Gendered geographies of genetic variation: sex,power and mobility in human population genetics

This article explores the ways in which geographies of human genetic variation are increasingly differentiated in terms of gender, and the ideas of reproduction, sex, power and mobility that underpin their interpretation. It thus seeks to extend recent work on the ways in which the ideas of race and relatedness are being shaped by recent accounts of human genetic variation and evolutionary history within human population genetics by exploring the gendered and sexual imaginaries of this field. At the same time, it seeks to extend feminist geographical work on social reproduction by attending to the figuring of reproduction itself. The article focuses on accounts of the geographies of Y-chromosome variation and the differences between the geographies of Y-chromosome variation and mitochondrial variation, and explores the degree to which this work is underpinned by, and potentially reinforces, particular accounts of gender, sex and the reproductive strategies of women and men. More specifically, I argue that despite some differences between the perspectives of those involved, much of this work deploys a model of male sexual competition that is at the heart of claims about the universal and determined fundamentals of reproduction, and indeed all social life, within evolutionary psychology. Gendered geographies of human genetic variation are being used as evidence for hitherto asserted but unproven claims about human nature. This article is a critical feminist engagement with the renaturalisations of culture within this strand of human population genetics.     

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

Abstract

As part of GPC’s 25-year anniversary celebrations, this article explores possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers. Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published in the period from around 2000 onwards and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home, from landscapes and buildings to personal possessions like clothes and letters. Doing so is a deliberate act intended both to demonstrate the liveliness of feminist historical geographies broadly conceived and to counter hierarchical readings of space, society and history with their inherent danger of privileging the public over the private, and the exceptional over the everyday and mundane.     

Modernity and Matrifocality: The Feminization of Kinship?

The extensive analytical focus on how gender relations in working lives, employment, education, political engagement and public life change under modernity needs extension into a consideration of the ways in which kinship and relatedness have also been changing. This article argues that relatedness under modernity tends towards matrifocality. This is explored through looking at broad patterns of social change in kinship practices across a range of societies experiencing transitions towards modernities over the past fifty years, and at how state and NGO development and social protection programmes contribute to this matrifocal turn.     

Bioarchaeology and Kinship: Integrating Theory,Social Relatedness,and Biology in Ancient Family Research

Theoretical developments in sociocultural anthropology have transformed the study of kinship. Here, we review these theoretical developments, consider their influence on bioarchaeological kinship research, and propose an alternative framework for studying relatedness in antiquity. We find that broader, more flexible conceptions of relatedness have grown increasingly prevalent in 21st-century bioarchaeology, but kinship research largely continues to emphasize methodological improvement and identification of biological kin in archaeological contexts. By approaching kinship as a multiscalar dimension of social identity, bioarchaeologists can leverage complex conceptions of relatedness with diverse types of data to gain nuanced perspectives on family-based social organization in the past.     

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.     

Reframing autonomy in political geography: A feminist geopolitics of autonomous resistance

Autonomy is often universally defined and undertheorized, making invisible ways of knowing and understanding autonomy that are embodied and practiced. Alternate theorizations have drawn on anti-capitalist and alter-globalization movements and discourses to provide accounts of struggles for autonomy as they relate to self-determination, identity politics, and oppositional action, however, in many cases these accounts are still grounded in universal understandings. In this paper I use a feminist geopolitical perspective to re-read autonomy for difference within, alongside and outside of contemporary political geographies of autonomy. Empirical work in self-declared autonomous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, demonstrates that current political geographies of autonomy do not sufficiently explain the ongoing struggle for indigenous farmers in the highlands. In the article, I examine how autonomy is understood and practiced by subsistence corn and coffee farmers who have declared themselves autonomous and in resistance. I argue that in the case of farmers in resistance, autonomy is not just a political act, but also an embodied practice deployed through agricultural production and consumption. A feminist geopolitics assists with reframing autonomy and identifying different ways that it is understood and practiced. In examining the practices that farmers view as contributing to autonomy, different understandings and ways of knowing autonomy emerge.     

Participatory and community‐based research,Indigenous geographies,and the spaces of friendship: A critical engagement

Geographic engagement with Indigenous peoples remains inextricably linked to colonialism. Consequently, studying Indigenous geographies is fraught with ethical and political dilemmas. Participatory and community‐based research methods have recently been offered as one solution to address concerns about the politics of gathering, framing, producing, disseminating, and controlling knowledge about Indigenous peoples. In this article, we critically engage with the emergence of participatory and community‐based research methods as “best practice” for undertaking research into Indigenous geographies. We articulate four concerns with this form of research: a) dissent may be stifled by non‐Indigenous researchers’ investments in being “good”; b) claims to overcome difference and distance may actually retrench colonial research relations; c) the framing of particular methods as “best practices” risks closing down necessary and ongoing critique; and d) institutional pressures work against the development and maintenance of meaningful, accountable, and non‐extractive relations with Indigenous communities. We then contemplate the spatiality of the critique itself. We consider the ways in which our longstanding friendship, as researchers invested at multiple scales with Indigenous geographies and identities, provides its own distinct space of practice within which to confront the political and ethical challenges posed by research with/about/upon Indigenous geographies and peoples. While not arriving at any concrete template for undertaking research about Indigenous geographies, we suggest that certain friendships, established and situated outside research relationships, may be productive spaces within and through which research methods may be decolonized.     

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

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

Carrying the Cross,Caring for Kin: The Everyday Life of Charismatic Christianity in Remote Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT In this paper, I address the important yet under‐examined role of charismatic Protestant Christianity in the reconfiguring of personhood and social relations in the remote Yolngu settlement of Galiwin'ku. I focus in particular on the ways in which this form of Christianity, locally articulated, brings together indigenous concepts of personhood with those introduced by the market, the state, and evangelism to produce what I refer to as Christian individuality and Christian relatedness. These dialectical tendencies in postcolonial settlement life call attention to the ways Yolngu converts use their Christian practices both to continue kin‐based moralities in the present and to engage (if selectively) modern individualism. This paper addresses post‐colonial conditions where demands of state institutions and modern governance interact with changing ideas of personhood and sociality. It contributes to the growing anthropological literature on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.     

Marginalia of a revolution: naming popular ethnography through William W. Bunge's Fitzgerald

Having recently been writing about the geographies of survival, here in this brief essay I extrapolate a methodological and ethico-political sensibility from the scattered fragments of my personal interactions with foundational radical geographer William W. Bunge. This essay is intended to reconcile the marginalization that Bunge experienced, and experiences today, within geography, with the methodological approach he pioneered, even as he is often not recognized for doing so. An exploration through a pile of notes, electronic voice files, and faxes helped me to think through lived forms of intellectual marginalia via the life and methods of William Bunge and possibilities that exist for recovering his method of ‘popular ethnography’.     

Embodying violence: critical geographies of gender,race, and culture

The papers in this themed section collectively explore the intertwined geographies of corporeality and violence; to explore the ways in which narrow representations of race and culture are imbricated in the mis/understanding of gender based violence. This introductory essay draws out linkages across these papers, and to several themes in feminist geography. Combined, the four papers in the themed section offer new pathways for feminist geographers to consider. The authors connect the intimate and the global, the personal and the geopolitical, and offer critical insights into how feminist geographers might unpack entangled inequalities that give rise to distinct experiences of violence. Through their disparate studies, the authors also destabilize the assumptions mapped onto gendered bodies, particularly those that rely on racist, sexist, and classist representations of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ to describe gendered vulnerability. Subsequently, their analyses reveal how these assumptions simultaneously work to erase or ignore structural inequalities of capitalism or the state, which frame, contribute to and perpetuate violence against vulnerable bodies and geographies. They collectively underscore the epistemological, methodological and ontological possibilities of corporeal geographies particularly when tasked with intellectually analyzing both exceptional and everyday experiences of violence.     

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

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

When things were ‘closing-in’ and ‘rolling up’: the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish war novel The Last September

This paper examines the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. Drawing on Said’s analysis of imaginative geographies as registers of territorial identity, I consider the ways in which Bowen’s text maps Anglo-Irish territorial identity in early twentieth-century Ireland. Reading the text as an authoritative, albeit subjective, record of Anglo-Irish experience in Ireland, I identify four interconnected spaces which constitute the imaginative geography of the novel: the open, empty and isolated country; a wider landscape of resistance and control; a distant but necessary England; and an historical landscape of colonial decline. In conclusion, I outline how the concept of imaginative geographies provides a useful lens through which the often fragmented and conflicted nature of territorial identities, both during and after the colonial period, can be explored.     

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?     

Exploring the vertical: science and sociality in the field among cavers in Venezuela

Recent scholarship on vertical geographies has lead to a critical reexamination of the relationship between space and power. In this paper, I develop a vertical geographies approach in an unexplored context and with a less tested method: that of cave explorers and scientists in the field in Venezuela, from an ethnographic perspective. Ethnographic analysis of exploration in practice, viewed in relation to a multi-dimensional environment and the social dynamics, bodies, and technologies involved in traversing it, illustrates the ways vertical geographies are constructed and experienced. For the Venezuelan Speleological Society, a group dedicated to cave exploration and science since 1967, examining these geographies highlights culturally specific ways the tension between sports and science in speleology play out and how new members are socialized in the field. Specifically, attention to verticality highlights the role that age, masculinist heroics, and other embodied dimensions play in the construction of speleological geographies. More broadly, an ethnographic focus on exploration, with humans probing the earth's sinuous contours, guards against thinking of verticality abstractly—doing so risks simplifying and even misrepresenting multi-dimensional and processual engagements among humans, their technologies, and the environment.     

Feminist and gender geographies in Ireland

Abstract

This report discusses feminist and gender geographies in Ireland. We first focus on the ways in which gender constructs Irish geographies, updating numbers of women in academic positions across Ireland. This shows that women are increasingly in secure positions, but remain under-represented in more senior positions. We then turn to research. We discuss how femininities and women, and masculinities and men, have been addressed in Irish geographies. The focus on femininities and women is crucial given recent strides towards gender and reproductive justice. We then briefly summarise sexualities work. The report concludes by arguing that Ireland not only has vibrant gender/feminist geographical scholarship, it also has significant potential for emerging research and developing new theorisations and research agendas.     

从近20年《历史地理学杂志》的相关文章看西方历史动物地理研究的新动向与启示

东西方历史学、地理学的不同特点及发展方向,使双方历史动物地理的研究也有所不同。通过对2000—2018年英国《历史地理学杂志》所刊历史动物地理相关文章的分析,可以发现近年来西方历史动物地理有议题与方法的多样化、关注与人类密切接触的常见动物、关注中小尺度具体空间下的动物这三个研究动向。在此基础上,相关研究成果不仅填补了历史研究中的一些空白,更对一些历史问题提出了新解,在推动史学研究的同时,也进一步突破了人类中心主义思想。这些研究长处值得我国历史动物地理研究在坚持自身优势的基础上加以借鉴。     

I hear dead people: science,technology and a resonant universe

In recent years the simplistic categorization of Victorian practices and beliefs as either ‘occult’ or ‘scientific’ has been undercut by a series of revisionist analyses that point to an over-arching concern with influence and effect, a concern that was manifest across the sciences and humanities and beyond into popular culture. This paper sets out to further problematize such a distinction via an exploration of twentieth-century research into electronic voice phenomena (EVP), celebrated by its adherents as proof of a spiritual plane of existence beyond the readily observable or audible. In doing so, I focus on the work of one of the most active EVP researchers, Konstantin Raudive, as well as the web pages of the World Instrumental Transcommunication organization, drawing out the pivotal role of technology in the construction of this form of knowledge and some of its associated imaginative geographies. In and of itself, EVP research tells us much about the authoritative status of cause and effect explanatory frameworks, as well as the innocence accorded technological apparatus. An examination of how EVP has been received within academia, however, also reveals how, in our ‘post’-positivist academic environment, efforts are still being made to locate explanation within the human subject, as the charge is made that EVP researchers suffer from a logocentrism or are witness to Freud's doppelgänger. In response to these critiques, I pose the question: can the willingness of EVP researchers to abandon such human-centered certainties resonate with emergent ‘post-human’ ideas on the nature of explanation itself?     

Knowledge nodes and international networks of connection: representations of private philanthropy by elite higher education institutions

This paper investigates the social and cultural geographies of large-scale individual giving in supporting the work of ‘elite’ international universities. With public funding of higher education in general decline, universities in countries of the global North are increasingly seeking funding from alternative sources, including private philanthropy. Although scholarly work has examined corporate and foundational giving to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), there has been little enquiry into how donations from wealthy individuals are represented by universities in their official literature. Publications such as annual reports, giving reports and campaign reports are used strategically by HEIs to project a global image. We examine the official literature of 50 elite HEIs located across the globe, uncovering new discourses into the cross-cultural reach of universities. We draw attention to complex social and cultural relations between HEIs and philanthropists, describing their encounters with reference to debates on personal mobilities, world-making and global and social inequalities. We conclude by highlighting the implications for theoretical work on ‘strategic philanthropy’ and on the transformative nature of HEIs as global centres of knowledge.     

Transnational geographies: Indian immigration to Canada

Immigration from the Asia and Pacific area now accounts for over 50 percent of all Canadian immigration. Therefore, any consideration of Canada's linkages with Asia must address this issue. While much work has debated the impact of immigration in Canada's urban centres, less has been directed to understanding the transnational nature of such population movements, or their specific transnational geographies. In this paper, I consider the geography of immigration from India to Canada. Immigration from India has traditionally been tightly regionalised, with the majority of immigrants originating from the Doaba area of Punjab. Settlement in Canada is also highly concentrated at the provincial, metropolitan and suburban scales. Drawing upon a range of qualitative and quantitative data collected in both India and Canada, I illustrate the geography of immigration from India and highlight some of the processes that contribute to creating transnational networks between these sites .