Searching for feminist geographies: mappings outside the discipline in Poland

Abstract

Feminist geography in Poland does not exist as a sub-discipline of geography. While there are individual Polish geographers pushing for feminist perspectives, most feminist analyses of issues relating to place, space and politics of location can be found within gender studies or feminist sociology. In this sense, feminist geography in Poland cannot compare to Anglophone feminist geography and attempts to incorporate it within such an established field risks being reductive. Instead, in this report, we shift the focus to the scholarship and activism that does exist in Poland, outside of geography. This contribution focuses on shedding light on geographical questions such as the body, the city and gendered geopolitics that have been recurring themes in gender studies, feminist sociology and feminist activism in Poland. We conclude by pointing to the need to mobilise broadly, and internationally, between disciplines with the intention of de-centering dominant knowledges. For feminist scholarship this is particularly important in the context of recent political successes of right-wing forces.     

Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

Spectral geographies: haunting and everyday state practices in colonial and present-day Alaska

Haunting is an analytic that foregrounds connections between the past and the present day. I employ haunting to analyze everyday practices of the colonial state in Alaska, thereby reinforcing the material connections between everyday activities and narratives and the imaginaries they create, questioning the timeless character of many studies of everyday geographies, and demanding attention to justice. A case study from Alaska involving federal non-recognition of the Qutekcak tribe demonstrates connections between colonial histories and present-day practices of the state, connections that take shape as a ‘spectral geography.’     

Quotidian geographies: placing feminism

We discuss Susan Hanson's contributions to geography during the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of quotidian geographies, geographies of the everyday. Beginning from our own experiences as graduate students and new faculty members, we describe the social and theoretical context in which Susan published her initial studies of men's and women's activity patterns that examined gender differences in travel behavior and their origins in men's and women's different household responsibilities. We also review her success peopling the discipline of geography. We conclude that human geography has benefited from the incorporation of feminist theory and methods as Susan predicted.     

Ideological others and national identifications in contemporary Poland

Sexual minorities in Poland are excluded from the traditional understanding of “Polishness” premised on conservative, Catholic values. This article examines how ethnic Polish citizens who identify as non‐heteronormative navigate their relationship to “Polishness” at a moment of heightened nationalism. Through 31 interviews with Polish sexual minorities, I show that while national identification is a struggle for some sexual minorities, others work to reframe what “Polishness” means to them. I argue for further research examining the ways that stigmatised members of the ethnic majority—what I term ideological others—understand and navigate their relationship to national identity. The study contributes to the literature on everyday nationhood and national identity by attending to national identification among stigmatised members of the ethnic majority.     

How environments speak: everyday mobilities,impersonal speech and the geographies of commentary

This paper examines commentary as a mode of speaking that has not received sufficient attention by social and cultural geographers. In contrast to a representational understanding of commentary, where commentary is the expert interpretation of an environment, this paper develops a more passive understanding of commentary where the commentator is a figure through which the affective, material forces that constitute environments become expressed. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, the paper examines three modes of everyday commentary related to commuting. The commentaries of reportage, anecdote and autoventriloquy each demonstrate in different ways how the affective, material environments of commuting become spoken. The paper shows, first, how commentary is a constitutive rather than derivative aspect of the experience of commuting. Second, it shows that commentary is an expression of affective, material environments, rather than either the willed self-expression of the speaker, or the manifestation of socially and historically contingent discourses. Third, it shows that commentary can both close down and draw out specific affective, material environments. Fourth, it shows how commentary modulates the powers of existence in the zone of the commute, transforming the affective possibilities immanent to different situations.     

Moral geographies of family: articulating,forming and transmitting moralities in everyday life

The family is often considered the foundation of moral learning in society, responsible for caring and parenting, and transmitting morals to children and young people, while a lack of moral guidance from family is associated with antisocial behaviour. Despite this deep moralizing of family life, very little is known about how morals are understood in the context of family, how family members form their moral outlooks, and how morals and difference are negotiated within everyday family practices. This paper addresses some of these burgeoning questions around the moral geographies of family. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with six families in the UK, I consider normative assumptions about what morals mean to families, which parts of family life morals are drawn from, and how morals are transmitted by and within families. In the conclusion I outline my contributions to both established and emerging areas of geographical interest.     

Feminist geopolitics,everyday death,and the emotional geographies of Dang Thuy Tram

Women's everyday experiences in war remain occluded; moreover, the bodily impacts of war remain hidden, masked by masculinist accounts of warfare that too often glorify heroic male combatants. In this article, we contribute, first, to the ongoing project to understand violence in everyday life and, second, to the understanding, specifically, of women's experiences in warfare. We do so through a reading of the diaries of Dang Thuy Tram, a female Vietnamese doctor who lived and died in the Vietnam War. By drawing on feminist geopolitics, coupled with the insights from emotional geographies – and specifically, those of love – we focus on two main themes: the emotional transformation of death and life, and the care of life amidst pervasive death. We conclude that an emotionally grounded feminist geopolitics is necessary to challenge masculinist accounts that normalize, naturalize, and glorify war.     

Transitional geographies: making mobile children

Geographers of childhood have variously accounted for the experiences of mobile children. Less has been said about the practices of becoming mobile, including the acquisition of skills, engagement with travel technologies and the shifting child–parent relations implicated in the process. This article explores the making of mobile children through ethnographic research with 7–12-year-olds practising the journey between home and school in Helsinki, Finland. Elaborating on the work of psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, it argues that families enact flexible spatial arrangements—transitional spaces—to experiment with their attachments to urban environments. Transitional spaces foreground the diverse relations between children, parents and the world, allowing the replacement of standard notions about growing up with situated accounts of how families make space for children's expanding mobilities. Against a cultural atmosphere stressing the risks and uncertainties of childhood, this view opens an affirmative approach to children's geographies—one that emphasises the trust, play and collaboration between adults, children and environments.     

Intersectionality in feminist geographies

This paper introduces a special themed section that arose from an International Conference on Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality: Places, Identities and Knowledges, held in 2016 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Six scholars of Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States seek to deal in five short papers with the intersectional dynamics of power structures and the central role of place within them. Here we situate the developments of intersectionality in feminist geographies in relation to the role of place and space in constituting intersectional relations, the relevance of context for the development of intersectionality and the use of different methodologies for research on it.     

Food,feeding and the material everyday geographies of infants: possibilities and potentials

This paper forges an agenda for researching geographies of infants. Scholars have tended to overlook the everyday geographies of very young children. However, outside of geography, infancy is seen as a specifically dynamic period of life, and is subject to sustained research and policy intervention. In particular, early childhood is viewed as a key point in which to intervene to transform enduring, interconnected, societal, educational, and health-based inequalities. Food and feeding are seen as critical both to the health of infants now and of the children and adults they become . However, much policy and research under-theorizes the importance of socio-spatial contexts and the subjectivity/agency of infants. There is, then, an urgent need for geographers to put infants onto the agenda, to inform and challenge these dominant accounts. Researching with infants necessitates not just critiquing modern, liberal notions of an autonomous subject/agent, but developing a new way of understanding subjectivity and agency. Drawing upon Lupton’s (2013) notion of infant–carer interembodiment, I suggest a way forward with reference to the material geographies of infant feeding.     

Student geographies and homemaking: personal belonging(s) and identities

Studies of the ‘geographies of students’ have become increasingly prevalent across the social sciences and are particularly concerned with the predilection for young UK University undergraduates to be mobile in their institutional choice. A more recent focus within this work has been upon student identities, with attention given to how the spaces to which students move and in which they settle can have both positive and negative consequences for the evolution of the student identity, and how such identities are often framed within the context of social activities; learning environments; friendship networks; or other sociocultural factors. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering the role of student accommodation – a site which often remains on the periphery of discussions of student identities – in offering students opportunities to construct, adapt and manage their student identities. This adds to the important contemporary geographies of student accommodation, which are currently debating, among others, purpose-built student accommodation and the broad housing ‘careers’ and strategies of students. In contrast, this paper explores the micro-geographies of student accommodation (and more specifically, the bedroom) to highlight its value in providing young, mobile students with an anchor within which they can draw together their learner, social and domestic dispositions into one geographical location.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Miniaturisation and the representation of military geographies in recreational wargaming

Miniaturisation affects space in many ways: projecting it, transforming it and co-producing it with those who make and gaze upon models. This paper draws on Stewart's work On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) to demonstrate how concepts of miniaturisation have the ability to contribute to geographical study. The empirical focus for the paper is a study of scale models deployed in the hobby of miniature or figure wargames in which players fight battles on the table top using model terrain and miniature figures. In this paper, I use examples of scaled terrain and figures to explore the process of miniaturisation and how this represents and transforms space. In doing so, the paper contributes to understanding the ways in which military geographies are represented through the media of models and performances of playing with them.     

Feminist geographies in Norway from the turn of the millennium

Abstract

Based on an overview of feminist and gender research over two decades, this article reflects on feminist geographies in Norway within a wider political and social context. We identify eight broad, partly overlapping themes of feminist geography: rurality; development policies and practices; entrepreneurship and economic change; migration and mobility; children and youth; sexuality and health; landscape and place; and emotions and autobiography. We find that much of the research has been collaborative, interdisciplinary, multicultural, and transnational. Feminist geographies in Norway are characterized by increasing emphasis on multiple realities and situatedness, and focus on rights and power relations among men and women in all spheres of society, including academia. Yet the gender dimension has tended to focus on geographies of women, with few studies of masculinity. Inspired in part through feminist critiques of research practices in social sciences, a recent development has been autobiographical approaches examining the significance of personal lives and emotions for the research process. We conclude that feminist geographies in Norway are diverse, empirically and contextually informed, and have become embedded within several fields of human geography.     

Trans geographies,embodiment and experience

Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research – subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces – and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces.     

Convergence space: process geographies of grassroots globalization networks

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey's notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People's Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People's Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action.     

Farming in the troposphere: drawing together affective atmospheres and elemental geographies

This paper focuses on the much-neglected contribution of weather to research encounters. Affective atmospheres and elemental geographies are used as a platform to examine the vibrant materialities of the troposphere. The weather encapsulates human and non-human bodies, moods and actions in an enveloping space and I trace how these materialities and immaterialities are transmitted between bodies in the research setting. In a (post)phenomenological sense, certain atmospheric and meteorological events figure as lively participants. Through three research moments with farmers, I discuss how various weather conditions such as a warm balmy spring, wet muddy winter and the suffocating heat of summer enables thinking on the relational weight of atmospheres. By following participants throughout the circadian rhythms of farming over a year, seasonal fluctuations were recorded. Thus, researcher effort to comprehend how bodies become attuned and sensitive to the causal powers of the troposphere is foregrounded within share-farming experiences.