Politics Of Scale

Critical Heritage Studies is a new and fast-growing interdisciplinary field of study seeking to explore power relations involved in the production and meaning-making of cultural heritage. Politics of Scale offers a global, multi- and interdisciplinary point of view to the scaled nature of heritage, and provides a theoretical discussion on scale as a social construct and a method in Critical Heritage Studies. The international contributors provide examples and debates from a range of diverse countries, discuss how heritage and scale interact in current processes of heritage meaning-making, and explore heritage-scale relationship as a domain of politics.

Rangelands are vast, making up one quarter of the United States and forty percent of the Earth’s ice-free land. And while contemporary science has revealed a great deal about the environmental impacts associated with intensive livestock production—from greenhouse gas emissions to land and water degradation—far less is known about the historic role science has played in rangeland management and politics. Steeped in US soil, this first history of rangeland science looks to the origins of rangeland ecology in the late nineteenth-century American West, exploring the larger political and economic forces that—together with scientific study—produced legacies focused on immediate economic success rather than long-term ecological well being. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a variety of forces—from the Homestead Act of 1862 to the extermination of bison, foreign investment, and lack of government regulation—promoted free-for-all access to and development of the western range, with disastrous environmental consequences. To address the crisis, government agencies turned to scientists, but as Nathan F. Sayre shows, range science grew in a politically fraught landscape. Neither the scientists nor the public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy—from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities—contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates about rangelands to this day. Looking at the global history of rangeland science through the Cold War and beyond, The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of past conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists.

Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent struggles and strategies around scale. Confl icts over scale can be seen as opaque class struggles. Political projects, whether from the ground up or representing corporate or state interests, continually contest the scale at which authority is vested. This volume looks at the way global corporations redefi ne the scale of power and how working- class and other movements build alliances and cross scales to develop political blocs. What injustices are perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? The book, consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers, and cultural studies scholars, explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global. Part I focuses on bodies in motion, entangled in battles over new boundaries and political coalitions, and the ways in which migrants and refugees are disrupted by intersecting time scales. Part II on the nation- state addresses the shifting responsibilities assigned by law at diff erent historical moments and the impact of global energy trade on national austerity policies. Part III, on rescaling sovereignty, discusses the misleading media discourse on “Brexit” and reconstructs the class bases of the move to the Right in Eastern Europe that threaten the EU. Part IV on the histories of changing scales of movements revisits historical debates on uneven and combined development, and sets out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenthand nineteenth- century Atlantic, which prefi gure contemporary struggles of labor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development. Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements are constrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in their eff orts to build class alliances and political blocs.

Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation bring new subjects into the fold of architecture. Documenting a series of performances, research projects, installations, films, characters, and exhibitions, Superpowers of Scale demonstrates the breadth of architectural knowledge and its possible representations.

Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.

Bringing together internationally renowned as well as emerging scholars, this book presents concrete case studies framed by theoretical concern with the issue of scale. It demonstrates that a diverse array of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives can productively converge on a common set of problems related to social, temporal and spatial scales and contemporary globalization. Local Politics, Global Impacts will stimulate empirical and theoretical research that focuses on understanding how political concepts, practices, and instruments translate across scales, and contribute to the emergence of a self-aware community of scholars and practitioners focusing explicitly on modelling the dynamics of local-regional-global interactions.

Succeeding in the art of contemporary policymaking involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. And yet, policy continues to be articulated through age-old categories and hierarchies of scale. This book asks why scale occupies this enduring position of privilege in policymaking, highlighting how scales are far from ‘natural’ features of policy and that they are instead essential to the armoury of policy practice. Drawing on empirical data from the field of education governance, the book traces how scales are crafted and mobilised in policymaking practices, demonstrating that ‘scalecraft’ is key to understanding the production of hegemony.

The social sciences are still predominantly modernist disciplines and, as such, products of the Enlightenment. Recent challenges to Enlightenment thinking thus carry with them the potential or threat to transform the social sciences radically. Postmodernism and the Social Sciences examines the nature and potential of this postmodernist challenge in each of the major social sciences. Starting with the practices of particular disciplines and proceeding to matters of shared concern, the essays provide an accessible discussion of the contemporary impact of postmodernism on social scientific thought.