Chris Wilbert

• PhD in Environmental and Cultural Geography
• Independent Researcher at Para-academic / independent researcher

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R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 3 9 (S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 0 6) I n 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers – obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears of the state, helping warn of new border incu...

Book review of Mark Bould's 'The Anthropocene Unconscious' and The Salvage Collective's 'Tragedy of the Worker'

Environmentalism and social sciences appear to be in a period of disorientation and perhaps transition. In this innovative collection, leading international thinkers explore the notion that one explanation for the current malaise of the “politics of ecology” is that we increasingly find ourselves negotiating “technonatural” space/times. Internation...

This study is set in the context of recent studies of the culture of littoral landscapes, and specifically nineteenth-century literary engagements with the coast of England. It examines the representation of the coastal landscape of Dunwich, Suffolk embedded in Algernon Swinburne's 1880 poem By The North Sea; in doing so, it focuses on the means by...

This study is set in the context of recent studies of the culture of littoral landscapes, and specifically nineteenth century literary engagements with the coast of England. It examines the representation of the coastal landscape of Dunwich, Suffolk embedded in Algernon Swinburne's 1880 poem By The North Sea; in doing so, it focuses on the means by...

A book review of Joseph Pugliese's 'Biopolitics of the more-than-human

For some decades now, a well established pattern has been in place whereby tourism growth in medium to large cities was seen as a good, requiring minor adjustments to diversify it spatially. European cities, like London, Cambridge, Bergamo have been seeking to divert some tourism beyond the central cultural, shopping and business districts, into wi...

Stories, we are told, are needed to see things, and here I look at how complexity is applied to forests, especially through notions of networks. For Beth Dempster, sympoiesis comes from a merging of the Greek words for collective and production, The concept has much in common with complex systems science in the focus on openness, heterogeneity, non...

Taking to task the metaphor of the body politic that she claims is central to the concept of the state in International Relations (IR), Stefanie Fishel uses posthuman and new materialist theories, along with new developments in the life sciences (in particular metagenomics), to argue that the use of this metaphor needs to learn from real material b...

In a disused military landscape in north Kent, a matter of concern emerges—struggles over landscapes, with differing groups seeking to speak for differing localities including the birds and other wildlife that have benefited from this enclosed, inaccessible, disused military site. The geographer Kevin Grove reminds us here that the hybridity of lan...

This chapter addresses, in detail, the current and future tourism opportunities and challenges for Cambridge (UK) and illustrates the potential role of ‘slow’ tourism as an antidote to what authors previously referred to as the ‘one day tourist’ problematic (see Wilbert and Duignan, 2015). It outlines how the historic and internationally famous cit...

This book begins with the editors own field notes from some “spaces of exchange” of animal bodies: dairy cattle and exotic pet markets. In one, a dairy cow is a “downer”—exhausted, emaciated, she will be shot at the end of the market and “rendered.” In the other, spider monkeys displayed in contemptuously small cages are sold for thousands of dolla...

This articles uses the example of the Red Barn Murder of 1827 in Polstead, England, to discuss the ways that an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Suffolk, England, selectively interprets the past, and screens out undesirable aspects of landscape heritage that do not fit traditional views of tourism and leisure.

PurposeWe outline the standards for “good” performance measures and propose the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a method for performance measurement on individual level. Methodology/approachUsing the example of a German cooperative bank with a cohort of 40 employees, we apply a multi-stage DEA approach to measure employee performance and report...

This research explores the experiences of internal migrant workers to Sharm Elsheikh, Egypt, where tourism practices can be viewed as an exchange of mobilities and hospitalities – of domestic migrant workers and international and domestic tourists. Here, nearly all parties are engaged in mobilities; yet, many workers (and some tourists) get stuck i...

This paper addresses an issue, which is regarded with ambiguity by most managers and employees: the The process of determining performance targets. Especially when target achievement is linked to pay or rewards, target agreements must meet objective standards. In practice, there are many obstacles to the creation of objective target agreements. Thi...

Colin Ward, who died in February 2010 at the age of eighty-five, was Britain’s most persistent and articulate defender of the libertarian Left in the second half of the twentieth century. For over six decades, this gentle anarchist bucked conventional wisdom by arguing that those who wish to see the emergence of a more compassionate, humane society...

Book review of Brett Buchannan's book Onto-Ethologies: The Animal environments of Uexkull, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. (SUNY Press, 2008).

Animal geographies might, at first, be thought a misnomer by those coming across the term for the first time. Current geographies of animals are not just about animals; how could they be? Instead, current animal geographies seek to challenge entrenched assumptions about animals in modern societies and in the historical developments of humanities di...

This chapter considers an aspect of leisure/tourism that has its focus the events of murder, crime scene tourism, and uses of media in east London. We focus on how popular guided walking tours in and around London shape and perform landscapes of the city as crime scenes. Whilst our main focus is on Jack the Ripper walks, an attraction which has exi...

The expansion of mankind, both in numbers and per capita exploitation of Earth's resources, has been astounding. To give a few examples: During the past three centuries human population increased tenfold to 6000 million, accompanied e.g. by a growth in cattle population to 1400 million (about one cow per average size family). Urbanisation has even...

The emergence of Bjorn Lomborg and what became known as ‘the Lomborg controversy’ has been treated by many as constituting a unique and original critique of the environmental movement. From a broader perspective though, many environmental social scientists have observed that this controversy is best thought of as the public high point of an increas...

In the winter of 2005–6 and then again in 2006–7 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the somewhat odd situation where 'twitchers'—those obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time out on the far-flung borders of countries—were being reinvented as eyes and ears of the State to help warn of new border incursions. These incursions are pos...

This book explores the problematic complexity of the ultimate expression of human power over animals and does so by outlining the extraordinary diversity of killing practices and spaces and the wide variety of meanings attached to these practices. Killing an animal is rarely simply a matter of animal death. This introduction gives just the barest o...

This chapter looks at the ways animals that are killers of people are portrayed, discussed, and presented in media and other spheres. It draws on Actor-network theory, and other theoretical accounts to do this. It discusses Val Plumwood's account of being attacked by a crocodile; as well as claims that dangerous big cats are extant in the UK; the c...

World cities like London have long been, and are increasingly, sold as places of tourism and leisure – spaces of attraction not just in terms of particular events and places, but also in terms of their urban culture. As such tourist London can be thought of as a massive conduit of flows of riotous forms. Firstly, we can think of differing kinds of...

World cities like London have long been, and are increasingly, sold as places of tourism and leisure – spaces of attraction not just in terms of particular events and places, but also in terms of their urban culture. As such tourist London can be thought of as a massive conduit of flows of riotous forms. Firstly, we can think of differing kinds of...

In this special issue of Science as Culture, we mull over the current state of our common environments and the politics of nature more generally. ‘The Death of Environmentalism’ has recently emerged as a provocative thesis circulating around the Internet and beyond. Whilst this thesis may well be generating more hot air than cool analysis, a growin...

In recent years it seems that a ‘crisis’ has been invoked in social and cultural geography at fairly regular intervals. At the height of postmodern and poststructuralist influence this may, retrospectively at least, have been expected. That it continues seems somewhat surprising. Indeed, the constant naming of a crisis sometimes reminds one of us a...

This chapter reviews work, methods, and political and ethical approaches to bringing animals in to cultural geography.

This article seeks to set out some of the issues and theories around animal geographies at the current time

This chapter seeks to use Autonomous Marxist approaches to political agency, and ANT approaches to more-than-human agency to draw out the liveliness of people and animals. It examines a series of examples from popular political protests where animals, and wider natures are seen to 'resist' against developers, capitalist organisations, and wider dom...

One of the things a new animal geography seeks to do is to follow how animals have been socially defined, used as food, labelled as pets or pests, as useful or not, classed as sentient, as fish, as insect, or as irrational ‘others’ which are evidently not human, by differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts. It thereby endeavours t...

Animal Spaces, Beastly Places examines how animals interact with people in different ways. Through a wide and comprehensive range of examples, which range from feral cats and wild wolves to domestic animals and intensively farmed cattle, the contributors explore the complex relations through which humans and non-human animals are mixed together. Ou...

Il testo è stato pubblicato originariamente come introduzione al volume collettaneo Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. New geographies of human—animal relations, a cura di Chris Philo e Chris Wilbert, Routledge, Londra 2000. Viene qui pubblicato in traduzione per cortesia degli autori. Le relazioni uomo-animale e la nuova geografia animale Kahuzi Beiga...

In this chapter we reject the notion of cyberspaces as autonomous pleasure domes. On the contrary we argue that the dichotomy sometimes imposed between entirely 'playful' worlds emerging in virtual places, and the 'grounded' serious business of everyday life, is a false one. The boundary between these spaces - and the purposes to which they are put...

ECO-RESTORATION is fast becoming a buzzword in contemporary ecological and environmental circles. The concept promises to be perhaps the most significant change in direction in environmentalism over the coming years. Ecological restoration is the adoption of a more pro-active response to environmental degradation. It goes beyond, yet complements, t...

The Apple perhaps more than any other fruit has been intimately bound up with humans. Thoreau called the Apple tree ‘the most civilised of all trees’ being longer cultivated than any other and so more humanised. [7] This relationship has been shown in many ways. In Ancient cultures, such as the Greeks, Romans, and Celts, the Apple was the source of...