Duty to God/my Dharma/Allah/Waheguru: diverse youthful religiosities and the politics and performance of informal worship

This paper draws on a case study of the Scout Movement in the UK to explore the everyday, informal expressions of ‘worship’ by young people that occur outside of ‘designated’ religious spaces and the politics of these performances over time. In analysing the explicit geographies of how young people in UK scouting perform their ‘duty to God’ (or Dharma and so forth), it is argued that a more expanded concept of everyday and embodied worship is needed. This paper also attends to recent calls for more critical historical geographies of religion, drawing on archival data to examine the organisation's relationship with religion over time and in doing so contributes new insights into the production of youthful religiosities and re-thinking their designated domains.     

Tag,you're different: the interrupted spaces of children at risk of anaphylaxis

Several contributions to understanding the emotional aspects of everyday lives have been made by geographers. What we undertake in this research is to focus that lens on the emotional context of experiences of children at risk and in particular on anaphylactic risk-scapes, particularly within the school environment. This research attempts to go beyond the policy response by privileging the voices of the affected children (and their parents) in order to understand the emotionality of their risk experience; how it is articulated and negotiated in place, and how bodily boundaries are interrupted. Qualitative methods were used to explore children's perceptions of, and experiences with, anaphylactic allergy in the school environment. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 children (aged 8–12 years) and 10 adolescents (aged 13–17 years) and their parents. Children were also asked to draw a picture of ‘what it was like to live with a severe food allergy’ and to then explain their illustration. Results revealed how the spaces of children at risk of anaphylaxis were interrupted; social spaces were interrupted through their bodily experiences of risk as they negotiated in and through school environments. These findings suggest allergic children contest school and policy constructions of ‘safe place’ through the interrupted spaces and bodily disruptions of emotion.     

Spaces of Wellbeing for People with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the geography of health in the concept of ‘wellbeing’, as it provides a fuller understanding of health, builds in embodied experiences, and accounts for the socio-spatial relations and contexts that shape health. The paper sets out the case for using ‘wellbeing’ to rethink the poor health outcomes experienced by people with learning disabilities, which conventional tools of healthcare and health promotion have failed to address. Shifting the focus of concern from the individualised objective ill-health of people with learning disabilities to a broader sense of emotional and social wellbeing and happiness, the paper argues that there is potential within learning disability spaces and networks for wellbeing to flourish, through greater self-determination and presence in and attachment to local places. The outcome is people with learning disabilities being able to find stability and build resilience in difficult bodily and social circumstances.     

Engaging in the disablement process over space and time: narratives of persons with multiple sclerosis in Ottawa, Canada

This article presents an interpretive analysis of the narratives of 15 men and women who have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) living in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Relatively little is known about how people who are affected by MS cope with the challenges posed by social and physical barriers in their environment. Our research investigates two objectives: (1) to explore how those who have developed MS cope with their disease and resulting impairments, both in terms of the bodily experiences of becoming a chronically ill person and in terms of how they cope with changing relationships, changing identities and challenges in their physical environment; and (2) how they engage in the process of disablement over time and space as a result of these changing social and spatial relationships. We argue that the physical body and its social placings in public and private spaces are intertwined and both affect experiences of health, ability, impairment, disability and chronic illness. We further argue that these relationships are experienced across time and space, and in place, as people who have developed a chronic illness, such as MS, engage in, with and through the process of disablement. This article demonstrates the need for researchers to pay more attention to the role and significance of the simultaneity of space, place and time in shaping the experiences of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, as it has been shown that these variables played a significant role in regulating the everyday experiences of this study's respondents.     

Change within the change: pregnancy,liminality and adventure tourism in Mexico

Abstract

Despite the growing number of pregnant women engaging in outdoor adventure activities, very few studies have explored pregnancy or the specific needs and challenges of pregnant women in tourism research. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine the participation of pregnant women in adventure tourism through the theoretical lens of liminality. Conceptualising pregnancy as a liminal stage in which women are ‘suspended’ between two statuses, opens diverse possibilities to delve into women’s experiences of embodiment, bodily image and control. In this sense, pregnancy is understood as an ‘internal change’, which adds specific challenges to women’s practice of adventure tourism, including bodily changes and different perceptions of risk-taking. Similarly, the context of adventure tourism provides an ideal space to reflect on liminal transitions and the ‘outside changes’ that pregnant women go through in the predominantly masculinised spaces that characterise this tourism segment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 Mexican women who actively pursue adventure tourism and who had engaged in these activities during at least one pregnancy. The analysis indicates the importance of norms and social expectations experienced by pregnant women when doing adventure tourism. The concept of the ‘rhizomatic body’ proved to be a valuable tool when looking at the social taboos, prohibitions and rules that apply to pregnant women in specific sociocultural contexts (in this case, Mexico). By reframing and reconceptualising pregnant women and their practice of adventure activities, the social construction of pregnancy is elucidated. Finally, the study contributes to the understanding of alternative models and experiences of being a woman in gendered spaces, while shedding light on relevant behavioural patterns among pregnant tourists and the sociocultural impacts of these patterns.     

The comfort of the river: understanding the affective geographies of angling waterscapes in young people’s coping practices

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic research with angling intervention programmes working with ‘disaffected’ young people in the UK to demonstrate how young people use the affective geographies of waterscapes to regulate their feelings and escape stressful lives. But rather than interpret the restorative or therapeutic quality of waterscapes as the consequence of (passive) immersion into green/blue spaces, we argue that ‘comfort’ is derived from an ongoing, active engagement with(in) the world. Drawing on works influenced by phenomenological theories and relational understandings of the more-than-human world, we illustrate how the affectual qualities of waterscapes are continually ‘woven’ into being through the material and embodied practices of young anglers. However, understanding why waterscapes ‘matter’ to young people also requires accounting for those assemblages originating in the past that shape these co-experienced worlds.     

Scaling from ‘below’: practices,strategies and urban spaces

Over the last 10 years, scholars in human geography have been paying increasing attention to the social construction of scale. Most of this literature takes its starting point in discourses of globalization and the way in which re-definition of scales operates through global political economics. This article is starting from an acknowledgement of the value of the scale debate for the analysis of urban everyday life and urban politics. Briefly, we reconsider the debate, in particular emphasizing the urban question as a scale question. However, we also identify some shortcomings in the debate so far. Even though many authors forward a conception of scales as relational, it is argued, they are often caught in a ‘hierarchical’ view of ‘scaling from above’. This is the background for an attempt to reverse the debate and consider the construction of urban spaces ‘from below’—from the practices and strategies of ‘ordinary’ people and organizations in the city. The interest in this article is how the diversity of everyday practices and politics interact with other scales in the construction of urban space.     

Mapping reflexive communities: visualizing the geographies of emotion

Whereas ‘simple modernity’ was characterized by objective space, the grid of the map, and a removal of all subjective symbols or signs, ‘reflexive modernity’ is characterized by a re‐subjectivization of space. Within this space ‘reflexive communities’ emerge to make sense of emotions and experiences, reflecting particular ways of behaving, thinking and being. As geographers one task facing us now is to visualize and map the spaces of reflexive modernization. This paper presents a means of visualizing the text of emotions uncovered in the research encounter—a way of ‘mapping’ reflexive communities—and shows how we can articulate, negotiate and represent, complex emotional landscapes. The ‘maps’—which draw on spatial metaphors that permeate everyday emotions—such as ‘distancing’ ourselves, ‘engaging’, ‘joining’, ‘feeling detached’, ‘embracing’—were developed initially through analysis of in‐depth interviews with long‐term sufferers of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Although the key focus of the paper is the experience of long‐term illness, the method of visualizing emotional geographies of everyday life could be applied in any number of fields. As such, it adds to the search across the social sciences for understanding the reflexive nature of contemporary space.     

Rights,participatory spaces and the daily fabric of children and young people’s voices in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

The past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in public policies aimed at hearing children and young people’s voices, which typically entail creating supportive participatory spaces. While this political project is usually presented as a radical move towards a more inclusive society, it raises critical questions about whose voices are being represented, how, why, by whom and for whom. Drawing upon recent ethnographic research on childhood and youth policies in Switzerland, this article explores how children and young people’s voices are produced in concrete situations. It studies how the institutional and material characteristics of participatory spaces and situated interactions shape which voices will actually be heard. The research highlights that, despite their inclusive ambitions, participatory spaces paradoxically exclude young persons who fail to articulate, orally or in written, linguistically, morally or politically legitimate voices.     

Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in Azerbaijan

While Michael Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’ points to the significance of the trivial reproduction of national representations in everyday routines, feminist political geographers have highlighted how the nation is brought into being through embodied and emotional practices. Building upon and extending these notions of the nation as represented and embodied, the paper argues that the nation also takes shape through bodily encounters and joyful as well as painful affections. In what we call ‘affective nationalism’, the nation emerges in moments of encounter between different bodies and objects through embodying, sharing, enjoying or disliking what feels national. We combine a Deleuzian reading of affect that discloses the mechanisms of material becomings with feminist scholarship sensitive to how bodies affect and are affected differently by materially produced nationalisms. Based on ethnographic field research in Azerbaijan, which we present in three vignettes, we untangle the affective becoming of national bodies, objects and places during a publicly staged ceremony of the collective remembrance of martyr and the celebration of a national holiday within the realm of a family. The paper makes two contributions to researching affective nationalism. First, it enquires into how people identify with Azerbaijan through their capacities to affect and to be affected by what feels national and, second, it explores how affective nationalism can be captured through vignettes of affective writing.     

Really shit work? Bodily becoming and the capacity to care for the urban forest

The urban forest has a significant impact on the city’s social and ecological performance. However, shrinking space and resources needed to care for trees means cultivating community care for the urban forest is an increasingly salient issue. To this end, the paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the powers shaping people’s capacity to care for trees. It identifies the body as one of these powers and turns to Deleuze and Guattari for a theory of corporeality that illuminates the body’s role in the process of becoming a ‘bushcarer’. This highlights the trans-corporeal practices and encounters that endow people with the skills and desire needed to care for the urban forest. With the ethical utility of the body being debated by social and cultural geographers, this article defends its potential by suggesting the body and its encounters are deeply implicated in the development of a dyadic capacity to care for the urban forest. For urban forestry, this means community engagement might be framed as an ethical event that facilitates experiments in bodily composition that might change our ways of thinking, feeling, and being with the urban forest.     

The ‘voices’ of children: de‐centring empowering research relations

This paper examines some problematic methodological and ethical issues associated with in‐depth qualitative research with children. The discussion has wider resonance for qualitative studies of young people in ‘rural’ contexts. Particular ethical issues arise when researching with children, which are underpinned by children's relative powerlessness in society. With this in mind, the paper considers substantive strategies to promote ‘empowering research relations’, drawing upon an empirical study with children in primary school spaces. Re‐theorisations of identities and power as fractured, dynamic and contextual, suggest that research is comprised of specific moments or ‘research performances’. It is argued that developing empowering research relations involves negotiating such performances in ways that contest, or transform, dominant societal relations between children and adults. In this paper, I consider some of the specific, embodied performances involved in my research, to expose some of the complexities of power relations and negotiations within space. Bringing to light particular moments emphasises that power relations between children and adults are not reducible to the powerless and the powerful. It is also demonstrated that research performances are influenced and constrained by expectations placed upon adult and child practices in society and institutional spaces, and by researchers' own unconscious reproduction of dominant identities.     

Aging animal bodies: horse retirement yards as relational spaces of liminality,dwelling and negotiation

This paper investigates how animal aging and ill-health are managed, spaced, interpreted, and experienced within a horse–human relationship. It does so by exploring the active construction of ‘retirement’ as a legitimate category within the life course of an animal. The analysis is concentrated around the emergent spaces of horse retirement yards. Conceptualising retirement yards as liminal spaces of transition and transformation, particular consideration is given to the role of the yard manager in creating a good retirement for the horse. This includes negotiating and narrating figurative and bodily processes of animal aging with the distant owner. The paper reviews the yard manager’s careful enactment of re-wilding in the shaping of aged and unsound equine bodies, but also their authentic inter-weaving of practices of domestication. Balancing re-wilding and domestication, in both figurative and bodily form, appears central to securing dwelling-in-retirement on a retirement yard and therefore, successful animal aging. In accordance with the non-uniformity of liminality, however, the relational care practices which permit dwelling-in-retirement require daily attention. They remain subject to multiple potential sources of disruption, including those which extend well beyond the aged or unsound state of the individual animal.     

Taking a hike: exploring leisure walkers embodied experiences

This paper uses ‘walk-along’ interviewing to investigate embodied experiences of walking on the South Downs Way, a long-distance trail in southern England. Using a qualitative methodology – encompassing 93 walk-along interviews and auto-ethnographic reflections of two walker/researchers – it explores how walkers conceptualise their own walking experiences and captures this information while they are walking. It contributes to and extends the emerging body of literature which explores people’s experience, specifically aiming to develop a deeper understanding of leisure walking experiences in the dynamic space of the walk. It examines a range of bodily sensations and emotional states associated with the leisure walking experience in the context of temporal and environmental aspects, identifying those feelings that are innate and those which are mediated by external conditions. Current experiences intertwine with memories of other places and times in a process where connections are made between mind, body, the immediate physical environment, self and others, and disconnections from everyday life and the wider environment. These connections and disconnections create a sense of perspective, achievement and well-being.     

Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

Indigenous bodies,indigenous minds? Towards an understanding of indigeneity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article explores how perceptions about bodies and interpersonal exchanges contribute to the production of indigenous subjectivities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on feminist methodologies and experiences with Cofán, Quichua and Secoya peoples in the province of Sucumbíos, I reflect on how bodies and their ‘grammar’ can become analytical spaces through which to understand indigeneity. Specifically, I look at the body as object and subject of imaginaries of difference with the goal to examine how moments and interactions through which people commonly identify as ‘indigenous’ construct, contest and/or maintain indigenous subjectivities. I conclude with a discussion on the possibilities of thinking about and with bodies to further a post-colonial questioning of indigeneity.     

Safe Places in Domestic Spaces: Two-Year-Olds at Play in their Homes

This paper contributes to the growing research literature on children's ‘intimate geographies’ by focusing on two-year-old children's explorations and play within the domestic spaces of their homes. It draws on video data showing three young girls playing in selected home spaces i.e. a family grocery shop in Peru, the upstairs rooms of a house in America, and the balcony of an apartment in Italy. Through analysis of short video sequences the paper describes the way children use and invest meaning in these spaces. It is argued that the three domestic locations can be seen as ‘safe places’, in both material and personal senses; and that they enable children's sense of belonging, foster their ‘emplaced knowledge’ and build on their confidence to explore spaces further afield.