Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Mothers' business,work/life and the politics of ‘mumpreneurship’

Heralded by some as ‘the new feminism’, the new, internationally widespread phenomenon of ‘the mumpreneur’ represents a hotly contested and contestable subject identity. This article explores the debate, arguing that its themes drive to the heart of current issues regarding changing working practices, locations and gender identities in affluent societies. The analyses of women entrepreneurs' views presented here (n = 330) reveal that practitioners are sharply polarised on ‘the mumpreneur’. This article explores these views and progresses research agendas by asking whether such information and communication technology-enabled transformations in working practices (embodied in the figure of the ‘mumpreneur’) have the potential to deliver greater choice for mothers' labour, or whether, conversely, they re-enable iniquitous gender role expectations and arrangements within families.     

Doing gender and the GeoHumanities – celebrations and intoxications

Abstract

This paper celebrates Gender, Place and Culture’s 25th Anniversary by staging a dialogue of sorts between feminist, queer and trans knowledge projects and the interdisciplinary field of practice based GeoHumanities, in other words creative research practices such as film-making, theatre, creative writing or live art. In embracing the vibrancy of these fields together the paper addresses two much wider issues; firstly, the continued challenges that these knowledge projects face, especially in an era of post-truth and the undermining of expertise, which together risks a reactive retrenchment of academic practices. Secondly, within the GeoHumanities, feminist scholar-practitioners have been leading the way in evolving the critical-political dimensions of these interdisciplinary practices, but as they acknowledge, much more remains to be done to ensure that the critical potential of these doings is realised.

In short, this paper asks, what can/have GeoHumanities ‘doings’ contributed to the challenges of gender based knowledge projects, and further, how can/are the critical questions framed by these knowledge projects evolving GeoHumanities practices? Three large concerns frame discussion of possibilities for mutual learning and advancement; what forms of knowledge count; who can make and legitimate knowledge, and how we might build critical perspectives for the transformations claimed in the name of these practices? As such, the paper honours GPC’s quarter century through a forward looking celebration of exciting scholarly practices that remain committed to the foundational tenants of feminist, trans and queer knowledge projects: namely their ongoing critique and remaking of knowledge hierarchies, academic practices, and the political economies of the academy.     

A disobedient gaze: strategic interventions in the knowledge(s) of maritime borders

Abstract

This article reflects critically on how forms of militant research that produce knowledge about the border can produce effects in the politics of migration themselves. It does so by looking at Forensic Oceanography, a collaborative research project that we have been conducting since the summer of 2011. We first locate this research among a broader ‘ecology of knowledges’ that are generated at the border and that directly affect way the border regime actually operates, underlining their ‘aesthetic’ dimension. Secondly, we problematise more specifically the knowledge produced by activists who fight against the border regime and attempt to think how these need to position themselves strategically in relation to existing knowledge practices so as to avoid complicity with the same power structures they are seeking to challenge. Finally, since our knowledge production has amongst others been geared towards the legal sphere, we sketch out a critical reflection on the reliance on legal strategy to forward progressive changes within the politics of migration.     

Healing is as healing does: Pragmatic resolution of misfortune among the Senufo (Ivory Coast)

Using the example of the representations and practices relative to the resolution of misfortune among the Senufo Fodonon, this article aims to show the non‐autonomy and irrelevance of categories such as ‘therapeutic,’ ‘illness,’ ‘medicine,’ usually taken for granted by anthropology.

These activities and representations refer to — and depend on for their coherence — heterogeneous domains of social organization extrinsic to ‘illness,’ in biomedicine's isolation of this concept. These domains consist of the matrilineage structure, the form of initiation institutions, the logic of secrecy, and the unobservable ‘religious’ entities which are fluctuating and transformable (ancestors, spirits, twins, etc.) amongst which the possible causalities of the misfortune are selected.

Following the stages of the “therapeutic processes,”; the first part describes one of two aspects — the procedures and institutions concerning the resolution of illness — and shows that they form a sub‐set of the local ways of treating the ‘event’ in general.

The second part describes the other aspect: the logic of possible causalities and the modalities of connection with the “therapeutic”; register. Far from being homogeneous, totalizable, mutually informative, these two domains, composite and paradoxical, are actualized and unified in concrete therapeutic procedures whose particular form and content are determined by constraints which are primarily pragmatic, issuing from historical situations peculiar to these individuals and groups.     

Humanists and Travellers,Gorgons and Gorillas: Hanno the Navigator's Periplus and Early Modern Geography (1530–1630)

This article is concerned with early modern interpretations of Hanno the Navigator's Periplus, an ancient travel account of a Carthaginian voyage down the coasts of Africa. The early modern period saw a rise in interest in geographical knowledge, and the ways in which different authors used Hanno's voyage reflects their understanding of the role of geography in conceptualising the world. In these discussions, writers had to negotiate between the confusing portrayals of the voyage in the received classical tradition and new reports brought by voyages of exploration. Here, I will discuss how these syntheses between humanist methods and contemporary travellers' accounts were shaped by the economic and political concerns tied to the first wave of European overseas expansion. Amid this climate, ancient geographical knowledge found pragmatic applications in contemporary issues of navigation, commerce and claims of territorial possession, as well as shaping European perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘the other’. This paper thus seeks to situate humanist practices and classical knowledge within the wider context of overseas voyages and early modern political and economic developments.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

The Garden and Beyond: the Dry Season,the Ok Tedi Shutdown,and the Footprint of the 2015 El Niño Drought

This paper offers a snapshot of the 2015 El Niño drought among Min people in Papua New Guinea's West Sepik and Western Provinces. Local assessments of food, water, and health show variation between locations, but with an overall tendency for the drought's effects to spread from lower to higher elevations as the drought progresses. This zone is in the hinterland of the Ok Tedi Mine, and the drought's regional impact was intensified by Ok Tedi's abrupt closure when low water in the Fly River stopped shipments of concentrate and cut off fuel and food supplies. The decision to close the mine was accompanied by the mandatory ‘repatriation’ of workers and their families to ‘home’ communities in the drought‐stricken hinterland. This, combined with deteriorating regional links, has eroded the capacity of Min communities to weather the drought, suggesting that we must look beyond the garden when calculating El Niño's costs.     

Critical voices from adolescent ‘shape shifters’ – accessing portraits in ‘Becoming Educated’

What young people have to say about schooling can be most revealing, particularly when they expose and challenge the injustices and logic of school policies and practices. This paper captures voices from secondary school students from a school in Victoria, Australia, as part of a research project called Becoming Educated. The paper explores a particular geography of youth around the notion of ‘shape shifter’ as it relates to young people's education in two ways: first, in understanding the changing roles and identities of students as observers of, and participants in, education policies and practices; and second, as a way of interpreting the intent of those who ‘shape’ new ideas and policies to create a kind of ‘temporary alteration of outside appearances for the purpose of deception’ [Merchant, B. 1995. “Current Educational Reform: ‘Shape-shifting’ or Genuine Improvements in the Quality of Teaching and Learning?” Educational Theory 45 (2, Spring): 251–268]. The latter has a particularly significant impact on the former, and this paradox is not one that goes unnoticed by young people.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

‘What say you to free trade in literature?’ The Thief and the Politics of Piracy in the 1830s

Between 1832 and 1834, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett produced a weekly twopenny paper called The Thief. As its title suggested, this publication consisted of articles, stories and illustrations extracted, condensed and brazenly stolen from other periodicals, magazines, newspapers and books. Modelled on the format of Le Voleur, an early paper of Émile de Girardin, the great innovator of French popular journalism, scholars of Mayhew have generally treated The Thief as inconsequential hack work, if they even mention it at all. This essay, the first analysis of the paper itself, argues that The Thief is less ‘throwaway’ than it first appears. In satirical fashion, the paper used the methods of the radical press to critique the ‘liberal values’ of useful knowledge and free trade. Mayhew's involvement with The Thief connected him with a vibrant radical underground print culture. Moreover, in its suspicion of middle-class liberalism and of the rhetoric of free trade, The Thief set the thematic tone for much of Mayhew's later work.     

Brideprice and Prejudice: An Audio-Visual Ethnography on Marriage and Modernity in Mt Hagen,Papua New Guinea

The relationship between bridewealth and women's autonomy is not only discussed amongst anthropologists, development practitioners and other scholars but also amongst brides themselves. Women continue to embrace such marital exchanges, despite their knowledge of ‘modern’ development discourse about the constraints of the practice on women's status and its links to gender-based violence. This paper provides a visual exploration of contemporary brideprice practices and women's autonomy in Mt Hagen. We draw on scenes from our ethnographic film (An Extraordinary Wedding: Marriage and Modernity in Highlands PNG) to explore deliberations and developments that occurred in the case of a particular marriage that took place in 2012. We argue that the institution of brideprice has the potential to enhance the visibility of some women and the importance of their contribution to their own and husbands' kin groups. Despite current tensions regarding brideprice, it can serve as an avenue for the enhancement of women's political participation. The particular brideprice exchange featured in our film, raised concerns for the participants, which we consider in terms of three questions: Does brideprice commodify women? Does it play a role in gender-based violence? Is it inimical to aspirations for modernist individuality? We discuss the importance of bekim (‘return gift’) and suggest that this practice challenges the notion of brideprice as a commodity transaction. We argue that, while there may be an association between brideprice and gender-based violence, brideprice, in and of itself, is not causative of violence. The marriage represented in the film, and discussed in this paper, reveals the creativity of participants in adjusting the values inherent in the customary practice of brideprice to their contemporary aspirations.     

La prudencia de Cortés: teoría política y práctica retórica en la Historia de la conquista de México de Antonio de Solís

The Historia de la conquista de México, published by Antonio de Solís in 1684, and later extensively reissued and translated, has been praised for the ‘elegance’ and ‘sweetness’ of its style. From very early on these qualities made the Historia to be read as a prose model worthy of imitation. Different scholars have studied Solís's sources and the way he manipulated them on the one hand, and, on the other, the extent of the reliability of his account. However, very little has been said about the actual writing practices of the Historia in the context of contemporary historiographical theories, or the author's own ideas about history or politics. This paper analyzes how some of these rhetorical techniques (I particularly focus on the use of oratio figurata, sententia, and epiphoneme) gave shape to Solís's political ideas, in particular the concept of prudence.     

European developments in strategic spatial planning

Strategic spatial planning which takes an integrated approach to the development of a territory seemed to go out of fashion, but now there are signs that it is being re‐established. This paper explores these developments using case studies from 10 European countries. The analysis uses an ‘institutionalist’ approach, which examines how the ‘agency’ of spatial planning practices responds to the ‘structure’ of contextual forces, at the same time influencing that structure. The ‘driving forces’ which are influencing strategic spatial planning are investigated, as are two aspects of the changes in spatial planning: institutional relations and policy agendas. The conclusions are that—at least in the case studies—there is a movement in the institutional relations towards horizontal articulation, territorial logic, and negotiative forms. Policy agendas too are changing, becoming more selective and using new conceptions of space and place. Those institutional developments, however, are not necessarily being translated into territorially‐integrated policy (as distinct from functional/sectoral policy). That translation appears to require simultaneous re‐framing of relational resources (trust, social capital), knowledge resources (intellectual capital), linked to strong mobilization efforts (political capital). The cases considered varied significantly in how far that had been done. Where it had, strategic spatial plan‐making practices were playing a key role in developing institutional territorial integration and re‐invigorating territorial identities.     

Knowledge,Morality and ‘Kastom’: SikAIDS among Young Yupno People,Finisterre Range,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent of knowledge about HIV/AIDS among young Yupno women and men. Local understanding of sikAIDS is shaped by cultural, moral and religious concepts and processes that are based on social values and practices. Difficulties these young people face in accessing information about HIV/AIDS and using it to implement preventative measures — for example by obtaining condoms — have to be seen in the framework of ‘kastom’ and a moral discourse coined and influenced by the Lutheran Church. As the research shows, there is an urgent need for a broad and contextually sensitive approach to sexual health, including information about conception, family planning methods, and sexually transmitted diseases when planning awareness campaigns for teenagers in rural regions.     

Geography,political economy and the ‘personality of Britain’

SUMMARY: This paper engages with the historical archaeology of the British Isles (With one or two exceptions, I follow the usage of Kearney 2006 in preferring the term ‘British Isles’ to ‘Atlantic archipelago’, preferring the more ideologically loaded, but familiar, term over the arguably more neutral but obscure term.) as a whole. It advocates an approach that foregrounds geography and political economy, via quite simple and traditional ways of mapping variation, for example the work of Cyril Fox. It seeks to play to archaeology’s strengths: rather than seeking abstract origins, it examines how practices later labelled as ‘colonial’ emerged from an intersection of concrete material practices.     

Authority,Gender and Knowledge: Theoretical Reflections on the Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal

Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods are increasingly taken up by public sector organizations as well as NGOs among whom they have been pioneered. While PRA methods are successfully employed in a variety of project planning situations, and with increasing sophistication, in some contexts the practice of PRA faces constraints. This article examines the constraints as experienced in the early stages of one project, and suggests some more general issues to which these point. In particular, it is suggested that, as participatory exercises, PRAs involve ‘public’ social events which construct ‘local knowledge’ in ways that are strongly influenced by existing social relationships. It suggests that information for planning is shaped by relations of power and gender, and by the investigators themselves; and that certain kinds of knowledge are often excluded. Finally, the paper suggests that as a method for articulating existing local knowledge, PRA needs to be complemented by other methods of ‘participation’ which generate the changed awareness and new ways of knowing, which are necessary to locally-controlled innovation and change.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

Making Skins: Initiation,Sorcery, and Eastern Min Notions of Knowledge

In this paper I consider the Kwermin notion of knowledge as ‘making skin’ of physical experience. The skin is acted upon in women's scarification and male initiations with the aim of instilling dispositions in the novices that are conducive to their becoming competent adult beings in their particular sociocultural environment. The scarification of women's abdominal skin is thought to enhance the fertility of their wombs, whereas the acts upon male novices’ skins in the initiation rituals are focused upon making them fierce warriors, vigorous husbands, and respectful communicators with ancestral spirits. It is argued that through the male initiations the Min reenact their joint origins from the ground at Yam (‘mother’) on Oksapmin land. Contrary to this initiatory emphasis on proper skin‐knowledge as fitness of being, sorcerers, and witches are greatly feared as they wrongfully penetrate the skin, either infusing the victim with suicidal desire or extracting its life‐substance until the victim withers and dies.