Hope’s Work

This article, given as the Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture on 28 August 2019, argues that hope can be found through training an attentiveness to the social world in troubled times. Hope then is an empirical question and a matter of documenting hopeful possibilities that often otherwise remain unremarked upon. In this sense “worldly hope” draws possibilities that are manifested in the social world and stands in contrast to cruel forms of optimism or an unrealistic faith in future progress. An argument for such an approach to hope and trouble is developed through two examples drawn from contemporary London life, namely, the silent walks at Grenfell Tower in West London and a community arts project in Bellingham, South East London.     

Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth

This study examines the recollections of medieval English men, found in proof–of–age inquests, regarding their participation in the rite of the purification of women after childbirth. Because the rite of purification was reserved to women, scant attention has been paid to how this rite and the customs surrounding it played in the lives of medieval men. These men’s recollections situate postpartum purification within the festivities celebrating the birth of a man’s heir. For them, it is a public event celebrating paternity and lineage, and a forum for the negotiation of social relationships.     

‘It’s a man’s world’: Recent Studies of Male Representation of the Female in the Middle Ages

Blamires, Alcuin (ed.) Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. An Anthology of Medieval Texts Baldwin, John W. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 Kay, Sarah and Rubin, Miri (eds) Framing Medieval Bodies Lomperis, Linda and Stanbury, Sarah (eds) Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature Burns, E. Jane Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature Krueger, Roberta L. Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance Cazelles, Brigitte The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century Meale, Carol M. (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500 Cherewatuk, Karen and Wiethaus, Ulrike (eds) Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistology Genre     

Tracing children’s politics

This article sets out to conceptualize children’s political agency and the spaces of children’s politics by addressing children’s politics in official settings and everyday contexts. The study is based on research concerning child and youth policies and the politics played out in children’s everyday life practices. To demonstrate how childhood policies typically seek to involve children in politics, we discuss recent legislative developments related to building a parliamentary apparatus for children’s participation in Finland. We propose that not all children are able to, or willing to, participate actively in this kind of political action, and that all issues important to children can not be processed through (semi)official arenas such as school councils, children’s parliaments and civic organizations. Thus, we agree with scholarship portraying children as political agents also in their everyday environments and on their own terms. To further conceptualize these mundane politics, we propose a model for identifying different modes and spaces of children’s agency in terms of political involvement and political presence. We conclude by discussing the challenges of studying everyday political geographies in childhood.     

‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.     

Peter Berger’s Early Work on Baha’i Studies

At the very beginning of his academic career, Peter Berger made an important contribution to the sociological study of the Babi and Baha’i religions. This article provides an overview of (1) Berger’s early ideas in the sociology of religion; (2) his overall analysis of the Babi and Baha’i movements; (3) his account of the contemporary Iranian Baha’i community; and (4) his impressions of the American Baha’i community of the time. A brief discussion of the continuing value of Berger’s Babi‐Baha’i study in the Sociology of Religion and in Baha’i Studies is also offered.     

Alternative Cartographies of the British Women’s Movement

Books reviewed in this article: Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 Peter Gordon and David Doughan, with a foreword by Sheila Rowbotham, Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations 1825–1960 Sybil Oldfield, Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550–1900: A Select Annotated Bibliography     

An angel’s power in a bishop’s body: the making of the cult of Aubert of Avranches at Mont-Saint-Michel

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Benedictine monks of Mont-Saint Michel promoted the cult of Aubert of Avranches, the abbey’s legendary co-founder, and used his newly rediscovered relics as a means of accessing the patronage and power of the elusive, incorporeal archangel Michael, the community’s other founder. Texts, images, the strategic placement of Aubert’s relics throughout the abbey church reinforced the association between these two saints, rendering Aubert more powerful and Michael more accessible. This local study of the interaction between these two cults at the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel suggests that medieval monastic uses of relics were more creative and varied than is generally recognized and that relationships between saints within a single cultic environment could be extremely complex and unstable.     

Children’s Diminishing Play Space: a Study of Inter-generational Change in Children’s Use of their Neighbourhoods

A survey of 421 children and 165 parents from three suburban primary schools in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia has provided information on the nature and location of children’s play, both at present and a generation ago. Although modern children have greater access to individual transport in the form of higher bicycle ownership, other constraints appear to have restricted their play space. These include the availability of home-based leisure technology such as computer games and greater parental restriction on where children might play. The results of the survey would appear to indicate that children prefer to play at home. However, analysis of the children’s stories and drawings suggests that, given the chance, a majority of children would choose to engage in outdoor activities in the bush, in parks or on the beach. Their actual choice of play space may thus be determined by a knowledge of parental constraints.     

Individual Accessibility Revisited: Implications for Geographical Analysis in the Twenty‐first Century

Analytical methods for evaluating accessibility have been based on a spatial logic through which the impedance of distance shapes mobility and urban form through processes of locational and travel decision making. These methods are not suitable for understanding individual experiences because of recent changes in the processes underlying contemporary urbanism and the increasing importance of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in people's daily lives. In this paper we argue that analysis of individual accessibility can no longer ignore the complexities and opportunities brought forth by these changes. Further, we argue that the effect of distance on the spatial structure of contemporary cities and human spatial behavior has become much more complicated than what has been conceived in conventional urban models and concepts of accessibility. We suggest that the methods and measures formulated around the mid‐twentieth century are becoming increasingly inadequate for grappling with the complex relationships among urban form, mobility, and individual accessibility. We consider some new possibilities for modeling individual accessibility and their implications for geographical analysis in the twenty‐first century.