Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural,social and political moments

Abstract

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three ‘feminist moments,’ our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions.     

Editorial Not all sweetness and light: New cultural geographies of food

Despite a resurgence of work that has begun to examine critically the artefactual mediation of memory, very few accounts have focused upon the interconnections between recorded music and daily acts of remembering. Drawing upon in‐depth case study‐based research into recorded music and everyday life with seventeen lower middle‐class households, this paper describes the composition of three practices of remembering with and through recorded music. First, remembering how to choose and ‘fit’ specific purchased music to particular socio‐spatial activities: a creative practice of mimicry, discretion and intuition in which the past is both embodied in the actions of judgement and choice and also functions to compose a co‐present, but not‐yet ‘virtual’ realm. Second, the widespread, ephemeral and subject‐less practice of ‘involuntary remembering’ in which a trace of a virtual past affects ‘in itself’. Finally, ‘intentional remembering’ in which a past is conditioned to occur as a fixed, relatively durable ‘memory’. The paper describes how such practices of remembering are bound up with the emergence of domestic time‐space, and thus the mode of being of the past, via the circulation and organization of affect.     

The dark side of cultural policy: economic and political instrumentalisation,white elephants,and corruption in Valencian cultural institutions

Cultural policy is usually assessed as a positive element for socio-economic development and therefore, its criticism is generally confined to poor implementation and discussion of its social effects. However, it is occasionally analysed as an instrument that produces unsustainable development, as a generator of white elephants, or as a means of waste, corruption, and clientelistic domination of the political sphere. This is what we might call the ‘dark side’ of cultural policy. Our case study of the city of Valencia (Spain), focussing on two of its major cultural institutions, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the Palace of Arts, exemplifies this cultural policy dimension. This article aims to analyse the systemic and contextual causes of this phenomenon of cronyistic behaviour and to elucidate in what sense it can be understood as a contingent drift specific to a particular territory or as a structural condition of cultural policy.     

Exploring evolutionary economic geographies

Evolutionary approaches in economics have gathered increasingsupport over the last 25 years. Despite an impressive body ofliterature, economists are still far from formulating a coherentresearch paradigm. The multitude of approaches in evolutionaryeconomics poses problems for the development of an evolutionaryeconomic geography. For the most part, evolutionary economicgeography imports selective concepts from evolutionary biologyand economics and applies those concepts to specific problemswithin economic geography. We discuss a number of problems withthis approach and suggest that a more powerful and appealingalternative requires the development of theoretically consistentmodels of evolutionary processes. This article outlines thecontours of an evolutionary model of economic dynamics whereeconomic agents are located in different geographical spaces.We seek to show how competition between those agents, basedon the core evolutionary principles of variety, selection andretention, may produce distinct economic regions sharing propertiesthat differentiate them from competitors elsewhere. These argumentsare extended to illustrate how the emergent properties of economicagents and places co-evolve and lead to different trajectoriesof economic development over space.     

Canada and the political geographies of rights

For some observers, liberal rights are politically disempowering, while for others they can provide a basis for mobilization, resistance and the formation of counter-publics. Yet neither of these claims says much about the geography of rights, which provides the focus for our discussion. Rights are geographical in several senses: rights are often about access to space or place; in liberal societies, geographies of private and public shape access to rights; space naturalizes social relations; the politics of scale open up new debates about and strategies for attaining rights within and beyond Canada; and places are both defined and called upon in struggles over rights. In an exploration of two Canadian case studies - gentrification in Vancouver and the status of Filipina domestic workers - we examine the ways in which the geography of rights proves consequential to dominant and oppositional rights claiming. We briefly lay out the meaning and significance of rights, before a discussion of their political significance in the Canadian context.     

Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.     

Border thinking: Rossport, Shell and the political geographies of a gas pipeline

Rossport is a small, sparsely populated rural area in the west of Ireland. Over the past seven years, some of its residents have been engaged in a struggle against the building of a gas pipeline through their locality by multinational corporations, including Shell and Statoil. Their struggle has garnered opposition and support within Ireland and internationally. This paper takes the story of Rossport as the starting point for a broader discussion of epistemology within political geography. Drawing on the work of Walter Mignolo, in particular his ideas about ‘border thinking’ and the ‘decoloniality of knowledge’, it argues that Rossport offers the possibility for a redeployment of postcolonial thought within political geography.     

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.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.