C Mather
Biographic Data
| ID | 8056 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Mather |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Mather |
| SIGNATURE | MATHER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Memorial University of Newfoundland |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0245-5247 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 243 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Struggling with Citational Politics as a Pathway to Unlearning and Relearning for Collective Action
There is a growing movement committed to the values of equitable and just citation, but the material practices of altering citational politics are more challenging. For instance, researchers in the Global South are under-cited, but how many citations are enough to correct this bias? How do we best determine when an author is from the Global South to begin with? We present a case study where social and natural science researchers (the authors) spe…
Regulating a ‘fish out of place’
Our paper aims to contribute to scholarship on the role of policy in regulating aquaculture development globally. We focus on the rapid rise in regulatory frameworks for farmed salmon escapes across 14 global production regions. Escape policies and frameworks aim to address a critical area of environmental concern for salmon aquaculture: the environmental, ecological and social impact of farmed salmon escapes into the wild. Building on previous r…
The antinomies of feed and feeding in animal agriculture
This paper is about the environmental politics and ethics of animal agriculture through a focus on feed and feeding. We review a large and interdisciplinary body of scholarship on animal agriculture to show that the production of feed, and the feeding of animals in confined systems of production, is associated with degradation, exploitation, and violence. At the same time, and especially in the current conjuncture, feed and feeding research and s…
Protein politics
Powerful actors associated with intensive livestock production are repositioning industrially produced meat and farmed fish as “sustainable protein.” This repositioning, we show, involves justifying the production of meat through a range of metrics, calculations, and valuations. These metrics and associated indicators underpin claims that sustainable protein is more efficient and less wasteful than conventional meat production. Our analysis quest…
Finprint’ technopolitics and the corporatisation of global food governance
Our concern in this paper is the environmental ‘footprinting’ of food and its role as a source of technopolitical power in global food governance. Our case is the highly industrialised farmed salmon sector which currently generates metrics and carefully curated visualisations to promote this fish as a more sustainable and ‘climate friendly’ protein relative to animal protein produced on land. We show how these metrics and visualisations depend on…
Opening Up Containment
Our paper contributes to Science, Technology and Society (STS) scholarship on the practices and technologies of containment. We build on existing work in STS that has analyzed containment as a performative sociotechnical system that generates and sustains new realities, new systems, and new relationships. Our contribution draws from the problem of containment in salmon aquaculture. The stakes for containing salmon are very high. Farmed salmon esc…
Multispecies hierarchies and capitalist value
Research in animal geographies is increasingly paying attention to hierarchies and inequalities within and between nonhuman animals. The way that animals are valued differently and hierarchically within this growing body of scholarship has tended to focus on a range of biopolitical differences between and within species. Collard and Dempsey's recent contribution, in contrast, points to the importance of hierarchy and difference in the valuation o…
Using citizen science to evaluate extended producer responsibility policy to reduce marine plastic debris shows no reduction in pollution levels
As governments around the world grapple with the challenge of responding to increased plastic pollution, extended producer responsibility (EPR) policy, which shifts the responsibility for waste management of a product to producers, is quickly becoming a cornerstone of legislative approaches to this issue. However, the effectiveness of this policy has never been assessed in terms of reducing plastic marine debris. Understanding if a policy like EP…
Full spectrum sustainability and a theory of access
The United Nations has identified access to and benefits from fisheries resources as key sustainable development challenges. The business-as-usual management approach focusing on a limited set of biological and economic considerations has not adequately addressed widespread global calls for governing the distribution of access and benefits effectively and equitably. Our paper develops a novel approach for incorporating social science analysis of …
Regulating the Blue Economy? Challenges to an effective Canadian aquaculture act
Ocean frontier assemblages
The ocean frontier has become central to a range of new and emerging strategies aimed at realizing the potential of the ocean economy. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the configuration of the ocean as a frontier and its role in transforming marine spaces through the case of salmon aquaculture in Canada. To this end, we engage with ‘frontier assemblage’, an analytic that is developed from scholarship on agrarian and extractive r…
Landing’ salmon aquaculture
In this paper, we critically assess two key shifts in the global salmon aquaculture sector: first, the development of large land-based salmon production facilities and, second, the increased reliance on land-based commodity crops in salmon feed. Proponents of this ‘landing’ of salmon aquaculture’s infrastructure promise sustainable solutions to the environmental challenges of farming in and from the sea. But the firmness of land is no predictor o…
Failing to plan is planning to fail
Gammage, L. C., A. Jarre, and C. Mather. 2021. Failing to plan is planning to fail: lessons learned from a small-scale scenario planning process with marginalized fishers from South Africa’s southern Cape. Ecology and Society 26(4):32. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12886-260432
Enacting Maasai and Palaeoanthropological Versions of Drought in Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania
While palaeoanthropologists have travelled to Tanzania’s renowned human origins site of Oldupai Gorge for over a century, lasting collaboration has yet to be established with the Maasai pastoralists who inhabit the area. This paper uses actor-network-theory and the concept of enactment to compare palaeoanthropological and Maasai livelihoods and to explore why collaboration has been infrequent. Here we show that both groups’ subsistence strategies…
"Is social licence "going rogue
In this commentary we trace an important change in the use of social licence for resource-intensive development projects. Social licence is shifting from an approach used by companies to improve relations with affected communities to a concept now used by environmental justice groups, non-governmental organisations and local communities to contest unpopular resource-intensive development projects. The term "going rogue" is a productive metaphor t…
Scientific facts and oral traditions in Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania
Reminiscent of past colonial practices, contemporary archaeological research in Africa is still often governed and carried out by foreign entities that move Africans aside from their pasts and their countries' archaeological heritage. Oldupai Gorge, located in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area, is a flagship human evolution research site. Less recognized is that a Maasai pastoral society inhabits the region. Despite over a century of excava…
Shrines and Compound Abandonment
Ocean grabbing, terraqueous territoriality and social development
This paper reframes the ocean-grabbing literature by moving beyond accounts where small-scale producers and communities are portrayed as only victims of states and capital. While state and corporate efforts to 'grab' resources require critical attention, the literature on ocean grabbing risks obscuring the multidimensional relations of less powerful agents. This paper engages access analysis to reveal complex spatial, social and political process…
Alternative environmentalities
Foley, P., D. A. Okyere, and C. Mather. 2018. Alternative environmentalities: recasting the assessment of Canada’s first Marine Stewardship Council-certified fishery in social terms. Ecology and Society 23(3):37. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10382-230337
Conservation and care
This paper aims to contribute to an emerging and vibrant body of post-structural scholarship situated within science technology and society (STS) on practices and their role in world making. Our focus is Atlantic salmon conservation in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We examine the different material and social orders that have over time connected human and salmon bodies. These different socio-material orders do not exist in h…
Consumption, Geography of
Making Space for Community Use Rights
Community use rights are rarely considered to be an economically viable or efficient option in conventional fisheries management policy. Our analysis challenges this view by pointing to the positive economic and social outcomes of community use rights in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We argue that resources allocated to community-based organizations can be used to build “community economies,” in the theoretical vocabulary of…
Implications of design on infection prevention and control practice in a novel hospital unit
The physical design of hospital wards is associated with transmission of pathogenic organisms and hospital-acquired infections. A novel hospital unit, the Medical Ward of the 21st Century (W21C), optimizes features for infection prevention and control practices. Ethnographic research on the W21C versus conventional hospital wards examined the experiential and behavioural elements of the different designs. Three recurring themes emerged regarding …
Consumption and its consequences
Blogging geographies
This paper responds to the call for research on the use of new information technologies in higher education contexts. This was done through a case study on the use of blogs in an advanced seminar class. The paper argues that the use of blogs provided a way of gauging how students were coming to terms with the course material and how they were engaging with the course texts. Intertextuality was used as a method of understanding how students engage…
From beginnings and endings to boundaries and edges
This paper discusses research on electronic waste in Canada and Bangladesh. We engage with ongoing debates in geography and the broader social sciences on the need to move beyond linearity in the analysis of commodity/value chains and global production networks. Our analysis suggests that the problem of linearity may be an artefact of theoretical and methodological presuppositions, which explains its longevity as an issue in methodological approa…
Ocean grabbing, terraqueous territoriality and social development
This paper reframes the ocean-grabbing literature by moving beyond accounts where small-scale producers and communities are portrayed as only victims of states and capital. While state and corporate efforts to 'grab' resources require critical attention, the literature on ocean grabbing risks obscuring the multidimensional relations of less powerful agents. This paper engages access analysis to reveal complex spatial, social and political process…
Geographies of food
This third and final 'Geographies of food' review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews - plus others whose work was not but should have been featured - were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people's work, and to enter into conversations about - and in the process review - other/new work w…
Biosecurity's unruly spaces
This paper is about the geopolitics of animal health governance. Through a biosecurity event in South Africa's pig sector we examine changes in the way the governance of disease risk is configuring intra-national spaces. Our case suggests an emerging geopolitics of animal health, one that is defined not by differences between nations but by a more complex patchwork of ‘secure’ and ‘unruly spaces
Shrines and the Domestication of Landscape
Landscapes reflect predominant patterns of social action and thought. In this article, the relationship between landscapes and shrines in Kusasi territory in northern Ghana is explicated in terms of the domestication of the natural world. Focusing on a particular settlement, I argue that Kusasi shrines embody local and tribal histories. Field observations and interviews reveal that the Kusasi use shrines to demarcate physical territories accordin…
Traditional taboos in biological conservation
Englilish The Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in central Ghana has been called a classic example of successful ''traditional'' conservation. Local hunting taboos on two species of primates (the ursine black and white colobus and the Campbell's monkey) are thought to date back to the 1830s when a local oracle instructed the villagers to ''care for the monkeys''. However, the same level of protection is not given to the surrounding forest or other a…
Market Liberalisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa
This paper is about the impact of market liberalisation on South Africa's citrus export industry. It responds to the lack of critical research on this topic: debates on the impact of liberalisation in agriculture are dominated by neo-classical economic approaches, which have uncritically applauded the impact of the 'free market'. According to these studies, (white) agriculture has become more competitive and responsive to global market forces. Ou…
Lineage Organisation of the Tallensi Compound
Houses frequently embody culturally specific principles of social organisation. In this article Tallensi compounds in the Upper East Region of Ghana are examined in terms of compound layout and the kinship relations of their occupants. By comparing the patrilineal descent patterns of occupants with the topological organisation of multi-courtyard compounds, it is proposed that there is a correlation between these two variables. Further multidimens…
Agro-commodity chains, market power and territory
Opening Up Containment
Our paper contributes to Science, Technology and Society (STS) scholarship on the practices and technologies of containment. We build on existing work in STS that has analyzed containment as a performative sociotechnical system that generates and sustains new realities, new systems, and new relationships. Our contribution draws from the problem of containment in salmon aquaculture. The stakes for containing salmon are very high. Farmed salmon esc…
Landing’ salmon aquaculture
In this paper, we critically assess two key shifts in the global salmon aquaculture sector: first, the development of large land-based salmon production facilities and, second, the increased reliance on land-based commodity crops in salmon feed. Proponents of this ‘landing’ of salmon aquaculture’s infrastructure promise sustainable solutions to the environmental challenges of farming in and from the sea. But the firmness of land is no predictor o…
Living with disease? Biosecurity and avian influenza in ostriches
Tribal recreation and recreating tribalism
This paper is about the links between culture, leisure and social control on South Africa's gold mines. Based on a series of reports commissioned by the Chamber of Mines in the 1940s, it explores attempts by the industry to retribalise migrant workers using sport and leisure and thus forms one chapter in the broader attempts by the state and capital to shape the culture of Africans in twentieth century South Africa. The paper also makes a contrib…
Beyond Decoding
Geographers and other social scientists have argued that cartoons can play an effective role in enhancing the classroom experience and foster the development of critical thinking skills. We confirm the case for the use of cartoons in the classroom while arguing that recent writing underestimates the potential of this medium as a teaching resource. Our argument is that this medium can and should be used in teaching theoretical and conceptual debat…
Between the ‘Local’ and the ‘Global’
South Africa's higher education system has undergone significant change since the end of apartheid. A central theme in the debates on higher education transformation has been the tension between the global imperatives of development and the need for universities to respond to the legacy of apartheid. This paper explores this tension by considering recent changes in geographical teaching and research. The paper argues that many of the tensions evi…
Forced removal and the struggle for land and labour in South Africa
"Is social licence "going rogue
In this commentary we trace an important change in the use of social licence for resource-intensive development projects. Social licence is shifting from an approach used by companies to improve relations with affected communities to a concept now used by environmental justice groups, non-governmental organisations and local communities to contest unpopular resource-intensive development projects. The term "going rogue" is a productive metaphor t…
Avian influenza multiple
Conservation and care
This paper aims to contribute to an emerging and vibrant body of post-structural scholarship situated within science technology and society (STS) on practices and their role in world making. Our focus is Atlantic salmon conservation in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We examine the different material and social orders that have over time connected human and salmon bodies. These different socio-material orders do not exist in h…
Maps, Measurements, and Landmines
The humanitarian impact of landmines was well publicised during the 1990s. The efforts by nongovernmental organisations during this decade led to an international treaty banning the production, stockpiling, and use of antipersonnel landmines. Since the late 1990s a series of important changes have occurred in the management and coordination of humanitarian demining, which are associated with the emergence of a new development discipline for those…
The anti-politics machine
The body in transnational commodity cultures
This paper is about an extraordinary promotional campaign for South African citrus exports in Europe during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The campaign involved hiring and then training young, white South African women to encourage citrus sales in supermarkets and corner stores in South Africa's main European citrus markets. We describe the origins of the campaign in the late 1960s and document its progress through the 1970s until its demise in …
The pipeline and the porcupine
Foreign Migrants in Export Agriculture
The restructuring of labour regimes in high‐value export agriculture has been an important research theme in the globalisation of agro‐food systems. Contrary to theories of agrarian transition, as export agriculture becomes more globalised, it does not shift to more modern forms of labour. Increasing competition within global agricultural trade has instead led to the use of more vulnerable workers in an attempt to secure a less militant and cheap…
Making Space for Community Use Rights
Community use rights are rarely considered to be an economically viable or efficient option in conventional fisheries management policy. Our analysis challenges this view by pointing to the positive economic and social outcomes of community use rights in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We argue that resources allocated to community-based organizations can be used to build “community economies,” in the theoretical vocabulary of…
Flexible Technology in the Clothing Industry
This paper provides some preliminary evidence on the impact of flexible equipment on the clothing industry in Vancouver. It is argued that the implementation of these machines is limited to certain sectors of the industry and to specific sections of the labour process in clothing factories. In spite of the limited impact of these machines in Vancouver, the implications of flexible equipment in this manufacturing sector are far‐reaching. Get artic…
The Anatomy of a Rural Strike
(1993). The Anatomy of a Rural Strike: Power and Space in the Transvaal Lowveld. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines: Vol. 27, Agriculture and Apartheid, pp. 424-438
Forced removal and the struggle for land and labour in South Africa
Towards sustainable agriculture in post-apartheid South Africa
The anti-politics machine
Tribal recreation and recreating tribalism
This paper is about the links between culture, leisure and social control on South Africa's gold mines. Based on a series of reports commissioned by the Chamber of Mines in the 1940s, it explores attempts by the industry to retribalise migrant workers using sport and leisure and thus forms one chapter in the broader attempts by the state and capital to shape the culture of Africans in twentieth century South Africa. The paper also makes a contrib…
Debate and Commentary
Populist Agrarian Visions and Rural Livelihoods in Kwazulu-Natal
The introduction to an edited collection normally sets the context and provides support for the arguments presented in the contributions that follow. Michael Lipton's, Frank Ellis', and Merle Lipton's introduction to Land, Labour and Livelihoods in Rural South Africa, Volume 2: KwaZulu-Natal and Northern Province plays a rather different role in that their position is largely not supported by the contributors to the KwaZulu-Natal section of this …
Agro-commodity chains, market power and territory
Foreign Migrants in Export Agriculture
The restructuring of labour regimes in high‐value export agriculture has been an important research theme in the globalisation of agro‐food systems. Contrary to theories of agrarian transition, as export agriculture becomes more globalised, it does not shift to more modern forms of labour. Increasing competition within global agricultural trade has instead led to the use of more vulnerable workers in an attempt to secure a less militant and cheap…
Geographical indications and the South Africa–European Union free trade agreement
Geographical indications, as a form of intellectual property, are becoming increasingly important in global trade. In South Africa’s trade and cooperation agreement with the European Union, problems over the use of names such as ‘port’ and ‘sherry’ provided an important obstacle to the conclusion of the trade deal. This paper argues that the conflict over geographical indications in this trade agreement must be seen in the context of broader init…
Maps, Measurements, and Landmines
The humanitarian impact of landmines was well publicised during the 1990s. The efforts by nongovernmental organisations during this decade led to an international treaty banning the production, stockpiling, and use of antipersonnel landmines. Since the late 1990s a series of important changes have occurred in the management and coordination of humanitarian demining, which are associated with the emergence of a new development discipline for those…
Lineage Organisation of the Tallensi Compound
Houses frequently embody culturally specific principles of social organisation. In this article Tallensi compounds in the Upper East Region of Ghana are examined in terms of compound layout and the kinship relations of their occupants. By comparing the patrilineal descent patterns of occupants with the topological organisation of multi-courtyard compounds, it is proposed that there is a correlation between these two variables. Further multidimens…
Market Liberalisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa
This paper is about the impact of market liberalisation on South Africa's citrus export industry. It responds to the lack of critical research on this topic: debates on the impact of liberalisation in agriculture are dominated by neo-classical economic approaches, which have uncritically applauded the impact of the 'free market'. According to these studies, (white) agriculture has become more competitive and responsive to global market forces. Ou…
Shrines and the Domestication of Landscape
Landscapes reflect predominant patterns of social action and thought. In this article, the relationship between landscapes and shrines in Kusasi territory in northern Ghana is explicated in terms of the domestication of the natural world. Focusing on a particular settlement, I argue that Kusasi shrines embody local and tribal histories. Field observations and interviews reveal that the Kusasi use shrines to demarcate physical territories accordin…
Unpacking animal metaphors for commercial relationships in the biotechnology industry
Metaphors are cognitive instruments with the capacity to influence how humans think about the world. Guiding our representations and shaping our experiences, metaphor is of anthropological interest because it is an integral aspect of culture. This paper aims to highlight the role of metaphor in the biotechnology industry. In particular, animal metaphors provide a means of consolidating information. In a culture where time is highly restricted, me…
Time and the structuring of ritual performance in the xenotransplantation debate
Advancements in biotechnology provoke fundamental questions about the relationship of humans to the natural world. A crisis arises as the knowledge, practice, and policies concerning biotechnology grow further out of step with each other. This paper examines the role of ritual performance as a means of resolving this crisis, uniting the organic with the socio-moral aspects of science, technology and regulatory policy. Ritual performance is eviden…
Accusations of Genital Theft
The pipeline and the porcupine
The body in transnational commodity cultures
This paper is about an extraordinary promotional campaign for South African citrus exports in Europe during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The campaign involved hiring and then training young, white South African women to encourage citrus sales in supermarkets and corner stores in South Africa's main European citrus markets. We describe the origins of the campaign in the late 1960s and document its progress through the 1970s until its demise in …
Traditional taboos in biological conservation
Englilish The Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in central Ghana has been called a classic example of successful ''traditional'' conservation. Local hunting taboos on two species of primates (the ursine black and white colobus and the Campbell's monkey) are thought to date back to the 1830s when a local oracle instructed the villagers to ''care for the monkeys''. However, the same level of protection is not given to the surrounding forest or other a…
Between the ‘Local’ and the ‘Global’
South Africa's higher education system has undergone significant change since the end of apartheid. A central theme in the debates on higher education transformation has been the tension between the global imperatives of development and the need for universities to respond to the legacy of apartheid. This paper explores this tension by considering recent changes in geographical teaching and research. The paper argues that many of the tensions evi…
Citrus, apartheid and the struggle to (re)present Outspan oranges
Living with disease? Biosecurity and avian influenza in ostriches
Beyond Decoding
Geographers and other social scientists have argued that cartoons can play an effective role in enhancing the classroom experience and foster the development of critical thinking skills. We confirm the case for the use of cartoons in the classroom while arguing that recent writing underestimates the potential of this medium as a teaching resource. Our argument is that this medium can and should be used in teaching theoretical and conceptual debat…
Political science (37 works) · Geography (26 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Economics (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Biology (17 works) · Business (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Archaeology (10 works) · Agriculture (9 works)