Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History

Consumption has emerged as an important historical subject, with most scholars explaining it as a vehicle for therapeutic regeneration, community formation, or economic policy. This work all but ignores how consumption begins with changes to the material world, to physical nature. While environmental historians have something important, even unique, to say about consumption, the split between materialist and cultural analyses within the field has dulled its ability to study consumption as a process and phenomenon that unfolds over space and time. By borrowing techniques from geography and ecology, environmental historians can analyze how space is socially produced through time, an insight that can help to connect material and cultural change in a sustained manner. Spatial histories can also unmask the relationships between production and consumption, and nature and culture, and thereby transcend and subvert seemingly fixed boundaries, from the local to the global. They can also further propel environmental historians into new realms of inquiry, such as international trade and the human body. Historicizing the spaces of consumption may also help to foster a more radical and democratic environmentalism, especially in developed nations, by compelling environmentalists to reassess the distancing effects of consumption upon their politics and attitudes toward those who produce commodities and consumer goods.     

Reconciling Economic and Cultural Explanations for Participation in Alternative Consumption Spaces

ABSTRACT With the cultural turn in economic geography, the emphasis on economic necessity when explaining participation in alternative consumption spaces (i.e. informal and/or second‐hand retail channels) has been contested by an agency‐orientated cultural reading that views engagement in such spaces as about the search for fun, sociality, distinction, discernment, the spectacular and so forth, and more recently by a geographically sensitive approach that ascribes agency to affluent populations and economic rationales to deprived populations. Drawing upon evidence collected during 120 face‐to‐face interviews in the English city of Leicester, however, this paper finds that people's reasons for engaging in such practices cannot be reduced simply to either economic necessity or agency. Instead, it reveals that such either/or thinking obfuscates how both co‐exist in people's explanations for engagement and combine in contrasting ways in different neighbourhood types, modes of goods acquisition and according to the type of good sought. The outcome of this paper is thus to transcend and reconcile previous reductive explanations using a both/and approach that recognises the varying ways in which economic necessity and choice are entangled in rationales for participation in alternative consumption spaces.     

Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption

Geography's debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in which the ethics, morality, and politics of responsibility has been problematised, we argue that existing research on consumption fails to register the full complexity of the practices, motivations and mechanisms through which the working-up of moral selves is undertaken in relation to consumption practices. Rather than assuming that ethical decision‐making works through the rational calculation of obligations, we conceptualise the emergence of ethical consumption as ways in which everyday practical moral dispositions are re‐articulated by policies, campaigns and practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change. Ethical consumption, then, involves both a governing of consumption and a governing of the consuming self. Using the example of Traidcraft , we present a detailed examination of one particular context in which self‐consciously ethical consumption is mediated, suggesting that ethical consumption can be understood as opening up ethical and political considerations in new combinations. We therefore argue for the importance of the growth of ethical consumption as a new terrain of political action, while also emphasising the grounds upon which ethical consumption can be opened up to normative critique.     

Spaces of capability: Consumption geographies at an inner‐city university

Inner‐city universities are noteworthy in relation to food provisioning and consumption because of their locations and spatial characteristics. Among 18,500 university students surveyed by Universities Australia in 2017, one in seven reports being unable to eat in regular patterns. This finding suggests that it is important to explore how eating spaces at inner‐city universities intersect with students' eating practices. Ethnographic work conducted over three semesters in Melbourne at RMIT University's city campus revealed that around 100 microwaves installed there were used by students to prepare food in ways that may support regular eating. The research included observations, focus groups, and digital ethnography. Analysis of the findings suggests that the university's eating spaces and their material arrangements are related to students' on‐campus and off‐campus practices. Using both Walker's interpretation of Sen's capability approach—the social practice capability framework—and Schatzki's site ontology, I propose that this relationship produces spaces of capability, encouraging and enabling varied activities such as using leftovers, bulk cooking, and buying discretionary foods less impulsively. The study and its use of the idea of spaces of capability may foster new insights about the ongoing challenge to ensure student wellbeing and to consider the relationship of student wellbeing to broader issues such as sustainable consumption and environmental justice.     

Tales of the Unexpected: Exploring Car Boot Sales as Marginal Spaces of Contemporary Consumption

Marginal and/or resistant consumption practices have been neglected in current geographical debates on consumption and retailing. This has resulted in partial and skewed theorizations of exchange within contemporary consumption. Consumption spaces such as car boot sales represent sites in which the conventions of the marketplace are suspended or abandoned, and replaced by forms of sourcing, commodity circulation, transaction codes, pricing mechanisms and value quite different from those which typify more conventional retail malls and department stores. Drawing on the anthropological literature on traditional and peasant markets, we argue that exchange within the car boot sale is socially, culturally and geographically embedded and we emphasize the intrinsic importance of fun and sociality to such activities. Marginal spaces such as the car boot sale offer both some important clues into the potential for rethinking marketplace dynamics, notably with respect to our understandings of value, and some intriguing possibilities for consumer politics.     

E-learning for Geography's Teaching and Learning Spaces

The authors embed their advocacy of educational technology in a consideration of contemporary pedagogy in geography. They provide examples of e-learning from a wide range of teaching and learning contexts. They promote the idea that considering best practice with reference to educational technology will increase the versatility of teaching geography in higher education. On the basis of reviewing the pedagogic options associated with e-learning using a variety of technologies, and their promotion of versatility in the use of e-learning approaches, they find and illustrate the new spaces that have become available to teachers and learners of geography.     

Spaces of Wellbeing for People with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the geography of health in the concept of ‘wellbeing’, as it provides a fuller understanding of health, builds in embodied experiences, and accounts for the socio-spatial relations and contexts that shape health. The paper sets out the case for using ‘wellbeing’ to rethink the poor health outcomes experienced by people with learning disabilities, which conventional tools of healthcare and health promotion have failed to address. Shifting the focus of concern from the individualised objective ill-health of people with learning disabilities to a broader sense of emotional and social wellbeing and happiness, the paper argues that there is potential within learning disability spaces and networks for wellbeing to flourish, through greater self-determination and presence in and attachment to local places. The outcome is people with learning disabilities being able to find stability and build resilience in difficult bodily and social circumstances.     

Spaces of humanitarian exception

Book reviewed in this article: Humanitarian Space and International Politics: The Creation of Safe Areas , by Hikaru Yamashita     

Enacting Experimental Alternative Spaces

This paper analyses the experimental nature of alternative spaces and the affective, emotional and embodied experience their enactment generates. In so doing, it grounds the analysis on the intentional community of Damanhur (Italy), as an example of experimental spaces. Scholarship concerning intentional communities draws on utopian studies that consider them as utopian laboratories. More recently, non‐representational approaches have emphasised the processual nature of utopias, yet studies have overlooked the experimental nature of these alternative spaces. Drawing upon in‐depth ethnographic data, this paper engages with community experimentations that took place in Damanhur for residents and visitors. It illustrates how utopian enactment is experimental and thus, disordering, unsettling and creative. Moreover, I argue that experimentations are not limited to unsettling the social structure of the community and, when studying the enactment of alternative spaces, emphasis should also be on their capacity to affect the individual.     

Leading Men to Violence and Creating Spaces for their Emotions

With this paper, I advocate an approach to violence in film that elaborates what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘preverbal intelligible content’. I focus on leading men and cinematic contrivances between emotions and violence with intent, ultimately, on saying something about how masculinities are differentiated spatially. I argue that masculinity is far from unassailable and I use filmic manifestations of leading men's emotions and violence to explore the contestable boundaries of that manliness. To demonstrate differentiated affective spaces, I use three movies that cast leading men in violent roles—Braveheart (1995), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Mystic River (2003)—as a foil against which larger theoretical issues find form. This offers insight into how spatiality and difference are inherent parts of film viewing, and how repetition invites multiple angles for engaging masculinities.

Guiando los hombres a violencia y creando espacios para sus emociones

Con éste artículo, propongo un enfoque en la violencia en el cine que elabora lo que llama Gilles Deleuze el ‘contenido preverbal inteligible’. Enfoco en los protagonistas masculinos y las artimañas cinematográficas entre emociones y violencia con intento, los cuales, últimamente, dicen algo sobre cómo las masculinidades son espacialmente diferenciados. Argumento que la masculinidad no es invulnerable, y utilizo manifestaciones cinematográficas de la violencia y las emociones de los protagonistas masculinos para explorar las fronteras impugnables de aquel virilidad. Para demostrar que los espacios son diferenciados y afectivos, utilizo tres películas que tiene protagonistas masculinos en papeles violentos—Braveheart (1995), Pulp Fiction (1994), y Mystic River (2003)—como un escenario en dónde se forman los asuntos teoréticos más grandes. Éste ofrece una comprensión de cómo la especialidad y la diferencia son partes elementales de viendo las películas, y de cómo las repeticiones invitan perspectivas múltiples para entender las masculinidades.     

Beyond Alternative: Exploring the Potential for Autonomous Food Spaces

Abstract: Much attention has been given in recent years to the rise of alternative food networks However, the very concept of “alternative” has come under increasing scrutiny, as theorists grapple with what is meant by alternative and whether the concept adequately captures the key components of such a diverse range of networks and communities. Drawing on poststructuralist political economy, I propose the concept of autonomous food spaces as one possible lens for approaches food‐provisioning activities that situate food within the broader context of non‐capitalist communities seeking to build relationships of mutual aid and non‐market exchanges. I use the examples of a radical collective kitchen, Food Not Bombs, and a community‐supported agriculture operation, Vegetables Unplugged, to explore the potential for autonomous food spaces as part of a broader “politics of possibilities” beyond capitalism.     

我国殡葬的木材消耗及其对策管见

本文认为我国殡葬的木材消耗可以划分为萌芽期、发展期、旺盛期、稳定期四 大阶段,并论证了殡葬的木材消耗度同国家统一、疆域盈缩、民族融合、人口繁衍的同步消长关 系,进而推断出从夏朝开国到解放初期,我国用于殡葬的木材大约 １８．９３亿 ｍ３,约等于 ９４８． ９６ 万公顷森林蓄积量。最后,就殡葬改革提出商榷建议。     

Spaces of the political*

In changing geographic locations, metaphorically or otherwise, perceptions change. Drawing inspiration from ancient Peking rather than Leo Strauss’ Athens and Jerusalem changes the compass points of political theory. This is because it moves the centre of gravity away from the tension of reason and revelation toward a city built upon another way of approaching the world, through the channelling and harnessing of vital energy flows, known as qi. Peking is designed, through fengshui, to channel the vital energy know as qi away from intensities and toward productive (harmonious) ends. How have we moderns channeled and harnessed such (political) intensities? This work traces the flow of energy as it takes on modern political forms, expressed through the built environment. Taking the nineteenth-century’s Crystal Palace and a Maoist Museum as contrasting examples, it illustrates the way in which the built environment channels and transforms energy. In terms of the political, it is the dissipation or intensification effect of these machines that becomes the defining characteristic of difference between these two different political worlds. As modern machine-technologies, these two examples also shine a light on the ways ‘modernity’ has encountered and dealt with the telluric.