - Changing Meanings. The Case of Saaremaa Island, Estonia.- Of Oaks, Erratic Boulders, and Milkmaids.- The Border and the Bordered.- A Hidden World? A Gendered Perspective on Swedish Historical Maps.- When Sweden Was Put on the Map.- Tycho Brahe, Cartography and Landscape in 16th Century Scandinavia.- New Money and theLand Market.- The Landscape of Vittskovle Estate - At the Crossroads of Feudalism and Modernity.- Greens, Commons and Shifting Power Relations in Flanders.- Enclosure Landscapes in the Uplands of England and Wales.- Land Purchase and the Survival of Swedish Ethnicity in Estonia.- The Dynamics of Property Rights in Post-Communist East Germany.- Different Methods for the Protection of Cultural Landscapes.- The Significance of the Dutch GIS Histlands.- The Future Role of Agriculture in Rural Communities.- Danish Farmers and the Cultural Environment.- The Human Factor in Biodiversity.- Diversity of Estonian Coastal Landscapes: Past and Future.- Management Strategies in Forest Landscapes in Norway.- Past Landscape Use as an Ecological Influence on the Actual Environment.- Can Landscapes Be Read?.- The Permanent Conference and the Study of the Rural Landscape

European rural landscapes : persistence and change in a globalising environment

This article identifies three interrelated challenges concerning the ecosystem services (ES) framework and the nature of landscape dynamics within the context of landscape management. These challenges are set within a problematic externalization of nature inherent in the ES framework. The first challenge concerns the lack of compatibility between the ES framework and the logics of landscapes. The second challenge addresses the complexity of ecosystems, unsubstitutable values, and intangible dimensions in economic valuation when applied to landscapes. The third challenge points at how the ES framework has problems in accounting for how and why sociocultural processes are crucial to environmental attitudes and behavior. We argue that the idea of landscape and its inherent landscape dynamics, a crosscutting dimension of these challenges, is a missed opportunity for the ES framework in order to take immeasurable and context-specific social and cultural processes more seriously and consequently deliver sounder advice on landscape management. We thus make a plea for the importance of creating platforms for dialogue across research communities working to improve the understanding of human–nature dynamics.

/pdf/ecosystem-services-and-landscape-management-three-challenges-3lkqtr3u2n.pdf

Ecosystem services and landscape management: three challenges and one plea

This paper is concerned with people, their practices and a situated, contextual and narrative mode of producing and constructing a landscape heritage. By way of illustration I offer a personal account of how I have come to know the landscape heritage of my family and their agricultural practices. Empirical material from a qualitative study among farmers on the south‐western coast of Norway will take its departure from this account. The aim is to demonstrate why a dialectics between a ‘landscape knowing’ and a ‘landscape seeing’ is relevant in debates about natural and cultural heritage.

Farming the heritage: on the production and construction of a personal and practised landscape heritage

Community resilience is often assessed in disaster risk management (DRM) research and it has been argued that it should be strengthened for more robust DRM. However, the term community is seldom precisely defined and it can be understood in many ways. We argue that it is crucial to explore the concept of community within the context of DRM in more detail. We identify three dominating views of conceptualizing community (place-based community, interaction-based community, community of practice and interest), and discuss the relevance of these conceptualizations. We base this discussion on quantitative and qualitative empirical and policy document data regarding flood and storm risk management in Finland, wildfire risk management in Norway and volcanic risk management Iceland. According to our results, all three conceptualizations of community are visible but in differing situations. Our results emphasize the strong role of public sector in DRM in the studied countries. In disaster preparedness and response, a professionalized community of practice and interest appear to be the most prominent within all three countries. The interaction-based community of informal social networks is of less relevance, although its role is more visible in disaster response and recovery. The place-based (local) community is visible in some of the policy documents, but otherwise its role is rather limited. Finally, we argue that the measured resilience of a community depends on how the community is conceptualized and operationalized, and that the measures to strengthen resilience of a particular community should be different depending on what the focal community is.

Gunhild Setten

Papers

The habitus, the rule and the moral landscape:

European rural landscapes : persistence and change in a globalising environment

Ecosystem services and landscape management: three challenges and one plea

Farming the heritage: on the production and construction of a personal and practised landscape heritage

Conceptualizing community in disaster risk management