Female artistic identity in place: the studio

In this paper I examine the role of the studio as a central site of artistic identity construction and maintenance. Using ten case studies drawn from interviews with contemporary women visual artists from Toronto, Canada, I argue that women artists value studio space because it powerfully reinforces their sense of commitment and belonging to a predominantly male‐dominated profession. I consider how women cope with the demands of artistic practice when they are unable to establish a spatially separate workspace by addressing the experiences of artists who are parents. I demonstrate how women artists who are primary care‐givers are rarely adequately protected from the interruptions of daily life and have grown accustomed to working in fragments of time and space. While these women may appear willing to concede space to others, when space is crucial to their artistic practice, they have a remarkably strong influence on the form of their creative environment. I maintain, then, that the studio as a fixed physical space continues to be a very real necessity for women artists in all stages of their careers.     

Black Geographies of Respite: Relief,Recuperation, and Resonance at Florida A&M University

In this article, I argue that places of respite provide relief from the burdens of oppressive articulations and experiences of society and space and are produced through three general practices: relief as a practice that mitigates psychological and physical burdens of oppression; recuperation as a form of (self-)care that can help heal harms; and affirmative resonance as a practice of counter-storytelling that challenges hegemonic social narratives and internalises affirmative narratives for marginalised peoples. Through a case study with members of the Marching 100 at Florida A&M University (FAMU), I demonstrate how these relational practices produce FAMU as a multiscalar place of respite for black students. Finally, I claim that places of respite, produced through a black sense of place, offer scholars interested in affirmative black geographies an ontological object produced by (and productive of) visions and practices of black life and produced for the celebration and protection of black lives.     

Gender differences in teenage alcohol consumption and spatial practices

In recent years teenagers have reported a decline in under-age drinking at the same time as their access to public space has been increasingly curtailed. In this paper we explore the spatial practices and drinking behaviours of a group of teenage girls and boys aged 13–14 years in Liverpool, UK. Our analysis considers how their use of space was bound up with experimentation with alcohol and how this varied by gender. We find in support of previous research that both boys and girls report nuanced experiences of public space, with some enjoying greater freedom while others have moved into more domestic and supervised leisure spaces in response to fears about their safety in public spaces. The boys also reported less alcohol consumption than the girls. These gendered experiences were mediated by social relationships and encounters with other young people, their parents and carers and also other adults in positions of authority.     

Exploring the daily geographies of diverse men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions

Within Canada, it has been estimated that almost half of all family, also known as informal, caregivers are now men. However, the contributions and experiences of these caregiver men have received relatively little attention, particularly from geographies of care and caregiving researchers. This analysis hopes to shed light on the unique, yet diverse, experiences of men caregiving for persons with multiple chronic conditions in Canada. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nineteen men caregivers in two provinces of Canada, this analysis aims to explore how social and physical axes of difference shape men’s daily lived geographies when providing care. Our thematic findings reveal that caregiving is experienced by participants at the three scalar levels of the body, the home and the community. Our intersectional analysis reveals that at each scalar level, being a man was not the only variable shaping caregiving experiences. Rather, it was also age, physical capacity, culture, socio-economic status, marital status, housing status, social connectedness, relationship to the care recipient and care recipients’ physical and mental capacity that shaped experiences and meanings of place during the caregiving process. Accounting for this diversity at each scale, our findings point to the unique stresses and challenges experienced. We conclude by emphasizing the significance in acknowledging the diverse challenges that exist for all caregivers in order to inform comprehensive and inclusive social policy that ultimately will produce equitable caregiver supports.     

Troubling meanings of family and competing moral imperatives in the family lives of young people with a parent who is at the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a narrative study of young people with a parent who is at the end of life to examine how family lives are troubled by life-limiting parental illness. Young people struggled to reconcile the physical and emotional absence of family members with meanings of ‘family’; the extent to which young people could rely on family to ‘be there’ in these troubling circumstances was of practical, emotional and moral significance. Our discussion is situated in the context of an English end of life care policy predicated on the ideal of a good death as one that takes place at home accompanied by family members. We explore how the shift away from family as a site for nurturing children towards family as a space to care for the dying is experienced by young people, and consider how these competing moral imperatives are negotiated through relational practices of care.     

Stories of crossings and connections from Bawaka,North East Arnhem Land,Australia

This paper engages with Indigenous peoples' conceptualisations of borders, arguing that these unsettle dominant Eurocentric constructs of the border as terrestrial, linear, bound and defined through western legal frameworks. It does this by drawing on one aspect of the many storytelling experiences offered by members of the Indigenous-owned Yolngu tourism business Bawaka Cultural Experiences in northern Australia. We argue that stories told to visitors about multiple and diverse connections between Yolngu and Makassan people from Sulawesi, Indonesia, are intentional constructions which challenge dominant conceptions of Australia as an isolated island-nation. The stories redefine the border as a dynamic and active space and as a site of complex encounters. The border itself is continuously recreated through stories in ways that emphasise the continuity and richness of land and sea-scapes and are based on non-linear conceptions of time. The stories invite non-Indigenous people to engage with different kinds of realities that exist in the north and to re-imagine Australia's north as a place of crossings and connections.     

Metelkova as Autonomous Heterotopia

This article examines conflicts concerning urban space, focusing on relationships between autonomous space and neoliberal urbanism through the empirical example of the cultural centre AKC Metelkova Mesto in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Through a thematic discourse analysis of activist interviews and collective statements by activist groups connected to Metelkova, research questions concern how urban conflict is constructed from the vantage point of autonomous space; what role autonomous space is assigned in relation to such conflict; and how tensions and antagonisms within the autonomous space can be understood. Theoretically we engage in a reinterpretation of the notion of heterotopia in conjunction with critical urban theory, analysing Metelkova as an autonomous heterotopia. Further, we argue that theoretisations of autonomous spaces need to consider experiences from Central and Eastern Europe, in which the conditions are shaped and constructed in conjunction with particular configurations of abruptly implemented neoliberal governance and the rise of the authoritarianism.     

Border crossings: reflections on women's lives in twentieth-century Britain

There has been a growing focus on personal life, memoir and autobiography in feminist writing, and in the social sciences more generally, in recent years. Feminist geographers, among others, argue that family relationships and personal recollections should be part of studies of the construction of personal identity and a sense of place. I combine this argument with research into women's labour market participation to explore the changing significance of waged work in British women's lives over the last century, seen through the personal lens of three generations of women's experiences of migration across geographical and class boundaries.     

Autogestion and competing hierarchies: deaf and other perspectives on diversity and the right to occupy space in the Mumbai surburban trains

This article offers a detailed ethnographic account of how people appropriate available space in compartments for disabled people in the Mumbai suburban trains, make it their own and monitor it, in the context of a succession of recent spatial changes. These compartments have increased in size over the years, and subsequently, the body of travellers has become more diverse. Passengers produce hierarchies based on need, physical differences, age differences and physical appearance, determining who can enter the compartments and who can’t, who can sit and who should stand, and where they should sit/stand. These hierarchies are mediated, but not dominated, by medical and disability certificates which are, in addition to a valid ticket, the documents that entitle people to travel in the handicapped compartments. Hierarchies are influenced by sexism, classism and audism and partially overlap but also are competing, such as in the case of deaf people who argue for the right to occupy seats and at the same time struggle with how to balance this quest with the need to act morally towards fellow travellers who seemingly suffer.     

Cartographies of encounters: Understanding conflict transformation through a collaborative exploration of youth spaces in Beirut

This paper explores practices and imaginations of space among young people in postwar Beirut. Relying on an innovative collaborative-mapping methodology, it shifts the focus from the traditional analysis of the city at war, centred on anxious urbanism, toward spatial dynamics of conflict transformation. It deploys an ethnographic approach to shed light on everyday perceptions of the urban landscape among a group of students. Their visions of space are composed along conventional tropes, comparable to Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes: images that connect temporal and spatial relationships to describe their ways of inhabiting the city. These images reveal that their experiences of space are not produced exclusively in relation to the memory of wartime topographies and politico-religious territories. Rather, they are also the result of their personal trajectories and agency. For these young people, ordinary encounters inspire a reframing of the political geography of the everyday, including renewed narratives on coexistence and strategies of circumventing the sense of spatial confinement they inherited from the war. The analysis shows that the experiences of these students stand in sharp contrast with the dominant image of unbending intergroup boundaries in postwar Lebanon. Young people's abilities to navigate, negotiate and rediscover social encounters in a complex, changing environment call attention to the transformative power of micro-situations in postwar contexts. Through highlighting their original lifestyles and ways of thinking, this paper argues that the city, far from only symbolising and reproducing conflicts, is also the place where mundane practices and imaginations reinvent the social fabric.     

An Archaeology of Modernity in Colonial Jamaica

The rise of modernity in Europe resulted in the redefinition of social relations between those in control of the apparatus of the state and economy on the one hand, and those who worked and lived within that apparatus on the other. This shift in the definition of the basic social unit from subject to individual citizen was fraught with tension, and resulted in vast changes in the lives of colonized people throughout the European sphere of control. While the material manifestations of these historical processes were many, this article considers how two phenomena associated with modernity impacted the lives of people enslaved at Marshall’s Pen, a Jamaican coffee plantation, in the opening decades of the 19th century. These two considerations included the spread of mass-produced goods mediated through the rise of consumerism visible through archaeologically recovered material culture, and shifting definitions of the relationships between space and social organization reflecting in changing settlement patterns of village life.     

Conceptions of place: approaching space,children and physical activity

In this paper, we argue that place mapping is useful for approaching children's conception of place and that this is of relevance when designing physical activity interventions. We contend that socio-material factors influence children's perception and use of places, and are crucial to understand in relation to their use of local neighbourhoods for physical activity. A place mapping of children's understandings and everyday use of their local neighbourhood in suburban Copenhagen was conducted with a fifth grade elementary school class. The mapping and subsequent analysis resulted in three categories of relevance to children's conceptions of place; located social experiences, experiences of the unknown, and children's contested spaces. We argue that such knowledge can provide useful information in the development and evaluation of activities that promote physical activity in urban spaces.     

Embodied bicycle commuters in a car world

As an initiative to increase cycling, bike to work (BTW) events emphasize a pragmatic approach in which people learn through sensory experience. Pragmatism contends that the lived experience of the commuter within fluid geographies of social and physical conditions informs commuting knowledge and behavior. I researched how bicyclists participate in the 2012 BTW event in Lake Tahoe (USA) and how these experiences facilitate the process of becoming bicycle commuters. My study included participant observations, interviews, video observations, and route mapping. I analyzed this data with thematic and narrative analyses. I find that the BTW event illuminates bicycling, a normally invisible practice in a car world, and creates temporary bicycle-friendly spaces that provide the embodied experience and knowledge of bicycle commuting within context. Through this lived experience, participants can break free from unconscious car-based patterns and become embodied bicycle commuters who engage in active renegotiations of their commuting practices.     

Disrupted Futures: Unpacking Metaphors of Marginalization in Eviction and Resettlement Narratives

In this paper, I examine how linguistic tropes that emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a Delhi resettlement colony both capture and reaffirm the experiences of forced eviction and marginalization on the urban periphery. By analyzing the urban subjectivities embedded in recurrent metaphors, I explore how people “make sense” of dispossession and ultimately, articulate their “place” in the city. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Metaphors We Live By; 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought), I argue that the utilization of metaphors in everyday language influences how people structure their relationships—with the state, with other residents of the resettlement colony, and with the city itself—and captures the pervasive uncertainty of resettlement. Unpacking such metaphors as “guides” to thought and practice can contribute to theories on spaces of insecurity and performativity of the marginalized in the city.     

They say ‘kids with asthma don’t play sports’: geographies of asthma

ABSTRACT

Asthma is common among children worldwide. Although complex, physical activity participation is important in asthma management, to decrease chronic disease risk, and to facilitate healthy lifestyles for children. Team sport participation is a common way for children to engage in physical activity, but the spaces in which team sport is experienced can present social, physical and emotional challenges for children with asthma. This research aims to understand elements of the environment, broadly defined, that impact experiences of asthma in sport. In-depth interviews were conducted with youth team sport athletes (n?=?11) diagnosed with asthma, and youth team sport coaches (n?=?18) in Ontario, Canada. Results suggest that understanding the physical and social needs of child and youth athletes, and ensuring well-controlled asthma, are critical to maximizing performance and improving quality of life for asthmatic athletes.     

Seeing what you know: Changing constructions and perceptions of landscape in Epirus,Northwestern Greece, 1945 and 1990

This paper considers how current understandings of historical events, past practices and movements of the people of Pogoni in Epirus, Northwestern Greece, informs the way they currently visually perceive their physical and social landscape. Taking two periods, marked as prior to 1945 and up to 1990, the paper explores, with the use of maps showing different temporal versions of the visual perception of the area, the combination of social, historical and spatial elements which combined to generate Pogoni people's perception of their “place”;. It argues that the current experience of place emphasises both the visual and historical aspects of it (through notions such as “cultural heritage"). In this context, what people “see”; is the combined outcome of particular reconstructions of past relations and movements around the place, overlaid with current practices, experiences and movements through the place.     

Fleshing out the geographies of social movements: Colombia's Pacific coast black communities and the ‘aquatic space’

The intersections between the concepts of space, place and resistance have recently received increasing attention from geographers dedicated to the study of social movements. Space and place are not merely seen as providing a physical background for mobilisations but as mutually constitutive of social movement agency. Yet, critics of theoretical frameworks drawn up by geographers have often rightly pointed to the lack of convincing empirical evidence presented in their support.This paper addresses these critiques by offering a theoretically informed and empirically grounded account of recent mobilisations by the social movement of black communities in the Pacific coast region of Colombia. Drawing on both the objective aspects of place and the subjective feelings that are derived from living in a place, I will show how these mechanisms have impacted on the specific spatial organising forms adopted by black communities. In particular, I will propose the concept of ‘aquatic space’ as a set of spatialised social relationships among Afro-Colombians, and show how these concrete everyday geographies have been drawn upon by black communities in the establishment of community councils along river basins.The paper argues that to make a strong point for more spatially sensitive analyses of social movements, geographers have to sustain their theoretical frameworks with concrete empirical data that not only illustrate spatial processes at play, but also convincingly demonstrate their very embeddedness in social practice. I thus argue for a strong consideration of ethnographies as a privileged research methodology to flesh out the geographies of social movements.     

Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons

The commons is increasingly invoked as a way to envision new worlds. One strand of commons research focuses at the local scale, on small groups in “traditional”, mostly rural societies; this research asks how commons are maintained over time. Another strand focuses on the commons at a global scale; this is political research that asks how commons can be reclaimed from a capitalist landscape. Here, I bridge these two approaches by theorizing the commons as reclaimed and maintained in the context of the city, through examining the experiences of limited‐equity housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. I argue that the urban commons is marked by two distinct traits: it emerges in space that is saturated with people, competing uses, and financial investment; and it is constituted by the collective work of strangers. The challenges of reclaiming and maintaining an urban commons are substantial, but the need for them is urgent.     

Contemporary Social Change as the Context for Geographical Enquiry: Towards a Reinvigoration of the Concept of Place

The nature of contemporary social change is explored by posing questions about the implications of neoliberalism, the character of leisure, the perils of materialism, and the shift from consumption to consumerism. Momentum is a powerful force in human affairs. Investigating its nature illustrates how the concept of equilibrium has been given undue emphasis in models of human behaviour. Momentum encourages ‘more of the same’ and is implicated in the way people fail to use leisure fully or effectively and in the way they subscribe to an emphasis on materialism and consumption as a path to happiness. Geography needs to engage with popular social scientific writing if it is to have a place in public intellectual debate. In many ways contemporary social change promises a reinvigoration of the concept of place and therefore challenges to both the substance and nature of geographical inquiry.