{"title":"Seeing the wood and the trees. Assessing Swedish Nature-Based Integration utilising the theory of socio-cultural viability","authors":"B. Singleton","doi":"10.11143/fennia.89965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.89965","url":null,"abstract":"Migration is a prominent topic in many European societies, spawning numerous initiatives aiming to help 'integrate' newcomers. One subsection of these initiatives in Nordic countries is 'Nature-Based Integration' (NBI). Varied in scope, NBI involve activities where newcomers engage in activities in local natural environments. This article analyses NBI in Orebro County, central Sweden. It utilises the Mary Douglas derived theory of socio-cultural viability (cultural theory) in order to examine the group dynamics and related narratives found within observed activities. Utilising cultural theory's fourfold typology of social solidarities, the NBI observed were characterised as a combination of egalitarianism and hierarchy, with the other two, individualism and fatalism, considerably less prominent. This has consequences for the relevance of NBI to newcomers' lives – the initiatives' 'success' as far as participants are concerned will relate to whether NBI compliment or conflict with institutional narratives in the other, much larger, parts of their lives. The collected data suggest that narratives of individualism are arguably not as prominent in NBI as in the lives of newcomers and Swedes using nature. This article thus represents a first step in understanding NBI's impact in the complex situations newcomers find themselves.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46331842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A wilderness treaty for the Arctic: Svalbard to the Inuit Nunaat, defining a sovereign wilderness","authors":"A. Carleton","doi":"10.11143/fennia.88571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.88571","url":null,"abstract":"Given the inherent endemism of the High Arctic and the proclivity of nations to vie over control of its lands and waters, the arrival of a treaty, which places protection of the endemic environment at its core, would be timely. The Arctic environment is changing, together with its identity as the home of indigenous peoples that are part of a contemporary reformulation of sovereignty. Treaty-formulation, which places the geography of the Arctic at its centre, also centralises her regional endemism and interconnectedness, a vital starting point for regional treaty-building.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49188214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perception of danger in the southern Arizona borderlands","authors":"H. Nielsen","doi":"10.11143/fennia.87338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.87338","url":null,"abstract":"The mainstream paradigm of the US-Mexico borderlands is that the undocumented migrants are posing a serious threat to the area, yet who or what is actually in danger at the border and what is the danger? This paper explores, through a phenomenological participant-researcher approach, the tension and different perceptions of danger connected to the southern Arizona borderlands. By joining the humanitarian aid group Ajo Samaritans as a volunteer, the borderland is both experienced and observed on the ground through active participation. In closing, it is observed that different actors convey different, and at times even direct opposite, dangers that elevate tension in the area. Under the surface, however, there are similarities and while this study argues that there are many threats as well as endangered entities in the desert, the undocumented migrants are the group most threatened and the desert itself poses the greatest danger.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46812130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Combating the shocks of the 'unplayful' field. Alone! – commentary to Taylor","authors":"Shenika McFarlane-Morris","doi":"10.11143/fennia.91074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.91074","url":null,"abstract":"This brief reflection is centered on the article, “The long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher.” The author, Stephen Taylor, should be commended for his bold move to detail his experiences with trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which were subsequent to the commencement of his doctoral fieldwork in a violent location of South Africa. The work of Taylor is stark evidence of the kaleidoscope of challenges surrounding fieldwork that the early career geographer oftentimes bear on their own, which potentially compromise their mental and physical well-being. Compounding these challenges is the cursoriness of preparedness of fledgling geographers for immersed fieldwork, and secondly, the availability of organized support systems for such individuals, once they are in the field. On these premises, I call for action amongst universities to improve the manner in which they prepare ethnographic researchers for fieldwork, particularly those to be conducted in developing countries.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"63502471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research - commentary to Bowman","authors":"B. Wood","doi":"10.26686/wgtn.13026341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.26686/wgtn.13026341","url":null,"abstract":"In this commentary I respond to Benjamin Bowman’s Fennia paper by extending upon his central thesis that argues that the prevailing methodological tools and framings used to research youth political participation perpetuate unhelpful and inadequate dichotomies about youth. Advancing upon this, I suggest that the youth climate strikes in 2019 highlight three prevalent discourses in youth research relating to climate change: (i) the tendency to view youth as isolated individuals, neglecting the role of adults and communities; (ii) the tendency to focus on individual behavioural change rather than recognise the need for systemic and societal responses to climate change, and (iii) the tendency to overlook structural characteristics of youth such as race, gender and social class. The resulting discourses of youth autonomy, individualism and homogeneity lead to a distorted picture of young activists and perpetuate harmful narratives which lead to stigma, despair and cynicism. The paper concludes by advocating for greater care in the research methodologies and critical frameworks we use to report on youth at public events, such as climate strikes, in order to allow for the complexity of the young political agent, the ambiguity of some of their actions and for opportunities that enable young people themselves to articulate their own participation.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83354504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mental health, coloniality and fieldwork in the European university: a reflection in three challenges – commentary to Taylor","authors":"Lioba A. Hirsch","doi":"10.11143/fennia.90763","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.90763","url":null,"abstract":"In this reflection piece, I discuss three challenges to the way we think about fieldwork and mental health in the context of European universities. These challenges emerged out of reading and reflecting on Stephen Taylor’s paper “The long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma and the ethnographic researcher”. Specifically I reflect on coloniality and whiteness and the ways in which I consider them to be entangled in both the problem and the discussion around universities’ handling of the mental health of their staff and students. In doing so I rely on decolonial and critical whiteness literature to argue that universities’ disregard for the (mental health) risks associated with conducting ethnographic fieldwork as well as the academic culture which fuels this disregard, reveal the ways in which universities and the knowledge they produce privilege whiteness.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49091423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Historical tools and current societal challenges: reflections on a collection of environmental migration cases","authors":"Roberta Biasillo","doi":"10.11143/fennia.86020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.86020","url":null,"abstract":"Through considering a \"Geo Archive\" as a tool of history, this paper explores several conundrums concerning environmental migration in social sciences. It demonstrates how historical perspectives can problematize and unsettle various automatisms that are widely present in journalistic, public, and policy discourses. Through examples from the Geo Archive, the article illustrates how unavoidable historical dimensions can enrich our understandings on the interaction between environmental issues and migration flows. This paper engages with an open access \"archive in-the-making\". This Geo Archive includes case studies of migration flows and puts those flows in conversation with environmental transformations and climatic changes. The analysed collection presents high-profile stories which are representative samples of different approaches, temporalities, geographies, sources of information, narratives, and scales. This endeavour encompasses different disciplines and fields of expertise: environmental humanities, IT and communication experts, and political ecology. The archive places itself within the realms of public history, environmental history, and history of the present and aims to reach out to wider audiences. This digital humanities project stemmed from a support action funded by the EU initiative Horizon 2020 titled CLISEL whose overarching goal was to analyse and better inform institutional responses and policies addressing climate refugees and migrants.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46216505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The unexpected place: Brexit referendum and the disruptions to translocal place-making among Finns in the UK","authors":"Evi-Carita Riikonen","doi":"10.11143/fennia.89199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.89199","url":null,"abstract":"As EU citizens and a ‘middling’ migrant group in the UK, Finns have been able to exercise a relatively limitless existence in Britain. However, this freedom became threatened after the Brexit referendum. Through a digital ethnographic approach, this paper shows that the result of the Brexit referendum turned Finns’ translocal place-making in the UK from being practiced by social bodies to being negotiated by political bodies and contributes to literature about translocal place-making as receptive to disruptions. The referendum disrupted Finns’ translocal place-making processes on personal and societal levels, cutting through both active, embodied processes in the UK and virtual, imagined processes in Finland. The referendum imposed newly experienced otherness and conditionality to the ability to participate in the British society. It did, however, also create translocal attachments towards both the UK and Finland. Through its disruptive nature, the event of the Brexit vote embedded itself in the future place-making orientations and narratives of the Finns in the UK, potentially having an impact on their future translocal trajectories and imaginaries.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42211833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mining conflicts in the European Union: environmental and political perspectives","authors":"S. Kivinen, Juha M. Kotilainen, T. Kumpula","doi":"10.11143/fennia.87223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.87223","url":null,"abstract":"Comprehensive knowledge on the issues contributing to mining conflicts is crucial in balancing between the exploitation of mineral deposits and local claims. We explore recent mining conflicts in the European Union using information derived from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice to improve the understanding of the potential impacts of the intensification of mining activities by the new minerals policies. The variety of causes of conflict is wide and ranges from environmental impacts to socio-economic and health concerns of the populations residing in the vicinity of the mines. While mining conflicts have arisen during all the phases of the life cycle of a mine, new mining projects have been well presented amongst the conflicts. Policy makers should increasingly pay attention to the multiple impacts that mining has had on the environment and socially, in order to be able to put the plans for increasing minerals extraction in Europe into practice.","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46899790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Doing belonging\": young former refugees and their active engagement with Norwegian local communities","authors":"Tina Mathisen, S. Cele","doi":"10.11143/FENNIA.83695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11143/FENNIA.83695","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the everyday lives of young former refugees in small Norwegian towns and considers how a focus on “doing belonging” can help us understand the processes of place attachment an ...","PeriodicalId":45082,"journal":{"name":"Fennia-International Journal of Geography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47739524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}