Suchergebnisse

Discusses the value of geographic information systems (GIS) for diplomatic activities during emergencies & disaster relief & addresses the limited use of GIS at the US State Dept despite documented widespread interest. How to expand GIS usage at the State Dept is considered. Adapted from the source document.

This week, the Scholl Chair examines the myriad, complex, and sometimes surprising factors that companies consider when deciding where to do business.

This article examines the question of why local food has become, for many activists and scholars, a core concept for understanding food systems and globalization and for challenging systems of injustice and inequality. I begin with the French concept of terroir, which is often translated as the "taste of place," and examine why this term, part of France's cultural common sense, is difficult to implement in other places. I then consider efforts to use local foods to grapple with the forces of globalization and efforts to use ideas about local food to moralize capitalism and humanize food distribution systems. I examine the relationship between movements for food sovereignty and food justice with local foods. Finally, I explore the uses of local foods as part of efforts to develop, assert, and sometimes market local, regional, or national identities.

Although medieval rentals have been extensively studied, few scholars have used them to analyse variations in the rents paid on individual properties within a town. It has been claimed that medieval rents did not reflect economic values or market forces, but were set according to social and political rather than economic criteria, and remained ossified at customary levels. This article uses hedonic regression methods to test whether property rents in medievalGloucester were influenced by classic economic factors such as the location and use of a property. It investigates both ordinary commercial rents and burgage rents (landgable), and explores the relationship between the two. It also examines spatial autocorrelation. It finds significant relationships between ordinary rents and property characteristics that are similar to those found in modern studies. The findings are consistent with the view that, in late medievalGloucester at least, ordinary rents were strongly influenced by classical economic factors working through the urban property market. The findings also suggest that burgage rents reflected economic factors, even though they remained fixed over time.

In this article, we explore the practice, promise, and contradictions of introducing liberatory practice into a higher education classroom. Freire introduced liberatory education in response to the hierarchical transfer of knowledge, "banking" concept of education that has dominated educational institutions. The banking approach to education demands that students memorize and repeat top-down "official" knowledge in order to achieve success. Liberatory pedagogy holds great hope, but developing a space for liberatory dialogue within the university classroom remains messy and rife with contradictions. Professors interested in liberatory pedagogy must make explicit the contradictions and challenge the multiple ways schools shape students, politically and culturally. We reflect on three different points in the semester as moments of explicit focus on the contradictions of creating liberatory spaces and dialogue within higher education. Location matters in every moment: our social locations shape our experiences, and the location of the classroom within higher education and the shifting locations in the liberatory process include managing the contradictions and possibilities of human liberation. We offer educators wishing to develop liberatory practices some ways of reflecting on and shaping a liberatory space within higher education classrooms through the lens of a professor and student engaged in the process of liberatory dialogue.

Abstract
Exploiting data on tens of millions of housing transactions, we show that (1) house prices grew by less in manufacturing-heavy US regions, (2) this pattern is especially present for the lowest-value homes and that (3) price declines coincided with worse labour market outcomes, consistent with an income channel. Counterfactual accounting exercises reveal that regional differences in the growth of these lowest-value homes are an important driver of the changes in overall house price inequality. Hence, the economic decline in manufacturing-heavy areas extends far beyond income and employment flows to house prices.