Bipolar antagonism and multipolar coexistence: framing difference and shaping fear in two Caribbean cities

This article proposes a new approach to urban geographies of fear, focusing on the connection between fear and cultural understandings and representations of difference. Much of the existing work on the relationship between fear, urban space, and social difference tends to take social difference as more or less given. In this article, we argue that how differences (such as ethnic, political or class differences) are framed has strong implications for geographies of fear. The article suggests that dualistic and nondualistic framings of difference influence levels of fear and that this becomes visible in the use and perceptions of urban space, and in the built environment through the erection of physical barriers. These spatial factors, as they limit mobility and interaction, tend to reproduce the specific framing of difference. Two discursive modes of representing difference are discussed. The first, ‘bipolar antagonism’, is based on a dualist rhetoric of irreconcilable opposites. This is contrasted with ‘multipolar co-existence’, in which social categories are understood as multiple or hybrid, with flexible or fluid boundaries, and as not necessarily antagonistic. This argument is elaborated through a comparative analysis of social–cultural and spatial processes in two Caribbean cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and Paramaribo, Suriname.     

Regulating sex work in the EU: prostitute women and the new spaces of exclusion

Contemporary prostitution policy within the European Union has coalesced around the view that female prostitution is rarely voluntary, and often a consequence of sex trafficking. Responding, different nation-states have, however, adopted antithetical legal positions based on prohibition (Sweden), abolition (UK) or legalisation (Netherlands). Despite the apparently sharp differences between these positions, in this article we argue that there is now a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of street prostitution. Noting the forms of exploitation that nonetheless adhere to many spaces of off-street work, we conclude that the state and law may intervene in sex work markets with the intention of tackling gendered injustice, but are perpetuating geographies of exception and abandonment.     

Councils,consultations and community: rethinking the spaces for children and young people's participation1

The participation of children and young people in decisions that affect them is now mainstream in social and public policy in the UK. Yet for many young people formal participation opportunities are abstracted from everyday lives and concerns. Children may not feel empowered despite the existence of formal structures for participation. This raises questions about how ‘spaces’ for participation are constructed. This paper critiques prevailing models of participation in formal structures and instead, argues for the need to rethink children's participation as a more diverse set of social processes rooted in everyday environments and interactions.     

'Gendered Exclusions': women's fear of violence and changing relations to space

This paper examines how women's fear of violence is realised as spatial exclusions. Quantitative surveys on fear are used to show the number of women who are afraid, and the nature of the most frightening places. However, it is argued that quantitative surveys are of limited value in approaching the mental and social processes behind fear and in understanding the fear-related production of space. Qualitative research methods are used to explain the matter in more depth. It may be argued that fear is a consequence of women's unequal status, but it also contributes to perpetuating gendered inequalities. The paper reveals multiple experiences that change women's relations to space. Experiences and attempts at violence, and incidents of sexual harassment produce a space from which women are excluded on account of their gender. Social and emotional aspects, such as increased feelings of vulnerability, lack of social support, and a feeling of not having control over what is happening to oneself, have spatial consequences. These feelings often increase along with ageing, injuring, bereavement or moving to another place, as well as pregnancy and motherhood. I argue that the spatial exclusions in women's lives are a reflection of gendered power relations. Women's subjective feelings contribute to the intersubjective power-related process of producing space. Urban space is produced by gender relations, and reproduced in those everyday practices where women do not-or dare not-have a choice over their own spatial behaviour.     

The production of emancipatory feminist spaces in a post-socialist context: organization of Ladyfest in Romania

Ladyfest – a Riot Grrrl feminist do-it-yourself festival – has been organized independently in cities around the world since the year 2000. The emancipatory spaces that activists at Ladyfest seek to cultivate through workshops, music, and art provide seeds of inspiration for transformative social change. The main strength of the festival is the capacity to strengthen networks. This article discusses how the idea for this festival arose in Olympia, Washington, expanded to other locations, and was later organized by young feminists in Romania. In 2005, young women in Timisoara organized the first such festival in their city with a community of women from both inside and outside of Romania, and held another festival in Bucharest in 2007. Retrospective interviews are used to unpack the meaning of such organizing in a post-socialist context with reflections on how feminism has changed in Romania over the past decade. Specifically, the analysis of this event offers insight on how the production of space can be used to catalyze interconnections between emancipatory feminist spaces, the mode of production, and flows of feminist knowledge and concepts.     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students form a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

Spaces of the street: Socio-spatial mobility and exclusion of youth in Recife

The ‘street’ and ‘youth’ have long been issues of social concern and the subject of research both in Brazil and elsewhere. The perception and experiences of youth in relation to the street, however, and the corresponding gender and class relations which permeate these, remain an under-researched topic. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in low- and middle-income neighbourhoods in Recife, this paper shows how the street consists of different spaces and how the youth experience corresponding layers of socio-spatial exclusions and inclusions which vary over time.     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students from a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

Borderland spaces for learning partnership: opportunities,benefits and challenges

This paper uses case studies and secondary literature to critically examine how learning spaces inhabited by geographers might be used productively as borderland spaces for learning partnership. Borderland spaces are novel, challenging, permissive and liminal, destabilizing traditional power hierarchies. In these spaces, students gain confidence in accepting agency in learning, moving towards critical thinking and reflective judgement, thereby developing self-authorship. They acquire new knowledge, skills and facets to their identity. They also feel anxiety as they take on new roles and adopt a partnership ethos. Faculty must guide students to support their successful navigation into and out of borderland spaces.     

Accommodating Otherness: anti-asylum centre protest and the maintenance of white privilege

Geographers have recently progressed the debate on NIMBYism by demonstrating that opposition to new development is frequently motivated by white residents' desire to exclude non-white groups. In this paper, I extend this argument by exploring community opposition to a proposed accommodation centre for asylum seekers in Nottinghamshire (UK). Herein, I detail a rhetoric of opposition that ignored the multiple origins and ethnicities of asylum seekers to depict them as an undifferentiated Other group. Though local campaigners rarely referred directly to their own 'whiteness', I argue their campaign can only be understood within a racialized problematic, constituting an attempt to defend the privileges of an 'unmarked' whiteness against the imagined threat of a racialized Other. In conclusion, I argue that studies of NIMBYism must take careful account of the contingency of racial identities if they are to effectively contribute to the geographic literature that seeks to de-centre white privilege.     

Regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the English question

Amid the globalization of economic life and a myriad of powerful challenges to Westphalian traditions of political statehood, it is now routinely contended that regions are 'in resurgence'. Nonetheless, much of the debate on this purported regional renaissance is bedevilled by confusion over what scholars and activists mean by regions and an analogous mystification as to why some regions are 'successful', 'lagging' or 'different'. Our paper aims to instil some coherence to this debate by distinguishing between what we term regional spaces and spaces of regionalism . It then draws on this distinction to explore the institutionalization of England's South West region, highlighting some tensions which prevail over its economic future, its political representation, its territorial shape and cultural vernacular. In undertaking this, we demonstrate how the formation of any given regional map is reflective – and indeed constitutive – of an unevenly developing, often overlapping and superimposing mosaic of economic practices, political mobilizations, cultural performances and institutional accomplishments. This prompts us to question the currently fashionable inclination to fully jettison a scalar and/or territorial approach to the theory and practice of spatiality in favour of relational/topological/non-territorial approaches.     

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.     

Formative Geographies of Belonging in White Australia: Constructing the National Self and Other in Parliamentary Debate, 1901

The relationship between nationally unified calls for immigration restriction in the White Australia period and the emergence of an imagined national identity has been the focus of much valuable historical research. Through the method of content analysis, a geographical lens was used to re-examine the Commonwealth Parliamentary debates regarding the development of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and to provide empirical support to the existing scholarship. The content analysis provided statistical evidence for the ways in which immigration restriction in this specific historical context was legitimised and rationalised by social constructions that reproduced racisms. Constructions of the Self and the Other were fundamental in defining exclusion and inclusion during the White Australia era. The national Self was complexly defined by overlapping constructions of the Self as Australian, British (racially and culturally) and White. This is indicative of the tensions and negotiations between national interests and cultural, historical and ‘racial’ ties to Britain at the time. Additionally, content analysis provided nuanced insight into the ways in which the designation of inherent (and diametrically opposing) racial attributes to the White Self and non-White Other justified the ways in which ‘they’ were different from ‘us’. In this way the Other was characterised as an intrinsic threat to the development of the nation and the wellbeing of its peoples. ‘We’, on the other hand, were integral to the development of White Australia.     

Building heteronormativity: the social and material reconstruction of men's public toilets as spaces of heterosexuality

This paper concerns changes in the spatial structure of British public toilets for men over the last ten years from secluded, indistinctly public/private spaces towards open, largely public structures. It examines a number of past and present toilet spaces in the British city of Manchester using spatial syntax analysis to consider how spaces have been adapted and policed differently in order to reduce opportunities for sex between men. It considers how these changes relate to shifts in the legislative context and in planning and policing initiatives away from explicit homophobia towards policies of inclusion of certain sexual minorities. The paper concludes that the way in which inclusion and a post-homophobic context have been expressed through legislative changes and planning and policing initiatives in relation to public toilets has led to a more explicit heteronormalisation of public spaces. The discussion relates to current debates in cultural geography about the consequences of greater participation of sexual minorities in public and issues of surveillance, control and privacy in public spaces.     

Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts.     

Sharing public space across difference: attunement and the contested burdens of choreographing encounter

This paper concerns how claims to public space are negotiated between differently embodied subjects, and how forms of bodily articulation shape capacities for sharing space. Drawing on a study of outdoor access practices, entailing mobile video ethnographies with walkers and cyclists, it explores the corporeal mechanisms through which the entitlements of differently mobile subjects are asserted, resisted, circumscribed or accepted in the time-spaces of bodily encounter. How the signalling of ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ conduct influences how bodies are allowed to move in relation to other bodies is the focus. Mobilisations of speed, affective and sensory attunement, and techniques of bodily articulation, were found to be a key in the disciplining of cycling and walking bodies. This paper highlights the central role of attunement to, and concession of, hybrid subjectivity in the choreography of encounters, and, moreover, how related burdens of orchestrating coexistence are shared and struggled over amongst different publics. It demonstrates that whilst greater attunement can enable differently mobile subjects to develop a reciprocal choreography, expectations of such attunement can also undermine the ability to share space if not met. This paper thus raises the dilemma of when to accept or extend the limits of attunement in facilitating coexistence in public space.     

“All Gone Now”: The Material,Discursive and Political Erasure of Bank and Building Society Branches in Britain

Abstract: This paper examines an apparent anomaly that lies at the heart of processes of financial exclusion within Britain. Given that the branch networks of banks and building societies have shrunk in size by about one‐third since 1989, a period during which the Government has launched a wide‐ranging set of policies to tackle financial exclusion, why is it that the issue of branch closure has been neutralised as a political issue? After providing evidence to show the extent of branch closure in Britain and illustrating the ways in which geographical research in particular has drawn attention to the nature of this problem, we look at the way the issue of physical access to financial services has been discursively and politically marginalised. We undertake a detailed history of public policy in the area, and the ways in which research funded by industry bodies and Government departments has been used and framed to build a pro‐market, neoliberal policy programme that constructs branch closures as natural and inevitable.     

The Evolution of Ethnographic Research Methods: Curiosities and Contradictions in the Qualitative Research Literature

This article evaluates six recent contributions to the literature on ethnographic research methods. Four concern collecting and analyzing texts, one introduces the use of textual and numerical data, and one illustrates the use of quantitative methods for qualitative data. The first four books reveal that current thinking in qualitative methods continues to privilege inexplicit criteria for data collection and analysis despite recognizing that explicit criteria work best. The last two books show how to effectively integrate qualitative and quantitative data in ways that resolve these contradictions.