The influence of the 'spaces of everyday life' on pregnancy health

Given the recent focus of medical geography on the social influences of health and illness, this paper draws upon a socio‐theoretical framework to show the link between pregnancy health and the spaces of everyday life. The health of pregnant women is becoming increasingly important given that 85 percent of women work during their pregnancy. Employment during pregnancy is consistently linked with good health for infants; however, large discrepancies exist on the effects for employed mothers. This study estimates the health effect of women's employment during pregnancy with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Findings show that women's involvement in paid employment has a beneficial impact for infants compared to women not involved in paid labour. Women who work one job or more per week experience more health problems than women who work less than one job per week. Finally, women who work in male‐dominated and gender‐neutral workspaces experience significantly more prenatal problems than women in female‐dominated workspaces. In conclusion, there is evidence to support that differences in employment status, number of workplaces involved in and gendered workspaces influence the experience of health and illness that are negotiated in the spaces of everyday life.     

Creating social spaces for transnational feminist advocacy: the Canadian International Development Agency, the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women and Philippine women's NGOs

The postauthoritarian democratisation process in the Philippines saw the rise of 'state feminism', which emphasised gender mainstreaming in government development planning. Various international development agencies, particularly the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), played an important role in harnessing the social capital of women's movements and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) for gender and development (GAD) programs in the post‐Marcos era (1986–2002). This period was marked by a decline in the CIDA's direct assistance to women's NGOs in the Philippines and its shift to institutional capability‐building of government agencies, particularly the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW). The article examines how local women's organisations have interpreted, engaged and negotiated transnational discursive practices on 'development', 'social capital', 'capacity‐building' and 'gender mainstreaming.' The CIDA‐funded Women NGOs Umbrella Project and Canadian aid to the Negros Occidental province are used as case studies to illustrate issues and problems in transnational linkages between Philippine women NGOs, national and local governments and Canadian development agencies. Such transnational linkages, embodied in the interesting mix of 'gender mainstreaming' and 'critical engagement' between states, donor agencies and women NGOs, show the interpenetration of the 'global' and the 'local' and the blurring of boundaries between 'state' and 'civil' societies in the course of gender advocacy. At the same time, transnational processes and demands may concurrently create better understanding, as well as conflicts and tensions between state machinery, NGOs and social movements, thus defeating the original intentions of development projects sponsored by international donor agencies.     

Scale frames and counter-scale frames: constructing the problem of environmental injustice

The concept of environmental injustice raises difficult questions about on how best to measure and address environmental inequities across space, and environmental justice politics are permeated by considerable debate over the nature and spatial extent of both problem and possible solutions. This paper theorizes the politics of environmental justice as a politics of scale in order to explore how environmental justice activists respond to the scalar ambiguity inherent in the political concept of environmental justice. With a case study of a controversy over a proposed polyvinylchloride production facility in rural Convent, Louisiana, I develop the concept of scale frames and counter-scale frames as strategic discursive representations of a social grievance that do the work of naming, blaming, and claiming, with meaningful reference to particular geographic scales. The significance of scale is expressed alternatively within these frames as an analytical spatial category, as scales of regulation, as territorial framework(s) for cultural legitimacy, and as a means of inclusion, exclusion and legitimation.     

Anti‐corporate Campaigning and Corporate “Social” Responsibility: Towards Alternative Spaces of Citizenship?1

This paper seeks to bring together debates on anti‐corporate protest with discussions on the nature of corporate responsibility. It does so in order to examine the implications of this interaction between conflicting social forces for the constitution of citizenship on the one hand, and for an understanding of the corporation on the other. I first identify the significance of anti‐corporate activism within the current anti‐globalisation movement. The proclaimed emergence of an era of corporate citizenship is then examined. The spaces of engagement between anti‐corporate activism and corporate social responsibility are constructed through a variety of means, including ethical trading initiatives and corporate codes of conduct. In interpreting these engagements, I identify three contrasting perspectives on the spaces of citizenship that might result. These stress in turn the turbulence of a global civil society, the re‐definition of the national state, and the spatial discontinuities of democracy. I also situate corporate social responsibility practices as part of the discursive narrative of the corporate form, enabling a consideration of the extent to which it is potentially possible to de‐centre the corporation.     

The Terrible Geographicalness of Terrorism: Reflections of a Hazards Geographer

Oppositional engagement with the phenomenon of terrorism by geographers could bring much needed scholarly clarity and balance to the militaristic dominant discourse on terrorism. The hazards subfield within the discipline of geography is germane to research on terrorism, as hazards geographers have been deeply concerned with environmental and technological extremes threatening human life and well‐being. A hazards perspective on terrorism could contribute towards defining terrorism, clarifying the contours of the terrorism discourse, root causes, and response. Insights gleaned from geographical research on social violence, technological and environmental hazards can be eminently applicable to researching various aspects of terrorism. The fundamental point is that terrorism is a deeply geographical phenomenon with potentially disastrous consequences for international peace. Beyond enhancing human safety, the geographical research agenda in terrorism will be part of the struggle to wrest control of the terrorism terminology away from the Western politico‐military elites, to keep them from using it to whip their real or imagined enemies.     

Gay Games: Performing 'community' out from the closet of the locker room

Matters of community, performativity, bodies, space, belonging, oppression, resistance and their relationship to culture are explored in this paper within the context of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games. I begin the paper considering how the everyday meaning and practices of sports produce spaces that are oppressive to many gay men. I then introduce the Gay Games as a site of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and intersex resistance, established to rupture stereotypes of heteronormativity in sports. Drawing upon my own research of Sydney's Gay Games I next explore how willingness to participate amongst self-identifying gay men depends upon how they understood their performance within the context of the event. I conclude the paper by arguing that willingness to participate in Sydney's Gay Games illustrates fundamental issues about the connectedness of bodies and space through the discursive body as space and the material body in space.     

人文地理学研究方法论的进展与"文化转向"以来的流派

欧美发达国家现代人文地理学研究的方法论已成系统。本文以国外文献与著名人文地理学者论点为依据,以现代人文地理学哲学思潮与衍生的研究方法论为基础,探讨了方法论与衍生的研究方法与其拓展的研究领域及其动力关系,追索并总结出前沿研究与研究流派脉络,以及探讨不同流派不断延伸的具体研究内容。     

The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic

ABSTRACT

This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies of African women were targeted in a political campaign that ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in 2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates how NGO policies and projects force performances of black female bodies that exploit their representational and affective labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced displacement from the South—necropolitics in the South.     

Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum

In this article, I examine cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness in the commercial Hollywood film: Girl Interrupted (1999). In contrast to most of the disability studies literature concerned with cultural representation, this article explicitly examines how the spatiality of ‘mad women's’ lives is constructed through film. Drawing on post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives on disability, and on conceptual ideas from the limited social geographic literature concerned with the lives of persons with mental illness, I explore the contradictory cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness constructed through this film. This approach recognizes that representations of ‘mad women’ and their places in society and space involve contradictory, tension-laden relationships between spectator and cultural product, complex discursive negotiations of meaning, and gendered processes of meaning-making, in some ways affirming mad women's lives and in others perpetuating negative stereotypes about women with mental illness and where they belong.     

There's more to landscape than meets the eye: towards inclusive landscape assessment in resource and environmental management

Consideration of aesthetic values in resource and environmental management in North America emerged in the 1960s. It soon became enshrined as 'visual resource management', which emphasized a singular visual notion of aesthetics and an expert‐based approach to assessment. This paper challenges this dominant view. An empirical research study is presented in which a broader conceptualization of the landscape aesthetic and a participatory methodology for assessment were developed and used to explore the landscape experiences of inhabitants of the Cariboo region of British Columbia. Themes, categories and ideas of landscape experience grounded in participant perspectives revealed a richness of landscape and can be seen as an opportunity to supplement and enrich current landscape assessment and 'visual' management. More importantly, this conceptual and methodological reorientation in understanding landscape aesthetic sensibilities both reflects and supports the shift in current thinking within resource and environmental management more generally, from technocratic, state‐centred, expert‐based approaches to locally responsive (place‐based), participatory and inclusive approaches for dealing with environmental concerns and resource‐development issues .     

Spaces of Labor Activism, Mexican‐American Women and the Farm Worker Movement in South Texas Since 1966

This paper studies the farm worker unionization experience and the historical development of Mexican‐American women's activism in South Texas to elaborate more precisely the relationship among socio‐spatial practices, political activism and labor's geography. Drawing upon archival documents and interviews, the paper describes how Mexican‐American farm workers used public space for political activity; however, radical unionization efforts also domesticized other spaces for women's activities. The paper chronicles how Mexican‐American women in South Texas transformed the farm worker center from a "domesticated space" into one of empowerment. In short, women in the union made the farm worker center into a space that challenged both the class‐based structure of larger South Texas society and masculinist practices within the larger farm worker movement. The analysis advances the imperative to better understand how workers "make space" to ensure their own survival. The paper advances the study of labor geography by arguing that working class mobilization reconstitutes dynamic social geographies within laboring communities themselves. In arguing this point, the paper illustrates the limitations of activism based solely on the use of public space and argues for more attention to the significance of other socio‐political spaces for labor mobilization.     

The Practice of Identity and an Irish Sense of Place

Following in the wake of Benedict Anderson's work in particular, cultural geographers and cultural studies scholars have analyzed the nation and nationalism as primarily 'imagined' or abstract entities. Coincidentally, the greatest analytic attention has been given to nationalist representations of place, rather than to the everyday discursive practices constitutive of the nation as lived. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory, in this paper I develop the beginnings of a corporeal approach to the nation. Here the relationship between the practice of identity (the embodiment of gendered and sexualized subjectivities via discursive practice within culturally defined spaces) and an Irish nationalist sense of place is explored. In this approach, analytic considerations of identity and space are collapsed within the shared material and metaphoric medium of the body. Irish nationalism and the nation are analyzed as corporeal materialities via an ethnohistorical focus on late nineteenth-century changes in the political economy of 'peasant' and nationalist bodies. The analysis suggests that a particular matrix of constructions of femininity and masculinity was extended paradigmatically throughout the society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These paradigmatic changes are characterized as a 'heterosexing' of bodies and places linked to economic change and the rise of the confessional state.     

Locating and Dislocating Gender in Rural Zimbabwe: The making of space and the texturing of bodies

In this article the author analyses some of the key discourses and practices that locate the meanings of gender in contemporary rural Zimbabwe and maps their strategic reproduction throughout a century of upheaval and change. In so doing, the author attempts to make several original contributions to an already well-developed literature: he analyses the hitherto largely neglected spatial dimensions of gender relations in this context, argues that the social construction of space and of gendered bodies is interlinked in this region, reinterprets many of the established accounts of corporeality in this context, and develops a Foucauldian inspired notion of power and patriarchy to help explain the constitution of space, bodies and gender relations in this particular arena. The author's detailed empirical analysis of a specific case is of interest to regional specialists but also has broader appeal as an example of the utility of contemporary theory to the investigation of developing world contexts . In attempting to describe the ways in which gender is located in material and discursive space in this context, the author's purpose is to assist those engaged in contemporary feminist struggles in Zimbabwe to ask questions about how gender might be dislocated from these geographical foundations.     

Thinking Through Networks and Their Spatiality: A Critique of the US (Public) War on Terrorism and its Geographic Discourse

Conventional thinking about war is encumbered by an inappropriate geographic paradigm that conceptualizes "targets" in terms of fixed latitudinal/longitudinal locations. This paper reconceptualizes terms such as "war" and "targets" to recognize intangible problems and develop appropriate counter‐terrorist strategies. This requires geographic inquiry focused on spatiality, not on location. We frame our discussion about terrorist networks (Al‐Qaeda in particular) in terms of understanding a network's sense of place and sense of space . The former "places" a network's meeting and recruiting grounds; the latter clarifies the operational dynamics of a network across space, at different scales, from the body to the neighborhood, to the region, and across nations. We argue that the roots of terrorism lie in conditions of disenfranchisement in particular types of places, understanding, however, that the socio‐cultural fabric of a terrorist network such as Al‐Qaeda evolves across space as well as time. Counter‐terrorist strategies should target neither people nor places but rather the conditions that give rise to terrorism; further, "intelligence" should focus on network dynamics, beyond particular people in particular places. We draw from network theories (specifically actor network theory and network approaches in economic sociology) to unravel network dynamics, and we draw from the literature on spatiality to interpret such dynamics in space, over time. We advocate a non‐military engagement with terrorism on both moral and strategic grounds; here we focus on the strategic dimension, the value of which has received scant attention.     

Narrating intersections of gender and dwarfism in everyday spaces

Dwarfs, midgets, even freaks, are among the terms that have been used to label little people. Feminist theorists have argued that discursive identities of women prevent any meaningful essentialised analysis of their experiences. Similarly, disability researchers have argued against generalising the experiences of disabled individuals. This paper explores the intersection of gender and dwarfism through the narratives of four women who are little people. Findings suggest that the ways women, who are little people, negotiate public spaces are affected by discourses of gender, disability and common conceptions of what is physically normal. Furthermore, these discourses have material implications in the everyday lives of these women. A brief historical overview of dwarfism is followed by narratives that describe experiences in public spaces, perceptions of height related to age and capability, gendered spaces and sexual stereotypes, uncomfortable spaces, violations of personal space and transportation. This paper provides a partial perspective on how discourses of dwarfism are manifest in social spaces and the built environment. Despite these significant commonalities that little people shared with other disabled people, there are socio‐spatial experiences that appear to be unique to people with dwarfism .     

从异地空间到异质空间——90后中国女性旅游者身体的自我建构

旅游作为休闲活动为空间中的身体实践提供了特定情境,且伴随技术迭代,旅游者可“置身”于地理实体空间与数字虚拟空间。本文选取90后中国女性为研究对象,探究其身体于旅游异地空间和虚拟异质空间中的自我建构;采用深度访谈法并对访谈文本进行扎根理论分析,研究发现：①90后女性具身化模型由内外两个维度构成,身体唤醒、身体建构等构成内部维度,场域空间、自他认知等构成外部维度;②尽管90后女性逐步唤起身体的自我意识,打破女性身体在消费主义影响下产生的“商品化”“神话化”现象,但其身体仍受到日常审美标准与他者监视的压迫。     

A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan's law of the media

The social implications of GIS have been debated over the past five years among scholars in several disciplines. GIS have been either conceived by practitioners as value‐free, neutral tools for problem‐solving or castigated by critical social theorists as socially biased technologies serving only corporate and state interests. Neither of these polarized views is very helpful in understanding the complex relationship between GIS and society. This paper argues that GIS are increasingly becoming media for communicating various crucial social and environmental information to the general public. By reconceptualizing GIS as media, the paper conducts a detailed tetradic analysis on the social implications of GIS using Marshall McLuhan's law of media. The analysis reveals the paradoxical and ambivalent nature of GIS technology. To make GIS fulfill democratic ideals in society, this paper calls for a shift of perspective, from viewing them as instruments for problem‐solving to viewing them as media for communication. This shift from instrumental to communicative rationality enables us to examine more critically and holistically how space, people and environment have been represented, manipulated and visualized in GIS and thus promotes a more critical and democratic GIS practice .     

Lives Versus Livelihoods? Deepening the Regulatory Debates on Soil Fumigants in California's Strawberry Industry

Soil fumigants have been critical to the California strawberry industry's success, but they are also highly toxic to farmworkers and nearby residents. This article traces recent regulatory debates over restrictions on their use which were cast as a contest of lives and livelihoods: activists emphasized the danger of the chemicals while industry emphasized their necessity. Activists’ claims were typical of environmental justice battles that focus on disproportionate toxic exposure to marginalized populations, but I problematize that they downplayed industry concern with farmworker jobs. Drawing on Marx, Foucault and recent literature on surplus populations and disposability, I suggest that the analytical separation of lives and livelihoods is complicit in the making of disposable workers such as California farmworkers. Strategically, upholding the separation was a missed opportunity to leverage the strawberry industry's new‐found concern with farmworker employment and push for measures that protect current and future farmworker health.