Italian cultural geography,or the history of a prolific absence

This article focuses on a group of buildings that form the site for a Steiner school in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. It examines the ways in which an environmentally friendly, ‘ecological’ structure was (and is) constructed such that the building and its accompanying practices might be seen as ‘performed art’. By more critically examining the school's geographies through ethnographic material, the paper moves away from the buildings' symbolic meanings to demonstrate how art and nature intersect in various ways, in the school's life. Art and nature were crucial to the type of education there, the physical process of building the school, and daily uses of the buildings. The paper also explores how the art-nature intersection is involved in the construction of ethical discourses and practices constitutive of ‘childhood’ and ‘education’.     

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State,Environment, and Race in Lerma,Mexico

This article explores the relations between infrastructures, labour, and internal colonialism in Lerma, Mexico. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research of two hydraulic projects there, the article argues that infrastructures are productive of the racial, environmental, and political relations that constitute internal colonialism both historically and contemporarily. I show how these infrastructural projects imagined and produced colonial relations between the environment, racialised workers, and the nation-state, and how these colonial logics endure today through infrastructures and the forms of racialised labour that maintain them. In doing so, this article contributes to literature that interrogates the relations between infrastructure and coloniality by focusing on how infrastructural labour makes internal colonialism enduring. The article concludes by reflecting on how the labour practices that make internal colonialism enduring also point to ways of producing infrastructures otherwise.     

‘I'm protective of this yard’: long-term homeless persons' construction of home place and workplace in a historical public space

Though research has examined the ways homeless persons work to be in public space, less research covers tying these ways to personal and social needs associated with home place and workplace. Additionally, scholars have given less attention to how central public spaces may not only be integral to long-term homeless persons' daily paths but also how they may be employed differently from marginal public spaces. In this article, I explain how long-term homeless persons attempted to make a historical-tourist public space, the Jackson Square area in New Orleans' French Quarter, personally and socially meaningful as home place and workplace. Drawing from participant observation and observation, I examine long-term homeless persons' attachment to Jackson Square. I argue that the Square's historical and tourist attraction status actually supported long-term homeless persons' desire and ability to occupy it in significant ways. This status along with long-term homeless persons' negotiating practices and inconsistent practices of authority and policing by those with (more) power made it possible for the Jackson Square area to become long-term homeless persons' home place and workplace.     

Interpretations of Burial and Commemoration in Moravian and African Diasporas on St. John, Virgin Islands

I address change and continuity in mortuary practices from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries within enslaved and free populations on the former Danish and current US Virgin Island of St. John. Based on the evidence I present, St. John’s former residents created diverse burial sites for practical and symbolic reasons related to environment, kinship, socio-cultural politics, and religion. The following analysis reveals how people historically transformed identities of selves and communities as they perceived and commemorated the dead through meaningful mortuary sites and practices within dynamic local and regional contexts.     

Telephones,Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults

In this paper, I explore the creative practices of cargo cult followers in the Kaliai bush of West New Britain. I focus on how rural villagers reworked their experiences of meaning and sociality through their appropriations of western technology. In particular, bush Kaliai cult followers frequently used telephones and cameras in idiosyncratic ways that mapped out anew and redisclosed the spaces occupied by a racialised human existence. Through their novel use of western technology, cult followers struggled to resituate and overcome the new distances and cleavages of modernity by unearthing other ways of being white that came from their customary past and ancestral homelands.     

Acts of heritage,acts of value: memorialising at the Chattri Indian Memorial,UK

Abstract

The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialisation at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing ‘valuations’ of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorises participants’ current affective practices as conscious ‘past presencing’ , and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging.     

Feeling,caring, measuring,knowing: the relational co-construction of parenting knowledges

Parenting practices, including the maintenance of a child with a healthy body weight are subject to normative and institutional regulation. This paper explores the specific practices of parenting in line with this regulation in relation to the creation and maintenance of knowledge, focussing on how parents come to know their child as healthy. Drawing on examples in which parents discussed their experiences of parenting in light of their understandings of ‘obesity’, these illustrate differentially constituted parenting ontologies which challenge the idea of a singular correct way to parent. This paper foregrounds the ways in which embodied knowledge may be constituted and enacted not only in and of a parent's own body but also through, alongside, and together with, the bodies of their child(ren). This is not to move away from embodied knowledge that centres on the self, but to highlight the relational and co-constitutive characteristics of embodied knowledges that arise through parenting.     

Feeling our way: academia,emotions and a politics of care

This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalised neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with.     

Post-trafficking bordering practices: Perverse co-production,marking and stretching borders

This paper highlights the significance of post-trafficking scenarios for understanding bordering practices in political geography. In so doing, it addresses two significant research gaps: the lack of attention to trafficking in geography and the failure of wider interdisciplinary debates to engage with post-trafficking specifically. While extensive research in political geography has addressed the related experiences of refugees, asylum seekers and ‘illegals’, much of this work has centred on policies, processes and practices that aim to keep ‘unwanted strangers out’. By contrast, very little research has addressed how the border is configured for and by those who are crossing-back over; those who are ‘returning home’, in this case from diverse trafficking situations. The paper draws on recent empirical research on post-trafficking citizenship and livelihoods in Nepal which examined how women returning from trafficking situations deal with stigma and marginalisation. Our analysis illuminates how bordering practices circumscribe and shape women's lives in powerful ways as they seek to (re)establish a sense of belonging and respect. We examine the interplay of state and non-state actors (national and transnational) in structuring mobility and anti-trafficking advocacy through a range of bordering practices and explore how the border is (co-)produced by varied actors at different border sites. This includes women returning from diverse trafficking situations, who invoke the border to argue that they are ‘not as trafficked’ as other women, and others who perform the border differently as agents for trafficking prevention.     

Networked practices of intangible urban heritage: the changing public role of Dutch heritage professionals

This study examines the changing roles of heritage professionals by focusing on the participatory practices of intangible urban heritage. Developments towards democratisation in the heritage sector led to a growing expectation that heritage professionals would work with local publics. This democratisation is manifested in (1) the use of digital media for grassroots heritage practices, (2) the broader scope of what is defined as heritage, and (3) a focus on communities in UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Heritage professionals are thus challenged to develop inclusive heritage practices, particularly in cities, which are characterised by a dynamic nature and cultural diversity. In this article, I analyse how urban heritage organisations and professionals have responded to these developments. Drawing on interviews and a qualitative content analysis of these organisations’ policy documents, I examine the ways in which heritage professionals reconsider their public role through what I define as networked practices of intangible heritage. This concept captures the networked structure in which heritage professionals increasingly work, and also demonstrates how heritage is given meaning through public practices that take place in both the physical and virtual realms of contemporary cities.     

Infrastructural territorialisations: Mega-infrastructures and the (re)making of Kenya

This paper, based on historical and contemporary dynamics of railway infrastructures in Kenya, analyses how mega-infrastructures are central in state practices of infrastructural territorialisation – an infrastructure-based production of territoriality as a historically and geographically specific form of spatio-political order and organisation, imbued with social tensions, stemming from the state-led imposition of a techno-politics onto its territory. Focusing on territorial and political objectives of the state advanced through the Uganda Railway and the Standard Gauge Railway, the paper demonstrates how both of these projects have been central in colonial and contemporary practices of infrastructural territorialisation, albeit in mercurial ways that do not fully represent original techno-political intensions of the state. This discussion, first, highlights how megaprojects – although primarily analysed by recent geographical scholarship as advancing contemporary geographies of global capitalism – also contingently coalesce with state (re)territorialisation practices. Second, undertaking these analyses in the Kenyan context, the paper shows how, despite shared historical dynamics of contingent state territorialisation – and the reconstitution of racial and socio-economic inequalities, advanced through megaprojects that in Kenya are socially interpreted through historical experiences of colonialism – current infrastructural territorialisations are also different; whilst the colonial territorialisation of Kenya emerged as relatively unchallenged, its present state territory-making is undermined by both the global character of megaprojects and the external actors that the state relies on for its practices of infrastructural territorialisation.     

Senegalese street‐sellers,racism and the discourse on ‘irregular trade’ in Rimini

The coast of Emilia‐Romagna is a favourite destination for the seasonal movement of Senegalese street‐sellers. It is no coincidence that Rimini hosted one of the first racist demonstrations of shopkeepers in 1989. The situation has worsened over time. In fact, the local public discourse on immigration never developed autonomously but has always been connected to the discourse expressing the main concern of the town: irregular trade. Yet discourses do not work alone and are linked also to social relations and to economic trends such as the restructuring of the local retailing economy and the tourist sector. This article therefore shows how racism in Rimini is the fluid product of, first, the overlapping of discourses about differing social phenomena which shape the dominant discourse on immigration; and, secondly, the identification with this dominant discourse that has emerged from everyday social relations and institutional practices. The latter part of the article presents elements of the counter‐discourse, based on observations and conversations carried out with Senegalese immigrants in a summer camp outside Rimini. Finally, a proposal by the mayor of Rimini to exclude non‐resident immigrants coming from outside the province is analysed as an example of the criminalization of immigrants through the application of a ‘sedentarist metaphysic’.     

Christian Capital: Singapore,Evangelical Flows and Religious Hubs

Recent scholarship has pointed out the ways in which religions are increasingly commodified, primarily through two mechanisms: the monetisation of religious objects and practices, and the materialisation and extension of religious-symbolic power through new technologies and practices. These two mechanisms of monetisation and materialisation provide very concrete ways of understanding religious commodification, but they do not provide a complete picture of how religious capital is created and sustained in the holistic context of society, city and nation considered in relation to international capital flows. “Christian Capital” includes not only the commodity, consumerist and media empires particularly associated with global-reach “megachurches”, but also the less-tangible situational, relational, human-social and influential wealth created between religious agencies and their urban-national contexts. Using the case of Christian agencies in Singapore and their strategic creation of transnational influences, this paper offers a conception of Christian capital that incorporates not only the materialisation of religious influence in terms of finances and commodities, but also its expression in less tangible but significant ways in terms of the creation of an international “brand” of Singapore Christianity.     

Gendered Socio-Spatial Practices in Public Eating and Drinking Establishments in the Midwest United States

Understanding how space is used in gendered social practice is crucial to gender constructionists' theorizing and research. Gendered socio-spatial practices help explain how power asymmetries between women and men carry over from one social setting to the next. In this article we integrate research on gender and space and on gender and practice in an examination of how female and male customers, employees and food and drink establishment owners structure, occupy, use and control physical and symbolic space in routine social practices in ‘public’ places. Gendered social practices, we argue, occur not only in space; they utilize, shape and, at times, obstruct, monopolize, give and give up space. Our findings, based on 76?hours of observations in 17 food and drink establishments in the Midwest United States, and interviews with the 17 women and men owners of those businesses, challenge oversimplified notions of separate private and public ‘spheres,’ and of the autonomy and power women and men experience in these arenas—as owners, managers, workers and as customers.     

Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Moon,mud, and cell phones: geographies of race and construction of difference through normalization

How does the meaning of space emerge and get negotiated when individuals of diverse backgrounds interact with each other? Studies reporting that African Americans tend not to spend time in outdoor space attribute this finding to limited access to resources, cultural values, degree of assimilation to mainstream practices, discrimination in outdoor space, or a perception that outdoor recreational space is “white space”. Little research has addressed how such meanings relate to other meanings attached to outdoor space, let alone how this happens through interactions between people with different views on outdoor space. This article, based on interviews and participant observation of college students on an alternative break trip from the Northeastern U.S. to New Mexico in 2014, shows how students of various backgrounds experienced nature differently, how differences were articulated and explained, and how they subverted normalization processes that render not “being in tune with nature” as deficiency. Suggesting that geographies of race are fluid and influenced by individuals’ agency, this article calls for encouraging students to examine the ways their subject positions have shaped their experiences and challenge cultural bias in what is deemed universally desirable.     

Gender,age and the politicisation of space during the time of political violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

This article examines the way in which the modality of the political violence between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front politicised space in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The article demonstrates how place is actively produced through everyday practices. It shows how the spatiality of the violence shifted – from the body to multiple sites of everyday life such as the school and the household and finally to the neighbourhood. Residents were drawn into the violence differentially on the basis of their gender and age, rather than political beliefs and affiliations. Places were politicised in ways that linked their meaning to the political identity of those found in that space. By presenting a spatialised analysis of the political violence, and illustrating how the production of place articulated with the co-production of political identities, this article makes a novel contribution to the existing literature on political violence in KwaZulu-Natal.     

Growing up,going out and growing out of the countryside: childhood experiences in Rural England

This article contributes to knowledge of children's geographies by considering how the micro-geographies of children change as they grow up in a rural locality. Drawing upon evidence from a Hampshire village, it explores how children of different ages are imagined, positioned and regulated in different public spaces, inside and outside the village, through repetitive acts and regulatory regimes. Attention is given to the ways in which these practices can cause conflict with other children and adults, exacerbating a sense of restriction felt by young people growing up in the countryside.     

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.