Challenging Hegemonies through Connecting Places,People and Ideas: Jan Monk's contribution to international gender geography (with particular reference to Spain)

The main goal of the paper is to study Jan Monk's contribution to the development of international gender geography, in particular in Spain. Our aim is also to explain the experiences and numerous connections among places, people and ideas that she has been weaving to foster international scholarship and, in this way, how she has challenged hegemonic approaches in feminist geography. Jan Monk comes originally from the Southern hemisphere and therefore she is well aware of the extent to which ‘Northern’ (or Anglo-American) ways of seeing the world define concepts, theories and ideas in geography (and also in feminist geography). Being an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ as well as her sensibility to the important of place has permeated Jan's contribution to international gender geography.     

Meaning,materials and melancholia: understandingthe Palace Hotel

Whilst social science has recognized that racist discourse often attempts to ‘fix’ outsider groups to particular locations, much less has been said about the locations themselves. The Palace Hotel is a prominent feature in gossip and public debate concerning the presence of ‘asylum-seekers’ in the seaside town of Southend-on-Sea, Essex. This paper considers why this is so. As a basis for the development of a theoretical model, the focus of the paper is outlined using a variety of qualitative sources, including interviews from the author's doctoral fieldwork. From here two distinct approaches are applied in order to explain how the Palace Hotel has become synonymous with the presence of ‘asylum-seekers’ in Southend-on-Sea. The first of these draws upon the social constructionist trend within geography that conceives of certain spaces as ‘marginal’. The second account engages with the often forgotten role that materiality plays in such constructions. It is argued that there is no need to choose exclusively between the two approaches because tensions can be resolved on the basis of a stratified realist ontology. The fundamental tenet of this ontology is that objects are permitted ‘relative autonomy’ from our lay or scientific knowledge about them. Central to the explanation offered is an examination of the opposing conceptions of temporality inherent to each account. Lastly, the psycho-dynamic ‘space’ between meaning and materiality is argued to be generative of a collective condition of melancholia. This insight is drawn upon in the recommendation of a coherent model for understanding the pronounced position of the Palace Hotel in discourse surrounding ‘asylum-seekers’ living in Southend.     

MATTER(S) OF INTEREST: ARTEFACTS, SPACING AND TIMING

This paper argues that time‐geography can make a contribution to contemporary ‘rematerialized’ geographies, because the interconnections among social processes, human corporeality and inanimate material artefacts within the landscape were among Hägerstrand's central concerns. Time‐geography needs none the less to be extended in several ways to make it more reconcilable with current thinking about materiality in geography. The possibility of combining Hägerstrand's framework with notions from (post) actor‐network approaches is therefore explored. It is suggested that concepts and notions from the latter may contribute to the advancement of the conceptualization of action at a distance and agency in general in time‐geography, as well as the incorporation of the immaterial realm into space—time diagrams. The resulting materially heterogeneous time‐geography is a framework for studying the spacing and timing of different material entities that is sensitive to the role of artefacts and their local connectedness with other material forms. Some of its elements are illustrated briefly through an empirical study of the roles played by a few mundane artefacts in working parents ‘coping with child‐care responsibilities on working days. The case study suggest that these artefacts not only enable goal fulfilment and routinization but also result in further spacing and timing practices, and can introduce uncertainty and novelty to existing orders.     

Feminist geographies in Greece: a personal trajectory between ‘local’ and ‘international’

Abstract

Feminist debates in the context of an active women's/feminist movement found their way into the Greek academy in the second half of the 1970s, initially in history. Urban studies and geography were ‘late-comers’ in these debates which took place in different disciplinary environments where geography courses were taught. The article presents a personal account in and through the development of feminist approaches in urban geography, drawing from my teaching and research experience since 1982 in a department of urban and regional planning. This experience has been accumulated as a hard exercise in navigating through the denial and reluctant consent of various levels of administration, students’ changing acceptance, some women’s valuable active support, in the university and beyond, and other colleagues’ opposition or indifference. In this process, recent and longer-term developments have contributed to form a (continuously negotiated and contested) space for feminism, for tolerance, diversity and difference, in which a ‘we’ has been tortuously formed which speaks across worlds, participates in a plurality of communities, communicates in more than one languages and in a plurality of voices between ‘local’ and ‘international’.     

Scaling health and healthcare: re‐presenting Thailand's HIV/AIDS epidemic with world regional geography students

Authors of world regional geography textbooks have recently become more interested in the broader theoretical changes that have emerged in human geography. Relying on feminist and other critical perspectives, concepts such as space, place and scale are being re‐imagined in this ‘new world regional geography’. This paper intervenes on behalf of a more critical world regional geography by suggesting how world regional geography teachers can educate students about scale as a social construction through the use of empirical data. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Thailand, this paper lays out a lesson on the HIV/AIDS crisis and how different representations of that crisis, from the national to the individual, offer different ‘ways of knowing’ the epidemic. Furthermore, this paper examines how we can push students to consider the ways in which scales of analysis are constructed and constituted through our own geographic practices.     

Queering code/space: the co-production of socio-sexual codes and digital technologies

The mutual production of space by sexuality and technology has been differently addressed in the often-disparate disciplinary pursuits of queer geographies and critical studies of technology in geography. Building on Dodge and Kitchin’s ‘code/space,’ we highlight how studies of technology in geography are already concerned with questions of sexuality through the examination of biopolitics and the regulation of bodies, together with the (re-)establishment of new and old lines between the public and the private. The immanence of sexuality in code/space foregrounds the importance of spatial processes characterised by their difference and normativity in the geographies of technology. Queer geographies critically examine such different experiences and processes of differentiation through space in their nuanced conceptualisations of spatial regulation and transgression. We illustrate how these two bodies of geographical scholarship might be synthesised by outlining three approaches for studies of ‘queer code/space.’ To show how there are a variety of relationships between sexuality, code, and space, we play on the double entendre of ‘code’ as a set of social rules and norms, and ‘code’ as the set of algorithmic instructions underlying software systems. In both senses, codes constrain forms of intimate life, but can also transgress, disrupt, and distribute the norm. To queer code/space is to emphasise the complexities of difference and normativity in living with technologies, where technologies might both proliferate and regulate socio-spatial experience.     

Budgie smuggling or doing bird? Human-animal interactions in carceral space: prison(er) animals as abject and subject

Carceral geography, whilst in dialogue with many aspects of theory-building in contemporary human geography, including notions of affect, mobility and embodiment, has yet to meaningfully engage with animal geographies to consider the nonhuman dimension of carceral experience. Likewise, criminological scholarship of human-animal carceral co-presence has yet to progress far beyond the consideration of animals as mere ‘signifiers’ of human endeavour and meaning. Further, the study of prison animals has thus far considered only those nonhumans intentionally present in carceral space, such as therapeutic animals, eliding completely those considered ‘vermin’. This paper broadens the scope of extant scholarship, considering the parallels between the discourses of the ‘rehabilitation’ both of prisoners and prison animals during incarceration, and of both the prisoner and the prison animal as abject.     

Revitalizing Economic Geography through Teaching Excellence: Some Pedagogic Reflections

In this position paper, the authors outline some of the pressing trends in the recent development of economic geography as a sub-discipline in human geography. In particular, they note the lack of critical discussion of important pedagogical issues in teaching what might be termed ‘new economic geographies’, and particularly those associated with the ‘cultural turn’. In doing so, the most challenging politics and practices of teaching economic geography are introduced. Drawing on the various contributions to this symposium, five areas for pedagogical developments and cross-fertilization are outlined.     

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.     

初论段义孚人本主义地理学思想的形成

1976年,人本主义地理学之父段义孚在《美国地理学家协会会刊》发表的论文中首次使用了"人本主义地理学"这一称法。人本主义地理学的出现由20世纪60年代末的人本主义思潮所带动,其通过关注人类自身状况而反映出与地理学学科的其他分支息息相关的各种现象,因而从属于地理学。段义孚将融合了地理学与哲学的、曾被称为"地理知识学"的学科推向一个新的高度。段义孚认为,"对生命意义的探求"是人本主义地理学的实质性核心,也是一直以来推动其进行人本主义地理学研究的动力。正如人本主义研究以人类的经验、意识以及知识为出发点,本文从人本主义视角出发,对段义孚人本主义地理学思想的形成过程进行系统化梳理。通过追溯段义孚人生经历中对其有重大影响的人物和经典著作,指出时代背景与个人经历共同促成段义孚人本主义关怀的形成。     

‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.     

From Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography

This paper charts one idiosyncratic and rather personalised path through the emergence of cultural geography in the Australian context. It takes as its example the transition from research which examines a category group identified as ‘urban Aborigines’ to more recent research of our own which looks at the theme of how Aboriginality is articulated in and through the space of the city. This transition provides a way of registering some broader changes within the sub-disciplinary field of cultural geography. The paper also reflects on recent criticism that a cultural emphasis detracts from the political edge of geographical research. The influential work of Fay Gale suggests that this claim is somewhat misplaced in the context of the development of the sub-discipline in Australia.     

他者,权力与地方建构:想象地理的研究进展与展望

本文通过对相关文献的梳理,对想象地理的理论起源及研究内容进行了总结与分析。根据想象的主体和想象对象的地理尺度差异,国外想象地理研究主要分为两个流派:一是探讨后殖民主义语境下"西方"对"东方"的文化形象的话语建构;二是研究"作者"通过地理文本的生产,以想象的方式对地方的文化形象进行重构的过程。同时,文章通过分析国外近30个实证案例,指出想象地理在地方的文化建构和空间文化意义的生产等文化地理重要话题的研究中都具有重要的作用,并据此对国内想象地理研究提出了展望。     

International conservation ‘volunteering’ and the geographies of global environmental citizenship

Growing numbers of fee-paying ‘volunteers’ leave the UK each year to work on international nature conservation projects. Powerful advocates argue that such volunteering offers active global environmental citizens the opportunity to make a difference, delivering public services through a politically and economically appealing model of social enterprise. This paper reviews the geographies of citizenship performed in international conservation volunteering from the UK to critically examine these claims. It draws on and develops three conceptual approaches from political geography. First, it examines international conservation volunteering as a mode of cosmopolitan global environmental citizenship, guided by the universal framework of natural science across a flat earth of difference making opportunities. Second, it reviews the material reality of conservation volunteering as an illustration of the neoliberal and neo-colonial tendencies within mainstream global environmentalism. Third, it moves beyond these familiar theoretical tropes to present a more-than-human account of international conservation volunteering from the UK. This attends to the material assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, practices and affects caught up in within these expressions of citizenship. In conclusion the paper critically compares the different materialisations of citizenship offered by these approaches. It finds that the geographies of citizenship performed within the sector are neither ‘global’ or ‘environmental’, nor do they comprise modes of citizenship that embody planetary humanism or panoptic rationalism. Instead, the modes, subjects and spatialities of citizenship performed here are asymmetric, affective and more-than-human. This has important implications for the scope, practices and future of international environmental politics and for the emerging sub-discipline of the geographies of citizenship.     

The Citation Relationships between Journals of Geography and Cognate Disciplines

There is an ongoing debate concerning the relationship between the disciplinary ends of the broad spectrum that is geography and also the relationship between geography and other disciplines, including the extent to which it is self-focussed or inward looking. These issues were assessed using an analysis of citation relationships between journals in the Thompson Scientific Journal Citation Reports databases at the category level. Thirty-four categories were used, comparing the two geography categories (‘Geography’, representing human geography and ‘Geography, Physical’, representing physical geography) with 32 other cognate categories. A matrix of the citation relationships between each category was developed using a relatedness factor that corrects for the opportunity for citations to occur. The resultant matrix of factors indicates that human geography journals are considerably more likely to cite their own papers than are those of physical geography, but that they are by no means the most self-citing of the journals assessed. Both human and physical geography journals have strong citation relationships with several other disciplines, with those for human geography most often being net export relationships in the sense of a balance of trade. This finding contradicts previous assertions that human geography imports more than it exports. The citation relationships of physical geography are smaller than those of human geography, and are typically small net imports. The relationship between human and physical geography journals is a small net export from physical geography to human geography, but their total trade volume is considerably smaller than their respective relationships with other disciplines. These results are likely to be caused by many factors in addition to the actual relatedness between disciplines and sub-disciplines, but they do represent a benchmark against which more detailed analyses can be assessed.     

Intervention: Engaging post-foundational political theory requires an ‘enmeshed’ approach

This intervention argues for renewed engagements with post-foundational political theory (PFPT) within political geography. We feel that post-foundational political geography may be on the cusp of becoming consolidated as a distinct and expansive approach to political geographic scholarship, but we argue that reductionist and binary caricatures of its central distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ must be avoided for it to reach its full potential. To this end, we suggest that ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ need to be considered as more ‘enmeshed’ than they have often been represented. We write as four political geographers and will, each in our own ways, highlight how an ‘enmeshed’ approach to PFPT can better translate its conceptual interventions into political geographic research whilst facilitating productive encounters with the broader worlds of critical geographic inquiry.     

Innovations in the afterlife of the Cold War: German-language human geography

This commentary will coalesce around two main points. First, the articles by Markus Hesse on urban geography, by Annika Mattissek and Georg Glasze on recent developments in discourse-analytic approaches, and by Ulrich Best on the genealogy of radical–Marxist or critical German-language geography all support the contention that key features of Germanophone human geography still mark it out as a ‘Cold War’ human geography. As will become clear, this contention goes well beyond noting the marginality (until recently) of radical–Marxist positions (Belina, B., Best, U., & Naumann, M. (2009). Critical geography in Germany: From exclusion to inclusion via internationalization. Social Geography, 4, 47–58). Second, I will argue that although this configuration has had real costs, including both analytic and ‘civic’ deficits, it has also allowed the development of distinctive strengths and innovative emphases in human geographic research that can and should be engaged by other sub-communities in the international discourse.     

Australasian Rural Geographies: At the Core,in the Antipodes?

This paper reviews ‘Antipodean’ rural geography research published over the period 2012–2014 inclusive. A broad, inclusive stance was adopted to what should be regarded as Antipodean rural geography. Key publication outlets were identified and scanned for what were deemed to be relevant paper titles and abstracts, then the institutional and disciplinary affiliations of authors, bearing in mind a general concern for ‘rural issues’. The review concentrates on the prominent themes of the recent mining boom and its externalities, new perspectives on agrarian and regional development, and population issues. Australasian rural geographers have not only become adept at ‘writing back’ to the centre but have played leading roles in the intellectual development of the sub‐discipline and cognate areas (e.g. rural sociology). Indeed, at least in the short period covered by this review and in the admittedly selective scope of that survey, Australian and New Zealand rural geographers have been at the forefront in advancing the sub‐discipline internationally. In doing so, they have not only placed the discussion of Australasian rural issues within a global context but have further refined the philosophical and conceptual approaches and tools used. In important respects, then, Australasian rural geographers are very much at the core of the international project of contemporary rural geography. Moreover, they have made – and continue to make – important contributions to the broader discipline of human geography.