Gender, Nature, Body

Feminist approaches to multi-scalar, more-than-human, power and politics pushes critical agrarian studies in novel directions. Gender-nature-body are critical sites for realignments of social, material and political relations, resulting in uneven access to and control over resources. Gender, race, class and other forms of intersectional socionatural relations are foundational to agrarian studies concerns such as class formation, collective action, extractivism and land grabs. The chapter reframes agrarian conflicts as the material and emotional outcomes of embodied, differentiated responses to enclosure and commodification, linking scales from the global economy to the uneven conditions of peoples’ lives to illuminate spaces of transformation

Social brains, simple minds: does social complexity really require cognitive complexity?

The social brain hypothesis is a well-accepted and well-supported evolutionary theory of enlarged brain size in the non-human primates. Nevertheless, it tends to emphasize an anthropocentric view of social life and cognition. This often leads to confusion between ultimate and proximate mechanisms, and an over-reliance on a Cartesian, narratively structured view of the mind and social life, which in turn lead to views of social complexity that are congenial to our views of ourselves, rather than necessarily representative of primate social worlds. In this paper, we argue for greater attention to embodied and distributed theories of cognition, which get us away from current fixations on ‘theory of mind’ and other high-level anthropocentric constructions, and allow for the generation of testable hypotheses that combine neurobiology, psychology and behaviour in a mutually reinforcing manner

Analysing extinction risk in parrots using decision trees

Comparative analysis techniques have been successfully applied in a number of recent attempts to identify the species traits associated with a current threat of extinction although less often to predict which species may become threatened in the future. Although prediction of risk is obviously a priority, such analyses are undermined by the fact that there may be non-linear and non-additive relationships between the species traits used. A Decision Tree analysis can accommodate with such relationships and here it is used to explore factors affecting extinction risk in parrots. The results firstly verify that simple biological and biogeographical traits can separate threatened from non-threatened species. It is also possible to predict which species are likely to become threatened in the future. The utility of the method is not in testing evolutionary-based hypotheses to explain extinction risk, rather it is a simple and practical method of confirming and/or predicting levels of risk. For well known taxonomic groups it could be used to confirm current IUCN threat categories and identify which species should receive closest attention when the group is next reviewed. For poorly known groups it could be used to predict categories of threat for unclassified species from small groups of classified ones