Critical Geographies of Education Beyond “Value”: Moral Sentiments,Caring, and a Politics for Acting Differently

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Singapore between 2013 and 2014, this article discusses the ways in which students mobilise different moral and ethical values to perform informal care at a private educational institute. The task is to advance a critical analysis of how students can “act differently” from the dominant strategic and calculative image of a neoliberal actor as portrayed in broader literature. Specifically, I suggest more attention needs to be given to love and care as the basis for radical practices in everyday life. I discuss the themes of deconstructive empathy, friendship solidarities, and intergenerational love to demonstrate how caring practices can produce more‐than‐capitalist subjectivities in the neoliberalising spaces of higher education. The article adds theoretical and empirical flesh to ongoing efforts in exploring “alternative” experiences of neoliberalising education through care, love, and intimacy.     

Gender,age and the politicisation of space during the time of political violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

This article examines the way in which the modality of the political violence between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front politicised space in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The article demonstrates how place is actively produced through everyday practices. It shows how the spatiality of the violence shifted – from the body to multiple sites of everyday life such as the school and the household and finally to the neighbourhood. Residents were drawn into the violence differentially on the basis of their gender and age, rather than political beliefs and affiliations. Places were politicised in ways that linked their meaning to the political identity of those found in that space. By presenting a spatialised analysis of the political violence, and illustrating how the production of place articulated with the co-production of political identities, this article makes a novel contribution to the existing literature on political violence in KwaZulu-Natal.     

Das andere Zuhause

Cities are increasingly addressing high-skilled migrants. Our contribution examines the factors that shape how this group relates to places and why cities provide different conditions for this. We draw on empirical data from an explorative case study with highly qualified migrants in the university city of Münster. First, we look at the place ties at the new place of residence and thereby focus on their local social networks and their sense of belonging. Second, we turn to the place-specific characteristics, in particular the role of “connections” and “urban opportunity structures”. Based on our findings we discuss how urban policy-making may influence the place attachment of this desired group.     

Resisting and Reconciling Big Wind: Middle Landscape Politics in the New American West

Abstract: While critical geographers have addressed how place politics impacts rural landscapes, less attention has been paid to the particular ways in which rural landscape identities are being impacted by the new energy economy. The nascent US wind energy opposition movement is evidence of broad, organized resistance to the landscape impacts associated with the re‐sculpting of rural energy geographies. Drawing from cultural landscape and place theory, this article examines the shifting terrain of wind opposition in the “New American West”. The article argues that wind energy opposition is fundamentally about who speaks for and negotiates conflicting social commitments to technology, economic values and an imagined American pastoral identity. By examining a case study of wind development in Nevada, this article considers how renewable energy development can constructively acknowledge the important role the “middle landscape” continues to play in American constructions of rural space.     

TOWARDS A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF PLACE ATTRACTIVENESS: A MIGRATION PERSPECTIVE

The attractiveness of places is currently gaining a high policy salience in policymakers' efforts to draw mobile capital. Yet, while there are a growing number of empirical studies considering the migration of people and the attractiveness of places, there is an acute lack of conceptual understanding of the phenomena that hamper discussions between researchers and policymakers. This article suggests a conceptual framework whereby place attractiveness can be better understood from a migration perspective. The empirical material for this article mainly draws upon interviews that were carried out with migrants who seem to have considered at least one alternative in their search for a suitable destination. The conceptual framework, which comprises the main result of the article, illustrates that needs, demands and preferences are central and empirically identifiable components for properly appreciating place attractiveness in a migration context. It is argued that the attractiveness of places increases with the successive fulfilment of these factors; but on the other hand, the more factors a migrant seeks to fulfil in his or her destination selection, the fewer the choice possibilities. The article moreover shows how a life-course perspective needs to be integrated in such analyses since not only do migrants' needs, demands and preferences depend upon their current life-course phase situation, their resources and constraints are also likely to correlate with the life-course. The conceptual framework can be used to ease understanding between researchers and policymakers in issues related to place attractiveness and the migration of relatively affluent migrants with choice opportunities.     

Sounding “brown”: Everyday aural discrimination and othering

Recent political geographic scholarship has revisited the relevance of banal, everyday nationalism in the context of identity. This article contributes to that literature by focusing more specifically on the role of sound – accent and language – in everyday, banal “othering” and discrimination driven by heightened nationalism. Examining sound, both how it is perceived and experienced, lends insights into how nationalism and exclusion play out in everyday life. Contextualizing and nuancing broader issues of “othering” and discrimination through sound demonstrates that exclusion is not always visual or overt. Based on three years of fieldwork and interviews with Indian Tamils living in the United States, this research examines the banality of nationalism in aural encounters. First, it highlights subtle othering and microaggressions as well as their physical, emotional, and psychological effects. Second, it demonstrates how language and accent can be used to “flag” otherness in ordinary daily interactions and spaces. Third, it shows how attention to aural ‘flagging’ reveals nuance of complex identities often binarized during climates of heightened nationalism. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the impacts of nationalism are embedded in people's daily lives and identities through subtle discriminatory aural encounters.     

PRODUCING GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE THROUGH VISUAL METHODS

The tradition of using qualitative interviews in the study of everyday life, place and identity in geography, housing studies and related disciplines is a long and sound one. Recently there has been increasing interest in using visual methods as part of qualitative methodological approaches. Through our own empirical work, this article explores one position in visual methodology, which suggests visual methods as a way of in a sense getting closer to the lived life. Drawing inspiration from qualitative methodology and performative perspectives in geography, this article argues that this position overlooks the ways in which the visual – here photography – can also be seen as performed. Based on the authors' experiences with visual methods in fieldwork in housing areas in greater Copenhagen, and using both informants' and researchers' photographic work, the article shows how a performative perspective on photography can be used in qualitative research in geography.     

“It was amazing to see our projects come to life!” Developing affective learning during geography fieldwork through tropophilia

This research, conducted with groups of undergraduate students before and after a European fieldwork exercise, critically examines the pedagogic value of fieldwork and its ability to provide students with transferable skills. This is achieved using Anderson and Erskine’s lens of tropophilia – the aesthetic connection between people and place – to explore the influence of “being” in the field upon affective learning. In doing so, this research suggests (1) that encouraging students to recognize how their own affective skills may influence the types of knowledge(s) that are produced on fieldtrips and (2) that people-place connections have the ability to inspire students to become more self-reflexive about their position(s) as learners.     

Memory Mapping: Affect,Place, and Testimony in El Lugar Más Pequeño (2011)

This article examines the Salvadoran documentary El Lugar Más Pequeño (The Tiniest Place, 2011) and argues that the film gives new insight into the complicated spaces and practices of memory post-transition and post-conflict through a process I call ‘memory mapping,’ which I define as the aesthetic process of representing the affective, polyvocal, layered relationship between past, present, and place as experienced by individuals and the communities in which they live. Engaging primarily with affect and memory theory, I contend that the film maps post-conflict memory in two specific ways: first, through testimony, and second, through an exploration of the relationship between memory and place. Ultimately, I argue that memory mapping sheds new light on how the aftermath of conflict – the physical, but also the emotional ruination caused by violence – is negotiated in the everyday of human life.     

Isaiah 1,4–9, Isaiah,and the events of 701 BCE in Judah

Abstract

The title of this paper points to the relationship between the Israelite cult as cultural performance and current trends in modern interpretation of the Psalms. The first part includes a review of the wellknown “spiritualisation” of cultic language which is compared to a new approach that describes this phenomenon as a “transformation” of cultic patterns. The second part intents to demonstrate how such transformations could have worked. The “liturgical” text of Ps 24 may serve as an eloquent example of this. Here, a fragment from the ancient temple cult is quoted in order to demonstrate the close connection between the secrets of the inner temple and everyday life. Ps 24 now appears to be an erudite text used for educational purposes.     

El padre transgresor: Crisis familiar y crisis social en el teatro popular bonaerense, 1896–1934

This article analyzes how five exemplary works of Argentine popular theater (1896–1934) construct unconventional readings of a perceived social crisis during Argentina's insertion into the global capitalist market. While dominant discourses focused on women's “errant” sexuality as the source of social demise, these works place the father figure —metaphor for social leadership— at the center of the debate to explore the chain of factors that hinder these fathers from fulfilling their “proper” gender roles, which ultimately causes the so-called social crisis. This focus on the paternal figure allows these plays to posit that social crisis stemmed from a destructive capitalistic logic based on the circulation of money, fraud, competition, and theft rather than from “errant” women. The recovery of these unconventional perspectives contributes to a more complex understanding of discourses on gender in the period, as well as of the relationship between discourses on everyday life and modernization.     

Sport in the “city of culture”

This article examines the emerging intrusion of sport into the realm of cultural policy in tandem with an increased emphasis on culture in civic planning programs. The empirical focus of the article is on the location of sport within recent campaigns by British regional cities to win the title of European City of Culture, to be conferred in 2008. The particular case study considered is the unsuccessful joint bid put forward by Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne and Gateshead. The article looks at how the economic revival of Newcastle has been driven by cultural regeneration, and at how sport has assumed a prominent place within the cultural symbolism and iconography of the city. Consideration is given to the policy background and implications; in particular, the developing links between sport policy and cultural policy and sport considered in relation to the “creative industries” and the arts as more traditionally perceived. The article offers critical reflection upon the role of sport within the desired cultural democracy of the planners and promoters of the “city of culture”.     

Experiencing virtual places: insights on the geographies of sim racing

Virtual spaces have emerged as everyday life spaces in contemporary societies. Very quickly, they have gained a cultural role in the daily life of their users, as these new territories gain their own communities, ideologies, and spatializations. However, little is known about how place is experienced in these different realms. This study seeks to understand place experience in virtual spaces, taking the sim racing virtual spaces as a case study and endeavoring to build a bridge between theory and empirics. This study uses ethnographic methods, which included a year-long participant observation period and a set of 20 in-depth interviews with users, in order to understand their narratives of the virtual geographies of two sim racing videogames: Gran Turismo and rFactor. The results of the study show that spirit of place, place ballets, and sense of place exist just as well among users of virtual spaces—despite the particularities of these new territories and their remaining tensions.     

Processional walking: Theorising the ‘place’ of movement in notions of dwelling

This article rethinks dwelling as an active and emergent process through which (re)connections to place are valorised by humans collectively walking with each other in a recursive manner. We revisit Heidegger's notion of dwelling, often criticised for perpetuating enclosure and stasis, by revealing the interconnections between dwelling and movement. Drawing on a two‐century old religious procession—the Manchester and Salford Whit Walks—as an empirical example, our interpretive analysis is centred around three themes. First, we demonstrate how dwelling becomes embodied in performative and collective movement. Second, we examine how dwelling in this context is reinforced through repetition and iteration of that movement. Third, we show how such movement is reliant on repair and maintenance work, which facilitates the (re)emergence of dwelling. We contribute, therefore, empirical insights into how dwelling emerges from a movement through place which, in turn, cements a being in place. Finally, this article has important implications for thinking about how the movement of citizens through processional forms of walking can be a powerful tool for underpinning feelings of dwelling and related concepts of sense of place and civic pride.     

New‐Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint,Brooklyn

In response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality of gentrification‐induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinking the concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact of new‐build gentrification on the everyday place‐making abilities of Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of the agency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenants who struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre's spatial triad and Blomley's work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everyday displacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition, appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.     

“Where is the border?” Villagers,environmental consultants and the ‘work’ of the Thai–Burma border

This article examines how Thai–Burma border residents are enrolled and engaged in remaking the political border through their knowledge practices and performances, or their own “borderwork”. Border residents do not perform this work alone, but in connection with other actors including environmental consultants. In order to highlight this co-production of the political border, I bring together border studies scholarship that see borders as process and performance with work in science studies that has highlighted the way that knowledge and order are co-produced. The importance of this approach is that it facilitates an understanding of the multifaceted and contradictory work to remake the border by multiple actors, a way to study “borders from the bottom up” that illustrates how the border is continually enacted. While this article puts forth the notion that the border represents an important site and process of struggle and negotiation in which marginalized communities invest, it also questions the assumption that because residents are engaged in remaking the border, the border is necessarily more ‘democratic’. The discussion and empirical data presented in this article also speak to broader debates in political geography about how borders are remade through practice and performance.     

The circulatory panopticon: Real names,rail infrastructure and Foucault's realist turn

This article examines the contemporary Chinese rail system as a circulatory panopticon: an apparatus that uses the “natural” movements of the population to render them legible and safe. The panoptic effect of rail space has emerged only recently. The Chinese state's introduction of the “real-name system” has made a state-legible identity an inextricable part of everyday life, and recent transformations in ticketing and station entry have placed it at the center of mobility practices as well. Synthesizing Foucault's apparatus of security with Karen Barad's realist conception of the apparatus, this article examines how the more-than-human elements of the rail system realize a panoptic assemblage out of the movements of passengers. Based on participant observation and interview data, this article examines three key elements of the rail system: the national identity card, the ticket, and the station entrance. Drawing on Barad's account of diffraction, I analyze how the particular material characteristics of these things both function to realize the circulatory panopticon and also to introduce novel discontinuities and fractures. This paper makes two contributions. First, it argues for a greater attention to the question of reality in Foucault's thinking: just as the art of government increasingly recognizes and calibrates itself against ‘reality,’ Foucault's analysis of governmentality becomes increasingly realist. Second, it shows how infrastructure is simultaneously a font of state power and a source of problems for the state—a contradiction deeply relevant in China today.     

Taking Space: Moments of Rupture and Everyday Life in Occupy London

Taking space has been a common feature of recent social movements worldwide, and was a defining act of the Occupy movement. This article examines the taking of two spaces by Occupy London in October 2011, and argues that there was a tension between taking space as a moment of rupture, lived space‐times of intensity that provide an opening to new possibilities, and everyday life, the routines and rhythms through which social life is reproduced. My argument builds on the work of Lefebvre, bringing together his conceptualisation of “moments” and everyday life, and his radical theory of the production of space. I argue that examining the tensions over taking space provides a useful angle to explore some of the challenges faced by the Occupy movement, such as an unequal division of labour on camp, and may help in negotiating them.     

Modernity and life politics: conceptualizing the biodiversity crisis

The article examines the implicit boundary narratives of both modernization theory and of its counter-discourses (neo-Malthusianism) and successors (globalism and reflexive modernization). Among the successors, special attention is given to the paradigm of reflexive modernization and its empirical corollary, the hypothesis of an emerging global agenda of “life politics”. After offering a matrix of basic theoretical responses to modernization theory, the paper locates the biodiversity crisis within current controversies about how to overcome the flaws of traditional modernization theory. It is suggested to trace the development of this policy area back to the early twentieth century and to reread it in the light of different societal and theoretical approaches toward modernization. In conclusion, it is argued that in order to enhance our analytical capabilities, the concept of life politics needs some critical injection from literatures more sensitive to notions such as spatiality, locatedness and the lived contexts of social groups.