The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia

This article concerns Arthur Vogan's novel The Black Police, published in 1890. In his book Vogan drew upon an affective global language of suffering that combined appeals to his experience as an eyewitness of the frontier with popular stereotypes drawn from British and American abolitionist precedents. These sources included Uncle Tom's Cabin and popular newspaper commentary on Queensland frontier violence that had circulated earlier in Australia and Britain. The reception of Vogan's novel was mixed: while it reached a wide audience, it failed to prompt official action, and local and British reviewers charged him with sensationalism and ‘embellishment’. Vogan defended his work vehemently, asserting it was based on fact. Reviewers' scepticism stemmed, however, from Vogan's uneasy blend of realist narrative, grounded in eyewitness testimony, and the popular and sensational fictional and visual conventions he deployed. At the end of a period of intense frontier conflict in Queensland over the preceding three decades, Vogan's novel of protest and its ambivalent reception point to the limits of humanitarian influence within an Australian, intercolonial, and ultimately imperial framework.     

Diasporic dwelling: the poetics of domestic space

This article explores the politics of diasporic dwelling in domestic spaces. Heidegger's concept of ‘dwelling’ is popular in studies of diasporic life as it articulates a sense of belonging in mobility without the problematic connotations of rootedness conjured up by ‘home’. However, the way Heidegger's ‘dwelling’ functions in diasporic contexts is rarely considered, an absence this article seeks to address by exploring the concept in more detail, focusing in particular on ‘the fourfold’ and preservation. This discussion is grounded in the domestic spaces of two Palestinian women living in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the article explores how these women's houses, and particular spaces within them, enable and constrain their dwelling. I argue for greater attention to be paid to the expansive and integrative capacities of domestic space and demonstrate the need to address houses in their social context and as internally heterogeneous. This article also contributes to ongoing debates about material and symbolic dwelling and diasporic identities that include but also exceed territorialised belonging.     

THE DYIRBAL KINSHIP SYSTEM

The Dyirbal-speaking people of North Queensland, Australia, have an unusual (and possibly unique) kinship system. Marriage takes place with someone not from ego's own generation but a generation above or below. A cross-cousin through an elder-sibling link at the parents' generation (i.e. mother's elder brother's child, father's elder sister's child) is a potential mother-in-law or father-in-law; ego may marry the child of such a relation. It follows from this that ego may also marry the child of a younger opposite-sex sibling of a grandparent (e.g. mother's mother's younger brother's child). The system is quite symmetrical with regard to sex. Following exposition of the rules of the kinship system, the paper discusses how these are actually put into practice. Justification for the kin categories is also provided by linguistic observations on (i) dual forms of kin terms; (ii) the possible subjects of ‘verbs of begetting’; (iii) the kinship basis of the two first person dual pronouns; (iv) the rules for using the special deferential (or ‘mother-in-law’) speech style.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Relational concepts of space and place: Issues for planning theory and practice

This paper seeks to conceptualize and explore the changing relationships between planning action and practice and the dynamics of place. It argues that planning practice is grappling with new treatments of place, based on dynamic, relational constructs, rather than the Euclidean, deterministic, and one‐dimensional treatments inherited from the ‘scientific’ approaches of the 1960s and early 1970s. But such emerging planning practices remain poorly served by planning theory which has so far failed to produce sufficiently robust and sophisticated conceptual treatments of place in today's globalizing’ world. In this paper we attempt to draw on a wide range of recent advances in social theory to begin constructing such a treatment. The paper has four parts. First, we criticize the legacy of object‐oriented, Euclidean concepts of planning theory and practice, and their reliance on ‘containered’ views of space and time. Second, we construct a relational understanding of time, space and cities by drawing together four strands of recent social theory. These are: relational theories of urban time‐space, dynamic conceptualizations of ‘multiplex’ places and cities, the ‘new’ urban and regional socio‐economics, and emerging theories of social agency and institutional ordering. In the third section, we apply such perspectives to three worlds of planning practice: land use regulation, policy frameworks and development plans, and the development of ‘customized spaces’ in urban ‘regeneration’. Finally, by way of conclusion, we suggest some pointers for practising planning in a relational way.     

The refugee camp as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities

Analyses of refugee camps have criticised Agamben's conceptualisation of exception, understood as the juridical production of ‘bare life’ by the sovereign. They have emphasised the multiplicity of actors and exclusionary dynamics involved in the production of exception, as well as the politicisation of space. This scholarship has however stayed framed around an ‘exclusionary paradigm’. This article proposes a complementary way to move beyond Agamben's analysis of the camp by reconsidering the idea of a ‘zone of indistinction’ between exclusion and inclusion. It refers to Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, where many dwellers have a dual status of ‘refugee-citizen’. It analyses how the subject and citizenship are ambiguously constructed as simultaneously excluded and included – and not solely included through an exclusion. To explore these complex spatial dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, the analysis addresses the exercise of three forms of power – sovereignty, discipline and government – by focusing on the materiality of the camp and the practices of authorities managing space. These powers are ambiguously contributing to the inclusion of the camp and its dwellers in the territory of the Jordanian state, as well as in the neoliberal city of Amman, while maintaining the character of the camp as an excluded humanitarian and temporary space. Through this process, camp dwellers are recast not only as assisted subjects and beneficiaries, but also as autonomous and productive subjects, as well as entrepreneurs and consumers. This article therefore argues that the camp needs to be re-considered as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities aimed at creating a differentiation in the city.     

Arthur Schopenhauer: Manuscript remains,volume IV; The manuscript books of 1830–1852 and the last manuscripts

This article presents and compares aspects of Charles Taylor's and Hans Blumenberg's seemingly opposing views about agency and epistemology, setting them in the context of the tradition in German ideas called ‘philosophical anthropology’, with which both align their thinking. It presents key strands of this tradition, from their inception in the late eighteenth century in the writings of Herder, Schiller and others associated with anthropology to their articulation by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen and Karl Löwith in the early twentieth century. The main issues here are: man's status as part of nature or as ‘radically divorced’ from nature; the possibility of objective knowledge of man versus the epistemological status of human ‘meaning’; the view of knowledge as abstraction versus ‘concrete’ or ‘lived’ experience. Within these parameters the article contrasts Taylor's emphasis on ‘engaged’ agency, embedded in discourses, bodies and predispositions, with Blumenberg's sense of our ‘indirect’ relation to reality: ‘delayed, selective, and above all “metaphorical”’. It concludes that each position may be traced back to a key strand in philosophical anthropology: the one emphasising man's unique freedom, the other that sees man's grasp of reality as uniquely interwoven with a background of meanings.     

E. H. Carr,Norman Angell,and Reassessing the Realist–Utopian Debate

While the realist argument presented by E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis has received much attention from scholars, recent scholarship has suggested that traditional interpretations of the work and the debate in which it figured have not accurately reflected the inter-war discourse. In this article, the author provides detail to support these claims through an examination of Carr's landmark work in comparison with prominent ‘utopian’ counterparts, primarily Norman Angell but also others such as Leonard Woolf and Arnold Toynbee. The conclusion of this article calls for increased emphasis on the works of internationalist writers of the inter-war period. It also echoes other scholars in calling for renewed focus on early twentieth-century internationalist thought and a critical reappraisal of Carr's landmark work through the prism of his policy recommendations and the critique he received during the original ‘great debate’.     

Exile at home: A matter of being out of place

This article employs Hannah Arendt's theorizing about assimilation to consider how sovereign citizens of a nation state might nevertheless experience a sense of exile. It builds on Aziza Khazzoom's notion of a ‘chain of Orientalism’ to suggest that the assimilation of Europe's Jews to Enlightenment ideals has had ongoing repercussions among Jews in the modern state of Israel. The article focuses on what it means to be Jewish in terms of religious observance, and who feels at home in the Jewish state. Employing vignettes from recent ethnographic fieldwork, it raises questions about the modern nation state's capacity to create conditions in which its own ‘people’ can flourish. In this case, Israel has claimed to make it possible for the Jews to flourish, in Arendt's terms, ‘as Jews’, but it is far from clear what ‘as Jews’ would, could or should mean. This leads the author to suggest that Israel has a Jewish problem.     

Being a tourist as a chosen experience in a proximity destination

ABSTRACT

Being a tourist is not a passive attitude. It is the result of a conscious decision essentially based on how individuals build what they perceive as unknown and how they decide to get to know it. In other words, tourists deliberately create a distance with the destination which allows them to enjoy the tourist experience as something exceptional. This paper is part of ongoing research and focuses on the subjective construction of the otherness, since this process determines what is left to be discovered. First, a theoretical overview will introduce the concepts of usual environment, proximity and tourist. Then, we will focus on guided tours as a mechanism of mediation between individuals and places. Finally, we will move on to the case of Barcelona's walking tours and the local participants’ experience as a way to adopt a tourist's approach. Preliminary results show, first, four categories of experience of proximate guided tours: educational, expert, recreational and tourist. Then, they focus on the proximity tourist experience using Urry and Larsen's notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ and Tuan's theory on the tourist and the resident's points of view. According to these theories, participants’ motivations and their individual frame of reference define a tourist's point of view. Based on that, results show that proximity tourists and traditional tourists share curiosity as motivation but do not have the same points of reference. In spite of that, the feeling of proximity with the destination does not constitute a barrier to become a tourist. It is the conscious adoption of the tourist's role which makes the individual gaze upon the visited areas like a tourist, regardless of the proximity with the environment. This approach of proximity tourism constitutes a way to enhance familiar places and develop tourism in an environmentally concerned context where proximate destinations are being promoted.     

Preemption contested: Suspect spaces and preventability in the July 7 inquest

The London Coroner's Inquest into the deaths of July 7 2005 unequivocally rejected the notion that the security services could and should have been able to identify the 7/7 perpetrators as potential future terrorists before July 2005. These findings contest powerful post-9/11 security logics of preemption and anticipation that hold that security intervention is logical and desirable in the face of unknown and unspecified threats. This paper analyses the spatio-temporal work conducted in and through the Coroner's Inquest, with a specific focus on its preventability evidence. The Inquest provides a rich archive in which the potentialities for intervention and preemption, and concomitant questions of suspect spaces, are engaged, debated, accepted and rejected. This paper argues that the Inquest rendered ‘7/7’ from a fast a familiar framing as anticipated catastrophe, into a ‘matter of concern’ in the sense discussed by Bruno Latour. The paper considers the ambiguous nature of the Inquest, and the way in which it both opened space for public debate and alternative conceptions of futurity; and closed down such space by accepting and normalising notions of networked threat.     

A Tale of Two Train Journeys: Lawrence Bragg,C. P. Snow and The ‘Two Cultures’

It was during two train-journey meetings with the physicist William Lawrence Bragg (1890–1971) that both Charles Percy Snow's (1905–1980) civil service career and, if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, the ‘two cultures’ metaphor originated. The first part of this paper is concerned with the background, consequences and significance of the first of these journeys: Kettering station in 1939. It will address the somewhat hazy record of Snow's wartime work found in existing accounts, and argue that Snow's wartime experience helped shape his characterisation of the scientific side of his ‘two cultures’. The second part of this paper deals with Bragg's intellectual influence on Snow, tracing the former's interest in ‘two cultures’ arguments prior to probable encounters between the two on the Cambridge to London train in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including a historically hazy one in which together they allegedly coined the famous phrase. In examining their early relationship, it becomes clear that Bragg was a key influence and support in Snow's career as an administrator and as a cultural commentator.     

The garden city idea in Australia

Ebenezer Howard's Garden City idea occupies an important place in the history of British planning, and in various guises it made a significant international impact. A preliminary exploration of the history of the idea in Australia is attempted, focussing on its meaning as a schema for social reform and on its impact on the landscape. The first two ‘phases’ saw the rise of ‘garden city principles’ to describe a model house and garden suburbia which was to redeem urban Australia. In the 1920s these ‘town planning principles’ were used mainly to sell land, but in a fourth phase beginning in the early 1930s they were refined into neighbourhood planning ideas, combining with previously neglected concepts of the satellite town and green belt to approach more closely the original vision of a garden city. This reformist text emerged as town planning was finally accorded professional respectability; however, with the ambiguous exception of Canberra, the promise of neither has been realized.     

‘In the best interests of the child’: juggling the geography of children's gardens (between adult agendas and children's needs)

This review paper presents literature, particularly in children's geographies, in support of the proposition that the rationales for the current children's garden movement flourishing particularly in the United States, albeit well-intentioned, continue to be dominated by adult discourses acting ‘in the best interests of the child’. The paper concludes that broadening the debate on ‘children and gardens’ through inclusion of research that focuses on children's competence and empowerment offers a different perspective of what children might want from these spaces. This highlights new directions for research on children's gardens which would focus this garden typology more on children's needs than adult agendas, and therefore contribute positively to development of these gardens as sustainable environments for children's learning and enjoyment of nature.     

The Greening of the Queensland electorate?

The Greens at the 2004 Queensland State election almost trebled their primary vote from 2001, an increase suggesting the party has already filled the vacuum left by the declining Australian Democrats as the State's principal Left-of-Centre minor party. This article argues, first, that much of this growth in support can be attributed to the substantial interstate migration to the State's southeast, a pattern that has contributed to a partial transformation of Queensland's traditional political culture to one more disposed to Green support. Second, given that this growth is set to continue, it is argued that the Queensland Greens are yet to maximise their vote. This article analyses the 2004 Queensland State election results to determine the impact of Green preferences under the State's Optional Preferential Voting (OPV) system, and to locate where geographically, and among whom demographically, Green support was strongest. A rudimentary profile of the ‘typical’ Queensland Greens voter is also offered.     

Edna O'Brien and narrative diaspora space

Given the persistent presence of migration in the work of Edna O'Brien, it is surprising how marginal a theme it is in critiques of her work. This article explores how questions of diaspora have reached a renewed level of depth and intensity in her novel The Light of Evening (2006) and the related short story ‘My Two Mothers’ (2011). Looking, in particular, at how letters play a central role in the relationships of three generations of Irish women across three countries, it analyses how issues of mother(land), diaspora and belonging are mediated through migrant fiction. It draws on the work of Avtar Brah and Paul Ricoeur to argue that, along with related forms of textuality within O'Brien's oeuvre, letters represent a ‘narrative diaspora space’ which illuminates the relationship between mothers, daughters and writing in Irish migrant experience.     

Feminist geographies in Greece: a personal trajectory between ‘local’ and ‘international’

Abstract

Feminist debates in the context of an active women's/feminist movement found their way into the Greek academy in the second half of the 1970s, initially in history. Urban studies and geography were ‘late-comers’ in these debates which took place in different disciplinary environments where geography courses were taught. The article presents a personal account in and through the development of feminist approaches in urban geography, drawing from my teaching and research experience since 1982 in a department of urban and regional planning. This experience has been accumulated as a hard exercise in navigating through the denial and reluctant consent of various levels of administration, students’ changing acceptance, some women’s valuable active support, in the university and beyond, and other colleagues’ opposition or indifference. In this process, recent and longer-term developments have contributed to form a (continuously negotiated and contested) space for feminism, for tolerance, diversity and difference, in which a ‘we’ has been tortuously formed which speaks across worlds, participates in a plurality of communities, communicates in more than one languages and in a plurality of voices between ‘local’ and ‘international’.     

Class,Place, and Gender: Contested Industrial and Domestic Space in Kohler,Wisconsin, USA, 1920–1960

The Kohler company, a family‐owned plumbing manufactory in Wisconsin, USA, known for the ‘garden industrial village’ erected for its workers during the 1910s, managed class relations through a gendered spatial arrangement of its model town. In the 1930s and 1950s, unionists striking at the plant responded by articulating their class alliances within and outside the town in spatial terms that revised the meaning of the place. In the process, the Kohler unions also necessarily refigured domestic space in ways that challenged the company's mapping of domesticity in the 1930s, but they drew back from such challenges in the 1950s.     

Turkey and the European Union: troubled European or European trouble?

This article examines EU‐Turkey relations and considers the potential impact of the EU pronouncement at the December 2004 summit and the subsequent (reluctant)decision to begin negotiations in October 2005 on Turkey's efforts to become a member of the Union. It briefly summarizes the debate over Turkish accession and outlines the main arguments and positions of EU members and institutions. It then highlights the inadequacies of the alternatives to full membership that have been offered to Turkey in the past and expresses the concern that the EU's adoption of ‘flexible integration’ may lead to Turkey being, at best, offered a ‘lower tier’ form of EU membership in the future. It continues by arguing that concerns about Turkey's suitability for EU membership because it is Islamic and its lack of ‘Europeanness’ are ill‐founded and/or irrelevant and that the best way to facilitate Turkey's continued contribution to European (and world)security and its western orientation, is to allow it to join the EU as a full member. It concludes that the decision to admit a new member is primarily a political one and that Turkey should be allowed to join the EU in the immediate future.