Teaching the Craft of Archaeology: Theory, Practice, and the Field School

Field schools are a rite of passage for archaeologists, the first experience of what for many is the defining activity of the discipline: fieldwork. While teaching competence in practical techniques is the minimum goal of any field school, this technical training must be situated within the broader goals that drive the fieldwork. The University of Denver Archaeological Field School provides the fieldwork for the Colorado Coal Field War Archaeological Project. This project is an experiment in archaeology as political action in the present. It explores the possibility of an emancipatory archaeology through engagement with contemporary audiences and struggles. In this paper we discuss some of the ways we try to link technical training with the admittedly unusual theoretical and political goals of the project, teaching not only skills but an awareness of the responsibilities these skills should bring.     

Chronotopes of study abroad: the cultural Other,immersion, and compartmentalized space–time

Study abroad offers a specific configuration of encountering cultural Others: in a demarcated “abroad” space in a compartmentalized time period. Informed by Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes, this article investigates narratives of American college students who studied in Paris, France and Bilbao, Spain in June–July 2011 based on an ethnographic fieldwork of their stay. I identify two chronotopes held in tension in their narratives that reflect tenets of the discourse of immersion: of homogeneous space where every minute students spend in the host society is “local” time full of learning, which risks portraying the host society as frozen in the time of the students’ stay; and of heterogeneous space where local space–time and outsider (e.g. American students and tourists) space–time co-exist hierarchically, where students strive to show their engagement with the former. This article calls for encouraging students to examine the effects of these chronotopes on their experiences and for viewing study abroad not as an encounter of two cultures but as diverse students joining in the ongoing production of heterogeneous host society space with a compartmentalized yet expanding notion of time.     

Physical Geography and the Geographic Thought Course

The positioning of residential fieldwork early in students' higher education is an established way of attempting to build and engage them in a community of learning. In the study reported here, the benefits of such early residential fieldwork were investigated using Krausse and Coates's seven scales of engagement. These scales consider a number of key indicators – specifically transition, academic, beyond-class, peer, staff–student, online and intellectual engagement. Data on these scales were collected via questionnaires completed by groups of students who did and did not attend such a residential fieldwork event, both before and after the event. A Wilcoxon test of these data showed significant increases in peer and student–staff engagement in the post-fieldwork group only. A Kruskal–Wallis analysis provides evidence that students who had been on residential fieldwork became more involved in a community of learning with both their peers and virtual communities than those who had not. These results support the hypothesis that early residential fieldwork is an effective way of engaging students new to higher education in a community of learning.     

Education for citizenship: community engagement between the Global South and the Global North

This paper discusses a fieldwork exercise in development geography undertaken by students in the UK. Based on community engagement in partnership with refugee and black minority communities in Liverpool, it explores how such fieldwork can deepen understanding of development geography, contribute to global citizenship and nurture personal skills. Students of development geography engaged in real-world experiential learning about the complexity of the social, economic and cultural issues facing refugees and black and racial minority groups, and the processes by which these change and evolve. The challenges of the fieldwork were positively received as students gained relevant and useful insights from their interaction with community stakeholders.     

Using GIS in an Earth Sciences field course for quantitative exploration,data management and digital mapping

Field courses are essential for subjects like Earth Sciences, Geography and Ecology. In these topics, GIS is used to manage and analyse spatial data, and offers quantitative methods that are beneficial for fieldwork. This paper presents changes made to a first-year Earth Sciences field course in the French Alps, where new GIS methods were introduced. Students use GIS in preparation to explore their research area using an elevation model and satellite images, formulate hypotheses and plan the fieldwork. During the fieldwork, a pilot group managed their field-observations using GIS and made digital maps. Students praise the use of quantitative digital maps in the preparation. Students made use of the available techniques during the fieldwork, although this could be further intensified. Some students were extra motivated due to the technical nature as well as the additional analytical possibilities. The use of GIS was experienced as a steep learning curve by students, and not all staff members are confident in supervising students using GIS, which calls for a sufficient preparation and training of both students and staff. The use of GIS adds abstract analyses and quantitative assessment, which is a complementary learning style to fieldwork that mostly focuses on practical skills.     

A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.     

UNESCO’s project to ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’: Iraqi and Syrian opinion on heritage reconstruction after the Islamic State

ABSTRACT

Following the devastation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul by the Islamic State (IS), UNESCO launched a project to ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’. This article critically reflects on this UNESCO-led project, drawing on 47 interviews with Syrians and Iraqis, as well as documenting the implications of UNESCO’s efforts in earlier (post-)conflict heritage reconstruction projects in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Mali. Specifically, this article focuses on two sites in Mosul, both deliberately destroyed by the IS and both nominated by UNESCO for reconstruction. The data analysed reveal that heritage reconstruction projects, especially in complex (post-)conflict environments such as Iraq, requires ongoing, nuanced and careful engagement with local populations to succeed. Failure to do so leaves both local people and their heritage sites vulnerable to renewed attacks and therefore ultimately undermines UNESCO’s broader mission to foster peace.     

Theorizing the City: Recent Research in Urban Anthropology

Half of the world's population now lives in cities. This number is expected to grow to two-thirds in the next fifty years. And yet, it is only recently that anthropologists have begun to take urban contexts seriously as fieldwork sites. In this article, I analyze three recent volumes on urban anthropology which each propose a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the city. I suggest that there is a fine line to be drawn between urban determinism—the suggestion that the city is the pivotal force in shaping individual lives, a perspective that ignores both human agencies and the complexities of causality—and anthropology which relegates the city to mere context, ethnographies that, almost by chance take place in urban contexts but say little about the realities of city life. The texts examined share two features in common: firstly, they are most effective when they, through close ethnographic or archival engagement, show the complexity and variation in urban contexts; and secondly, each text displays an absolute commitment to ethnographic fieldwork as a powerful tool to understand the lived experience of the urban. As a commitment to long-term participant observation is the sine qua non of our discipline, my central question is whether “urban anthropology,” is not just anthropology after all?     

State of Change: Concept Metaphor of Pauline Principalities and Powers for a Political Theology of Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

This essay responds to the need for a constructive account of the state that does not over-determine religious community-state relationships in peacebuilding scholarship and practice because experience and historically embodied stances towards the state defy affirmations about the state that produce a static formula. It offers a concept metaphor rooted in the three-fold eschatological reality of the state at home in a world of pluralism that emerges from reflections on fieldwork in Colombia. The metaphor stresses the need to break the state’s claim to ultimacy as the initial movement of engagement that allows for redemptive transformation. The notion of the state as a dynamic process is consistent with the stance Colombian communities have embodied in an ever-changing environment of conflict and peace.     

Introduction

This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the well-being of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field.     

The form, the permit and the photograph: an archive of mobility between South Africa and India

Inspired by recent scholarship that calls for a more critical engagement with archives and knowledge production, this article plots the biography of an archive in Cape Town. Unravelling the layers of paperwork, it locates the origins of the archive in a repressive state project of excluding Indian immigrants and controlling those within the borders of the Cape Colony. The paper trail reveals documents of identity and the state’s attempts to verify identity. In seeking to answer the question as to how the historian should approach such an archive of control and surveillance, it concludes that a social history and gendered approach to migration is possible and the real treasures are those documents that enter the archive beyond the limits of state intentions.     

Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Introduction

The more current the notion of globalization becomes, the more it seems to be beset with vagueness and inconsistencies. The notion as such and the complex reality it attempts to grasp are therefore met with a mixture of uneasiness and fascination by social scientists. This lack of clarity is not exceptional—it seems to be the fate of many fashionable terms and probably also the cause of their popularity—and it is no reason to abandon the notion altogether. Even if globalization amounts to nothing more than a sensitizing notion, rather than an analytical concept, it is important to realize that the ambiguities it calls forth issue urgent challenges, not merely on the level of theory but also with regard to a better understanding of actual global entanglements and the crises to which they give rise.     

Teaching and learning global urban geography: an international learning-centred approach

The recent drive for the internationalization of curricula, together with calls for the internationalization of the sub-discipline of urban geography beyond the “west”, and the growing shift towards learning-centred paradigms in higher education, provided impetus for the design and delivery of an upper level undergraduate urban geography module – “Global Urbanism” – that is reported here. Using this module as a case study, the paper demonstrates the ways in which student learning and engagement with internationalized global urban geography can be facilitated by a learning-centred approach that is enhanced through the design of, and engagement with, assessment items, particularly research-led learning journals.     

What Has the Geography of Sleeping Arrangements Got to Do with the Geography of Our Teaching Spaces?

As geographers we are used to researching and teaching about those other than ourselves and it is timely to turn our gaze on the social and spatial practices of our own teaching spaces. One particular teaching space is the overnight geography field trip, a context in which geography fieldwork is ostensibly the main focus for two or more consecutive days. Teaching spaces such as classrooms and field trips, like all social spaces, are imbued with spoken and unspoken assumptions about sexuality, gender and 'race'. Geography field trips are one site in which to examine how social space is constituted via spoken and unspoken assumptions and how these assumptions shape field trip participants' understandings of themselves within these spaces. Simultaneously, field trips offer a site for the consideration of the socio-spatial relations of the reproduction of contemporary geographic knowledge. This article is one response to what Jon Binnie identified as an urgent need for geographers to understand how geography is being taught. Although sleeping arrangements are 'not formally notified' as part of fieldwork activity, the author demonstrates how sleeping arrangements conveyed important messages about sexuality, gender and cultural practices during seven overnight field trips held by two universities and two high schools in New Zealand. The concern is how apparently mundane arrangements such as the organisation of sleeping might reveal the ongoing hegemonic social and spatial relations of teaching and learning geography, as these are shaped by sexuality, gender and 'race', so that we might be better informed to challenge and change these practices.     

Georges Perec’s experimental fieldwork; Perecquian fieldwork

This paper traces key themes in contemporary experimental fieldwork – explorations of ordinary places by artists, writers, activists, enthusiasts, students and researchers – to the works of Georges Perec. Preoccupations of this work – including playfulness, attention to the ordinary, and writing as a fieldwork practice – are all anticipated and elaborated in Perec’s oeuvre, where they converge around an ‘essayistic’ approach. Exhibiting these traits, some contemporary fieldwork is more convincingly Perecquian than psychogeographical or Situationist, despite the tendency to identify it with the latter. Through Perec, it is therefore possible to bring contemporary experimental fieldwork into focus, identifying a coherence and sense of project within it, while speaking to the question of what it means and could mean to conduct fieldwork experimentally. Particular attention is paid in this paper to Perec’s most accomplished and sustained field texts, both of which have been translated into English: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010, from 1975 original in French) and Species of Spaces (1999/1974).     

Bastard Spice or Champagne of Cinnamon? Conflicting Value Creations along Cinnamon Commodity Chains in Northern Vietnam

In upland northern Vietnam ethnic minority farmers are cultivating what some global retailers refer to as the ‘champagne of cinnamon’. However, a closer examination reveals that this spice is not ‘true cinnamon’ but cassia, with the exact species remaining uncertain. Drawing on commodity chain literature and debates over the creation of value and quality, the aims of this article are twofold. First, it investigates the making of ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ as it moves from the hills of northern Vietnam to supermarket shelves in the global North, and the actors and livelihoods involved. Second, it explores how different actors define ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ and infuse it with often-contradictory values. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork over a four-year period, the study finds that the state and cooperating non-government organizations tend to ignore ongoing taxonomic confusion while creating a geographical indicator to highlight the uniqueness of this commodity. Yet, concurrently, exporters and retailers in the global North focus on other distinctions as key marketing tools including remoteness, ethnicity, taste and health benefits. The article thus calls for an expanded analytical focus on competing value creation for agro-food products and on the impacts for commodity producers, in this case ethnic minority farmers in the global South.     

Decolonizing Geographies of Whiteness

Engagement with the study of whiteness is slow within the discipline of geography despite repeated calls for it to be placed on the research agenda, and regardless of a strong heritage of critical “race” and postcolonial scholarship. This paper considers this reticence, and the problems inherent in Whiteness Studies more generally. It then offers examples from inner Sydney, Australia, that avoid some of the more pressing shortcomings of studying whiteness. By prizing open the essentializing bounds of hegemonic ethnicity, this paper identifies whiteness as context‐specific, processural and contestable.     

Intimacy and angst in the field

This article explores the paradoxes of angst and intimacy in ‘the field.’ One aim of feminist research is to attend to overlooked day-to-day practices through which difference and power work. Yet, this focus on intimate and submerged experience is also risky, potentially asking that people share their most intimate experiences with the researcher. How does such attention to the personal lives of others intersect with ethical demands and postcolonial critiques of representation? A desire to understand the submerged life of the geopolitical in women's day-to-day life in India's Ladakh region has driven my research on the politics of marriage and contraceptive choices. Taken by a feminist approach to the geopolitical, I sought out the ways that intimate life was inflected by territorial struggles, without adequately comprehending either the promise or the risks of making intimacy and the body a subject of research. This work was complicated and enriched by my status as a foreigner married into a local family, which provides a not-quite-outsider positionality. This article reflects on the role of intimacy in fieldwork in two senses: doing research on intimacy, and navigating intimacies in and after the field. I argue that intimate fieldwork is full of both promise and peril for feminist researchers. I call then for careful engagement with such topics, and for a rethinking of the boundaries of the field as they relate to the researcher, who carries these boundaries in his or her own body when navigating social relations in the field.     

Arendt’s Promise to Civil Society: Bridging the Social and the Political

In Arendt’s political theory the concept of civil society is often read as an extension of her concept of the social and is therefore dismissed as irrelevant to her political vision. This view leaves Arendtian theory in an exclusivist position with regard to contemporary political contexts and experiences. My aim in this essay is to address this problem by discussing the relationship of Arendtian theory and the concept of civil society in the context of contemporary political experience. This calls for not only a particular reading of the social in Arendt but, more importantly, for a joint reading of Arendt’s concept of the council state and civil society. Here, civil society is defined as the associations institutionalized by the voluntary engagement of active citizens, which definition, I argue, is compatible with Arendt’s concept of politics as action, plurality, and participation.     

Doing democracy and governance in the fast lane? Towards a ‘politics of time’ in an accelerated polity

This article examines the relationship between time, governance and political participation through a critical engagement with the ‘acceleration thesis’. Whilst the acceleration thesis argues that the ‘shrinking of the present’ is a condition of contemporary governance, others have viewed it as dysfunctional to the democratic process and effective policymaking. By drawing on a wide range of literature and through the use of illustrative examples, this article argues that slow and fast politics have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the practice of governance and democratic participation. In turn, questions are raised about how public organisations and others might manage temporality and change in an ‘accelerated polity’. The article concludes by calling for further research into the ‘politics of time’ and its effects on public policymaking and political participation.