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ABSTRACTThis article engages with Ronaldo Munck’s arguments as to what is ‘Marxist development’ and presents the author’s own views. ‘Marxist development’ needs to be understood in Marx’s terms. First, this must be done by centring Marx’s methodology – dialectical materialism. Second, while Lenin, Luxemburg, the dependistashave helped us understand Marx better and the criticisms of post-developmentalists and indigenous environmentalists have made Marxism nuanced, yet neither Lenin, nor Luxemburg nor any response to criticism is the best representation of Marx. Marxist development can be properly understood in the light of Marx’s vision of emancipation and self-realisation. While Marx accepted that domination of nature was needed for human emancipation, his politics of self-realisation rests on recapturing an alienated relationship with fellow human beings and re-establishing creative and sensuous experiences with nature which capitalist industries had rendered distant and opaque. Additionally, the efficacy of Marxist development in the context of climate change and our contemporary economic crisis are examined, and it is argued that there is tremendous productive potential in following Marx’s vision of development as we confront a very uncertain environmental and economic future.

I am fascinated by Marx’s openness to learning and engagement with diverse intellectual traditions—political economic, German and Greek philosophy, utopian socialist tradition, and English literature to name a few. Marxism for me, hence, is engagement and conversations with eclectic ideas, with fidelity to the communist manifesto, and in turn, its commitment to equality and justice. In this paper, while highlighting my own journey as a student of Marx’s scholarship, I examine the key role hegemony plays in our society. Formal education, I argue, is hegemonic to the extent that it is geared at producing docile individuals, particularly from oppressed sections of the society, that internalize theories and concepts favorable to elites: it should not surprise us when the oppressed act or vote against their own interest. Yet some centers of learning are also epicenters of counter-hegemonic praxis—one such place is Jawaharlal Nehru University where I unlearn and re-learned my Marxism and began my journey as a Marxist geographer. Additionally, I examine the role of “vulgar Marxism” (unwillingness to engage with contemporary geographically specific challenges) that is often passed off as Marxist orthodoxy and argue that this has been a real threat to the spirit of the Communist Manifesto. I examine the decline of the Communist Party in Bengal in India to highlight how vulgar Marxism can subvert social justice and make the “Communist Party” unpopular.

Martin J. Haigh's India Abroadis ill-informed and misleading in multiple ways. It presents a romanticized view of ‘Indian’ culture and, what the author calls, Hindu or Hinduism. The article represents misreading of post-colonial praxis, and in turn, post-colonial comradery. Post-colonialism, as an intellectual movement, examines the impact of colonialism on the cultures of colonizing and colonized people. Post-colonialists, sometimes drawing upon Marxian traditions, have mapped exploitative and dependent relations between the metropolitan and colonial societies (Gregory et al. 2009, Blaut 1993). Post-colonial theorists tend to be sensitive to the political implications of the ways the history and cultures of colonial societies are represented. And I bring up post-colonial theory precisely because this post-colonial call to sensitivity, that the author highlights by citing Kumar (2005) has morphed into romanticization and celebration of this category called Hindu, and in turn India, in very problematic ways. In what follows, I highlight how the author's attraction to cultural relativism obfuscates social contradictions and a history of exploitation in India.

Biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER) is an important and fundamental task for biomedical text mining. Bio-NER has various applications, especially in Natural Language Processing, and its performance heavily impacts dependent tasks. However, the class imbalance problem is the major issue for an effective Bio-NER. Over the past few years, rule-based methods and deep learning-based methods have been widely used. However, they are not able to effectively handle class imbalance issues. Therefore, we proposed a hybrid method by taking advantage of both methods for Bio-NER, which is named Hybrid Bio-NER (HBio-NER). Furthermore, we propose a training data format called ‘single_entity-O’, which reduces the class imbalance problem. Data preprocessing and ‘single_entity-O’ data representation format improve the class balance, further improving the HBio-NER system performance. HBio-NER identifies the named entities using the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model and named entity boundaries (begin, inside of entity mentions) using rules. The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested on two data sets (NCBI disease and CHEMDNER chemical data sets) with different word representation models (GloVe, Word2Vec and FastText). The comparative analysis indicates that significant performance gain is achieved by the proposed method especially for disease named entity recognition.

Rationalities endemic to modernity entail an implicit spatial imaginary of networks. Additionally, modernity envisages nature as an external domain that is discoverable by science and domesticable through technology in order to drive economic productivity. This article examines Grapevine Reservoir as an artifact of modernity. Through an examination of Dallas-based representations of Denton Creek space, we seek to demonstrate that the area was discursively produced as a distal node of the Dallas network: as nothing more than a point-source for urban water. And as water flowed into Dallas, the city flowed outward to Grapevine along the same conduit. We draw on archival data from a major local newspaper during the proposal and construction phases of the reservoir (1921–1954), as well as key government documents prepared by the US Congress and US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in the 1940s. Texts were subjected to discourse analysis, to examine how urban interests rationalized Denton Creek space.

Ethnobiology is increasingly recognized from within and outside of its boundaries as interdisciplinary. The Society of Ethnobiology defines the field as “the scientific study of dynamic relationships among peoples, biota, and environments.” Ethnobiologists are able to skillfully assess challenges of biocultural conservation across the divides of political ecology. They are situated to mediate between conservation programs that target biodiversity preservation with little concern for the needs of human communities, and those (such as the New Conservation movement) that privilege those needs. Ethnobiology also transcends the pervasive assumption in these fields that Western knowledge and economic goals should guide change. Because of ethnobiology's importance as a bridging discipline, it is important to ask what unifies ethnobiology. Is it common subject matter? Or, is there an underlying emphasis representing an “ethnobiological perspective?” Answers to these questions are explored here using content analysis and discourse-and-ideology analysis. We use the results to identify the unique roles ethnobiologists play in biocultural conservation. This analysis also proved useful in the systematic identification of four salient themes that unify ethnobiology—ethics in ethnobiology, shared environmental and cultural heritage, interdisciplinary science and non-science, and ecological understanding. How ethnobiologists conceive of themselves is critical for further enrichment of the field as interdisciplinary human-environmental scholarship, particularly in reference to biocultural conservation. Self-definition makes explicit the unique strengths of the field, which by its very nature integrates a sophisticated understanding of political ecology with appreciation of the value of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), social science, and the biological sciences.

This paper examines the tensions and contradictions within the Indian state in its production of socio-economic policies. Pressure of global governance institutions, multinational corporations, and neoliberal states of the global North that back such corporations, have been instrumental in the production of -friendly economic policy in India. Additionally, in representing the interest of the national bourgeois, the Indian state has been receptive to ideas that favor marketization of the economy. However, public pressure, where the poor constitute the majority of the Indian population, has compelled the Indian state to also strengthen welfare. In examining this contradiction of the simultaneous production of neoliberal and welfare policy, we analyze the case of the public distribution system (which is being marketized) on the one hand, and the employment guarantee scheme (that demonstrates strengthening of welfare) on the other.

Neoliberal transformation is not simply a top-down process. Neoliberal hegemony at the global level has an ally in the Indian elite in producing class-biased economic growth at the national scale. This paper examines the social contestations around India's economic policy regime, its reproduction and transformation. It shows how the coercive power of global governance institutions has worked in tandem with the interest of the local elite to produce neoliberal changes in India. But class elites are not a homogeneous group. Fractures in class power affect the nature of political-economic change. Post-independence, the rural bourgeoisie, i.e., the quasi-feudal landlords and the medium-size landowners, at different stages of political-economic history, were the main social forces influencing economic policy, and the Tatas and Birlas, India's big business houses, were their urban counterparts. 1980s were witness to the rise of a “new breed of entrepreneurs” in India with foreign business collaborations, who have now emerged as the dominant class-relevant force, constantly nudging India in the neoliberal direction. Additionally, neoliberalism has the support of the Indian upper caste since the new economic regime has created avenues for re-assertion of upper-caste power. Thus, the Indian economic space continues to be contested through endogenous politico-democratic contestations, fractured and continually reorganizing class power, caste assertions, global policy discourses and coercive power of global governance institutions.

Space, Oil and Capitalcontributes to the current and vibrant debate on energy resource scarcity and contestation. Conventional geopolitics and political economy focus on oil supply security, whose quantity and location are viewed in geologically deterministic terms (e.g., Klare 2001, 2004). A focus on geological limits makes competition for oil a competition for the control of the spaces in which it is located, or through which it is transported to consumers. Mazen Labban deviates from such arguments and proposes that it is not oil geology that produces geopolitical contestations, but the production of space in the process of competition that is crucial to producing the finiteness of oil. Drawing primarily from Marx, Luxemburg, Lefebvre and Harvey, Labban demonstrates that competition for oil is geared at ensuring that part of it stays out of the market in order to make its production profitable. Competition over oil, despite generally held beliefs, is not geared at ensuring supply, but at regulating supply and ensuring profit.