Dusting Down Second Hand Rose: Gendered identities and the world of second-hand goods in the space of the car boot sale

This is concerned with the connections between second-hand exchange and consumption, and gendered identities, and draws on research conducted within car boot sales in Britain. The article demonstrates the highly gendered nature of patterns of exchange and consumption within the space of the car boot sale; connects this to the various gender identities found within conventional retail environments, notably the department store; and examines in depth the intricacies of what happens when both women and men buy from and sell to one another in the space of the car boot sale. For women, the world of the car boot sale is shown to require the negotiation of the multiple and frequently contradictory feminine subject positions embedded in exchange and consumption, notably woman as object of masculine heterosexual desire, woman as mother and woman as homemaker. For men, by contrast, the construct of masculinity to be negotiated is apparently homogeneous, utilitarian and instrumentalist-man the builder of domestic space. The article reflects on these differences and on the highly gendered pattern of exchange and consumption found within car boot sales, arguing that both are intricately connected to the expert gendered knowledges inscribed in particular commodities, knowledges which are argued to be at a premium in spaces of second-hand exchange and consumption.     

eBay and research in historical geography

The electronic trading forum eBay presents fascinating but under-examined possibilities for research in historical geography. With literally millions of items for sale and millions of users participating in on-line auctions there seems little limit to what one might find. In this essay, three authors briefly trace the history of auctions and of eBay, before explaining how eBay works, and then describing some of the ways that buying (or not buying) research materials on eBay has changed the ways that we think about our work. We further explore some of the implications—empirical, theoretical, methodological and ethical—that the availability of such items to the highest bidder presents, address some of the consequences for the socially constructed and place-specific nature of value that on-line auctioning reveals, and ponder some of the implications of this for contemporary consumption.     

Spaces of care in the city: the place of a community drop-in centre

This paper explores the ways in which drop-in centres may at times function as spaces of care in the city. Drawing on participant observation research within a particular centre in Bristol, a city in south-west England, it focuses upon social relations within the drop-in space and the various subjectivities that were observed to emerge in this relational environment. Through a consideration of individuals who appeared to be positively assisted by their involvement in the drop-in, a sense is developed of the different ways in which such agencies may function as spaces of care. Use is made of Carl Rogers' notion of the core conditions for successful therapeutic encounter, as developed within the person-centred school of humanistic psychotherapy, to explicate these positive experiences. At the same time it was clear that some individuals found the drop-in to be a less than comfortable or even exclusionary environment. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader significance of drop-in centres as caring environments and on the value of humanistic conceptions of therapeutic relation for interpreting organizational spacings of subjectivity.     

From Madonna to Marx: Towards a Re‐theorisation of Homelessness

Homeless people, so the story goes, are regularly excluded from spaces of consumption because they offend customers. For a significant portion of homelessness scholarship, such exclusion is the point of departure for subsequent analysis. Others, by examining homelessness within these consumption spaces, theorise that anti‐homeless policies and attitudes emerge because homeless people cannot or have not properly consumed (e.g. nice clothes, housing). This article, conversely, argues that homeless people's “offensiveness” derives from their relation to production (rather than consumption), from their class position. Homeless people's spatial incongruity, specifically, originates in their apparent unproductivity, their violation of the capitalist law of value and its ideological justifications. This historical materialist analysis is not only more revealing, it also positions homeless people as a working class faction in need of political organising rather than an abstract population in need of pitiful charity.     

Morality and the Concept of the Market Seller among Gehamo

This paper examines the negative moral evaluations of people who buy and resell fresh food by Gahuku and Gehamo people in and around Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. During my fieldwork from 2010 to 2015, vendors in the Goroka fresh food market argued that the value of fresh food should be based on the work that people did to produce it rather than on price competition, or on supply and demand. An examination of market vendors’ practice of ‘giving extra’ to customers, and the responses of vendors who resold food to negative moral evaluations of their activities, led me to an examination of the morality of production in relation to land, ancestors, and social relations; the morality of the marketplace; as well as ideas about what makes someone a good social person. Drawing on Erik Schwimmer's (1979) discussion of the concept of work in Melanesian societies, I argue that vendors in the Goroka market continue to emphasize use value and their own identification with the food that they are selling rather than the exchange value of alienated produce. While marketplaces are the apparent locus par excellence of capitalist economic activity, a consideration of the morality of Goroka market vendors leads to the caution that just because one sees something that looks like a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions does not necessarily mean that it is a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions. Similarly, just because something looks like a price does not necessarily mean that it is a price. Those considerations, in turn, lead to a re‐examination of Kenneth Read's (1955) characterization of morality and personhood among Gahuku in light of contemporary market exchange.     

Liminality at work in Norwegian hotels

ABSTRACT

Hotels are spaces of temporary accommodation, but they are also important temporary spaces for an increasingly mobile and segmented workforce with different backgrounds and motives. In this paper we wish to address the temporary and transitional nature of hotel work by employing the term ‘liminality’. More specifically, we analyse the hotel as a liminal space for transient workers that view this work as a temporary endeavour. By drawing upon data from a study of hotel workers in Norway, we discuss how the liminality of hotel work may be understood. Here, we turn to an important debate within tourism studies on the blurring relationships between consumer and producer identities in resorts, often referred to in terms such as ‘working tourist’ or ‘migrant tourist-worker’. For a relatively privileged group of workers, the hotel becomes a space of liminal lifestyle pursuits as well as a space of work. We also contrast this privileged group with a different and less privileged liminal group of ‘expatriate workers’. Transient lifestyles and consumption of recreation among workers can have problematic effects in terms of reducing solidarity, and we wish to develop this further by investigating how worker representation and solidarity develops in liminal spaces of work. While strategies of liminality may have a transformative impact on the individual, their aggregate effects might simultaneously alter the way in which hospitality work is negotiated – from the collective to the individual level. As such, hotels as employers of working tourists pose a great challenge to collective representation, and may undermine effective worker action for less privileged groups of workers. The final section of this paper addresses this challenge, asking what bearings the individualism that dominates liminal work spaces has for trade unionism in the hospitality industry.     

Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea: Place,Personhood and Exchange

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.     

Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces

Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovereignty, or rule by chance. This allows us to see camps and borders not only as the outcomes of humanitarian projects but also of anxieties about governance and rule; to see their inhabitants not only as abject recipients of aid, but also as individuals who make decisions and choices in complex conditions; and to show that while the outcome of projects within such spaces is often unpredictable, the assumptions that undergird such projects create regular cycles of implementation and failure.     

BUTCHERING PATTERNS AND SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF FAUNAL ANIMAL REMAINS CONSUMED AT THE LOS MILLARES CHALCOLITHIC SETTLEMENT (SANTA FE DE MONDÚJAR,ALMERÍA,SPAIN)

The archaeological settlement of Los Millares (Santa Fe de Mondújar, Almería) is located in the Mediterranean coastal area of southern Spain. This archaeological site constitutes one of the most important settlements belonging to the Copper Age in the Iberian Peninsula and has given its name to the ‘millariense’ culture. The settlement has been completely excavated, yielding major archaeological faunal remains, with 27,426 bone fragments classified by researchers from Munich University (Germany). In this paper, we apply different statistical methods (mainly χ² analysis) to study the spatial distribution of bones from domestic and wild animals, reconstructing the patterns of appearance within specific functional spaces. These functions can be associated with meat consumption (sites to cut the animals into small pieces, areas where the meat was eaten, garbage sites, etc.) and the production of handmade objects (bone tools, stone tools, etc.). The results show different spatial distributions of faunal remains within the areas of the settlement, according to the animal species and particular parts of the animal skeleton, as well as the age and the sex of individuals. The findings reflect social behaviour that relates the consumption of certain species to a specific sector of population, and such behaviour can be discerned in the animal remains. Moreover, there is evidence regarding economic matters, such as meat production and the exchange of animals, which require further research.     

The Elusive Maya Marketplace: An Archaeological Consideration of the Evidence

The modeling of ancient Maya economies has been a dynamic area of archaeological research in the past few decades, but in most cases there has been little attention on how goods actually changed hands. Through an overview of the literature, this paper considers marketplace exchange as one mechanism of distribution. Researchers have proposed a number of physical features and artifact characteristics that may be expected in association with marketplace activity, and new methods of data collection have been offered that can be used to build a case for marketplace exchange. What remains is the challenge of developing strategies to identify ancient Maya marketplaces convincingly through archaeological excavation.     

Constructing contemporary artistic identities in Toronto neighbourhoods

This paper examines the role of the neighbourhood in the construction of artistic identities. Drawing upon in‐depth, semistructured interviews with Canadian visual artists from Toronto, I identify some of the common features of downtown Toronto neighbourhoods where artists congregate. I demonstrate that artists are drawn to neighbourhoods that have not been gentrified and do not directly reflect current dominant values in society. I focus, in particular, on the importance of marginal niches of improvisational space within the urban fabric. Marginal spaces, often neglected and overlooked, weakly classified and in a state of becoming, I argue, are essential to the development and sustenance of an artistic identity .     

The Pervasive Nature of Heterodox Economic Spaces at a Time of Neoliberal Crisis: Towards a “Postneoliberal” Anarchist Future

Abstract: Re‐reading the economic landscape of the western world as a largely non‐capitalist landscape composed of economic plurality, this paper demonstrates how economic relations in contemporary western society are often embedded in non‐commodified practices such as mutual aid, reciprocity, co‐operation and inclusion. By highlighting how the long‐overlooked lived practices in the contemporary world of production, consumption and exchange are heavily grounded in the very types and essences of non‐capitalist economic relations that have long been proposed by anarchistic visions of employment and organization, this paper displays that such visions are far from utopian: they are embedded firmly in the present. Through focusing on the pervasive nature of heterodox economic spaces in the UK in particular, some ideas about how to develop an anarchist future of work and organization will be proposed. The outcome is to begin to engage in the demonstrative construction of a future based on mutualism and autonomous modes of organization and representation.     

Reconciling Economic and Cultural Explanations for Participation in Alternative Consumption Spaces

ABSTRACT With the cultural turn in economic geography, the emphasis on economic necessity when explaining participation in alternative consumption spaces (i.e. informal and/or second‐hand retail channels) has been contested by an agency‐orientated cultural reading that views engagement in such spaces as about the search for fun, sociality, distinction, discernment, the spectacular and so forth, and more recently by a geographically sensitive approach that ascribes agency to affluent populations and economic rationales to deprived populations. Drawing upon evidence collected during 120 face‐to‐face interviews in the English city of Leicester, however, this paper finds that people's reasons for engaging in such practices cannot be reduced simply to either economic necessity or agency. Instead, it reveals that such either/or thinking obfuscates how both co‐exist in people's explanations for engagement and combine in contrasting ways in different neighbourhood types, modes of goods acquisition and according to the type of good sought. The outcome of this paper is thus to transcend and reconcile previous reductive explanations using a both/and approach that recognises the varying ways in which economic necessity and choice are entangled in rationales for participation in alternative consumption spaces.     

Whose Economy for Whose Culture? Moving Beyond Oppositional Talk in European Debate about Economy and Culture

This paper provides an overview of the economy-culture debate as currently rehearsed within European urban and regional change circles, explores some of the key theoretical inadequacies of this debate and outlines and illustrates one possible way of moving debate forward. The paper begins by identifying the different ways in which economy and culture, and economy-culture articulations, are thought about within this debate and by arguing that what purports to be a debate about articulation collapses in practice into the respective privileging of either culture or economy. Subsequently, after a critique of the "economy-culture as differential logics" argument, we forward what we consider to be the minimal conditions for conjoining economy and culture theoretically. These entail according economy and culture equivalent conceptual standing, centring meaning and seeing meaning and practice as conceptually inseparable. We then illustrate this approach at the level of particularities, using a range of examples that span commodities, "productive" practices and processes of consumption and exchange.     

In the front line: women,work and new spaces of labour politics in Poland

Pessimistic accounts of women's lives in post-communist Poland view women as powerless and passive victims of the transformation process. In contrast, this article argues that while political change and the restructuring of the economy have closed down some spaces of articulation and organisation, others have opened up. The article focuses on the way in which women in their spheres of work are shaping and actively resisting change through new organisations and individual and collective actions, which are in some ways a break with the past, but in other ways build on previous forms of activity. The work draws on qualitative research conducted over the last decade across Poland. This has coupled extensive interviews with women workers, national and regional trade union leaders, activists and feminists in a number of major Polish cities with reviews of Polish media and policy. We examine the economic and ideological context in which these new articulations are taking place, against the background of Poland's post-war communism and the rise of opposition movements. We look at the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the implications for women within the labour market and in their domestic lives. In particular, we examine initiatives from below in workplace organisation, by focusing on new unions and new actions in the public sector, and the beginnings of organisation in the new areas of the economy such as supermarkets. Finally, we look at how women are articulating their interests beyond formal workplaces. We conclude that we should be optimistic about these new spaces of activism. While some are well established, others are embryonic but provide a strong foundation on which women can increase their participation in spaces that promote their varied interests.     

The Britishness of ‘British Video Games’

Abstract

British Government policy has much to say about video games, through production support, regulation and recognition (or lack of it) of their cultural nature, with games defined and promoted as part of the creative industries in a manner which owes much to film policy. Yet, the drive to promote both the games industry and games culture, and the inconsistent usage of terms like culture and creativity, produces tensions between different elements of ‘Britishness’, expressed and experienced not only through policy, but also through the creation and consumption of games. In considering the specificity of games’ contribution to British identity, therefore, we must understand how different elements of cultural policy interact with the interests of audiences and creators to define ‘British games’ – games which have the quality of being, or being seen to be, British. Such games might be expected not only to represent British culture within a global marketplace, and to project soft power, but also to address the British nation in some manner. This diversity, of global and local, of present-mindedness and nostalgia, suggests that British games articulate a complex and plural sense of national (cultural) identity.     

资本、权力与空间:“空间的生产”解析

全球化时期的生产方式从根本上决定了资本和权力是城市空间产生和演化的主要动力。它们分别展现了不同的作用范围、形式及效果:资本主要作用于物质的、社会—经济空间的生产,而权力主要作用于抽象的、政治—制度空间的生产。这两个过程相互影响、相互交织。本文将"空间的生产"理论与城市空间实践结合起来进行转型中国语境下的解析,尝试提供一个研究我国城市与区域空间重构问题的马克思主义政治经济学视角。     

Travelling in your backyard: the unfamiliar places of parenting

Current theoretical understandings of family-as-activity, as suggested by the terms ‘doing family’ or ‘families we choose’, locate family practices such as parenting, within the realm of the spatial. Feminist geography particularly has been instrumental in conceptualisations of parenting as a spatial project that involves constant renegotiation of the ‘everyday’ spaces of home, work and play. However, what are less evident in the literature are the specificities of the actual places and spaces of parenting: where parents go in the course of their parenting or how they actually use particular spaces. Furthermore, most scholarly work on parenting has been based on the theoretical and material experience of heterosexual parents, with the experiences of non-heterosexual parented families under-documented. Using data from a recent study with lesbian parents, this paper seeks to address some of these conceptual and empirical gaps, suggesting that an exploration of the everyday spatialities of same-sex parenting contributes, not only to expanding current geographic understandings of family and parenting, but also understanding of the material places where these identities—familial, parental, sexual—intersect.     

中国城市女性居民行为空间研究的女性主义视角

在以人为本、重视差异性等后现代思潮的大背景下,基于女性主义视角的西方城市女性居民行为空间的研究有了长足的发展。中国城市中的女性群体,作为城市社会中的一个重要亚群体单元,在改革开放后经历着重大变化的同时也面临着新的挑战,对中国城市女性居民行为空间的女性主义研究已悄然起步,今后的研究视角不仅要关注女性自身的特点及其与男性的对比,而且更要重视女性内部的差异性以及城市内部和城市之间的比较。