Feeling at home in public: diasporic Moroccan women negotiating leisure in Morocco and the Netherlands

Muslim women are often cited as subject to restriction in their mobility through public space, especially in European contexts, in comparison with non-Muslim community members. Yet any woman might face restriction in her access to leisure outside the home through geographies of risk and fear, as well as geographies of care and responsibility. In this article, we describe the ways in which Moroccan Muslim women resident in Europe negotiate access to leisure outside the home, in both Europe and Morocco, demonstrating that they practice mobilities framed by safety, risk and responsibility combined with individual volition to be participants in public spaces. Using examples from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss a notion of ‘viscosity’ as safe public space that acts as an extension of the home, where women feel comfortable enacting their daily lives and engaging in leisure practices. By comparing data from the Netherlands and Morocco, we highlight the role of Muslim-dominant and Christian-dominant public spheres in these negotiations of leisure. The ways women inhabit such spaces reflect individual concerns about personal safety, as well as maintaining respectful relations with family and being protected from unknown dangers, in ways that reflect not only religious beliefs but also geographies of risk related to other factors. Inhabiting such spaces implicates how they become part of the community at large, as visibly present participants, by negotiating many factors beyond religious beliefs as part of their access to public leisure spaces.     

A relational approach to walking: Methodology,metalanguage, and power relations

To better understand walking practices and the power relations informing them, Mattias Kärrholm and colleagues argue for a relational methodology and metalanguage. In the process, they propose a threefold approach: (a) identify different walking assemblages; (b) investigate how diverse types of walking assemblage relate in series; and (c) study how certain objects can gather or bind series together and act as boundary objects. In this article, we explore the worth of that approach, drawing on research interviews held over 2015–16 with residents from Wollongong, Australia, during a period when their municipal government was implementing a walkable city strategy. Here, we analyse participants' conversations with us for what they reveal about walking types, walking assemblages, interseriality, objects of passage, and boundary objects—five terms used by Kärrholm et al. to interrogate urban walking. Our work suggests that participants are adept at gauging the constant transformations that characterise their walks. This narrative evaluative capacity is, perhaps paradoxically, both compelling and mundane and suggests that participants make sense of a range of meanings from complex social and spatial dynamics and do so in ways that highlight privilege and disadvantage in the city. These findings have wider relevance for those interested in walking and mobilities studies and methodologies.     

ARCHITECTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE AIRPORT BALCONY: MOBILITY, SENSATION AND THE THEATRE OF FLIGHT

Contemporary studies within the apparent ‘mobility turn’ focus upon airports as sites indicative of our mobile world, yet they tend to forgo investigations of the contextual architectural geographies that shape and inflect these mobilities. This paper examines the relationship between the architecture of the airport balcony and practices of seeing. While recent scholarship has taken airports to be incredible symbolizers of power and places of heightened visual scrutiny, the paper explores how through the architectural mediation of seeing, early airports were designed to instil specific inspirations, beliefs and messages within the airport user – constructing a new and modern experience. Far from a blank space evacuated of social presence and meaning, the paper investigates how airport design interacts with and shapes social experience. By examining the mobile practices and experiences of inhabiting the airport balcony, the paper advances conceptualizations of moving and seeing by complicating their practice as ‘collective individuations’ of social, architectural and sensual engagements, registers, and percepts.     

The changing Neolithic household: Household autonomy and social segmentation, Tell Halula, Syria

While households are widely held to have existed as the fundamental building block of early agricultural villages, researchers have only a limited understanding of the local social and economic trajectory of Neolithic households. Expanding our archaeological understanding of the Neolithic household beyond architecture, settlement organization, and subsistence practices, in this paper we explore how gradual changes in mortuary practices at Tell Halula, Syria, help us to understand the process of household development around 7500–7300 Cal. BC. Drawing upon high-resolution mortuary data we consider the tempo and mechanisms of change and how these patterns help us understand the organization of the household. Material patterns including the increased use of burial objects, an increased frequency of the placement of burial objects among adults, and the differential use of burial objects between households. These represent subtle, yet observable, small-scale shifts in how social roles were redefined and materialized. We argue that these reflect a series of gradual changes that are suggestive of increased household autonomy and an increase in social segmentation within and between households. The Tell Halula data highlight elements of continuity and how household members adhered to a broadly shared physical and organizational framework of life. Data also illustrate how household members developed subtle means by which practices were personalization, and potentially, reflect growing means by which households and individuals were identified within these communities. Collectively, this research provides a detailed understanding of the grass-roots building blocks of Neolithic households over a short time frame and a more detailed understanding of the local social and economic trajectory of Neolithic households.     

'MOVING AROUND': THE SOCIAL AND SPATIAL MOBILITY OF YOUTH IN LUSAKA

Claims have recently been made for a 'mobilities paradigm' which is challenging the relative 'a-mobile' focus of much of the social sciences. The agenda drawn up for this mobilities paradigm is clearly based on Northern trends with little consideration of the South. African populations have always been mobile but little is known about the mobility of urban populations and in particular of the youth, who constitute a large proportion of the population. This paper explores the daily and residential mobility of young people in Lusaka building upon interviews held with low- and middle-income youth. The aim is to contribute to discussions of: how mobility varies by gender and class; the links between spatial mobility and social and economic mobility; the nature of the relationship between patterns of mobility and residential structure; and how examining mobility can illuminate many other aspects of young people's lives. Overall the picture emerging from Lusaka is rather bleak. In a context of spiralling economic decline and rising HIV/AIDS rates, the social mobility of youth is predominantly downwards which is reflected in the residential and daily mobility patterns of the young people. There is a strong link between young people's mobility and their livelihoods, an aspect of mobility that is widespread in the South but largely overlooked by the emerging mobilities paradigm.     

Gendered mobilities in the making: moving from a pedestrian to vehicular mobility landscape in Shimshal,Pakistan

Although feminist geographers understand gender and mobility as mutually constitutive social processes, few studies explain how gender relations are constituted in particular mobility contexts, and how and why they shape mobility patterns in specific socio-spatial circumstances. We address these questions in an analysis of gendered mobilities in Shimshal, Pakistan, which until recently have taken shape in the context of a pedestrian mobility regime. The gender and mobility relationship has transformed as vehicular mobilities have replaced pedestrian mobilities with the construction of the Shimshal road. To demonstrate empirically the co-constitution of gender and mobility, we analyze aspects of socio-spatial context that have shaped gendered pedestrian mobilities, followed by those associated with the new vehicular mobility regime that are modifying gender relations in Shimshal. Shifting gender relations reshape corporeal mobility patterns. Road infrastructure has enhanced men’s and youth’s outbound travel as wage earners and students, respectively. These mobilities have reshaped women’s capacity to move, constraining their mobility beyond the village. As prosperity becomes contingent on outbound movement, men’s and youths’ social horizons and mobilities are expanding, while women’s compromised access to mobility as a social resource produces new mobility hierarchies and gendered exclusions.     

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices,planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

This article considers the agency of crop plants within sociocultural processes by examining how grape vines influence seasonal labour patterns in Australian viticulture and wine production. Drawing on ethnographic research within a large Australian wine company, I examine how vineyard managers and winemakers coordinate the timing of the grape harvest with the ripening of grapes. I argue that by making the harvest's approach perceptible to humans, chemical and sensory tests of grape ripeness precipitate seasonal changes in viticultural work—rendering grape vines active participants in patterning social time. Practices of attention to ripening grapes thus render the social agency of grape vines perceptible. I analyse these time-reckoning practices as a ‘learning to be affected’, in which human viticulturists actively strive through multiple sensory practices to become attuned to plants' activities. However, attending to the multiple practices used to reckon the ‘right’ time to harvest grapes also emphasises that these ways of enacting the times and agencies of crop plants may interfere or conflict with one another. Highlighting the emotional stresses and tensions between viticultural workers that this may generate, I suggest that agricultural time is both more conflicted and more suffused with power relations than theoretical accounts have typically indicated.     

Embodying vertical geopolitics: Towards a political geography of falling

The emergence of air power in the 20th Century marked a new era of warfare. Speed, covertness, mobility, and verticality emerged as the buzzwords. This paper examines experimental body-centred encounters with verticality during preparatory parachute training at Ringway Aerodrome 1940–1945. I trace how falling bodies encountered, were organised in, and harnessed space for air-led warfare and, by extension, how vertically moving bodies perform alternative geopolitical realities. First, the paper outlines a political geography of falling and calls for greater critical conceptual thinking on the micro-practices capable of exerting geopolitical influence. Second, I outline three design principles cultivated through military parachuting. Repetition, relationality, and alignment advance theorisations of the organisation of aerial space, and affirm the entangled geographies of embodiment, verticality, and geopolitics. I draw upon the Royal Air Force's practical airborne training programme as a means for enacting ‘high readiness, forced entry’ operations through the amalgamation of man, technological-non-human, and air. The paper argues for the achievement of air power and the performance of aerial supremacy through gravity and falling. This has important implications for unpacking the corporeal mobilities and training practices by which geopolitical realities are known, embodied, made, and articulated, and of the role of elite performances of aerial mobility in disrupting inter/national aerial sovereignty.     

Changing spaces: the role of the internet in shaping Deaf geographies

While there is a burgeoning literature on the role of ICT in the creation of new forms of social networks, dubbed on-line communities, much less attention has been paid to the complex set of relationships which are emerging between some off-line communities and the internet, and in particular to some of the new spatialities that are emerging as a result of community-based ICT practices. This paper develops this work by focusing on the example of ‘the Deaf community’. In reflecting on the implications of the communication possibilities offered by the internet for the production of Deaf space we begin by outlining the history of development of the off-line Deaf community in the UK and by reflecting on the concept of ‘community’. The paper then goes on to explore how Deaf people are using the internet to communicate with each other and, in doing so, to reflect upon how the internet is contributing to the re-spatialisation and scaling-up of this community while also having other unanticipated effects on Deaf people's mobilities and the space of the Deaf club.     

BETWEEN PLACES AND FLOWS: TOWARDS A NEW AGENDA FOR NEIGHBOURHOOD RESEARCH IN AN AGE OF MOBILITY

This article discusses the role of the neighbourhood in an era of increased mobility. It explores the consequences of the “new mobilities paradigm”, which argues that the growing importance of flows – of people, goods and information – results in a deterritorialization of social practices. Rows thus gain prominence in comparison to places like regions and neighbourhoods. At the same time, however, neighbourhoods continue to play a role in the actions and imaginations of people, neighbourhood organizations, and government policies. People still live in neighbourhoods, and governments still try to solve often severe social problems through neighbourhood policies. We argue that the neighbourhood has to be re‐imagined as a collection of hybrid nodes connecting a multiplicity of flows that bind actors and objects in order to understand the potential effectiveness of these policies. From this new mobilities perspective, we make suggestions for future neighbourhood research.     

Leaving nothing but ripples on the water: performing ecotourism natures

This paper investigates nature–society relationships through the socio-spatial practices of ecotourism. Drawing on Whatmore's ideas of ‘hybrid geographies’, we examine the embodied experiences of kayakers participating in ecotours in Krabi Province, Thailand. Calling upon relational materiality, particular attention is given to the corporeal mobilities and experiences to explore performing ecotourism natures of the kayaker. Our case study provides a lens through which to explore methods for engaging with the sensuous worlds. Our results suggest that in the performances of enacting ecotourism geographies, kayakers are unable to move beyond the bounds of the natural premised on its separation from the human realm. We conclude by critically reflecting on our methodology.     

Putting the border in place: customs regulation in the making of the Irish border, 1921–1945

This paper explores the historical geography of the making of the Irish border through a focus on the practices of customs regulation through which it was constituted and on the impeded, permitted and concealed mobilities of people and objects across the customs boundary after 1923. It traces how legislative change at the level of the state – in this case the governments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom – was translated into the routine practices of those trying to regulate the movement of people and objects across the customs boundary, and considers the responses of those subject to, and regularly subverting, these efforts. Drawing on recent interests in the prosaic practices of the state, and in materiality and mobility more widely, our focus is both on the work of political power at the border through the practices, texts, tools and techniques of customs regulation, and on the experience and effects of customs control for those living near the newly defined line between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.     

Building Bundles,Building Memories: Processes of Remembering in Adena-Hopewell Societies of Eastern North America

Over the past 20 years, archaeologists have grown increasingly interested in exploring the relationships between humans and things. In part, this focus on materiality has been fueled by the integration of modern philosophical perspectives and considerations of non-Western ontologies and the New Materialisms. In North America, much emphasis has been placed on exploring the relational aspects of American Indian ontologies in the past and present. In this article, I build upon these perspectives by integrating memory as an important infrastructure through which these relationships are cast and maintained. I refer to these memory-based practices as processes of remembering. I argue that identifying these discursive memory processes provides an opportunity to refine how we understand objects like bundles and the social process of bundling—one way archaeologists have framed complex human/thing relationships. I use an Adena-Hopewell burial mound from the Middle Woodland period in Eastern North America (ca. 200 BCE–CE 500) as a case study to illustrate how societies during this era were, at least in part, organized and sustained through the rituals involved in revising bundles of ancestors, objects, and memories of human action. I argue that bundling assemblages of the past managed social dissonance by stabilizing or transforming perceptions of kinship in social coalitions.     

Returning home: heritage work among the Stl’atl’imx of the Lower Lillooet River Valley

This article focusses on heritage practices in the tensioned landscape of the Stl’atl’imx (pronounced Stat-lee-um) people of the Lower Lillooet River Valley, British Columbia, Canada. Displaced from their traditional territories and cultural traditions through the colonial encounter, they are enacting, challenging and remaking their heritage as part of their long term goal to reclaim their land and return ‘home’. I draw on three examples of their heritage work: graveyard cleaning, the shifting ‘official’/‘unofficial’ heritage of a wagon road, and marshalling of the mountain named Nsvq’ts (pronounced In-SHUCK-ch) in order to illustrate how the past is strategically mobilised in order to substantiate positions in the present. While this paper focusses on heritage in an Indigenous and postcolonial context, I contend that the dynamics of heritage practices outlined here are applicable to all heritage practices.     

Heritage Ethics for a Present Imperfect

Lynn identifies three critical discussion that framed the Stanford workshop. First, the language of the code, which she feels should reflect our acknowledgement that archaeologists are not the primary stakeholders for most situations and using core values instead of codification as a starting point. Second, the recognition of particular histories and the consequences of colonial encounters, with the acknowledgment that colonialist relations continue to exist in many places. Third is the issue of how WAC positions itself in relation to issues of social justice. Lynn points out that while WAC could be an active vehicle for attaining social justice on a global scale, the ethical implications of taking any kind of interventionist stance need to be fully thought through, lest they be seen as telling people what to do—a stance that would only serve to mirror imperialist and colonialist practices. We need to ask people what they want in regard to their heritage and be prepared to listen, even if archaeology is not immediately important for them or they suggest directions that we find challenging.     

Refusing Reform,Reworking Pity,or Reinforcing Privilege? The Multivalent Politics of Young People’s Fun and Friendship within a Volunteering Encounter

This paper analyses initiatives which took British young people from ethnic minority and disenfranchised backgrounds to volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa. It asks whether decolonial possibilities can be seen in the politics of youthful fun and friendship amid a practice undeniably driven by interpenetrating neocolonial logics, where enrolment in helping “needy” others is seen as a means to “improve” working-class and racially marked youth. The paper argues that volunteers’ investments in leisure constituted a politics of refusal towards how they were acted upon as objects of concern. More ambivalently, playful, friendly interactions between British and African youth disrupted relations of charitable pity and signalled desires for solidarity and equality, but cannot be claimed as fully decolonial. At times, fun also re-entrenched neocolonial and other oppressive relations. Overall, the paper demonstrates that a close reading of the multivalent, affective politics of young people’s fun and friendship can reveal much about the reproduction or subversion of contemporary neocolonial logics that operate both within and beyond the borders of postcolonial Britain.     

Medieval food and colour

For medieval people, colour provided important information about the nature of objects, and that was no less true of what they ate than of anything else. On one level colour might expose moral and spiritual connotations; on another it might offer indications of characteristics of a foodstuff according to medieval humoral theories. Moreover, it was to form an important element in the elite cuisine that developed across Europe from 1200 and perhaps earlier. Display was a crucial part of this cuisine, and this paper demonstrates how and why it was employed, and the ways in which these culinary practices were emulated elsewhere in society. There were general cultural associations between colours and culinary preparations, and some types of dish show common patterns of colouring. However fleeting the colours of foodstuffs, they offer a further dimension to our understanding of meals, the material culture of dining and medieval mentalities.     

From speech to literature: Low German and Mennonite identity in two worlds

Chile's geographical remoteness has largely defined the imaginaries people share about this Latin American country. Despite its historical image as finis terrae (“the end of the world”), migrants from all corners found their way to these isolated peripheral lands. Thanks to new means of transport and communication, Chile nowadays is as exposed to the global circulation of people, objects and ideas as the rest of the world. Based on a combination of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this article traces how old (and originally foreign) imaginaries about Chile as an inaccessible island keep on influencing how contemporary Chileans participate in and frame their perceived exclusion from a plethora of new transnational mobilities, regardless of whether they have the means and freedom to cross imaginary boundaries and real borders or not. Although increasingly under outside pressure, the value of immobility remains at the core of the Chilean social imaginary, geo-politics and cultural life.     

‘Samudayik Shakti’: Working-class feminism and social organisation in Subhash Camp,New Delhi

This article illustrates the intersections between architecture and agency in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, by ‘situating activism in place’. It highlights the significance of place in social action by examining the architecture of everyday places—the house, the street and the square—as the sites of both individual transformations and collective consciousness. Through observations of the activities of and interviews with members of Samudayik Shakti, a women's organisation and a men's panchayat, this article highlights a number of related processes in Subhash Camp: how different women experienced different places through everyday spatial practices; how the spatial practices in these places were shaped by different social structures at different scales, from the family to the state; how the architecture of these places was significant both as sites of control and of emancipation of women's bodies; and how this dynamic contributed to the making of social action in Subhash Camp.     

Growing older and social sustainability: considering the ‘serious leisure’ practices of the over 60s in rural communities

The important role which older people play in rural community development through their various activities has become a substantive area of interest across social science disciplines, including gerontology, sociology, psychology and human geography. Reflecting the demographic shift of an ageing countryside within many parts of the global north, the future of rural social policy initiatives will increasingly depend on a nuanced appreciation of the social and voluntary activities undertaken by the growing older population. We seek to expand this focus to consider the social value of these practices for both the individual and the particular communities of which they are a part, and make a case for ‘serious leisure theory’ (Stebbins 1982) as a potentially rich seam for exploring these relations. This is put into practice through a case study involving the over 60s residents of a village in rural Wales, and through in-depth interviews we draw attention to their role in securing socio-economic sustainability in the locality through voluntary, hobby-based and amateur pursuits. In conclusion, we consider the analytical merits and limitations of serious leisure theory and, more broadly, the implications of the political fashioning of community-engaged older people as exemplar public citizens in the context of ongoing neoliberal welfare reforms.