Journals at the University of Arizona
Not a member yet
18839 research outputs found
Sort by
Zabel Yessayan (1878-1942): At the Intersection of Armenian Nationalism and the Women’s Movement
No full textZabel Yessayan (née Hovhannessian) was an Armenian intellectual and perhaps the most prolific Armenian female writer of the early twentieth century. Born into a middle-class family in Istanbul in 1878, Hovhannessian benefited from the broadening educational opportunities of the Hamidian period, while at the same time being acutely aware of anti-Armenian prejudices in the Ottoman Empire during this era. Hovhannessian’s educational and familial background enabled her to pursue a career as an author and intellectual. Through the life of Zabel Yessayan, I intend to examine a key concept introduced by James C. Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistancethat within subordinate groups a rigid solidarity, often itself maintained through equally authoritarian means, must be preserved in order to effectively resist the dominating group. Power relations within subordinate groups tend to prioritize the struggle against the overall oppressor over attempts to establish more democratic power structures within the group. I assert that, in the case of Yessayan, the more radical aims of the women’s movement were frequently subordinated to the objectives of the Armenian nationalist program. While the views that she advocated were relatively progressive for her time, she clearly envisioned women playing the role of nurturing mothers of the Armenian nation, educating and raising its sons to be patriots, consoling the victims of massacre, and helping to lift up the impoverished.
Narratives of Technology and Self-Determination in the STARPAHC Project
No full textThis paper examines the Space Technology Applied to Rural Papago Advanced Healthcare Project (STARPAHC) which took place on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation from 1974 -1978 as a joint project between NASA, the Indian Health Service, and the O'odham Executive Health Staff. This is accomplished primarily through the analysis of the primary evidence available from the STARPAHC archive at the University of Arizona. The finding is that two parallel narratives of STARPAHC emerged. One, promoted by NASA and public media that the project was testing the technology on the O'odham for America's space program and a second, promoted by the Indian Health Service and the tribe which imagined STARPAHC as the application of space technology for the self-determination of the O'odham. The findings of the paper are that these contested narratives existed because of differences in the understanding of technology's role for self-determination. Particularly from the IHS and O'odham, significant efforts were made to control the narrative in order to promote their image of STARPAHC, but biases and missteps from NASA made this difficult. Concluding, the paper suggests that STARPAHC is useful for understanding how technology interfaces with the idea of sovereignty for Indian nations
Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference
No full textThe 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Conference was the fourth and biggest meeting on IWT convened at the initiative of the UK Government. Using a collaborative event ethnography, we examine the Conference as a site where key actors defined the problem of IWT as one of serious crime that needs to be addressed as such. We ask (a) how was IWT framed as serious crime, (b) how was this framing mobilized to promote particular policy responses, and (c) how did the framing and suggested responses reflect the privileging of elite voices? Answering these questions demonstrates the expanding ways in which thinking related to crime and policing are an increasingly forceful dynamic shaping conservation-related policy at the global level. We argue that the conservation-crime convergence on display at the 2018 London IWT Conference is characteristic of a conservation policy landscape that increasingly promotes and privileges responses to IWT that are based on legal and judicial reform, criminal investigations, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement technologies. Marginalized are those voices that seek to address the underlying drivers of IWT by promoting solutions rooted in sustainable livelihoods in source countries and global demand reduction. We suggest that political ecology of conservation and environmental crime would benefit from greater engagement with critical criminology, a discipline that critically interrogates the uneven power dynamics that shape ideas of crime, criminality, how they are politicized, and how they frame policy decisions. This would add further conceptual rigor to political ecological work that deconstructs conservation and environmental crime.Keywords: illegal wildlife trade, poaching, conservation, crime, event ethnography, criminolog
Imposing legality: hegemony and resistance under the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) initiative
No full textTimber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms triggered by global concerns about forest degradation and deforestation. The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative is a significant effort to not only screen out illegal timber and wood products from the EU, but also support trading partner countries to improve their legality definitions and verification processes. But by using bilateral agreements (Voluntary Partnership Agreements) as a key mechanism, the EU legitimizes trade partner nation-states as the authority to decide what is legal. We engage in a theoretical debate about the complexities of the meaning of legality, and then analyze empirical data collected from interviews in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe with policy, civil society and industry actors to understand how different actors understand legality. We find hegemonic notions of Westphalian statehood at the core of 'global' notions of legality and often contrast with local understandings of legality. Non-state actors understand these hegemonic notions of legality as imposed upon them and part of a colonial legacy. Further, notions of legality that fail to conform with hegemonic understandings are readily framed by nation-states as immoral or criminal. We emphasize the importance of understanding these framings to elucidate the embedded assumptions about what comprises legality within assemblages of global actors.Key words: FLEGT, timber legality, hegemony, power, globalizatio
Environmental justice dialogues and the struggle for human dignity in the deciduous forest of Bangladesh
No full textThe article presents environmental justice dialogues in, and affecting, the Madhupur Garo community in Bangladesh. The Garo community, which identifies itself as adivasi meaning 'indigenous', has occupied the deciduous forest of Madhupur in Bangladesh for centuries, developing a symbiotic relationship with nature. An environmental justice movement, called the "Eco-park Movement" has long protested a government development plan to establishing an 'eco-park' in the Madhupur deciduous forest. The eco-park plan interfered with the Garo's right to life and livelihood as well as threatening them with possible eviction from their traditional land. From their protest movement, the concept of environmental justice has acquired a meaning with emphasis on human dignity. The Garo community not only defines environmental injustice as a lack of access to the decision-making process, information and the judiciary, but includes other elements: obstruction to fair access to environmental resources for livelihood, as threat to the economy, health, trade, education, security, privacy and right to life. Finally, the Garo connect all these environmental human rights issues with rights to self-determination and human dignity.Key words: Sustainable development, environmental justice, political ecology, capabilities and conflicts, human dignity, eco-park movement, right to life
The anticipatory politics of dispossession in a Senegalese mining negotiation
No full textThe concept of accumulation by dispossession is often mobilized in political ecological and geographical literature, to explain the ways that capitalist accumulation depends on the violent and extra-economic seizure of land and resources. Yet dispossession is also mobilized as a fear about the future, as a way of articulating historical and non-capitalist motivations for land expropriation, and as an avenue for political action. Amid negotiations for a heavy mineral sands mine in the Casamance region of Senegal, narratives of dispossession circulated frequently, even though no mining had yet taken place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this article examines the contentious politics around the proposed mine, which mobilize multiple timescales. In this context, activists and village residents have engaged in an anticipatory politics that is influenced by past and present processes of land occupancy, environmental change, and state disinvestment, and is aimed at contesting potential dispossessions to come, making claims to resources, and securing a place in the imagined future. At the same time, state and corporate actors have engaged in their own anticipatory actions, through environmental impact assessments and other technologies of prediction that minimize, invalidate, or circumvent anti-dispossession movements. This article argues that experiences of and resistances to dispossession are mediated by the folding together of temporal frames and diverse displacements. In particular, it attends to anticipation as a key temporal mechanism through which dispossession is both enacted and contested. As such, it contributes to political ecology by combining materialist conceptions of dispossession and displacement with theorizations of anticipation and the future.Keywords: accumulation by dispossession, anticipatory politics, mining, Senega
The direction of ecological insurrections: political ecology comes to daggers with Fukuoka
No full textThis article proposes a political ecology of resistance. This is done by putting forward insurrectionary political ecology as a lens of research and struggle, through the confluence of the complementary "political" practice of insurrectionary anarchism and the "ecological" method of "no-till natural farming." While seemingly different, the article argues that these practices are compatible, animating a political ecology of resistance around anti-authoritarian political and ecological lifeways. This direction, or compass, of insurrectionary political ecology is discussed in relation to other autonomous tendencies, as it complements and strengthens existing critical schools of thought heavily influenced by political ecology, such as (decolonial) degrowth, environmental justice and post-development. Insurrectionary political ecology deepens connections with scholarly rebels in political and ecological struggles outside—and rejecting—the university system. The article includes discussions of research ethics, various conceptions of "activism", autonomous tendencies and existing differences between the concepts of "revolution" and "insurrection", in order to debate notions of "counter-hegemony" and "duel-power." The overall purpose here is to offer a theoretical ethos for a political ecology of resistance that invigorates political praxis to subvert the ongoing socio-ecological catastrophes.Keywords: Resistance; insurrectionary political ecology; post-development; decolonization; degrowth; insurrectionary ecology; environmental justic
The strategy of shifting cultivators in West Kalimantan in adapting to the market economy: empirical evidence behind gaps in interdisciplinary communication
No full textIssues of climate change and expansion of large-scale land acquisition for industrial plantations continue to ravage the shifting cultivation system that 300–500 million subsistence farmer households depend on. In Indonesia, particularly in Kalimantan and Sumatera, village communities continue to practice shifting cultivation amidst the conversion of lands into industrial plantations. The rampant conversion of farmer's land by large scale companies based in the market economy has resulted in the decline of the shifting cultivation system, and compelled them to enter commercial production. I employed qualitative methods, conducting in-depth interviews and observations in West Kalimantan in 2018. Shifting cultivation today is not just for subsistence, but it is also a strategy to maintain claims to land that has been handed over to companies. Concurrently, people have been developing community plantations using industrial commodities such as rubber and oil palm, which still incorporate subsistence features. The changes occurring in villages have led to conflict since land availability has reduced, while the alternative of working for forestry and plantation companies is hampered by their lack of skills and knowledge. Theoretically, this study indicates the need for communication and synergy between the perspectives of political ecology and cultural ecology in order to understand the socio-politico-economic complexities haunting the village community's alterations in subsistence strategies. The practical implications are that land-based village development should open up communication among stakeholders and position village communities as the key beneficiary in the long run.Keywords: Shifting cultivation, land conversion, adaptation strategy, market economy, political ecology, Kalimantan, Indonesi
From paper to practice? Assembling a rights-based conservation approach
No full textDrawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages.Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples
SURGICAL TREATMENT OF CYST OF THE CANAL OF NUCK AND PREVENTION OF LYMPHATIC COMPLICATIONS: A SINGLE-CENTER EXPERIENCE
No full textThe canal of Nuck is a residue of the peritoneal evagination that runs along the round ligament through the inguinal canal in women. Its partial or total patency can lead to a cystic lymphangioma (CL). CL of the canal of Nuck in an adult female is a rare entity and its clinical diagnosis can be difficult or incorrect. Ultrasonography can be useful to identify the nature of groin masses. A potential CL of the canal of Nuck should always be considered in the differential diagnosis of inguinal swelling in adult females. Even if it is possible to consider conservative treatment, the optimal therapeutic option is surgical excision of the cystic mass and closure of the inguinal ring by an anterior approach. In this study, we report a case series of four women affected by a cyst of the canal of Nuck to underline the surgical treatment's therapeutic role of this pathological condition and the importance of preliminary identification of lymphatic vessels with BPV (Blue Patent Violet) in order to prevent lymphatic injuries such as lymphorrea and lymphocele in the groin after surgery due to the disruption of inguinal lymph nodes and lymphatics