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"This paper is focused on Tanure Ojaide's poetry as ecocritical art for negating ecological imperialism, which he envisions is one of the major causes of political impasse, ecological malaise and socio-economic dissonance in the Niger delta of Nigeria as well as a fundamental obstacle to its remaking. In order to remake this region for environmental and developmental sustainability, Ojaide's poetics advances the possibility of this through art of resistance, a kind of dissidence poetry couched in ecocriticism that negates ecological imperialism, a capitalist practice that destroys the Niger delta environment. Ecocriticism is a type of aesthetics or artistic representation that considers the nature of the relationship existing between literature and the natural environment. The central idea of this paper is that Ojaide's ecocritical poetry is premised on questioning as well as negating imperialist operations in the Niger delta, where the activities of the multinationals in partnership with Nigeria's political class have left a ledger of destruction, deprivation and violence. Thus, in Ojaide's contention, since art is a refraction of realities in human world, it could be a potent instrument in remaking Nigeria for sustainable development through the insights and possibilities that it offers."

"While few would deny that present generations have a moral obligation to preserve the environment for future generations, some theorists reject the existence of a legal duty in this regard. This article takes the opposite view. It argues that ample juridical as well as ethical social justice theory-contractarian distributive and reciprocity-based theories prominent among them-establishes that future generations have a legal right to a clean and healthy environment. But most helpful in ensuring intergenerational ecological justice, the author contends, is a respect-based theory of social justice which at its core honors the values that underwrite human rights law and policy inclusively conceived and embraced."

"This article discusses three interrelated challenges related to conducting social science research in 'Internet Time'. (1) The rate at which the Internet is both diffusing through society and developing new capacities is unprecedented. It creates some novel challenges for scholarly research. (2) Many of our most robust research methods are based upon ceteris paribus assumptions that do not hold in the online environment. The rate of change online narrows the range of questions that can be answered using traditional tools. Meanwhile, (3) new research methods are untested and often rely upon data sources that are incomplete and systematically flawed. The paper details these challenges, then proposes that scholars embrace the values of transparency and kludginess in order to answer important research questions in a rapidly-changing communications environment."

Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo stands out among today's many talented and prominent African women writers for her widely acclaimed novels depicting the role of African women in a changing world. Like many people of her generation Aidoo witnessed Ghana's 1957 transition from British colony to independent state, as well as the conflicting interests and competing power bases that emerged in its post-independence years. Specifically, in the 1980s Ghana went through changes of governments, military coups, and economic downturns that affected not only the rural but also the urban populations. In an era of growing globalization and a new world order such turmoil brought about a new set of changes. This paper analyzes the various social, economic, and cultural conflicts and challenges Ama Ata Aidoo's female characters experience in her 1991 novel Changes: A Love Story, which takes place mainly in urban environments in West Africa and Europe in the 1980s. It has been praised by many literary critics for its thought-provoking portrayal of African women's redefined roles in their post-independence urban environment, and in 1993 it won the

In 1974 Lewis Thomas expressed frustration with cultural criticism's fascination with physics, especially quantum mechanics. "I wish the humanists," he wrote, "would leave physics alone for a while and begin paying more attention to biology." 1 Glen Love echoed Thomas's plea for attention to biology in 2003 when he remarked: "If some humanists have been attracted to some of the most difficult and obscure physics, they have for the most part ignored the life sciences, especially evolutionary biology and ecology." 2 Since its organization from a groundswell of overlapping concerns and ideas into a school of criticism in the 1990s, ecocriticism has visibly countered this tendency, drawing on biology and ecology to critique cultural works. Recently, the scientific roots of ecocritical practice have been a topic of conversation at the conferences of both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (as well as their UK counterparts). 3 This special double-issue focuses on both on the scientific foundation and future of ecocritical thought.

"In the United Nations (UN) Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PF), indigenous political subjectivities take shape in the power relations that not only make indigenous peoples subjects but also subjugate them. This article discusses the process and the possibilities of resistance that open up for indigenous peoples within it. The approach taken acknowledges the limiting political environment of the UN for indigenous peoples, because it is a non-indigenous political system based on state sovereignty. Yet, it does not view the situation of those peoples in the PF as totally determined by the states and their dominant discourse. The theoretical framework of the article draws on the work of Michel Foucault and his conceptions on power, resistance, subjectification, technologies of domination and of the self. The power struggles in the PF, described through the complex of sovereignty, discipline and government, and the resistances within them engender paradoxical indigenous subjectivities: colonized/decolonized, victim/actor, traditional/modern, global/local. Indigenous peoples are able to engage both in resistance that is a reaction to states' exercise of power or the creative use of its tools and in indirect resistance that 'stretches' the UN system and constitutes action on its own terms."

"Reflecting on the relation between the media ages of orality, writing, and digital networking, Liu asks the question: what happens today to the "sense of history" that was the glory of the high age of print? In particular, what does the age of social computing-social networking, blogs, Twitter, etc.-have in common with prior ages in which the experience of sociality was deeply vested in a shared sense of history? Liu focuses on a comparison of nineteenth-century historicism and contemporary Web 2.0, and concludes by touching on the RoSE Research-oriented Social Environment that the Transliteracies Project he directs has been building to model past bibliographical resources as a social network."

"Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these 'internet scandals' impacting politics in the semi-authoritarian political environment? To address this and related questions, I juxtapose two case studies of police corruption scandals that erupted in the social media sphere in 2009/2010. Drawing on the findings, I argue that Russia's ruling elites are presently very much capable of managing these outbursts of public outrage. Mainly with the help of the powerful state-controlled television, public anger is very swiftly redirected towards lower-level authorities and foreign, supposedly hostile powers."

"This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans)."

Inequality is far from being an unequivocal expression. Although one may say that the various meanings of the concept were somehow always present because of the link between equality and justice, modernity and its natural rights doctrine expanded its reach. Inequality became ultimately related to the material level of an unequal distribution of goods. Nowadays, this is not to be taken for granted anymore. The word "inequality" may be found applied not only to political or moral issues, but also to culture, gender, environment, education, race, or social esteem, to mention but a few. The sort of unifying substratum once given by the material background of the concept is now largely considered to be just one among many other components of inequality, so that when referred to, this type of inequality receives the specific label of "economic income inequality."

This article provides a discursive grounding for understanding the construction of military imaginaries by adding the concepts of 'antagonism' and 'intercalation' to articulation theory. By examining the cases of industrial-mechanized warfare theory and network-centric warfare theory through the lens of this expanded articulation theory, it is argued that military imaginaries often serve to define and link conceptions of science, technology, society, economy, war, and military organization, thought, and practice into a unified image of the larger security environment - that is, the military imaginary. Military imaginaries often share a common narrative structure that privileges co-periodized change among the elements of the articulation, resulting in the phenomenon of 'antagonism' serving as a generic threat used to justify military modernization and even the use of force.

This article explores the upgrade and perpetual innovation economy of digital gaming as it informs understandings and practices of the 'self'. Upgrade is situated in terms of digital gaming as a globalized techno-cultural industry. Drawing on accounts of governmentality and cultural work, research with digital games design students is drawn on to explore the overlapping twin logics of technological upgrade and work-on-the-self. The games industry-focused higher education context is examined as an environment for becoming a games designer and involving processes of upgrading the self. Having examined processes and practices of upgrading the self in terms of technological skills and personal development/enterprise, the article turns to some of the critical issues around anxiety, industry conventions and working practices.

This paper focuses on the demands for autonomy of the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankwamo peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta with regard to control over their territories, self-determination, indigenous legal jurisdiction, management of the environment, food sovereignty, and political control through their own authorities. The main argument is that the autonomy of indigenous peoples is being influenced by the current context of local, national and international conflicts and other specific circumstances in the region in such a way as to require viewing autonomy as a complex process that transcends national and supranational legal frameworks. Indigenous autonomy is articulated within local, national and international dynamics and within processes of recognition of, and disregard for, indigenous rights - obliging us to understand it as a relational indigenous autonomy. It is relational because it is expressed in different ways depending on the interactions among different social actors and the specificities of the historical contexts.

This article proposes aging black women's geographies as a critical forum to rethink human-spatial relationships in Brazil. It ethnographically explores aging black women's life narratives recounted while walking through their neighborhood in the city of Belo Horizonte. Their accounts of their lives in the neighborhood speak to racial, gender, and class positioning in Brazil and how these positions manifest in spatial configurations. However, their stories also reimagine the relationship between individuals, communities, and space offer counter-narratives to traditional concepts of geographic hierarchy, domination, and separation, suggested in ideas such as the 'favela'. The analysis shows how aging black women's geographies model possibilities for re-envisioning liberatory practices and environments.

In his media ethics, Roger Silverstone was particularly sceptical of the idea that increasing mediaconnectedness in itself is set to improve our overall moral condition or to foster a cosmopolitan cultural outlook. In arguing that we need to go 'beyond connection', he raised the broader issue of the cultural condition that an intensely connected environment is establishing, and posed questions of the kinds of relatedness, the sense of belonging, the moral horizons and awareness of responsibilities that such a condition entails. This article takes an historical approach to these issues by considering how mediated connectivity may have been regarded, particularly in relation to the ideas of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, during the 1930s. Considering this earlier period of modernity - in which media technologies and institutions were emerging as significant shapers of cultural attitudes, but before they had achieved the ubiquity and the taken-for-grantedness of today - can, it will suggested, offer a useful perspective on our own globalized, media-saturated times.

Concerted clamors ring in the corridors of our planet: "Nature is dying, and with it, life on earth. Humans! Your end is approaching." Are we then battling the postendist phase of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the "unborn"-those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of present politics and society? How are we, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "responsible for our rose"? (Anderson 1987: vii) Are we entering a new eco-logics of nature? And how is a Green politics formed that may, in the process, globe the earth? Loren Eiseley observes: It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soils, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned-escaped, it may be-spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master. (Eiseley 1960: 123-24) What happens to nature now? Is nature now...

"This article investigates the treatment of gender issues in "research for development" natural resources management (NRM) projects. Through discussion of an NRM research project in the United Kingdom and India, the article explores how the use of inaccurate gender stereotypes results in projects being compromised. The article seeks to explain why this happens despite widespread appreciation of the centrality of gender issues to NRM and poverty. In explanation the article identifies the significance of difficulties in the partnerships between the natural and social science dimensions of these projects. The study demonstrates that instead of easy and equal partnership, the relationship between natural and social science practitioners and practices remains characterized by inequality and poor communication, with serious consequences for the understanding of, and response to, gender issues."

"This article begins by describing how the figure of the human has been thought in anticolonial and postcolonial writing-as that of the rights-bearing citizen and as the "subject under erasure" of deconstructive thinking, respectively. The essay then goes on to show how the science of climate change foregrounds the idea of human beings' collective geological agency in determining the climate of the planet, a move that makes the other two figures not redundant but inadequate to the task of imagining the human in the age of the Anthropocene. The article ends by arguing the necessity of our having to think of the human on multiple and incommensurable scales simultaneously, keeping all the three figures of the human in disjunctive association with one another."

"This essay examines how a recent fictionalisation of post-disaster life in Bhopal, Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People (2007), opens up perspectives on eco-crime, disaster, and systemic injustice on the level of genre. It begins by showing how the novel evokes private eye, noir, and spy genres in ways that present similarly hybrid forms of detective agency and legal subjectivity as a means of responding to the disaster's criminal dimensions. It then shows how this hybridity relates to the way Sinha plays off crime fiction's genealogical relationship with revenge tragedy both to disrupt the disaster's common real-world designation as 'tragedy' and to implicate readers in modes of active witnessing that probe legal-democratic failure. The essay concludes by discussing how these formal techniques shed light on the potential for interdisciplinary exchange between postcolonial ecocriticism and green criminology in relation to transnational crimes such as Bhopal."

Leading sociologists have approached the climate crisis by emphasising a way forward and identifying hopeful directions. What sense is to be made of suggestions that we are instead on the brink of a 'collapse' in which the crisis is not resolved but leads to the end of existing civilisation? Partly based on three studies of contemporary opinion in the Hunter Valley in Australia, a coal industry centre, this discussion is also based on an examination of the public response to climate change world wide, the nature of the crisis as understood by science, the political response so far and the economic problems of replacing fossil fuels. What social theories might help explain what is happening? It is concluded that 'collapse' can be understood by conceiving capitalist society as a social machine, informed by a 'social imaginary'.