Documentary film and ethical foodscapes : three takes on Caribbean sugar

This article demonstrates how certain stories, voices and values around agro-food networks can be made powerful by documentary film. Our central argument is that documentaries mobilize ethics by presenting a partial and affective account of their subject matter, which makes their audience feel differently about the social relations that underpin the production of food and acts as a focal point for media scrutiny and political interventions. We focus attention on three documentaries about Caribbean sugar to explore multiple and disparate ethical claims made about the farmers, workers and communities that embody Caribbean sugar industries. Through a comparison of the three documentaries, we chart how the production and distribution of these films have entailed quite different ethical narratives, encounters and interventions. A key finding is that the context in which films are received is just as important as the content they deliver. The paper concludes with a guarded endorsement for using documentary film to transform the unequal life conditions experienced in the global food system, stressing the need for empirically-grounded critique of the context of documentaries and suggesting the important role that geographers might play as interlocutors in their reception

Cut loose in the Caribbean : neoliberalism and the demise of the Commonwealth sugar trade

This article focuses on the way the Anglophone Caribbean succumbed to the overhaul of the European Union sugar trade and how these countries have attempted to restructure their economies in its wake. We show how the protagonists of reform gave a sense of inevitability to the demise of the Commonwealth trade system and conveyed (unrealistic) strategies for how this should be managed for the benefit of the Caribbean. In this way we detail the hegemony of neoliberalism in contemporary trade politics and the need for alternative strategies for rural development in the Caribbean region

Past Buoy Lines: Exploring Metaphors, Boundaries, and Poetic Possibilities in Giftedness Research

This piece is a poetic and narrative inquiry (Leggo, 2004) into the conceptual, physical, and emotional underpinnings of research methodology in the field of gifted education. First, the author explores the metaphorical possibility of swim-ming rather than standing in the field of inquiry and how relationships to self, environment, and other would shift in ways potentially commensurate with the task of researching giftedness. Then, responses to a questionnaire asking re-searchers about their understandings, hopes, and fears in the use of “non-traditional” methodologies in the field of gifted education are explored through the creation of poetic aphorisms

Aid for trade and African agriculture : the bittersweet case of Swazi sugar

In 2006, the European Union reformed its sugar regime, reducing the price for sugar by 36%. To cushion the impact on traditional overseas suppliers, an ‘Aid for Trade’ programme called the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol countries (AMSP) was implemented. This paper explores the impacts of the AMSP in Swaziland. The authors discuss emergent agrarian class differentiation and argue that the benefits experienced by farmers are jeopardised by ongoing processes of liberalisation. The paper concludes by suggesting that donors must consider market stabilisation and corporate regulation if they are to make ‘Aid for Trade’ work for the poor

Counting fixed points and rooted closed walks of the singular map x↦xxnx \mapsto x^{x^n} modulo powers of a prime

The "self-power" map $x \mapsto x^x$ modulo $m$ and its generalized form $x \mapsto x^{x^n}$ modulo $m$ are of considerable interest for both theoretical reasons and for potential applications to cryptography. In this paper, we use $p$-adic methods, primarily $p$-adic interpolation, Hensel's lemma, and lifting singular points modulo $p$, to count fixed points and rooted closed walks of equations related to these maps when $m$ is a prime power. In particular, we introduce a new technique for lifting singular solutions of several congruences in several unknowns using the left kernel of the Jacobian matrix.Comment: 18 pages. Version 2 shortens proofs, reduces redundancy, and introduces new technique for counting rooted closed walks. Version 3 updates title to agree with journal publicatio

Awakeness, complexity and emergence: Learning through curriculum theory in teacher education

In this self-study research, we explore how the work of significant and diverse curriculum scholars informed the learning of teacher candidates within an intensive summer semester that serves as the foundation for a Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP) at a Canadian university. Questions that guided our inquiry include: How did teacher candidates take up and negotiate theory as part of their emerging professional identities? How did teacher candidates understand the relationship between pedagogy and their learning of/through curriculum theory? How did teacher candidates embody diverse theories and how did they understand the significance of this within and beyond this foundational semester? And finally, as teacher educators, how are our beliefs, understandings and practices developing through this self-study? We employed a qualitative, grounded theory approach and engaged in iterative cycles of analysis with learning artifacts and interview transcripts from 26 teacher candidates. We identified the rich and layered themes of emergence, complexity, and awakeness, which revealed shifts in teacher candidates’ awareness in relation to their evolving identities. We discuss these themes in relation to the above questions and locate the influences of the selected theorists. This research contributes to the field of curriculum studies through offering a living case that explores how taking up diverse and contemporary curriculum theorists has potential to both support teacher candidates to experience praxis and shift the ground of teacher education