Rethinking relational economic geography

Recent theoretical and empirical work in economic geography has experienced what might be termed a 'relational turn' that focuses primarily on the ways in which socio-spatial relations of economic actors are intertwined with processes of economic change at various geographical scales. This phenomenon begs the questions of whether the 'relational turn' is simply an explicit reworking of what might be an undercurrent in economic geography during the late 1970s and the 1980s, and whether this 'turn' offers substantial advancement in our theory and practice. In this paper, I aim to evaluate critically the nature and emergence of this relational economic geography by revisiting its antecedents and conceptual frameworks. This evaluation opens up some significant conceptual issues that are further reworked in this paper. In particular, I argue that much of the work in this 'relational turn' is relational only in a thematic sense, focusing on various themes of socio-spatial relations without theorizing sufficiently the nature of relationality and its manifestation through power relations and actor-specific practice. This paper thus illuminates the nature of relationality and the multiple ways through which power works itself out in 'relational geometries', defined as the spatial configurations of heterogeneous power relations. As a preliminary attempt, I first conceptualize different forms of power in such relational geometries and their causal effects in producing concrete/spatial outcomes. I then show how this relational view can offer an alternative understanding of a major research concern in contemporary economic geography – regional development.     

What Has the Geography of Sleeping Arrangements Got to Do with the Geography of Our Teaching Spaces?

As geographers we are used to researching and teaching about those other than ourselves and it is timely to turn our gaze on the social and spatial practices of our own teaching spaces. One particular teaching space is the overnight geography field trip, a context in which geography fieldwork is ostensibly the main focus for two or more consecutive days. Teaching spaces such as classrooms and field trips, like all social spaces, are imbued with spoken and unspoken assumptions about sexuality, gender and 'race'. Geography field trips are one site in which to examine how social space is constituted via spoken and unspoken assumptions and how these assumptions shape field trip participants' understandings of themselves within these spaces. Simultaneously, field trips offer a site for the consideration of the socio-spatial relations of the reproduction of contemporary geographic knowledge. This article is one response to what Jon Binnie identified as an urgent need for geographers to understand how geography is being taught. Although sleeping arrangements are 'not formally notified' as part of fieldwork activity, the author demonstrates how sleeping arrangements conveyed important messages about sexuality, gender and cultural practices during seven overnight field trips held by two universities and two high schools in New Zealand. The concern is how apparently mundane arrangements such as the organisation of sleeping might reveal the ongoing hegemonic social and spatial relations of teaching and learning geography, as these are shaped by sexuality, gender and 'race', so that we might be better informed to challenge and change these practices.     

Arena symposium: equal opportunities

The Internet is a hospitable medium for distance learning. Some geography educators fear that distance education confronts the discipline with a moral dilemma, however. One, in particular, acknowledges some of the advantages of distance learning, but contends that it cannot convey the sense of place that is 'the essence of what it means to be a geographer'. This paper is concerned with the morality of distance learning. In particular, it considers educators' obligations to deliver quality education, and to make it as widely accessible as possible. The paper stresses that the key distinction between distance learning and traditional resident instruction is not the mode of delivery, nor is it the distances in time and space that separate students and teachers. Rather, it is that distance learners are a qualitatively different, older population, with different educational needs from traditional on-campus undergraduates and graduate students. The paper argues that geography educators have a moral obligation to serve lifelong learners, an obligation that should take precedence over our allegiance to conventional notions about what constitutes the essence of our field.     

初论段义孚人本主义地理学思想的形成

1976年,人本主义地理学之父段义孚在《美国地理学家协会会刊》发表的论文中首次使用了"人本主义地理学"这一称法。人本主义地理学的出现由20世纪60年代末的人本主义思潮所带动,其通过关注人类自身状况而反映出与地理学学科的其他分支息息相关的各种现象,因而从属于地理学。段义孚将融合了地理学与哲学的、曾被称为"地理知识学"的学科推向一个新的高度。段义孚认为,"对生命意义的探求"是人本主义地理学的实质性核心,也是一直以来推动其进行人本主义地理学研究的动力。正如人本主义研究以人类的经验、意识以及知识为出发点,本文从人本主义视角出发,对段义孚人本主义地理学思想的形成过程进行系统化梳理。通过追溯段义孚人生经历中对其有重大影响的人物和经典著作,指出时代背景与个人经历共同促成段义孚人本主义关怀的形成。     

A Framework for the Integration of DVD Technology in Geography Teaching and Learning

This article discusses the results when integrating digital versatile disc (DVD) technology in full-time second-year geography for BEd degree students at a university in South Africa, a developing country. It proposes a framework for the integration of the DVD in geography teaching and learning, steered by students’ needs, feedback and observations by the lecturer. The proposed framework recommends clear guidelines on how to integrate the DVD, as well as the interactions between the role players/resources. It also explains how the DVD was compiled, what was included and how it was effectively applied in conjunction with seminars, as an alternative to traditional lectures. An action research design was utilized and both qualitative and quantitative data were collected.     

Children's Understanding of Aerial Photographs

As aerial photographs are widely used in geography education, it is important to know how children's understanding of these representations develops through the school years. We review research that has addressed children's understanding of the content of aerial photographs, and we describe a series of studies in which children used information from aerial photographs to carry out spatial tasks in a large space. We demonstrate that using an aerial photograph can be an aid to subsequently using a map, and we discuss the educational applications of the research with aerial photographs.     

Challenges to geography's public and practitioners

Abstract

Economic geography is in a state of flux. This paper argues that there is a need to develop a relevant and theoretically informed economic geography. Some of the more difficult challenges facing both teachers and students are outlined, and the author describes how such difficulties have been tackled through an Enterprise in Higher Education initiative centering on innovative assessment procedures for group research projects. The project is evaluated in terms of potential gains to both staff and students.     

Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance

This paper examines the mid-nineteenth century photographic collecting practices in the Colonial Office (CO) in London. Following methodologies laid down by Stoler and Joyce, the paper excavates the epistemic procedures through which photography and its role in colonial governance operated between the late 1860s and 1875. I focus my analysis on the production of, and response to, two CO despatches, which were circulated in November 1869 requesting photographs. But what was the work expected of these photographs, what were they meant “to do”? What was their relationship with anthropology and geography? The paper argues that in the praxis of central government, the role of photographic evidence was more uncertain and confused than instrumental interpretative models have assumed. I shall argue that in many cases photographs were not “evidence” in any dynamic sense in information provision, but rather functioned as tools of reassurance.     

Introducing humanistic geography through fieldwork

Abstract

One challenge of teaching humanistic geography is to encourage students’ responses to landscapes in ways which may be different from their previous experience. Conventional wisdom about successful field teaching suggests that students should be prepared beforehand with the skills and techniques to be employed. The author questions how appropriate this is in humanistic geography and the article describes and evaluates an alternative approach using fieldwork as the introductory activity.     

“Looking with intention”: using photographic essays as didactical tool to explore Berlin

ABSTRACT

Although photography has long been acknowledged as an important research method and didactical tool in human geography, we feel the need to redraw attention to this particular form of doing explorative research. Today’s society becomes increasingly “ocularcentral”, yet this trend seems unparalleled with a rise of photography in academic work. Based on 10-year experience of using photographic essays in our graduate course on Urban and Cultural Geography, we show how taking pictures can enhance active and engaged learning, spark feelings of enchantment, and stimulate critical, reflexive and non-discursive thinking by asking students to translate theory to practice and vice versa. Our students have “looked with intention” how certain geographical theories are “congealed” in Berlin’s urban landscape, specifically linking theory to empirical practice and vice versa. Despite the act of photography being inevitably partial, personal, biased, voyeuristic, colonial and possibly unethical, we believe that the enthusiasm and geographical gaze it brings into the classroom outweigh these limitations. The paper illustrates with multiple examples how the embodied practice of photography results in students carefully reflecting on the physical and social world around them and acknowledging the multimodality of the city, not just as built environment but also as a social sphere and lived place.     

Is Feminist geography relevant?

Abstract

As the whole point of feminism is to empower women and girls and to improve the circumstances of their lives, most feminist geographers would claim that indeed feminist geography is — or at least aims to be — relevant; they would then hasten to point to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in this claim: what counts as relevant and relevant to whom are complicating questions. The work of feminist geography encompasses teaching, activism and scholarship — all potentially relevant activities. In considering what counts as relevant, I discuss the difficulties of equating relevant with applied and of knowing whether or not our teaching, research and activism will turn out to be relevant. Complicating any claim to relevance is our inability to know, and lack of control over, how others will use our work. Asking ‘relevant to whom?’ points to the difficult truth that what some women view as positive change others may see as harmful to their interests; in this senserelevance is specific to particular contexts, scales and places. At the same time, relevance can enter the intricate web of global interconnections and transcend particular contexts, scales and places. Relevance itself is therefore a geographic concept. Feminist geographers struggle to hold together these sometimes contradictory geographic dimensions of relevance. I close by arguing that the growing body of feminist geography work engages with a range of social issues around the world and certainly has the potential for relevance at a variety of scales. But the relevance question will remain a complex and ambiguous one for feminist geographers.     

The Challenges and Opportunities of Foreign-born Instructors in the Classroom

Foreign-born instructors are an integral part of the US education system. While universities see them as contributing to internationalization, many students, parents and legislators are concerned about their impact on students' educational achievement. Supported by data collected from students and professors, the author identifies the main problems students experience with foreign-born instructors, as well as the main challenges foreign-born instructors face in adjusting to the US education system. Recommendations are developed aimed at improving classroom interactions between American students and foreign-born instructors and it is shown how the instructor's ‘foreignness’ can be an important teaching resource, particularly in disciplines such as geography.     

Scaling health and healthcare: re‐presenting Thailand's HIV/AIDS epidemic with world regional geography students

Authors of world regional geography textbooks have recently become more interested in the broader theoretical changes that have emerged in human geography. Relying on feminist and other critical perspectives, concepts such as space, place and scale are being re‐imagined in this ‘new world regional geography’. This paper intervenes on behalf of a more critical world regional geography by suggesting how world regional geography teachers can educate students about scale as a social construction through the use of empirical data. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Thailand, this paper lays out a lesson on the HIV/AIDS crisis and how different representations of that crisis, from the national to the individual, offer different ‘ways of knowing’ the epidemic. Furthermore, this paper examines how we can push students to consider the ways in which scales of analysis are constructed and constituted through our own geographic practices.     

Mourning Geography: A Punctum,Strathclyde and the Death of a Subject

Abstract

This article documents the formal consultation held at the University of Strathclyde in 2011 which concluded with a decision to withdraw the geography programme from the academic curriculum. In examining the remains of this consultation, the article offers an understanding of the reactions of staff and students to the proposed closure through the theoretical work on mourning by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. With use of the notions of punctum and studium in particular, it tracks the discursive location, if not definition, of what was and is poignant about geography at this higher education institution.     

Searching for good practice in postgraduate education

Regional geography courses have declined in status and number at many North American universities. Yet it is regional courses which students with limited geographical education at the high school level may identify as typical geography, and thus regional courses may play a significant role in recruitment of geography majors. Regional courses on the students' country or state/province offer an excellent opportunity to showcase how geographic perspectives can enrich our understanding of the familiar, both in terms of place and discipline. This paper discusses the pivotal role a regional geography course has been given in a new university's geography curriculum, and the innovative structuring of the course so as to avoid some of the deficiencies of common instructional patterns which may deter some students from pursuing further geographic education.     

“With almost clean or at most slightly dirty hands”. On the self-denazification of German geography after 1945 and its rebranding as a science of peace

Since the 1980s there is an overall agreement that German academic and applied geography between 1933 and 1945 were closely linked to the ideology and practice of National Socialism. There is very little historical work, however, on how geography was reestablished in Germany after the end of National Socialism. This paper deals with West German geography after 1945 and the attempts to reestablish geography as a legitimate discipline within academia. Taking the influential paper by German geographer Carl Troll as a starting point, this paper deals, on the one hand, with the way geographers positioned geography in relation to National Socialism, and how they told the history of their recent past. It then asks what the defeat of Germany and the experiences of the war in general meant for how geographers in Germany thought about the relation between the discipline and politics. It is argued that a number of cleansing and legitimating strategies that freed geography from direct involvement with National Socialism, went hand in hand with a very quick adaption to the new world order and a rebranding of geography as a science of peace.     

Teaching (Political) Economic Geography: Some Personal Reflections

Teaching economic geography is not a matter of replicating textbook models. It requires engagement with the ever-changing global economy, which often puts the lie to existing theory. It demands that the teacher break down the economy into its major parts, in a way that students can grasp. This does not mean abandoning theory; on the contrary, it means getting beyond static exchange models to grasp the dynamics of commodity systems, divisions of labour, technology and capital flows. To this, add how geography matters to the way economies work. And always maintain a critical stance toward the world and toward received wisdom.     

A political geography of walking in Jordan: Movement and politics

The past 10-15 years has seen the growth of walking groups taking walkers from Amman to rural parts of Jordan at weekends and the development of the Jordan Trail. Through the narration and analysis of everyday accounts of walking, this paper explores political geographies of identity, movement, and territory in Jordan. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that at the heart of a growth of walking for leisure in Jordan are important political questions. How is walking conditioned by situated cultural politics? How can walking unearth intimate and embodied accounts of territory in Jordan? I build upon three developments in political geography to do this. First, research on political geography and walking; second research on everyday political geographies of the Middle East; third, critical and feminist work on territory. Literature on political geography and walking is developed by centring Jordanian walkers and the (post)colonial context of Jordan to explore what walking means under different political conditions and for individual bodies. In doing so I contribute to work on identity and nationalism in Jordan and the importance of the everyday to explore political geographies of the Middle East. I develop critical and feminist work on territory by arguing that walking bodies make and contest territory and in doing so calling for greater synergies between cultural and political geography. These arguments are made in two empirical sections. The first explores how different people talk about walking, the language for walking, and assumptions about walking bodies. The second explores how walking connects different bodies to territory, and creates territorial nationalist narratives, but also how walking can highlight indigenous and embodied relations with territory. This paper concludes that walking is political because it shapes and is shaped by situated political geographies and because it enables embodied and intimate accounts of territory to emerge.     

Two Dozen Directions

A self-assessment schedule has been developed for first-year geography students at Curtin University of Technology. Its purpose is to guide students towards independent learning by encouraging them to reflect more on ‘what’ and ‘how’ they learn. Results of the 2003 and 2004 trials showed that the self-assessment schedule had a positive impact on student learning and was at least partially effective in improving students' critical thinking skills. It helped students to plan and organize their thoughts, describe the geographical characteristics related to their fieldwork exercise and indicated that students were generally positive about becoming more independent and reflective learners.