Building an inclusive peace is an uneven socio-spatial process: Colombia's differential approach

Colombia is struggling to implement what is far and away the world's most inclusive peace accord. As such, it is a useful case for thinking about what peace means, how it means different things to different people, and how to build peace across difference. Geographers widely agree that peace is an ongoing spatial process that varies across time and space, but have paid less attention to how it varies across groups within space. Social inequalities like race, gender, and sexuality are spatialized. They operate in and through space in interlocking ways, and looking at inclusion issues can strengthen understandings of how peace space is made. Attempts to build more inclusive peaces can also be strengthened by understanding and addressing the uneven socio-spatial processes involved.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

Producing Privatization: Re‐articulating Race,Gender, Class and Space

Abstract: This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal‐type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class.     

Immigrant "Illegality" as Neoliberal Governmentality in Leadville, Colorado

Abstract:  In this paper, I frame immigrant "illegality" as a local-scale technique of neoliberal governmentality. Drawing on recent work of anthropologists, I present illegality as a racialized, spatialized social condition which operates as governmentality by marginalizing and criminalizing immigrants, loosening the US border and forcing it into local spaces, and impacting immigrants' everyday lives and mobility. The paper then draws on a case study of Leadville, Colorado, to illustrate the utility of this framework. In Leadville, we see how through illegality neoliberalism seeps through scales. Illegality disciplines immigrant labor in service of the neoliberal order, turns all residents into surveillers of immigrants' subordinate sociospatial position, and masks contradictions within neoliberalism that arise particularly at the local scale. I argue that conceptualizing illegality as a governmentality technique provides a powerful tool for understanding changing state spatiality, especially ways in which neoliberalism is diffused and embedded into local economic, political, and social processes.     

Rights to the rescue? The promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights and the rise of the Mexican security state

This article demonstrates how the promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights in Mexico has furthered a conservative agenda of state securitization. To do so, it presents a discourse analysis of national media reports focused on the story of Eufrosina Cruz, a Zapotec woman who became the figurehead for state-led initiatives to promote Indigenous women's rights. It argues that a colonial rescue narrative constructed through Cruz's figure helped generate new hegemonic discourses of gendered indigeneity that portrayed Indigenous peoples' alternative political practices and spaces as anti-democratic and illegal. In an era where advancements in party democracy were linked to processes of state securitization, these categorizations helped justify new forms of state intervention into Indigenous peoples' lives. By exploring how rights initiatives were discursively constructed through racialized, spatialized and gendered constructions of indigeneity, this article contributes to a critical geography of indigeneity within political geography.     

A SPATIAL HEDONIC APPROACH ON LAND USE CHANGE ANTICIPATIONS*

ABSTRACT This paper estimates land use conversion anticipation when zoning is the primary tool of land use regulation. Extending the Capozza and Helsey model (1989) to the case of uncertainty in future land use zoning, a spatialized hedonic model is proposed to estimate such anticipation phenomena at a fine level (cadastral unit). Estimations use Mixed Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) techniques with a two‐stage model that links agricultural and developable land markets. This allows for mapping varying spatial parameters that measure anticipation effects within the theoretical framework. Results confirm the influence of anticipation on agricultural land prices in the Provence region. Moreover, the level of data spatialization allows us to take into account intra‐municipalities' heterogeneity of land use conversion anticipation.     

Beyond the regional lifeworld against the global systemworld: towards a relational –scalar perspective on spatial–economic development

Recent writings in economic geography have questioned the way the literature has featured the regional scale in discussing issues of innovation and economic competitiveness, and called for a different conceptualization of scale. This paper takes up the challenge to go beyond what is called the 'regional gaze', by presenting a critical review of the regionalist literature and outlining an alternative approach. The critique of the 'regional gaze' is developed in two steps: first, by discussing the influence of strategic management discourse; and second, by invoking the twin concepts of lifeworld–systemworld. This critical account results in identifying various windows for elaborating an alternative conceptualization of the relationship between economic development and space. A first alternative is found in the dimension of the 'non–local' or 'extra–local', but the significance of these notions is considered to be limited. Drawing on recent work on scaling and the 'politics of scale', a relational–scalar approach is proposed that focuses on the question of how scalar qualities are socially produced and contested. What is called for is a geographical imagination that sees innovation and economic competitiveness as braced on spatialized networks rather than bounded territories scaled at the regional level. An illustration of how such a perspective may be elaborated is found in recent discussions on the concept of 'global production networks'.     

Spaces of labour control: comparative perspectives from Southeast Asia

This paper seeks to identify the spatialized dimensions of labour control in sites of rapid and recent industrialization in Southeast Asia. Using a comparative analysis of locations in Penang (Malaysia), Batam (Indonesia) and Cavite/Laguna (the Philippines), it is argued that the construction and control of space has been used to enhance control over the working body, and, in particular, to contain labour organization, unionization and collective bargaining. Three broader arguments are made. First, that labour geographies need to be cognizant of the spatialized politics of labour beyond a narrow focus on the trade union movement. Second, that space is a potent tool in labour control and must be explicitly considered alongside the identity–based control strategies and institutional structures that have usually informed studies of labour regimes in newly industrializing contexts. Finally, a comparative perspective on local labour markets, and control regimes in particular, shows that the ways in which space is constructed and controlled differs between contexts, implying that universal judgements on the relevance or importance of particular arenas or spaces for labour politics should be reserved.     

The Social Production of Latin@ Visibilities and Invisibilities: Geographies of Power in Small Town America

This paper explores the sociospatial dynamics unfolding in Perry, a rural Iowa town that has been facing rapid change since the 1990s due to growing Latin@ settlement. We focus on what we call the social production of Latin@ visibilities and invisibilities: spatialized practices by individuals, families, communities, and institutions that render different Latin@ groups visible or invisible, with repercussions for survival, community integration, and political praxis. We discuss the border within as an extension of border politics and borderlands rhetorics to the US “heartland”, and how the entrenchment of a regime of deportability creates racialized and gendered conditions for the in/visibility of Latin@ immigrants and Latin@s more broadly. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical and political implications of our analysis for such geographies of power and the social relations, locations, and discourses that constitute and are constituted by them.     

NGOs,Disaster Relief and Asset Transfer in the Horn: Political Survival in a Permanent Emergency

Famines have winners and losers. Conventional analysis has concentrated on the losers: what has been neglected is that famines can result from the conscious exercise of power in pursuit of gain or advantage by the politically strong. This article is an attempt to analyse the process of political survival in the context of permanent emergency. Through examples of local asset transfer, and indicating how this process articulates with a wider regional parallel economy, the paper offers an analysis of political survival in the arc of crisis that runs from Sudan through southern Ethiopia to Somalia. The role of donors and NGOs is examined in terms of how they relate to the weak and the strong within the asset transfer economy. Donors are seen to have supported the strong whilst the position of NGOs is more contradictory. Although programme measures to protect assets have been developed, and the disjuncture between the rules of sovereignty and the protection of human rights has been highlighted, these measures have essentially failed. A review of trends since the end of the Cold War suggests that the chances of preventing the further consolidation of a transfer economy within the region are negligible. The position of those who gain from such a destructive se the process of political survival in the context of permanent emergency. Through examples of local asset transfer, and indicating how this process articulates with a wider regional parallel economy, the paper offers an analysis of political survival in the arc of crisis that runs from Sudan through southern Ethiopia to Somalia. The role of donors and NGOs is examined in terms of how they relate to the weak and the strong within the asset transfer economy. Donors are seen to have supported the strong whilst the position of NGOs is more contradictory. Although programme measures to protect assets have been developed, and the disjuncture between the rules of sovereignty and the protection of human rights has been highlighted, these measures have essentially failed. A review of trends since the end of the Cold War suggests that the chances of preventing the further consolidation of a transfer economy within the region are negligible. The position of those who gain from such a destructive process seems assured.     

‘Unlike Vancouver … here there’s nothing’: imagined geographies of idealized health care for LGBTQ women

This article explores imagined geographies of health care among Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) women in Halifax and Vancouver. In expressing the possibilities and limitations of accessing care, participants frame their own experiences through spatialized narratives of how LGBTQ people are thought to be treated elsewhere. Participants’ explicit connections and distinctions between Halifax and Vancouver gave insight into how their perceived difficulties in one health care context are sometimes framed by imagining more ease in accessing care in the other. We explore here the implications of these imagined, idealized spaces, which may set up false expectations that things are always better elsewhere. We reveal imagined geographies and senses of place as highly relevant features in LGBTQ women’s accounts of experiences with and access to health care and expand conventional arguments about physical access to care.     

'Are we there yet?' feminist political geographies

Our purpose in this paper is to chart the increasing and diffuse importance of feminist scholarship to political geography. We argue that feminist geographers have spatialized multiple forms of the political, rather than simply offering a singular feminist perspective to the literature. To canvas that breadth we suggest three distinct (albeit obviously related) takes on the political in feminist political geography: the distributive, the antagonistic, and the constitutive. This framework showcases the impressive breadth of feminist political geography and perhaps works against a sense of marginality that stems from such diffuseness. We illustrate our argument with particular reference to research that has appeared in Gender, Place and Culture over the past decade.     

The Changing Face of Heritage at Canada’s National Historic Sites

In order for all citizens to fully belong to a nation or a community, they must have membership in that society’s institutions, systems and social relations on both the formal and everyday levels. Heritage sites are public institutions of formal cultural presentation and informal social encounters where society demonstrates community membership. But in a country such as Canada where global economics and popular culture combine with an unprecedented influx of immigrants, how a community imagines itself and articulates its heritage is changing radically. Canada’s National Historic Sites (NHS) is among the important public institutions devoted to both the presentation of heritage and demonstration of citizen membership. This paper describes how this institution is adapting to changes in imaginings about citizenship, on both the formal and informal level. It looks at how NHS is expanding the involvement of all citizens in the why, what, how and to whom of heritage presentation, evolving its practices to include ethic minorities in its imaginings of Canadianness. Using as an example a new NHS exhibit and designations related to the Underground Railroad and African‐Canadians, the paper considers how historic sites, as formal instruments of the state, can be re‐tuned as informal sites of discourse and negotiation about identity, citizenship and belonging.     

Gender and Organisational Restructuring in the National Health Service: Performance, Identity and Politics

Over the past decade, debates within economic geography and organizational sociology have shown that gender is embedded within economic discourses, organisational relations and processes of restructuring. The argument has been widely illustrated through reference to "identity", with examples offered of the ways in which organizations and organisational change draw on specific performances of masculine and feminine identities. However, whilst we now know a great deal about organisational expectations of gendered performance at work, we actually know little of how these required performances impact individual constructions of identity. This paper aims to explore this gap between organisational discourses of gender, on the one hand, and the construction of individual identities, on the other. The paper uses narrative analysis of interviews with five nurses working in two hospitals in the British National Health Service (NHS) to trace the place and articulations of organisation, profession and gender in the construction and presentation of self. The paper reveals complex processes of negotiation and resistance and both stable and shifting identifications as individuals actively construct gendered identities inter alia through their interpretations of organisational and professional change. This emphasis on agency, resistance and personal politics has important implications for thinking about the nature and form of workplace politics and may offer a missing piece of the puzzle in recent bids to build new forms of labour organisation.     

The effect of variation in methodology on the outcome of osteoarthritic studies

There is a great deal of variability in how osteoarthritis is scored and analysed. This paper compares several commonly used techniques of data presentation and analysis, using a prehistorical skeletal sample from the southeastern USA. It finds that these methodologies result in greatly different outcomes, not only in the overall frequencies of lesions, but also in the statistical findings and in which joints apparently have the most arthritis. It is unlikely that a consensus will quickly develop on how to deal with osteoarthritic lesions, owing to widespread disagreements on even such basics as scoring. In the interim, the best way to ensure comparability of studies is to present the most complete and least manipulated data possible, along with easy-to-interpret summary scores.     

Crossing the rubicon: fact or fiction in Roman re-enactment

Abstract

This paper discusses the role and use of Roman re-enactment as a means of engaging with, visualizing and interpreting Roman material culture, and how this is translated into presentation material for public display. The paper raises several issues on the use of re-enactors to interpret a specific period from the past, and reflects on why people actively participate in re-enactment, with an emphasis on accuracy and authenticity.     

Gender,craft labour and the creative sector

This paper responds to a resurgence of interest in craft labour as an integral aspect of policy generation in the creative sector. It highlights the local, and industrial, cultural, and political histories and processes that create divisions and distinctions within craft economies. Drawing on research with designer makers in Birmingham Jewellery Quarter, the paper demonstrates how gender infuses the responses of policy actors in their regeneration plans for the local economy. It notes the significance of local meanings of craft and how this leads to misrecognition and devaluation. It also illustrates how the economic importance of designer makers is diminished within a policy environment that has had a long-standing focus on large-scale manufacturing. This leaves designer makers occupying a role that is predominantly focused on their symbolic and decorative value. This bodes ill for cultural policy reformulation that is based on the economic significance of flexible specialisation within small-scale, networked businesses.     

The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: Women's dress,mobility and Islamic knowledge

The issue of veiling marks an ideological fault line in urban Turkey. Based on focus groups conducted with migrant women to Istanbul in the spring of 1999, this article aims to show how veiling, as a form of dress, is a spatial practice that gains its significance through women's urban mobility and their construction of Islamic understandings in the city. At the same time, both urban mobility and Islamic knowledge are structured by wider relations of power, such as the struggle between the secular state and resurgent Islamic politics. In order to situate the practice of veiling within these structures, the author argues that Istanbul is marked by a pattern of shifting 'regimes of veiling,' and that these spatialized norms of dress affect the meaning and enactment of women's veiling choices. This concept is particularly useful to draw out the ways in which veiling, despite providing some protection from urban harassment, may actually constrain women's urban mobility in the context of Istanbul. The focus group analysis illustrates these points and demonstrates how women's views on Islam provide a basis for their attitudes towards veiling, mobility and space. The author suggests that among the participants, two main trends in Islamic understandings related to veiling can be observed: one towards the 'privatization' of religion along secularist lines, accompanied by a flexible attitude towards veiling, and another towards the public contestation of formal anti-veiling regimes justified in terms of knowledge gleaned through direct, textual engagement with Islam. In this way, this study aims to link veiling, as a socio-spatial practice, to the local, gendered production of Islamic knowledge in Istanbul.     

Space,power and sexuality: transgressive and transformative possibilities at the interstices of spatial boundaries

The themed section consists of articles that explore the relationship between power and space in relation to gender and sexuality by looking at processes of transgression, subversion or expansion of normative spatial practices and narratives. Using a theoretical framework that draws out power and space within a more specific context of feminist and queer literature, the articles explore the possibility to transgress, subvert or expand norms at the interstices of spatial boundaries beyond traditional binaries and hierarchies. Collectively, the articles call for a continued theoretical and methodological focus into the importance of looking at everyday sites of struggles and resistance in the crevasses, the liminal zones of space. The transgression of spatialized norms of sexuality and gender present a transformative potential that should be recognized for its political significance but, we argue, with caution as heteronormative and heteropatriarchal norms too often remain de rigueur in a neoliberal context.     

Community Unionism in Canada and Labor's (Re)Organization of Space

The extensive restructuring of industrialized economies continues to challenge workers and their unions in the 1990s. Labor unions are trying to remain viable institutions in the face of globalization of economic production, deindustrialization, and technological change. These processes have increasingly challenged workers in traditionally highly unionized sectors of the economy such as manufacturing and resource extraction industries. At the same time, unions have failed to organize large numbers of workers, often young and female, in geographically fragmented workplaces in expanding sectors of the economy such as consumer services and subcontracted goods production. There has been a call for new "spatialized strategies" allowing unions to access these new sectors and spaces and to produce scales of organization compatible with post-industrial capital. One strategy being adopted by the labor movement is coalition building with non-labor community interest groups with common goals in order to shape geographies of production. The experience of two Canadian unions with "community unionism" is discussed as an example of a spatialized strategy still in early development.