‘Looking at the Others’: Oscar Wilde and the Reading Gaol Archive

In looking at Wilde and the prison, scholarship has understandably focussed on the lengthy and complex De Profundis, and how the prison experience confirmed or re-shaped Wilde as a writer and thinker. Wilde himself claimed to have been saved by the ‘others’ that he encountered in prison, and these ‘others’ have received scant attention. Who were they? How does a greater knowledge of them supplement our sense of the nineteenth-century prison and of Wilde? This essay looks closely at the Reading Gaol archive, tracing out the lives of some of those with whom Wilde was incarcerated and providing analyses of the prison population in Reading while Wilde was there. Aside from yielding the only known photographs of any of the young working-class men in whom Wilde took an interest, the essay seeks to build a more nuanced reading of Wilde's experience. Above all, the aim is to open out the meanings of the Wilde myth, and, in particular, to offer a more socially inclusive version.     

Countering exclusion: the ‘St. Pats for all’ parade

The St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City has historically been a crucial site for annually reproducing narratives of Irishness through a very public performative ritual taking place on Fifth Avenue. However, in recent years controversy has surrounded this event, associated with the organizers' decision to ban self-identifying Irish homosexuals, a decision supported by the US Supreme Court. In response, a ‘counter-parade’ now takes place in the neighboring borough of Queens, which is beginning to mount a serious challenge to the more established ritual. Billed as the first all-inclusive St. Patrick's Day parade in the city's history, this ‘St. Pats for All’ parade articulates a very different narrative of Irishness than that paraded on Fifth Avenue. In this article I seek to examine this alternative event and the contested identity politics associated with Irishness in New York City, focusing primarily on the axes of nationalism and sexuality, and the role played by public space.     

‘Informed Seeing’: Reading the Seventeenth-Century Embroidered Cabinet at Milton Manor House through its Historical and Social Contexts

This object lesson examines a seventeenth-century cabinet, held at Milton Manor House in Oxfordshire, which has been embroidered with biblical scenes. Starting from the premise that knowledge informs seeing, this article provides a close reading of the cabinet’s iconography and historical context in order to highlight the knowledge — both the general ideologies and the individual interpretation — that may have informed its production. Through a detailed reading, the maker’s negotiation of the virtue of submissiveness, a major tenet of women’s education in the period, is identified as a possible theme.     

Jane Eyre's ‘Arabian Tales’: Reading and Remembering the Arabian Nights

This article considers the significance of the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century memoirs and accounts of childhood. Taking Jane Eyre (1847) as my chief example, I investigate the nature of the childhood encounter with the stories and the intensity of the child's emotional and sensory engagement with the work. I then consider how these stories and books function not only as childhood souvenirs, but also as stand-ins for childhood itself in the construction of an autobiographical subject. Finally, I offer a reading of the presence of the Arabian Nights within the narrative of Jane Eyre and its role in structuring the memories of its eponymous heroine.     

Choreographing pumping: remaking the ‘ideal’ worker through maternal embodiment in the workplace

The negotiation of employed mothers’ identities as mothers and workers has often been theorized through separation, where women perform their maternal and professional identities differently and distinctly in the home and workplace. However, milk expression in the workplace, as a form of maternal embodiment at work, challenges this separation and the ‘ideal’ worker dedicated entirely to the goals and desires of the firm. This study analyzes how mother-workers negotiate milk expression to suggest that identity practice in the workplace is a choreography between co-workers and supervisors that have the potential to produce hybrid subjectivities outside of the logic of the ‘ideal’ worker or the separation of spheres. Critical moments of performance occur in the movement between spaces within the workplace when maternal and professional work occur simultaneously or maternal embodiment becomes visible to co-workers and supervisors. This paper extends the conversation about gendered organizations to suggest that working mothers are already engaging in the production of hybrid subjectivities in the workplace that have the potential to remake the ‘ideal’ worker.     

Editorial: Geography and the ‘European Year of Citizenship through Education’

The paper introduces a library of video podcasts (vodcasts) used to support the learning and teaching of geographical methods and techniques relating to physical geography and GIScience in particular. While the notion of video learning is not new, the accessibility of the multimedia snippets via lightweight mp4 players in a field context allows a geographical freedom to learning that goes beyond previous classroom-based work. Evaluation, conducted through the use of reflective diaries and focus groups, identified that all students thought the podcast reference library was a valuable learning resource, of particular appeal to students with a visual approach to learning.     

Heritage views through urban exploration: the case of ‘Abandoned Berlin’

This article frames the practice of urban exploration and its interest towards abandoned places from a heritage perspective. It is argued that most urban explorers prioritise the excitement of trespassing and the creation of their own narratives over the historic importance of the sites they explore. These ‘performative’ explorers avoid deliberate attention that may lead to vandalism or touristification – an alternative way of ‘preserving by not preserving’ that celebrates decay and assumes the sites’ progressive loss. To achieve this, they prefer not to disclose exact locations, creating a divergence towards a minority of practitioners who prefer to collect data on history and current state of conservation to make it public. Attention is paid to these ‘communicative’ explorers, whose documentation renders abandoned places visible, opening further debates about a more inclusive preservation and memorialisation. By distinguishing both heritage views, the objective of this article is to contribute to the enlargement of Heritage Studies by incorporating urban exploration as a space for reflection between loss and bottom-up preservation and interpretation.     

Comics and the Demystification of France's Immigration ‘Problem’: Reading Christophe Dabitch's Immigrants

While universalism constitutes the foundation of French republicanism, public discourse and changes in immigration law have revealed that racial and/or ethnic discrimination and exclusion are necessary for cultural assimilation and for the protection of France's ‘universalist’ model. Studies have also shown that at least 40% of the French population is of foreign origin. So how has France justified the reconciliation of universalism and particularism (now referred to as communitarianism) in certain instances but not others? Christophe Dabitch's collaborative comic-book project, Immigrants (2010), aims to deconstruct the French republican narrative of universalism by using a popular medium that is both transcultural and transnational. An effective collage of visual styles, reproduced testimony and scholarship on immigration in France, Dabitch's album proposes writing an alternative French history of immigration and invites readers to question founding mythologies which have erected France as the country of human rights. This article has three objectives: to present Immigrants as a serious historical and artistic project on immigration; to critically examine this publication's purpose (can comics effectively demonstrate that immigration is a common but significant aspect of nation building?); and to explore how comics can positively re-imagine France as a métropole cosmopolite, as an international point of convergence.     

‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.     

‘Thinking of the land in that way’: indigenous sovereignty and the spatial politics of attentiveness at Skwelkwek’welt

Grassroots Secwepemc attempted to stop the expansion of Sun Peaks resort on a site for Indigenous knowledge. I attend to the practice of Indigenous knowledge related to the confrontation and assert that Indigenous sovereignty and identity were outcomes. To make this argument, I investigate the space made for emotion, affect and intuition in the performance of Indigenous knowledge. From a relational materialist position, these more-than-representational forces play an important role in epistemology, ontology, ethics, and subjectivity. Identity therefore materialized in three ways related to feeling(s). As a result of their attunement to these forces, the Secwepemc understood that (non)humans underpin their material being and placed the collective on the political horizon. Furthermore, the practice of Indigenous knowledge encouraged an identity characterized by “attentiveness” to feeling(s) and to the activity of feeling itself. From the perspective of the struggles of subjugated knowledge, I also contextualize the attentiveness at the core of Indigenous knowledge practices as part of a more-than-representational and decolonizing spatial politics.     

‘What’s left of the flag’: the Confederate and Jacobite ‘lost cause’ myths,and the construction of mythic identities through conflict commemoration

The use of battlefields and associated conflict sites provide tantalising hooks upon which to hang tapestries of grand narratives relating to regional and national identities, often defined by what the identities are not. This paper examines the unlikely connection between Jacobite and Confederate romanticism, and how battlefields, conflict related sites, and symbolic material culture are mobilised through active commemoration by some heritage groups in support of a created, mythic identity of a ‘Southern Celt’. Furthermore, it examines the production of a mythic history that whitewashes and recasts the Confederacy, the reality of the Civil War, and the Confederate Flag, while at the same time minimising, hiding, or ignoring competing narratives.     

‘Stepping into history’: reading the Second World War through Irish women's diaries

This article examines two very different wartime diary accounts by Irish women, Romie Lambkin, a driver in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and Mary Morris, who nursed in England, France and Belgium. Both texts assert the legitimacy of the Irishwoman's wartime story through consciously placing themselves in history, affirmed by the difference between their ‘real’ existence as participants in the war, and the ‘unreal’ Eire, outside history and reality, a ‘fairyland’, as Lambkin calls it, of lights and food set against a blacked out and bombed out Europe. More broadly, drawing on theoretical perspectives on life-writing and identity, the discussion focuses on these accounts as dynamic, vividly written contributions to our understanding of the war experience, showing how the subjective experience narrated in a diary has an important place in the collective historical narrative of the Second World War.     

Mixed-use ‘regeneration’ of employment land in the post-industrial city: challenges and realities in London

This article explores the relationships between land-use planning, property and economic development, with a focus on the changing attitudes towards employment land in post-industrial cities. Drawing on case study data from two London local authorities, it finds that planning authorities are moving away from protecting employment land to actively promoting the mixed-use redevelopment of employment sites, even when there are thriving businesses on these sites and a shortage of supply of employment premises and land, relative to demand. We examine the drivers for changing policy including the national and regional policy contexts, housing targets, the influence of austerity measures, rise of Neighbourhood Planning and changing conceptions of regeneration and the role of housing therein. The article highlights the complex task faced by local planners and the tensions involved in simultaneously finding sites for housing, fostering economic development and promoting mixed-use redevelopment in planning policy and decisions. We find that changes in policy are fuelling speculation for housing development on sites occupied by viable businesses, supporting rather than responding to deindustrialization. This is leading to a gap between aspirations for delivering mixed-use environments on hitherto employment sites and realities on the ground.     

Challenging the ‘Slave-Driving Employers’: Understanding Victoria's 1896 Minimum Wage through a World-History Approach

In 1896 the colony of Victoria introduced the world's first legal minimum wage that also extended to adult men. It was much discussed around the world by commentators who saw its significance in terms of its radical break with the past. Traditionally conceptualised as an outcome of a domestic anti-sweating movement that focused on the exploitation of women and children in the clothing industry, I suggest that the radical innovation of the minimum wage is best explained if we adopt a world-history approach that recognises the potency of anti-slavery discourse in the nineteenth century, the encounter of British and Chinese workers in the context of urban manufacturing in 1890s Melbourne, and the ways in which the minimum wage, later theorised as a living wage, made the humanity of workers central to modern definitions of labour.     

The ALP and the union movement: ‘Catch‐all’ party or maintaining tradition?

Considerable debate continues over whether the Hawke government has been loyal to or betrayed the ‘Labor tradition’. This article argues that two important ideological influences upon Labor are ‘labourism’ and ‘social democracy'; both depend upon the union movement for ideas and practical support While labourism explains much about the accord process and suggests that the ‘Labor tradition’ was not betrayed by the Hawke‐Keating axis, it cannot capture the complete ideological landscape of the contemporary labour movement Labourism fails to explain the more social democratic aims of the Australian Council of Trade Union's objective of ‘strategic unionism’. Yet, ironically, strategic unionism may well fail due to the steady decline in union membership over the last fifteen years. The influence of social democracy and labourism upon the Australian Labor Party (ALP) would diminish should unions’ coverage of the work force continue to decline and with it arguably, so would the'Labor tradition’.     

Competitiveness through integration in the European Union Strategy for the Alpine Region: a ‘balanced development’ approach

In the last 10 years, the European Union has devoted specific attention and resources to the establishment of macro-regional strategies, with the objective of joining together transnational areas to favour the effective and organized management of common challenges. In most macro-regions, however, the identification of strategies to increase competitiveness is a rather difficult task, given the extreme internal diversity in economic activities. Focusing on the youngest macro-regional strategy – EUSALP – this paper highlights the specific combinations of territorial growth assets that allow to overcome the inefficient use of local abundant strategic resources, in line with a ‘balanced development’ approach. The results, obtained on the basis of a database gathered at NUTS3 level, are useful to provide policy suggestions to support the competitiveness of EUSALP through synergies and complementarities, according to a cooperation networks perspective.     

‘What about my voice’: emancipating the voices of children with disabilities through participant-centred methods

Children with diverse physical, communication and/or cognitive impairments are often overlooked as active research participants. This paper challenges and lays bare norms and constructs, such as ableism and adultism, which lead to children with disabilities being left out or researched by-proxy. Additionally, the paper contests these constructs through discussing and presenting participant-centred research methods that seeks to enable children’s involvement and establish them as legitimate research participants. The application of these methods in children geography studies is illustrated through the author’s own use of creative methods of activity-based interviews and co-construction narration with older children with various physical/neurological impairments. Overall, the aim of the paper is to bridge some gaps, dispel assumptions and inspire researchers with additional ways of conceptualising and approaching research with children with disabilities, since the inclusion of all children in research rests with researchers and their understanding and use of appropriate research methods.