Trans/national knowledge production through difference: dilemmas of doing research on veiling in Amman,Jordan

Abstract

This article examines some dilemmas I experienced while doing research on fashionable veiling in Amman, Jordan. My fieldwork experience and the knowledge I co-produced with the participants were shaped by each layer of my identity as a Jordanian, Muslim, non-veiled woman, with a particular classed, spatialized Ammani heritage and affiliation with western feminist academia. The article engages with the implications my positionality had on my insider-outsider status and the knowledge the participants and I co-produced. I argue that the research setting, while fraught with difference, constituted a site for transnational solidarity and knowledge production. The participants and I had divergent understandings of, and aspirations for, Jordanian Muslim femininity shaped by our varying positions within the Global North-Global South. I argue that we practiced solidarity by collaborating and co-constructing a transnational site to unpack and defend their viability. I found that our collaboration was not fuelled by a shared sense of injustice and did not produce a shared outlook on Islam, Jordanianness or femininity. Rather, it created a site where we were able to emphasize our divergent sense of these paradigms as women positioned differently within the trans/national, cultural, and religious spaces we shared.     

When bodies do not fit: an analysis of postgraduate fieldwork

Feminist geographers are increasingly examining embodied aspects of research. These embodied dimensions of fieldwork often build upon intersecting positionalities, yet studies focusing on bodily limitations encountered by feminists in the field are relatively few. In this article, we explore what it is like to be bodies that do not fit easily into the context within which they are supposed to be doing fieldwork. We are both female postgraduate students conducting fieldwork in the Global South. We have encountered, many times over, instances where, because of our sick and fatigued bodies, we have not been able to continue our work. We question the normalization of able-bodied postgraduate students by problematizing our own experiences, and argue that discourses of ability dominate fieldwork, in both its expectations and its conduct. This is especially the case for those with invisible disabilities because researchers may appear healthy but are not. As a result, postgraduate students may jeopardize their health for the sake of their research.     

Interpreting for the Afghanistan Spanish Force

The participation of interpreters as linguistic and cultural mediators is considered essential to the success of military operations in a foreign country. This study examines the situation of two categories of civilian interpreters who worked for the Spanish armed forces in Afghanistan: interpreters recruited in Spain and interpreters recruited in Afghanistan. The distinct positionalities of these groups of interpreters emerge as a recurring theme in the interviews carried out as part of this research. The findings indicate that the interpreter’s positionality impacted the interpreter’s agency, the trust placed in him or her by the armed forces, and exposure to danger. In highlighting interpreters’ active participation in the communicative situation, this paper increases understanding of the positionality of interpreters in war zones.     

Positionality,subjectivity, and race in transnational and transcultural geographical research

This article investigates the complexities of negotiating subject positions in transnational and transcultural research by focusing on the gendering of race and racialization. As more people claim to be of mixed ‘racial’ descent and Western researchers grow more diverse, it is increasingly important that this diversity is reflected within geographical research; however, much of the existing research on subjectivity and its role in the research process has focused either on ‘white’ researchers in Global South contexts or on researchers working in their ‘home’ country or community. Less visible are accounts from those who challenge conceptions of ‘white’ Western researcher or whose racial identity can be conceived as hybrid. Moreover, there is a tendency to conceptualize race/racialization and their effects on subjectivity and positionality in relatively narrow terms. This article draws attention to the changing subjectivities of a racialized gendered body as it moves into different contexts. I examine how conceptualizations of race and discourses of racialization constitute researcher subjectivity, and how different understandings of ‘race’ mediate relationships between researcher and research participants (and others). To understand the spatial (re)configurations of (race) subjectivities and how this affects researcher positionality, I offer an autoethnography of a bi/multiracial Western woman of New Zealand Māori/Pākehā descent interpellated as ‘insufficient Other’ in her home context of Aotearoa New Zealand, then reconstituted as white and ‘sufficient Self’ in the Philippines by her research participants and Filipino ‘family’ and friends.     

Feminist research in online spaces

The Internet is growing in popularity as a research site and is often framed as the next frontier in human subjects research. The opportunities the Internet provides for political organizing, making personal experiences more public, and creating spaces for a variety of voices makes it particularly relevant to feminist geographers and researchers such as ourselves. However, many qualitative researchers approach online research as though the Internet simply archives an abundance of data that is ‘there for the taking.’ Being trained in feminist research methods, we took issue with this approach, yet also encountered challenges when trying to apply feminist practices and ethical perspectives to online research environments. We explore these challenges through a collaborative reflection on our own independent online research experiences. Three themes emerge: (1) interpreting politics and visibility in online spaces, (2) researcher positionality across virtual and material study sites, and (3) subjectivity and power in online research ethics. Reflecting on these themes, we argue that the insights of feminist ethics and a feminist geographical lens are crucial for bringing much-needed reflexivity and reciprocity into online research. Simultaneously, online research opens up exciting new ways of conceptualizing central ideas within feminist research ethics, including politicization, positionality, and power.     

Teaching Indigenous geography in a neo-colonial world

Australian universities are increasingly embedding Indigenous content and perspectives within curriculum to promote Indigenous cultural competency. We present teaching challenges in an Indigenous geography course designed to present an engaged, intercultural learning experience. We critically reflect on student evaluations, informal discussions and observations to complement scholarly debates. Course design and delivery was seen as stimulating and illuminating in terms of course content. While diversity of student cohorts, backgrounds and learning styles remain challenging, the romanticism of some students can override critical engagement with the geographical context of the course material and their positionality. There remains a tendency in both student constructions and the geographical literature to create an Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary that not only essentializes both, but can be culturally unsafe for Indigenous students. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students may share a sense of pessimism in confronting apparently unstoppable development and environmental destruction. We argue for scholarship around the fundamentally intercultural nature of coexistence to contextualize the spatial diversity of Indigenous lives in landscapes, currently obscured by dominant constructions of Indigeneity. Critical reflection on settler educators’ and learners’ positionalities with respect to neocolonial structures will help to transcend both essentialism and pessimism.     

Introduction

This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the well-being of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field.     

The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

In this article, we develop and advance the concept of the lit world by bringing together literatures about everyday lighting, automation in everyday life and human perception, along with our ethnographic research into people’s experience of automated lighting in Melbourne, Australia. In doing so we formulate and argue for an approach to automation that situates it as part of everyday mundane worlds and acknowledges its entanglement with the emergent and experiential qualities of everyday environments as they unfold. We demonstrate this through the example of automated lighting, understood as a situated technology that has contingent effects and participates in the making of particular ways of seeing and feeling the world. We thereby argue for an account of automation that reaches beyond its potential for the management of human (and other) behaviour, to ask how the qualities and affordances of automated technologies might seep out of their intended domains, and create new perceptual and experiential opportunities. In a context where automation is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, such attention to the experience and use of automated technologies which already exist on a large scale is needed. Urban lighting is an example par excellence of automation in the world because it has a long history beyond the recent association of automated technologies with code and digital infrastructures. As scholars debate how automated technologies will become part of our future digital lives, understanding how people live in a lit world offers a starting point for considering how we might live with other anticipated algorithmic forms of automation.     

Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated,Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract

Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.     

You’re not welcome at my table: racial discourse,conflict and healing at the kitchen table

In this article, we reflect on the need for, and geography of, embodied cross-racial talk in the current political context. We reflect on our 2015 article ‘Kitchen Table Reflexivity: Negotiating Positionality through Everyday Talk’ to question whether we were too optimistic in our advocacy of the kitchen table as a space for racial reconciliation through interracial dialogue. We draw on our own experiences to explore multiple tables at which we may or may not both be present. In conclusion, we encourage everyone to do the hard work of determining which tables are the right ones for them to be present at to have the hard, but necessary, conversations about race and racialization in our contemporary society.     

‘God was with me everywhere’: women’s embodied practices and everyday experiences of sacred space in Czechia

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the rise. We deploy auto-photography as a method that invites participants’ own visual representations and interpretative narrations of their quotidian experiences. Thirty-eight Christian, Buddhist, and non-religious women participated in this study in 2016. Our analysis of photographs and interviews shows that our participants turn places that are not primarily associated with religion or spirituality (such as a kitchen sink or a bus stop) into sacred or spiritual places while at the same time integrate officially sacred spaces (such as churches and meditation centers) into their daily lives through social activities. Thus, we argue that a mutually transformative process is taking place in contemporary Czechia. In this process, religiously affiliated and non-affiliated women alike transform everyday spaces into sacred sites through their embodied and emotional practices that seek calmness, peace, and transcendence. At the same time, women who participate in organized religions remake the sacrality of officially sacred sites through their emphasis on social connections and feelings of communal belonging and shared identity. Our findings underscore that sacred space is not fixed in any one location and its production involves the continual emotional and material investment by ordinary women.     

Teaching critical reflexivity in short-term international field courses: practices and problems

This study critiques the use of critical reflexivity in short-term international field courses. Critical reflexivity’s benefits include preparing students for professional research, deepening their learning, and giving the chance to see how student perspectives on fieldwork sites are influenced by their own identity and positionality. I use an inter-disciplinary review of reflexivity to describe four challenges faculty must address if they wish to train students to use reflexive practices in the field. I then describe student observations from a short-term field course to Southeast Asia that incorporated reflexivity and argue that faculty should include reflexivity cautiously on short-term field courses.     

Robert Frost's ambivalence: Borders and boundaries in poetic and political discourse

Phrases from Robert Frost's well-known poem “Mending Wall” are often used to frame discussions of borders in academic and political discourse. Used by some to justify the construction of physical barriers, others have used excerpts from the poem to fundamentally question the truism it appears to project. In light of recent interest in borders, our paper returns to Frost's full poem and its contexts in order to define, theorize, and critically mobilize what we take to be a useful ambivalence regarding fences. We use Frost's formulations to address the universal difficulty of moving beyond the borders of our daily lives, whether imposed at the edges of the nation-state, inscribed in our social relations, or inferred within the formal dimensions of a poem. Working at the crossroads of political geography, psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis we argue that addressing the central role of borders in our lives and Frost's deep ambivalence about fences and borders is a useful step in any political and aesthetic movement forward. We cannot be “good neighbors” in other words or even good co-inhabitants until and unless we acknowledge that we are ambivalent not only toward the Other, but also about the very concept of borders and boundaries itself. Ideas presented about ambivalence provide border scholars and political geographers with an opportunity to re-evaluate our positionality and recognize how our own humanity intersects with that of others.     

Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’

Feminist geographic commonsense suggests that power shapes knowledge production, prompting the long-standing reflexive turn. Yet, often such reflexivity fixes racial power and elides more nuanced operations of difference – moves feminist scholars have, in fact, long problematized. To counter this, we revisit Kobayashi's (1994) ‘Coloring the Field’ [‘Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race”, and the Politics of Fieldwork,’ Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73–90]. Twenty years on, and grounded in our fieldwork in South Sudan and Honduras, we highlight how colonial and gender ideologies are interwoven through emotion. Decentering a concern with guilt, we focus on the way whiteness may inspire awe while scholars of color evoke disdain among participants. Conversely, bodies associated with colonizing pasts or presents can prompt suspicion, an emotive reaction to whiteness not always fixed to white bodies. These feelings have significant repercussions for the authority, legitimacy, and access afforded to researchers. Our efforts thus disrupt notions that we, as researchers, always wield power over our participants. Instead we argue that the positioning of ‘subjects of color’ in the global south, racially and in their relationships with us, is historically produced and socioculturally and geographically contingent. Rethinking the field in this way, as a site of messy, affective, and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by bringing together feminist postcolonial and emotional geographies.     

Flirting in the field: shifting positionalities and power relations in innocuous sexualisations of research encounters

In the last few decades, an engaged and sophisticated discussion about the production of data and power relations has developed within feminist methodology. Positionality, i.e. the set of relations constituting informants' and researchers' subject positions, has been widely used as an analytical tool to account for the complicated ways in which data are co-constructed in fieldwork. Based on our own experience of fieldwork conducted in the city of Zurich, however, we argue that sexuality is underrepresented in this debate. First, reflexive writing on fieldwork has been reluctant to consider sexuality as a category in the same way, for instance, as gender or race. Second, even apparently innocuous sexualisations have a considerable effect on the constitution of data and are therefore worth including in the analysis. In this article, we examine how flirtation as a part of the participant–researcher relation has re-shaped the research encounters in our respective research projects. We discuss the complex navigations between conflicting rationales that it entailed for us as researchers, depict the minor and major shifts in positionalities that emerge from the flirtation and examine the reasons why we sometimes embraced flirtation and sometimes rejected it. The objective of the article is to further enrich feminist methodological writing, and to suggest to the reader the potential for including various shades of sexual performances, such as apparently harmless flirtation, into our reflections on data collection.     

Ambivalence,pride and shame: conceptualisations of German nationhood

ABSTRACT. This article examines complex everyday expressions and understandings of nationhood in Germany, focusing on citizens' articulations of national pride and their relationship with the nation. Through an analysis of ninety semi‐structured interviews with ‘ordinary’ Germans conducted between 2000 and 2002, we argue that the prevailing, elite‐centred approach to studying nationhood has not adequately captured the complex relationships that individuals have to the nation. We examine how individuals actively process and interpret nationhood in ways that reveal ambivalence, confusion and contradictory emotions towards the nation. Such individual variation is not neatly captured by official, elite, public or institutional presentations of the nation. We argue for further research on everyday understandings of nationhood and on ordinary people's views on national pride and national identity.     

Informality Materialised: Long‐term Temporariness as a Mode of Informal Urbanism

This paper establishes an important link between the architectural strategies and long‐term sustenance of “ordinary” informal spaces in the planned modernist city of Islamabad. By focusing on the modalities of street hawking in Islamabad, this paper demonstrates that the architecture of ordinary informality follows an aesthetic and materiality of temporariness, and invokes design criteria based on the rituals of daily assembly and disassembly, and shared customs involving “temporary” claims to immediate public space. The paper uses the concept of “long‐term temporariness” to argue that the sustained existence of street hawking depends upon the routine maintenance of the relationship between its temporality and materiality, evident in both the everyday spatial practices and official procedures concerning informal street commerce. The paper thus situates street hawking within the realms of both formal and informal processes, and highlights the role of provisionality in urban transformations in the global South.     

The Changing Face of Heritage at Canada’s National Historic Sites

In order for all citizens to fully belong to a nation or a community, they must have membership in that society’s institutions, systems and social relations on both the formal and everyday levels. Heritage sites are public institutions of formal cultural presentation and informal social encounters where society demonstrates community membership. But in a country such as Canada where global economics and popular culture combine with an unprecedented influx of immigrants, how a community imagines itself and articulates its heritage is changing radically. Canada’s National Historic Sites (NHS) is among the important public institutions devoted to both the presentation of heritage and demonstration of citizen membership. This paper describes how this institution is adapting to changes in imaginings about citizenship, on both the formal and informal level. It looks at how NHS is expanding the involvement of all citizens in the why, what, how and to whom of heritage presentation, evolving its practices to include ethic minorities in its imaginings of Canadianness. Using as an example a new NHS exhibit and designations related to the Underground Railroad and African‐Canadians, the paper considers how historic sites, as formal instruments of the state, can be re‐tuned as informal sites of discourse and negotiation about identity, citizenship and belonging.     

Performing Hospitality in Moldova: Ambiguous,Alternative, and Undeveloped Models of National Identity

This paper examines performances of hospitality in everyday life to explore the lived experience of “being Moldovan”. National identity in Moldova can only be understood by reference to the peculiarities of history—to the presence of a neighbouring kin-state (Romania), a multiethnic population, Soviet ideology, and successive efforts at nation-building. The instabilities, contradictions, and ambiguities of national identity are also experienced and interpreted, as they are regularly performed in informal and formal settings. The “hospitality” of Moldovans—performed daily through linguistic code-switching, in practices of buying and selling, in life-cycle celebrations such as weddings, and in the official greeting and welcoming of dignitaries and visiting delegations by folk-costumed performers—is, paradoxically, an important site of this experience of ambiguity. The same set of practices both renders its performers “masters of their own houses”, while at the same time revealing the limits of the metaphor.