While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture’s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data (...) excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. We demonstrate that a wide range of objectives drive UA and that political orientations and discourses differ by geography, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes. (shrink)

Gandhi’s example has inspired countless political struggles worldwide over the past century. We might then ask how his thought has been transferred and translated when taken out of the particular historical and geographic context in which he lived. How have Gandhi’s ideas been changed or altered when adopted in different contexts? Which aspects of Gandhi’s thinking remain most relevant to struggles for social and environmental justice today? These are just a few of the questions that were discussed at the “Perspectives (...) on Gandhi’s Significance Workshop” hosted by Reed College in Portland Oregon, on April 16th, 2016. (shrink)

This proposes a new theory of Quantum measurement; a state reduction theory in which reduction is to the elements of the number operator basis of a system, triggered by the occurrence of annihilation or creation (or lowering or raising) operators in the time evolution of a system. It is from these operator types that the acronym ‘LARC’ is derived. Reduction does not occur immediately after the trigger event; it occurs at some later time with probability P t per unit time, (...) where P t is very small. Localisation of macroscopic objects occurs in the natural way: photons from an illumination field are reflected off a body and later absorbed by another body. Each possible absorption of a photon by a molecule in the second body generates annihilation and raising operators, which in turn trigger a probability per unit time P t of a state reduction into the number operator basis for the photon field and the number operator basis of the electron orbitals of the molecule. Since all photons in the illumination field have come from the location of the first body, wherever that is, a single reduction leads to a reduction of the position state of the first body relative to the second, with a total probability of mP t , where m is the number of photon absorption events. Unusually for a reduction theory, the larc theory is naturally relativistic. (shrink)