Ethics of care,emotional work,and collective action of solidarity: the Patronas in Mexico

In this paper, we examine the mobilization of the Patronas, a group of Mexican women who have fed thousands of Central American migrants over the past two decades. We argue that the Patronas’ work of feeding and caring for migrants goes beyond essentializing these women’s work as just housewives, mothers, and caregivers. Furthermore, we assert that through these care activities, the Patronas exert a feminist ethic of care that is understood as a set of practices based on trust, reciprocity, and solidarity. The Patronas’ praxis of caring for the migrants resonates with people and attracts hundreds of volunteers to join these women’s emotional and nurturing work leading these women and volunteers to participate in a political practice of solidarity. In this paper, we articulate three key findings: (1) the interplay between the Patronas’ emotional work and the ethics of care, (2) the emergence of a collective act of solidarity around the Patronas’ caring work that leads hundreds of volunteers to visit these women and join them, and (3) the kitchen as a place where the collective act of solidarity begins and where the Patronas experience their personal transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study contributes to further our understanding of the interplay between Latin American women’s participation in social movements, emotional work in these movements, and the ethics of care.     

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti-Trafficking in Nepal

In this paper, I explore how the diverse labour migration practices of people who challenge their state’s restrictive policies produce a form of stigma that extends from people to the places where they reside. Drawing on the findings of Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Nepal, I demonstrate how people residing in one such place attempt to undo stigma by adopting diverse practices amidst restrictive anti-trafficking and migration policies. I reveal a novel practice of prospective labour migrants negotiating and receiving money from their choicest mobility facilitators to assist their unauthorised labour migration. This exchange of money potentially criminalises prospective labour migrants, their family members, unlicensed and licensed recruitment agents, community leaders, anti-traffickers, government officials, hotel owners, transport service providers, and airport immigration officials as traffickers. Underscoring the collateral damage of anti-trafficking in Nepal, I assert that the exchange of money to facilitate unauthorised migration expands the remit of criminalisation of citizens as “traffickers”.     

‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people's everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young people's friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on children's independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.     

‘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.     

‘Looking alright,feeling alright’: emotions,sizing and the geographies of women's experiences of clothing consumption

Recent work within geographies of consumption has focused on the practices of consumption as a means to find out ‘what people do when they go shopping’. This paper argues that few of these accounts of consumption have considered the significance of emotions in understanding the intricacies of consumer experience. Drawing on material from research about women's experiences of clothes shopping this paper, therefore, utilizes recent work in the social sciences which understands emotions not as inherent or as induced by practices or commodities and instead emphasizes the intersubjective nature of emotions whereby emotions ‘are self‐reflective, involving active perception, identification and management on the part of individuals’ (Lupton : 16). In short, this view posits that the consumer has the capacity to ‘manage’ or to experience and re‐experience emotions in particular consumption moments. Such an understanding offers a conceptualization which does not conceive of women's engagements with consumer culture within a victim/resistance dichotomy, instead uncovering geographies of consumption in which women may feel uncomfortable or depressed in a particular moment but then engage in practices through which they experience that moment differently. These emotional experiences are explored through considering the significance of the spatialities of the changing room, shop floor and the corporeal space of the ‘sized’ body, and the consumption practices of cheating, coping and connecting.     

Occupational genders and gendered occupations: the case of water provisioning in Maputo,Mozambique

Taking issue with how associations between technical prowess or entrepreneurship and masculinity tend to be taken for granted or are seen as stemming from natural or intrinsic gender differences, over the last two decades feminist scholars have developed theoretical approaches to understand the gendering of professions and abilities as the performative outcome of particular cultures and histories. We build on these insights to explore how associations between masculinities, technology and entrepreneurship shape ideas and practices of small-scale water provision in Maputo. Our findings show how activities (i.e. technical craftsmanship, hard physical work) or abilities (i.e. risk-taking, innovativeness) regarded as masculine tend to be considered the defining features of the profession. This shapes how men and women make sense of and talk about their work, each of them tactically emphasizing and performing those aspects best fitting their gender. Our detailed documentation of men’s and women’s everyday involvements in water provisioning challenges the existence of sharp boundaries and distinctions between genders and professional responsibilities. It shows that water provisioning requires many other types of work and skills and male and female household members collaborate and share their work. The strong normative-cultural associations between gender and water provisioning lead to a distinct under-recognition of women’s importance as water providers. We conclude that strategies to effectively support small-scale water businesses while creating more space and power for women involved in the business require the explicit recognition and re-conceptualization of water provisioning as a household business.     

Nonsense and possibility: ambiguity,rupture and reproduction in children’s play/ful narratives

ABSTRACT

Play has been widely acknowledged as a site of important processes in children’s lives, ranging from socialisation to subjectification. Little empirical work, however, has focused on the particular features of play that mobilise criticality and contestation, or that alternately enable the micro-politics of exclusion. This article draws on school-based research in the west of Ireland with young children from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds. Centring on understandings of generational, gendered and raced belongings, it examines children’s narratives of play and playful narratives that de/reconstruct positionings in peer contexts and in broader societal spaces. More specifically, it explores how the in-between and ambiguous character of children’s play practices and playful speech contribute to such multiple sites of becoming. It concludes with a suggestion for further adult engagement with these play/ful political practices, and for consideration of potential links to ‘large p’ politics in children’s lives.     

Flogging Parsons? Australian Anglican Clergymen,the Magistracy,and Convicts, 1788–1850

In colonial Australian history the entanglement of clergymen, colony, and empire has made the Anglican clergyman one of the colonies' more controversial figures. Historical and popular understanding of this encounter has been overshadowed by the “flogging parson” and “moral policeman” traditions in Australian historiography. Centring on prominent parson‐magistrates such as the Reverend Samuel Marsden, prevailing interpretations have emphasized individual clergymen's efforts to inculcate convict discipline and deference. Examined collectively, however, a less negative and impressionistic picture of colonial clergymen emerges. In contrast with established views, this article demonstrates that parson‐magistrates consistently provided pastoral care and advocacy at the parish level, while as writers and activists they worked for the structural reform and eventual abolition of the convict system itself. Their collective efforts are the focus of this article, which in turn offers a fresh assessment of the encounter between clergymen and convicts in Australia before 1850.     

A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space

The attempted extirpation of Indigenous populations has been an enduring condition of the ‘idyllic proceedings’ of primitive accumulation. For Marx, such acts of evisceration characterised the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness of the West, is read here as one such ‘annal of mankind’ written in ‘letters of blood and fire’. More pointedly, by contributing to an interdisciplinary approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, it is argued that Blood Meridian should be considered a quintessential novel of the racial and historical geography of the frontier economy and its spatial expansion within the uneven conditions of capitalist development. This is evidenced through the real spaces and historical occurrences that shaped capitalist expansion recounted in the novel. The latter include the racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state between the 1840s and 1850s in Mexico through the actions of the Glanton Gang; the slaughtering of the buffalo that reached its peak in the 1870s marked in the novel by bonepickers that trawl the calcined architecture for skeletons to turn into commodities for the West; and the systematic mapping and simplifying practices conducted through outposts of appropriation on the frontier, such as Fort Griffin, which signal the barbed-wire fencing of rangeland into ranches. The meridian of bloodiness marked by these racialised acts is therefore revealed as an intrinsic aspect of the literary economy of primitive accumulation.     

Ordinary Geographies: Care,Violence, and Agrarian Extractivism in “Post-Conflict” Colombia

In Colombia’s agrarian spaces, war and extractivism are deeply entangled. Almost four years after the peace accords signed between the national government and the FARC guerrilla, post-conflict geographies are best characterised by the ongoing dispossession of local populations related to the entrenchment of extractivism. Drawing from ethnographic work carried out in the Colombian Caribbean on the ordinary practices and spaces of social reproduction, the ordinary geographies, this article explores gendered practices of care and their role in both sustaining and disrupting paramilitary violence and agrarian extractivism. The focus not just on the gendered effects of war and extractivism, but on gender’s constitutive role in the configuration of these processes and dynamics, allows us to contribute to recent literature on extractivism, dispossession and violence from a feminist standpoint.     

Networked practices of intangible urban heritage: the changing public role of Dutch heritage professionals

This study examines the changing roles of heritage professionals by focusing on the participatory practices of intangible urban heritage. Developments towards democratisation in the heritage sector led to a growing expectation that heritage professionals would work with local publics. This democratisation is manifested in (1) the use of digital media for grassroots heritage practices, (2) the broader scope of what is defined as heritage, and (3) a focus on communities in UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Heritage professionals are thus challenged to develop inclusive heritage practices, particularly in cities, which are characterised by a dynamic nature and cultural diversity. In this article, I analyse how urban heritage organisations and professionals have responded to these developments. Drawing on interviews and a qualitative content analysis of these organisations’ policy documents, I examine the ways in which heritage professionals reconsider their public role through what I define as networked practices of intangible heritage. This concept captures the networked structure in which heritage professionals increasingly work, and also demonstrates how heritage is given meaning through public practices that take place in both the physical and virtual realms of contemporary cities.     

Turn your trash into… Rubbish,art and politics. Richard Wentworth's geographical imagination

This paper analyses the photographs and installations of artist Richard Wentworth in order to examine his urban imagination and the cultural politics of rubbish that underlie it. In doing so this paper contributes more broadly to understandings of rubbish and material culture, and to geography's attention to artistic understandings and inhabitations of urban spaces. Central to this analysis are the geographies of Wentworth's work, its production, consumption and circulation. The paper attends to three nested sets of practices: the ‘everyday’ practices of people which draw Wentworth's eye, the potential of creative cultural practices for developing critiques of space and place, and the practices of the artist. As a result the paper pushes forward debates around the relationship between geography and art, reflecting on the analytical value of art practice to contemporary social-cultural geographies.     

Radical equality,care and labour in a community economy

The reproductive and care work predominantly undertaken by women has historically been undervalued in traditional measures of the economy. However, calls for more work, or better work for women (and men) doesn’t necessarily solve the issues surrounding waged labour such as zero hour contracts, the ‘double work day’, and other forms of increasing precarity and competition. In this article I explore how alternative forms of labour exchange in the Wellington Timebank provide one way in which subjects can partially operate outside the waged economy. I draw on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of how a radical equality underpins a democratic politics to explore the everyday negotiations around labour that occur in this alternative economy. I connect work being done by the Community Economies Collective to ideas of radical equality and a feminist ethic of care to show how embodied and everyday practices like timebanking enable subjects to challenge the inequalities of waged work and in Rancière’s terms, partially construct alternative ‘distributions of the sensible’.     

Claiming ‘creativity’: discourse, ‘doctrine’ or participatory practice?

Drawing on empirical work with a third sector community organisation in the UK and the young NEET adults (16–20 years old, ‘not in employment or education or training’) they ‘creatively’ work with, this paper explores the practices and meanings of creativity as they emerged through a project funded through public and third sector organisations. The paper argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between creativity as a process or method, evidenced in the approaches, practices and ethos of the community organisation I worked with, and the notion of creativity as productive outcome seen in wider policy. This is having an impact on the practices and values of community organisations, particularly as they are pushed to rationalise processes as a result of austerity measures. Indeed, in the era of wider public and third sector cuts, creativity as a process or method is becoming harder to sustain on a day-to-day basis.     

The spatial practice of public engagement: ‘doing’ geography in the South Wales valleys

This paper explores the spatial practices of public engagement through the consideration of an audio walk project that took place in Ebbw Vale in the summer of 2010. In the current political climate public engagement is often seen as a universal good, a way of demonstrating the productive dialogues that exist between ‘experts’ and their manifold publics. As studies in science communication have shown, however, this is a little misleading, for the term ‘public engagement’ masks a great diversity of projects and initiatives, which vary in the degree, methods and effectiveness of their engagement. In this paper, we argue that what is missing from many of these critiques is an attentiveness to the ‘placing’ and ‘spacing’ of our public engagement practices: where we work, who we work with and how we work all affect the nature, meaning and effectiveness of public engagement. Drawing on the idea of spatial practices, this paper explores the situated doing of the Ebbw Vale audio walk project.     

“Intellectually Promiscuous”: An Interview with Linda Hutcheon (Konstanz,September 19, 2013)

Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, was the University of Konstanz’s choice to give the prestigious Wolfgang Iser lecture in September 2013, which simultaneously opened that year’s annual convention of the German Anglistenverband (organized by Silvia Mergenthal and Reingard M. Nischik). Within this framework, Linda Hutcheon spoke to me about the development of various strands of thought in her impressive body of work—encompassing nine monographs, several collaborative books, and literally hundreds of articles and book chapters. We discussed the importance of crossing borders between disciplines, media, and nations, as well as of positioning oneself as a reader and critic. Other topics included her own intellectual background in comparative literature, in Canadian Studies, and in her more recent interdisciplinary projects on opera; recent developments in and since postmodernism; and the interconnections within her work on various practices of repetition with a difference, whether seen as postmodern, as parody, or as adaptation.     

Adam Boreel and Galenus Abrahamsz. Against constraint of consciences: seventeenth-century dissenters in favor of religious toleration

This paper examines two seventeenth-century works written by Adam Boreel and Galenus Abrahamsz, two most famous scholars among the Amsterdam Collegiants who advocated ideas in favour of religious toleration. This study is divided in three main parts. Firstly, I give historical information on the circumstances that led Galenus Abrahamsz to write his work. Secondly, I make a thorough comparison between Abrahamsz’s work and Boreel’s treatise, arguing that the latter exerted great influence on the former. However, despite major parallels, I also show that there are deep differences in their works. Thirdly, I argue that both Boreel and Abrahamsz pursued the same aim: to establish religious toleration among Christians. In the conclusion, I suggest that we should not regard Abrahamsz as a Collegiant himself, but only as a sympathizer of Collegiant ideas. I also suggest the significance of further studies on the Collegiants, their practices, and their ideas.     

The quality of (in)justice in London's magistrates' courts

Concerns about structural racism and policing have fuelled public demands in the US, UK and elsewhere to ‘defund’ and demilitarize the police. However, given the interlinked nature of the entire criminal justice system – the police, courts and prisons – further thought needs to be given to how the system should be reformed. This article summarizes research on the nature of injustice experienced in magistrates’ courts in London from the point of view of defendants from black, Asian and ethnic minority communities and ‘the precariat’.     

Poppies for medicine in Afghanistan: lessons from India and Turkey

This study examines India and Turkey as case studies relevant to the Senlis Council’s ‘poppies for medicine’ proposal. The proposal is that Afghan farmers are licensed to produce opium for medical and scientific purposes. Here it is posited that the Senlis proposal neglects at least three key lessons from the Turkish and Indian experiences. First, not enough weight has been given to diversion from licit markets, as experienced in India. Second, both India and Turkey had significantly more efficient state institutions with authority over the licensed growing areas. Third, the proposal appears to overlook the fact that Turkey’s successful transition was largely due to the use of the poppy straw method of opium production. It is concluded that, while innovative and creative policy proposals such as that of the Senlis proposal are required if Afghanistan is to move beyond its present problems, ‘poppies for medicine’ does not withstand evidence-based scrutiny.     

Crowded kitchens: the ‘democratisation’ of domesticity?

Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, interviews and ethnographic observation of kitchen practices in South Yorkshire (UK), we suggest that men's entry into the kitchen has facilitated the expression of a more diverse range of masculine subjectivities, while also creating new anxieties for women. Specifically, our evidence suggests that family meals may be experienced as a site of domestic conflict as well as a celebration of family life; that convenience and shortcuts can be embraced by women without incurring feelings of guilt and imperfection; that cooking is being embraced as a lifestyle choice by an increasing numbers of men who use it as an opportunity to demonstrate competence and skill, while women are more pragmatic; and that kitchens may be experienced as ‘uncanny’ spaces by women as men increasingly assert their presence in this domain. Our analysis confirms that while the relationship between domestic practices and gendered subjectivities is changing, this does not amount to a fundamental ‘democratisation’ of domesticity with significantly greater equality between men and women.