Global policy paradigms,gender equality and everyday lives in Beijing,Hong Kong,Seoul and Taipei

Focusing on the interface between gender equality, the labour market, and everyday lives in four East Asian societies – China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan – this article seeks to articulate the spatial expression and multi-scalarity of global governance and policy paradigms. It will demonstrate that whilst regions, places and people are influenced by global processes and paradigms, these move and embed in different ways across spaces, time and scales. In this context, the article seeks to develop a more nuanced appreciation of ‘the social lives’ of global policy models, engaging with the role of ideas and institutions and the interactions of transnational, national and local dynamics in the shaping of gender equality policies and everyday experiences. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei the article draws out the perceptions of individuals from different policy, sectoral, social and cultural settings of gender equality. It highlights the tensions and disjunctures between general principles and particular situations, and in embedding gender equality policies into the social imaginaries and everyday lives of women and men. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the role of place and power relations in shaping localized responses to and experiences of gender justice.     

Fluid lives: subjectivities,gender and water in rural Bangladesh

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh on arsenic contamination of drinking water, the article looks at the ways that gender relations are influenced by not just direct resource use/control/access and the implications of different types of waters, but also by the ideological constructs of masculinity/femininity, which can work in iterative ways to influence how people relate to different kinds of water. Conflicts and struggles over water inflect gendered identities and sense of self, where both men and women participate in reproducing and challenging prevailing norms and practices. As a result, multiple social and ecological factors interact in complex and interlinked ways to complicate gender–water relations, whereby socio-spatial subjectivities are re/produced in water management and end up reinforcing existing inequities. The article demonstrates that gender–water relations are not just intersected by social axes, as generally argued by feminist scholars, but also by ecological change and spatial relations vis-à-vis water, where simultaneously socialized, ecologized, spatialized and embodied subjectivities are produced and negotiated in everyday practices.     

Spatial extensions of childhood: from toy worlds to online communities

Digital technologies offer children opportunities to expand their everyday worlds and manipulate their spatial surroundings in real time. This article draws from ethnographic research in Helsinki focusing on children's sociality and technology encounters. Particular attention is given to techno-toys and online networking communities. Connections between companies developing digital technologies and children's everyday spaces give rise to new generational involvements. Adult-designed technologies support and exploit children's mutual relations, create opportunities for these relations, and are aimed at directing their course. Consequently, the fascination with commercial spaces is not surprising: they appeal to children by supporting their aims. The article suggests that in order to understand emerging techno-worlds that arrange, extend, and transform children's everyday doings, childhood scholars need to learn to ask questions that go beyond either/or stands. Only through a detailed understanding of the ways in which corporate offerings participate in, and promote, the production of everyday spaces for children can adults efficiently guide the very complex ways in which such spaces influence children.     

Chinese factor in the space,place and agency of female head porters in urban Ghana

Migrating from northern Ghana to the coastal capital Accra in search of work, female head porters (‘kayayei’) find themselves in social structures and spatial orders that are imbued with various relations of seniority and power that constrain newcomers' entrepreneurial options. Yet, with the recent arrival of Chinese entrepreneurs in the social arena of Accra's marketplace, these power relations and gate-keeping mechanisms have begun to change. In this article, we analyse how female head porters perceive and appropriate the opportunities that arise as a result of the Chinese being seen by both they themselves and others as outsiders to Ghanaian society. By unintentionally enabling head-load carriers to extend their actual and symbolic claims to spatial realms that they were previously excluded from, the Chinese traders are facilitating head porters' expanded role within the social construction of place and space in Ghana's main urban market centre. They are therefore altering the patterns of everyday interactions between these head-load carriers and their environment.     

Gendered and generational experiences of place and power in the rural Irish landscape

The out-migration of young people from rural regions is a selective and highly gendered process suggesting considerable differentiation in the way young men and women identify with and experience rural life. Gender imbalance in rural youth out-migration has prompted feminist researchers to consider more carefully linkages between the gendered nature of rural space and place and the social and spatial mobility of rural young men and women. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Irish fishing community, this article explores the gendered dimensions of rural youth experience. Theoretically grounded in the conceptual triad of gender, power and place, this article considers how young men and women experience ‘the rural’ as masculine and feminine subjects. Special attention is given to the ways in which relations of power in ‘the rural’ are articulated, contested and accommodated in the everyday lives of local young men and women. As well as highlighting the ways in which rural space and place is male-dominated, this article foregrounds other power relations at play in the rural. As part of this effort, I problematize male power and point to the ‘effectivity of girls as conduits of power’. I argue that subjectivities of intra-gender relations are a critical dimension of rural youth experience and cannot be overlooked in research on rural youth experience and emigration.     

Gender,Nations and States in a Global Era

Abstract. Nations and national projects are gendered in different ways. Feminist theory has raised important questions about the conceptualisation of ‘difference’. This article develops the conceptualisation of the different ways in which nations and national projects are gendered, arguing for a mid‐level conceptualisation of gender relations. It argues against, on the one hand, the excessive fragmentation of gender, and on the other, too simple dichotomies of mordless unequal gender relations. This draws on a theorisation of gender relations which connects the different dimensions into specific kinds of gender regimes, either public or domestic gender regimes. This enables us to conceptualise different national projects as having a more or less public or domestic gender project. The conflicts between different national projects and with other polities, such as states, are then conflicts between differently gendered projects. The usefulness of this mid‐level conceptualisation is demonstrated through examples of the competing relations between the UK, Ireland, the EU and the Catholic Church in a global era.     

Everyday nationalism and international hockey: contesting Canadian national identity

This paper examines how hockey is used to construct and demarcate the Canadian national community from external others, namely, the USA, Europe and Russia/USSR. The paper suggests popular nationalist narratives around the sport of hockey construct difference from external others in ways that place them in tension with state and corporate interests. Drawing on the concept of everyday nationalism, this article explores how the interplay between international competition, national identity and commercial sport has made hockey an ambiguous and contested national symbol in Canada.     

Banal and everyday (inter)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s–1914

This article explores the anarchists' multilayered theoretical and practical engagement with the concepts and performance of nations, nationalism and national belonging, by applying the frameworks of banal nationalism (understood as an ideology) and everyday nationhood (the daily practices in which nation and nationhood are enacted) as analytical categories, to investigate the Italian and French anarchist exile groups in London between 1870 and 1914. Adopting these theoretical categories proves fruitful in probing the anarchists' perception and enactment of the idea of nation and national belonging, contributing to the literature on the relationship between pre-1914 socialist movements and (inter)nationalism and highlighting the specificity of anarchism therein. Using Fox and Miller-Idriss's four categories of everyday nationhood, we show that while the anarchists explicitly subverted the everyday performance of nationhood, redeploying it along internationalist lines, some forms of attachment to the national did endure and were in fact not always contradictory with anarchist internationalism. Looking at the exilic rituals of this intensely diasporic group thus complicates the simplistic but still pervasive view of a monolithic ideological internationalism and rejection of the national on the part of anarchists.     

Global flows and everyday violence in urban space: The port-city of Buenaventura,Colombia

Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban space? I suggest an analysis that links the production of urban space through everyday practices to the notion of violence as inherent to urban power relations on the one, and to the role of global flows of goods in urban space on the other hand. The main argument is that, global interconnections through the port are not decoupled from, but rather constitute a condition for violence in Buenaventura, particularly in neighbourhoods next to port terminals. This urban space is constituted both by daily violence and by stretching along global supply chains. Both violence and the secured, off-access port spaces shape, transform and limit inhabitants' mobility, while they enable global flows. I identify coping strategies such as mapping safe spaces, accompaniment, adaptation of movement to zig-zag patterns, and organised spatial strategies. The article contributes to recent debates on violence and the everyday, and urban space shaped by violent global-local encounters.     

Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.     

Bodies that sweat: the affective responses of young women in Wollongong,New South Wales,Australia

I argue that people's bodily sensations of sweat – smell, touch and sight – can provide insights to the relations between subjectivity and space. I draw on feminist ideas of the body as a physiological, psychological and sociological assemblage out of which spatially situated knowledge, ethics, subjectivities and social relations are forged. Empirical evidence is drawn from self-reflexive accounts of 21 young women living in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Their narratives convey how sweat and sweatiness are integral to negotiating everyday life. First, participants' narratives illustrate the way the sweaty body-as-seen is bound up with gendered identities and self-disgust. Second, visceral experiences of the materialities of sweat and sweatiness often give rise to a heightened sense of bodily awareness, self and spatial marginalisation in the course of everyday lives. Third, participants' narratives highlight the tensions of spatial experience of sweat and sweatiness that simultaneously attract and repel bodies. Visceral experiences of sweat and sweatiness are central to better understanding of the spatiality of subjectivity.     

Virtual youth: non-heterosexual young people's use of the internet to negotiate their identities and socio-sexual relations

This article explores the ways that non-heterosexual young people are negotiating their identities and socio-sexual relations on the internet in the UK. Drawing on the key concepts of embodiment and performativity, and based on in-depth qualitative research with non-heterosexual youth and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth workers, this article investigates the use of social networking websites which have been specifically designed for LGBT users, and the connections between virtual and material spaces in young people's everyday lives. This research reveals that although the internet is an important medium through which new and existing socio-sexual trajectories are being negotiated, there is also a more complex and multi-dimensional relationship between young people's online and offline realities.     

Home as a Pocket of Local Order: Everyday Activities and The Friction of Distance

Discourse on the information society currently highlights issues of networks, flows and mobilities as prime organizers and re‐organisers of time—space relationships. Such discourse promotes notions of the flexible use of time and space, of people's decoupling from place and even of the end of geography — the belief that distance does not matter. Yet, in this article we argue that the roles of geographical stationarity and proximity in everyday life — understood as the creation and maintaining of pockets of local order — indicate the continuing and often neglected importance of the friction of distance. We demonstrate this empirically by focusing on the home as a pocket of local order, investigating the intensity and spatial extension of people's everyday activities, projects and contacts — their corporeal, virtual and medial (media‐related) mobilities — with the world outside. We support our thesis with data from the population, household and individual levels.     

What is national self‐determination? Nationality and psychology during the apogee of nationalism*

Abstract. The idea of national self‐determination propounded at the 1919 peace conference centred in Paris marked a new era in international relations. In this article I re‐examine the history of the idea of national self‐determination in this period by situating it in the context of ‘the psychological turn’. I argue that national self‐determination came to serve as a popular philosophical basis for post‐war democracy among Entente liberals at a time when the Enlightenment equivalence between democracy and ‘self‐determination’ was under challenge from new scientific depictions of the unconscious and irrational, and the biologically determined self. The focus of my discussion is the psychological discourse that threaded through the versions of national self‐determination articulated by British and French intellectuals during World War I.     

身份、流动与权力:街头摊贩的空间实践

城市公共空间的意义与秩序,建构于使用者利用空间并遇到相关主体的日常场景中。论文以空间实践为理论视角,搭建涵盖身份、流动、权力的分析框架,发掘开封小吃夜市摊贩的身份属性与流动特征,探寻边界和节奏同权力运作的关联。研究认为：①回族摊贩为夜市赋予民族特性和地方性特色,回族社区是塑造从业身份的引力场;②摊贩通过短距离流动将集体社会文化属性嵌入空间,造就夜市和清真寺的空间邻近关系;③夜市的正规性附着于空间边界,场所的可占据性呈现于时间节奏,反映出权力运作依赖于空间资源的有限性与区位条件的差异性。空间实践能够为解释空间变迁中意义与秩序的形成逻辑提供理论框架,此案例分析可为公共空间的长效治理提供政策启迪。     

New‐Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint,Brooklyn

In response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality of gentrification‐induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinking the concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact of new‐build gentrification on the everyday place‐making abilities of Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of the agency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenants who struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre's spatial triad and Blomley's work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everyday displacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition, appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.     

Gendered mobilities and border-crossings: from Elbasan to Athens

The study of migratory movements, with all their changing features in the context of post-1989 political, economic and geographical restructurings, offers a prime site for reflection on the gendered meaning/s and content of mobilities and borders. Particularly in human geography, new questions and different approaches to established themes in migration research are elaborated in this ‘era of globalisation’. Negotiations of geographical and social borders and boundaries, the speed and ease of movement, but also gender inequalities in choice and cases of immobility and/or enclosure, emphasis on agency and the importance of space and place are some such themes and questions. This article is based on research with migrant women in Athens; it follows the trajectories of an Albanian woman from Elbasan to Athens as a starting point for the discussion of gendered practices and perceptions of migration, (im)mobility and border-crossings. In these trajectories, space is involved, in its material aspects but also in terms of representations and codings. Notions of place, local/global relations and gender identities are re-worked in the efforts to set up bearable everyday lives ‘here’, while maintaining links ‘there’. At the same time, ‘here’ (in Athens) and ‘there’ (in Elbasan) come out as open and temporary while borders are (re)produced, negotiated and challenged in multiple ways and at various spatial scales.     

New visual methods for teaching intersectionality from a spatial perspective in a geography and gender course

Intersectionality is a complex concept to deal with when doing research but also when teaching the interrelationships between space and social relations. Here we present “Relief Maps” as a visual tool for teaching intersectionality and its spatial dimension in higher education courses. “Relief Maps” are a model developed for research and applied in a Geography and Gender course at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) with the aim of promoting student reflection on the relationships between power structures, places and lived experiences, starting from their everyday lives.