Counterfactual geographies: worlds that might have been

This paper argues for a renewed consideration of counterfactuals within geography. Drawing upon Doreen Massey's emphasis on notions of ‘possibility’, ‘chance’, ‘undecidability’ and ‘happenstance’, we argue for an engagement with approaches in the humanities that have addressed such issues directly. We review previous uses of counterfactual method in historical geography, particularly as related to cliometrics and the ‘new economic history’ of the 1960s, but argue that a recent upsurge of interest in other disciplines indicates alternative ways that ‘what-if’ experiments might work in the sub-discipline. Recent counterfactual work outside of geography has had a notably spatial cast, often thinking through the nature of alternative worlds, or using counterfactual strategies that are explicitly concerned with space as well as temporal causality. We set out possible agendas for counterfactual work in historical geography. These include: consideration of the historical geographies within existing counterfactual writings and analyses; suggestions for distinctive ways that historical geographers might think and write counterfactually, including experiments in geographies of happenstance, and the exploration of more-than-human possibilities; analyses of the geography of and in counterfactual writing; and study of the political, ethical and emotional demands that counterfactuals make. This discussion and framework provides an extended introduction to this special feature on counterfactual geographies.     

The relational turn in island geographies: bringing together island,sea and ship relations and the case of the Landship

Island studies are a growing field of research. A relational turn has recently taken place in island studies alongside relational turns in associated fields of research, including oceanic and ship geographies (although not always in conversation with them). While all three now challenge the landlocked nature of geography and related disciplines, this paper suggests that islands, oceans and ships should not always be reductively conceptualized in isolation, because they are often bound together through complex and shifting relations and assemblages. After reviewing debates and conceptual gaps in the critical island, sea and ship literatures, the paper makes this argument by reference to an island dance performance and social institution that is not wholly of the island, the ship or sea, called the Barbados’ Landship.     

MATTER(S) OF INTEREST: ARTEFACTS, SPACING AND TIMING

This paper argues that time‐geography can make a contribution to contemporary ‘rematerialized’ geographies, because the interconnections among social processes, human corporeality and inanimate material artefacts within the landscape were among Hägerstrand's central concerns. Time‐geography needs none the less to be extended in several ways to make it more reconcilable with current thinking about materiality in geography. The possibility of combining Hägerstrand's framework with notions from (post) actor‐network approaches is therefore explored. It is suggested that concepts and notions from the latter may contribute to the advancement of the conceptualization of action at a distance and agency in general in time‐geography, as well as the incorporation of the immaterial realm into space—time diagrams. The resulting materially heterogeneous time‐geography is a framework for studying the spacing and timing of different material entities that is sensitive to the role of artefacts and their local connectedness with other material forms. Some of its elements are illustrated briefly through an empirical study of the roles played by a few mundane artefacts in working parents ‘coping with child‐care responsibilities on working days. The case study suggest that these artefacts not only enable goal fulfilment and routinization but also result in further spacing and timing practices, and can introduce uncertainty and novelty to existing orders.     

From the Holiday to the Academy: Implications for physical geography in higher education arising from 'popular' field-based geography in Dorset

The popularity of physical geography at all levels of formal education is declining. This paper argues that a key factor in the decline may be the disparity between geographies studied within formal education and the popular geographies encountered during leisure pursuit. Through the example of the Jurassic Coast Project, an initiative for the interpretation of Dorset's coastal landscape, approaches towards the integration of popular and academic geographies are explored. Drawing explicit links between popular experiences and academic knowledge may benefit physical geography, improving its status amongst public and student audiences, and addressing the concerns that surround its decline within higher education.     

Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography

In this article, the authors assess some of the major trends within anglophonic feminist historical geography appearing in the decade since Rose & Ogborn called for the development of an explicitly feminist approach to the subfield. In examining the 'geography' of feminist historical geographies, three main categories of scholarship are evident: a 'new' historical geography of North America, portions of which are informed by feminist theories and methods; a British school of feminist historical geography with a focus on the discipline of geography, geographical knowledges and colonialism/imperialism; and feminist historical geography interventions in cultural politics of space and place. A diversity of feminist methods and epistemologies appears across the literature. In an attempt to avoid a reading of these trends as better or worse approximations of historical 'progress', the authors conceptualize them as emplaced within a number of specific social and spatial contexts. Most recent work is concerned with the production of gender differences as they are worked through economic, political, cultural and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. The continued need simply to write women into historical narratives and geographies, however, is also evident. The work of feminist historical geography questions and challenges geography's masculinist historical record.     

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.     

Networks, narratives and territory in anthropological race classification: towards a more comprehensive historical geography of Europe's culture

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe's biological races in the 1820s-1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community's shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core-periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe's complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity.     

Suzanne MacKenzie Memorial LectureConceptually unclad: feminist geography and Aboriginal peoples*

This paper argues that feminist geography can provide some useful lessons in an attempt to increase Aboriginal peoples' representation in geography. It asks the question: How can we use the example of feminist geography to think about a geography that is more inclusive of Aboriginal people? The paper focuses on the issues of content in teaching, drawing on examples from urban and social geography, and on methodological challenges, especially the issue of reflexivity. Feminist geographer Suzanne Mackenzie argued that an emerging feminist geography left the discipline ‘conceptually unclad’, challenging scholars to consider new theoretical frameworks and new perspectives. I argue that emphasising the geographies of Aboriginal people also enriches geography, including feminist geography.     

Naturalising the Highlands: geographies of mountain fieldwork in late-Victorian Scotland

Through a detailed examination of two late-Victorian field clubs dedicated to the exploration of alpine botany in the Scottish Highlands, this paper contributes to work on the historical geographies of civic science. By focusing on the scientific and social character of mountain fieldwork it analyses the reciprocal relations between the spaces, practices and science of Highland botanising and wider concerns with sociability, character and civic virtue. In so doing it investigates the transposition of a variety of discursive resources from evolutionism to tourism into the language and practices of botanical science. This focus enables the paper to complicate more general accounts of natural history in the Victorian period and to consider a number of methodological issues relevant to reconstructing the historical geographies of science.     

Fighting for recognition: feminist geography in East-Central Europe

In East-Central Europe (ECE), the evolution of feminist geographies began after the end of state socialism. Aiming to identify individual and shared characteristics, this study outlines the development of gender/feminist geography in East-Central European countries. Providing a brief historical overview, the first part of the article substantiates the arguments that i) the evolution of feminist geography in ECE is linked to the post-socialist transition; although the fall of state socialism has removed the political, social and ideological obstacles that prevented its gaining ground, this approach is still considered to be relatively new; and ii) today, development is hindered mainly by conservative mainstream geography, which seems slower in transforming itself than in some related disciplines which have ‘embraced’ gender studies. The topics, methods and theories of feminist geography that have developed in ECE is significantly influenced by the resistance that advocates of feminist geography have to contend with from representatives of mainstream post-socialist geographies. The second part of the article presents the major characteristics of gender/feminist geography in Europe's post-socialist region, while providing an outline of the various methods used in an attempt to earn positive recognition for gender studies. The concluding section maps some lessons to be learnt on the relationship between the production of feminist geographical knowledge and post-socialism.     

当代西方"新文化地理学"知识谱系引论

当代西方人地理学在“后现代地理学”之后蓬勃发展起“新化地理学”。新化地理学是地理学的“化转向”和“化研究”以及社会科学普遍的“空间转向”之后的学术互动产物。它与地理学以往的知识遗产包括传统的化地理学既有联系也存在从研究议题、概念、认识论和方法论的重大差别,是走向批评范式的人化和理论化的知识体系。本立足丰富庞杂的理论献,全面综述和分析了新化地理学的知识谱系和未来的发展走向。     

Too little,too much: Cultural feminist geographies

This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geographical perspectives. Along the way we examine emergent scholarship on the governance of gender through culture concepts, the idea of gender as a form of foundational ordering grammar, the implications of non-representational claims for feminist scholarship, and the nature of performativity. We conclude by encouraging feminist cultural geography to chart the emergent geographies of relational natures and material cultures that reveal gender as both embodied and discursive, given and enacted.     

Praxis and theory in the writing of American historical geography

The use of primary sources in the writing of American historical geography is a relatively recent practice, and one which warrants more attention than it has been accorded. Of immediate appeal to historical geographers when they finally turned to primary sources were contemporary travel accounts, topographies and geographies. Because they were, and still are, much used, and because they reveal in simple and direct fashion the difficulty of encountering past “reality”, these kinds of material are the focus here. To turn from these essentially qualitative sources to more quantitative sources neither resolves nor avoids the issue we wish to raise, the problem of subjectivity. There are two sides to the problem of subjectivity; the first concerns the contemporary as observer and recorder of facts; the second concerns the latter-day scholar as observer and recorder of facts. The old conception of the geographer as an impersonal observer is no longer acceptable. In the quest for an understanding of the geography of the past, it may well be that “objectivity is the fruit of genuine subjectivity”, and that what is required is a collective effort of subjective scholars engaged in a continuing dialogue.     

Geographies of relatedness

This paper explores the analytic purchase and substantive concerns of what I am calling geographies of relatedness . Drawing on recent work in feminist anthropology which has reconsidered kinship as classificatory system and practice, and highlighting the attentiveness to sites, scales and contexts within this work, I suggest ways in which a focus on relatedness may shape approaches to established and emerging matters of concern in human geography. I consider first the foundational status but flexible meaning of 'blood' in kinship thinking, and the ways the flexibility of kinship can be curtailed and its foundational status reinstated in relation to the nation and the state. Second, I consider the geographies of relatedness that are constituted through and practised in the process of establishing degrees of biological connection, delimiting difference, mapping human 'diversity' and defining personal, collective and human origins at different scales and with different effects. A focus on geographies of relatedness, I argue, highlights the ways blood ties or similarly naturalized connections move between and connect categories of relatedness with different sizes, extents and configurations across space, as well as different temporalities. It suggests an alertness to new global mappings of human relatedness and difference and combines a critical attention to ideas of the 'nature' of human reproduction as foundational, original or primal in the natural order of the social, to ideas of 'place of origin': personal, national, ethnic, racialized, universal in their familiar and emergent forms.     

Regional survey and the economic geographies of Britain 1930–1939

This paper re-considers the history of economic geography in the interwar period in Britain. The activities of the discipline are considered in the context of the commercial geographies of this time, and the intensive round of industrial and social surveys undertaken at a regional level in Britain in the period. Taken together, these economic geographies constructed a range of representational and material spaces and helped construct industrial regions characterized by particular types of places, peoples and performances. These surveys, and the production of the economic geographies that they facilitated, became a key intellectual arena where conflicting ideas about the political and economic management of the industrial region and the national economic were acted out. Following the intention of recent work into the histories of geographical knowledge, the essay will seek out the lateral associations of economic geography, paying particular attention to politically situated nature of the economic geographies produced by academics, regional organizations and the Labour Party.     

Experts,publics and the environment in the UK: twentieth-century translations

Prompted by contemporary concerns in the West over a global vision of nature and society at risk, this paper builds on recent studies of expertise within a broader public culture. By focusing on earlier episodes of social and political uncertainty, the paper argues that there is scope to extend such analysis in terms of historical geographies of specialist knowledge. The paper examines the formative years of British ecology, a discipline which from its beginnings in the wake of urban industrialism more than a century ago, was centrally concerned with the relations of human well-being and the environment. In exploring when, where and how an ecological expertise became defined, it shifts the focus from familiar milestones in the discipline's public recognition. By tracing the discursive and material practices of those who sought to identify and define ecology as a specialism, the paper illustrates the importance of groupings within and beyond accredited expertise in giving it meaning and purpose. In doing so it highlights the fragility and fluidity of the boundaries around ‘expertise’, and the significance of geographical context and connections in shaping its conduct and content. In terms of broader historical geographies, the paper suggests that while ‘expert’ cultures may be projected as giving greater public reassurance, the sense of certainty that this implies disguises complex processes in which the boundaries are imprecise between specialist and lay knowledge and between scientific and public spaces.     

Speaking the land: exploring women's historical geographies in Northern Québec

This review article explores the significance of studying the historical geographies of Aboriginal women in Northern Québec and presents potential research avenues. The article's premise is that we cannot understand the historic and contemporary geographies of subsistence economies without more research about the roles that women played in them. Related to this issue is a broader reflection on how geographies of the past are reconstructed by historical geographers, both from an epistemological and methodological point of view. As a discipline, historical geography has been chiefly dedicated to the study of the encounter of migrant Europeans with new world lands and societies, with the result that Aboriginal and women's geographies have commanded less attention. This gap in knowledge should be addressed by emerging researchers. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and moving from the general to the particular, my inquiry evolves in three parts. First, I identify some key debates that are pertinent to a study of gender and Aboriginal women in a colonial context. Second, I review the existing ethnographic literature on Cree women in Eastern Canada and assess insights about their role in subsistence economies. Third, I outline specific avenues that help frame a research programme to study the historical geographies—by which I understand the places, placing, and place-making—of Aboriginal women in Northern Québec.     

Charting the development of social and cultural geography in Mainland China: voices from the inside*

This article provides an overview of the recent development of social and cultural geography in China. It discusses six major bodies of work: cultural areas, cultural diffusion and cultural integration; geographies of ethnic cultures; cultural landscape and cultural economy; place and place-based cultural politics; marginal social groups; and geographies of social injustice. Although social and cultural geography is still located on the periphery of the disciplinary landscape of Chinese human geography, it is nonetheless developing into a noteworthy field of research. We start this review by calling attention to some problems in epistemologies and analytical approaches. Social and cultural geography in China often suffers from an analytical separation between environment and culture as ontologically enclosed entities. Also, it pays insufficient attention to the mutually constitutive relations between the social and the spatial. However, more recent studies have begun to engage with constructionist/poststructuralist approaches, and develop less positivist interpretations of space, social relations and cultural meanings. This review suggests that social and cultural geography in China needs to develop broader research scopes and strengthen theoretical frameworks. It concludes by calling for constructive dialogues between Chinese and Western human geographical scholarships.     

Sonic geography in a nature region

This paper considers the sonic geography of a region since the late nineteenth century, taking material from the Norfolk Broads, a wetland region in eastern England. This area has been defined through competing cultures of nature and leisure, with the presence, absence and nature of sound a key concern. The theme of sonic geography is set within debates concerning the nature of regional identity, moral geographies of conduct in landscape, and uses of the term ‘soundscape’. The paper draws on surveys of sound, travel guides, press reports, private journals and fictional accounts, showing how in the contested valuation of a regional landscape the aesthetic, ecological and social are enfolded through sonic geography.