Meaning,materials and melancholia: understandingthe Palace Hotel

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

Engendering Gramsci: Gender,the Philosophy of Praxis,and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan,Bangladesh

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity‐building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness‐raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be “engendered” to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.     

Twisted Lives: On the Temporality and Materiality of Biographical Presences

People??s biographies are dominated by a multitude of factors. In recent years it has come to a general understanding that people??s life histories are embedded in things just as things are premising the biographies of people. Still, the scholarly discussion has concentrated heavily on individual biographies resulting in life-histories of bodies and individuals confined by their bodily framework rather than conceptualizing the person through the mutual interaction between people and things and the interrelationship between various presences in the revelation of the temporality and materiality of biography. In this paper I aim to explore the category of personal biography resting upon aspects of Heideggerian philosophy. I argue for biographical presences that are spread across time, subjected to shared participation and intrinsically intertwined with the narratives they generate. The argumentation rests upon my personal involvement with the biography of a seventeenth-century peasant from the farm Búearárbakki in southern Iceland. The site and its material culture have emerged as the cause and consequence of our shared life-histories manifesting the notion of multi-temporality and materiality to the category of biography.     

'Respect the life of the countryside': the Country Code, government and the conduct of visitors to the countryside in post-war England and Wales

Geographers examining the spaces of government and governance, and in particular those drawing upon the writings of Michel Foucault on government and governmentality, have tended to overlook the importance of different media, technical devices and practices of self-government to specific rationalities and programmes of government. In this paper I argue that the materialities and immaterialities of many mundane media technologies, the way they articulate and translate particular programmes of government, and the way they instil practices of self-government in citizens, are important but frequently overlooked dimensions of the geographies of government. I focus on the codes of countryside conduct – The Country Code/Countryside Code – that have been published in England and Wales since 1951. I examine how the National Parks Commission, and subsequently the Countryside Commission and Countryside Agency, identified the potential strengths and limitations of using the Country Code booklet to govern the conduct of visitors to the countryside. The paper shows how the material form of the booklet and methods of distributing and promoting it were seen to matter, and examines how civil servants attempted to extend the 'reach' of the Code and articulate its message through a diverse range of media which entailed different kinds of performative encounters in different spaces.     

They're here—I can feel them: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges

Indigenous Knowledges (IK) are continually contrasted with Western positivist sciences. Yet the usual conception of IK—as a translatable knowledge about things—renders incomprehensible its discussion as a spiritual or ethical practice. A practice taking place within what we call an epistemic space. A moose hunting event can demonstrate how IK is produced through the epistemic spaces within which hunting is performed. Part of the performance is becoming-animal; as practiced by Koyukon Athabascans, a moose hunt reproduces the social relations between hunter and prey, spiritual relations that demonstrate an ontology and ethics seemingly distinct from those of the Western wildlife sciences founded upon Enlightenment humanism. Yet such ‘Western–Indigenous’ dichotomies falsely indicate entirely separable spaces within which to produce accounts of reality. Instead, this account of a moose hunt demonstrates an assemblage of actors within one space, who together become more than the authors' individual positions and selves, and becomes an event. We additionally argue that more faithfully representing this assemblage requires changing the form of the usual academic paper. Thus tacking between a narrative and theoretical approach that switches from each of our first-person points of view, we aim to depict how knowledge of one hunting event becomes assembled.     

Informality Materialised: Long‐term Temporariness as a Mode of Informal Urbanism

This paper establishes an important link between the architectural strategies and long‐term sustenance of “ordinary” informal spaces in the planned modernist city of Islamabad. By focusing on the modalities of street hawking in Islamabad, this paper demonstrates that the architecture of ordinary informality follows an aesthetic and materiality of temporariness, and invokes design criteria based on the rituals of daily assembly and disassembly, and shared customs involving “temporary” claims to immediate public space. The paper uses the concept of “long‐term temporariness” to argue that the sustained existence of street hawking depends upon the routine maintenance of the relationship between its temporality and materiality, evident in both the everyday spatial practices and official procedures concerning informal street commerce. The paper thus situates street hawking within the realms of both formal and informal processes, and highlights the role of provisionality in urban transformations in the global South.     

Feminism and the Spaces of Transformation

Feminist political theory draws on particular spatial imaginations in elaborating a politics of transformation. This paper establishes this in relation to two familiar accounts of feminist transformation – those of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. Respectively I read their work as suggesting that transformation of gender relations takes the form of ubiquitous revolution, taking place everywhere, or a distant dream of an (im)possible future – elsewhere. The paper then turns to discuss the work of Julia Kristeva, often dismissed as not feminist and conservative. I read her work politically, within the frame of feminist theory. She offers a different, heterogeneous account of transformation, as both possible in the present and also limited by the existence and need for social and symbolic orders. In exploring the heterogeneous spatial imagination of her work, the paper suggests that the spatialities of abjection are diverse and productive. Abjection is not simply about devising territories and borders. Moreover, dominant spatialities cannot be described as simply masculine. Finally, drawing links with Lefebvre's account of representational spaces, I argue that Kristeva's work can be extended to inform our understanding of how spaces themselves can be transformed.     

Things and the Slow Neolithic: the Middle Eastern Transformation

This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.     

Lost in translation: exploring childhood identity using photo-elicitation

Photo-elicitation is recognised as a visual method which can enhance children’s participation in research and is responsive to childhood experiences. This paper reports on a participatory study which employed photo-elicitation and examines what this method can reveal about research designed to explore children’s identity. Twenty children (6–10 years) were given a digital camera to take pictures ‘all about me’ at home and an after-school club. In addition, parents and practitioners participated in semi-structured interviews. This paper considers the materiality of photo-elicitation and describes the different ways in which children build narratives using photographs as interview prompts. Despite the capacity for photo-elicitation to enable children to take pictures of material things which forge connections to embodied, affective and routine identity processes, this paper critically examines how photographs as material things are made sense of and potentially translated within social practices bounded by power dynamics.     

Gay and lesbian emotional geographies of clubbing: reflections from Paris and Turin

Urban nighttime entertainment spaces, including bars, pubs, and clubs, are a crucial space for the performance of gendered social relations and the experience of sexual identities. This article investigates the emotional spaces of commercial gay and lesbian recreation in two different settings: lesbian nights in Paris, France, and gay clubs in Turin, Italy. This research was carried out through direct observation and auto-ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the literature from emotional geographies, the article proposes an alternative take on the geography of gay and lesbian clubbing by applying the metaphors of the island and the archipelago from cultural geography to the gay and lesbian scene. The island and archipelago are presented as metaphors that imply emotions, performance, materiality, spatiality, strategy, and imagination in the performance of the gay and lesbian playscape. The article argues that the club, intended as a type of gay and lesbian island, does not necessarily imply a condition of insulation. Rather, the island implies both metaphor and materiality, and movement may also be considered an emotional strategy for gays and lesbians in the heteronormative urban space.     

People,plants and performance: On actor network theory and the material pleasures of the private garden

Actor network theory has received considerable attention within geography. In this paper I suggest that geographers have looked at these ideas in a particular way and that this can be productively complemented by an excursion into the contemporary private garden. Through exploring the ways in which people and plants live together there, some geographical criticisms of a defined actor network theory no longer seem to necessarily apply to a more diffuse set of actor network ideas. Furthermore, these ideas can also provide a productive means of engaging practically with the material presence of things, insofar as this materiality is important in the constitution of human cultural experience.     

论古文化旅游产品的开发——以洛阳市为例

本文首先界定了旅游产品的概念,在分析了古文化旅游产品开发的优势和难点的基础上,提出了古文化旅游产品的两大开发战略:寓无形于有形,变形定为神动;精品化战略。最后,文章结合洛阳市古文化旅游资源的实际,分析其古文化旅游资源的特点,提出洛阳市古文化旅游产品开发的六大战略,即精品发展战略、系列产品发展战略、资源综合开发战略、多渠道驻留游客战略、旅游网络战略、可持续发展战略,并在开发战略的指导思想下,指出了近期洛阳市古文化旅游产品开发的行动重点在于,营造古都旅游氛围;综合整治古文化景点,创造舒适旅游环境;丰富产品内容,寓无形于有形;增加文化与趣味并重的项目,变形定为神动;完善产品功能,提供优质服务等。     

Making space for fish: the regional,network and fluid spaces of fisheries certification

In this paper, we examine the multiple spatialities of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certifications. The MSC uses its ecolabelling scheme to promote sustainable fisheries management; its logo may be used on the products of certified fisheries. The certification process involves the definition of a ‘fishery’. This involves the designation of boundaries around a particular location. While these boundaries suggest exclusivity for each fishery, these regional spaces are also entwined in the MSC's network, whereby they are viewed relationally. The utility of areal boundaries is also rendered problematic by the materiality of the seas: coastlines change, fish swim, water moves and ships travel. To operate its scheme successfully, the MSC has to recognise this spatial fluidity, acknowledging the rupture of boundaries and the movement of actors. We argue that attention to a multiplicity of spatialities helps direct attention to the role of non-humans in the acting out of hybrid geographies.     

Political Theology,Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how citizenship is not just a legal status that entails certain rights and duties, but also denotes an identity, a performance of politics, and a shared rationality. Third, I identify the dominant ways in which citizenship is understood in the contemporary context, namely, through either a nationalist or cosmopolitan framework, contrasting these with a consociational conception of citizenship. And lastly, I lay out how a consociational framework provides a more generative basis for conceptualizing religious diversity.     

`Operation motorway': landscapes of construction on England's M1 motorway

Recent years have seen an increasing number of academics attempt to write more process-oriented and ‘non-representational’ accounts of landscape. Drawing upon this literature, I discuss a number of the movements, materialities, and practices entailed in constructing England's M1 motorway in the late 1950s. The performances, movements and durability of a diverse range of things—including earth-moving machines, public relations brochures, maps, helicopters, senior engineers, aggregate and labourers—are shown to be important to the construction and ordering of the motorway and spaces of the construction company in different times and spaces, with people's experiences or understandings of construction, both now and in the past, emerging through memories, talk and embodied encounters with architectures, texts and artefacts which are assembled, circulated and/or archived. Aerial perspectives assumed a prominent role in depictions of construction, while journalists and engineers frequently drew upon a military vocabulary and alluded to the military nature of the project when discussing the motorway.     

Movement in Print: Migrations and Political Articulations in Grassroots Publishing

What makes a book political? This essay takes up this question through analysis of a small network of grassroots publishing projects. In doing so, I suggest that the materiality and mobility of a book can be just as, if not more, significant than its content when considering its political character. Specifically, I examine the interconnected trajectories of a cluster of books published since 2010 that participate in conversations about migration, work, and popular politics in Argentina and Bolivia. By zooming in on two very distinct contexts of book culture (Buenos Aires and La Paz) and especially the connections and tensions that emerge between them, I seek to account for some of the heterogeneous contemporary formations of what Ángel Rama called the ‘lettered city’ in Latin America. As I focus on grassroots publishing projects, I shift my attention away from the usual spaces of book culture, allowing other marginal circuits of production, circulation, and consumption to appear. Combining ethnographic narrative with textual analysis, this essay develops the double concept of political articulation (as expression and connection) to offer a transdisciplinary exploration of how movement is shaping the print book – materially and politically – in Latin America today.     

Alternative Spaces of the "Argentinazo"

The ongoing instability in Argentina that emerged from the December 2001 uprising in Buenos Aires (the "Argentinazo") has been one of the highest profile examples in recent years of reaction to the economic "disciplining" of a country. For enthusiasts, this reaction has been resistance, an upsurge against neoliberalisation by people conscious of what was happening and with alternative conceptions of how things should be ( Aufheben 2003 ; Carrera and Cotarelo 2003 ; Dinerstein 2002 ; Galeano 2002 ; Harman 2002 ; "IM" 2002 ; Klein 2003a , 2003b ; MAS 2002 ; Ollier 2003 ). Subaltern resistances such as those developed by Argentines have been the subject of much geographical writing on resistance in recent years ( Castells 1997 ; Leyshon, Lee and Williams 2003 ; Pile and Keith 1997 ; Sharp et al 2000 ). This paper addresses the range of actions, or "action repertoire"( Tarrow 1998 :20–21), of the Argentinazo to examine the extent to which alternative material and discursive "convergence spaces"( Routledge 2003 ) of political engagement emerged both as resistance to, and articulating a coherent alternative to, neoliberalism.     

The Matter of Carbon: Understanding the Materiality of tCO2e in Carbon Offsets

Abstract: This paper examines the socio‐natural relations inherent in the commodification of carbon reductions as they are generated in energy‐based carbon offset project activities, and abstracted to wider market systems. The ability to commodify carbon reductions takes place through a socionatural–technical complex that is defined by the material nature of technology's interaction with the atmosphere, local social processes and the evolving governing systems of carbon markets. Carbon is not unproblematically commodified: some projects and technologies allow a more cooperative commodification than others. The examples of a hydroelectricity plant and an improved cookstove project in Honduras are used as empirical case studies to illustrate the difficulties and opportunities associated with the relational aspects of carbon commodification. Drawing upon select literatures from post‐structural thought to complement the principal lens of a more structural, materiality of nature analysis, the paper also outlines the reasons why carbon offset reform is needed if offsets are to more progressively engage debates about climate mitigation and North–South development.     

Counterfactualism,utopia, and historical geography: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt

Though counterfactual histories are treated with suspicion by some historians, they can be both useful and politically progressive. In fact it is possible to argue that counterfactual historical geographies might even be utopian. Though this seems counter-intuitive (how could alternative histories imagine a better future?), both histories and utopias encourage a kind of popular historicism, a sense that things have been (and could be) different. Whether this makes counterfactual fictions utopian depends on how you define utopia. Recent critical re-appraisals of the concept have suggested that we might think of it as a process, an ongoing critique of the present, not as an end in itself. Counterfactual histories can be utopian because they encourage a critique of teleology and determinism; their geographies can also be utopian because they remind us that spaces are multiple and open. A close reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (2002), a novel that describes a world without Europe after a more virulent version of the fourteenth-century plague kills everyone west of Constantinople, demonstrates that counterfactual historical fictions present an unequalled opportunity to reflect upon the practice of history. The novel also suggests that counterfactual historical fictions also allow for a critical evaluation of the nature of space. The paper concludes by demonstrating the value of counterfactual fictions through their representations of history, and of spaces of movement, multiplicity, and agonistic encounter.