Editorial Not all sweetness and light: New cultural geographies of food

Despite a resurgence of work that has begun to examine critically the artefactual mediation of memory, very few accounts have focused upon the interconnections between recorded music and daily acts of remembering. Drawing upon in‐depth case study‐based research into recorded music and everyday life with seventeen lower middle‐class households, this paper describes the composition of three practices of remembering with and through recorded music. First, remembering how to choose and ‘fit’ specific purchased music to particular socio‐spatial activities: a creative practice of mimicry, discretion and intuition in which the past is both embodied in the actions of judgement and choice and also functions to compose a co‐present, but not‐yet ‘virtual’ realm. Second, the widespread, ephemeral and subject‐less practice of ‘involuntary remembering’ in which a trace of a virtual past affects ‘in itself’. Finally, ‘intentional remembering’ in which a past is conditioned to occur as a fixed, relatively durable ‘memory’. The paper describes how such practices of remembering are bound up with the emergence of domestic time‐space, and thus the mode of being of the past, via the circulation and organization of affect.     

Editorial: Gender and sexual geographies of blackness: anti-black heterotopias (part 1)

This editorial theorizes the spatialization of black gender and sexual minorities. We examine the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality work to complicate the geographies of black gender and sexual marginality. Drawing on insights from Foucault's theory of heterotopia, we develop the concept of anti-black heterotopias to understand the spatial ordering of black gender and sexuality within the larger geographies of black people. We contend that if anti-black racism forces black people to live within contained landscapes that exist on the margins of whiteness, then black gender and sexual minorities, who are subject to violence and public ridicule, live in a placeless space, a location with no coordinates. In other words, the heterosexism/homophobia toward black gender and sexual minorities that is expressed in socio/spatial terms is complicit with the spatialization of anti-black racism. We also use anti-black heterotopias as a way to situate the eight articles in parts 1 and 2 of this themed section, as well as to highlight the theoretical linkages between them.     

Quotidian geographies: placing feminism

We discuss Susan Hanson's contributions to geography during the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of quotidian geographies, geographies of the everyday. Beginning from our own experiences as graduate students and new faculty members, we describe the social and theoretical context in which Susan published her initial studies of men's and women's activity patterns that examined gender differences in travel behavior and their origins in men's and women's different household responsibilities. We also review her success peopling the discipline of geography. We conclude that human geography has benefited from the incorporation of feminist theory and methods as Susan predicted.     

Introduction: towards trans geographies

Gender geographies have focused on normatively gendered men and women, neglecting the ways in which gender binaries can be contested and troubled. Trans people question hegemonic conventions that link sexed bodies, gender roles and lives. This collection spans a range of theoretical fields in this context, including trans theories, queer engagement, feminist geographies, gender geographies and sexualities geographies. It offers empirical investigations of trans lives, while addressing the often theoretical use of ‘trans’ to render gender fluid, incoherent and unintelligible. As a whole this themed section questions geography's presumption of man/woman and male/female.     

The cultural geographies of Abstract Expressionism: painters,critics, dealers and the production of an Atlantic art

In this article I propose that the artistic genre of Abstract Expressionism which emerge d from New York in the late 1940s provides an illustrative example of the way a productive, trans-national geographical framework can be provided by exploring the cultural geographies of the Atlantic world. By drawing on the ways Abstract Expressionism was constructed and promoted within the rigid national perspective of 1950s' US cultural policy and reacted against in Britain and Europe on similarly nationalistic terms, I show how the circulatory exchange of cultural flows reveals a more co-produced understanding of these histories. The notion of a network of painters, dealers and critics is used to emphasize the way Abstract Expressionism was produced through a spatial framework which plays a constitutive, rather than purely connective, role. In doing so I draw particular attention to the period from the early 1950s to the 1960s and the artistic activity and critical writing associated with New York City and the Cornish coastal town of St Ives.

Les géographies culturelles de l'Expressionnisme Abstrait: les peintres, les critiques, les marchands et la production d'un art de l'Atlantique

Je propose dans cet article que le style artistique de l'Expressionnisme Abstrait, né à New York à la fin des années 1940, fournit un exemple permettant d'illustrer la façon dont un cadre géographique productif et transnational peut être élaboré à partir d'une exploration des géographies culturelles de l'univers Atlantique. En prenant comme base les moyens par lesquels l'Expressionnisme Abstrait a été construit et s'est développé dans le cadre rigide et national de la politique culturelle américaine des années 1950 et s'est confronté à une Angleterre et une Europe tout autant nationalistes, je démontre comment l'échange circulaire des courants culturels permet de voir et de comprendre que ces histoires ont en partie été coproduites. La notion de réseau de peintres, de marchands et de critiques sert à souligner par quel moyen l'Expressionnisme Abstrait a été produit au travers d'un cadre spatial dont la fonction est constitutive plutôt que simplement de permettre de former des liens. Ce faisant, j'attire l'attention sur l'époque allant du début des années 1950 jusque dans les années 1960 et sur l'activité artistique et les écrits critiques qui sont liés de près à la Ville de New York et à Saint-Ives, village côtier de Cornouailles.

Las geografías culturales del Expresionismo Abstracto: pintores, críticos, marchantes y la producción de un arte atlántico

En este papel sugiero que el género artístico de Expresionismo Abstracto que surgió en Nueva York en los años 40 es un ejemplo ilustrativo de la manera en que se puede facilitar un productivo marco geográfico transnacional por una exploración de las geografías culturales del mundo atlántico. Las maneras en que se construía y promovía el Expresionismo Abstracto dentro de la perspectiva nacional rígida de la política cultural de los Estados Unidos de los años 50 y las maneras en que se reaccionaba contra ello en Gran Bretaña y Europa en términos igualmente nacionalistas sirven como ejemplo de cómo el intercambio circulatorio de flujos culturales revela una interpretación co-producida de estas historias. La idea de una red de pintores, marchantes y críticos sirve para destacar el modo en que el Expresionismo Abstracto fue producido por un marco espacial que juega un papel tanto constitutivo como conectivo. En particular destaco el período de los años 50 a los años 60 y también la actividad artística y la literatura crítica asociada con la ciudad de Nueva York y la ciudad córnica costera de St Ives.     

Cyborg geographies: towards hybrid epistemologies

As a mode of critique, the cyborg is often separated from its role as a figuration. This article reviews Donna Haraway's cyborg theory to restate the importance of the cyborg as a figuration in critical methodology. Figuration is about opening knowledge-making practices to interrogation. I argue that the cyborg enables this inquiry through epistemological hybridization. To do so, cyborg figurations not only adopt a language of being or becoming, but narrate this language in the production of knowledges, to know hybridly. The epistemological hybridization of the cyborg includes four strategies: witnessing, situating, diffracting and acquiring. These are modes of knowing in cyborg geographies. To underline the importance of this use of cyborg theory, I review selected geographic literatures in naturecultures and technosciences, to demonstrate how geographers cite the cyborg. My analysis suggests these literatures emphasize an ontological hybridity that leaves underconsidered the epistemological hybridization at work in cyborg figuration. To take up the cyborg in this way is to place at risk our narrations, to re-make these geographies as hybrid, political work.     

Prejudice: rethinking geographies of oppression

Despite equal opportunities legislation in many western societies, overt prejudice against minority groups is still evident. Yet, despite the persistence of equality issues, ‘prejudice’ is a term that is not widely employed in geography because of its association with a particular history of meaning within social psychology. In this paper I explore the concept of prejudice and its relationship to geographical research on discrimination and oppression. Then using original empirical research in three communities I examine how prejudice is justified and articulated by majority people. In doing so, I explore the complex intersectionalities of negative attitudes towards specific minority groups and the ways that specific mechanisms of sub-ordination can reinforce and support one another.     

Voice: sonic geographies of childhood

This article uses the sonic geographies of childhood as an entry point into long-standing and important debates in the sub-discipline on ‘voice’. The article uniquely explores children’s voices from the past through considering a different type of research material – archival audio recordings. It argues that literally listening to past children’s voices (and noises, sounds and silences) can offer fresh insights into the concept of voice that tends to be associated with contemporary contexts. Drawing on archival encounters with ‘second hand’ field recordings of children across different schools and playgrounds in London in the 1960s, this article engages and extends wider theoretical debates about childhood, voice and memory. The article calls for more attention to the unique characteristics of sound and wider soundscapes of childhood. The article critically reflects on the possibilities and tensions associated with such work.     

Blogging geographies

This paper responds to the call for research on the use of new information technologies in higher education contexts. This was done through a case study on the use of blogs in an advanced seminar class. The paper argues that the use of blogs provided a way of gauging how students were coming to terms with the course material and how they were engaging with the course texts. Intertextuality was used as a method of understanding how students engaged with the course. The analysis was based on blog postings, student comments, course evaluations and the instructor's reflective journal.     

Transitional geographies: making mobile children

Geographers of childhood have variously accounted for the experiences of mobile children. Less has been said about the practices of becoming mobile, including the acquisition of skills, engagement with travel technologies and the shifting child–parent relations implicated in the process. This article explores the making of mobile children through ethnographic research with 7–12-year-olds practising the journey between home and school in Helsinki, Finland. Elaborating on the work of psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, it argues that families enact flexible spatial arrangements—transitional spaces—to experiment with their attachments to urban environments. Transitional spaces foreground the diverse relations between children, parents and the world, allowing the replacement of standard notions about growing up with situated accounts of how families make space for children's expanding mobilities. Against a cultural atmosphere stressing the risks and uncertainties of childhood, this view opens an affirmative approach to children's geographies—one that emphasises the trust, play and collaboration between adults, children and environments.