Reconfigurations of Place and Ethnicity: Positionings,Performances and Politics of Relocated Banabans in Fiji

Spatial belonging and ethnic identity among the Banabans resettled on Rabi Island in Fiji are the product of historically and culturally specific articulations and transformations. Such reconfigurations of place and ethnicity, based mainly on enmeshments between the Banabans' new island home, Rabi, and their island of origin in the Central Pacific, Banaba, have let them position themselves as an autonomous community living out a diaspora existence. Central to this identity politics of positioning are ethnic performances in which neo‐traditional enactments are deployed to produce embodied knowledge of Banaban existence and to communicate such knowledge to a wider world. We argue that the Banabans of Fiji, caught in a post‐colonial environment of ethnic‐nationalist discourses and practices, make strategic use of such ethnic performances to affirm and advance, both internally and externally, their own politics of spatial and ethnic positioning on Rabi.     

Remembering the making of Gender,Place and Culture

Separately and together we offer our memories of how Gender, Place and Culture came into being. In so doing we seek to make available the kind of histories that often remain hidden from view. At the same time we illustrate the fallibility of memory and the conditions of possibility that frame what we can narrate.     

Class,Place, and Gender: Contested Industrial and Domestic Space in Kohler,Wisconsin, USA, 1920–1960

The Kohler company, a family‐owned plumbing manufactory in Wisconsin, USA, known for the ‘garden industrial village’ erected for its workers during the 1910s, managed class relations through a gendered spatial arrangement of its model town. In the 1930s and 1950s, unionists striking at the plant responded by articulating their class alliances within and outside the town in spatial terms that revised the meaning of the place. In the process, the Kohler unions also necessarily refigured domestic space in ways that challenged the company's mapping of domesticity in the 1930s, but they drew back from such challenges in the 1950s.     

Reconceptualizing Senses of Place: Social Relations, Ideology and Ecology

The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize sense of place through the examination, re-analysis and theorization of two case studies, one of an ex-urban community in England, the other a Himalayan farming and herding community. The paper begins by examining the traditional locus of sense of place research in humanistic geography with extensions to political geography and interpretive anthropology. Identifying three core components—social, ideological and ecological—of senses of place, the paper goes on to reconceptualize these elements using Habermas's theory of communicative action and Ingold's work on environmental psychology. It then applies this reconceptualization to the case studies of Towcester and Shimshal. The paper concludes by emphasizing the ways these cases enrich our understanding of sense of place, by stressing the theoretical contributions of conceiving sense of place as rooted in theories of social organization and society, and as being variably and contingently ecologically emplaced.     

Crossing the Factory Frontier: Gender, Place and Power in the Mexican Maquiladora

A pressing question raised by contemporary feminist theorists is how to conceptualize the intricate relationship between women as social agents and "Women"— an ideological representation of a female subject. Scholars have shown how women must often disavow this Woman in trying to establish their own careers. This article explores one facet of this issue by tracing one woman's journey through a Mexican maquiladora in the hope of demonstrating how this ideology produces the capitalist division of labor through the reproduction of sex-difference, nationality, and ethnic categories within one firm. The account raises some interesting questions about resistance, which may not be resolvable in the context of the workplace alone.     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

Class,Caste, Gender,and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle-class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper-caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender.