Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children's Literature

This paper argues for the uses of children's literature in the study of children's geographies. It focuses in particular on the nature of representations of urban space in children's literature, a genre more usually connected with the pastoral and explores the narrative strategies and approaches of children's literature which does venture into the city. I propose five modes in which the city is written for children and ask, from the position of literary criticism which distrusts children's stories' ability to speak for children, how far these modes can be said to coincide with children's lived experience of the city.     

中国藏区脱贫与生态保护政策的联动性探讨

藏区是中国贫困发生率最高的区域之一,也是中国乃至世界最重要的生态区域,更是少数民族贫困地区最具典型意义的区域。避免扶贫和生态保护单一政策的制度缺陷,发挥二者间制度安排的联动效应,选择统筹发展路径,是藏区经济社会可持续发展的关键。     

近代苏南渔民贫困原因探究

随着苏南社会近代化进程的加快,苏南渔民生活水平却并未有任何提高,甚至比封建社会时期还要贫困。造成这种状况的原因有很多,其中,渔民渔业权的丧失,封建势力的盘剥,外来势力的掠夺和进行水产品倾销以及市场失灵等是主要原因。探究近代苏南渔民贫困的社会根源,对于如何改善弱势群体的民生或有一些启发。     

Transpennine: Imaginative Geographies of an Interregional Corridor

The Pennine Chain is the most significant physical constant in the economic and administrative geography of England. It is crossed perpendicularly by the densely urbanized belt lying between the estuaries of the Mersey and Humber. The paper attempts to conceptualize this transpennine space in terms of a shared textile history, a common upland heart, a transport corridor, an axis of solidarity in the economic geography of the north-south divide, a European trade route, an environmental artwork. The paradox that European INTERREG funding has facilitated transpennine thinking at a time when institutional factors are reinforcing the watershed, leads to a conclusion which looks forward.     

Twenty years of Tourism Geographies: a bibliometric overview

Abstract

Tourism Geographies is a prominently ranked journal that emerged from activities of the Tourism Commission of the International Geographical Union. It is indexed in the ‘Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management’ and ‘Geography, Planning and Development’ fields in the Scopus database and published its 20th volume in 2018. A bibliometric assessment of the articles and authors who have contributed to Tourism Geographies over its first two decades highlights major trends and dominant issues covered by the journal’s content. Key indicators include the most published and most cited authors and articles, the institutions and countries that those authors are affiliated with, other academic journals that are closely linked to the journal through citations, and the most used keywords in the journal. The Scopus database provides access to these basic bibliometric data, while the VOSviewer software enables graphical analyses and displays of co-citations, co-occurrences of keywords, and bibliographic couplings (shared references) across papers and authors. Overall, Tourism Geographies is closely linked to other leading journals indexed by Scopus in the ‘Tourism’ and ‘Geography’ fields and publishes papers from around the world. Research topics that have been most prominent in the journal include tourism development, tourist destinations, tourist attractions, heritage tourism, tourism perceptions, sustainable tourism, and travel behavior. Among the most viewed individual papers have been those addressing issues related to sustainability, poverty issues (related to tourism in poor areas, volunteering, sustainable tourism, and the environment), and community planning (sustainable tourism planning, tourist routes and movement, and new locations for tourism development).     

Sexing the Self: Geographies of engagement and encounter

Geographic research on the construction of sexual identity takes inspiration from two main sources. The first is the post-structural literature that suggests sexual subjects are sutured to identities created in the realms of discourse. The second is a psychoanalytical tradition concerned with the desires and disgusts experienced by sexual subjects as they seek to reconcile their inner selves with the outside world. In this paper an attempt is made to combine these contrasting perspectives by exploring the way sexualities are negotiated by individuals as they encounter a world that is both real and imagined. The utility of this approach is illustrated with reference to the author's research on sex work, which demonstrates that the making of sexual identities involves a dynamic relation between Self and Other--a relation that is subsequently encoded in representations of space. The paper concludes that the making of sexual identities can only be understood by examining the ways that representation and experience entwine in specific places to create sexual identities that are fractured, contested and always becoming.     

Urban-Riverine Hinterland Synergies in Semi-Arid Environments: Millennial-Scale Change,Adaptations, and Environmental Responses at Gerasa/Jerash

This interdisciplinary study addresses issues of urban-riverine hinterland relationships in semi-arid environments over millennia at Gerasa/Jerash in Jordan, presenting research that stimulates new lines of enquiry with much broader implications than those relating to this single site. Through the presentation of new data on wadi-sediment responses to social and environmental change, we assess ways in which urban settlements, their hinterlands, and rivers interact over long time periods and how such changes may be read together with historical sources and shed new light on urban-hinterland dynamics. We explore the hypothesis that synergistic relationships between an urban core and its hinterland are essential to the long-term sustainability of both. Our integrated approach gives new insight into settlement dynamics and resource use and carries implications for our understanding of the present through the past.     

Geographies of Industrial Convergence: The Case of Retail Banking

This paper considers the relationship between space, place and the convergence of industrial structures and organizational forms by way of an analysis of the retail banking industry in the USA and the UK. The paper examines this process from two theoretical positions. It does so firstly by viewing the process of convergence through the analytical lens of political economy, which looks for explanation in broad structural forces, such as changes in regulatory space and pressures on profitability. The paper then goes on to draw attention to some of the limitations of interpretations of this kind by drawing attention to the importance of place-based evolutionary economic change, and the ways in which conventions of industrial restructuring are transmitted over space. By way of illustration the paper focuses upon the organizational and practical implications of the implementation of two banking technologies: Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) and telephone banking. In doing so, the paper calls for accounts of economic change to pay attention to the rich histories of industrial sectors and for a more active account of economic change which pays attention to the ways in which outcomes are produced through the mixing and borrowing of technologies and practices through space and over time.     

The Franciscans and the Scottish Wars of Independence: an Irish perspective

The intention of this paper is to examine the role of the Franciscans in the Scottish Wars of Independence. Many of the studies relating to this period have been confined to either the political or ecclesiastical arena. They also choose to treat the individual countries of the British Isles in an unconnected fashion. This paper is intended to redress the balance, using the involvement of the Franciscan friars in Ireland and Scotland to study political events on either side of the Irish Sea. By examining the actions of diverse nationalities belonging to a single order I hope to establish why the Franciscans saw fit to involve themselves in either the nativist or royalist causes and to determine it was purely race that dictated their actions when their countrymen went to war.     

Child Poverty in the American States: The Impact of Welfare Reform,Economics, and Demographics

This article identifies the predictors of child poverty rates at the state level before and after the adoption and implementation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The analysis shows that the most important state‐level factors that influence child poverty rates are demographics, the health and viability of the state economy, and often the generosity, inclusiveness, and quality of state welfare programs. States with large numbers of black citizens, and those that score highest on infant mortality, teen births, births to unmarried women, children living with a parent without a high school degree, and children living with a single parent have the highest rates of child poverty. Child poverty rates are lowest in states that suffer less unemployment, and in wealthier states. States that score higher on per capita personal income, tax revenues, and taxable resources have lower child poverty rates. While specific “tough” welfare policies adopted by some states seem to have no impact on child poverty rates, we tested for the first time a sophisticated measure of the overall quality of state welfare programs. The analysis reveals that the global quality of a state's welfare programs is often an independent predictor of child poverty. States with the most generous, inclusive, and supportive welfare programs have done the best job of lowering and containing child poverty.     

Reexamining transport poverty,job access,and gender issues in Central and Eastern Europe

Tirana, the Balkan capital examined in this study, displays patterns of gendered job search behavior and access, which are unique within contemporary Europe and even within post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Here, it is a rather spatially constricted job search range rather than transport poverty that prevents women living in first-ring suburbs from attaining satisfactory employment. Female commutes are extraordinarily short and most often on foot. While the city now has nearly one million inhabitants and a high car ownership rate, and is located in Europe, the employment and mobility choices and behaviors of its female residents resemble those in developing rather than developed countries, and in small rather than large cities. The reasons underpinning this situation have more to do with socio-cultural gender barriers and less with transport poverty or labor market weaknesses. This finding might apply to other Balkan capitals or cities outside Europe, which have recently experienced large waves of internal migration and where both existing residents and newcomers have not yet adjusted to ‘big city’ life.     

Geographies of family formations: spatial differences and gender cultures in Britain

The significance of national differences in family formations has been addressed through the social policy debate over women's position in different welfare state regimes. However, the nature and effects of sub–national family geographies remains under–researched. In this paper we use census mapping to describe regional and local differences in partnering and parenting within Britain. We develop an index of the 'Motherhood Employment Effect' to indicate different geographical levels of adherence to the 'traditional' male breadwinner/female homemaker family, and use a 'Family Conventionality' index to describe geographical differences in the social evaluation of marriage. The geography of family formations thus described does not follow the better known 'north–south' or 'urban–rural' geographies of economic performance and prosperity. We use the example of Lancashire and Yorkshire to explore further the socio–economic associations of this family geography, employing additional indicators of 'household conventionality' and 'family restructuring'. Finally, we speculate as to how this relatively unfamiliar family geography may be related to the existence of regional gender cultures, and briefly outline some implications for social policy.     

Between anatamo- and bio-politics: Geographies of sexual health in wartime Seattle

We offer an analysis of public health governmentality and its constitutive elements during a moral panic around venereal disease in World-War II Seattle, Washington. Tracing how norms of sexuality, gender, race, age and class were instilled through urban public health practices, we highlight the importance of the local state’s spatial ontologies and imaginations in connecting in particular the elements of anatamo-politics and bio-politics. By doing this, we extend current work on governmentality in geography by suggesting that geographical imaginations and ontological framings by the local state – particularly urban public health authorities – are themselves important elements in the control of populations and identity.     

The role of the museum in interpretation: The problem of context

The key questions in interpreting objects in museums are: What are they doing there? and Where did they come from? National and local importance are not mutually exclusive: the critical difference is between intrinsic value, and value through context or association. Context is an integral part of interpretation. Experts can visualise an original location or environment; ordinary museum visitors need the context of people, or place, or familiar activities, to be able to relate to unfamiliar objects. Is seeing a good replica as good as seeing the original?     

Wild(er)ness: Reconfiguring the Geographies of Wildlife

Amidst millennial talk of the 'end of nature' ( McKibben 1989 ), this paper examines the precarious geographies of 'wildlife' in rather less apocalyptic terms. Animal (and plant) species designated wild are placed categorically outside the ambit of 'human society', confined to inhabiting the margins and interstices of the social world. Yet, we contend, such animals have long been routinely imagined and organized within multiple circuits of social power, which (re)configure them in important ways. These social orderings of animal life confound the moral geographies of wilderness, which presuppose an easy coincidence between the species and spaces of a pristine nature. In this paper, we employ the fluid spatial vocabulary of topology to map a more volatile and relational conception of the fabrics of wildlife. Our arguments are worked through glimpses of two historically very different social orderings of 'wild' animals – those associated with the military vernacular of the gladiatorial games of Imperial Rome, and the scientific vernacular of endangered species listing and conservation under CITES (the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species). These 'foldings' of wildlife in distant time/space aim to disrupt the linear historical narratives of 'civilization' and 'evolution', which consign wildlife to marginal spaces with a teleological destiny of erasure.     

Geographies of mediation: Market development and the rural broker in Maharashtra, India

This paper explicates the role of community-level intermediaries in post-liberalized economic sectors. Focusing on nascent commercial markets for improved, smokeless cookstoves in southwestern Maharashtra, I describe how development is encountered by three analytic groups – artisans, female stove users and NGO field officers. This study highlights patterns of strategic intermediary action, or forms of brokering, used to negotiate the commercialization process for individuals involved in the fabrication, distribution and use of improved cookstoves. A close analysis of the mediating agent can strengthen theories on how individuals and communities encounter sector privatization and state retrenchment. This study reveals a diverse set of brokering activities and actors, and shows how intermediaries combine tasks associated with traditional conceptions of the political fixer and market broker by working within and between groups of market, village and state operatives to transform market supply chains. Mediating agents coordinate counter regulating activities within civil society in the absence of heavy state intervention and play a crucial role in activating and connecting community interests to latent neoliberal state resources.     

Geographies of state failure and sophistication in maritime piracy hijackings

Many analysts are concerned about territories subject to state failure becoming safe havens for terrorists. In this article, I apply this logic to maritime piracy syndicates and their ship hijacking operations, and argue that a focus on the geographies of state failure can help us explain why pirates' behavior varies between failed and weak states. Analysis of a dataset of hijacking incidents suggests that state failure is associated with less sophisticated attacks, while state weakness encourages more sophisticated attacks. Through case studies of the process by which pirates carry out their attacks in East Africa and Southeast Asia, I argue that it is the differences in political and economic landscapes that influence how pirates embed their operations across territory, and thus how they carry out their operations. Notably, because they do not have to worry about enforcement, pirates in failed states can engage in time-intensive kidnappings for ransom, while only weak states provide the markets and transportation infrastructure necessary for operations where ships and cargo are seized and sold for profit. These findings suggest that weak states might actually be more problematic for international security in some respects than failed states.