Browsing by Author "Rice, Stian"
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Item Convicts are returning to farming – anti-immigrant policies are the reason(The Conversation, 2019-06-07) Rice, StianItem Divide and cultivate: the role of prisons and Indian reservations in U.S. agricultural imperialism(Taylor & Francis, 2022-02-02) Rice, StianThis paper examines the spatial history of U.S. food production through the evolution of two carceral spaces: rural penitentiaries and Indian reservations. These sites have long provided opportunities to spatially fix surplus labor and capital in U.S. agriculture: from the confinement of Indians during settler colonialism, through the regulation of labor surpluses after Reconstruction, to the present-day expansion of convict leasing to backfill migrant labor shortages. This paper challenges traditional framings of prisons and reservations as peripheries excluded from core landscapes of food production and consumption. Instead, these ‘carceral fixes’ participate in specially mediated relationships with ‘free’ agriculture—relationships that respond to the crisis-driven demands of capital and currents of racism and nativism. Within the U.S. food system, this flexibility has made prisons and reservations indispensable for spatially fixing not only capital and labor, but racial violence. Through these relationships, the indirect violence of falling farm prices is translated into the direct violence of physical and mental abuse, exploitation, alienation, diabetes, and malnutrition. Critically, this state-mediated violence is redirected from white to non-white bodies.Item Extracting Khmer Rouge Irrigation Networks from Pre-Landsat 4 Satellite Imagery Using Vegetation Indices(MDPI, 2020) Coakley, Corrine; Munro-Stasiuk, Mandy; Tyner, James A.; Kimsroy, Sokvisal; Chhay, Chhunly; Rice, StianOften discussed, the spatial extent and scope of the Khmer Rouge irrigation network has not been previously mapped on a national scale. Although low resolution, early Landsat images can identify water features accurately when using vegetation indices. We discuss the methods involved in mapping historic irrigation on a national scale, as well as comparing the performance of several vegetation indices at irrigation detection. Irrigation was a critical component of the Communist Part of Kampuchea (CPK)’s plan to transform Cambodia into an ideal communist society, aimed at providing surplus for the nation by tripling rice production. Of the three indices used, normalized di erence, corrected transformed, and Thiam’s transformed vegetation indexes, (NDVI, CTVI, and TTVI respectively), the CTVI provided the clearest images of water storage and transport. This method for identifying anthropogenic water features proved highly accurate, despite low spatial resolution. We were successful in locating and identifying both water storage and irrigation canals from the time that the CPK regime was in power. In many areas these canals and reservoirs are no longer visible, even with high resolution modern satellites. Most of the structures built at this time experienced some collapse, either during the CPK regime or soonItem The hydro-logic of genocide: remaking land, water, and bodies in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-79(Wiley, 2019-08-24) Rice, Stian; Tyner, James; Munro-Stasiuk, Mandy; Kimsroy, Sokvisal; Coakley, CorrineRecent scholarship in hydropolitics and the hydrosocial cycle has emphasized the ways that water and society are co-constitutive, acknowledging the productive entanglement of hydraulic and social actors and processes. In this paper, we apply a hydrosocial framework to understand an infamous waterscape of mass violence. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge planned and partially implemented an extensive irrigation system to increase rice production in the Cambodian countryside. The programs of rationing, forced labor, and execution imposed by the government during construction killed up to two million people. We find that these infrastructural projects helped the Khmer Rouge remake water into a technology of capital accumulation and social control. The production of these systems enrolled water as an active agent into new relations of power, providing the state with classification and control over not only water, but the physical bodies of Cambodian men, women, and children. Furthermore, we find the Khmer Rouge’s infrastructural violence was predicated on the production of new subjectivities—ones that emerged from a narrow imagination of idealized rice plants and laboring bodies. This case illustrates how a pervasive materialist logic, combined with the imperative of capital accumulation, may evolve into justification for mass murder.Item Inmate Labor And 'Convict Leasing' In Idaho(Boise State Public Radio, 2019-07-03) Rice, StianItem Madagascar’s Famine Is More than Climate Change(Walsh School of Foreign Service, 2022-01-24) Rice, StianClimate change has brought historic drought to southern Madagascar, but placing all the blame on nature lets malfeasant policies, some of which have been in place since colonialism, off the hook. Preventing future famine demands a bottom-up reorganization of Madagascar’s food system and its relationship to the world.Item Meaningful life in the time of Corona-economics(Sage, 2020-06-09) Tyner, James; Rice, StianThe COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to think more deeply about who and what we value in society, with value determined not on conditions set by capital but instead on achieving meaning in life. In this commentary, we pose a series of interconnected questions to geography: What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Furthermore, is such a life possible under capitalism? And what does a society that prioritizes meaningful life look like?Item Revanchist ‘nature’ and 21st century genocide(Taylor & Francis Online, 2021-10-20) Rice, Stian; Tyner, James A.The natural world is responding to anthropogenic change through novel pathogens, antibiotic-resistant microbes, and pest infestations. This resurgence is part of a non-human reappropriation and transformation of human-altered environments. In this commentary, we argue that this ‘revanchism’ has prompted two new forms of genocide: the pre-emptive mass slaughter of non-human animals, and the annihilation of humans as expressed through COVID-19 and other pandemics; forms that will become exemplars for mass murder in the twenty-first century.Item The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence(Wiley, 2017-06-15) Rice, Stian; Tyner, JamesOver the last 20 years, urban political ecology has made substantial contributions to the study of urban ‘socionatures’, part of the field's aim of applying political ecology to urban space. At the same time, urban political ecology has been limited by a perspective that tends to confine urbanisation to urban spatial forms; a conflation of process and site. The city is seen to be made by and for urban metabolism, disconnected from both rural and global socionatures. This paper offers a small, empirical corrective, based on a case study of Cambodian re-urbanisation under the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide began with the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge forces in April 1975. According to the standard narrative, the subsequent destruction of urban infrastructure and forced evacuation of residents is a historical case of ‘urbicide’ and reflects a broader interpretation of the Khmer Rouge as ideologically ‘anti-urban’. Using documentary evidence, this paper reconstructs the functional role of Cambodia's network of cities under the Khmer Rouge. Contrary to the narrative, we find that cities were not destroyed. Rather, urban sociospatial practices, forms and rural–urban relations were reorganised to support the demands of rice production for foreign exchange and facilitate the administration of violence. This pragmatic reconstruction challenges claims of urbicide and contradicts the narrative of ‘dead cities’ and ‘ghost towns’. Most importantly, it challenges urban political ecology's city-centrism: the processes that reanimated Cambodia's cities were the same ones that transformed rural space and motivated the evacuation of cities in the first place. Cambodian re-urbanisation accompanied re-ruralisation, a dialectic propelled by the transition to state capitalism. In this light, we encourage an urban political ecology that looks beyond the city's cadastral limits and engages those political ecologies within which the urban is situated.Item Systemic coordination and the problem of seasonal harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie(2019) Berardo, Ramiro; Turner, V. Kelly; Rice, StianThe management of natural resources may potentially be improved when governance structures in social-ecological systems enable coordination among multiple actors who may operate on the same or different geographic and/or governmental scales. In this article, we analyze the network of formal coordination ties that link governmental and nongovernmental actors in the Maumee River watershed, which is the largest source of phosphorus loading into Lake Erie, one of the five Laurentian Great Lakes of North America. Since the 1990s, Lake Erie has seen a return of the seasonal harmful algal blooms (HAB) that were common in the 1960s and 1970s, and considerable research suggests that they might be triggered by excessive amounts of phosphorus produced by agriculture. Analyzing an assortment of documents that collectively detail how stakeholders relate to each other on the topic of nutrient management in the watershed, we examine who are the actors that are more likely to fulfill coordination roles, and the scales at which coordination takes place (vertically vs horizontally). Results suggest that coordination has been formalized vertically, with actors who operate at higher governmental levels being more likely to coordinate the activities of actors at lower levels. In addition, we see evidence of horizontal coordination but only in the confines of the individual state jurisdictions that share the watershed. We see this as a potentially important obstacle to solving the HABs problem in Lake Erie, given that the management of interjurisdictional watersheds is likely to be ineffective in the absence of proper coordination across the different jurisdictions that share the watershed.