Contemporary engagements within corridors of the past: temporal elasticity, graffiti, and the materiality of St. Rock Street, Barcelona

In a medieval Barcelonan side-street, urine, rubbish, and a bewildering array of graphic imagery splatters the narrowing walls between two major thoroughfares. A contemporary conflict between residents, unknown artists and others is played out using banners, bottles, stickers, posters, stencils, spray paint, and bodily substances. In this shadowed liminality, local and global debates are superimposed upon substructures constructed from disease, prostitution, and the Saint of the Plague. The continuing urban struggle constitutes temporal statements of dirt and purity, violence and humour, dominance and resistance, death and salvation. Like the renovated facades masking the crumbling remains of structures long neglected, the government’s literal whitewashing of the art is a temporal cover-up of a discursive symptom stretching from deeply embedded preconditions. However, from his niche in the angular bend of the alley bearing his name, the statue of St. Rock remains unblinkingly staring, raised above the contestations expressed below.

The materiality of the immaterial. Services sectors and CO2 emissions in Uruguay

This paper analyzes the carbon dioxide emissions of the services sectors subsystem of Uruguay in 2004. Services, with the exception of transport, are often considered intangible because of their low level of direct emissions. However, the provision of services requires inputs produced by other sectors, including several highly materialintensive sectors. Through input–output analysis we investigate the relationship between the services subsystem and the rest of the economy as regards carbon dioxide emissions. This approach allows us to study the importance of the set of services branches as a unit in the economic structure as well as to analyze in detail the relationship between the branches. The results depict that services’ direct emissions are the main component, as a consequence of transport-related sectors. However, the pollution that the services subsystem makes the rest of the economy produce is very significant, and it is almost all explained by non-transport-related sectors. This analysis is useful for determining the sectors in which mitigation policies are more effective, and whether they would be better tackled through technical improvements and better practices or through demand policies.

A minor theory of the transit of materiality into discourse, Via Campesina.

In this thesis I explore how the material properties of plant seed enter the political discourses of the international peasant coalition the Via Campesina and coalition member the National Fanners Union of Canada (NFU), querying how this process might be employed as a resource for a transformative eco-social politics. I employ several post-structural theoretical constructs, configuring them together as a "minor theory". This minor theory provides the basis for a "minor" reading of three sets of Via Campesina and NFU texts. The aim of these readings is to track the movement of seed from a local agricultural concern to a transitive political one, across both the material and discursive registers. In surfacing the presence of the seed's physical properties in the three texts, I highlight the distinctions between the constraining seed of corporate industrial agriculture, and the social and agroecological opportunities resulting from what I call a "Seed Event".

Materiality, subjectification, and government: the geographies of Britain's Motorway Code

In this paper I provide a critical discussion of Foucault's work on government and governmentality. I argue that geographers have tended to overlook the ways in which practices of self-government and subjectification are performed in relation to programmes of government, and suggest that they should examine the technical devices which are embedded in networks of government. Drawing upon these observations I suggest how geographers might proceed, tracing the geographies of a specific artefact: the British government's 1958 Motorway Code. I examine how the code was designed to serve as a technology of government that could shape the conduct of fairly mobile and distant subjects, enabling them to govern their conduct and the movements of their vehicles.

The adoption of the materiality concept in social and environmental reporting assurance: a field study approach

This study investigates the logics or values that shape the social and environmental reporting (SER) and SER assurance (SERA) process. The influence of logics is observed through a study of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the materiality concept by accounting and non-accounting assurors and their assurance statements. We gathered qualitative data from interviews with both accounting and non-accounting assurors. We analysed the interplay between old and new logics that are shaping materiality as a reporting concept in SER. SER is a rich field in which to study the dynamics of change because it is a voluntary, unregulated, qualitative reporting arena. It has a broad, stakeholder audience, where accounting and non-accounting organisations are in competition. There are three key findings. First, the introduction of a new, stakeholder logic has significantly changed the meaning and role of materiality. Second, a more versatile, performative, social understanding of materiality was portrayed by assurors, with a forward-looking rather than a historic focus. Third, competing logics have encouraged different beliefs about materiality, and practices, to develop. This influenced the way assurors theorised the concept and interpreted outcomes. A patchwork of localised understandings of materiality is developing. Policy implications both in SERA and also in financial audit are explored.

The recuperated materiality of disability and animal studies

This chapter considers a perhaps unexpected connection between disability and animal studies, given disability studies' understandable reluctance to be associated with animal liberation/rights struggles. It finds that both fields remain rooted in ideas of experience and feeling, or the notion of an essential embodied experience, even while they offer up critiques of the way essentialism operates more broadly to disenfranchise or disadvantage the groups they represent. The chapter goes on to analyse what the implications are of this notion of 'embodiment' and the materialism that accompanies it, it foregrounds the contradictions that ensue, and then discusses what this means for the way political action is (and can be) conceived of.