The role of fluctuating soundscapes in shaping the emotional geographies of individuals living with Ménière’s disease

Abstract

The potential for everyday soundscapes to evoke diverse emotions amongst different cultural and acoustic communities is increasingly recognised within the literature. However, few studies have examined how these soundscapes can shift with the onset and progression of specific hearing impairments. This paper explores such shifts, drawing on a series of in-depth narrative interviews conducted in the south west of England with individuals diagnosed with Ménière’s disease; a long-term progressive vestibular disorder characterised by episodes of vertigo, tinnitus, sensorineural hearing loss and, for some people, hyperacusis (high sensitivity to sudden irregular sounds). Located in the subfield of ‘emotional geographies’, the paper discusses how participants were forced to connect with and attune to previously unremarkable aspects of their everyday soundscapes in ways that were both emotionally and socially challenging. Four aspects of participants’ embodied, emotional soundscapes are critically explored: hearing life in ‘2D’; corporeal and environmental ‘sonic intruders’; corporeal sound ‘symbols’; and seeking to regain a semblance of control through soundscape (re)-negotiations. Such insights are important to inform conscious acoustic design efforts that respect the ‘ears and voice’ of people living with varying levels of auditory sensitivity, rather than urban and community planning policies that continue to prioritise vision and transit.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Making a Home in Gold-rush Victoria: Plain Sewing and the Genteel Woman

In the rush to be rich, contemporary commentators warned that not everyone was suited to life on Victoria’s goldfields. Women unfamiliar with household labour or exertion were cautioned to remain at ‘home’. This article explores the genteel women who migrated to Victoria during the first two decades of the gold rush, and how they negotiated the British ideal of genteel leisure against the demands for domestic labour in the colony. In particular, it interrogates the often-mundane plain sewing practices necessary to make a new home alongside the push for a colonial genteel industriousness, demonstrating how women manipulated standards of living through everyday material practices.     

White noise: sound,materiality and the crowd in contemporary heritage practice

Sounds of our Shores was a joint venture between the National Trust and the British Library that employed a crowdsourcing methodology to create a permanent archive of British coastal sounds. In this paper I pursue a critical analysis of that project in order to problematise the recent emergence of practices aimed at capturing and preserving everyday sounds as ‘sonic heritage’. More broadly, I use the case study to think through two trends in contemporary heritage practice. These are, first, a turn towards crowdsourcing as a means of democratising representation, and, second, a current trend towards the accumulation and preservation of an ever-broader range and mass of materials as heritage. The framework for my analysis is provided by a dual reading of the term ‘white noise’. Thus, for my purposes, ‘white noise’ describes both an acoustic phenomenon (the product of every possible frequency sounding simultaneously; a sonic expression of perfect equality and perfect chaos), and a particular mode of racialised sound production and audition, modulated and constrained by whiteness. White noise displaces and silences its Others. The white ‘listening ear’, to borrow Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman's terminology, is either deaf to, or appalled by, the sounds those Others make.     

A Visceral Politics of Sound

Questions of bodies and embodiment are a critical focus for geographers. In this paper we advance discussion of the mobilisation of bodies that investigates the interconnections between the visceral and discursive, through paying attention to the affordances of sound. We draw on our ethnographic research of the Climate Camp parade held during October 2009 in Helensburgh, New South Wales, Australia. Using feminist theory and visceral understandings of socio‐political life, we explore sounds to illustrate how people's beliefs about climate change are mobilised at this parade. We argue that visceral experiences of the rhythmic affordances of sounds—flow, pulse and beat—provide us insights as to how people are mobilised into action. Our results explore bodily judgements of sounds to illustrate how a visceral approach can help to mobilise bodies in ways that can both upset, and reproduce, particular beliefs, subjects and places.     

Socio-cultural proximity,daily life and shopping tourism in the Dutch–German border region

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses feelings of socio-cultural proximity and distance with a specific focus on the tourist experience in cross-border shopping and everyday life practices in border regions. We examined shopping practices of Dutch border crossers who visit the German town Kleve in the Dutch–German border region. This particular border context has allowed us not only to reflect on a multidimensional approach towards socio-cultural proximity and distance, but also to examine how these different dimensions express themselves in the tourist experience when it comes to people and places that are geographically ‘close’ but assumingly socially and culturally ‘distant’ from home. Although some differences prompted feelings of discomfort, in particular, differences in social engagement, feelings of comfort stand out in our analysis of cross-border shopping tourism. Furthermore, our study shows that shopping tourism and exoticism, on the one hand, and everyday routines and the mundane, on the other hand, are closely intertwined in the lives of people living in a border region, resulting in a fluid interpretation of the exotic and the mundane in the cross-border context.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

Voice: sonic geographies of childhood

This article uses the sonic geographies of childhood as an entry point into long-standing and important debates in the sub-discipline on ‘voice’. The article uniquely explores children’s voices from the past through considering a different type of research material – archival audio recordings. It argues that literally listening to past children’s voices (and noises, sounds and silences) can offer fresh insights into the concept of voice that tends to be associated with contemporary contexts. Drawing on archival encounters with ‘second hand’ field recordings of children across different schools and playgrounds in London in the 1960s, this article engages and extends wider theoretical debates about childhood, voice and memory. The article calls for more attention to the unique characteristics of sound and wider soundscapes of childhood. The article critically reflects on the possibilities and tensions associated with such work.     

‘Fundermediaries’ in Nairobi,Kenya: Development Partnerships in the Aid Chain

By representing the voice of communities, community-based organizations (CBOs) are increasingly joining development partnerships. This article explores the inherently contradictory relationship between ‘voice raising’ and the politics of listening. While academia has mostly focused on the inclusion of CBOs, few studies have approached this subject from the perspective of the listening practices of ‘fundermediaries’ (a portmanteau term combining ‘funder’ and ‘intermediary’). This ethnographic research on a CBO led by male sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, illustrates that the listening ability of fundermediaries hinges on their position in the aid chain, and specifically on the dynamics of their own accountability. The analysis distinguishes between two partnership types. The first uses a pragmatic approach, which ultimately limits the channels for CBOs to be included and heard, resulting in them having to ‘make noise’ to ensure they are heard. The second creates more possibilities to listen, engages in constructive dialogues with partner CBOs, and includes the ideas and expertise of CBOs in development strategies; hence, CBOs feel heard and are positive about these partnerships. Improved listening practices facilitate opportunities to reconfigure the position of the different actors in development partnerships and can benefit both the positions of CBOs in the aid chain and the programmatic outcomes of fundermediaries.     

Becoming (ethnic minority) teenagers: a practice study of emotional well-being at a Danish sports school

This article explores how everyday school life interacts with students’ practices of ‘becoming teenagers’ at a Danish school, analysing how age and ethnicity intersect with emotional well-being. The article builds on an ethnographic study at a public sports school following ethnic minority and majority students in two school classes from the fifth to seventh grades. Taking a practice approach, the article first analyses school as a social site before turning phenomenological attention to experiences and expectations of becoming teenagers, focusing on the experiences of ethnic minority students. The article addresses how school as social site constituted by discursive, material and social arrangements shapes a normative linear process of becoming at school, that is, becoming a responsible, healthy, Danish citizen. Consequently, dissonance between embodied being and expected normality affects the emotional well-being of ethnic minority students, whose transnational practices are constrained within a national practice architecture.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.     

‘Homes’ and being ‘at home’ in New Zealand: women's place-making in internationalised higher education

Research on students' experiences in internationalised higher education largely assumes students' autonomy and privileges their public selves. New Zealand research is no exception. Little attention has been paid to students' lives beyond classroom contexts; how national policy and institutional practices shape students' everyday experiences and ‘home’ lives similarly and differently. In addition, gender is afforded scant attention or considered only as a secondary concern, and people whose partners or family members are international students are invisible. This article endeavours to address the relative inattention to gender in international education research and the invisibility of women whose partners are international students. It draws on data from interviews with 17 women involved in a broader doctoral research project during 2005 and 2006. The women were either migrant or international students or had partners enrolled as international students. The article uses ‘home’ as a lens for examining women's situated and transnational place-making and factors that promoted or precluded a sense of belonging in New Zealand. It draws connections between women's accounts of ‘home’ and feeling ‘at home’, and broader politics, policies and institutional practices in New Zealand higher education.     

Shaping childhood risk in post‐conflict rural Northern Ireland

The realities of the ethno‐sectarian conflict have dominated the analysis of social problems within the context of Northern Ireland (NI). As a result of this, issues such as non‐conflict related childhood risk have received less attention than in the remainder of the UK. However, with the rapidly changing agenda of the Peace Process there is now the momentum to take a broader approach to examining Northern Irish society. This paper examines children's own experiences of growing up in rural NI and explores their own and adults' perceptions of the risks that they encounter and the resulting constraints placed on children's activity outside the home. It is evident that the legacy and reproduction of ethno‐sectarian conflict still influences notions of fear and mistrust of ‘an ethno‐sectarian other’. However, as shown within this paper these fears run in parallel with other fears that are constructed around concerns over ‘everyday’ risks that are evident in the range of outdoor play practices reported by the children involved in the study.     

‘The meat market’: production and regulation of masculinities on the Grindr grid in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,UK

This article explores the regulatory practices that shape the production of embodied masculinities in profile pictures in the online dating app, Grindr. Mobile dating applications are becoming increasingly enmeshed in everyday socio-sexual lives, providing ‘new’ spaces for construction, embodiment and performance of gender and sexuality. I draw on 31 semi-structured interviews and four participant research diaries with men who use Grindr in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a post-industrial city in North East England. Exploring the ways men display, expose and place their bodies in online profile pictures, revealed the production of two forms of masculinity – hypersexualised masculinity and lifestyle masculinity. I argue that the regulatory practices that shape men’s bodies in everyday spaces work to produce these masculinities. I take a visual approach that pays attention to the spatial practices that produce pictures, but that also pays attention to other senses, particularly touch. Paying attention to the visuality of the Grindr grid enables an understanding of the instability of online/offline dichotomies, as it is the interactions of online and offline spaces that enable the production of digital masculinities.     

Turkish–Dutch mosques and the formation of moral subjects

This article explores how mosque spaces become everyday sites of ethno-religious subjectivation for immigrants and citizens originating from Turkey in the Netherlands. I argue that the symbolic and material constructions of mosques as simultaneously moral and moralizing spaces undergird the production of ethno-religious subjectivities through mosque-centered everyday practices. The articulation of Muslimness to Turkishness at mosques in culturally specific and gendered ways is crucial for the formation of a particular modality of the Turkish–Dutch self as moral subject. The ensuing incorporation of practices and activities that are deemed ‘secular,’ i.e. ‘cultural’ or ‘recreational’ to mosque services engenders a creative tension between the sacred and profane conceptions of mosque space. Mosque administrators and their congregations concur that recreational activities and quotidian accessibility to mosques are essential to the long term survival of Turkish–Dutch alterity, for mosques are spaces where children and youth are exposed to the performances of Turkish-Islamic morality and subjected to collective social control. However, the diversification of mosque services does not always sit comfortably with the meaning and use of mosques as sacred sites proper within a secularized framework. A creative tension between mosques as serene and pure spaces of the sacred and mosques as impure and immoral spaces of the everyday arises, as a result.     

Disturbing geography: obsessive‐compulsive disorder as spatial practice

This paper explores the spatial practices of obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD). It begins by introducing the key elements of the disorder: obsessions and compulsions. It then concentrates on obsessions and compulsions relating to fears of bodily contamination. Such fears necessitate the formation of psycho‐social boundaries in ways that are similar to agoraphobia and other mental‐health problems. Avoiding bodily contamination also involves complex spatial orderings to prevent the illicit movement of contaminants. The vital importance, yet fragile nature, of these spatial formations means that negotiating social space and interactions can be immensely fearful, and the OCD sufferer may retreat to the relative safety of home. However, the domestic is a space of ambivalent safety. Everyday objects become saturated with fear, transforming the experience of ‘home’. Boundaries and spatial orderings are transgressed in the movement of people and objects. Thus, the OCD sufferer is driven to (re)order space constantly, and in doing so often uses everyday materials in inventive ways. We critique the depiction of OCD as irrational and excessive, and set the creative practices of OCD in relation to the ‘slippage’ of Michel de Certeau's distinction between spatial strategies of domination and the art of tactical living.     

‘It’s good but it’s not enough’: the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions

Developing a critical analysis of the relational and situated practices of social policy, this paper draws on an evaluation of an early intervention project in Scotland (UK) where volunteer adult mentors supported young people ‘at risk’ of offending or antisocial behaviour. Contributing to ‘enlivened’ accounts of social practice, we explore how practices of mentoring developed through the co-presence of mentor and young person in the often transitory spaces of care which characterized the ‘diversionary activities’ approach in the project. We expand the notion of the relational in social practice beyond the care-recipient dyad to include wider networks of care (families, programme workers, social institutions). The paper explores how such social interventions might both be ‘good’ for the young people involved, and yet recognize critiques that more individualized models of intervention inevitably have limitations which make them ‘not enough’ to deal with structural inequalities and disadvantages. Acknowledging the impacts of neoliberalism, we argue critical attention to diverse situated relational practices points to the excessive nature of engagement in social policy and provides scope for transformative practice where young people’s geographies can be ‘upscaled’ to connect to the realms of social policy and practice.     

Water,skin and touch: migrant bathing assemblages

This paper offers a contribution to cultures of urban water research through household ethnographies conducted with 16 participants who migrated from Burma to Sydney, Australia. We draw on a strand of corppreal feminism and offer the concept of bathing assemlbages to interpet how watery skin encounters provide clues to how participants washed themselves in their ‘home’ country may presist, transform or stop. Our analysis maps how dimensions of the self (ethical, gender, class, ethnic, national faith and others) are constituted by, and generative of, the felt intensities of watery encounters through different bathing assemblages. This paper illustrates how bathing practices are shaped as much by emotional and affective intensities as by reasoned activity. We show the utility of corporeal feminism not only for theorising subjectivity, but also for household sustainability politics.