The ‘Evidence’ of sex,the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.     

Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post-Imperial Berlin

In September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post-empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

French-Caribbean Refugees and Slavery in German Protestant Maryland

The late eighteenth century saw the immigration of thousands of French refugees from France and its Caribbean colonies to the United States. An examination of one family of these refugees, Jean Payen de Boisneuf and his relatives the Vincendières, reveals that the values that the refugees imported, such as plantation slavery and Catholicism, could be antagonistic to social norms in the regions they chose to settle.     

韩国经济地理学研究现状和趋势

至今在我国国内,有关评介韩国地理学研究状况的文章甚少。虽然韩国地理学研究历史较短,但有些领域的研究已走到了我们的前面。本文将系统地介绍韩国农业地理学、工业地理学、商业流通地理学、交通地理学的研究状况,并指出目前在经济地理学研究中所存在的一些问题和今后的发展趋势。     

A spatial analysis of human fertility in Scotland: Reappraisal and extension

In an earlier study of Scottish fertility (Jones, 1975) it was concluded that a substantial part of the areal variability in county and major city Crude Birth Rates could be attributed to variations in age structure and, to a lesser extent, socio‐economic composition. Because Crude Birth Rate levels are affected by population composition this study seeks to determine the extent to which areal variations in reproduction can be attributed to behavioural rather than structural effects. It is suggested that areal differences in Scottish reproductive behaviour reflect well defined, deeply ingrained and temporally persistent differences within Scottish society.     

Risk Management Strategies Among African-American Slaves at Locust Grove Plantation

African Americans faced a variety of risks under the institution of slavery. The theory of risk management is used as a context for understanding the lives of slaves at Locust Grove Plantation in Kentucky and for deconstructing the common myth that slavery was unusually mild there. African Americans used a diversity of means at Locust Grove to cope with risk, including generalized reciprocity, food storage, religion, and strong kinship/community bonds.     

The production of tyrannical space

Bullying is an internationally pervasive problem that impacts significantly on the behaviour, health and wellbeing of children. Drawing on ideas developed in both the abundant psychology literature, and the landmark study by Percy-Smith and Matthews Tyrannical Spaces (2001) Percy-Smith, B. and Matthews, H. 2001. Tyrannical spaces: Young people, bullying and urban neighbourhoods. Local Environment, 6(1): 49–63. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar], this paper examines the psychosocial dynamics of bullying as they interrelate with various environments. The key groups involved in bullying are considered particularly with respect to their spatial rituals, actions and interactions. In the absence of sustained geographical research in this field, some broad directions for future geographies of bullying are suggested as the basis for future inquiry. Some initial indications are provided as to how these might involve, and connect to, existing disciplinary interests in geographies of exclusion, moral and emotional geographies.     

Technology,Free Labor,and Slavery: Lincoln on Discovery and Invention

Abstract

Abraham Lincoln presented a lecture in 1858–1859 on the process of “Discoveries and Invention.” In this lecture he discusses man's desire to improve his condition and the use of technology to that end. The process of discovery and invention allows man to develop that technology and alleviate his state. Education, especially literacy, allows knowledge to be passed down through time, facilitating yet further improvement. Yet, Lincoln warns that human nature can also become raw material, as seen in the institution of slavery. In light of Lincoln's more commonly known natural rights argument against slavery, this warning about human nature takes on greater significance. Coupled with an address on agriculture from 1859, Lincoln's lecture on discovery and invention attempts to illustrate the liberating power of invention and education while reminding us of the limits posed by man's natural equality.     

“The stone in the sling”: Frederick Douglass and Belfast abolitionism

Frederick Douglass’s sojourns in Belfast during 1845–1846 coincided with the “Send Back the Money” controversy in the Free Church of Scotland over the receipt of money from and fellowship with slaveholders, the South Carolina minister Thomas Smyth’s exclusion from the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1846, and the aftermath of the debate at the inaugural meeting of the Evangelical Alliance over fellowship with slaveholders. Since Douglass regarded Belfast as the central location of Presbyterian sympathy for the Free Church outside of Scotland, he believed that the town was crucial in the crusade against the Free Church. The attacks on the Free Church, however, cost the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society considerable support in the long term. Belfast also played a role in the personal development of Douglass. His dispute with his Dublin publisher, Richard Davis Webb, over the ministers’ recommendations to his Narrative constituted evidence of growing maturity. Although William Lloyd Garrison united with Douglass in Belfast to denounce the Evangelical Alliance, this essay argues that Douglass displayed evidence of independence from strict Garrisonianism.     

Honoring Susan Hanson's 45 years in geography

The essays in this themed section honor Susan Hanson's 45 years in geography. They are written by senior academic geographers who participated in a series of panels at the Annual meeting of the Association of the American Geographers in Boston in 2008 that celebrated Susan's scholarship and her impact on the discipline of geography.