Body Shopping: Reconfiguring geographies of fitness

This article critically interrogates the representational politics implicated in the metaphorical and material production of geographies of embodied fitness. It is intended as a contribution to the growing critical appreciation of the ways in which humans and non-humans are worked together in the production and reproduction of cyborg or hybrid geographies. It therefore mobilises the word fitness in the literal sense of a bodily state, but also in the metaphorical sense of how diverse 'things' come to fit together, how collections of bodies and machines come to be intelligible as inhabitable worlds. But, importantly, this article also argues that this sort of analysis is inadequate if it fails to engage with the ways that the production of human-machinic hybrids is also bound up in the enactment of geographies of ontological purity, a purity that is diffracted, at least in part, through categories such as gender and race. To illustrate this, the paper briefly outlines the ways in which the fitness equipment manufacturer NordicTrack attempts to produce geographies of fitness. Specifically, it suggests that while these geographies muddy the clarity of the boundaries between categories such as male/female, human/non-human, nature/culture, at the same time they work as forces of purification, subtly and not so subtly reinforcing these very same dualisms.     

Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place

Abstract

This review offers thoughts, queries and hesitations regarding articles drawing on participatory action research (PAR) published over 25?years of Gender, Place and Culture. It foregrounds the interconnections and overlaps between PAR and feminist geographies, and considers a continuum of participations-collaborations-actions-knowledges co-produced across a range of interrelated feminist methodologies. I emphasise epistemological commitment as central to PAR, pointing to work in GPC that evidences critical approaches to research process, embedded in feminist perspectives regarding how scholars re-produce the world and/as act/ing in the world, particularly in attending to shifting, situated and complex subjectivities and power inequalities. Working together with participants is vital, through an ethic that centres participants’ voices, as actors in their own lives. Highlighting the emotional and embodied geographies that weave through such research and writing, this review suggests deepening and strengthening interdependences and a feminist ethos of care as researchers, to further foreground diverse stories and voices, work towards social and spatial justice, and co-produce progressive changes with people and place.     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

A political geography of walking in Jordan: Movement and politics

The past 10-15 years has seen the growth of walking groups taking walkers from Amman to rural parts of Jordan at weekends and the development of the Jordan Trail. Through the narration and analysis of everyday accounts of walking, this paper explores political geographies of identity, movement, and territory in Jordan. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that at the heart of a growth of walking for leisure in Jordan are important political questions. How is walking conditioned by situated cultural politics? How can walking unearth intimate and embodied accounts of territory in Jordan? I build upon three developments in political geography to do this. First, research on political geography and walking; second research on everyday political geographies of the Middle East; third, critical and feminist work on territory. Literature on political geography and walking is developed by centring Jordanian walkers and the (post)colonial context of Jordan to explore what walking means under different political conditions and for individual bodies. In doing so I contribute to work on identity and nationalism in Jordan and the importance of the everyday to explore political geographies of the Middle East. I develop critical and feminist work on territory by arguing that walking bodies make and contest territory and in doing so calling for greater synergies between cultural and political geography. These arguments are made in two empirical sections. The first explores how different people talk about walking, the language for walking, and assumptions about walking bodies. The second explores how walking connects different bodies to territory, and creates territorial nationalist narratives, but also how walking can highlight indigenous and embodied relations with territory. This paper concludes that walking is political because it shapes and is shaped by situated political geographies and because it enables embodied and intimate accounts of territory to emerge.     

Any Labour Geographies in Urban Theory? Workers Meet Lefebvre and Harvey (Yet Again)

This paper examines the urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey to construct an urban perspective on labour geographies. Lefebvre understood work in a work–nonwork continuum beyond binarism, and Lefebvre and Harvey hailed the outpouring of working-class agency from cities. However, they may have obscured the role of labour movements in urbanisation when identifying the living-place (such as streets, neighbourhoods, or housing) as the primary seat of urban agency. Learning from labour geographers in the 1990s, I query this ambiguity to enhance the urban theory of Lefebvre and Harvey, conceive of the urban scale as the site of unfinished industrial/urban dialectics, and conceptualise labour agency as a producer of transformative continua in urbanisation. Interpreting Toyota’s factories as rescaled pivots of industrial urbanisation, I explore how Japanese labour movements challenged just-in-time production, its union form, and its work/nonwork divides, producing new urbanising continua—even planetary ones—between different transformative agencies.     

Language as apparatus: entanglements of language,culture and territory and the invention of nation and ethnicity

Postcolonial linguistics has shown that African languages emerged from a complex figuration of missionary, scientific and colonial practices. The article interprets this emergence as the result of an existential onto-epistemological dislocation stabilised through the hegemonic project of colonialism. It rests on an apparatus of modernity that separated nature and culture/society and stabilised this new order with a particular notion of language as an autonomous object. In the nineteenth century, language enters a conjunction of territory and culture, which played out in Europe in the terms of a nationalist, hegemonic trajectory and in Africa as the fractionation of ethnic/linguistic groups and the pervasive linguo-ethnification of contemporary societies. Thus, language can be understood to be an apparatus productive of nationalism as well as ethnicity. In an attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of this conceptualisation, I show how today these trajectories have effects in that Afrikaans in South Africa as ethnified language loses and Swahili in Tanzania as national language gains ground at the respective universities. Both languages compete with global academic English, which despite its colonial heritage appears as a deterritorialised, culturally neutral language.     

Hacking the master code: cyborg stories and the boundaries of autism

In this paper, we consider how the use of Internet technologies by individuals on the autism spectrum (AS) may contribute to recoding the spatial, sociopolitical, ontological, and epistemological boundaries commonly assumed to delimit autistic from non-autistic lifeworlds. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, we argue that the responses of AS individuals to a survey about online communication suggest these individuals are engaged in a form of cyborg writing, admixing constraints and opportunities in a way that opens alternative, polycentric, and indeterminate but nonetheless important political possibilities for people on (and off) the AS.     

Speaking the land: exploring women's historical geographies in Northern Québec

This review article explores the significance of studying the historical geographies of Aboriginal women in Northern Québec and presents potential research avenues. The article's premise is that we cannot understand the historic and contemporary geographies of subsistence economies without more research about the roles that women played in them. Related to this issue is a broader reflection on how geographies of the past are reconstructed by historical geographers, both from an epistemological and methodological point of view. As a discipline, historical geography has been chiefly dedicated to the study of the encounter of migrant Europeans with new world lands and societies, with the result that Aboriginal and women's geographies have commanded less attention. This gap in knowledge should be addressed by emerging researchers. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and moving from the general to the particular, my inquiry evolves in three parts. First, I identify some key debates that are pertinent to a study of gender and Aboriginal women in a colonial context. Second, I review the existing ethnographic literature on Cree women in Eastern Canada and assess insights about their role in subsistence economies. Third, I outline specific avenues that help frame a research programme to study the historical geographies—by which I understand the places, placing, and place-making—of Aboriginal women in Northern Québec.     

‘You’re not big,you’re just in Asia’: Expatriate embodiment and emotional experiences of size in Singapore§

This article brings together work on privileged migration with critical geographical work on body size. In uniting these areas together I focus on the role of embodiment within expatriate experiences of migration to Singapore. I argue that despite a developing body of critical work on migration, this work has failed to explore embodied experiences of size. To counter this gap, this research demonstrates the importance of recognising how sized narratives and experiences are shaped through gendered migration and the need to explore the multiplicity of experiences of women in different places of the city. Drawing upon empirical research with expatriate women in Singapore I advance work within critical geographies of body size by presenting original work that challenges dominant and medicalised understandings of fatness as inherently bad. Furthermore, I contribute to the growing area of work that places emphasis on the subjective nature of size through recognition of work on migration. In this article, I explore how migration was embodied and discussed through size, firstly by looking at how women discussed losing their sense of identity. Secondly, the temporal and spatial embeddedness of size. Finally, how women rejected and resisted dominant discourses through humour and indifference.     

Converging anticipatory geographies in Oceania: The Belt and Road Initiative and Look North in Fiji

Anticipatory geographies are state-driven initiatives promoting economic hope through the language of rejuvenation, prosperity and connectivity. As a discursive process, anticipatory geographies reconfigure spaces and identities. These narratives have proliferated in an age of intensified connectivity as states aim to imprint their political and economic visions. Oceania has become a site of multiple anticipatory geographies external and internal to the region with the presence of China as an enabling factor. In 2006, Fiji reintroduced a Look North policy to globalize economic connectivity placing Fijian agency at the centre, and in 2015, Beijing included Oceania into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. This work examines the processes when two anticipatory geographies meet. Adapting critical geopolitics, the research presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of Chinese and Fijian texts referencing Look North and BRI. The work reveals the entanglement of anticipatory geographies in Fiji has generated a co-produced discourse of prosperity displaying continuity from Look North to the BRI. Although there is a shift toward defining the Sino-Fijian relationship through BRI, it does not signal an overwrite of an indigenous policy framework. I argue Look North has been ‘re-placed’ into the BRI to co-produce a narrative that permits the ongoing articulation of Fijian interests. With the Belt and Road becoming the defining framework for China's relations with countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, this work suggests Fiji's handling of BRI's impact on its domestic spaces and policies is an indicator of how other states will reposition their promises of economic hope to civil society.     

Geographies of youth – a generational perspective

ABSTRACT

Twenty years ago the publication of Cool Places created visibility for emerging research on geographies of youth. Yet in comparison with Children’s Geographies geographical work on youth has failed to mature as a sub-disciplinary field. In this contribution I explore the reasons why this may be so highlighting the way youth geographies has struggled to define its own identity, and its lack of a strong founding, globally relevant, theoretical approach. Instead, I argue that the development of intergenerational geographies has led thinking about youth to be absorbed into wider framings of geographies of age, or geographies of family life.     

基于后人类思想的国际城市研究：理论溯源与概念辨析

进入二十一世纪以来,以赛博格城市、混合城市、城市政治生态学、集合城市主义为代表的后人类城市研究思想成为揭示当代城市中人类与非人类复杂交织关系的前沿性理论视角。本文在深入探讨上述概念的理论渊源、主要思想观点及其应用进展的基础上,指出后人类城市思想在我国城市研究中的可能方法论意义,即城市分析不能将人类与非人类绝对割裂地看待,而需要将城市中的主体或客体重新定义为人类与非人类的“混杂体”,整合以往分散在自然、工程、社科与人文等不同领域中的观察与分析,拓展人们对城市过程的认知,开创更多的城市研究可能性。     

The understated turn: Emerging interests and themes in Canadian posthumanist geography

Posthumanist geography is a broad tradition incorporating a range of intersecting theoretical approaches including assemblage theory, actor-network theory, new materialisms, affect theory, neo-vitalism, political ecology, post-phenomenology, and non-representational theory—as well as contributions from a number of theoretically progressive subject fields such as new mobilities, relational thinking, sensory and performance studies, biosocial and biopolitics studies, and science and technology studies. The specificities of and differences between these traditions and fields aside, common to posthumanism is a scepticism of human exceptionalism. Here, the sovereign human subject is decentred, and in doing so, posthumanist work acknowledges the agencies of a full array of human and non-human actors and forces. Recognizing that there are important “geographies to (the discipline of) geography,” this paper identifies and reviews some of the key posthumanist interests and themes that have emerged over recent years quietly and organically in Canadian geography, namely posthumanist (i) Indigenous geographies; (ii) animal and natures geographies; (iii) health, wellbeing, and disability geographies; (iv) affective and atmospheric geographies; and (v) non-representational and creative methodologies. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the nature and strengths of Canadian posthumanist geography, and on some possibilities for future advancement.     

Masculinities and geography,moving forward: men’s bodies,emotions and spiritualities

Geographical work on men and masculinities has expanded and diversified since the 1990s. Gender, Place and Culture has been, and continues to be, a significant outlet for this research. Geographies of masculinities now range across diverse sub-fields – social, cultural, economic, health, post-colonial, urban and rural geographies. We provide a brief overview of this scope, including the expansion of geographies of masculinities beyond the Anglo-American sphere. We then focus on two vibrant fields of research on geographies of men and masculinities, which cut across the various sub-fields of the discipline: men’s embodied and emotional geographies, and their experiences in relation to religion, faith and spirituality. We discuss these fields, suggesting further productive developments for geographies of masculinities, which include work on the body and wellbeing, body size, male care giving, men’s experiences in diverse faith communities, and men and alternative spiritualities. Ongoing development of geographical work on men and masculinities is important for helping to contest patriarchal structures and knowledge production.     

Spacing Palestine through the home

This paper explores connections that can be made between houses, homes and violence in Palestine, and representational consequences of making such connections. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Birzeit, I put recent work on critical geographies of home into conversation with geographies and geopolitics of Palestine. I criticise the tendency to represent Palestinian geographies almost entirely through the lens of the Israeli Occupation. While such studies have a great deal of value both academically and politically, this paper augments such work by developing a different focus and a different representational approach. I use detailed ethnographic vignettes and interviews to engage with the domestic practices that make particular Birzeiti homes. These intimate domestic encounters underpin my argument that there is a need for more work that apprehends Palestinian geographies as complexities that bear a relation to, but are not fully determined by, the Israeli Occupation.     

The history and philosophy of social science

Carlo Ginzburg is best known as the author of a popular and widely commented work of microstoria Il formaggio e i vermi, published in 1976. Rather than focusing on Ginzburg's contributions to the genre of microstoria, or on the development of his long and very productive scholarly career, my aim in this article is to reflect on a set of themes that recur, with impressive persistence, in his work, from his earliest publications in the mid-1960s, to his most recent works. Above all, I suggest that two elements recur in his work, and that these, jointly, impart upon it its defining character. They are the concern with epistemological issues of knowing, and the ethical conception of the historian's work, which Ginzburg expressess and defends with urelenting rigour.     

Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai

Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in Lane 49, a public housing community in downtown Shanghai. Utilising feminist geography and feminist political theorisations of material permeability this article contributes to Chinese geographies of protest, providing a local epistemology of housing activism which demonstrates the importance of drawing materiality into understandings of activist tactics. The article also contributes to radical geographies of protest by deconstructing the idea of public protest in a public place and thus offering opportunities to demonstrate how, through blurring public‐private binaries, protest can emerge and survive in authoritative governance regimes.     

Life and Death Decisions in our Posthuman(ist) Times

Abstract: Geography, like much of social science, is witnessing a resurgence of interest in Michel Foucault's formation of biopower—the power to make live and foster life. This paper seeks to engage with this interest by staging a dialogue between the work of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow on the one hand and that of Giorgio Agamben on the other. I propose that, while Rose and Rabinow provide a diagnostic for our emerging geographies of “life itself” and outline allied forms of political citizenship known as “biosociality” or “biological citizenship”, it is Agamben who enables us to consider the limit figures to this form of political inclusion. To draw out these limit figures I focus on recent debates surrounding end‐of‐life decisions and provide examples from the Dignity in Dying campaign and the Not Dead Yet movement. Throughout, I situate this paper within recent debates on posthumanism and the posthuman in geography. In doing so I effectively ask: why, in our seemingly posthuman(ist) times, does much of Western politics seek to decide on the form, the right and, inevitably, the limit of human beings?     

Stigma and the doomed-to-fail school careers of young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT

The paper contributes to ‘geographies of education’ (Holloway, S., and H. Jöns. 2012. “Geographies of Education and Learning.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (4): 482–488), as it presents the typical school careers of students stigmatized in educational institutions because of their disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Drawing on qualitative research with male residents of one disadvantaged neighbourhood in ?ód? (Poland), I identify their typical careers as ‘doomed-to-fail school careers’. The paper has three aims. First, it highlights the significance of stigma-based spatially embedded school practices on the educational failure and low-paid employment of students from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Second, it uncovers forms of school control over stigmatized students and the students’ resistance to these. Finally, I argue that Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma in human geography (Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma. Notes on Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall) offers a unique language to describe and explain the spatially embedded educational experiences of marginalized students.     

Teaching creative geovisualization: Imagining the creative in/of GIS

Creative geovisualization is situated at the intersection of geography, arts, and digital humanities with a particular emphasis on visualization and mapping that preserves, represents, and generates more authentic, contextual, and nuanced meanings of space and people with an artistic and humanistic perspective and approach. This is a creative expansion in critical GIS practices and a new alternative to traditionally science-rooted approaches to GIS and mapping. Reflecting the experience of teaching a “creative geovisualization” course in an interdisciplinary curriculum, I demonstrate how critical and creative scholarship with mapping and geovisualization is introduced in the classroom and is illuminated in the students' creative practices. The class encompasses key epistemological and methodological groundings of creative geovisualization—including non-representational theories; critical cartography and GIS; the convergence of geography, arts, and humanities; psychogeography; and qualitative and affective geovisualization. Empirical examples of students' works illustrate the blending of different modes of creative engagements with GIS and geovisualization and specific ways to work with various forms of embodied, relational, interpretive, and expressive geographies. GIS and mapping become creative as they continue evolving in process, and it is time that we deeply (re-)imagine “the creative” in/of GIS in critical GIS pedagogies.