Gender geography in Japan: the trajectory,fruits of research and future challenges

Abstract

The indication by female geographers outside of Japan that, due to the original dearth of female geographers, a gender perspective had been missing from geography held true for Japan as well. In 1993, Yoshida was the first person to discuss the importance of a gender perspective in a Japanese journal of geography. Nearly 25 years have passed since its publication, and the aim of this paper is to investigate what developments have taken place in Japanese geography on gender research. As the accomplishments of feminist geography in English-speaking countries was merely ‘imported’ to Japan around 1990, there is no firm starting point of ‘feminist’ geography, which originated in women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, in the country. Rather, it can be said that Japanese geographers, regardless of sex, undertake gender geography, which does not limit a particular sex as the sole subject and/or object of research. The results of research on gender geography by men geographers began to appear from the year 2000. The use of life history method emerged as a trend in research since 2000. While there has been gradual progress in research on gender geography in Japan, the number of researchers are still by no means large. While Japanese geography has hitherto involved a one-way absorption of the fruits of overseas research on gender/feminist geographies, at least based on studies that have already accumulated in Japan, it is now necessary that Japanese study results also be communicated to overseas.     

The geographical lives of commodities: problems of analysis and critique

In two programmatic essays, Peter Jackson has reviewed new critical research on the geographical lives of commodities. This paper offers a constructive critique of his particular reading of this research. It is argued that three major issues require urgent attention if critical geographers and fellow‐travellers are to take their commodity research forward. First, there is too much imprecision in the use of the related terms ‘commodities’, ‘commodification’ and ‘commoditization’. This threatens to render all three terms meaningless or at the very least confusing. Secondly, this lack of conceptual clarity is linked to the problem of superficial engagements with normative issues. It is argued that the recent geographical research on commodities has thus far glossed over important questions of both academic and lay judgement. Finally, the paper suggests that the ‘modest’ role for critical academics envisaged by Jackson and other commodity researchers is only defensible if questions of voice, message and audience are addressed systematically. Overall, the paper presents a menu of explanatory and normative issues that require attention if critical commodity analysts like Jackson are to maximize the potential of their research agenda.     

Whither labor geography and the rise of the robots?

The rise of the robots suggests a technological revolution like no other. It heralds potentially profound impacts on jobs and labor markets. Geographers have so far remained relatively quiet about such transformations. This commentary suggests ways in which social and cultural geographers can expand upon a robust labor geography and the debates surrounding the relationship between robots, robotic technologies, and labor. Six areas of engagement are offered that outline the richness and nuance of social and cultural geographical analysis related to the ‘rise of the robots’ at a time where much of the popular discourse around robotics is characterized by the extremities of either dystopian angst or positive boosterism. We call on social and cultural geographers to engage in conceptually rigorous and empirically informed research that provides novel ways of making sense of the multiple dimensions of our robotic futures.     

Australian Geographers and Geographical Information Science

Geographical Information Science (GIScience) has become an important sub‐discipline for North American geographers but in Australia few geographers are engaged in this ‘research in GIS’ area. Australian geographers seem more concerned with ‘research using GIS’ which has become absorbed into the geographical tradition of thinking and communicating with diagrams, images, and maps. The breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in Australia makes it difficult to be sure, but most of those engaged in GIScience in Australia seem to identify with disciplines other than geography.     

Boundary-making in feminist research: new methodologies for ‘intimate insiders’

In the past 20 years, feminist geographers have gone to great lengths to complicate notions of ‘the field’ and make clear that the field is not an easily bounded space. This body of work has demonstrated the complexity of field spaces, explored ways to destabilize boundaries, and traced the power relations between researchers and participants. Ultimately, this work takes the breaking down of boundaries as an inherent good in field research, and, subsequently, little work has focused explicitly on the utility of physical and emotional boundaries that develop in field research. Our experiences as feminist geographers who reside in our fields show there is much left to understand and subsequently disrupt regarding the boundaries of ‘the field.’ In this article, we build on the concept of ‘intimate insiders’ to discuss the complex negotiation of doing research in the places where we have created personal lives and our sense of community. We often found ourselves struggling to define the physical and emotional boundaries of ‘the field’ on the outside for the sake of our participants and ourselves. In this article, we reflect on boundary-making as a specific feminist methodological practice for addressing the complexity of fieldwork. We discuss the techniques and strategies we used for conducting research in the communities in which we are long-term community residents. In the tradition of feminist methodology, we draw from our research experiences in State College and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to reconsider how producing distance through boundary-making has the potential to benefit our participants, our projects, and ourselves.     

Geography and Global Change Science: Relationships Necessary,Absent, and Possible

Initiated by geoscientists, the growing debate about the Anthropocene, ‘planetary boundaries’ and global ‘tipping points’ is a significant opportunity for geographers to reconfigure two things: one is the internal relationships among their discipline's many and varied perspectives (topical, philosophical, and methodological) on the real; the other the discipline's actual and perceived contributions to important issues in the wider society. Yet, without concerted effort and struggle, the opportunity is likely to be used in a ‘safe’ and rather predictable way by only a sub‐set of human‐environment geographers. The socio‐environmental challenges of a post‐Holocene world invite old narratives about Geography's holistic intellectual contributions to be reprised in the present. These narratives speak well to many geoscientists, social scientists, and decision‐makers outside Geography. However, they risk perpetuating an emaciated conception of reality wherein Earth systems and social systems are seen as knowable and manageable if the ‘right’ ensemble of expertise is achieved. I argue that we need to get out from under the shadow of these long‐standing narratives. Using suggestive examples, I make the case for forms of inquiry across the human‐physical ‘divide’ that eschew ontological monism and that serve to reveal the many legitimate cognitive, moral, and aesthetic framings of Earth present and future. Geography is unusual in that the potential for these forms of inquiry to become normalised is high compared with other subjects. This potential will only be taken advantage of if certain human‐environment geographers unaccustomed to engaging the world of geoscience and environmental policy change their modus operandi.     

Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy

Political geographers have recently focused their attention on the performative nature and imaginative geographies of US security strategies. This work has illuminated a number of mechanisms through which geographical knowledge has been interpreted and reformulated to support specific political agendas. This paper builds upon and develops the insights of these recent studies, arguing that current US security strategies are constructed around a policy of integration, whereby states are encouraged, through a range of measures, to mesh with attitudes and perspectives on the world. It assesses the ways in which these integration strategies are being performed, through an analysis of US National Security Strategy documents, the works of writers such as Kagan and Barnett, and the imaginative geographies and popular geopolitical representations of the US and its enemies. This paper contends that these practices combine to produce the effects that they name, bringing to life an imaginary geography that mirrors and supports the particular logics of the US-led ‘war on terror’.     

Geographers and the Discourse of an Earth Transformed: Influencing the Intellectual Weather or Changing the Intellectual Climate?

This article considers how geographers might choose to respond to many geoscientists' claims that we are entering ‘the age of humans’. These claims, expressed in the concepts of the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and global tipping points, make epochal claims about Earth surface change that are also far‐reaching claims upon Earth's current inhabitants. The scale and scope of their normative implications are extraordinarily grand. After describing the content and wider context for these claims, the history of some geographers' engagement with global change research is sketched and their current contributions described. Wider alterations in the modus operandi of global change scientists seem to offer a perfect opportunity for geographers to demonstrate the intellectual and societal value of their discipline's ‘integrative’ aspirations. However, the article suggests that this opportunity is likely to be used in a rather conservative way that downplays the sort of wide, deep and plural forms of integrative analysis that a post‐Holocene world surely calls for. Such forms exist in geography but are currently not, by and large, feeding into wider debates in global change research about how to understand and influence the future of Earth and humanity. The question is: how might they serve to alter the intellectual climate prevailing in global change research as Future Earth becomes the new umbrella for its next phase of development?     

Is Feminist geography relevant?

Abstract

As the whole point of feminism is to empower women and girls and to improve the circumstances of their lives, most feminist geographers would claim that indeed feminist geography is — or at least aims to be — relevant; they would then hasten to point to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in this claim: what counts as relevant and relevant to whom are complicating questions. The work of feminist geography encompasses teaching, activism and scholarship — all potentially relevant activities. In considering what counts as relevant, I discuss the difficulties of equating relevant with applied and of knowing whether or not our teaching, research and activism will turn out to be relevant. Complicating any claim to relevance is our inability to know, and lack of control over, how others will use our work. Asking ‘relevant to whom?’ points to the difficult truth that what some women view as positive change others may see as harmful to their interests; in this senserelevance is specific to particular contexts, scales and places. At the same time, relevance can enter the intricate web of global interconnections and transcend particular contexts, scales and places. Relevance itself is therefore a geographic concept. Feminist geographers struggle to hold together these sometimes contradictory geographic dimensions of relevance. I close by arguing that the growing body of feminist geography work engages with a range of social issues around the world and certainly has the potential for relevance at a variety of scales. But the relevance question will remain a complex and ambiguous one for feminist geographers.     

Forum: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies

This forum discusses linkages between cultural geography and allied ‘cultural’ disciplines. A symposium on this topic – held at the 2005 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in Armidale – was triggered by the targeted inclusion of geography in a cross‐disciplinary network funded by the Australian Research Council. Although non‐geographers in the network have articulated strong interest in and an enthusiasm for geography, their knowledge of, and everyday participation in its disciplinary travails have been limited. Given this, the papers in the forum review geography's long and dynamic consideration of the relations between place and culture, and raise a set of key issues for geographers to consider: how we might interact with other disciplinary debates about the ‘cultural’, retain distinctiveness as the home of intellectual inquiry around issues of space and place, and leverage opportunities to forge more permanent connections to geographers working not in our traditional institutional settings, but in a range of research centres, schools and disciplinary homes.     

Indigenous Research: Whose Priority? Journeys and Possibilities of Cross‐Cultural Research in Geography

Decolonising research in geography is part of a broader ‘reflexive’ process which continues to question the positivist status of ‘researcher as observer’. This paper contributes to this reflexive turn, drawing on the particular experiences of a cross‐cultural Honours thesis. The paper is pursued through a parallel journey involving a non‐Indigenous researcher (and author of the cross‐cultural Honours thesis) engaging Indigenous research 1 with interpretative insight from an Indigenous adviser or ‘on‐looker’. The methodological difficulties revealed by the parallel journey are emphasised to highlight both the complexities and reflexive possibilities of cross‐cultural research but also to consider potential institutional and pedagogic implications that stem from the experience. One of the substantial findings of the paper is that, by linking Indigenous community priorities to research and coursework, conventional (and often unequal) research relations are minimised and colonising tendencies reduced. By challenging the conventional way that cross‐cultural research is conceived, and the way that institutional practices and research frameworks are implemented, geographers can continue their prolonged and complex efforts at decolonisation of the field and their own practices.     

Australasian Rural Geographies: At the Core,in the Antipodes?

This paper reviews ‘Antipodean’ rural geography research published over the period 2012–2014 inclusive. A broad, inclusive stance was adopted to what should be regarded as Antipodean rural geography. Key publication outlets were identified and scanned for what were deemed to be relevant paper titles and abstracts, then the institutional and disciplinary affiliations of authors, bearing in mind a general concern for ‘rural issues’. The review concentrates on the prominent themes of the recent mining boom and its externalities, new perspectives on agrarian and regional development, and population issues. Australasian rural geographers have not only become adept at ‘writing back’ to the centre but have played leading roles in the intellectual development of the sub‐discipline and cognate areas (e.g. rural sociology). Indeed, at least in the short period covered by this review and in the admittedly selective scope of that survey, Australian and New Zealand rural geographers have been at the forefront in advancing the sub‐discipline internationally. In doing so, they have not only placed the discussion of Australasian rural issues within a global context but have further refined the philosophical and conceptual approaches and tools used. In important respects, then, Australasian rural geographers are very much at the core of the international project of contemporary rural geography. Moreover, they have made – and continue to make – important contributions to the broader discipline of human geography.     

Export-oriented industrialisation,the new international division of labour and the corporate state in the Third World: an exploratory essay on conceptual linkage*

The division of the social sciences into separate disciplines is now largely recognised as spurious. Nowhere is this more so than in what we generally call ‘development studies’. Major contributions to development studies have come, and must continue to come, from economists, political scientists, sociologists and geographers–a pattern that is epitomised in the enormous amount of ‘interdisciplinary readers’ in development studies and the manner in which journals from all social science disciplines publish research on development studies as part and parcel of their regular format. As a political scientist my research in general and my research in development studies in particular has recently been informed, amongst others, by scholars who we might nominally call geographers (especially the work of Clark and Dear, 1984; Clark, 1983; Harvey. 1982; Brookfield, 1975; Peet, 1980; and Rimmer and Forbes, 1982). I am pleased, therefore, to be able to publish a contribution to the current debate on development issues in a journal of geographical studies. It is, indeed, most apposite that the following discussion of the New International Division of Labour should be presented to an audience which, more than most, should appreciate the increasingly significant spatial aspects of this division of labour as it strives to locate and relocate major elements of the global productive processes in different parts of the developing world.     

信息时代的地理学研究——NCGIA对若干理论问题的探索

本文以美国国家基金委员会资助美国国家地理信息与分析中心(NCGIA)进行的瓦伦纽斯(Varenius)研究项目有关信息时代地理学研究的一系列中期研究报告与论文为基础,介绍了中心一些著名学者以地理学家独特的地理哲学思维,对信息时代的地理学研究若干理论问题所作的新探索与阐述,旨在为国内学者了解、追踪地理信息科学的新发展,开展地理信息科学的跨世纪研究提供借鉴。     

Economic Geography as Dissenting Institutionalism: The Embeddedness, Evolution and Differentiation of Regions

This paper endorses recent pleas for an ‘institutional turn’ within economic geography. In particular, it reveals and connects the coherence and distinctiveness of dissenting institutional economics as a way of thinking for economic geography. Economic geographers have recognized this tradition but its continuity and compass is not fully appreciated. To provide such an appreciation, this paper argues that the paradigmatic distinctiveness of dissenting institutionalism rests especially on its recognition that real world economies are embedded, have histories or evolve, and are different. The discussion is based around these three cornerstone principles of embeddedness, evolution and difference. For the future, greater attention to the region as an institution, albeit a complex one, along with greater attention to the synthesis of multi‐dimensional processes that are normally analyzes as separate conceptual categories, is encouraged.     

Pathways of confinement: the legal constitution of carceral spaces in France’s social housing estates

This paper analyzes the enactment and evolution of article L.126 of the Code of Construction and Housing (CCH) in France and demonstrates the careful ways lawmakers have redefined ‘common areas’ in social housing estates as carceral spaces. It argues that such transformation has inserted these areas into a ‘carceral continuum’ that facilitates the arrest, prosecution and confinement of young people ‘hanging out’ in ‘common areas’. Drawing on the work of legal geographers on the co-constitutive relationship of law and space, and urban and carceral geographers exploring the criminalization of urban space and the extension of the carceral state, the paper illustrates how the pathways of confinement are legally constituted. The legal process documented here seeks to highlight the law’s meaning-making capacity and the complex legal practices – by actors and institutions located at multiple scales – which significantly condition urban practices and relationships. The analysis suggests, finally, that law’s constitutive power has limits that are brought to the fore by anti-police violence struggles. Pathways of confinement are, thus, fragile networks dependent upon the ongoing enactments, discourses, and practices by lawmakers and law-enforcers.     

CAN WE GET OLD HERE? SENIORS' PERCEPTIONS OF SEASONAL CONSTRAINTS OF NEIGHBOURHOOD BUILT ENVIRONMENTS IN A NORTHERN,WINTER CITY

Populations around the world are ageing. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed initiatives to encourage cities and regions to become age‐friendly for seniors. This work examines WHO's age‐friendly domains in the context of a northern, winter city in Canada. The urban centre of Edmonton, Alberta experiences both a climate characterized by long, cold winters and a sprawling, built environment with very low population densities. The research found that seniors did report a difference in built environment preferences in summer and winter and that some of those preferences match the elements of the eight WHO domains. However two additional important findings also emerged. First, winter weather was the dominating concept for discussion of the environment regardless of the time of year, and these weather concerns conflated seniors' perceptions of public–private spaces, pointing to the need to carefully examine how this conflation might influence civic participation. Second, participants almost unanimously spoke to the need to make individual adaptations in order to navigate their environments as their mobility decreased. In other words, instead of expecting environmental adaptations to meet their changing needs, seniors accepted and individually managed – to the best of their ability – the ongoing challenges. These findings provide empirical results that can be used to develop supportive built environments in winter cities, with an emphasis on ‘upstream’ health geography and public health imperatives that enable safe and vibrant neighbourhoods to support healthy aging, which has implications for geographers, planners, and public health personnel.     

Trans geographies,embodiment and experience

Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research – subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces – and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces.     

Violence and space: An introduction to the geographies of violence

Violence is a confounding concept. It frequently defies explanation and lacks an agreed upon definition. Yet geographers are well positioned to bring greater conceptual clarity to violence by thinking through its intersections with space. In setting the tone for this special issue on Violence and Space we highlight some of the key lines of flight that have shaped geographical thinking on violence. While there are a significant number of geographers interested in the question of violence, the field of ‘geographies of violence’ remains an emerging area of research that deserves greater attention and a more rigorous examination. By emphasizing the spatiality of violence, this special issue aims to contribute to a more sustained conversation on the violent geographies that shape our daily lives, our encounters with institutions, and the various structures that configure our social organization. This introduction is but an initial sketch of what we believe needs to be a much larger and unfolding research agenda dedicated to understanding violence from a geographical perspective.