Citizens without nations

To broach the question of whether citizenship could exist without (or beyond) community, this paper discusses genealogies of citizenship as membership that binds an individual to the community of birth (of the self or a parent). It is birthright as fraternity that blurs the boundary between citizenship and nationality. After briefly discussing recent critical studies on birthright citizenship (whether it is civic or ethnic or blood or soil) by Ayelet Shachar and Jacqueline Stevens, the paper discusses three critical genealogies of the relationship between birthright and citizenship by Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. Although each provides a critical perspective into the question, Weber reduces citizenship to fraternity with nation and Arendt reduces citizenship to fraternity with the state. It is Foucault who illustrates racialization of fraternity as the connection between citizenship and nationality. Yet, since Foucault limits his genealogical investigations to the 18th and 19th centuries, a genealogy of fraternity of what he calls an immense biblical and Greek tradition remains for Derrida to articulate as a question of citizenship

Is American Public Administration Detached From Historical Context?: On the Nature of Time and the Need to Understand It in Government and Its Study

The study of public administration pays little attention to history. Most publications are focused on current problems (the present) and desired solutions (the future) and are concerned mainly with organizational structure (a substantive issue) and output targets (an aggregative issue that involves measures of both individual performance and organizational productivity/services). There is much less consideration of how public administration (i.e., organization, policy, the study, etc.) unfolds over time. History, and so administrative history, is regarded as a “past” that can be recorded for its own sake but has little relevance to contemporary challenges. This view of history is the product of a diminished and anemic sense of time, resulting from organizing the past as a series of events that inexorably lead up to the present in a linear fashion. To improve the understanding of government’s role and position in society, public administration scholarship needs to reacquaint itself with the nature of time.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The European Space Agency BIOMASS mission: Measuring forest above-ground biomass from space

The primary objective of the European Space Agency's 7th Earth Explorer mission, BIOMASS, is to determine the worldwide distribution of forest above-ground biomass (AGB) in order to reduce the major uncertainties in calculations of carbon stocks and fluxes associated with the terrestrial biosphere, including carbon fluxes associated with Land Use Change, forest degradation and forest regrowth. To meet this objective it will carry, for the first time in space, a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Three main products will be provided: global maps of both AGB and forest height, with a spatial resolution of 200 m, and maps of severe forest disturbance at 50 m resolution (where “global” is to be understood as subject to Space Object tracking radar restrictions). After launch in 2022, there will be a 3-month commissioning phase, followed by a 14-month phase during which there will be global coverage by SAR tomography. In the succeeding interferometric phase, global polarimetric interferometry Pol-InSAR coverage will be achieved every 7 months up to the end of the 5-year mission. Both Pol-InSAR and TomoSAR will be used to eliminate scattering from the ground (both direct and double bounce backscatter) in forests. In dense tropical forests AGB can then be estimated from the remaining volume scattering using non-linear inversion of a backscattering model. Airborne campaigns in the tropics also indicate that AGB is highly correlated with the backscatter from around 30 m above the ground, as measured by tomography. In contrast, double bounce scattering appears to carry important information about the AGB of boreal forests, so ground cancellation may not be appropriate and the best approach for such forests remains to be finalized. Several methods to exploit these new data in carbon cycle calculations have already been demonstrated. In addition, major mutual gains will be made by combining BIOMASS data with data from other missions that will measure forest biomass, structure, height and change, including the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar deployed on the International Space Station after its launch in December 2018, and the NASA-ISRO NISAR L- and S-band SAR, due for launch in 2022. More generally, space-based measurements of biomass are a core component of a carbon cycle observation and modelling strategy developed by the Group on Earth Observations. Secondary objectives of the mission include imaging of sub-surface geological structures in arid environments, generation of a true Digital Terrain Model without biases caused by forest cover, and measurement of glacier and icesheet velocities. In addition, the operations needed for ionospheric correction of the data will allow very sensitive estimates of ionospheric Total Electron Content and its changes along the dawn-dusk orbit of the mission

Organizing in the Anthropocene

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations

The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife

In this paper I analyse the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil between 1920 and 1950. I argue that the transformation of the city was predicated on an absorptive and eradicative notion of whiteness that necessitated the creation of dry, enclosed land. The process of urban transformation proceeded not only through a racial division of space, but through a racial division of nature. Racialised groups, and the houses, marshlands, and mangroves where they lived were subject to eradication not only as spaces but as ecologies and landscapes. Brazilian racial thought in the period was fundamentally imbricated with ideas about nature. Histories of coloniality, indigeneity, enslavement, and escape meant that forests, wetness, and the spectre of commonly held land were understood as threats to whiteness and its self‐association with order, enclosure, purity, and dryness. To answer why the division between the wet and the dry was so important, and why whiteness needed dryness, I turn back to philosophical investigations of the foundational myth of Brazil. I argue that a peculiarly Brazilian philosophy of nature, which drew racial lines within nature itself, underpinned a familiar, if uncanny, white supremacy that ordered society along the material and symbolic contours of race. Under colonial modernity, this philosophy translated into a division of the pure – rational, cleansed, dry, modern, urban space – from the impure – muddy, fearful, tangled, forested landscape. Under the conditions of dependent capitalism, the process on which this racial division of nature relied was enclosure. Identifying the historical process of the racial division of nature is of particular significance in Brazil, given the still flowing undercurrents of racial oppression and environmental plunder