Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Statecraft,Scalecraft and Urban Planning: A Comparative Study of Birmingham,UK, and Brisbane,Australia

Recent discussions on state rescaling have pointed towards the need for a greater focus on how and why state activity may change over time in order to generate insights into the provenance, trajectories and outcomes of rescaling in different global regions and national state spaces. Consequently, this paper explores the dialectical and recursive relationship between the concepts of “statecraft” and “scalecraft” to explore the evolving sites, objects and mechanisms for urban planning within two key urban centres in different parts of the world—Birmingham, UK, and Brisbane, Australia. It is illustrated how a range of actors—from the national to the local level—have sought to craft and reshape the strategies and structures for urban planning according to different imperatives. In turn, the implications for a tighter specifying of the process of state rescaling are considered, as well as the subsequent nature of urban planning arrangements.     

Indigenous health organizations,Indigenous community resurgence,and the reclamation of place in urban areas

Research around the world has been nearly unanimous about the positive impacts of Indigenous‐led health organizations on Indigenous peoples' qualitative experiences in health care, in the face of often negative experiences in non‐Indigenous‐led health care settings. Urban environments, including health care environments, are areas of increasing attention with regard to Indigenous peoples' health in Canada. In this study, which took place in the northern city of Prince George, British Columbia, 65 Indigenous community members and health services workers participated in interviews and focus groups, describing their experiences with urban Indigenous‐led health organizations—defined in this study as non‐governmental organizations that prioritize the values and practices of local Indigenous communities. Employing perspectives on place and relationships drawn from Indigenous critical theory and Indigenous community resurgence to analyze the findings of this qualitative study leads to a focus on how relationships impact and can even constitute places, enabling new understandings of the roles of Indigenous‐led health organizations in urban Indigenous community resurgence.     

Telling stories: Exploring research storytelling as a meaningful approach to knowledge mobilization with Indigenous research collaborators and diverse audiences in community‐based participatory research

A growing number of geographers seek to communicate their research to audiences beyond the academy. Community‐based and participatory action research models have been developed, in part, with this goal in mind. Yet despite many promising developments in the way research is conducted and disseminated, researchers continue to seek methods to better reflect the “culture and context” of the communities with whom they work. During my doctoral research on homelessness in the Northwest Territories, I encountered a significant disconnect between the emotive, personal narratives of homelessness that I was collecting and more conventional approaches to research dissemination. In search of a method of dissemination to engage more meaningfully with research collaborators as well as the broader public, I turned to my creative writing work. In this article, I draw from “The komatik lesson” to discuss my first effort at research storytelling. I suggest that research storytelling is particularly well suited to community‐based participatory research, as we explore methods to present findings in ways that are more culturally appropriate to the communities in which the research takes place. This is especially so in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, where storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same. However, I also discuss the ways in which combining my creative writing interests with my doctoral research has been an uneasy fit, forcing me to question how to tell a good story while giving due diligence to the role that academic research has played in its development. Drawing on the outcomes and challenges I encountered, I offer an understanding of what research storytelling is, and how it might be used to advance community‐based participatory research with Indigenous communities.     

Building intersectoral partnerships as place‐based strategy for immigrant and refugee (re)settlement: The Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership

This paper examines the role of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership in the Syrian refugee resettlement in Canada's national capital following the federal government's 2015–2016 resettlement plan. Based on the findings of qualitative data collection—including semi‐structured interviews with representatives from community organizations, settlement agencies, and the City of Ottawa—two main arguments are advanced. First, while the current literature tends to portray the Canadian settlement sector as a passive victim in the face of neoliberal restructuring and austerity measures, this paper offers a more nuanced perspective by reflecting on the sector's ability to exert agency by developing initiatives and devising strategies that are rooted in the local context. Second, the case of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership sheds light on the significance of intersectoral networks and partnerships that extend beyond the settlement sector to build a sound approach for welcoming refugees and newcomers more generally. These findings serve to demonstrate the potential of partnerships as a place‐based settlement model that is responsive to context‐specific needs and enhances local community strengths, thus providing important lessons that can inform future immigrant and refugee (re)settlement and integration in other Canadian cities and regions.     

Syrian refugee resettlement and the role of local immigration partnerships in Ontario,Canada

We examine Canada's recent Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI) paying close attention to the resettlement role played by mid‐sized urban communities. We elaborate on a key policy dimension at work at this scale of action: local immigration partnerships (LIPs). We start with a very brief review of Canada's history of mass refugee resettlement. Second, we assess the policy of LIPs, particularly how they have been presented as a form of “place‐based policy,” and third, we offer an overview of the role the LIPs played in three case study communities (Hamilton, Ottawa, and Waterloo) during the SRRI. Finally, we present three overarching themes that emerged from our research in each of these communities: the importance of each community's history of immigration and refugee resettlement; the embeddedness of the LIP and its leadership in the local community; and how the positioning of each LIP relative to the three levels of government and its official Resettlement Assistance Program agreement holders impacted its ability to act. The history, location, and place characteristics of each community influenced the nature of intersectoral and intergovernmental relations in distinctive ways, and differentially shaped the effectiveness of each LIP's ability to contribute to the SRRI.     

Lisbon's Red Belt: A Cautionary Tale on Politicisation and Depoliticisation of the Urban Realm

Within the making of Portuguese liberal‐representative democracy, the Portuguese Communist Party became a major actor in local government in urban deprived peripheries, shaping Lisbon's Red Belt. In this article, we analyse the communist discourse on the Portuguese urban question, showing how it politicised the urban as a site of unevenness and deprivation, but simultaneously depoliticised it by refusing to acknowledge it as a proper space for conflict. This historical account leads us to a critical debate with proposals that discuss urban politicisation by ontologising “the urban” or “the political”—we argue that these approaches tend to be less helpful in understanding processes of contingent, partial and inter‐related forms of politicisation/depoliticisation of the urban in itself. In contrast, we argue for a more attentive theorisation on politicisation–depoliticisation of the urban condition as a most valuable path to grasp situated formulations of citizenship and, hence, configurations of political regimes.     

Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

The Dualism of Urban Governance in Denmark

The article argues that the present Danish urban policy and urban democracy can be characterized by a striking duality and tension between: (1) Participatory empowering welfare oriented community strategies, which targets deprived districts and neighbourhoods, which are based on notions of the inclusive city. This trend is founded on priorities of radical democracy, social justice, inclusion and citizens empowerment; (2) Neo-elitist/corporative market driven strategic regional and global growth strategies, which are based on notions of the Entrepreneurial Globalized City and where urban policy becomes a question of facilitation of the “growth machine” and neo-liberalized urban authoritarianism. The article discusses dilemmas for overcoming the growing tension between elitist neo-corporate growth regimes, which are in operation via “Quangoes” and closed elite networks, and community empowerment and welfare oriented policy in the age of globalization. Taking the stand of community empowerment and welfare policy, the article conclusively discusses ways to shape a new inclusive politics of difference including using “positive selectivism” as part of an empowerment strategy.     

Appreciating the heterogeneity in the unity of Africa: A socio‐ecological perspective on Africa's geographies

The African continent is known by various metaphors and geographies, but for many there are also unknowns about the continent. Geopolitically, Africa is a continent that is considered remote—an economically emerging continent seen as entangled in persistent challenges of wars, political dictatorship, poverty, disease, and more recently migration. Given these predispositions it is typical to stereotype events, practice, and behaviour as “African.” There is, however, now recognition of the continent as emerging economic power house. But unpacking the diversity of Africa reveals a huge potential with respect to resource endowments, diversity of ecology, socio‐cultural economic advancement, politics, language, and demographics. Colonial history coupled with traditional Africa shaped the geopolitical boundaries that have added to the confusion about this massive and diverse continent. Intellectual discourses either amplify the differences due to specificities of geographical focus or generalizations such as the contested notion of “African.” However, using socio‐ecological lenses, Africa is unified by these very differences in addition to being a massive landmass with several big and small island states. Appreciating these differences is useful to understanding the observed patterns of social, economic, and political systems that unify the continent. This paper illustrates the notion of “African” to describe the heterogeneous nature of a “unified” continent. Some illustrative examples between Africa and other continents are used.     

Communities and archaeology under the Soufrière Hills Volcano on Montserrat,West Indies

Abstract

The volcanically devastated landscape of Montserrat and its social fabric comprise what Maria calls a “traumascape”—a site of tragedy and catastrophe that is also a place of coping and resilience. How Montserratians engage with trauma is evident in how they remember their recent and historical pasts, and in how they are reinventing aspects of their heritage in order to sustain a distinctly Montserratian identity for the future. Such a process of coping presents challenges for conducting archaeology in collaboration with the community. In this article, we describe the experiences of a recently established project on the island (Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat) and discuss the potential for, and the obstacles involved in, developing longer-term, sustainable forms of collaboration between archaeologists and local Montserratian communities when facing the unusual circumstances of volcanic disaster and hazard.     

Community Volunteering as Neoliberal Strategy? Green Space Production in Berlin

Abstract: The task for critical urban research is to analyze processes of neoliberalization “on the ground”. This paper examines—based on original empirical research—in how far the outsourcing of former local state responsibilities for public services and urban infrastructure is expressed in the promotion of community gardening in Berlin (Germany). It shows the contradictory outcomes: on the one hand, a failing strategy of outsourcing towards residents and the opening up of opportunity structures for other interests. On the other hand it shows how far the emergence of open green spaces maintained by volunteers can only be understood against the background of “roll‐back” neoliberal urban politics and that their rationality cannot be separated from “roll‐out neoliberalism”.     

From interdisciplinary to inter‐epistemological approaches: Confronting the challenges of integrated climate change research

Spurred by the literature on climate change and its calls for undertaking holistic research that more fully integrates the work of biophysical and social scientists, this article responds to the question: To what extent has climate change research in Canada embraced and been guided by the theories and tenets associated with interdisciplinarity and to what extent have integrated approaches been sensitive to cross‐cultural perspectives? It provides an overview of some of the epistemological issues raised in the interdisciplinarity literature that particularly impact research development and design. Furthermore, since much of the climate change literature that claims to be integrated or interdisciplinary draws from Indigenous Knowledge (IK), additional insights are provided from this perspective. The article develops a framework that can be used to undertake and/or evaluate research in a way that acknowledges “upstream” epistemological issues. The framework is then used to evaluate a comprehensive database (n = 282) of Canadian climate change articles. It is argued that an interdisciplinary approach adds a critical voice to the literature on integrated climate change research and is valuable because of its focus on epistemology and methodology. The article advocates the creation of a space for inter‐epistemological acknowledgement in which the academy develops an ethos of self‐reflection, while simultaneously respecting and integrating parallel knowledge frameworks, such as IK.     

Ambitious deep energy retrofits of buildings to accelerate the 1.5°C energy transition in Canada

Scientists advise limiting global warming to 1.5°C with substantial actions by 2030. Our viewpoint argues that climate response strategies in Canada have underemphasized and underestimated the potential contribution deep energy retrofits can make to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, leading to inadequate responses in the building sector, and that Canada can (and should) be ambitious with building retrofits over the next decade. GHG savings from building retrofits can be realized more quickly than GHG reductions from other sectors, and either deliver net cost savings or are cost‐effective when compared to other mitigation measures. Retrofits can also provide social and economic benefits, such as improved health and comfort, and lower energy costs. This paper reviews energy use and building retrofits in Canada and argues the following should be implemented: (1) focus innovation on deep energy retrofit processes, not singular retrofit actions; (2) maximize both social and environmental benefits; (3) improve data gathering and availability for analysis and delivery; (4) innovate for a process of decisions and to avoid “dropouts” during the retrofit process; and (5) focus innovation on business models that maximize benefits.     

Participatory and community‐based research,Indigenous geographies,and the spaces of friendship: A critical engagement

Geographic engagement with Indigenous peoples remains inextricably linked to colonialism. Consequently, studying Indigenous geographies is fraught with ethical and political dilemmas. Participatory and community‐based research methods have recently been offered as one solution to address concerns about the politics of gathering, framing, producing, disseminating, and controlling knowledge about Indigenous peoples. In this article, we critically engage with the emergence of participatory and community‐based research methods as “best practice” for undertaking research into Indigenous geographies. We articulate four concerns with this form of research: a) dissent may be stifled by non‐Indigenous researchers’ investments in being “good”; b) claims to overcome difference and distance may actually retrench colonial research relations; c) the framing of particular methods as “best practices” risks closing down necessary and ongoing critique; and d) institutional pressures work against the development and maintenance of meaningful, accountable, and non‐extractive relations with Indigenous communities. We then contemplate the spatiality of the critique itself. We consider the ways in which our longstanding friendship, as researchers invested at multiple scales with Indigenous geographies and identities, provides its own distinct space of practice within which to confront the political and ethical challenges posed by research with/about/upon Indigenous geographies and peoples. While not arriving at any concrete template for undertaking research about Indigenous geographies, we suggest that certain friendships, established and situated outside research relationships, may be productive spaces within and through which research methods may be decolonized.     

Gwaabaw: Applying Anishinaabe harvesting protocols to energy governance

Oil and gas extraction has transformed Anishinaabe society in ways that undermine the consensual, holistic, and egalitarian basis of natural law. To many Indigenous people, framing fossil fuels and other energy sources as “natural resources” does not accurately define energy projects or capture related risks. Some Anishinaabe pipeline opponents have suggested that traditional harvesting protocols—culturally embedded moral precepts that govern the gathering of food and medicinal plants—also be applied to activities that produce energy. This paper explores how this could be done, focusing on tar sands extraction and the Line 3 expansion plan. I begin by discussing Anishinaabe harvesting protocols, identifying four overlapping key concepts: rights, responsibility, relationality, and reciprocity. These principles are then mapped onto Anishinaabe understandings of oil, hydro, wind, and solar energy. The resulting analysis challenges extractivist narratives of energy production, opening possibilities to rethink the relationship between people and energy as well as the values that inform energy decisions.     

Geographies of capital formation and rescaling: A historical‐geographical approach to the food desert problem

Although the “food desert” concept has captured the public imagination and spurred public policy efforts in many North American cities, the term has been critiqued by academics for being definitionally and methodologically vague, and for providing an incomplete picture of the complexity of food access. Rather than dismiss the study of urban, inner‐city food deserts, however, scholars can study disparities in retail food access through a historical, critical political economy lens to understand underserved retail landscapes as a product of capital formation and rescaling over time. The purpose of this article is to conduct such an analysis, using the case study of a low‐income community in Kingston, Ontario. Using historical research and qualitative interviews, the major finding of this analysis is that the physical accessibility of retail food appears to have declined over time in relation to the capitalization of the retail food sector. An imperfect relationship can be outlined over three phases of Canadian urban economic history to suggest that the food desert problem emerged largely in the transition from a decentralized, small‐scale, and neighbourhood‐embedded retail food industry to the scaled‐up, disembedded industry that now dominates the landscape. This industry‐level rescaling is contributing to a new urban politics of class and consumption through subtle, everyday activities such as food shopping.     

Linking Gentrification and Labour Market Precarity in the Contemporary City: A Framework for Analysis

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call “weak” and “strong” links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of “gentrification‐supporting” and “gentrification‐fostered” labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.     

Towards a Language of ‘Europe’: History,Rhetoric, Community

From Herder to Benedict Anderson, language and nation have been at the centre of ideas about (imagined) community. This hypothesis, however, poses a problem for analysing ideas about Europe. How can we understand “Europe” as a concept or form of identity when language and nationality are considered the foundation of imagined communities and loyalties? This article addresses this difficulty. It uses J. G. A. Pocock’s definition of “sub-languages” to suggest that one can investigate the rhetorical strategies, images and vocabularies with which texts articulate ideas about Europe. These sub-languages evoke imagined communities, most obviously when texts name and identify particular groups of people as “Europeans.” But by using images and rhetorics about Europe, these texts also appeal to a readership that comprehends—even if it does not fully accept—certain assumptions about the continent. In this way, texts evoke an imagined community of readers who purportedly share a similar way of understanding Europe, or who can perhaps be persuaded to think about it in similar terms. These processes are historically particular, and so the article concludes with concrete examples. It focuses on how early-nineteenth-century philhellenes evoked a European imagined community to solicit support for the Greek Revolution (1821–32).     

Race,Space, and Nature: An Introduction and Critique

In this essay we put forth nested arguments about the way that racialization remains a powerful force in contemporary society, contending that intersections with space and nature offer important lessons about the (de)construction of race. We argue that the pernicious character traits of racial constructs develop through spatial practices and intersect with ideas about “nature” and belonging. We trace these concepts through recent conversations in geography and environmental studies, and we call for a persistent, critical, and prominent engagement with racialization in the spatial social sciences. Finally, we introduce the papers that constitute this symposium, which engages these questions from a range of perspectives and across a variety of landscapes. We hope to spur the conversation about “race and geography”, broadly conceived, beyond studies conceptualized around race alone. We are hopeful that this work, and the larger body of work it contributes to, travels beyond academic conversations to engage broader social justice debates about the “nature” of racial inequality—to ultimately participate in its dismantlement.