And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying,death and mourning

A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh.     

Takeaway food,waste, and their geographies in workplaces

This article draws on empirical research to develop an understanding of the social and cultural geography of food and its waste in the workplace. Our aim is to contribute to the wider body of literature on everyday geographies of waste and wasting in relation to food, paying attention to the complex trajectories of the disposal of the waste produced by food consumption beyond the scale of the household. On that basis, the work explores the distinct ways in which the waste produced by takeaway food consumption is managed in workplaces and examines how food consumption and wasting manifest in relation to both workplace contexts and wider sociocultural and material factors in urban China. Such matters are still under‐researched there. Specifically, we identify the different conduits through which food and food packaging become waste in workplaces. Food is transformed into waste soon after it becomes surplus, whereas food packaging becomes waste through two conduits: the conventional way of binning and the alternative way of reusing.     

Embodied geographies of kangaroo meat

A growing body of work in social and cultural geography is concerned with examining food to explore ethical, civic and social concerns. I build on the critiques by engaging with the visceral. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn, I argue that eating reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to attend to visceralities of difference as understood within the context of power geometries that shape and reshape food politics. This analysis is promoted by the Australian Commonwealth Government's endorsement of suggestions by environmental scientists that households' meals should substitute kangaroo for farmed livestock to lower greenhouse gas emissions. I investigate appetites for kangaroo as discussed while plating-up, and sometimes digested, by white bodies in kitchens and dining rooms within thirty households in Wollongong, New South Wales. To explain where kangaroo is rendered inedible, or edible, I use the recognition that the visceral realm—narrated through the aromas, tastes and touch—offers insights to place, subjectivity, embodied skills and food politics.     

A visceral approach: cooking 'at home' with migrant women in Hamilton, New Zealand

People's visceral experiences of food – the tastes, textures and aromas – can tell us a great deal about their emotional and affective relations with place. Questions of bodies and embodiment are increasingly becoming a focus for geographers and migration scholars. In this article we extend some of this work by examining how the visceral can shape (and be shaped by) a range of socio-political relations. We concentrate on food and eating as a central political issue and illustrate how a visceral approach can push understandings of migrants' experiences. We focus on a group of 11 migrant women from South Africa, Singapore, Korea, Iraq, Thailand, Hong Kong, Somalia, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and India in their 'new home' in Hamilton, New Zealand. Each of the women prepared and cooked for us a dish that was significant to them in some way. These migrant women are comfortable in their domestic spaces and largely experience cooking not as a burden but as an important way of staying viscerally connected with their 'old home'. Creating a domestic space where the body feels 'at home' can help resituate and reconstitute the diasporic subject. This kind of visceral approach is useful for informing the development of social policy.     

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

A Visceral Politics of Sound

Questions of bodies and embodiment are a critical focus for geographers. In this paper we advance discussion of the mobilisation of bodies that investigates the interconnections between the visceral and discursive, through paying attention to the affordances of sound. We draw on our ethnographic research of the Climate Camp parade held during October 2009 in Helensburgh, New South Wales, Australia. Using feminist theory and visceral understandings of socio‐political life, we explore sounds to illustrate how people's beliefs about climate change are mobilised at this parade. We argue that visceral experiences of the rhythmic affordances of sounds—flow, pulse and beat—provide us insights as to how people are mobilised into action. Our results explore bodily judgements of sounds to illustrate how a visceral approach can help to mobilise bodies in ways that can both upset, and reproduce, particular beliefs, subjects and places.     

The post-Islamist problematic: questions of religion and difference in everyday life

The term post-Islamism has been broadly applied to suggest that we are witnessing a new phase of Islamist politics in which the goal is not to make the state Islamic but to change the lived experiences of Islam. Whether post-Islamism applies to the Turkish case has been a matter of much debate. We approach post-Islamism in Turkey using a feminist geographic analytic that shifts our focus from formal politics to the embodied and the everyday. Drawing upon eight focus groups with men and women in Istanbul in 2013 and 2014, we analyze discussions of education reform, the possibility of religious politics and religious difference to demonstrate how the premises of post-Islamism depend upon the (often unsuccessful) papering over of multiplicity. We argue that everyday, embodied solutions to the questions of post-Islamism often undermine the very categories (state, society, religion and secularism) upon which the post-Islamic problematic is based.     

Creative geographies of ceramic artists: knowledges and experiences of landscape,practices of art and skill

This paper argues for a conception of art as an embodied and creative material practice. It draws on research conducted with seven professional ceramic artists who deal with landscape in their work to explore their processes of art-making through interview and (filmed) observation. It demonstrates the distributed range of embodied and relational more-than-artistic practices which inform how landscape is encountered, known and ultimately represented. It argues that artists’ self-expression in art is based upon material, social and political knowledges which interweave in artists’ lives. By studying ceramicists’ making this paper demonstrates both the non-conscious skill and the conscious technical knowledge needed to make art. It shows chance to have a triple role in practices of making, as something to work alongside, to work against and to draw on as a creative resource. This paper both argues for and demonstrates the value of an approach to art-making that frames it as a complex of both conscious, socio-cultural, technical knowledges and non-conscious skills which together (in)form works of (ceramic) art.     

Home sounds: experiential practices and performativities of hearing and listening

We argue that a closer attention to the everyday visceral experiences of hearing and listening offers new insights into geographies of home and practices of sustainability. We suggest that this approach is significant to understanding how sound helps to assemble and reassemble the relationships that comprise home. We concentrate on a group of 10 amenity-led migrants in their ‘new coastal home’ in Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia. Each participant recorded a sound diary composed of their everyday sounds. Our interpretation explores the visceral connections in the processes of making bodies feel ‘at home’. First, we discuss how the rhythmic affordances of both human and non-human sounds help configure and reconfigure the spatiality and temporality of home. Second, our interpretation explores how sound is bound up with sustainability politics of homemaking. We investigate experiential practices and performativities of listening and hearing that may help constitute and reconstitute ‘a’ subject. This approach extends current thinking that encourages engagement with the corporeal, affective and emotional dimensions of home.     

‘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.     

一“鲜”难求？地方流动对可持续饮食系统的影响机制

可持续饮食系统的研究愈发受人重视，当前从关系主义视角的研究，偏重于与食物前向关联的“身体”，忽视了与食物后向关联的“地方”。本文选择福建省罗源县为案例研究地，分析了20世纪90年代至今罗源饮食地理的变化情况，旨在探究地方流动对地方饮食系统的影响机制。研究发现，罗源从“海味、清鲜、笋糟、非标准”的闽菜系主导的地方饮食特征变为多元菜系并存的标准化饮食特点，原来日常生活中常见的“新鲜”变得一“鲜”难求。该变化是由工业化、城镇化造成的“去地化”结构性因素与乡贤回家投资、三峡移民饮食跨地方迁移等“再地化”因素共同影响形成的。本文提出地方饮食系统的可持续性取决于个体的差异化感知，不能用生产—消费饮食系统的可持续性来替代个体对“可持续”的具身感知认同。     

Eating Hawai'i: local foods and place-making in Hawai'i Regional Cuisine

In this paper, we look at what it means to ‘eat Hawai'i’ and examine how Hawai'i Regional Cuisine (HRC) imagines, produces, and consumes place through particular constructions of local foods. The term ‘local’ attaches to foods as a marker of numerous positive attributes such as seasonal, sustainable, and community-based. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic research on Hawai'i Island, we examine spatial and discursive constructions of local and how this particular cuisine places itself in local food networks while simultaneously using place to localize itself within the Island's food networks. Using a case study approach to carefully contextualize localness, we show how Merriman's Restaurant and HRC complicate notions of alternative and local food systems in its discursive and material production and reproduction of Local food and locally grown food.     

The body eating its food politics: reflections on relationalities and embodied ways of knowing

This Viewpoint article builds on feminist geography research methods, scholarship of embodiment, and more-than-human geographies to challenge us to think about how relationalities are reconfigured through attention to the human eater’s body. Drawing on an example from ethnographic research, the author problematizes how an embodied act of eating other non-human bodies raises concerns for how we negotiate the complicated sets of ethical relations that we each confront on a daily basis. In particular, this example is used to describe the ethical dilemmas researchers encounter when the intellect conflicts or collides with the corporeal. Rather than reinstate the mind–body dualism that feminists have long argued against, this article grapples with the complicated and complex negotiations embodied knowledge contributes to academic knowledge production. Embodied knowledge is not straightforward, yet should be acknowledged in our academic scholarship and debated about its potential for epistemological and ontological openings in our areas of research.     

旅游食物浪费研究评述及展望

旅游食物浪费是我国食物浪费问题的重灾区,其根源在于旅游活动特有的非日常和反结构特征。但目前我国旅游食物研究大多仍关注资源开发和消费促进,浪费研究则处于描述性的起步阶段。本文对国内外旅游食物浪费相关文献进行评述,分析了旅游食物浪费研究的总体特征、概念基础与内容,指出国内研究主要集中在消费端的测量和行为分析;从旅游食物体验的独特性质出发,基于消费文化与旅游体验视角对旅游食物浪费进行溯源;梳理了有助于解决旅游食物浪费问题的理论,包括消费文化视角下从资源消耗型食物消费到环境综合消费、综合价值提升以减少资源成本、基于全价值链参与提升认知和情感以减少浪费;也包括旅游体验视角下针对不同食物体验性质探索节约路径、创造多维度体验以减少资源消耗、以食物共享和慢食为代表的可持续理念的运用等;最终,文章对解决旅游食物浪费问题的未来研究提出了参考框架,从关注点、理念、对象和领域出发,提出议题和对应方法,为兼顾目的地食物价值增值和减少粮食资源消耗提供理论参照。     

What is Waste that We Should Account for it? A Look Inside Queensland's Ecological Rucksack

While most Australians are conscious of the amount of waste that they place in garbage bins, relatively few would be aware of the waste that is generated in the course of producing the goods and services that they consume. This ‘embodied waste’ makes up a large part of the ‘ecological rucksack’ of those goods and services. This study develops a waste account for Queensland, using the ecological rucksack framework to illustrate patterns of waste production in the Australian economy. It classifies wastes both by type and broad sector of production. The study finds that the Queensland economy generated more than four billion tonnes of waste during the 2006–2007 financial year. The largest waste streams are produced at the resource extraction and distribution stages, and are predominantly materials that are disposed of without being used or are lost through inefficient use. The majority of the waste is produced upstream of the point of consumption and a large part is associated with materials produced for export.     

Geographies of everyday nationhood: experiencing multiculturalism in Melbourne

In this article, we explore the geographies of nationhood manifest in everyday life, arguing that our quotidian surroundings continually reproduce the nation as we engage with them. We show that nationhood is obvious and ubiquitous in the lives of people when they are asked to attune to it, and that even when not in the forefront of attention, it partly informs how we make sense of our daily experiences. This is not to claim that nationhood is fully formed or coherent, a separate substratum waiting to be tapped into or closely defined by an identifiable symbolic repertoire, if only we pay attention. Instead, we demonstrate that nationhood is emergent in everyday life, is reproduced continuously and intimately entangled with the sensations, routines, material environments, public encounters, everyday competencies, memories, aspirations and a range of other affective and embodied qualities that comprise how we understand and inhabit our worlds. This mundane experience involves shifting between reflexive and unreflexive states, and the method we deploy ‐ photo‐elicitation ‐ is devised to draw out these oscillations and heighten the attunement of participants to the usually unreflexively apprehended taken‐for‐granted national qualities of everyday space. Here, we aim to empirically foreground the neglected spatial dimensions that characterize the experience of banal nationalism.     

Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

Mapping the subaquatic animals in the Aquatocene: Offshore wind power,the materialities of the sea and animal soundscapes

This paper examines the controversy around marine animal management in Taiwan Strait, where the sea has been territorialized by offshore wind power developers. Concerns have been focused on the impacts of pile-driving noise on the Taiwanese white dolphin which is on the IUCN list of extremely endangered species. To deal with the problem, both state and developers have been involved in volumetric practices which attempt to render the marine mammals knowable, and in turn, governable. While recent work on volumetric thinking has revealed that power is exercised through volume, we contend that insufficient attention has been given to those lively ‘non-human’ subjects living in the volumetric spaces. Inspired by recent scholarship on animal atmospheres and the wet ontologies, we argue that marine animals are sentient beings that cannot be known, or mapped, by the state-corporate volumetric practices which are mainly based on scientific experiments, conducted in isolated social contexts. To illustrate this, we draw on assemblage thinking and develop the idea of marine animal soundscapes. We suggest that marine animal soundscapes exist only through the embodied experience of a sensory, marine animal body, which is able to affect, and learn to be affected by, others, through non-linguistic ‘signs’, such as sound. We maintain that animal soundscapes are shaped by social, ecological and material circumstances, of which, the materialities of the sea, such as its liquidity, rapidity and fluidity, are of great importance. With an emphasis on the subaquatic animal soundscapes, our approach intends to extend social relationality to non-humans and calls for an ontology, distinct from the one with which existing volumetric analysts work.