Domesticating Birth in the Hospital: "Family-Centered" Birth and the Emergence of "Homelike" Birthing Rooms

Childbirth is both an embodied and symbolic process, and the home and the hospital have been the shifting and contested sites of childbirth in contemporary discourses of birth in the United States. I argue that the economic and cultural imperatives of deregulation and downsizing of US health-care produce new spaces of domesticity and birthing bodies. Through an examination of the relatively recent transformations of hospital space into "homelike" birthing rooms, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how discursive and material shifts in the practices and sites of birth create new spatialities and subjectivities. The emergence of the "homelike" hospital room situates the production of birth spaces at the nexus of debates around domesticity, the body, the politics of reproduction, and the economics of health care in the United States.     

Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo do Alemão

Activists and journalists in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro are using social media to intervene in the violence that shapes their communities. In this article I draw on critical urban and digital media theory to understand how militarized policing, the spatialization of race, and discourses of criminalization influence favela populations. I examine how these discursive and material violences are motivating residents to autoconstruct new digital communities. Through digital autoconstruction, journalists and activists are using social media technologies to safely direct mobility, to witness police violence, and to unsettle socio‐spatial imaginaries of endemic crime. As such, they are deploying digital practices to disrupt material, epistemological, and discursive mechanisms of social control. These actions show that digital technologies are always‐already embodied and take shape through material histories, such as those of racialized state violence. Journalists and activists in Complexo do Alemão ultimately demonstrate that targets of violence are not simply victims of digital and violent surveillance, but are active in creating new digital relationships of care across diverse scales, transforming these technologies in the process.     

Fiction ‘néo-réactionnaire’ avec Richard Millet

Omnipresent in the political and media landscapes, the neo-reactionary discourse has become a major discursive trend in contemporary France. Recent scholarship has started to theorise its mechanisms of production and circulation, with a particular focus on the visibility and posture of the celebrities who embody it. The importance of this discourse’s literary component has been pointed out, but also restricted to discussions pertaining to the role played by these public figures’ writings published for a mass audience such as essays and newspaper articles. The objective of this article is to highlight the need to take into consideration literary representations that echo but also complete the theoretical arguments developed in more popular outlets. Through the analysis of Richard Millet’s Province (2016), the potential of fiction, and more precisely the realist novel, will be explored in order to suggest that a thorough understanding of the neo-reactionarydiscourse can only be achieved through the study of the multiple platforms that disseminate and shape it.     

Deconstructing Spatial Planning: Re-interpreting the Articulation of a New Ethos for English Local Planning

This article reviews recent debates about the emergence of “spatial planning” as a new ethos for English planning, suggesting that continued uncertainty around the term's use is partly caused by a failure to consider its emergence as the product of a contested political process. Drawing on an interpretive approach to policy analysis, the article goes on to show how this new organizing principle is a complex articulation of different and potentially contradictory reform impulses. The result is to destabilize the concept of spatial planning, showing how it has been constructed as an “empty signifier”, an unstable and tension-filled discursive stake in an ongoing politics of reform. Finally, it is argued that this has significant implications for the ways in which implementation success and failure should be understood and for analysis of planning reform initiatives and systems more widely.     

Towards an ‘optics of power’: technologies of surveillance and discipline and case-loading midwifery practice in New Zealand

Midwives in New Zealand achieved professional autonomy in 1990 with an amendment to the Nurses Act 1977. Predicated on a natural approach to childbirth it was envisaged that midwifery would counter the trend of increasing medicalisation of childbirth. Some 20 years later, we continue to be concerned by increasing rates of intervention in childbirth including caesarean section operations. Midwifery practice is no longer supervised in a hierarchical arrangement with the obstetrician at its peak, however, we suggest that new and more subtle disciplinary mechanisms have come to the fore post-1990. Drawing on Foucault's concepts of the ‘medical gaze’ and the ‘panopticon’ we describe the ways in which midwifery practice (and through them the bodies of childbearing women) continues to be disciplined to conform to obstetric norms.     

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.     

Stuck between ‘the rock’ and a hard place: rural crisis and re-imagining rural Newfoundland feminine subjectivities

There has been a growing body of research exploring the mobility experiences of rural youth as they migrate in search of work, education and leisure. In this article we contribute to this body of knowledge by examining the mobility experiences of young women (16–24 years) living on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In contrast to dominant constructions of rural crisis that position out-of-the-way places as in decline, dying or dead, we argue that the young women in our study articulated complex, affective relations to place. In so doing, they negotiated localized histories, prevailing social relations, broader discursive constructions and embodied affective connections in forging their emplaced feminine subjectivities. We argue that foregrounding the complex and at times contradictory relationships that the young women articulated with their rural homes is an important step in prying open dominant albeit constraining constructions of the rural, thereby allowing for alternative and more inhabitable imaginings of out-of-the-way places.     

Afghanistan's energy sociotechnical imaginaries: Alternative visions in a conflict zone

Imaginaries are understood to be both discursive and cognitive constructs that shape behaviour, policies, and institutions – but how do longstanding imaginaries evolve in new circumstances, and how do they interact with existing power structures in changed circumstances? Drawing on conceptions of discursive power, this paper investigates the interplay of power with both new and old imaginaries in the case of Afghanistan, specifically regarding alternative energy futures. Employing an interpretive approach, we draw on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with elite stakeholders and policy observers, to provide an account of the relations between alternative energy futures imaginaries and political power. We demonstrate, how certain discursive practices are made possible, authorised and articulated through imaginative geographies. Critically, the government-advocated imaginary of Afghanistan as an energy corridor and hence an energy importer both represents the views of several powerful interests and concurs with the long-held idea of Afghanistan as a buffer state. In this way, political path dependencies are reinforced through a supportive imaginary, just as the dominant imaginary is itself reinforced by the main stakeholders. While in line with our interpretive epistemology we do not make claims for the specific configuration of imaginaries being generalisable elsewhere, we do find the general theoretical approach useful for understanding discursive aspects of conflict zone politics, particularly vis-à-vis energy system trajectories.     

Territory and the governmentalisation of social reproduction: parliamentary enclosure and spatial rationalities in the transition from feudalism to capitalism

Recent applications of Foucauldian categories in geography, spatial history and the history of town planning have opened up interesting new perspectives, with respect to both the evolution of spatial knowledge and the genealogy of territorial techniques and their relation to larger socio-political projects, that would be enriched if combined with other discursive traditions. This article proposes to conceptualise English parliamentary enclosure–a favourite episode for Marxist historiography, frequently read in a strictly materialist fashion–as a precedent of a new form of sociospatial governmentality, a political technology that inaugurates a strategic manipulation of territory for social change on the threshold between feudal and capitalist spatial rationalities. I analyse the sociospatial dimensions of parliamentary enclosure’s technical and legal innovations and compare them to the forms of communal self-regulation of land use customs and everyday regionalisations that preceded it. Through a systematic, replicable mechanism of reterritorialisation, enclosure acts normalised spatial regulations, blurred regional differences in the social organisation of agriculture and erased the modes of autonomous social reproduction linked to common land. Their exercise of dispossession of material resources, social capital and community representations is interpreted therefore as an inaugural logic that would pervade the emergent spatial rationality later known as planning.     

Eating Hawai'i: local foods and place-making in Hawai'i Regional Cuisine

In this paper, we look at what it means to ‘eat Hawai'i’ and examine how Hawai'i Regional Cuisine (HRC) imagines, produces, and consumes place through particular constructions of local foods. The term ‘local’ attaches to foods as a marker of numerous positive attributes such as seasonal, sustainable, and community-based. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic research on Hawai'i Island, we examine spatial and discursive constructions of local and how this particular cuisine places itself in local food networks while simultaneously using place to localize itself within the Island's food networks. Using a case study approach to carefully contextualize localness, we show how Merriman's Restaurant and HRC complicate notions of alternative and local food systems in its discursive and material production and reproduction of Local food and locally grown food.     

Excesses of nationalism: Greco‐Turkish population exchange

This article studies 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey through a case study of its experience in Izmir. It traces the ways the early Republican state engaged in the project of reshaping the population by eliminating the non‐Muslims who were rendered as ‘excesses’ in the spatial and discursive matrices of the nation‐state. Through the experience of the exchange in Izmir, it argues that the process of the accommodation and assimilation of the exchangees played a significant role in shaping the modalities of Turkish nationalism by creating new lines and fissures, further dividing the ‘Muslim brethren’ into ever restrictive constructions of Turkishness. It also underlines that this forced displacement is not just a significant episode in Greek and Turkish histories but that it represents a turning point in the project of nation formation in general.     

A Moldovan ‘sheep'? – framing Moldovan passivity

This article offers a different perspective for understanding Moldovan discourses of passivity by turning its attention to representations of national identity. Its main focus is a Moldovan ballad, Miori?a, and the way in which it discursively both frames and legitimises inaction. It builds on the idea that Miori?a is a central part of the way in which Moldovans represent their identity with respect to the writings of Ion Dru??, its main promoter in Moldovan society. More importantly, the ballad is conceptually linked to national characteristics such as lamentation and kindness, characteristics that can be summed up under the headline of ‘passivity’. Thus, drawing from constructivist and post‐structuralist approaches, the article stresses how these elements inform the Moldovan view of the self, its identity and even its representations of foreign affairs, framing the Moldovan lack of agency on a discursive level.     

THE EUROPEANIZATION OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: LOCAL STRATEGIES AND EUROPEAN SPATIAL VISIONS IN NORTHERN FINLAND

By exploring the Europeanization of current practices of regional spatial planning, this article sets out to demonstrate the evolution of the European integration project. Specifically, by creating spaces of engagement to which the local and regional actors are “forced” to adapt, the emergence of European spatial planning has made planning practices at the regional level more complex and complicated. As such, the present study contributes to the current understandings of Europeanization by exploring the European integration process through the geographical conceptualizations of space and scale. These conceptualizations are used to illustrate the multidimensionality, complexity and subtlety of the geographies of Europeanization. The empirical investigations show that regional and local spatial policies are strongly engaged – both explicitly through the “technicalities” and implicitly through the “mentalities”– to the spaces of Europeanization. The engagement affects the effectiveness of sub‐regional spatial planning by promoting mismatches between the strategic frameworks and the material practices of the policy. Overall, the article illustrates that the geographies of Europeanization are continuous processes, which take place – often unrecognizably – in manifold discursive and material practices in various geographical contexts.     

Pelvic stress injuries in a small‐bodied forager

The assumption of natural selection for obstetric adequacy would predict the occasional discovery of skeletal evidence for inadequacy, yet such cases are rare. Here stress injuries to the pelvic ring are associated with an asymmetrical pelvis caused by partial agenesis of the right sacral costal process. The small, middle‐aged woman lived about 2000 years ago and pursued a physically vigorous life as a coastal forager on the South African Cape coast. The right sacral costal process (ala) is about 5 mm narrower than the left. This sacral hemiagenesis led to pelvic asymmetry, and concomitant instability. The six articular faces of the pelvis show the normal surfaces replaced by disorganised, porous new bone and extensive eburnation. The left pubic face shifted dorsally, making contact with the ventral aspect of the right pubis. The most distinctive aspect is the presence of osteitis pubis, or pubic symphysis stress injury, which is clinically associated both with difficult childbirth and with vigorous athletic activities. Adjustments to the altered pelvis include erosions and osteophytes at sites of ligament attachment, and prominent bilateral insertion areas on the tibiae for the stabilising iliotibial band. While habitual activities may explain some pelvic features, such as the bilateral bevelling of the acetabular borders, it is postulated that childbirth exacerbated the joint instability and the subsequent deterioration. This case joins a small literature on the condition of pubic symphysis stress injury, and illustrates the mechanisms through which natural selection for pelvic size and shape characteristics may have occurred. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Living in anachronistic space: Temporalities of displacement in Moscow's Soviet-era standardised housing

In 2017, the Moscow municipality announced the demolition of several thousand remaining Soviet-era, standardised apartments (khrushchevki). Known as the Renovation, the renewal project promises to replace the khrushchevki with new residential districts. Based on fieldwork in Northern Izmailovo, a district targeted for demolition, this article analyses encroaching displacement by foregrounding the temporal experiences of affected residents. Building on literature that explores the political underpinnings of discourse and aesthetics in urban renewal projects, with particular attention to Rancière's temporal politics, the article contends that the Renovation depends on the discursive construction of its targets as spatial anachronisms. This renders the Soviet-era housing blocks, and those who live within them, vulnerable to a spectrum of modernising aestheticising interventions—from minor ornamentation to wholesale demolition. Based on ethnographic data, the article shows how the initial stages of redevelopment have altered a local network of benches. For a group of long-standing, elderly residents, these disruptions have instigated more profound reckonings with their own sense of time in/and space, leading to an understanding that they, too, are seen as anachronistic features of the city. Paying attention to urban materiality on a granular scale, particularly in standardised housing estates, reveals the multifaceted temporalities that inform residents' engagements with the spaces of their home districts. The article argues that doing so counters the exclusionary temporal logic of the discourse of anachronism by denying its ubiquity. In turn, it speaks to growing geographic interest in amplifying alternative temporalities in the face of destructive, terminal change.     

Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth–Century Pornography in England

This article analyses seventeenth–century pornographic literature and popular ballads to explore alternative representations, and hence interpretations, of female same–sex desire than those presented by either early modern legal, medical and religious discourse in which the image of the tribade predominates, or the homoerotic prose and poetry of female writers. It argues that early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result of either a physical abnormality (clitoral hypertrophy) or the desire to live as a man, and thence to take on his sexual as well as social role.     

The definition of culture in culture-based urban development strategies: antagonisms in the construction of a culture-based development discourse

Implementing culture-based development strategies is a recent trend in large and small cities all over Europe. The definition of culture and the objectives of cultural strategies are highly contested in the public debate. Analysing the newspaper debates on the establishment of the Cultiva foundation in Kristiansand, Norway, this article discusses how and why the discursive debate on the definition of culture creates different discursive positions in the public debate on culture-based development. In the different discourses on what these strategies should be, there are a number of antagonisms that contribute to defining the relationships and interfaces between the different discursive positions. The main lines of discursive conflict are between urban planners and/or policy-makers who follow a spatial logic that emphasises a comprehensive understanding of territorial planning and cultural workers and/or artists who follow a critical artistic creation logic that emphasises the values that exist in art and the potential of the cultural field for personal development, general education and social criticism.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.     

Midwives as expert witnesses in the 18th-century Finnish courts of justice

ABSTRACT

In this article, I will explore how legalized Finnish midwives acted as expert witnesses in court hearings before 1809, how they worded the statements they gave in court, on what grounds they decided a woman was pregnant or had given birth, and what signs they considered as indicating a miscarriage or the birth of a full-term infant. Their work as expert witnesses relied on their midwifery training as well as their learned knowledge of the anatomy of the female body and the physiology of birth. Ultimately, their knowledge was supported by contemporary guidebooks on midwifery and forensic medicine. As expert witnesses, the trained and legalized midwives of the eighteenth century can be seen as having been legally literate women, who had a duty to provide oral or written evidence to the court and other instances who demanded it. Midwives were capable of using understandable medical and legal terminology in terms of the processing of the court case in their testimony. The forensic examinations carried out by legalized midwives and the expert witness statements they gave also demonstrate the professional skills and expertise of these women.. Their testimonies also show that they were familiar with the characteristics of infanticide referred to in the Swedish medical and forensic literature.     

TRANSGRESSING URBAN UTOPANISM: AUTONOMY AND ACTIVE DESIRE

It has been extensively argued by theorists of liberal globalization as well as by radical theorists such as situationists and anarchists that as the site of the concentration of capital, the city is the primary site for the formation of new subjectivities, new rights‐claiming practices and the intensification of resistance as the starting point for an alternative, inclusionary urban citizenship. This article contends that by dismissing or separating rural and agricultural practices, such theories express a contradiction that can best be understood not as a struggle between rural and urban utopias, but between two different approaches to utopianism – hegemonic, associated with statist practices; and critical, associated with autonomous practices. The article considers emergent free spaces within the UK, including intentional communities, autonomous social centres, radical housing co‐operatives and eco‐villages, both in urban and rural areas, as specific instances of materialized utopias that are becoming autonomous, allowing us to think beyond dominant spatial formations by offering alternative futures whilst simultaneously engaging in resistant practices in the present. Voices of interviewed practitioners and observations of practices in these spaces are brought into dialogue with theory, highlighting gaps and weaknesses and opening space for further theorizing and new imaginings. This offers possibilities for a critical‐autonomous conception of utopianism that does not take existing spatial formations for granted.