Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

Aerostatic spacing: on things becoming lighter than air

The development of practical aerostatic or lighter than air balloon flight in 1783 marked the emergence of a new way of being and becoming mobile, one that also involved an important technical and experiential transformation in earth–atmosphere relations. This paper narrates an account of the distinctive kinds of spaces of which aerostatic flight is generative. At the centre of this account is the claim that the affective materiality of aerostatic flight is simultaneously processual and possessing of what political theorist Jane Bennett calls 'thing-power'. In developing this claim, the paper draws from a range of historical and contemporary accounts of aerostatic flight in order to elaborate upon three aspects of the spaces of things becoming aerostatic: the distinctive kinds of sensing of which aerostatic flight is generative; the differential qualities of affectivity in which the movement and materiality of aerostatic things participates; and the kinds of vertiginous events in which the felt movement – actual or anticipated – of aerostatic things is implicated. The paper concludes by speculating upon how attending to the distinctive and sometimes disquieting materiality of aerostatic things might contribute to geographical engagements with the spaces of air and atmosphere.     

浅谈如何激发学生的数学问题意识

小学思想活跃,求职欲望旺盛,对事物有着强烈的好奇心,这就是问题意识的萌芽种子。这粒种子的能不能萌芽,取决于它是否有一个适宜的环境和氛围。激发学生的问题意识,是教师在课堂教学中通过各种有效的教学手段和方法,指导学生通过观察,主动发现问题和提出问题,并努力分析和解决问题,让学生敢问、会问和爱问,提高学生认识事物和创新实践的技能,从而无形中提高了教师自身的教学技能与水平。     

基于地气活动的酥碱带形成机制

毛管理论不能解释干旱区近地面酥碱带的形成。本工作以敦煌莫高窟的地气研究为基础,通过地气活动规律揭示了酥碱带的形成机制。在大气波动影响下,大气与地气存在频繁的空气交换。当大气压升高时,地气体积压缩,有干燥大气进入土壤。当大气压下降时,潮湿地气膨胀上升,在建筑墙体内到达一定高度。在长期干湿空气的频繁交替作用下,墙体内的大量易溶盐分反复结晶-溶解,导致近地面建筑酥松风化。另外,孔隙内较为剧烈的空气和颗粒物流动对酥松建筑有较强的冲蚀作用。地气导致酥碱带普遍发生,其高度与气压日波动幅度和包气带厚度成正比,与当地大气压成反比。酥碱带地气形成机理的揭示,为建筑酥碱的防治、防潮和土遗址维护等提供了坚实的科学依据。     

HIDE AND SEEK

This response takes up the final question offered by David Lurie's essay: “In the end, is it ever possible to write a fully nonallegorical history of writing's origins?” by considering the nature of allegory, its relationship to hiding and invisibility, and the material quality of its character when invoked to describe an origin.     

The body as research tool: embodied practice and children's geographies

Recently, attempts have been made to advance our ways of thinking and doing Children's Geographies. This paper contributes to that endeavour in two respects. Firstly it considers how the concept of heterogeneous (or hybrid) geographies may offer a new framework for the study of childhood. Secondly, and more substantively, it explores how ‘non-representational’ ideas and approaches – concerned with the non-cognitive and the profoundly practical – may be employed to inform our empirical engagements within this new theoretical framework.     

Straight Pins,Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists’ books – that is, books that are art unto themselves – and books as ‘archives’. Here, I understand the ‘book’ as ‘archive’ in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets ‘archival art’: that is, art, in this case book art, that ‘draws on informal archives but produces them as well’ in an effort ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.     

‘The greatest loss was a loss of our history’: natural disasters,marginalised identities and sites of memory

This paper examines intersections between space, materiality, memory and identity in relation to lesbian and gay experiences of recent disasters in Australia. Drawing on interviews with lesbians and gay men in two disaster sites, the paper argues that disaster impacts may include the loss of sites of memory that inform and underpin the formation and maintenance of marginalised identities. We explore the ways in which social marginality is experienced by sexual minorities during disasters as a result of threats to sites of lesbian and gay memory. The paper contributes to scholarship in geographies of memory by investigating the impacts of disasters on how memory is spatially located and experienced.