Suchergebnisse

In the 1930s, the Canadian state sunk large sums of capital into forested landscapes in order to address a mounting and widespread unemployment crisis and the environmental legacy of industrial forestry practices. Unemployed men were enrolled into relief camps established at emerging Forest Experimentation Stations. These Stations reflected, and contributed to, a growing emphasis on reforestation and sustained-yield production. I argue that the use of relief labor in the development of forest research stations represented a socio-ecological fix to the broad crisis of the 1930s that sought to: (1) secure the conditions for renewed capital accumulation, (2) tackle the problem of unemployment, and (3) address the frayed legitimacy of the state and forestry sector. I build on debates on the formal and real subsumption of nature to consider the socio-ecological dimensions of David Harvey's theorization of the "spatial fix."

Planting trees under a piece-rate wage scheme is widely recognized in Canada as a veritable national "rite of passage" for young,White, middle-class university students and travelers. Canadian artists Sarah Ann Johnson, Lorraine Gilbert, and Althea Thauberger have received popular and critical acclaim for their artistic representations of the "tree planting experience" in Canada. In this article, the authors critically examine tree planting art—and its reception—and argue that it constitutes the most recent incarnation of art that links nature and nationalism together in the Canadian context. Following Catriona Sandilands incisive reflections on nature and nationalism in Canada, it is argued that the artists in question, and their various commentators, enshrine tree planting as an obligatory passage point through which White middle-class subjects can access both the "pioneering" moments of the nation and the promised greener tomorrow of Canada's future. The connections made by the artists between nature and the nation are by no means innocent, as the authors aim to suggest, but rather, rely on a liberal-individualist account of labor in which the social dynamics of gender, class, and race are erased.

What does it mean to work with radical concepts in our time of rampant inequality, imperial-capitalist plunder, racial/sexual/class violence and ecocide? When concepts from the past seem inadequate, how do scholars and activists concerned with social change decide what concepts to work with or renew? The contributors to Ethnographies of Power address these questions head on.
Gillian Hart is a key thinker in radical political economy, geography, development studies, agrarian studies and Gramscian critique of postcolonial capitalism. In Ethnographies of Power each contributor engages her work and applies it to their own field of study.
These applied concepts include: 'gendered labour' practices among South African workers, reading 'racial capitalism' through agrarian debates, using 'relational comparison' in an ethnography of schooling across Durban, reworking 'multiple socio-spatial trajectories' in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, critiquing the notion of South Africa's 'second economy', revisiting 'development' processes and 'Development' discourses in US military contracting, reconsidering Gramsci's 'conjunctures' geographically, finding divergent 'articulations' in Cape Town land occupations, and exploring 'nationalism' as central to revaluing recyclables at a Soweto landfill.
Ethnographies of Power offers an invaluable toolkit for activists and scholars engaged in sharpening their critical concepts for the social and environmental change necessary for our collective future.