The condition of ‘Cosmo-housewives’: leisure shopping,the mainstream and its ambiguities

‘Leisure shopping’ is a particular kind of shopping activity that is devoted mainly to fashion clothes and accessories. Women are commonly represented as the main leisure shoppers, and consequently, they tend to be at the centre of shopping centres' mainstream discourses. This article argues that interpretations of representations of ‘leisure shopping’ and the corresponding practice have too often ignored the daily and seemingly ‘banal’ experiences of the social actors involved. The primary purpose of this article is to show how gender roles are performed and reified in high-end factory outlet villages in Italy. It adopts a cross-sectional approach to ‘leisure shopping’ that includes an analysis of the ‘languages’ of two Italian high-end factory outlet villages, the ‘social space’ represented by the same sites and the ‘stories’ about a few ideal-typical female shopping experiences. These aspects are situated in the Italian cultural and political context at the time the research was conducted. Very different demands – such as sensuality, efficiency and motherly care – are put on women in Italy, as well as in the majority of Western societies. The analysis reveals that through their practice of browsing in a high-end factory outlet village, women often reproduce stereotypes while simultaneously trying – though ambiguously – to challenge them.     

Characterizing and evaluating rival discourses of the ‘sustainable city’: Towards a politics of pragmatic adversarialism

For many, shifting economic and social contexts have created the conditions for a radical reappraisal of the orthodox image of the 'sustainable city'. However, in assessing such potentialities, there is insufficient knowledge about the way in which local actors construct, live out and are gripped by this signifier. This article responds to this deficit by exploring how key actors engaged in urban development actually interpret the challenges of the 'sustainable city'. In part, using a Q methodology study in Bristol and Grenoble, we discern and construct three distinctive discourses of the sustainable city, which we name progressive reformism, public localism, and moral stewardship. Our findings challenge previous critiques of sustainable urbanism. We observe no consistent support for mainstream conceptions of sustainable urban development, but neither do we find significant support for entrepreneurial or radical green localist discourses of the sustainable city. Instead, we identify a common indifference to the tenets of ecological modernization (and, by extension, entrepreneurialism), and a shared skepticism of local self-sufficiency. We thus argue that such discourses offer uncertain foundations upon which to construct new visions of the 'sustainable city'. In our view, this is because of the transformation of the 'sustainable city' from a relatively fixed idea into a floating signifier, coupled with the practices of local practitioners as policy bricoleurs. We conclude that efforts to develop new visions of 'sustainable cities' are best served by fostering an agonistic ethos of 'pragmatic adversarialism' amongst strategic leaders and stakeholders, which foregrounds politics and the right to difference.     

Going Against the Flow: Sinn Féin’s Unusual Hungarian ‘Roots’

Can states as well as non-state political ‘actors’ learn from the history of cognate entities elsewhere in time and space, and if so how and when does this policy knowledge get ‘transferred’ across international borders? This article deals with this question, addressing a short-lived Hungarian ‘tutorial’ that, during the early twentieth century, certain policy elites in Ireland imagined might have great applicability to the political transformation of the Emerald Isle, in effect ushering in an era of political autonomy from the United Kingdom, and doing so via a ‘third way’ that skirted both the Scylla of parliamentary formulations aimed at securing ‘home rule’ for Ireland and the Charybdis of revolutionary violence. In the political agenda of Sinn Féin during its first decade of existence, Hungary loomed as a desirable political model for Ireland, with the party’s leading intellectual, Arthur Griffith, insisting that the means by which Hungary had achieved autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire in 1867 could also serve as the means for securing Ireland’s own autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. This article explores what policy initiatives Arthur Griffith thought he saw in the Hungarian experience that were worthy of being ‘transferred’ to the Irish situation.     

Buddhist buildings in England: the construction of ‘under-represented’ faith heritage in a multicultural and post-Christian setting

Until recently the ‘heritage industry’ in England overlooked buildings of minority faith traditions. Little has been written about this ‘under-represented’ heritage. Drawing on data from the first national survey of Buddhist buildings in England, we examine the ways in which Buddhist heritage is beginning to be incorporated into the state-funded ‘heritage industry’ as well as how Buddhist communities in England construct heritage through these buildings. First, we draw upon spatial theory in the study of religion to examine three dimensions of minority faith buildings in England and what this tells us about the communities involved: ‘location’ (i.e. the geographical location of the buildings); ‘space’ (i.e. what the buildings are used for and their relationship to local, national and transnational scales); and ‘place’ (i.e. what types of buildings are selected by different communities and why). We then turn to theories of memory that have become popular within the study of religion as well as heritage studies. Religion understood as ‘a chain of memory’ plays an important role in heritage construction via faith buildings, and an analysis of faith buildings, their spatial dimensions and role in ‘memorywork’, helps us think through the dynamics of modern religious belief in a multicultural and post-Christian setting.     

‘Highway to Heaven’: the creation of a multicultural,religious landscape in suburban Richmond,British Columbia

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.     

Arm’s-length funding of the arts as an expression of laissez-faire

While questions continue to be raised over the continuation, nature and mechanisms of arms’-length funding for the arts, its theoretical foundations within a wider social and economic context remain under-explored. This article argues that the principle on which the arm’s-length relationship is constructed is defined by the concept of laissez-faire. It is this that sets rules for how the public and private spheres interact within a liberal and individualistic society. By this argument, providing public subsidy to the arts is a compensating act integral to the operation of a free-market economy and ensures the autonomy of individual artists, even while producing public benefits.     

Sandercock: ‘Expanding the language of planning’

In her book Towards Cosmopolis, to which this paper is an appendix, Leonie Sandercock outlines with insight, passion and sensitivity an emancipatory politics of difference and the ways in which a progressive planning, transformed from its modernist roots, can contribute to such a politics. It is in this context that she has developed the idea of what a planning curriculum should look like. But somehow, in discussing planning education, the forceful and imaginative thrust of her book seems to get lost in a rather narrowly‐based conception of what ‘planning education’, itself a multiplicity of practices, looks like these days and in homogenized images of the ‘planner’ which can easily be criticized.     

Integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of British Arab activists

Immigrant-receiving societies are increasingly emphasizing the need for immigrants to integrate into mainstream life. In Britain, this trend has manifested itself in ‘social cohesion’ discourses and policies. Discussions about social cohesion have often focused on the residential patterns of immigrant and minority groups in British cities, with the assumption that residential patterns are an indication of social integration. Integration, however, is also a socio-political process by which dominant and subordinate groups negotiate the terms of social membership. We explore the ways in which British Arab activists conceptualize their membership in and responsibilities to their places of settlement; we also consider how they reconcile notions of integration with their connections to their places of origin. Our study participants speak of the need for immigrants to participate actively in their society of settlement, but they reject the idea that integration requires cultural conformity or exclusive loyalty to Britain. Their definition of integration as a dialogue between distinctive but equal groups sharing a given place provides a normative alternative to social cohesion discourses.     

‘Unlocking the cage door’: the spatiality of counselling

This paper examines the spatiality of counselling, focusing on ideas about positions, boundaries and spaces emerging from practitioners' accounts. Counsellors describe counselling as a practice within which the relative positions of self and other are explored and negotiated. To that end, counsellors adopt a contradictory position in relation to expertise, claiming to be experts in not being experts. Counselling transgresses bureaucratic boundaries between different forms of care, and normative boundaries of secrecy. In their place, counselling works with spatio-temporal, confidentiality and ethical boundaries, which are simultaneously concrete and specific, fluid and illusory. These boundaries create spaces within which the interplay of reality and fantasy can be explored. These spaces can be understood in terms of processes of exteriorizing the inner worlds of clients and interiorizing external spaces including those made available by counsellors and counselling services. The spatiality of care associated with counselling strategically invokes binary distinctions, for example, between reality and fantasy, but also disrupts dualistic conceptualizations of space in favour of an understanding of space as simultaneously real, imagined, material and symbolic.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

The ‘Evidence’ of sex,the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.     

Feminism and its ‘other’: representing the ‘new woman’ of Bangladesh

This essay examines women's oppression and organizing against gender violence in contemporary Bangladesh through the lens of television. I argue that the telefilm Ayna (The Mirror, 2006), written and directed by popular film actor and women's rights activist Kabari Sarwar, offers a window into the changing social and economic landscape of contemporary Bangladesh and the complex negotiations of power and inequality across gender, class and community. Furthermore, it offers an opportunity to unpack the social messages underlying development and modernization initiatives, the new kinds of alliances as well as dependencies engendered by them, and their multiple and uneven consequences. An investigation of the representations of competing and contradictory notions of women's subjectivity and agency in this telefilm allows us to understand how these intersect with shifting notions of local/global patriarchies, feminist solidarity and women's empowerment in Bangladesh today. Further, this essay illuminates the disjunctures between representations of the ‘new woman’ circulated through development and certain feminist advocacy narratives with women's lived realities of oppression, and survival.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.