Changing patterns of human resource use and food consumption have profoundly impacted the Earth's biosphere. Until now, no individual taxa have been suggested as distinct and characteristic new morphospecies representing this change. Here we show that the domestic broiler chicken is one such potential marker. Human-directed changes in breeding, diet and farming practices demonstrate at least a doubling in body size from the late medieval period to the present in domesticated chickens, and an up to fivefold increase in body mass since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, the skeletal morphology, pathology, bone geochemistry and genetics of modern broilers are demonstrably different to those of their ancestors. Physical and numerical changes to chickens in the second half of the twentieth century, i.e. during the putative Anthropocene Epoch, have been the most dramatic, with large increases in individual bird growth rate and population sizes. Broiler chickens, now unable to survive without human intervention, have a combined mass exceeding that of all other birds on Earth; this novel morphotype symbolizes the unprecedented human reconfiguration of the Earth's biosphere.
This paper critically analyses pervasive contemporary discourses that call for children and young people to be “reconnected” with nature and natural resources. Simultaneously, it reflects on emerging forms of nexus thinking and policy that seek to identify and govern connections between diverse sectors, and especially water, energy and food. Both of these fields of scholarship are concerned with connections, of different kinds, and at different spatial scales. Based on a large‐scale, mixed‐method research project in São Paulo State, Brazil, this paper explores how these rather different literatures could be combined in order to (re)think notions of (re)connection that operate across different spatial, political and material registers. Through research with Brazilian professionals and young people about their experiences of, and learning about, the water–energy–food nexus, the paper makes several substantive contributions to scholarship on childhood, youth, environmental education and nexus thinking. Centrally, it is argued that, rather than dispense with them, there are manifold possibilities for expanding and complicating notions of (re)connection, which rely on a more nuanced analysis of the logistical, technical, social and political contexts in which nexuses are constituted. Thus, our work flips dominant forms of nexus thinking by privileging a “bottom‐up” analysis of (especially) young people's everyday, embodied engagements with water, food and energy. Our resultant findings indicated that young people are “connected” with natures and with the water–energy–food nexus, in both fairly conventional ways and in ways that significantly extend beyond contemporary discourses about childhoods–natures (and particularly in articulating the importance of care and community). Consequently, the nexus approach that is advocated in this paper could enable more nuanced, politically aware conceptualisations of (re)connection, both within and beyond scholarship on childhoods–natures and nexus thinking.
Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the over-production and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and good health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond animal-based food systems is a societal grand challenge requiring coordinated international research by the social sciences and humanities. A ‘selective openness’ to this range of disciplines has been observed within multi-discipline research programmes designed to address societal grand challenges including those concerned with the sustainability of food systems, inhibiting the impact of social sciences and humanities. Further, existing research on animal-based foods within these disciplines is largely dispersed and focused on particular parts of food systems. Inspired by the ‘Sutherland Method’ this paper discusses the results of an iterative research prioritisation process carried out to enhance capacity, mutual understanding and impact amongst European social sciences and humanities researchers. The process produced 15 research questions from an initial list of 100 and classified under the following five themes: (1) debating and visioning food from animals; (2) transforming agricultural spaces; (3) framing animals as food; (4) eating practices and identities; and (5) governing transitions beyond animal-based food systems. These themes provide an important means of making connections between research questions that invite and steer research on key challenges in moving beyond animal-based food systems. The themes also propose loci for future transdisciplinary research programmes that join researchers from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities and stakeholders from beyond academia to develop cooperative research and implementation initiatives. The experiences gained from the prioritisation process draw attention to the value of spending time to discuss and collaboratively steer research enquiry into emergent and controversial matters of concern. Fundamental, ethical questions around the continuation or complete cessation of the use of animals for food was a key tension. The positioning of research towards these questions affects not only the framing of the research area but also the partners with whom the research can be carried out and for whom it may be of benefit.
This edition of Cultural Geographies in Practice serves a dual purpose. It presents a photo-essay that depicts recent and ongoing ‘topographic’ research in London’s Borough Market, and it is an article about photography and topography as textual forms. The photo-essay examines London’s Borough Market through a series of assembled images that relates a narrative of Borough Market and demonstrates the inherent complexity of place. Through its unfolding, it seeks to variously question the ways in which text and pictures can be assembled into types of topographic (re)presentations. The article, presented as an essay, interrogates and simultaneously reclaims the practice of topography. It argues that topography is a methodological intervention into place and place-making as well as a critical spatial practice that can demonstrate place’s inherent complexity. The article further suggests that the implicit reflexivity of the essay-form through which photo-essays emerge allows for a critical spatial practice like topography to be undertaken.
Recent scholarship in the social sciences has begun to question the cultural contingencies that demarcate waste from ‘stuff worth keeping’ (Watson and Meah, this volume). This scholarship has problematized linear discourses of production, consumption and disposal, and interrogated the relationships between objects, commodities and value but has yet to investigate the ways in which place and place-making are complicit in constituting these relationships. This paper explores where and how the lines between foodstuff and food waste are drawn, as well as the role of place and processes of place-making in contesting and reproducing them. Focusing on salmon heads and salmon, this paper examines not only how food becomes waste, but also on the issue of how waste becomes food. Specifically, we analyse the geographical processes through which salmon heads are valued as foodstuffs in some places but waste in others. We argue further that these valuations extend beyond the place of one market to encompass an assembled geography of markets. Further, we suggest that by tracing out the geographies of salmon heads and salmon – and the markets where each can be found – we can better articulate where as well as how it is that waste can become food. Ultimately, we argue that questions of food and waste are not just questions of materiality, but questions of the ways in which the material intersects relations of place, place-making and geography. Salmon heads, we argue, become a matter of geography.
Engaging contemporary forms of nexus-thinking with interdisciplinary food scholarship and childhood and youth studies, this paper explores the social, cultural and political implications of young people's entangled connections with-and beyond-food. The paper draws on a large-scale research project investigating young Brazilians' relationships with and understandings of the water-energy-food nexus. Based upon ethnographic, mixedmethods research, we attend to young people's everyday, material experiences of water-energy-food, and call for a transfigured nexusthinking, alive with the lives, cares, relationalities and politics at the heart of 'the nexus'. Through examples ranging from participants' routines, rhythms and mobilities to experiences of food insecurity, we show how young people express a range of social-political sensibilities that articulate with food and expand nexus-thinking in several interconnected ways. First, by exposing the multi-scalar and multi-temporal processes underlying their everyday 'nexuses'. Second, by destabilizing the water-energy-food nexus to include ever-new elements emerging from lived experiences of resource access. Third, by showing the embeddedness of resources in the cultures, politics and social fabric of communities. Fourth by uncovering the workings of social difference in articulating nexus dis/ connections. It is through these encounters with youths in Brazil that we propose a (re)politicisation and critical transfiguration of nexus thinking. Les géographies de l'alimentation au-delà de l'alimentation: transfigurer l'approche nexus au travers de rencontres avec des jeunes au Brésil Combinant les formes contemporaines d'approches nexus avec la recherche interdisciplinaire sur l'alimentation et les études sur l'enfance et la jeunesse, cette communication explore les implications sociales, culturelles et politiques des liens compliqués des jeunes ARTICLE HISTORY
Having reliable and up-to-date poverty data is a prerequisite for monitoring the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and for planning effective poverty reduction interventions. Unfortunately, traditional data sources are often outdated or lacking appropriate disaggregation. As a remedy, satellite imagery has recently become prominent in obtaining geographically-fine-grained and up-to-date poverty estimates. Satellite data can pick up signals of economic activity by detecting light at night, it can pick up development status by detecting infrastructure such as roads, and it can pick up signals for individual household wealth by detecting different building footprints and roof types. It can, however, not look inside the households and pick up signals from individuals. On the other hand, alternative data sources such as audience estimates from Facebook's advertising platform provide insights into the devices and internet connection types used by individuals in different locations. Previous work has shown the value of such anonymous, publicly-accessible advertising data from Facebook for studying migration, gender gaps, crime rates, and health, among others. In this work, we evaluate the added value of using Facebook data over satellite data for mapping socioeconomic development in two low and middle income countries – the Philippines and India. We show that Facebook features perform roughly similar to satellite data in the Philippines with value added for urban locations. In India, however, where Facebook penetration is lower, satellite data perform better.
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