OF BOUNDARIES,PLACES, AND SITUATIONS

Thomas F. Gieryn's Truth-Spots: How Places Make Us Believe presents eight case studies to support his historical-sociological thesis that “Places … have agency and exert a force of their own on the direction and pace of knowledge and belief” (18). Gieryn adds a new angle to a century-old discourse on the social construction of truth: the emplacement of credibility in narrated material locations. Throughout his career, Gieryn has contributed extensively to the spatial and placeful analysis of knowledge and social power: from advancing the concept of discursive “boundary-work” in the 1980s, to a refined method of “cultural cartography” in the 1990s, and in the twenty-first century, toward investigations of places: defined as meaning-enriched material locations. He has now advanced “truth-spots” as a type of place that credibilizes truth-claims. This essay reviews the key concepts in the career of this historical sociologist of scientific knowledge, through a mapping of Gieryn's own trajectory within the arc of a long pragmatist tradition in US social science. I shall use Gieryn's own case studies to test two key claims in his account of how place operates in the social-cultural construction of belief: (1) The model of “place” that Gieryn proposed in 2000, and has used consistently ever since (termed here a “Gieryn-place”), and (2) Gieryn's claim that features of “truth-spots” exhibit an observably independent (“agentic”) effect on the credibility of claims made there. I argue that both Gieryn-places and truth-spots suffer from incomplete specification of the ways in which people attach meanings to locations; of the boundaries of places; and of the sites of conscious encounter with places. They suffer also from his own boundary-work to exclude imaginary, cultural, and virtual spaces from his conception of place. This essay argues that a credible account of how place operates in/as history will require a focus on situation and situatedness, drawing on the pragmatist tradition of the Thomas Theorem. The concept of situation completes the circuit between meaning-production and the attachment of meaning to places and opens a gate for historical investigation, across the boundary between imagined, virtual, and conceptual spaces, and lived, material embodied places.     

Terror and Territory

Abstract: While geographical aspects of the “war on terror” have received extensive discussion, the specifically territorial aspects have been less well explored. This article engages with the relation between territory and terror through three main angles. First, the relation between terrorist training camps and the absence of sovereign power over territory in particular places is examined through a broadening of Agamben's notion of a “space of exception”. Second, the portrayal of al‐Qaeda and militant Islam more generally as a deterritorialised organisation is interrogated, noting the territorial aspects of its operations. Third, the territorial responses are studied, particularly looking at the way the international legal term of territorial integrity, with its dual meanings of territorial preservation and territorial sovereignty is under increased threat. This is illustrated with a study of Afghanistan and Iraq and particularly through an analysis of the 2006 war in Lebanon.     

Mapuche youth between exclusion and the future: protest,civic society and participation in Chile

In Chile, indigenous Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand, parental aspirations and neo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective and social ties to a racialized and often stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. The paper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture [Johnson-Hanks, J. 2002. “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 865–880] to explore the contradictions facing youth in transitions to adulthood [Jeffrey, C. 2010. “Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of Life.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 496–505.] and to consider the spatial–territorial dynamics through which these contractions are expressed [Smith, S. H. 2012. “‘In the Heart, There's Nothing’: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory.” Transactions of the IBG 38 (4): 572–585]. The paper explores young indigenous rural secondary students' understandings of their life trajectories and socio-political conjunctures. The paper shows that although indigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding their futures [cf. Kraftl, P. 2008. “Young People, Hope and Childhood-Hope.” Space and Culture 11 (2): 81–92], these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racial exclusions, and the emotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties to indigenous communities and family members. Drawing on one year's in-depth qualitative research, the paper outlines the beliefs, practices and identities of rural Mapuche youth subjects caught between parents' experiences, and the Chile they want to inhabit with jobs, status and opportunity. The paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singular moments of modern historical ‘events', as they have tended to be construed in the previous literature. Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least in contexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs.     

Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.     

Obedient children and reckless rebels: Jabotinsky's youth politics and the case for authoritarian leadership, 1931–1933

This article traces the pivotal role that ideas about “youth” and “generationhood” played in Vladimir Jabotinsky's political strategy as leader of the Union of Revisionist Zionists and its youth movement, Brit Yosef Trumpeldor (Betar). During the leadership struggle within the movement between 1931 and 1933, Jabotinsky believed that he could draw upon debates sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” in order to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The article demonstrates that Jabotinsky's deliberately ambiguous and provocative constructions of “youth” and “generationhood” within the movement's party literature and in articles addressed to the Polish Jewish public, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement's regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.     

Eastern Asia's revitalization of the state ideal through maritime territorial disputes

In the midst of globalization and other processes that redefine state-territory-sovereignty relationships, reassertion of traditional state ideals is common. This article highlights one venue through which this takes place. Building on Stuart Elden's distinction between territorial sovereignty and territorial preservation as two aspects of “territorial integrity,” among other conceptual guides, the article posits that strong emphasis on territorial preservation through territorial disputes in effect works to counteract territorial sovereignty's slippage. Analysis of states' semi-official prosecution of five maritime territorial disputes in eastern Asia shows various rhetorical strategies that prop up traditional notions of unbreakable bonds between state, territory, and sovereignty. These include obscuring state historicity and naturalizing the nation-state relationship, using territory to represent historical victimhood and sanctifying state territory, and using the disputes to find a place for the state within the international state system. The analyzed territorial disputes include the southern Kurils/Northern Territories (Russia vs. Japan), Dokdo/Takeshima (Korea/Japan), Senkaku/Diaoyutai (Japan/China), Paracels (China/Vietnam), Spratlys (Vietnam/Philippines/China, especially).     

State Stigmatisation in Urban Turkey: Managing the “Insurgent” Squatter Dwellers in Dikmen Valley

This paper contributes to the accounts of territorial stigmatisation by examining the state role in it in the case of Turkey, a country that suffers from growing state power. The existing debates are mainly restricted to its function as an economic strategy paving the way for capital accumulation through devaluing working-class people and places. Drawing on textual analysis of political speeches, local newsletters and mainstream national newspapers and fieldwork material that include interviews and observations in Dikmen Valley where some squatter communities mobilised against the state-imposed urban transformation project, I demonstrate that state conceptualisation of “problem people” targets the “insurgent” rather than the “unprofitable” groups. Stigma in urban settings functions in inciting the desire to meet the patterns deemed appropriate by the state, rather than the market. Moving from that, I argue that stigma is used as a state-led political strategy, which is integral to the growing authoritarianism in Turkey.     

PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE: THE CARNIVAL AT GREENHAM COMMON*

In this paper I examine reactions to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. I argue that the media, local and government responses to the Greenham women reveal geographical assumptions about “normality.” The peace women, by living away from home, on the edge of a military (and therefore masculine) establishment challenged accepted patriarchal understandings of “women's place” and were thus described as “out of place.” More specifically, the women were referred to in terms of hygiene, inadequate culinary ability, sexuality and hysteria. Each of these implies a gendered form of disorder in which social, cultural and geographical boundaries have been transgressed. These reactions are placed within the context of Bakhtin's formulations of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism. I suggest that the women, through their highly visible opposition to a patriarchal military establishment, represent a threat to neatly bounded official culture which finds its geographical expression in the formal territories of the courtroom and the air base. In conclusion this illustration is placed in the wider context of cultural/political protest. I argue that transgression, while serving to reveal normally assumed hegemonic landscapes, is restrained by already existing boundaries.     

The “Battle of Seattle” revisited: Or,seven views of a protest-zoning state

Increasingly, the expression of dissent at major events is controlled with a territorial strategy – it is banned from some areas and confined to others. One of the more notable uses of this strategy was in Seattle in 1999 during the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization. After widespread unrest forced the cancellation of the conference's first day of events, the City of Seattle erected what it termed a “restricted access” zone, and what its critics termed a “no protest” zone. I use the Seattle events to consider what it means for the state to zone the expression of dissent in such a fashion. I extend and complicate Mitchell's notion of a “dialectic of public space” by outlining seven different perspectives from which one can view the protest-zoning state. This multiplicative nature of the state, I suggest, provides yet more reason to be skeptical of state efforts to confine dissent. Because the state is inherently a contested object, it must remain susceptible to robust discussion of its practices.     

Spiritual geopolitics of Georgia's territorial integrity

This paper represents a study of the geopolitical reasoning of the Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) and its leader Patriarch Ilia II regarding the question of Georgia's territorial integrity. Does the GOC's territorial discourse complement or challenge Georgia's territorial nationalism? The empirical analysis of the geopolitical discourses of Patriarch Ilia II in the early 1990s and in the wake of the 2008 August (Russia-Georgia) War shows a complicated relationship between spiritual and secular geopolitical discourses on Georgia's territorial integrity. Ilia's spiritual geopolitics is neither dissident nor entirely complementary. The Patriarch's definition of Georgia's territorial integrity eschews the broadly accepted formulation of “Russian occupation” within Georgia and in its place, insufficient faith and religiosity within the Georgian society take a more prominent place in the explanation of the problem's origins. Ilia II defines the religion and the GOC as the unifying factor, spiritually, territorially, and politically, of the rival parties and alienated peoples and territories. The church's canonical territoriality, rather than the state's sovereign territoriality, plays the key object of concern in the Patriarch's geopolitical discourse. However, Ilia II frames this narrow institutional interest of the church as the basis for the nation's territorial unification. By advocating more narrowly for the GOC's canonical jurisdiction across the entire disputed territories, rather than actively embracing secular anti-Russian geopolitical narratives, the church simultaneously stands outside of the territorial conflict, taking a seemingly neutral position, and reinforces the territorial claim of the Georgian state. By distinguishing and problematizing the role of GOC's canonical territoriality in the question of Georgia's sovereign territoriality, the paper concludes that the GOC is a territorial power in its own right, not merely a spiritual wing of the state of Georgia.     

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti-Trafficking in Nepal

In this paper, I explore how the diverse labour migration practices of people who challenge their state’s restrictive policies produce a form of stigma that extends from people to the places where they reside. Drawing on the findings of Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Nepal, I demonstrate how people residing in one such place attempt to undo stigma by adopting diverse practices amidst restrictive anti-trafficking and migration policies. I reveal a novel practice of prospective labour migrants negotiating and receiving money from their choicest mobility facilitators to assist their unauthorised labour migration. This exchange of money potentially criminalises prospective labour migrants, their family members, unlicensed and licensed recruitment agents, community leaders, anti-traffickers, government officials, hotel owners, transport service providers, and airport immigration officials as traffickers. Underscoring the collateral damage of anti-trafficking in Nepal, I assert that the exchange of money to facilitate unauthorised migration expands the remit of criminalisation of citizens as “traffickers”.     

World Making,Critical Pedagogies,and the Geographical Imagination: Where Youth Work Meets Participatory Research

Renewed interest in the critical geographies of education has raised productive yet under‐examined synergies with reflections taking place among radical youth work and participatory research practitioners. In particular, such intersections point to important ways that the geographical imagination might advance a critical yet creative means of learning through the living material forces of everyday worlds. This paper examines this common ground through a collaborative, London‐based case study exploring young people's sense of home and belonging in the inner‐city. It argues that cross‐overs between the praxis of participatory research and youth work offer generative potential to act alongside young people in the production of autonomous geographical knowledges. Specifically, the case is made for prioritising an imaginative, experiential and intersubjective pedagogical process of “world making”, as an alternative to practices that intervene in, act upon and ultimately “other” the everyday lives of young people.     

Mapping Illegality: The i‐Map and the Cartopolitics of “Migration Management” at a Distance

Cartographies for “migration management” are part and parcel of controversial border practices far from conventional borderlines. Focusing on the i‐Map, this study renders how the European Union's current practices of remote border control are visualised among migration policy circles and expert security actors through a “mapping migration matrix”. The lines portraying migration flows in recurrent maps generate a shared expert language and a common geographical imaginary reinforcing practices of contention and classification of those assumed to move toward the European Union irregularly. It is argued that illegality is constructed in ways that target border crossing long before any border is crossed, making someone illegal at the very moment and place where s/he might decide to migrate. This paper analyses the cartopolitics and limits of cartographic expertise in the production of a “routes thinking” able to legitimise extra‐territorial interceptions and practices of remote border control.     

PLACE AND SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE: SOME LESSONS AND REFLECTIONS*

The “localities debate,” stimulated by the Economic and Social Research Council's “Changing Urban and Regional Systems” initiative, was conducted in the pages of Antipode and Society and Space at a length that showed scant regard for emerging environmental sensitivities. Much of it involved politically contentious claims and increasingly exhausted theory; it resolved very little and in that sense was little more than a storm in a pretty familiar pudding basin. A later flirtation with postmodernism simply pushed aside questions of explanation while raising the political stakes as celebration of the differences between places became the order of the day. Nonetheless, important issues emerge from or relate to that debate, and we draw on our experiences to comment on three of them: (i) agents, structures, the production of space and the material bases of place: some issues of theory; (ii) the production of places, people's attachment to place, and place-based political strategies: some issues of practice; (iii) localities, postmodernism and the difference that place makes: is the regressive turn to postmodernism as approach avoidable?     

'Creating a Place to Belong': Girls' and Boys' Hut-building as a Site for Understanding Discourses on Childhood and Generational Relations in a Norwegian Community

The empirical focus of this article is children's huts as a particular place for constructions of identities and peer relations among children in a Norwegian local community. Building huts can be seen as children's construction of special places during childhood. Often these places are seen as secret places, reflecting a separate 'children's culture' developed within a particular microcosm. I argue that the social practices developed among girls and boys are related in complex ways to local cultural practices and the construction of gendered generational relations in the community. The title 'Creating a place to belong' refers not only to children's attachment to particular physical places, but also to children's place within a field of age-related as well as inter-generational relations.     

On the Stickiness of Territorial Stigma: Diverging Experiences in Amsterdam’s Most Notorious Neighbourhood

In Western Europe, a select number of “ghettos” are at the forefront of public anxieties about urban inequality and failed integration. These notorious neighbourhoods at the bottom of the moral spatial order are imagined as different and disconnected from the rest of the city. This paper examines how residents in Amsterdam Bijlmer, a peripheral social housing estate long portrayed as the Dutch ghetto, experience the symbolic denigration of their neighbourhood. Interviews show that all residents are highly aware of the negative racial, cultural and material stereotypes associated with their neighbourhood. However, these negative stereotypes are not equally felt: territorial stigma “sticks” more to some residents than others and substantial inequalities are observed in who carries the burden of renegotiating blemish of place. Differential engagement with stigma depends on how residents’ identity and the materiality of their surroundings intersect with stigmatising narratives of place.     

The spaces of Australian capitalism: Making “place” out of “space” in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

Radical geographers have emphasised the centrality of class relations to the production of social space. In particular, this literature makes the distinction between the homogenising “abstract space” of global capital and meaningful, specific social “places.” The tension between the two expresses itself in spatial forms, creating the landscapes of capitalism. This political-economic conception of space and place is generally under-explored in the Australian context, particularly regarding the highly important post-World War II Long Boom period. This article interrogates the spatiality of this epoch through David Ireland's award-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. Rooted in the notion of literary geography, which argues that literature “knows” things about the space of the society into which it is born, the article argues that Ireland portrays and handles in a particularly vivid and powerful way the dialectical articulations, simultaneously contradictory and intertwined, of space and place in the spatiality of Australian capitalism. Whilst he ultimately concludes that the powers of capital's abstract space dominate, he nevertheless demonstrates that through explicitly spatial projects of place-making, workers can attempt to impose their own political economy on the spatial form.     

Children's nomination of friendly places in an urban neighbourhood in Shiraz,Iran

This study investigates how children conceive of and value the outdoor environment as a child-friendly one with particular reference to an urban neighbourhood in Shiraz, Iran. It utilizes Chatterjee's (2005. “Children's Friendship with Place: A Conceptual Inquiry.” Children, Youth and Environments 15 (1): 1–26) place friendship construct to find out friendly places and their attributes from children's points of view. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 106 middle childhood children. Findings suggest that a child-friendly neighbourhood is made up of diverse places that children use to meet their different needs. However, formal and informal open spaces, private precincts, and streets in the neighbourhood afforded highest contributions to place friendship.