Gender Equality in National Politics: The Views of Australian Male Politicians

Studies of gender and politics have typically been studies of women and politics. In contrast, this paper places men at the centre of its inquiry by drawing on interviews with 15 current federal male politicians. Of concern is exploring the ways in which men conceptualise the question of gender equity in the Australian parliament. Three frameworks are identified in the men's narratives. These are that the parliament is a masculinised space but that this is unavoidable; that the parliament is now feminised and women are advantaged; and that the parliament is gender neutral and gender is irrelevant. It is argued that collectively these framing devices operate to mask the many constraints which exist to marginalise women from political participation and undermine attempts to address women's political disadvantage as political participants. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of the paper beyond the Australian context and calling for further research which names and critiques political men and their discourses on gender and parliamentary practices and processes.     

Spaces of Labor Activism, Mexican‐American Women and the Farm Worker Movement in South Texas Since 1966

This paper studies the farm worker unionization experience and the historical development of Mexican‐American women's activism in South Texas to elaborate more precisely the relationship among socio‐spatial practices, political activism and labor's geography. Drawing upon archival documents and interviews, the paper describes how Mexican‐American farm workers used public space for political activity; however, radical unionization efforts also domesticized other spaces for women's activities. The paper chronicles how Mexican‐American women in South Texas transformed the farm worker center from a "domesticated space" into one of empowerment. In short, women in the union made the farm worker center into a space that challenged both the class‐based structure of larger South Texas society and masculinist practices within the larger farm worker movement. The analysis advances the imperative to better understand how workers "make space" to ensure their own survival. The paper advances the study of labor geography by arguing that working class mobilization reconstitutes dynamic social geographies within laboring communities themselves. In arguing this point, the paper illustrates the limitations of activism based solely on the use of public space and argues for more attention to the significance of other socio‐political spaces for labor mobilization.     

Liquid passions: bodies,publics and city waters

This article explores water’s capacities as a vibrant matter with specific properties that generates passions, attachments and a sense of belonging, and which enrols bodies in new connections, socialities, alliances and politics in unpredictable ways. Based on research into practices and engagements with water in a large urban public space the paper builds on studies of blue space. It concludes that water has the capacity to enhance a sense of well-being in those that swim in it and to mobilise a very particular sense of embodiment which gives this form of public space its distinctiveness constituting new forms of sociality and connections amongst diverse individuals. It seeks to do this by paying attention to the experiences of things themselves and the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and the ‘vital materiality’ that runs through and across bodies both human and non-human. The article also explores water’s capacity to be constituted and defined by experts as dangerous and risky matter, and to thus engender political associations and connections amongst diverse groups who seek to oppose such expert interventions.     

Implementing International Environmental Agreements: The Case of the Wadden Sea

It has been a feature of the past 30 years or so that individual sovereign states have been increasingly willing to partially set aside their own interests in favour of international treaties on pollution control and wildlife protection. It is the political will of the government signatories to such agreements that is the key to successful implementation as that political will provides the legitimate enforceable authority that is necessary to ensure compliance. This paper examines a trilateral agreement made by the Governments of Denmark, Germany and Holland for the protection and management of the Wadden Sea—one of Europe's most important wildlife sites. The examination of that agreement explores the key mechanisms used for its implementation and, in the case of the Wadden Sea, those mechanisms include the operation of key European Union environmental Directives. The paper finds major differences in approach and application of the Birds, Habitats and Environmental Impact Assessment Directives across the Wadden Sea region and argues that these differences undermine the trilateral agreements made by the three governments.     

Exception beyond the sovereign state: Makhmour refugee camp between statism and autonomy

This paper explores the camp as a space of autonomy within the context of Makhmour refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. It re-examines the relationship between the camp and autonomy by inverting the concept of exception. Drawing on the theoretical opening provided by Khaled Furani (2014), the paper develops a critical understanding of the exception that originates not in the sovereign decision of the state and its juridical apparatus, but in the capacity of political subjects to form autonomous collective life in struggle with, against and beyond the state. Moving the locus of the exception from the sovereign state to the governed allows for a novel conception of the camp as a constituent site for autonomy. The experience of Makhmour shows the emergence of what I will call the “anti-camp” within the spatiality of the refugee camp, providing theoretical and empirical insights into alternative conceptualisation of the camp. While the anti-camp is a political manifestation of will to autonomous world-making, it is a process marked by constant bricolage, negotiation and contestation with the statist form of time and space.     

Political pragmatism and the creative economy: Singapore as a City for the Arts

Can the arts and culture prosper under a less than democratic political regime? This paper looks at the soft authoritarian Singaporean government and the making of Singapore into a ‘City for the Arts’. Many scholars advocate that a culturally vibrant and creative city must also celebrate diversity, tolerance and experimentation. This implies that a democratic space is needed for creative energies to flow. Singapore is not known for its democracy. But Singapore has become relatively successful in being the cultural hub in the region. A more liberal approach to diversity and criticism of the authorities can now be observed but there are still many strong‐handed social and political controls in the city‐state. This paper tries to answer these two questions: has Singapore become democratic because the authorities want the arts and culture to flourish? Is democracy necessary for the creation of a lively cultural city?     

#MeToo,white feminism and taking everyday politics seriously in the global political economy

ABSTRACT

This paper examines social media movements, specifically #MeToo, in relation to the politics of feminism and white privilege in the contemporary global political economy. Analysis of social media movements is located as a key part of the intricate web of practices that enable certain types of gendered identity and socioeconomic privilege to intersect, in powerful ways and to potent effect. The paper argues that, while scholarship on the global political economy has not often taken seriously popular culture sources in and across world politics, and needs to do better in this regard, investigating the politics of popular culture, race and socioeconomic privilege in contemporary world politics is important. This is because such analysis foregrounds everyday, cultural practices of knowledge formation, building space for emphasising relations of power but also highlighting the possibilities of and for resistance, agency and avenues for creative thinking and doing in world politics.     

Western utopianism/dystopianism and the political mediocrity of critical urban research

This paper seeks to summarise the interplay between utopian and dystopian thinking throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on the city. The gradually shrinking appeal of the socialist utopia and its replacement with the globalised free–market as a 'revanchist utopia' left socialist utopian thinking in a state of disarray towards the end of the previous century. Utopian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or 'Stadtschmerz', is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society. It is concluded that the declining political impact of critical urban research is caused partly by its lack of engagement with crafting imaginative alternative futures for the city. The works by Sennett, Sandercock and the Situationists, among others, may contain elements to reverse the current utopian malaise in urban research.     

Western utopianism/dystopianism and the political mediocrity of critical urban research

This paper seeks to summarise the interplay between utopian and dystopian thinking throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on the city. The gradually shrinking appeal of the socialist utopia and its replacement with the globalised free–market as a 'revanchist utopia' left socialist utopian thinking in a state of disarray towards the end of the previous century. Utopian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or 'Stadtschmerz', is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society. It is concluded that the declining political impact of critical urban research is caused partly by its lack of engagement with crafting imaginative alternative futures for the city. The works by Sennett, Sandercock and the Situationists, among others, may contain elements to reverse the current utopian malaise in urban research.     

Lost in translation: why Nigeria's police don't implement democratic reforms

The transfer of democratic values and practices such as community‐based policing to African police forces is a key aspect of western aid and security policies, yet the cultural transmission on which it depends is not fully understood; the ways in which African officers respond to theories and practices imported from western societies has yet to be assessed critically. Further, despite decades of international support for police reform and re‐education, there is little evidence to support the assumption that the skills, technologies and procedures associated with western policing can act as an effective channel for the transmission of democratic values. This article uses the Nigerian police's response to both externally funded and internally generated reform projects to address a question with implications for policy transfer more generally: what explains the uneven transmission of politically sensitive forms of knowledge? It discusses how imported ideas and practices are received by Nigerian officers and political elites, and how they are transformed having been filtered through local interests and dispositions. It shows that even when the process of reform is accepted, the political will required to ensure its effective implementation is not. Democratic practices do not travel well because recipients respond to imported practices in an adaptive manner, integrating aspects of donor understanding and indigenous realities.     

White socio-spatial epistemology

Recent work by geographers concerned with the enduring presence of racism has called for an interrogation of the privileges and contingencies of whiteness. Central to this project of denaturalizing White Identity has been the disclosure of its co-constitution with a host of social practices. Building on the work of critical theorists in the humanities and social sciences concerned with masculinist and post-colonial epistemologies, this paper outlines a socio-spatial epistemology of whiteness. Whiteness's central tenets are an essentialist and non-relational construction of space and identity that underwrite its claims to be realized independent of an Other. Spatially, this refusal manifests itself in the deployment of discursive categories associated with scales, boundaries and extensivity in ways that reify space into discrete, unrelated parcels. We discuss some of the implications of this non-relational construction of space and identity in the context of residential segregation and spatial mobility. The paper concludes by noting that historically and geographically specific forms of whiteness have drawn upon a common socio-spatial framing and that further study in this field will benefit anti-racist activism by disclosing the workings of racialization in numerous human geographic contexts.     

White But Not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests Through Spatial Mimicry

The role of mimicry in the construction and deconstruction of social identities has enriched our understanding of power relations considerably. However, as a spatial practice, mimicry has received scant consideration. In what ways can space itself become an object of mimicry? What strategies and practices are involved in this process and with what political objectives? The current paper treats these questions by analyzing processes of mimetic spatial production aiming to transform the Israeli‐occupied territory of Mount Hermon into an “ordinary” western ski resort. Yet this concerted effort produces a variety of tensions and contradictions that ultimately undo the normalization of the colonial space, comprising a test case of the convoluted ways in which mimicry of space, not merely in space, generates various forms of slippage, excess and ambivalence.     

On Spatial Planning and Marxism: Looking Back,Going Forward

The renewed interest in Marxism that occurred in social sciences and humanities after the 2008 economic crisis has not yet found its counterpart in spatial planning. This paper examines what Marxist planning theory and practices could mean in the current conjuncture. It does so through scrutinising (1) the vibrant Marxist discourse in planning that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, (2) the recent history (since the 1980s) of planning theory and its relation to the political economy, and (3) the current political economic context (not least defined by the diabolic crisis). Where previous Marxist approaches to planning were very strong on analysing the political economy, I argue there is currently a need—with old hegemonies losing ground, communicative approaches losing support, and neoliberalism in the political economy losing legitimacy—to also discuss establishing alternatives.     

Political theorising: Four conceptions of the nature of theory

This paper is focused upon the issue of the nature of political theorising. The paper presents four different conceptions of political theorising derived from literature on the subject written by those concerned with the nature of political theory or philosophy. These four different conceptions constitute alternative practices for those who designate themselves political theorists. They constitute alternative practices because they are based upon different understandings of the nature of thinking, the role of the intellectual, the function of language or the character of social science. The intention behind this paper is to map the intellectual terrain occupied by those who engage in political theorising. The final recommendation is that each of the four conceptions be accepted as legitimate alternative practices and any temptation toward designating one conception as true political theorising be resisted.     

The Politics of Spatial Policy and Governance in Post-1990 Hungary: The Interplay Between European and National Discourses of Space

There is now a wealth of literature discussing how regional development and spatial planning practices in Central Eastern Europe have been shaped through the alignment with EU policy frameworks. However, scholars have tended to study governance dynamics in terms of adaptation and learning, paying thus little attention to how spatial policy change is inherently interlinked with the political contestation of nation-state spaces. This paper proposes to address this lack by combining insights from political economic work on state spatial restructuring and discourse theory. From this perspective, the institutionalization of spatial policies is examined as a political process in which particular understandings of space become seen legitimate and stabilized depending on how well they fit existing discourses. The paper demonstrates the added value of this approach through a case study of spatial policy change in post-1990 Hungary, and argues that the approach is more generally applicable to examine shifts in spatial policies and to address concerns with the increase in uneven development at different scales.     

对地缘政治学批判的再思考

本文探讨了政治地理学最重要流派的地缘政治学的理论、发展和实践;对“反动”的德国地缘政治学历史批判的渊源进行了探索。作者认为,地缘政治学在二次大战后的一度衰落,仅是其理论组成之一的国家有机体学说,而另一理论组成的地缘战略学研究一直是地缘政治学研究的主流,是历史和当今国际关系研究的重要基础;德国的地缘政治学,其理论的合理部分,其研究所用的方法,对今天的地缘政治学研究仍有意义,应该历史地、客观地、科学地探讨德国地缘政治学的合理内核,恢复其作为一门科学的应有地位,促进政治地理学学科的发展。     

行政区与功能区嵌套空间的生产与重构——国家尺度重构视角下的深圳特区扩容

我国经济特区的设置具有明显的国家尺度重构特征。深圳经济特区在扩容过程中产生了行政区与功能区嵌套的地理空间。采用 TPSN 组合方法对深圳特区扩容不同阶段的社会空间特征进行比较,发现,不同阶段会形成不同类型的嵌套空间,并且 TPSN组合存在明显的差异。嵌套空间生产与重构的直接动因包括资源协同效应、政策协同效应和综合协同效应,以政治动员网络为主的网络维度在嵌套空间生产与重构过程中扮演着关键角色。研究结果表明,对我国嵌套空间的研究深化了国家尺度重构理论,而在行政区划调整的制度供给进一步收紧的背景下,嵌套空间可视为一种新型的行政区划改革与调整手段。     

Building economies from the bottom up: (mis)representations of poverty in the rural American Northwest

This paper examines interconnected processes of economic restructuring and representations of poor subjects that rely on imaginaries of race, ethnicity, class and rural space. We argue that poverty and privilege are mutually produced and so we focus on the representational practices of White leaders in persistently poor counties across the American Northwest. We draw from case study research to understand region-wide material and discursive processes that are contributing to economic distress and social marginalization. We interrogate the range of representational practices that White leaders employ to explain, deny and/or racialize poverty in their communities. We also draw attention to how poverty emerges from the intersection of political, economic and cultural processes operating across a range of scales and sites. We further analyze how representations of the poor and poverty rest on a host of imaginary landscapes about who belongs, who is an outsider and who has a right to a place and its services. We argue that these representations serve to invigorate neoliberal policies and silence a more critical debate about poverty in the USA.     

边界效应与跨国界经济合作的地域模式——以东亚地区为例

边界是划分不同政治实体及其管辖地域的政治地理界线。国际边界对地区经济发展有屏障和中介两种效应,并在一定条件下可相互转化。从跨国界经济合作的角度,可划分出封闭型、半封闭型和开放型等边界类型,不同的边界类型对跨国界次区域经济合作的影响不同。边界效应在空间维上是可变的,通过空间扩散向腹地外延。文中图示了核心腹地、紧密腹地和边缘腹地三种类型。在经济全球化和区域经济集团化的推动下,开放型边界逐渐增多,跨国界次区域经济合作日益发展,成为区域经济集团化的一种重要表现形式。本文以边界经济合作发展迅速的东亚地区为研究样本,提出了边界跨国界经济合作的3种基本地域模式,即通道模式、贸易口岸模式和开发区模式,并探讨了各自在边界经济合作中的发展内涵及发展前景。     

A practice theoretical perspective on the Europeanization of spatial planning

This paper provides a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of the Europeanization of spatial planning. While the supply of studies on the questions of how, where and when the Europeanization of spatial planning takes place is rich and diverse, the temporal and spatial aspects of the processes have been studied from a rather narrow perspective. In many of the studies, time and space have been examined as objective, pre-existing features of the processes, which has resulted in interpretations of Europeanization as a temporally successive and spatially scalar process. The paper has two main goals. First, it seeks to outline European spatial planning as a distinctive field of political and academic interaction whose central constitutive elements are interconnected policy and research practices. Second, as a more general theoretical goal, the paper develops a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of Europeanization. In this paper, it is argued that the policy and research practices constitute a temporal–spatial infrastructure for Europeanization. This infrastructure consists of both objective configurations of the practices and the existential temporal–spatial dimensions opened in the practices.