Public protest,public pedagogy and the publicness of the public university

This article links protest and pedagogy in a study of the public university in India. Using as case studies two publicly funded metropolitan universities demonstrates how protests in a neoliberal higher education context in India are instantiations of a larger debate about the nature of democracy, and about the nature of the ‘public’ across the country itself.     

Heritage,transnational memory and the re-diasporisation of Scotland

For a long time in Scotland, diasporic – and popular – heritage with its imaginary emphasising kinship, stylised images and ritualised practices was either overlooked or discredited. The term ‘diaspora’ itself to define Scotland’s vast overseas population has been scrutinised for its usefulness. However, since devolution, it has gained currency in public discourse and policies and has led to the ‘re-diasporisation’ of Scotland. Yet, the ‘diaspora’ had long been identified as an important niche market in relation to heritage perceived as an economic resource. This article explores the changing perception and place of diasporic heritage in Scotland since the 1970s through two case studies. Focusing on processes of remembrance of nineteenth-century Highland emigration materialised through monuments and museums, it highlights the conflicting and shifting relationships that different communities – home and diasporic – have with their past, place and the meanings ascribed to them. The transnational memories increasingly promoted in Scotland act as a means of re-energising nationhood and initiating revisions and re-reading of popular and diasporic culture.     

The dynamic nature of social disadvantage: implications for hazard exposure and vulnerability in Greater Vancouver

Urbanization and re-urbanization continually alter spatial patterns of social disadvantage and hazard exposure, which in turn affect social vulnerability. The current study explores vulnerability to hazards in Greater Vancouver over a 15-year period (1986 to 2001). Results illustrate how social disadvantage is multi-dimensional and emerges from the social geography of a city. The study illustrates the speed with which both the structure and spatial patterns of social disadvantage can change in cities experiencing rapid growth or redevelopment. The study also suggests that Greater Vancouver does not display consistent patterns of minority- or income-based environmental inequity in hazard exposure, which raises questions about the role of various policies in ameliorating vulnerability to natural and technological hazards .     

Remaking National Identity: Two Contested Monuments in Post-Communist Poland

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the remaking of national identity in post-communist Poland through the analysis of urban spaces, and, in particular, two controversial monuments that were erected under communism and survive to this day in two Polish cities. By systematically tracing the trajectory of the contested monuments, from their inception through their changing symbolism to their disputed legacies, this article will pose important questions not only about the development of cultural memory and of Polish civic society, but also the role of various agents involved in these processes. The article will examine the interaction between the official and local ‘politics of memory’ and individual initiatives centred on these monuments in an attempt to unravel the intricacies of Poland’s de-communization and nation-building following the fall of communism.     

A walk of art: the potential of the sound walk as practice in cultural geography

Some of the most experimental and exciting work using sound and spatiality has come from the art world. This essay traces how an exciting hybrid of sound art and walking – the sound walk - has evolved over the last century. Examining the latest examples of sound walks in London and New York, and reflecting on the author's experience of creating a sound walk route, this essay focuses on the potential of this medium to create flowing, multi-sensory and embodied ways for social and cultural geographers to research the outside environment. The essay concludes that the medium could also be useful for presenting site-specific cultural geography to the public in an accessible and inclusive way.     

Poster power: rural electrification,visualization, and legibility in the United States

This article examines graphic visualization and visuality in Lester Beall’s 1937 series of posters for the United States Rural Electrification Administration. The posters are commonly thought of as raising public awareness of the benefits of electricity in the rural America, but what was meant by public and awareness in 1937 in terms of rural reform in the United States has remained unclear until now. This article posits that to understand how these posters were seen in 1937 requires an acknowledgment of how Beall’s posters graphically visualized the complexities of rural electrification, and how graphic visualization was contiguous with bureaucratic communication and the visual sensitivity of a public.     

Eclectic and pragmatic: the colours of Dutch social and cultural geography

In the Netherlands, human geography has traditionally been an applied, practical science. Close ties have always existed with spatial planning and regional-economic policy. With good reason, the first generation of planning specialists—in the 1960s—consisted largely of people trained as geographers. Geographers were also the socio-spatial engineers of the welfare state (de Pater 2001b; de Pater and de Smidt 1989).     

Claims to Place: The public art of Sue Jane Taylor

This paper explores the ways through which the public art of Scots artist Sue Jane Taylor and the practices associated with it both unsettle narratives of globalisation and conjure in their stead new narratives of place. With reference to the stories of five works/workings of art—Glencalvie and Borgie in the Highlands, Aberdeen (the onshore site for the North Sea oil industry) and Clydebank, and Lower Pultneytown, Wick—I show how the art, as evidence of a deeply politicised aesthetics, makes visible not only the specificities of historical and contemporary struggle, but is also bound up with creating and imagining new political possibilities. Art and artistic practices are understood not simply in terms of shaping meanings but as constitutive of processes of subject formation and of the ‘becoming’ of place.     

Awake anon the tales of valour: the career of a war memorial in St. Catharines,Ontario

Memorials cultivate a common understanding of the past that is communicated through the celebration of select people, places or events. Because memorials are located in public space and crafted from time‐defeating materials, the process of commemoration is inherently political. Scholars have studied this process to discover the agendas that inform the ideological content of memorials, but rarely how this content is received by its audience. This question is especially pertinent when memorials outlast the generation and the ideology that created them. This study attempts an answer by exploring the career of one memorial: the monument in St. Catharines, Ontario, dedicated to Private Alexander Watson, a casualty of the Battle of Batoche (1885). It finds that the monument's significance was transformed by political, cultural and historiographical shifts. While its local audience has forgotten its specific message, its generic intent to honour fallen soldiers is still recognized.     

Child migrants and deportees from Poland and Ukraine after the Second World War: experience and memory

This article aims to compare the biographical experiences and individual memories of child deportees and migrants from Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a field study of over 100 biographical interviews in two local communities situated in the borderland regions which were particularly exposed to post-war displacement, resettlement and population exchange: Ukrainian Galicia and Western Poland. The author claims that although the history of these two distant communities was totally different, contemporary memory of being a refugee/deportee/forced migrant, losing one's home/homeland and watching the deportation of the previous inhabitants of one's new place of residence bear many similarities. While analysing autobiographical narratives, I attempt to find common threads and topics generated by their experiences as children, as well as explain the differences by exploring the social context of individual memory, with a special accent on post-war socialisation and the Polish and Ukrainian memory culture. The author also strives to show how and why the children's memories differ from those of their parents.     

From home to city: gender segregation,homosociality and publicness in Istanbul

This article examines the complex and tangled relationships between home, city, and gender in Bagcilar, a municipality in Istanbul governed by Islamist-oriented political parties since 1992. Focusing on women’s spatial experiences at the intersection of the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, the secular and the religious, this article argues that home provides a medium through which gendered forms of governance and publicness are produced in the city. Home as a domestic sphere confines women’s roles to those of motherhood and wifehood, but also functions as a place of sociability for women. The municipality’s Islamic political discourse, combined with secular urban practices, mobilizes women through familial norms, gender-segregated events, and women-only sites in Bagcilar, where home and urban space are mutually constructed, regulated, and legitimized. Thus, women’s publicness, which derives from but goes beyond domesticity, also enables intimate same-sex sociality in urban spaces. Although this creates only conditional access to the city for women, their agency and engagement with the city emanate from such publicness.     

Public art as public pedagogy: memorial landscapes of the Cambodian genocide

Historical memory in the form of public art acts as a pedagogical tool, both revealing the artist’s interpretation of history and serving as a historical device for the viewer. In Cambodia, new generations are developing an understanding of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979) and its effect on their country’s history. Young peoples’ understanding of history is constructed through institutional, living, and public memory pedagogies. These pedagogical channels do not always work in unison, leaving gaps in historical education. In Cambodia, institutional and living memory pedagogies on the Khmer Rouge genocide often fail to transmit this important national history to those who did not live through it. Publicly accessible memorial art has the potential to supplement the historical understanding of young, rural Cambodians. Three murals sites in rural Cambodia act as landscapes of public pedagogy by depicting scenes of Khmer Rouge atrocities. This paper aims to understand the significance of the impact and implications of public memorial art as an educational supplement, and how public art can be utilized as public pedagogy in Cambodia and beyond.     

Human rights politics and scaled performances of memory: conflicts among the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina

This paper builds on the geographies of commemoration literature extending the scope of inquiry to consider the scaled performances through which the politics of memory unfold. I focus on an analysis of conflicts over the creation of memorial landscapes that emerge from the intricate ways in which representations of the past and the everyday politics of social movements intersect. The paper analyses the competing politics of memory of two groups of Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers of people who ‘disappeared’ during Argentina's Dirty War). Their strategies underscore geographic dimensions of the politics of memory as the Madres clash over how to appropriately place memory in the landscape. While one group emphasizes making visible the events of the past to promote transmission of memory and to remember those who disappeared, the other group focuses on re‐interpreting symbols about the past in an attempt to encourage future activism. Such conflicting strategies manifest spatially in a variety of ways, ranging from the creation of physical markers in the built environment to the performance of collective rituals that centre on activists' bodies as sites for either commemoration of the past or future activism. The Madres' conflicts highlight how different spatialities contribute to validate or condemn competing politics of commemoration.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.     

Trench art between memory and oblivion: a report from Poland (and Syria)

ABSTRACT

This paper summarises some of the results of archaeological research on twentieth century military heritage in the Polish woodlands, namely the discovery of artefacts made, remade, and personalised by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians during military conflicts. Such objects are examples of so-called ‘trench art’. I draw attention to the universality of trench art, a phenomenon that is usually associated with the past conflicts such as the Napoleonic Wars and the First and Second World Wars. Nonetheless, trench art is, in its complexity, diversity and affectivity, an integral part of modern warfare, including the recent tragic conflict in Syria. After presenting the project and some examples of trench art documented during the research, I discuss a unique artistic intervention entitled Painting on Death to illustrate the affective, aesthetic, and political value of modern trench art.     

Roller derby's publicness: toward greater recognition of diverse genders and sexualities in the Bible Belt

While scholars have considered the various meanings of roller derby for participants and discussed how roller derby critiques and stabilizes gender and sexuality normativity, their investigation into how a larger public is impacted by roller derby's public performances has received less attention. Here, we begin to address this oversight. Employing both participant and spectator data, we examine facets of publicness in the discursive and material spatial practices associated with roller derby in the US Bible Belt, specifically Oklahoma. While some scholars doubt that there is much social impact from roller derby, we suggest that the specific spatial qualities in roller derby's public performances, in both the sporting and playful senses, contribute to a change in cultural norms – that of greater recognition of diverse genders and sexualities in this region. Such validation increases the social stability of individuals who do not neatly reside within heteronormativity.     

Art as a diagnostic: assessing social and political transformation through public art in Cairo,Egypt

Since January 2011, Egypt has undergone several waves of political upheaval in order to craft a new form of governance. Central to this process has been the role of art. This article argues that artistic interventions that engage with the idea of public space and that take place in the public space of the city engender interactions that illuminate the complexities and difficulties currently facing Egyptian society. More so than serving as documentation of what has taken place or as acts of protest, public art can serve as a diagnostic of issues that simmer underneath the surface of national politics. Based on interviews, focus groups, and observations conducted between 2011 and 2013 with Cairo-based artists and arts advocates, the paper explores the way in which public art has signaled tensions regarding class, gender and increasing political polarization. By exploring the relationship between art, artists and urban space, this paper extends analyses on political transitions to take account of the effects produced by forms of artistic expression within the public sphere.     

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post-Soviet Bishkek

Scholars of nationalism have long looked to material forms of symbolic power to understand the politics and cultures of nations, and national monuments specifically have been studied as reflections of ideological programmes of political regimes. However, these approaches have paid insufficient attention to processes of creation. Given the importance of material symbols as sites through which the nation is understood, I argue that analysing the dynamics of creation expands our understanding of symbolic nation making. Using the case of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and focusing on moments of creation and the actors involved in them, I build a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of national symbols on the ground based on three interconnected and co-constituting dynamics: spatial, temporal and aesthetic/semiotic. Using this framework, I demonstrate how meaning and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent in the creation of national monuments and how it is their very imperfection as material representations that provides the context for the nation to emerge as a category of discourse.     

社会记忆与认同建构：松坪归侨社会地域认同的实证剖析

本文选择华侨农场和生活在农场里的归侨作为研究对象 ,运用社会记忆的相关理论 ,通过参与观察及口述访谈 ,剖析社会记忆如何作用于归侨的认同建构。本文提出 ,在对国家或地方的认同建构上 ,“归侨意识”始终贯串着归侨的集体记忆 ,认同建构是情景性的 ,流动的 ,是一个交织着多重利益的复杂的心理过程。本文希望通过实证研究 ,达到反思移民安置与地方融入这一社会现象的目的。对移民的安置不但是提供物质性安排 ,更重要的是营建一个和谐宽容的社会心理环境 ,使移民与安置地尽快融为一体 ,共谋发展