The geographies of UK university halls of residence: examining students' embodiment of social capital

Recent investigations into ‘student geographies’ have recognised the complex ways in which students from different backgrounds go about ‘fitting in’ among their peers within university-managed accommodation. Halls have been characterised in the literature as highly pressurised spaces in which multiple (and potentially conflicting) identities can perpetuate disadvantage through incongruous accessibility to student-centric social activities and behaviours. This paper joins these debates by critically examining universities' ‘Student Accommodation’ web pages alongside qualitative interviews in order to question notions of halls being inclusive and encouraging a cultural mix. Using Bourdieu's reading of social capital this paper suggests that, while these spaces may perpetuate disadvantaged access to social capital, some students may transcend this, drawing on other forms of non-student social capital which legitimises their position among their peers in halls. This adds to previous discussions of ‘difference’ by highlighting the power of social capital in transforming individuals' positions within social groupings.     

Being a tourist as a chosen experience in a proximity destination

ABSTRACT

Being a tourist is not a passive attitude. It is the result of a conscious decision essentially based on how individuals build what they perceive as unknown and how they decide to get to know it. In other words, tourists deliberately create a distance with the destination which allows them to enjoy the tourist experience as something exceptional. This paper is part of ongoing research and focuses on the subjective construction of the otherness, since this process determines what is left to be discovered. First, a theoretical overview will introduce the concepts of usual environment, proximity and tourist. Then, we will focus on guided tours as a mechanism of mediation between individuals and places. Finally, we will move on to the case of Barcelona's walking tours and the local participants’ experience as a way to adopt a tourist's approach. Preliminary results show, first, four categories of experience of proximate guided tours: educational, expert, recreational and tourist. Then, they focus on the proximity tourist experience using Urry and Larsen's notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ and Tuan's theory on the tourist and the resident's points of view. According to these theories, participants’ motivations and their individual frame of reference define a tourist's point of view. Based on that, results show that proximity tourists and traditional tourists share curiosity as motivation but do not have the same points of reference. In spite of that, the feeling of proximity with the destination does not constitute a barrier to become a tourist. It is the conscious adoption of the tourist's role which makes the individual gaze upon the visited areas like a tourist, regardless of the proximity with the environment. This approach of proximity tourism constitutes a way to enhance familiar places and develop tourism in an environmentally concerned context where proximate destinations are being promoted.     

Reassessing the ‘Crisis of Faith’ in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry

This article examines both recent scholarship in the field of Victorian religion and conviction alongside new research on secularization that have cast doubt on an older historical narrative about the ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘triumph’ of the secular. My discussion challenges the emergence of an alternative narrative of crisis that focuses on the ‘crisis of doubt’ rather than the ‘crisis of faith’. In particular, it answers the recent work of Timothy Larsen who argues that many past (and some present) approaches to Victorian religious culture have overemphasized doubt at the expense of considering enduring forms of Christian religiosity. By reappraising the career histories of the radical secularists (notably, Annie Besant) that Larsen uses to support his thesis, I test some of the key assumptions and conclusions of his influential account. My analysis questions the positioning of faith and scepticism as polar opposites and the usefulness of the idea of ‘crisis’ when examining either belief or doubt. Changes in individuals' convictions and practices might be better seen as part of their life-long quest for an all-embracing morality.     

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.     

Gendered struggles over land: shifting inheritance practices among the Serer in rural Senegal

Although women’s land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women’s land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women’s equal access to land. This article draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and ‘technologies of the self’, this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals’ marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to ‘demand their rights’. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women’s and men’s positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic laws and a desire to ‘change with the times’. While the effects of ‘reverse’ discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, ‘counter’ discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women’s land inheritance.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

Cuban Landscapes: Heritage,Memory, and Place

Growing individual mobility has been a key element in the re-evaluation of the links between (national) place and identity in what has been labelled a'borderless world'. In this paper, an alternative perspective is provided by exploring the ways in which discussions around travel are used to redefine the nation as a bounded, familiar and homely place.

In the first section, a number of key themes in the wider literature on ‘home’ are identified and applied to the nation, notably the idea that ‘homely spaces’ are imagined and experienced in relation to journeys elsewhere. This idea is then evidenced by a range of empirical data, which shows how individuals are often made aware of their own national identity and allegiances, when negotiating encounters with other people and cultural forms.

In discussing the discomfort and uncertainty they experience in ‘foreign’ locales, the national home is defined as a secure base from which to proceed and, most importantly, to return. Interestingly, these types of views were expressed by a range of social actors, ranging from college students, who travelled widely and with great enthusiasm, to retired people, who were increasingly restricted in their ability to visit foreign locales.     

Kinned to be Norwegian: transnational adoptees' positioning in relation to whiteness and the negotiation of nationhood

Embedded in ongoing discussions on everyday nationhood in the context of migration‐related diversity, this article explores how Norwegian transnational adoptees, as border subjects, negotiate their national belonging and identities by positioning themselves in relation to whiteness. By doing so, it further explores the relationship between race and nation. The analysis demonstrates that transnational adoptees position themselves as white when encountering the norm of whiteness, which the author argues in favour of understanding as continued process of doing race. While phenotypic differences trigger a process of racialisation through which transnational adoptees can easily be placed in a minoritised position, adoption provides them with unique access to whiteness, mostly along the negotiable and intertwined dimensions of kinship and the notion of ‘origin’, referred to as the place where they grew up. The article argues that individuals' positioning along majoritisation/minoritisation processes is another important dimension to understand one's multiple and fluid national identity and belonging in migration‐related diversity. The analysis also furthers the discussions on hierarchy of belonging by highlighting the relevance of kinship in intersection with race.     

Strathern's Melanesian ‘dividual’ and the Christian ‘individual’: a Perspective from Vanua Lava,Vanuatu

What happens to people's concept of the person when their ‘dividuality’ engages with the Christian concept of the ‘individual’? According to Vanua Lava kastom, when people die they go to sere timiat, the place of the dead. But do they still go there when the person had been a Christian during their life time? Where is the Christian heaven and hell? Is there a separate Christian ‘soul’? Will the dead be eternally separated from each other and their ancestors? Can kastom and Christian concepts be reconciled? Depending on denomination and degree of conversion (devout, nominal, or ‘back‐slider’) people have found multiple answers that help them conceptualise their final resting place. Their answers are of relevance for theoretical debates in anthropology about dividuality, individuality and engagement with modernity.     

Elemental mobilities: atmospheres,matter and cycling amid the weather-world

Abstract

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent ‘elemental’ materialities. Such ‘matters’ matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and ‘elementary’ aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists’ experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air’s force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such ‘elemental’ matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling.     

Branded Axes,Thrown into a Pool? The Hoogeloon Hoard and the Shape‐Based Bronze Economy of the North‐West European Bronze Age

One of the biggest challenges for students of the European Bronze Age is to understand the reason behind the massive deposition of large amounts of recyclable metal in non‐metalliferous regions. Such depositions are particularly puzzling when material was buried in a manner which directly seems to denote trade itself, in so‐called ‘trade hoards’. Based on observations on a recent find of such a hoard, in Hoogeloon (NL), we move to an overview of Bronze Age metalwork economy in general and the deposition of trade stock in particular. We argue that Middle Bronze Age metalwork circulation in North‐west Europe may be understood as an aes formatum system, with the serially produced axes in hoards displaying a koiné having a particular social evaluation: a ‘brand’. We suggest that objects were selected by brands for their deposition in the landscape and that this ‘ritual’ act was integral to the ‘practical’ economy of circulation.     

The industrial district: A stage of a diffuse industrialization process—the case of Roanne

The industrial district is an important element of the theoretical debates concerning the appearance of original features of regional development in Europe. Issuing from Marshallion theory, this concept was ‘reinvented’ in the late 1970s in order to interpret a series of ‘regional success stories’ of industrial development that occurred in middle Italy. Thus, for some economists and geographers, the industrial district has become a new ‘standard’ of regional development, appearing as an autonomous integrated system, whose functions are based on the principle of ‘automation’. This system represents an optimal structure in terms of economic efficiency and resource allocation, and owns its proper mechanisms of reproduction related to specific territorial regulations. A crisis for such a system can only be related to exogenous factors. Rejecting this static vision of economic structures, which reintroduces the ‘growth/crisis’ divide in the analysis of economic development, it seems necessary to promote a more dynamic approach in terms of ‘change through continuity’. This approach was initially developed by some Italian authors who tried to analyze the original features of regional development in the Third Italy in terms of ‘industrialization without fracture’. This approach does not deny the existence of industrial districts, but refuses to accept that they are static: districts can evolve, change, develop . . . Thus, they appear as a particular stage of development in a diffuse industrialization process. Their evolution is no longer simply related to exogenous variables but also to endogenous ones; and this evolution does not necessarily lead to an implosion or a complete transformation of space but can also lead, through the continuity of the industrial district's mechanisms, to a post‐district organizational configuration.     

‘Sane’ and ‘insane’ imperialism: British idealism,new liberalism and liberal imperialism

It is contended that British Idealists, New Liberals and Liberal Imperialists were all in favour of imperialism, especially when it took the form of white settler communities. The concession of relative autonomy was an acknowledgement of the potential of white settler communities to go the way of America by severing their relationship with the Empire completely. Where significant differences emerge in their thinking is in relation to non-white territories in the Empire where native peoples comprised the majority, and the British Government and its agents administered in trust ‘lower’ peoples on the scale of civilisation with the ostensible goal of guiding them towards self-determination in the Empire. The differences in degree of commitment to these ideals were largely expressed in terms of the pejorative categories of ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ imperialism, which were flexible and manipulated for political gain, rather than analytic precision. Liberal Imperialists and New Liberals were opposed to each other in terms of the degree to which they supported imperialism, whereas British Idealists aligned themselves on both sides of the divide.     

Food in the City: Urban Food Geographies and ‘Local’ Food Sourcing in Melbourne and San Diego County

Perceptions of food systems and food acquisition decisions are grounded in specific socio‐economic and environmental contexts. Working in two relatively affluent urban communities in Melbourne, Australia and San Diego County, USA, this article explores the ways that individuals perceive their food systems, where they acquire food, and their definitions of ‘local’ sourcing. Surveys and interviews reveal a clear discrepancy between the ideals and the reality of food acquisition decision‐making, particularly the desire to eat ‘local food’. Survey respondents' realities do not live up to their expectations. These practices can largely be explained by the interplay between the respondents' perceived priorities, food preferences, dietary requirements, and decision‐making constraints in particular urban geographies. Further research is needed on the role of perceptions in food decision‐making in specific geographic contexts.     

Remapping disclosure: gay men's segmented journeys of moving out and coming out

Drawing on recent work that examines the contingent, personal nature of queer migration, this paper provides empirical support for recent claims that coming-out journeys are more complex than the linear, often rural-to-urban typologies that have framed them during the past two decades. Since coming-out journeys are rarely elaborated beyond a conceptual level, overly teleological understandings involving homophobic, rural places, inclusive urban homelands, and one-time, linear ‘flights’ and ‘escapes’ persist. Employing the migration narratives of 48 self-identified gay men who settled in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, this paper challenges the linearity and finality of coming-out migration by highlighting particular segments of the journey. These include short-term trips to scout the gay life potentials of places, migrations that result in a degree of re-entry into ‘the closet,’ relocations that allow men to test or try on different places and identities, and moves (or imminent moves) that ‘trigger’—rather than stem from—a coming-out process. Taken together, these segments suggest that coming-out journeys are ongoing, relational, and often discontinuous journeys influenced by both queer individuals' intersectional subjectivities (e.g., age, race, and class) and the social contexts of the places they encounter.     

When nature nurtures children: nature as a containing and holding space

Contemporary theories of childhood recognize children as experts in their own lives, individuals whose perspectives are worthy of study. Immigrant and refugee children riding waves of historical, geographical, political, cultural and familial changes are likewise recognized as ‘socially competent actors’, anchored in part by their capacity to express personal interests and to form opinions. In a Montreal-based 2012 phenomenological study, 19 of these socially competent actors representing 5 continents were invited to share their perspectives concerning the role of the natural world in their socio-cultural adaptation process. Data provided information concerning children's lived experiences of nature. Research findings provided strong evidence that children entered into relationship with nature. Within this relationship, nature nurtured children by providing a space not unlike that of Winnicott's ‘holding’ or Bion's ‘containment’.     

Rethinking Aboriginal ‘Resistance’: The Community Development Employment (CEPD) Program

In this paper I wish to contribute to an understanding of ‘Aboriginal resistance’ by a study of the politics of remote Aborigines' ‘employment’. I begin by highlighting some themes in recent discussions of the Community Development Employment Projects (cdep ) policy, before looking back at some features of the welfare and pastoral economy in the Central Australian hinterland, c. 1950 to c. 1975. My aim is twofold: to show some of the cultural continuities in the relationships between remote Aborigines and government; and to criticise constructively the notion of ‘Aboriginal resistance’, to advocate a structural and processual notion of ‘resistance’ and to move away from one based on the clear identification of actors.     

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco'S Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press. Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism. The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation. Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.