Introduction: towards trans geographies

Gender geographies have focused on normatively gendered men and women, neglecting the ways in which gender binaries can be contested and troubled. Trans people question hegemonic conventions that link sexed bodies, gender roles and lives. This collection spans a range of theoretical fields in this context, including trans theories, queer engagement, feminist geographies, gender geographies and sexualities geographies. It offers empirical investigations of trans lives, while addressing the often theoretical use of ‘trans’ to render gender fluid, incoherent and unintelligible. As a whole this themed section questions geography's presumption of man/woman and male/female.     

Teaching visualised geographies: towards a methodology for the interpretation of visual materials

Abstract

This paper suggests a number of questions which can be used to structure a small‐group discussion about the interpretation of visual images. As many geographers now are demonstrating, geographical knowledges are very often visualised. However, there is currently little on offer methodologically to help students approach the interpretation of visual images critically. This paper hopes to start to remedy this situation. It begins by sketching a theoretical understanding of the meanings of visual images. It then suggests a number of questions that flow from that understanding, which can be addressed to a particular visual image in order to facilitate a discussion about its possible meanings.     

The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth

The concept of hybridity has become an influential theoretical tool for examining and reconsidering relations between society and nature. Although benefits have accrued from this school of thought, this paper contends the deployment of hybridity within the geographic discipline falls short of its reconstitutional claims. These shortcomings are a consequence of the original sources used to develop the language and logic of hybridity. Although the concept of hybridity has a long history in the biological sciences, the utilisation of hybridity in the geographic discipline has predominantly relied upon evolving theories developed in science and technology studies. This paper indicates how Haraway's cyborg and Latour's Middle Kingdom limit the scope of hybridity by portraying humanity as central to hybridity. The pervasive centrality of humans within the literature on hybridity (1) limits the ability of geographers to embrace poststructuralism in its entirety and (2) diminishes the discipline's claim to credibly represent the (natural) landscape. This paper argues for a thicker hybridity by borrowing from emergent theories in the biological sciences, wherein hybridity is conceived as a common occurrence that frequently takes place outside the direct purview of society. Rather than reifying nature, thick hybridity forces society to embrace environmental uncertainty more than it has heretofore.     

Cross over food: re-materializing postcolonial geographies

Recent geographical discussions of postcolonialism have highlighted its emphasis on texts and discourses, its neglect of more material aspects of (post)imperial/colonial domination and the need for detailed empirical research articulating postcolonialism and global capitalism. This paper addresses these issues by reporting on research based in a recent debate in the UK trade press over the 'failure' of Caribbean food to 'cross over' into the UK 'mainstream'. It outlines the contrasting manufacturing and marketing practices of two Jamaican food companies whose accounts of (not) attempting this 'cross-over' illustrate postcolonialism's hybrid, resistant, ambivalent, scale-jumping, boundary-crossing, material cultural politics.     

Knowledge, uncertainty and physical geography: towards the development of methodologies for questioning belief

Although it is widely acknowledged that our understanding of environmental systems cannot be reduced to single predictions and unique explanations, determinism remains a common strategy in physical geography. This paper argues for explicit assessments of uncertainty in environmental data and models as a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for balancing uncertain scientific arguments against uncertain social, ethical, moral and legal arguments in managing environmental systems. In particular, this paper aims to: (1) demonstrate the importance of assessing uncertainty within a realist research framework; (2) consider the nature of scientific uncertainty as the basis for developing methodologies that question belief; and (3) explore some important aspects of a methodology for evaluating uncertainties in environmental research.     

Conserving Rainforest 4: aural geographies and ephemerality

Works of installation sound art are inherently spatial. Documentation of this form, which dates from the 1950s, involves an engagement with diverse histories of geographical knowledge and oral-historical methodology. David Tudor's Rainforest 4 (1973) is a performed sculptural sound installation which remains the best-known of his pieces. Its durability—when most other of his works remain unperformed, partly because they are too hermetic to decipher or depend on unavailable technologies—belies its “score” which consists of a simple diagram and a few words. Oral history, formal and informal, is not only key to understanding the history of the piece, but is integral to its performance. This paper explores some historical geographies of Rainforest 4 and the aesthetic of ephemerality in live electronic music, for which documentation of performance is secondary. In examining the paradoxes of Rainforest 4's conservation, we explore Tudor's engagement with particular notions of nature and spirituality as well as the social hierarchies and conservative impulse which keep the piece alive.     

Counterfactual geographies: worlds that might have been

This paper argues for a renewed consideration of counterfactuals within geography. Drawing upon Doreen Massey's emphasis on notions of ‘possibility’, ‘chance’, ‘undecidability’ and ‘happenstance’, we argue for an engagement with approaches in the humanities that have addressed such issues directly. We review previous uses of counterfactual method in historical geography, particularly as related to cliometrics and the ‘new economic history’ of the 1960s, but argue that a recent upsurge of interest in other disciplines indicates alternative ways that ‘what-if’ experiments might work in the sub-discipline. Recent counterfactual work outside of geography has had a notably spatial cast, often thinking through the nature of alternative worlds, or using counterfactual strategies that are explicitly concerned with space as well as temporal causality. We set out possible agendas for counterfactual work in historical geography. These include: consideration of the historical geographies within existing counterfactual writings and analyses; suggestions for distinctive ways that historical geographers might think and write counterfactually, including experiments in geographies of happenstance, and the exploration of more-than-human possibilities; analyses of the geography of and in counterfactual writing; and study of the political, ethical and emotional demands that counterfactuals make. This discussion and framework provides an extended introduction to this special feature on counterfactual geographies.     

Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

Convergence space: process geographies of grassroots globalization networks

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey's notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People's Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People's Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action.     

Decolonizing geographies of travel: Reading James/Jan Morris

Travel writing can produce critical 'in-between' spaces, which contribute to broader cultural politics of postcolonialism, by transgressing and in a preliminary sense deconstructing imperial binaries. These imperial binaries structure subjectivities, on the one hand, and material geographies, on the other. This paper examines such a project, through a reading of travel writing by James/Jan Morris, which shows how processes of decolonizing subjectivities and material geographies may be recursively related. Morris is known for newspaper coverage of the 1953 Everest expedition, for a trilogy on the British Empire, for the autobiographical account of a sex change, and for many travel books and articles; all of which foreground themes of gender and imperialism. The paper argues that Morris's decolonizations have charted and created in-between spaces of subjectivity and material geography, ambivalent spaces with critical potential. The ambivalence of these spaces can constitute a critical limitation, but also an opportunity; in response, the conclusion redirects some critical attention away from writers and textual spaces to readers and interpretations, and thus points towards a postcolonial (and wider) politics of reading.     

'I must get out': the geographies of domestic violence

The geographies of domestic violence are envisaged in this paper as a series of enlarging, though restricted spaces. Although the social construction of home is as a place of safety and support, in reality it can be a place of violence, where women are spatially restricted either to the home itself, or to its immediate environs. Women who break free and seek safety in a women's refuge, or who move to a new home in a different place, continue to live spatially restricted lives, in the fear that their former partner may trace them.     

Social geographies of rural mental health: experiencing inclusions and exclusions

A dominant urban focus in previous research on the social geographies of mental health has obscured the experiences of people with mental health problems living in rural localities. Critiquing this urban focus, we report on research conducted in the rural and remote Scottish Highlands. Evidence derived from in-depth interviews with over 100 users of psychiatric services in the Highlands is deployed to investigate the complex socio-spatial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion experienced by these users on a daily basis. A discussion of the explanations that users themselves offer of their experiences is accompanied by a theoretical framing of these issues pivoting on relations of proximity–distance and intimacy–repulsion.     

The body as research tool: embodied practice and children's geographies

Recently, attempts have been made to advance our ways of thinking and doing Children's Geographies. This paper contributes to that endeavour in two respects. Firstly it considers how the concept of heterogeneous (or hybrid) geographies may offer a new framework for the study of childhood. Secondly, and more substantively, it explores how ‘non-representational’ ideas and approaches – concerned with the non-cognitive and the profoundly practical – may be employed to inform our empirical engagements within this new theoretical framework.     

Currents,visions and voyages: historical geographies of the sea

This paper offers a prospectus for a version of historical geography that puts the seas and oceans at the centre of its concerns. This is pursued in three ways. First, via a discussion of the epistemological and historiographic perspectives that might be taken on geographies of the sea, which argues that the view from the ocean can develop geographies of spaces beyond the local and the national, and can attend to the relationships between the human and natural worlds. Second, through a consideration of the imaginative, aesthetic and sensuous geographies of the sea that contends that maritime worlds open up new experiential dimensions and new forms of representation. Finally, in a survey of the material and social worlds of the oceans that suggests that new life can thereby be breathed into current concerns with global political economy, material geographies, the relationship between knowledge and located practice, and the intersections of social and spatial difference. The paper also provides an introduction to a special issue on the historical geography of the sea.     

Naturalising the Highlands: geographies of mountain fieldwork in late-Victorian Scotland

Through a detailed examination of two late-Victorian field clubs dedicated to the exploration of alpine botany in the Scottish Highlands, this paper contributes to work on the historical geographies of civic science. By focusing on the scientific and social character of mountain fieldwork it analyses the reciprocal relations between the spaces, practices and science of Highland botanising and wider concerns with sociability, character and civic virtue. In so doing it investigates the transposition of a variety of discursive resources from evolutionism to tourism into the language and practices of botanical science. This focus enables the paper to complicate more general accounts of natural history in the Victorian period and to consider a number of methodological issues relevant to reconstructing the historical geographies of science.     

Editorial Not all sweetness and light: New cultural geographies of food

Despite a resurgence of work that has begun to examine critically the artefactual mediation of memory, very few accounts have focused upon the interconnections between recorded music and daily acts of remembering. Drawing upon in‐depth case study‐based research into recorded music and everyday life with seventeen lower middle‐class households, this paper describes the composition of three practices of remembering with and through recorded music. First, remembering how to choose and ‘fit’ specific purchased music to particular socio‐spatial activities: a creative practice of mimicry, discretion and intuition in which the past is both embodied in the actions of judgement and choice and also functions to compose a co‐present, but not‐yet ‘virtual’ realm. Second, the widespread, ephemeral and subject‐less practice of ‘involuntary remembering’ in which a trace of a virtual past affects ‘in itself’. Finally, ‘intentional remembering’ in which a past is conditioned to occur as a fixed, relatively durable ‘memory’. The paper describes how such practices of remembering are bound up with the emergence of domestic time‐space, and thus the mode of being of the past, via the circulation and organization of affect.     

Place, networks, space: theorising the geographies of social movements

This essay examines how geography affects the different types of networks underlying social movements. The principal argument of the paper is that networks forged in particular places and at great distances play distinctive yet complementary functions in broad-based social movements. Not only does the articulation of these different types of networks result in complementary roles, but it also introduces key relational dynamics affecting the stability of the entire social movement. The purpose of the paper is therefore threefold: to provide a conceptual framework for interpreting the complex geographies of contemporary social movement networks, to stress the contributions of place-based relations in social movements and to assess how activist places connect to form 'social movement space'.     

Introduction: space,place and the geographies of women's caregiving work

The vast majority of caregivers, whether formal or informal, paid or unpaid, are women. Health care restructuring across the West, inspired by a shift from the welfare to neoliberal state, has greatly impacted caregiving. The idea for this collection arose as a result of a special paper session on the geographies of caregiving, held as part of the Association of American Geographers Meeting (Chicago, 2006). In hearing the papers presented, it became clear that geographers are engaged in interesting and innovative research in this area, much of which involves women's caregiving work in particular. As both unpaid informal family caregiving and paid formal practitioner-provided care are mainly addressed in this collection, they are briefly discussed in this editorial. This is followed by a discussion of the geographical contributions to the growing caregiving literature, which provides the foundation for an overview of ongoing and new research directions. The four articles that make up this special issue are then reviewed in brief. Finally, we identify issues that cut across all four articles, leading to a discussion of future research directions.     

Student geographies and homemaking: personal belonging(s) and identities

Studies of the ‘geographies of students’ have become increasingly prevalent across the social sciences and are particularly concerned with the predilection for young UK University undergraduates to be mobile in their institutional choice. A more recent focus within this work has been upon student identities, with attention given to how the spaces to which students move and in which they settle can have both positive and negative consequences for the evolution of the student identity, and how such identities are often framed within the context of social activities; learning environments; friendship networks; or other sociocultural factors. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering the role of student accommodation – a site which often remains on the periphery of discussions of student identities – in offering students opportunities to construct, adapt and manage their student identities. This adds to the important contemporary geographies of student accommodation, which are currently debating, among others, purpose-built student accommodation and the broad housing ‘careers’ and strategies of students. In contrast, this paper explores the micro-geographies of student accommodation (and more specifically, the bedroom) to highlight its value in providing young, mobile students with an anchor within which they can draw together their learner, social and domestic dispositions into one geographical location.