Identity,contingency and the urban geography of 'race'

Traditional research in urban geography concerned with issues of 'race' has focused on a series of substantively important issues, yet with conceptual foundation inadequate to the task. Specifically, this body of work has employed outdated and theoretically limited conceptions of identity without sufficient consideration to the importance of historical and geographic contingency. I argue in this essay that topics of traditional concern to urban geography gain new relevance and importance when they are reconsidered and reworked from a social constructivist perspective that takes seriously the importance of identity and contingency. I illustrate my argument with discussions of two aspects of my current research agenda. First, I discuss how research on urban residential segregation gains considerably from a more sensitive encounter with multifaceted notions of identity that explicitly address geographic contingency. Second, I review recent empirical research on US mortgage-lending markets that demonstrates the geographic and class contingency of discrimination. The paper ends with a call for research that employs multiple methodologies.     

Israeli feminist geography: women,gender and queer geographies

Abstract

This article charts the changing knowledges within Israeli feminist geography in the last few decades. It briefly reviews some of the topics that characterize Israeli scholarship, and in particular the ways in which the academic knowledge changed from the focus on women’s geography, to feminist and gendered analysis of spaces, to a more recent focus on sexuality and gender. We argue that it is not that one knowledge replacing others, but rather all knowledges and approaches exist simultaneously within Israeli geography today.     

Performing the Lodge: Masonry, masculinity, and nineteenth-century North American moral geography

Geographies reinforce gender and facilitate gender performativity. In this study of nineteenth-century Masonry, we demonstrate the influence of Masonic Temples in the promotion and performance of ‘Masonic masculinity.’ Masonry, through its design and construction of interior space, its embedded material symbolism and especially the geography of Masonic ritual itself, inculcated morality in prospective and raised Master Masons. Masonic Temple architecture and décor typify Victorian moral environmentalism vis-à-vis the parlor, the Masonic Lodge a domesticated male space where significant numbers of bourgeois men (and women) acted out a particular and peculiar masculine moral geography.     

Feminist geographies in Norway from the turn of the millennium

Abstract

Based on an overview of feminist and gender research over two decades, this article reflects on feminist geographies in Norway within a wider political and social context. We identify eight broad, partly overlapping themes of feminist geography: rurality; development policies and practices; entrepreneurship and economic change; migration and mobility; children and youth; sexuality and health; landscape and place; and emotions and autobiography. We find that much of the research has been collaborative, interdisciplinary, multicultural, and transnational. Feminist geographies in Norway are characterized by increasing emphasis on multiple realities and situatedness, and focus on rights and power relations among men and women in all spheres of society, including academia. Yet the gender dimension has tended to focus on geographies of women, with few studies of masculinity. Inspired in part through feminist critiques of research practices in social sciences, a recent development has been autobiographical approaches examining the significance of personal lives and emotions for the research process. We conclude that feminist geographies in Norway are diverse, empirically and contextually informed, and have become embedded within several fields of human geography.     

The political geographies of D/decolonization: Variegation and decolonial challenges of /in geography

Anglophone and North Atlantic geography is enmeshed institutionally, epistemically and racially in colonial modern privilege, highlighting the urgent task of addressing its modes of theorization, interpretation, and research. Decolonizing analysis builds from postcolonial, critical, feminist and racism critiques, and problematizes accounts of knowledge, subjectivity and power. In pursuit of decolonizing knowledge production and addressing global inequalities, this paper enjoins political geography to more systematically engage with decolonial analysis, conceptualization and theory. Political geography has much to contribute to interdisciplinary decolonial scholarship through contextualized, grounded, multiscalar and granular analysis of socio-spatial relations. The paper examines the common ground and potential tensions between Anglophone political geographies and decolonial theory (῾decoloniality’), then examines the case of Ecuador's politics of plurinationalism to illustrate a decolonizing political geographical analysis. The case highlights how the variegated political geographies of decolonization arising within and against coloniality require from political geography a decolonial turn, which would entail divesting core political geography concepts of western norms, including plural epistemologies of space and power in analysis, and recalibrating knowledge production processes.     

Tourism's labour geographies: Bringing tourism into work and work into tourism

ABSTRACT

Geographers have certainly contributed actively to the extant scholarly literature relating to tourism work and workers. Nevertheless, with few notable exceptions, most of this research has been piecemeal and case-based demonstrating unawareness of broader theoretical discussions and debates within the emerging sub-field of labour geography. For this special issue, a total of eight papers have been selected, most of which deal to varying degrees with labour mobilities, a theme that mainstream labour geographers themselves have largely avoided in the past. Additionally, the thorny issue of setting the intellectual boundaries between what constitutes work and leisure in contexts such as volunteer tourism is taken up in some of the discussions. Our aim with this special issue is to encourage the development of closer intellectual connections between labour geography and the study of tourism work and workers and their everyday mobilities.     

Canadian studies and American geography: trends and issues

Geography is perceived to be a relevant contributing discipline within a growing Canadian studies community in the United States, and the Association of American Geographers (AAG) retains a viable Canadian Studies Specialty Group. Since the early 1990s, however, the number of American geographers affiliated with Canadian studies organizations has not significantly increased: the community of scholars remains small and geography holds a peripheral position in terms of its actual contribution to US‐based Canadian studies programs. This article documents and interprets these trends using membership data collected by prominent professional organizations in Canadian studies and geography. It also explores the question of why American geography's Canadian regional specialists are not engaging formal Canadian studies initiatives in greater numbers. The observations that emerge suggest that a diversification of research themes in Canadian studies, particularly in the realms of environmental and physical science, would both increase participation by American geographers and enhance the field's ability to address pertinent aspects of the Canadian experience. Although observations presented pertain directly to the state of Canadian studies in American geography, they may also shed light on the lack of involvement by geographers in a variety of area studies fields in the United States and elsewhere.     

Praxis and theory in the writing of American historical geography

The use of primary sources in the writing of American historical geography is a relatively recent practice, and one which warrants more attention than it has been accorded. Of immediate appeal to historical geographers when they finally turned to primary sources were contemporary travel accounts, topographies and geographies. Because they were, and still are, much used, and because they reveal in simple and direct fashion the difficulty of encountering past “reality”, these kinds of material are the focus here. To turn from these essentially qualitative sources to more quantitative sources neither resolves nor avoids the issue we wish to raise, the problem of subjectivity. There are two sides to the problem of subjectivity; the first concerns the contemporary as observer and recorder of facts; the second concerns the latter-day scholar as observer and recorder of facts. The old conception of the geographer as an impersonal observer is no longer acceptable. In the quest for an understanding of the geography of the past, it may well be that “objectivity is the fruit of genuine subjectivity”, and that what is required is a collective effort of subjective scholars engaged in a continuing dialogue.     

Material and cultural consumption in Cuba: new reference groups in the new millennium

Reference groups serve as markers for citizen-consumers to determine tastes and preferences about work and material and cultural consumption. These groups have evolved slowly in socialist Cuba, mostly during the post-Soviet era. This paper examines the symbolism, roles, and meanings of three such groups: the Cuban Diaspora, Cuban Gen-Yers or Millennials (survivors), and entrepreneurs. A combination of these groups is changing values about a new consumption taking hold across the island and offers insight into material and cultural consumption.     

Improving the transition to university: introducing student voices into the formal induction process for new geography undergraduates

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the area of school to university transitions within geography. This article focuses upon one aspect of these transitions, namely the induction programmes offered by universities to their new undergraduates. It argues in favour of extending the length of the induction period currently offered by many institutions and incorporating student voices into the induction process through peer mentoring. In making this argument, the article reports upon the new Extended Induction to Geography programme that Newcastle University piloted for the first time in 2011–2012.     

Emotional geographies of veiling: the meanings of the hijab for five Palestinian American Muslim women

This article explores experiential and emotional dimensions of veiling practices, the ‘emotional geographies of veiling,’ in relation to Muslim women's community activism. By approaching the hijab as a symbol with both discursive effects and personal meaning – a psycho-social space – this article offers important insights into the intertwined, complex processes of internal embodiments and public manifestations of Muslim female identities. Based on the analysis of life narratives of five Palestinian American Muslim women in Milwaukee, a medium-sized city in the American Midwest, this article comes to the conclusion that public visibility through veiling entails both socio-spatial and emotional/internal processes. The analysis of these women's narratives explores how veiling practices can guide personal piety and self-transformation, and contributes to the solidification of a politically and religiously identifiable community.     

Anomalies in red and blue: Exceptionalism in American electoral geography

Red and Blue America has become the spatial metaphor for an electoral divide on two main dimensions – a nonmetropolitan Red and a larger metropolitan Blue, and a traditionalist Red and a more modern Blue. In this paper, we evaluate the validity and consistency of this conventional wisdom, using both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections results by county. While previous research has underscored the overall pattern and its accuracy, we choose instead to explore mainly the anomalous results: “metropolitan” or “modern” areas that President Bush carried, and “nonmetropolitan” and “traditional” areas that Democrats won. We develop a typology of the anomalous counties and carry out a simple analysis of characteristics that help show how and why they are anomalous. We then compare the 2000 and 2004 results to discover anomalous areas, counties which switched parties or which became more or less partisan. Trends between 2000 and 2004 suggest a weakening of the metropolitan and nonmetropolitan dimension but a deepening of the cultural one, although we note as well that most of the electorate does not place itself at these partisan extremes. We relate these findings to longer term structural changes in American society, and to Republican strategies to mobilize insecure voters. Finally, we lay out an agenda to look at a sample of counties, using qualitative methods, in order to understand these anomalous results.