Digital Commons Network^™

Religion And Technology: Refiguring Place, Space, Identity And Community, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper reviews the literature on the religion-technology nexus, drawing up a research agenda and offering preliminary empirical insights. Firsts I stress the need to explore the new politics of space as a consequence of technological development, emphasizing questions about the role of religion in effecting a form of religious (neo)imperialism, and uneven access to techno-religious spaces. Second, I highlight the need to examine the politics of identity and community, since cyberspace is not an isotropic surface. Third, I underscore the need to engage with questions about the poetics of religious community as social relations become mediated by technology. Finally, …

The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-Vigilance Of Children And The Global Retreat From Social Reproduction, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

In an early scene in The Terminator, the Cyborgian Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into an L.A. gun shop and asks to see the wares. The shopkeeper lays out Uzis, submachine guns, rocket launchers, and other sophisticated means of overkill, nervously understating, "Any one of these will suit you for home defense purposes." The situation is likewise in the growing child protection industry. In keeping with the shopkeeper's sly comment, these businesses feast on an all-pervasive culture of fear, while creating a mockery, alibi, and distraction out of what they are really about - to remake the home as a citadel through …

Chernobyl Stories And Anthropological Shock In Hungary, Krista Harper

Krista M. Harper

The Budapest Chernobyl Day commemoration generated a creative outpouring of stories about parental responsibilities, scientific knowledge, environmental risks, and public participation. I examine the stories and performances elicited by the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1996. In these “Chernobyl stories,” activists criticized scientific and state paternalism while engaging in alternative practices of citizenship. The decade between the catastrophic explosion and its commemoration coincides with the development of the Hungarian environmental movement and the transformation from state socialism. Chernobyl Day 1996 consequently became an opportunity for activists to reflect upon how the meaning of citizenship and public …

Mapping 'New' Geographies Of Religion: Politics And Poetics In Modernity, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article reviews geographical research on religion in the 1990s, and highlights work from neighbouring disciplines where relevant. Contrary to views that the field is incoherent, I suggest that much of the literature pays attention to several key themes, particularly, the politics and poetics of religious place, identity and community. I illustrate the key issues, arguments and conceptualizations in these areas, and suggest various ways forward. These 'new' geographies emphasize different sites of religious practice beyond the 'officially sacred'; different sensuous sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different constitutions of population …

The Garifuna Of Belize: Strategies Of Representation, Sharon E. Wilcox

Student Research Submissions

This study considers representation within the media as a method of fostering a sense of community and identity among a group of people, as well as a strategy to achieve political and economic gains. The subject of this investigation is the Garifuna of Belize and the representation of their identity through various media outlets, including documentary film, websites, news articles, scholarly writing and trade books. Furthermore, this paper explores the development of these representations of the Garifuna as a strategy for improving the political and economic strength of the community.

Learner-Centered Instruction: Inquiry-Based, Technology-Enriched, Integrating Workplace Reality: A Resource Guide For Teachers, Marjorie L. Mclellan

Geography Faculty Publications

Inquiry-based instructional strategies function best with motivated students whose interest and imagination are already enlivened and whose curiosity will help them master new learning skills. The responsibility for supplying the initial impetus falls upon many diverse entities across the student's educational life. College teachers often inherit students with years of spoon-fed, low-expectation instruction, challenging instructors in higher education to overcome this deficit. Fortunately, most students possess a native curiosity that is eventually heightened by academic success, especially when their achievements are perceived to stem from their own work and thought processes. This is the power of inquiry-based learning.

The rapidity …

"The Little City In Itself": Middle-Class Aspirations In Bangor, Maine, 1880-1920, Sara K. Martin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the inception and growth of "the Little City in Itself," a residential neighborhood in Bangor, Maine, as a case study of middle-class suburbanization and domestic life in small cities around the turn of the twentieth century. The development of Little City is the story of builders' and residents' efforts to shape a middle-class neighborhood in a small American city, a place distinct from the crowded downtown neighborhoods of immigrants and the elegant mansions of the wealthy. The purpose of this study is to explore builders' response to the aspirations of the neighborhood's residents for home and neighborhood …

Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray

Economics

Popular and official representations of the environment in Burkina Faso present soils as fragile and potentially subject to catastrophic collapse in fertility. In the cotton growing zone of southwestern Burkina Faso, researchers and policy makers attribute changes in land cover and land quality to population growth. This paper presents evidence questioning the dominant "population-degradation narrative" as applied to Burkina. We find that farmers are intensifying their production systems. While population has led to land scarcity, farmers are responding to both the resulting uncertainty in land rights and reductions in soil quality by intensifying the production process. Investments are used both …

Gender, Nature, Empire: Women Naturalists In Nineteenth Century British Travel Literature, Karen M. Morin, Jeanne Guelke

Karen M. Morin

No abstract provided.

Gendering Resistance: British Colonial Narratives Of Wartime New Zealand, Karen M. Morin, L. D. Berg

Karen M. Morin

No abstract provided.