From the Parish to the Publich Realm

The parish church held a central place in local communities in the 18th century, both physically and symbolically; however, the institutions and practices governing the churches differed significantly between the Scandinavian countries. This article traces the development of local church government in Norway from its position under 18th-century absolutism to its inclusion into the new system of local self-government, established in 1837. It is compared to the very different institutions of self-government in Sweden in the same period. Although there were many lines of continuity within local government across the political dividing line marked by the Norwegian constitution of 1814, both local church offices and the parish community underwent conceptual changes related to the new constitutional system. Local church government therefore provides an example of how the notion of the population in general changed from absolutism to constitutional rule; from commoners in contradistinction to the state to communities constituting the very foundation of the state.     

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.     

新中国成立前后中财委恢复城乡交流的政策研究

建国前夕和建国初期,中财委在领导全国稳定物价和统一财经的工作中,通过贸易系统的恢复和商业资本的注入,复苏了被国民党政府及长年战争中断的城乡交流。随后,中财委在工商业调整中拟订了收购土产等政策并转交了城市经营方针,进一步推动了城乡交流的发展,使国内经济得以恢复,并为中国工业的发展提供了正确的发展方向和路径。回顾这段历史,对于我们统筹好当今的城乡关系具有重要的启示和借鉴意义。     

Growing up,going out and growing out of the countryside: childhood experiences in Rural England

This article contributes to knowledge of children's geographies by considering how the micro-geographies of children change as they grow up in a rural locality. Drawing upon evidence from a Hampshire village, it explores how children of different ages are imagined, positioned and regulated in different public spaces, inside and outside the village, through repetitive acts and regulatory regimes. Attention is given to the ways in which these practices can cause conflict with other children and adults, exacerbating a sense of restriction felt by young people growing up in the countryside.     

Women’s magazines and socioeconomic change: Para Ti,identity and politics in urban Argentina

Popular media plays an important role in the production and reproduction of hegemonic cultural norms, as well as in the construction of class and gender identities. Periods of economic crisis generate struggles over ways of understanding social reality that can destabilize or reinforce different identities. The media often plays an important role in the reconfiguration of identities. Expanding on these ideas, I conduct a discourse analysis of a women’s magazine to examine how popular media reflected and influenced shifting gender and class identities in Buenos Aires, Argentina between 1995 and 2008, a period of major socioeconomic change. By drawing attention to supposedly ‘non-political’ actors and spaces, I argue for expanding the range of sites we investigate in order to make sense of changing class and gender subjectivities during times of socioeconomic crisis.     

Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain

This article explores the role of comfort as an affective encounter across bodies, objects (namely clothing) and spaces. I focus on how bodies that are marked as strange and a source of society’s discomfort negotiate this positioning through the presentation of one’s body. What does it mean for these bodies to be comfortable or uncomfortable? This question is answered through work done with Black Muslim women in Britain. By exploring how comfort is felt in relation to racially marked bodies, this article develops work on emotional geographies. Comfort is understood as both an emotional product and process that changes as bodies move across different spaces. In noting this movement, I also explore how boundaries around the body (enacted through e.g. the multi-dimensional hijab) presents a particular form of territorialisation that facilitates comfort as we present our bodies across different spaces. These boundaries can be both a source of comfort and discomfort through their positioning as deviant from social norms. In understanding the different roles of boundaries, I explore the social processes that construct comfort (or discomfort) as we move through different spaces. This is intertwined with furthering work on Muslim geographies by challenging the overwhelming focus placed on ‘public’ facing garments like the headscarf and abaya. Such a focus limits an understanding of the fluidity of Black Muslim women’s identities, and how these changes in our clothing practices affect and are affected by the relationships built across spaces.     

Environmental governance and private actors: enrolling insurers in international maritime regulation

Government programmes have always relied on the enrolment of intermediate actors, both public and private, in the regulatory process. An increasing recognition that the form of implementation is as important as the passing of new legislation means that these actors are increasingly the focus, rather than just the means to an end, of regulatory programmes. This is particularly the case in international maritime environmental regulation. In this paper I examine how the enrolment of private actors takes place, both discursively and through the use of incentives and sanctions. I focus in particular on the use of liability and compulsory insurance and examine the conditions necessary for an environmental insurance market to function. I then take one set of private actors—Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Clubs which insure shipowners' third party liabilities—and look how international government institutions create (dis)incentives and discourses that encourage the P&I Clubs to act in favour of regulatory goals. The contingent nature of regulation means there is an increasing feedback in which P&I Clubs are allowed to contribute to the framing of specific government programmes in the name of practical implementation, but this must be balanced against the risk of allowing private interests to determine ultimate policy objectives.     

Flexible topographies: Muslim spaces in a German cityscape

This paper examines transient and semi-permanent Muslim spaces, their social construction, use, and relevance for diverse pious Muslims in Stuttgart, Germany. I describe the location, creation, negotiation, and maintenance of such spaces and analyze their position and contribution to a larger urban Muslim social geography. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stuttgart, Germany, I illustrate how individuals mark or inhabit spaces momentarily or more permanently as Muslim spaces. I illustrate how at least for the length of a particular encounter, spaces are used in manners that reflect Islamic sensitivities and normativities. These spaces are ever more inseparably and irreversibly woven into the urban fabric. Over time they become and indeed some already have become integral parts of the cityscape. Some spaces in the process of recurrent islamically inspired uses become semi-permanent or even permanent Muslim spatialities, especially in contexts with considerable Muslim interaction or movement. The density of transient encounters and spaces over time contributes to the consolidation of an increasingly well-known and shared urban Muslim social geography. Within this spatiality, pious Muslims know that planned or unplanned encounters will be framed by Muslim beliefs and practices. Paying attention to the ‘elusive evidence of the ordinary’ [Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York. New York: Basic Books, p. 10], I demonstrate how increasingly visible Muslim spaces and practices slowly become part of the urban fabric and every day culture.     

The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico's agrarian reform

In the immediate aftermath of Mexico's revolution (1910–1920), increasing numbers of surveyors, agronomists, and agrarian bureaucrats headed out to the countryside to implement the agrarian reforms promised in the decree of 1915 and the Constitution of 1917. In this essay I ask a very basic set of questions about the use, evaluation, and making of spatial knowledge in a revolutionary context: when bureaucrats went in to the field after the revolution, what did they do? What roles, if any, did local inhabitants themselves play in the processes that unfolded? And what constituted the acceptable body of knowledge—the archive—necessary to resolve persistent boundary questions that impeded the reform? I examine these questions by looking closely at the textual and personal interactions between one agrarian bureaucrat and the inhabitants and authorities in the villages to which he had been sent in central Veracruz. Their interactions reveal the degree to which campesinos in the countryside appropriated and deployed different aspects of revolutionary rhetoric in an effort to shape new spaces, or recreate previous ones, in the 1920s.     

Self-Government in a Republic of 325 Million: Distracting Anachronism or Worthy Aspiration?

What do modern Americans mean when they say they believe in self-government—or do they mean anything at all? This article attempts to offer a reasonable, realistic expectation of what self-government can be in an extended republic of 325 million citizens characterized by a highly developed division of labor and intense specialization. It argues that if self-government is taken too literally, it becomes an impossible ideal likely to promote cynicism. On the other hand, if self-government is dismissed as an anachronism, the resulting technocratic government is likely to become irresponsible and illegitimate. Representative government offers the best middle way, but our practice of it must be repaired and defended against critics.     

Cinema-going during the Gezi protests: claiming the right to the Emek movie theatre and Gezi Park

This paper explores the relationship between social movements, urban regeneration programmes and media outlets in cities, with a focus on the transformation of urban culture in regards to people’s engagement with the spaces of media platforms. The argument is based on the study of cinema-going practices of an audience community in Istanbul, during and preceding the Gezi uprising. By employing ethnographic methods, this paper interrogates the activism of an audience community against the impact of shopping-mallisation and commodification of Istanbul’s urban spaces under AKP rule. In order to reclaim ownership of their spaces and future, this audience community claimed their right to the Emek movie theatre, Gezi Park and other parks whilst creating their own outdoor screenings and social media platforms. This paper also provides an interpretation of social movement development attached to media outlets such as film festivals and screenings, particularly the development of spatial activism in relation to people’s use of films, streets and movie theatres, thus illustrating, challenging and reinforcing rights to the city. More broadly, it gives new insights on the film and protest culture of a ‘secular’ group within a predominantly Muslim population and shows alternative and creative methods of protesting during a popular uprising.     

An economic assessment of informal recreation policy in the Scottish countryside

Countryside recreation policy in Scotland is currently delivered through numerous ad hoc arrangements. This paper assesses the economic effectiveness of these arrangements using cost‐benefit analysis. The benefits associated with recreation enhancements are measured using the contingent valuation method, while the costs are assessed through a survey of public and voluntary section expenditure on informal recreation. The analysis demonstrates that recreation policies are generally economically efficient in that they target enhancement programmes that are shown to generate high economic benefits. The exception to this is related to investments in visitor centres. The paper concludes that the cost‐benefit methodology adopted in this research can provide useful information for the strategic analysis of countryside recreation policy.     

Choosing Health? Exploring Children's Eating Practices at Home and at School

Abstract:  This paper considers the influences on children's eating habits in both school and home spaces in the UK. Since 2002 the UK government has been committed to halting the increase in child obesity rates, and has sanctioned particular parental and school based practices as more "healthy" than others. This study examines this through critically questioning, in particular, the classed discourses written into health education advice and advocates a new way of thinking about health education messages. Based on qualitative research with children from one secondary school and with eight families in the North of England the paper reveals that while parents and children make decisions about their lives with reference to dominant discourses about ideal "healthy" family eating practices, their ability to realise these practices is limited in numerous ways. Moreover, the influences on children's eating habits in both home and school spaces are intricately interrelated and children's practices are clearly influenced by the spaces they inhabit. Their decisions involve balancing health education knowledge with a range of other knowledges that are bound up in the socio-spatial relations of their everyday lives. A holistic approach to understanding children's eating habits therefore requires a critical understanding of class background, parental influences and contemporary parenting practices as well as the microgeographical relations found in the school dining room.     

Unsettling Migrant Reintegration: The Serial Risk-Taking of Returning Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to Cordillera,Philippines

In 2017, the Philippine government boosted its campaign on Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) reintegration, a set of programmes designed to aid returning Filipino labour migrants. In this paper, I examine migrant reintegration through the case of returned migrants to the province of Benguet, Philippines. Rather than use “sustainability of return” as main focus of assessment, I foreground instead the historical geographies undergirding the current reiteration of this migration policy. By doing so, I demonstrate how the “gambling” practices of returned migrants can be read as not an easy acquiescence to the neoliberal imperative for self-entrepreneurship encouraged by the Philippine state. In highlighting gambling as an embodied strategy emerging from and through imperial histories, I argue that migrant reintegration gets revealed as rehearsal of certain colonial logics that have oriented certain peoples to the labour of serial risk taking for survival. Close attention to return migrants’ gambling practices raises urgent questions regarding the relentless push for entrepreneurship as development solution.     

Towards a more emotional geography of civic pride: a view from an English city

This article argues that civic pride has been relatively under-explored in geography and deserves greater attention as an emotional and political value associated with place. Through a case study of Nottingham, England, I examine how local civic actors perceive and express civic pride and the values it encompasses, using a discourse analysis of interviews, policy material and local media. I illustrate how civic pride is connected with everyday feelings of identity, community and what people value and aspire to in a given place, and demonstrate how we might think critically about civic pride’s connections to and relevance beyond local government. The analysis illustrates how, in the context of recent developments across British cities, civic actors and institutions engage with and value the city in different ways and that a diverse set of discourses and practices can emerge from a shared concern to protect civic identity and autonomy. Bringing together emotional and urban geographies literature, this paper challenges geographers to think carefully about how place-based values like civic pride can shape and reproduce often well-meaning but problematic discourses and practices within cities, but also how the underlying meanings and values associated with pride can surface in resistive and progressive ways.     

Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in everyday mobilities: the practice of prayer and meditation in corporeal travel

This paper contributes to contemporary geographies of religion by exploring how everyday spaces of mobility and flows can be transformed through specific practices such as prayer and meditation that contribute to personal spirituality. The work challenges traditionally held assumptions that sacred space or codified religious spaces requires stillness and calmness by drawing on the New Mobilities Paradigm to explore how spiritual practices are conducted within the flows and movement that characterise contemporary everyday life. Using questionnaires and diary-interview methods, everyday journeys of participants captured how prayer, meditation and encounters with others and the environment facilitated by movement can transform and be transformed by mobility and the mode of travel. Participant’s accounts of their everyday mundane journeys reveal personalised associations of the everyday spaces that they travel through and the different routines they enact on a daily basis that incorporate religious objects, practices or ideas. These journeys and time-spaces form what I term a ‘subjective spiritual geography’, a network of the interrelated time-spaces threaded together by the individual’s schedule and routine that create, maintain and reinforce personal and informal religious meaning in everyday life.     

Telephones,Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults

In this paper, I explore the creative practices of cargo cult followers in the Kaliai bush of West New Britain. I focus on how rural villagers reworked their experiences of meaning and sociality through their appropriations of western technology. In particular, bush Kaliai cult followers frequently used telephones and cameras in idiosyncratic ways that mapped out anew and redisclosed the spaces occupied by a racialised human existence. Through their novel use of western technology, cult followers struggled to resituate and overcome the new distances and cleavages of modernity by unearthing other ways of being white that came from their customary past and ancestral homelands.     

Femininity, Race and Treachery: How 'Tokyo Rose' Became a Traitor to the United States after the Second World War

Based on archival and printed sources, this article revisits the ordeal of Iva Toguri d'Aquino (1916–2006), the Japanese American woman who became trapped in the myth of 'Tokyo Rose' and was tried for treason in 1949. It retells the tale by weaving together the various narratives of her story and pays particular attention to the ways in which the media constructed her story. The larger purpose is to explore why the federal government and the mainstream media deliberately ignored the other available narratives that explained Toguri's actions as a broadcaster for Radio Tokyo during the war. An analysis of the alternative narratives in conjunction with the stories of other female announcers who were  not  prosecuted ('Manila Rose') or who did not gain the infamy of 'Tokyo Rose' ('Axis Sally') will help us better understand how treason is gendered and orientalised.