Rewriting the history of Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia

The nineteenth-century Chinese population in Australia was made up mostly of men, drawing many commentators to the conclusion these men faced an absence of family life, resulting in prostitution, gambling, opium use and other so-called vices. Recent research has, however, expanded and complicated our knowledge of Chinese families in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly concerning the extent to which Chinese men and white Australian women formed intimate relationships. This article traces the origins of the misconceptions about Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia, and considers how new directions in scholarship over the past decade are providing methods for enlarging our knowledge. It argues that instead of being oddities or exceptions, Chinese-European families were integral to the story of Australia's early Chinese communities.     

Not Everyone Has (the) Balls: Urban Exploration and the Persistence of Masculinist Geography

In geographic scholarship, urban exploration (urbex) has been examined as an embodied practice with radical potential for re‐appropriating urban spaces. However, geographic literature on urban exploration has largely ignored the particular qualities of the urban explorer as a subject and neglected feminist scholarship on embodiment and social difference. Based on our examination of both popular and academic treatments of urbex we identify a prevalent and largely unacknowledged culture of masculinism. We ask: Whose bodies explore? What counts as experience? What constitutes the exchange between body and place? And, with what effects? Addressing these questions permits considerations of exclusions and marginalizations left unaddressed in much geographic literature on urbex.     

The Disappearing State and the Quasi‐Event of Immigration Control

Immigration enforcement by sheriffs and police can be characterized as a proliferation of quasi‐events which never quite rise to the status of an event. This poses distinct challenges for feminist‐inspired scholarship on the state which seeks to document, ethnographically, how the state goes about its business on the ground. In this article we draw on our fieldwork experience in North Carolina and Georgia on sheriffs’ and police departments’ use of traffic enforcement and policing roadblocks to scrutinize drivers for their legal status, and ask how our ethnographic approach to the problem of state power inevitably stumbles in relation to the ordinariness of these practices. We conclude that feminist scholarship committed to an ethnography of the state could do much more to think through the potentially aporetic quality of that which is our common object of research—the state in practice.     

Cities,Racialized Poverty,and Infrastructures of Possibility

This essay argues that the study of urban poverty is too often characterised by the disappearance of specific people and bodily politics from our analytic frames, rendering modes of life and politics illegible to scholars. We call for attention to the embodied politics of knowledge production, as neighbourhoods surrounding universities are exploited first as laboratories for poverty scholarship—exemplified in the relationship between the Chicago School’s theory of human ecology and the racialised real estate markets—and then as devalued spaces for creative industries. Following work at the intersection of urban studies and American studies, we call for a relational reading of the archives of dominant poverty scholarship, and for scholarship attentive to the body—as a knowledge project only ever partially recorded in fieldnotes or the archives—as a key site for politics.     

Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey

While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.     

Unearthing feminist territories and terrains

The constructs of ‘territory’ and ‘terrain’ are the subject of increasing scrutiny within political geography. While momentum builds in their interrogation as both diverse and lively practices, and complex political technologies, this article takes pause. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of feminist scholarship, it seeks to reflect upon existing trajectories and provide provocation for further accounting. Inspired throughout by, and seeking to bring to bear, a feminist perspective on territory and terrain, this article follows a tripartite structure. First, it critically explores the bodies of knowledge historically underpinning the concepts of territory and terrain. Developing a call for a feminist historiography of territory and terrain, we reflect upon both the gendered evolution of the concepts, and their ongoing reproduction in conceptual debates. Second, it seeks to both highlight and diversify embodied accounts and accountings of these concepts. Here, thinking with and beyond the body, we turn to the non-human and spiritual to explore territory and terrain in expanded and extended ways. Lastly, we examine bodies of expertise, reflecting on academic territories and terrains, and highlighting potential concepts and methodologies seeking to (re-)sculpt and (re-)articulate understandings of territory and terrain. The paper, whilst not all-encompassing, serves as an important provocation that seeks more equitable accounts of political geography's messy, muddy, and lively territories and terrains.     

Becoming Rafinesque: Market Society and Academic Reputation in the Early American Republic

This article focuses on how knowledge came to be valued in conflicting ways in the American Republic during the 1820s and 1830s – one based on a market model that considered knowledge to be a commodity for sale, and another that produced cultural value through social connections created in new academic institutions. Constantine Rafinesque, who taught at Transylvania University in Kentucky, and his research in the natural sciences serve as an example of the first sort of scholarship. His life also illustrates how a market society could lead to dandies, like Rafinesque himself, even in academia, and how that threatened both new middle class social proprieties and a system of clubby social relations that had come to dominate America’s colleges and universities in the early nineteenth century.     

Towards decentralized anthropological scholarship: Some ethical considerations

This article outlines the future of decentralized blockchain scholarship and some ethical questions we must consider in its wake. What is the role of research participants in a decentralized publishing ecosystem? And how do we move towards more just values and practices in intellectual creation and dissemination?     

Dialectical movements with the Toba people in the Argentine Chaco

Since 1998, I have undertaken fieldwork with the Indigenous peoples of the Argentine Chaco, focusing initially on their dances and embodied practices. After this ethnographic research, I began to think more deeply about the relationships between fieldwork and reflexivity and the possibilities of redefining analytical categories in the global South. The purpose of this article is to revisit my emphasis on a ‘dialectical approach to embodiment’ as a starting point for analysing cultural transformation in Latin America. I argue that this methodological approach has been closely linked to the interweaving of conflicting embodied experiences and peripheral geopolitical locations. In this regard I analyse how the contradictory experiences identified in my fieldwork with the Toba people, and also in my intersubjective and geopolitical positions as a Latin American academic woman, led me to a critical re-examination of dialectics. Further, I describe how this methodological approach, while well received among Latin American scholars has to some degree been resisted by (North) American and British scholars, and I explore the geopolitical implications of these disparate academic positions. Through these critical movements, I hope to contribute to rethinking dialectics in postcolonial contexts, adding some embodied voices from the Latin American South.     

Ethical consumption? There's an app for that. Digital technologies and everyday consumption practices

Ethical consumption mobile phone apps are increasingly popular. These apps allow consumers to scan the barcodes of products they are considering purchasing and determine whether or not they align with their ethics. App technologies are often applauded for their potential to provide consumers with targeted, crowd-sourced information about products while shopping and to foster more political, and less individualistic, consumption practices by connecting users to one another and to campaigns. There is a growing field of scholarship conceptually examining the role of information and digital technologies in ethical consumption. However, there is little empirical research on how consumers engage with ethical consumption apps in everyday ways. Drawing on an in-depth study with 21 participants, this paper explores how app use mediates people's experiences of ethical consumption. We contend that the app design structures and limits how individuals engage in ethically motivated consumption and influences their conceptualizations of ethical consumption as a political practice. We conclude by illustrating that critically examining what it means to be “ethical” in a digital world is a crucial area of research for geographers, particularly as these ethics play out through the everyday use of mobile technologies.     

Can You Hear us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research

Indigenous methodologies are an alternative way of thinking about research processes. Although these methodologies vary according to the ways in which different Indigenous communities express their own unique knowledge systems, they do have common traits. This article argues that research on Indigenous issues should be carried out in a manner which is respectful and ethically sound from an Indigenous perspective. This naturally challenges Western research paradigms, yet it also affords opportunities to contribute to the body of knowledge about Indigenous peoples. It is further argued that providing a mechanism for Indigenous peoples to participate in and direct these research agendas ensures that their communal needs are met, and that geographers then learn how to build ethical research relationships with them. Indigenous methodologies do not privilege Indigenous researchers because of their Indigeneity, since there are many ‘insider’ views, and these are thus suitable for both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous researchers. However, there is a difference between research done within an Indigenous context using Western methodologies and research done using Indigenous methodologies which integrates Indigenous voices. This paper will discuss those differences while presenting a historical context of research on Indigenous peoples, providing further insights into what Indigenous methodologies entail, and proposing ways in which the academy can create space for this discourse.     

The Gender,Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Feminism and animals: exploring interspecies relations through intersectionality,performativity and standpoint

This article explores the ways and extent to which feminism helps investigate interspecies relations and the lives of animals in academic scholarship. It argues that animals need feminism. Indeed feminists are well suited and positioned to take on questions of and issues related to animal lives through key theoretical ideas and methodological approaches, namely intersectionality, performativity and standpoint. Extending such ideas and approaches to animal subjects fills gaps in animal studies literature and generates invaluable insights on the fundamental workings of power in society and the implications for both humans and animals. The article also argues that feminism should embrace animals and animal scholarship. Doing so generates new insights on societal relations of power and extends existing feminist boundaries regarding whose knowledge counts and how it is counted. Ultimately, an enhanced feminism–animal dialogue generates geographical knowledge that is comprehensive and reflective of the interrelatedness of all beings that shape individual, institutional and ideological realms.     

A love story: for ‘Buddy System’ research in the academy

This article makes a case for a ‘buddy system’ approach to research and scholarship, or a kind of ‘caring with’ our colleagues, as feminist praxis and as an intentional, politicized response to the neoliberalization of the academy. Through autoethnographic writing on our travels together into farmed animal auction yards, we explain the buddy system as a mode of caring, solidarity, and love that differs from collaborative research, focused as it is on caring for and about our colleagues and their research even (or especially) when we have no direct stakes in the research being conducted. We contribute to three feminist conversations with this approach: feminist care ethics in geography; emotional geographies; and critical perspectives on the neoliberalization of the academy. We advocate the buddy system as an extension of feminist care ethics, enriching how feminists think about ‘doing’ research. We draw on feminist geographies of emotion and our own emotions (grief especially) experienced while witnessing processes of nonhuman animal commodification to politicize the act of researching and to develop a more caring way of inhabiting the academy. This is particularly important, we argue, in the context of deepening neoliberal logics that turn the academy into a place where care and love become radical acts of resistance and transformation.     

Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’

An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation thought conscientiously can also be a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance that demonstrates engagement with those authors and voices we want to carry forward. We argue for a conscientious engagement with the politics of citation as a geographical practice that is mindful of how citational practices can be a tool for either the reification of, or resistance to, unethical hierarchies of knowledge production. We offer practical and conceptual reasons for carefully thinking through the role of citation as a performative embodiment of the reproduction of geographical thought.     

Stuck between ‘the rock’ and a hard place: rural crisis and re-imagining rural Newfoundland feminine subjectivities

There has been a growing body of research exploring the mobility experiences of rural youth as they migrate in search of work, education and leisure. In this article we contribute to this body of knowledge by examining the mobility experiences of young women (16–24 years) living on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In contrast to dominant constructions of rural crisis that position out-of-the-way places as in decline, dying or dead, we argue that the young women in our study articulated complex, affective relations to place. In so doing, they negotiated localized histories, prevailing social relations, broader discursive constructions and embodied affective connections in forging their emplaced feminine subjectivities. We argue that foregrounding the complex and at times contradictory relationships that the young women articulated with their rural homes is an important step in prying open dominant albeit constraining constructions of the rural, thereby allowing for alternative and more inhabitable imaginings of out-of-the-way places.     

Human Rights,Care Ethics and Situated Universal Norms

Abstract: As interest in the relationship between geography and ethics grows, it becomes important to examine how different approaches to ethical philosophy may fit with geographic scholarship. To that end, this article focuses on a particular approach to ethical responsibility—international human rights law—and asks how that approach can be put into conversation with discussions in geography about morality, distance and care. It explores three contributions of such a conversation: first, it examines how the relational ontology of care ethics provides a new perspective on the moral value of human rights, so that the relationships and context in question drive the relative value of rights. Second, the article discusses contributions that human rights can bring to questions of caring across distance. Finally, it unpacks the duties that accompany human rights and questions the scope of duty that attaches to the norm of equality.     

Anthropocene and the dawn of a planetary civilization

This exploratory article invites anthropologists to renew their curiosity about the human condition and creatively decode today's contemporary myth-making practices. After a decade of active academic engagement with the Anthropocene, we would do well to turn our endless curiosity about the world and its diversity to the Promethean stories ecomodernists are spreading with accelerated ease within the public sphere. To burst out of our media-saturated environment, the author asks: what patterns of deglobalization and reglobalization will emerge from the stories we tell each other about the Covid-19 pandemic and the health of the planet? In what ways do these stories inform us about the society we want to create, inhabit and pass on? The author shows how redeploying our skills as storytelling analysts and ethnographers of embodied and collective experiences helps us to renew questions about place and mobility. As we enter a new era of symbolic manipulation, remembering the importance of myths may help us contribute to the emergence of a planetary civilization that the earth appears to be calling for.     

They're here—I can feel them: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges

Indigenous Knowledges (IK) are continually contrasted with Western positivist sciences. Yet the usual conception of IK—as a translatable knowledge about things—renders incomprehensible its discussion as a spiritual or ethical practice. A practice taking place within what we call an epistemic space. A moose hunting event can demonstrate how IK is produced through the epistemic spaces within which hunting is performed. Part of the performance is becoming-animal; as practiced by Koyukon Athabascans, a moose hunt reproduces the social relations between hunter and prey, spiritual relations that demonstrate an ontology and ethics seemingly distinct from those of the Western wildlife sciences founded upon Enlightenment humanism. Yet such ‘Western–Indigenous’ dichotomies falsely indicate entirely separable spaces within which to produce accounts of reality. Instead, this account of a moose hunt demonstrates an assemblage of actors within one space, who together become more than the authors' individual positions and selves, and becomes an event. We additionally argue that more faithfully representing this assemblage requires changing the form of the usual academic paper. Thus tacking between a narrative and theoretical approach that switches from each of our first-person points of view, we aim to depict how knowledge of one hunting event becomes assembled.     

Proceeding through Colonial Past-Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability,Refusal, and Autonomy

This article examines how the colonial past manifests within the present through an analysis of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Drawing on feminist geographic scholarship for decolonising knowledge production, I argue that geographers have a responsibility to the people they work with and the places where they conduct research to know what came before. Through an analysis of how the colonial past surfaced in everyday and ongoing experiences of negotiating consent during fieldwork, I show how reflecting on the colonial past-present offers insights into the colonial power geometries of knowledge production. Proceeding through the colonial past-present offers useful lessons on being accountable to people and lands, recognising refusal, and making autonomy. While this article is focused on my experiences as a white settler scholar from the USA who did research in a Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico, proceeding through colonial past-presents offers lessons to any and all geographers who struggle to unsettle the persistent colonial power geometries of knowledge production.