Rethinking electoral geography: spaces and practices of democracy in Nicaragua

Despite engagements with Foucauldian and Deleuzian insights by many geographers, concerns remain that we are still failing to understand the difference geography makes to the exercise of power. This article, which focuses on the 2006 Nicaraguan elections, has three main aims. The first is to explore the relationship between power and space through the lens of an electoral campaign. The second is to contribute to recent attempts to theoretically reinvigorate electoral geography. The third is to provide an alternative reading of democratisation in Nicaragua. Ultimately, this article focuses on how ordinary people in the interests of creating a better life for themselves make do with the circumstances in which they live.     

Gilded Ages and Gilded Archaeologies of American Exceptionalism

Archaeology’s ties to an interest in America’s natural and cultural resources, enshrined in the Antiquities Act of 1906, can be tied to the development of the presumed entitlements associated with gilded age-era conceptions of America’s cultural and racial exceptionalism. Archaeology, historic preservation, and related interests in the materiality of America’s past were in fact among the mechanisms used to legitimize America’s global emergence in the modern era. Considering elite ideas about race and a fear of “race suicide” as well as the rise of the environmental conservation and the historic house movement, this paper argues that archaeology and related pursuits of historic materiality have been regularly deployed to enforce Anglo-Saxon racial values. Explicitly formed in the historical context of mass-immigration, this dynamic is explored in a discussion of two archaeological sites in Jamaica, Queens connected to gilded-age discourse on Americanization.     

Praxis and theory in the writing of American historical geography

The use of primary sources in the writing of American historical geography is a relatively recent practice, and one which warrants more attention than it has been accorded. Of immediate appeal to historical geographers when they finally turned to primary sources were contemporary travel accounts, topographies and geographies. Because they were, and still are, much used, and because they reveal in simple and direct fashion the difficulty of encountering past “reality”, these kinds of material are the focus here. To turn from these essentially qualitative sources to more quantitative sources neither resolves nor avoids the issue we wish to raise, the problem of subjectivity. There are two sides to the problem of subjectivity; the first concerns the contemporary as observer and recorder of facts; the second concerns the latter-day scholar as observer and recorder of facts. The old conception of the geographer as an impersonal observer is no longer acceptable. In the quest for an understanding of the geography of the past, it may well be that “objectivity is the fruit of genuine subjectivity”, and that what is required is a collective effort of subjective scholars engaged in a continuing dialogue.     

Clio, Columbia, And The Cosmopolitans: Beyond American Exceptionalism And The Nation–State

Books reviewed in this article:
Thomas Bender, Rethinking American History In A Global Age     

Performing the Lodge: Masonry, masculinity, and nineteenth-century North American moral geography

Geographies reinforce gender and facilitate gender performativity. In this study of nineteenth-century Masonry, we demonstrate the influence of Masonic Temples in the promotion and performance of ‘Masonic masculinity.’ Masonry, through its design and construction of interior space, its embedded material symbolism and especially the geography of Masonic ritual itself, inculcated morality in prospective and raised Master Masons. Masonic Temple architecture and décor typify Victorian moral environmentalism vis-à-vis the parlor, the Masonic Lodge a domesticated male space where significant numbers of bourgeois men (and women) acted out a particular and peculiar masculine moral geography.     

Curriculum development and society: West German geographers respond to the American high school geography project

Abstract

Industrial geography courses at the Historically Black Universities (HBUs) and the Historically White Universities (HWUs) in South Africa are a true reflection of apartheid education designed by the government in the 1950s. The education system offers whites good and quality education, while blacks receive poor education. The nature and history of the HBUs have affected the content and the teaching of industrial geography. Unlike the HWUs industrial geography courses at the HBUs do not contain much of the recent changes in the subject.     

Continuous campaigning and electoral outcomes: The Liberal Democrats in Bath

From the 1950s onwards, David Butler and a number of co-authors of the Nuffield studies of British General Elections stressed the perceived futility of local campaigns, dismissing them as ritual, irrelevant exercises. During the 1990s, a new orthodoxy emerged. Using their own surrogate measure of campaigning, three groups of scholars found that the more intense a party's campaign in a constituency, relative to its opponents', the better its performance there. The significance of campaigning appears to vary across the country's three main political parties; however, it seems to be particularly important to the success of the Liberal Democrats. These findings are entirely consistent with arguments regarding the role and efficacy of local campaigning, but there remains a need for more direct evidence. If the traditionalists are correct, then local campaigning will have no impact on either turnout or the electoral performance of the party involved. If the ‘revisionists’ are correct, then where a party campaigns intensively it should be better able to identify and mobilise its core supporters, ensure that they turn out to vote, and thus improve its performance relative to its opponents. To evaluate these two arguments require data on where and how a party campaigns intensively, at local scales which can then be linked to electoral turnout data for those small areas. Such an evaluation is reported in this paper, using a case study of one ward in the City of Bath at the 1999 local government elections there.     

Pillars and electoral behavior in Belgium: The neighborhood effect revisited

This paper explores the processes behind the neighborhood effect in electoral geography. Studies on neighborhood effect have largely ignored the local institutions and cultural milieu within which people are socialized. By taking into account the spatially differentiated social embedding of individuals, we are able to highlight the impact of local institutions on electoral behavior and restore the temporal dimension that has shaped the political specificities of places. In the case of Belgium, we show that social embedding (which took the very accomplished form of pillars) affects voting behavior through two different channels: a direct effect, coming from the family transmission of pillar values, and a contextual effect captured by a measure of the local embeddedness of the pillar.     

Gender representation in geography: Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper explores key skills required by potential employers of geography graduates. Academic ability combined with a variety of transferable skills such as communication, organisation and self-motivation appeal to many of the employers questioned. Graduates can face potential difficulties expressing these key skills in standard application forms and interviews. Extracurricular activities and previous employment can provide impressive ways to display skills relevant to the job. Key skills are dynamic; graduates need to keep pace with ever changing expectations particularly with regard to information technology.