Blogging geographies

This paper responds to the call for research on the use of new information technologies in higher education contexts. This was done through a case study on the use of blogs in an advanced seminar class. The paper argues that the use of blogs provided a way of gauging how students were coming to terms with the course material and how they were engaging with the course texts. Intertextuality was used as a method of understanding how students engaged with the course. The analysis was based on blog postings, student comments, course evaluations and the instructor's reflective journal.     

For post-statist geographies

This article critically investigates past and contemporary treatments of the state within geographical scholarship. We propose that there is a silent statism within geography that has shaped it in ways that limit geographical imaginations. Statism, herein, refers to a pervasive, historically contingent organisational logic that valourises and naturalises sovereign, coercive, and hierarchical relationships, within and beyond state spaces. We argue that although the explicit, colonial statism that characterised early geography is past, traces of statism nonetheless underpin much of the discipline. While political geography has increasingly critiqued ‘state-centrism’, we argue that it is essential to move beyond critique alone. Using anarchist state theory to critically build upon perspectives in geography, we argue that statism is intellectually and politically problematic and should be recast as an active constituent of unequal social relations. In turn, we outline five core myths that form its logical foundations. In concluding, three initial areas in which post-statist geographies can make inroads are identified: interrogating intersections between statism and other power relations; constructing post-statist epistemologies and methodologies; and addressing how the state is represented in geographical work.     

Feminist digital geographies

At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the resounding whiteness and heteronormativity of these theoretical origins. In the second half of the article, we trace new horizons of contemporary digital geographies scholarship that engage queer and critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, and black and queer code studies. These theoretical moves give voice to longstanding silences and are indispensable to a political and ethical digital geographic scholarship and praxis, as well as to re-making our technologies and ourselves as digital subjects.     

Changing children's geographies

This keynote explores the changing nature of children's geographies as an academic project. It proceeds in four parts. Part 1 considers the shift away from research on children's spatial cognition which envisaged the child in largely biological terms, and contemplates contemporary efforts to rework the nature/culture dualism. Part 2 traces the incorporation of new social studies of childhood into geography, emphasising the importance of children's voices, their positioning within axes of power, and the need for quantitative and qualitative methods. Part 3 explores how feminist research led to interest in parents, educators and other actors/institutions which shape, and are shaped by, children's lives. Part 4 ponders what children's geographies might add to, and learn from, broader interdisciplinary debates, and the benefits and pitfalls of research impact. The conclusion argues that a well-informed appreciation of sub-disciplinary history provides a strong vantage point from which to engage with new ways of thinking.     

Interstitial and Abyssal geographies

Against the backdrop of the contemporary crisis of faith in modern reasoning, work on islands and with island cultures has come to the fore in the development of alternative, non-Eurocentric, non-modern, ways of being and knowing. Much attention has surrounded a wide range of critical work associated with the ‘ontological’ or the ‘relational’ turn, highlighting interstitial, entangled, post- and more-than-human creative encounters of becoming. This paper examines the emergence of what we call ‘abyssal thought’, a related but distinctly different analytical approach drawing largely from critical Black studies. Central to abyssal approaches is the understanding of the world as ontologically inseparable from its violent forging through antiblackness. In putting coloniality at the heart of the modernist problematic, abyssal work turns to the Caribbean in particular as a gateway, door or ‘punctum’, a space of ‘abyssal geographies’, inviting a deconstruction or unmaking of the world. Exploring how, this paper draws out three key aspects of the abyssal analytic: (1) the abyssal ‘subject’ forged through the ontological violence of the making of the modern world, (2) the abyssal as a refusal of impositions of spatial and temporal fixities, and (3) the methodological approach of ‘paraontology’. Thus, its key concerns are those of refusal, deconstruction and ‘suspension’ rather than of creative becoming. In distinction to relational ontologies of interstital island work, the desire is not to save or to remake understandings of the human and the world but rather to negate them.     

Intersectionality in feminist geographies

This paper introduces a special themed section that arose from an International Conference on Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality: Places, Identities and Knowledges, held in 2016 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Six scholars of Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States seek to deal in five short papers with the intersectional dynamics of power structures and the central role of place within them. Here we situate the developments of intersectionality in feminist geographies in relation to the role of place and space in constituting intersectional relations, the relevance of context for the development of intersectionality and the use of different methodologies for research on it.     

Agamben's geographies of modernity

This paper examines the geographical underpinnings of Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereign power. Reflecting on Agamben's attempt in developing a unified theory of power, I highlight the eminently spatial nature of two of the key concepts that mark his argument: the structure of the ban and the camp as a paradigm of modern politics. In particular, I analyse how the spatialisation of biopolitics finds in the camp the ideal site for the definition of endless caesurae in the body of the nation, and for the definition of population as a merely spatial concept. I claim, therefore, that the biopolitical state machine activated by the recent war on terror is not only an autopoietic machine, but that it is also at the origin of new geographies of exception that are imposing a new nomos on global politics: a nomos within which decision is produced by a permanent state of exception, and where law exists only through its endless strategic (dis)application.     

Prosaic geographies of stateness

Despite long-standing calls to rethink the state ‘as a social relation’, reified understandings that view the state as a differentiated institutional realm separate from civil society are notably persistent in academic and political debate. By contrast, this paper focuses on the myriad ways in which everyday life is permeated by the social relations of stateness, and vice versa. The paper reviews the conceptual difficulties in defining ‘the state’ and suggests that these can be addressed in part through a focus on the mundane practices that give rise to ‘state effects’. It considers how the concept of prosaics, based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, might provide a fruitful approach for studying such practices, their geographies and the geographies of state effects. A case study of the governance of anti-social behaviour in the UK is used to show the potential application of this approach in empirical research. The paper concludes with some reflections on possible future avenues of research.     

Feminist geographies and intersectionality

In this intervention, I raise questions for feminist geographers who use intersectionality in their work. First, I invite feminist geographers to consider their expertise in relation to the significance of locality and the role of social context as a crucial factor in intersectional analyses. Second, I query the focus on multiple axes of difference and question the need to focus on specific axes over others and how this may be resolved. Finally, the issue of methods in research about intersectionality is explored and I reflect upon research with ethnic and religious minority young people that adopted an approach informed by intersectionality in order to provide a focus for this discussion.