Stressed Environments and Communities
In what ways do environments and communities become ‘stressed’, and with what consequences? What happens as physical environments become polluted or otherwise degraded and thereby become un- or barely-habitable; or when the social institutions that support social reproduction, such as employment or the social welfare apparatus deteriorate, thus creating human communities whose life-worlds are torn apart materially and affectively? What results as these stresses are transmitted into the life-worlds of others elsewhere through the ripple-effects of a global political ecology/economy provoking, and ethically demanding, new forms of ‘response-ability’?
An emergent theme for the HGRG is a focus upon how environments and communities become ‘stressed’ and with what consequences. As physical environments become polluted (maybe ‘toxic’ or ‘irradiated’) and otherwise degraded (maybe due to climate change), resident human communities of cities and countrysides are having their life-worlds torn apart materially and affectively. Our concern is with the vectors of stress created in and seeping out from such environments as milieux of more-than-human encounter and as communities of life, labouring and protest. It is also with everyday practices of coping, as well as with how anticipations of future stresses feed through into modes of environmental governance that, variously, prioritise insecurity and risk-calculation, resilience and renewal, or therapy and well-being.
Selected publications (please go to staff pages for links to copies of publications or journal sites):
Belal, A, Briggs, J, Sharp, J and Springuel, I (2009) Bedouins by the lake. American University in Cairo Press.
Briggs, J and Sharp, J (2009) One hundred years of researching Egypt: from rule of experts to Bedouin voices? Scottish Geographical Journal (3-4): 256-272.
Drew, S., Waldron, S., Gilvear, D., Grieve, I., Armstrong, A., Bragg, O., ... & Shah, N. (2013). The price of knowledge in the knowledge economy: Should development of peatland in the UK support a research levy?. Land Use Policy, 32, 50-60.
Chatterton, P., Featherstone, D.J., and Routledge, P. (2013) Articulating climate justice in Copenhagen: commons, solidarities, antagonisms. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 45 (3). pp. 602-620
Karaman, O. (2013), Urban Renewal in Istanbul: Reconfigured Spaces, Robotic Lives. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37: 715–733.
Pollock V and Sharp J (2012) Real participation or the tyranny of participatory practice? Public art and community involvement in the regeneration of the Raploch. Urban Studies 49(14): 3063-3079.
Sharp, J., Campbell, P., and Laurie, E. (2010) The violence of aid? Giving, power and active subjects in One World Conservatism. Third World Quarterly, 31 (7): 1125-1143.
Shaw, I., Jones, J.P., and Robbins, P. (2010) A Bug's Life and the spatial ontologies of mosquito management. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100 (2): 373-392.
Shaw, I., Jones III, J.P., and Butterworth, M. (2013) The Mosquito’s Umwelt, or One Monster’s Standpoint Ontology. Geoforum . (In Press)
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