Unfamiliar families and disturbing climate futures

Ecomaternalism remains the dominant narrative concerning the role of families in climate politics. The centrality of ecomaternalist narratives to intersectional constructions of race, gender, heteronormativity, and nature means that interrogating and disrupting these dominant representations of families is a crucial task of ecofeminist, postcolonial, and queer political theory. This article explores other ways to narrate familial politics that might challenge rather than reproduce dominant power relations. Examining three Africanfuturist short stories by Nnedi Okorafor (“Spider the Artist”), Tlotlo Tsamaase (“Virtual Snapshots”), and Terh Agbedeh (“Mango Republic”), set in Nigeria and Botswana, I argue that they draw our attention to transformations within cyborg, digitized, and utopian families and social structures, as well as the potential for violence within the heteronormative patriarchal family. They narrate alternative discourses about families in crisis, families as threat, and families as ruination that are rarely articulated in climate politics. In these stories, the family is not the solution to climate politics, but a social relation that will (and should) change as the climatic and social context changes

Governmentality at the limits of the international: African politics and Foucauldian theory

AbstractThe ability of International Relations theory to ‘travel well’ to other parts of the world has become one of the central questions within the discipline. This article argues that a Foucauldian-derived ‘analytics of government’ framework has particular advantages in overcoming some of the difficulties IR theory has faced abroad. These advantages include a methodological focus on specific practices of power at their point of application; attention to similarities between practices of power that cut across perceived binaries such as the domestic and international, and public and private; and an illumination of the ways in which practices of freedom are combined and interrelate with forms of coercion and violence. This argument is illustrated in the context of debates about the applicability of Foucauldian theory to African politics, through examples drawn from Bayart's work on globalisation, the power of development partnerships, and violence and civil war. It argues that deploying governmentality as an analytical framework, rather than seeing it as a specifically neoliberal form of power relation, can not only facilitate the application of IR theory outside Europe and North America but can also help develop a broader perspective on genuinely world politics.</jats:p

Establishing riverine nutrient criteria using individual taxa thresholds

Nutrient enrichment is one of the most pervasive impacts on aquatic ecosystems globally. Approaches to establish nutrient criteria that safeguard aquatic ecosystem health are highly variable and, in many instances, criteria are derived from correlations between in-situ nutrient concentrations and biological indices. Summarising entire assemblages with a single index can result in a substantial loss of information and potentially weaker relationships. In this study, we compared the derivation of nutrient criteria using biological indices and those from individual taxa for rivers and streams in New Zealand. Random forest models, including nutrient concentrations, were built to predict two biological indices and individual taxa across New Zealand's river monitoring network. For all acceptable models, the response of the biological indices and individual taxa to increasing Dissolved Inorganic Nitrogen (DIN) and Dissolved Reactive Phosphorus (DRP) were then predicted for every river reach across the nation, and nutrient concentrations that protected 80% of taxa were then identified. Models for the biological indices were poor but were good for most of the taxa, with nutrient concentrations almost always being the most influential factor. To ensure persistence of at least 80% of the taxa within a river reach, we estimated that DIN (Dissolved Inorganic Nitrogen) concentrations would need to be below 0.57–1.32 mg/L, and DRP (Dissolved Reactive Phosphorus) concentrations below 0.019–0.033 mg/L, depending on the river type. In general, high order, low slope rivers and streams required more stringent nutrient criteria than steep, low order streams. The link between nutrient concentrations and biological indices were weak and likely suffer from the loss of information from summarising an entire assemblage into a single numeric. We consider that the derivation of nutrient criteria for waterways should also examine the individual relationships with the taxa in a river system to establish protection for a desired proportion of taxa