Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

Sense and the city: exploring the embodied geographies of urban walking

Within UK pedestrian policy, walking is promoted as a sustainable mode of transport that benefits both the body and mind. However, much policy discussion assumes all walking to be the same and a largely self-evident means of transport, whilst many academic engagements with walking are highly abstract theorisations that lack any systematic empirical exploration of actual pedestrian practices. As such, there is little that unpacks the experiences of those who navigate, negotiate, and traverse the city streets in their day-to-day lives. In contrast, this paper aims to situate and understand the practice of everyday walking in the unfolding experiences of urban pedestrians. Walking is positioned and understood as a socio-technical assemblage that enables specific attention to be drawn to the embodied, material and technological relations and their significance for engaging with everyday urban movements on foot. The analysis draws upon in-depth interview and walking photo diary data from participants in the inner London boroughs of Islington and Hackney. Particular analytic attention to the different styles and conventions of urban walking and how these are intimately linked to bodily senses and the materiality of the city provides an opportunity for creating an increased engagement between urban and pedestrian policy and urban and social theory.     

Twenty-five years of children's geographies: a planner's perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the key trends and changes that have taken place in my 25 years of children's geographies research. I reflect on the growing awareness of children in research but also the continued marginalisation of children and children's concerns in my own planning profession, and the continuing need for a greater presence for Majority world children in research. I ask if we as children's geographers can rise to the growing global challenges children face. To do so will require greater interdisciplinary work and recognition of the ever more complex and dynamic nature of societies if we are to create a robust forward-looking research agenda with and for children.     

How matter comes to matter in children's nature play: posthumanist approaches and children's geographies

In the present paper, a posthumanist approach is used to analyse children's play activities in natural environments. The aim is to analyse intra-actions between children, the material environment and discourses, with a focus on the material and embodied aspects of these intra-actions. Forty-two children between six and eight years and from two Swedish schools participated in the study. Video observations of play activities have been the most important data source. For the analysis of how matter ‘acts’, play with sensorimotor content has been distinguished from play with symbolic content. In sensorimotor play, matter seems to ‘talk’ more directly to children's hands and bodies. In play activities with symbolic content, matter works both directly and through discourses, when objects are given symbolic meaning. In both kinds of play, discursive practices in the peer groups are influential.     

Bodies over borders: The sized body and geographies of transnationalism

This article connects the study of transnationalism with the growing area of fat studies. It proposes that a ‘trans-sizing’ approach to the body has the potential to illuminate both accounts of transnational migration and the body. I conclude by outlining two research agendas with the aim of expanding the focus of work on fatness and transnationalism; first, through focusing on (anti)obesity discourse in China, and second, on the relational experiences of migrant encounters in global cities.     

Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

Towards an embodied securityscape: Brian Chikwava's Harare North and the asylum seeking body as site of articulation

This article introduces the concept of an embodied securityscape, arguing that asylum seekers embody a point of articulation between two differently located security nexuses: security-migration and security-development. Drawing on Brian Chikwava's novel Harare North, the article illustrates this articulation, not only in the thematic development of the embodied experiences of the narrator, but also in the way the novel articulates differently located conventions of form. Ultimately, the article argues that this embodied securityscape, as illustrated through this novel, produces an alternative narrative space for the messy politics of asylum.     

Food,feeding and the material everyday geographies of infants: possibilities and potentials

This paper forges an agenda for researching geographies of infants. Scholars have tended to overlook the everyday geographies of very young children. However, outside of geography, infancy is seen as a specifically dynamic period of life, and is subject to sustained research and policy intervention. In particular, early childhood is viewed as a key point in which to intervene to transform enduring, interconnected, societal, educational, and health-based inequalities. Food and feeding are seen as critical both to the health of infants now and of the children and adults they become . However, much policy and research under-theorizes the importance of socio-spatial contexts and the subjectivity/agency of infants. There is, then, an urgent need for geographers to put infants onto the agenda, to inform and challenge these dominant accounts. Researching with infants necessitates not just critiquing modern, liberal notions of an autonomous subject/agent, but developing a new way of understanding subjectivity and agency. Drawing upon Lupton’s (2013) notion of infant–carer interembodiment, I suggest a way forward with reference to the material geographies of infant feeding.     

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.     

Harraga and Europe: The emotional geographies of undocumented migrants in Tunisian filmmaking

European concern over undocumented migration is conventionally told as a story of unwitting migrants risking their lives to reach the European shores to escape poverty and/or war. We are interested in further opening up and contributing to a more nuanced discussion of the multiple drivers behind migration though a focus on emotions. We do so by mapping out the emotional geographies of Tunisian harraga captured by five Tunisian filmmakers. Our visual analysis of the Tunisian harraga as transmitted by the documentaries and feature films reveals that the migrant's journey across the Mediterranean is motivated by a set of complex and contradictory emotions. Hopes for a better future in the form of individual and societal dignity are mixed up with fear of the dangers of the crossing and of bringing shame to the family. We find that the migrant's desire to up and leave their home country is propelled by the differential between the emotions tied to our-place and their-place.     

Nexus thinking and the geographies of children,youth and families: towards an integrated research agenda

ABSTRACT

This paper argues for and demonstrates the value of integrating nexus thinking - a conceptual and policy framework for the multiple interdependencies between resources, most commonly food, water and energy – into the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families (GCYF). Through discussion of the two areas’ current limitations, a review of existing GCYF work on food, water, energy and materiality, and secondary auto-analysis of data generated on families’ situated environmental concerns in India and the UK, the paper identifies three key contributions of an integrated nexus thinking-GCYF research agenda. Firstly, nexus thinking can advance understandings of how children and young people negotiate multi-scalar social, political, economic and ecological processes; secondly, an integrated agenda can ‘embody’ nexus thinking by situating children and families in the nexus of interconnections; thirdly, nexus thinking offers a policy-relevant frame through which GCYF can engage questions of intergenerational justice with questions of resource sustainability.     

Children as community planners: embodied activities,visual-spatial thinking,and a re-imagined community

ABSTRACT

This qualitative research endeavor explored the role of embodiment as a pathway to visual-spatial thinking. The researchers relied on an interdisciplinary approach using geography and theater rooted in kinesthetic and empathetic embodied activities to facilitate visual-spatial thinking within the context of a community redevelopment project. The participants consisted of 14 elementary and middle school aged girls attending a Girls Inc. program within a low-income housing community. The researchers situated the findings using McCormack’s ([1998. Visual/Spatial Thinking: An Essential Element of Elementary School Science. Washington, DC: Council for Elementary School Science]; [2011. “Don’t Verbalize, Visualize!” NSTA WebNews Digest. Accessed June 15, 2016. http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=58298]) visual-spatial thinking typology and theories of embodiment. The findings revealed that the girls exhibited three types of visual-spatial thinking, which ranged from foundational to highly advanced ways of thinking about space, to include visual-spatial perception, memory, and creative thinking. The results also illustrate that embodied activities that engage sensorimotor functions through an interdisciplinary approach, can facilitate visual-spatial thinking.     

The carceral wet: Hollowing out rights for migrants in maritime geographies

Over recent decades, various governments have turned to the spatiality of the maritime realm in the pre-emptive policing of migration, deploying concentrated efforts of mobility regulation to territorial and extra-territorial seas. With and through this process of increased policing, the maritime has concurrently been expunged of frameworks of rights for migrants. This article explores the hollowing out of rights at sea and how it has allowed governments to use maritime environments and more broadly the condition of wetness as a means to hold migrants beyond the juridical order and administrative bodies of the state. This practice emerged in a discernible way in the United States in the early 1990s, when the Refugee Convention was ruled not to apply on the high seas. De-territorialising the maritime from the state's geography of protection allowed the US Government to re-territorialise the sea as a space of heightened policing. Similar strategies of de- and re-territorialising the sea subsequently developed in Australian policies of migration control. Through this, the maritime is used to contain migrants not only in a condition of partial rights and exaggerated policing, it is also used to relocate migrants, exposing a “disciplined mobility” that works through the sea. Interrogating these various legal renditions of the maritime exposes the carceral wet that has developed in migration regulation at sea.     

Bodies,gender, place and culture: 21 years on

This article examines research on embodiment published in Gender, Place and Culture (GPC) over the past two decades. We searched using the keywords ‘body’, ‘bodies’, ‘embodiment’, ‘embody’, ‘flesh’, ‘fleshy’, ‘corporeality’ and ‘corporeal’, the titles and abstracts of all the articles that have appeared in GPC since it first began publication in 1994. Articles containing these keywords were listed in a searchable bibliography. What we found was a growing volume of research inspired by ‘body politics’ produced over a 21-year period that compares favourably to cognate geography journals. We also found that various themes have emerged including maternal and geopolitical bodies. In other areas, we identified gaps. Throughout the article, we engage with the question: has the upsurge of interest in embodiment, as expressed in the pages of GPC since 1994, led to an upheaval of masculinist ways of thinking in the discipline? We conclude by expressing our feelings of ambivalence.     

Where in the world are youth geographies going? Reflections on the journey and directions for the future

ABSTRACT

This viewpoints paper reflects upon the journey youth geographies have travelled over the last 20 years and highlights some thoughts on where directions for new research might be best placed in the coming decades. In particular, the paper draws attention to the growing numbers of youth in the Global South and especially in the African continent where youth populations are set to continue to rise. The paper identifies some of the potential challenges faced by the majority of youth in coming years in particular the need to decolonise thinking around youth geographies while also considering the importance of economic, social and political contexts in shaping debates. The paper charts some potential new directions while also suggesting that youth’s own perspectives need to receive greater prominence in theory and outcomes.     

Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place

Abstract

This review offers thoughts, queries and hesitations regarding articles drawing on participatory action research (PAR) published over 25?years of Gender, Place and Culture. It foregrounds the interconnections and overlaps between PAR and feminist geographies, and considers a continuum of participations-collaborations-actions-knowledges co-produced across a range of interrelated feminist methodologies. I emphasise epistemological commitment as central to PAR, pointing to work in GPC that evidences critical approaches to research process, embedded in feminist perspectives regarding how scholars re-produce the world and/as act/ing in the world, particularly in attending to shifting, situated and complex subjectivities and power inequalities. Working together with participants is vital, through an ethic that centres participants’ voices, as actors in their own lives. Highlighting the emotional and embodied geographies that weave through such research and writing, this review suggests deepening and strengthening interdependences and a feminist ethos of care as researchers, to further foreground diverse stories and voices, work towards social and spatial justice, and co-produce progressive changes with people and place.     

Power and Scale: The Shifting Geography of Industrial Relations Law in Australia

Abstract: In an increasingly complex literature exploring the geographies of socially constructed scale, interest has focused on the relationship between scale, power and the contested political terrains through which these relations are played out. In this paper, I argue that these interactions must be understood in specific contexts, where shifts in scale are inextricably linked to shifts in the sources and instruments of power. By applying a scale perspective to the analysis of recent industrial relations legislation in Australia, I show that the nature and direction of rescaling is “fixed” by the powers of institutional actors and the scope of their jurisdictions. I then draw on the distinctively scaled relations of the Australian context to assess the extent to which Australia's national rescaling processes can be seen as representing a process of convergence toward universal “spaces of neoliberalism”.     

Embodying violence: critical geographies of gender,race, and culture

The papers in this themed section collectively explore the intertwined geographies of corporeality and violence; to explore the ways in which narrow representations of race and culture are imbricated in the mis/understanding of gender based violence. This introductory essay draws out linkages across these papers, and to several themes in feminist geography. Combined, the four papers in the themed section offer new pathways for feminist geographers to consider. The authors connect the intimate and the global, the personal and the geopolitical, and offer critical insights into how feminist geographers might unpack entangled inequalities that give rise to distinct experiences of violence. Through their disparate studies, the authors also destabilize the assumptions mapped onto gendered bodies, particularly those that rely on racist, sexist, and classist representations of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ to describe gendered vulnerability. Subsequently, their analyses reveal how these assumptions simultaneously work to erase or ignore structural inequalities of capitalism or the state, which frame, contribute to and perpetuate violence against vulnerable bodies and geographies. They collectively underscore the epistemological, methodological and ontological possibilities of corporeal geographies particularly when tasked with intellectually analyzing both exceptional and everyday experiences of violence.     

Spectral geographies: haunting and everyday state practices in colonial and present-day Alaska

Haunting is an analytic that foregrounds connections between the past and the present day. I employ haunting to analyze everyday practices of the colonial state in Alaska, thereby reinforcing the material connections between everyday activities and narratives and the imaginaries they create, questioning the timeless character of many studies of everyday geographies, and demanding attention to justice. A case study from Alaska involving federal non-recognition of the Qutekcak tribe demonstrates connections between colonial histories and present-day practices of the state, connections that take shape as a ‘spectral geography.’