Fashioned Forest Pasts,Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales

This article considers how environmental problematics are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa’s humid forest zone. Examing the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine‐grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with ‘discourse’ perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and ‘local’ knowledges. The authors explore the day‐to‐day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers’ alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.     

Feminist geography,the ‘everyday’, and local–global relations: hidden spaces of place‐making*

An interest in the taken‐for‐granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the ‘everyday’ in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local–global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a ‘greying’ population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of ‘hidden’ caregiving contribute to contemporary place‐making, and open up our understanding of the ‘local’.     

American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France

This essay is a transnational and comparative study of how gendered national stereotypes structured the experience of American women who studied in France in the 1920s and 1930s and how this cross‐cultural exchange contributed to cultural internationalism. In both the French and American popular imaginations, American girls and French jeunes filles connoted opposite modern and traditional notions of femininity. In the process of negotiating these two competing identities in popular consciousness and in daily life, some American women students came to appreciate the limitations of the stereotypes, as well as more complex underlying cultural differences, notably in their encounters with French youth's heterosocial practices and with French women students. I argue that the outcome of this process included women's construction of alternative identities for themselves and a new tolerance and appreciation for cultural difference that represents a distinctive development toward cultural internationalism. This study challenges the cultural asymmetry of United States and European relations between the wars and locates gender and women at their centre.     

Neither ‘America’ nor ‘Québec’: constructing the Canadian multicultural nation

ABSTRACT. Although researchers have deconstructed the myth of stark social differences between the various North American sub‐societies, an assimilating American melting pot and an ethnically oppressive monocultural Québec are still popular representations within Canadian majority discourses, such as the English‐language mainstream media and parts of academia. In this paper, I argue that images of ‘America’ and ‘Québec’ play important roles for the multicultural reconstruction of Canadian nationhood. Examining selected op‐ed articles from two Toronto‐based mainstream newspapers during the 1990s, I develop and exemplify a theoretical understanding of how national identities are constituted and transformed within inter‐ and intra‐national relations of power and alterity. I pay special attention to the particularisation of Canada through the confrontation with American nationhood, the ambiguities of recognising the distinctiveness of Québec inside Canada, and the consequences of projecting Québec's supposedly ‘ethnic’ nationalism outside the boundaries of Canadianness.     

Three reflections on Revolution at Point Zero for (re)producing an alternative academy

Abstract

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle is a collection of Federici’s essays, her theorizations and research on feminist struggles to reconfigure social reproduction in ways alternative to capitalist relations. In this intervention, I present reflections on three experiences – teaching Federici’s work, being a graduate student and precarious academic worker, and engaging in rich and meaningful friendships – in order to offer a consideration for how Federici’s centering of social reproduction can provide lessons for resisting the neoliberalization of the academy, taking care of each other, and cultivating alternative and more just social relations. Federici’s work gives principles for how to live and resist together, principally because of her centering of social reproduction and the possibility of crafting an alternative set of social relations. In this intervention, I question and advocate for relationships, accountability, and a critical politics of social reproductive labor as being essential to such a struggle.     

Not all dogs go to heaven,some go to Battersea: sharing suffering and the ‘Brown Dog affair’

This paper concerns the memorialisation of a dog's (after)life. It traces the story of the ‘Brown Dog’: a terrier allegedly vivisected in 1903 by English physiologist Sir William Bayliss and subsequently commemorated by two statues in Battersea, London. Each statue has been the locus for ethical encounters between human and animal, and I draw upon the work of Donna Haraway to explore them. The first, installed in 1906 in Battersea borough, enjoyed a prominent social existence at the centre of Edwardian anti-vivisectionism. The second, by contrast, erected seven decades later in 1985, was welcomed with minimal fanfare and now sits, an obscure curiosity, in a corner of Battersea Park. Both statues attempt to honour the non-human lives lost through the unequal and instrumental power relations of animal testing. Here, I see the statues as experimental means of ‘paying attention to’ the suffering inflicted through animal experimentation and vivisection, mobilising Haraway's concept of ‘shared suffering’. I also argue that their varied success demonstrates how both the nature of and responses to the animal suffering they embody are historically contingent. The paper follows recent trends in animal geography arguing that explorations of ‘discomforting encounters’ might offer better ways of relating with animals.     

Global Governmentality and graduated sovereignty: National belonging among poor migrants in ecuador

Questions about the transformation of governance and national identity are being re‐examined in the context of contemporary economic globalisation. Scholars are debating the ways in which globalisation is reworking national identities through the shifting of economic governance away from ‘... the territorially defined boundaries of the nation‐state ... [and into] “unbundled” space for which there is not yet a name’ (Gupta, 1998: 321). Much of the work that has examined these questions of national identity and belonging under globalisation have emphasised questions of mobility, memory and identity in diasporic communities. In this paper, by contrast, I work with economic migrants within Ecuador to emphasise how contemporary globalisation processes reach inside national territories and work to reconstitute and reinvigorate pre‐existing social hierarchies and spatial identities. I develop these arguments in the context of Ecuador's economic crisis of the last two decades, drawing on in‐depth interviews with migrants to Quito.     

Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.     

Prices and Politics in Andean Water Reforms

Water rights are best understood as politically contested and culturally embedded relationships among different social actors. In the Andean region, existing rights of irrigators’ collectives often embody historical struggles over resources, rules, authorities and identities. This article argues, first, that the neo‐liberal language that is increasingly used in water policies is ill‐suited for recognizing and dealing with these social, cultural and political dimensions of water distribution. Local water rules and rights, their dynamics, and the way they are linked to power relations, local identities and contextualized constructions of legitimacy, remain invisible in neo‐liberal policy discourse. Second, this same discourse actively destroys these local rights systems and presents itself as the only viable cure to the problems it generates. The ways in which local irrigators’ collectives attempt to protect their water security raise questions about the fundaments and effects of neo‐liberal water reforms, but these questions are neglected or poorly understood. This article proposes a more situated, layered and contextualized approach to Andean water questions, not just to improve representational accuracy but also to increase political visibility and legitimacy of peasant and indigenous water claims. What is needed is not just a new ‘typology’ or ‘taxonomy’ of water rights, but an alternative ‘water rights ontology’ that understands locally existing norms and water control practices, and the power relations that inform and surround them, as deeply constitutive of water rights.     

Engendering Gramsci: Gender,the Philosophy of Praxis,and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan,Bangladesh

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity‐building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness‐raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be “engendered” to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.     

Commoditizing the safari and making space for conflict: Place,identity and parks in East Africa

Increased resource scarcity, the social construction of nature, the disintegration of moral economy and associated policy shifts are often cited as the main drivers of resource conflicts in East Africa. Research in geography, anthropology and rural sociology has unveiled how common explanations of resource conflicts overlook multi-scalar political, economic, social, cultural and environmental tensions. The purpose of this study is to provide more nuanced explanations of resource conflicts by incorporating three disparate but related threads of literature. Using literatures on the commodification of nature, multi-stranded notions of identity and geographical conceptualizations of ‘place’, I demonstrate how three transformational moments structure and propagate conflicts between herders and protected area managers around a national park in Kenya. I argue that the rise of a commoditized form of nature tourism coupled with idealized notions of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ have altered the micro-geography of interaction between herders and protected area managers. These altered geographies of interaction have diluted the shared history and traditional relations of reciprocity, created new social milieux, and lead to the creation of binary identities among herders and protected area managers. The enforcement of these binary identities culminates in conflict.     

Childhood narratives: adult reflections on encounters with difference in everyday spaces

Research on children and young people commonly focuses on the present experiences of childhood. Yet Philo, C. [2003. “‘To Go Back up the Side Hill’: Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood.” Children's Geographies 1 (1): 7–24] has argued that we might also access the ‘worlds’ of children and childhood through the memories or recollections of adults, given that we have all been children once. In response, this paper explores the narratives of adults reflecting on their childhood experiences and in particular, on the formation of their attitudes towards difference. The paper offers a means of understanding how adults reflect on their childhood encounters with difference, how their attitudes towards difference are developed over time and the extent to which these childhood narratives are carried into adult lives. This is not to suggest that early experiences are deterministic. Rather, individuals can reflect on their own lives and encounters and choose to change or react to wider social relations in new ways such that they produce and embody new dispositions.     

It's safe: food as a way of expression for children in Warsaw

ABSTRACT

The role of food in family relations is often discussed with a focus on discipline and control. This paper shows how food can also be used to create children’s safe spaces, defined as the social conditions that allow relatively independent expression of opinions, emotions and practices. Based on ethnographic research conducted with families in Warsaw in 2012–2013, I discuss different ways in which food is used to create and express such safe spaces. Firstly, I look at how children use food to create their own, personal and hidden safe space, in opposition to parental rule. Secondly, I analyse how food is used to build a safe space between adults and children. I argue that within often antagonistic family food relations there is in fact a space for children’s expression. Thirdly, I discuss the role of food in creating safe spaces for children during the research process. This paper takes a relational approach to the concept of safe space, and considers what kind of social relations and processes enable children’s autonomous expression with the means of food.     

Securing disunion: Young people's nationalism,identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009, Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.     

“Peace is Our Only Shelter”: Questioning Domesticities of Militarization and White Privilege

Abstract: This paper traces how Los Angeles peace activists tried to make visible the grave domestic effects of Cold War militarization. Women Strike for Peace went beyond a focus on the productive relations between the state, military and industry captured by the term “military–industrial complex” to analyze how reproductive spaces were part of this complex. In opposing war, they challenged what I am calling militarized domesticities: how war‐making shapes the ‘home front’ and home as the spaces national security states claim to protect. I build on feminist antiracist intersectionality theories to situate the military–industrial complex per se within broader processes of the militarization of society and daily life. The questions become how do gendered processes of militarization—that work in conjunction with relations of white privilege—produce and connect differently situated “private” spaces or home places? How might strategies for dismantling the military–industrial complex emerge from the contradictions of these processes?     

Epistemic justice and everyday nationalism: An auto‐ethnography of transnational student encounters in a post‐war memory and reconciliation project in Kosovo

This contribution introduces an exercise in epistemic justice to the study of everyday nationalism in post‐conflict, transnational (local and international) encounters. It explores how everyday nationalism, in often unexpected and hidden ways, underpinned a cocreational, educational project involving several local (Albanian) and international (British based) university students and staff collaborating on the theme of post‐war memory and reconciliation in Kosovo. The set‐up resembled a microcosm of transnational social encounters in project collaborations in which the problem of nationalism, typically, is associated with one side only: here, the Kosovars. Guided by Goffman's (1982) social interactionist framework, the study employs selected participants' paraethnographic and auto‐ethnographic reflections of their project experiences and practices after the event in order to trace the everyday workings of mutual assumptions and constructions of a national self and other for all sides involved. In this, it explores how the project participants' asymmetric positioning within a wider, global context of unequal power relations shaped their vernacular epistemologies of belonging and identity. It thereby excavated what otherwise taken‐for‐granted criteria can become relevant in such local/international social encounters as reflected upon and how the enduring power imbalances underpinning these might best be redressed.     

The ‘voices’ of children: de‐centring empowering research relations

This paper examines some problematic methodological and ethical issues associated with in‐depth qualitative research with children. The discussion has wider resonance for qualitative studies of young people in ‘rural’ contexts. Particular ethical issues arise when researching with children, which are underpinned by children's relative powerlessness in society. With this in mind, the paper considers substantive strategies to promote ‘empowering research relations’, drawing upon an empirical study with children in primary school spaces. Re‐theorisations of identities and power as fractured, dynamic and contextual, suggest that research is comprised of specific moments or ‘research performances’. It is argued that developing empowering research relations involves negotiating such performances in ways that contest, or transform, dominant societal relations between children and adults. In this paper, I consider some of the specific, embodied performances involved in my research, to expose some of the complexities of power relations and negotiations within space. Bringing to light particular moments emphasises that power relations between children and adults are not reducible to the powerless and the powerful. It is also demonstrated that research performances are influenced and constrained by expectations placed upon adult and child practices in society and institutional spaces, and by researchers' own unconscious reproduction of dominant identities.     

IDENTITIES AND URBAN SOCIAL SPACES IN LITTLE TOKYO,LOS ANGELES: JAPANESE AMERICANS IN TWO ETHNO‐SPIRITUAL COMMUNITIES

Ethnic identities are expressed and articulated in particular places. These mutable identities are crucial sources of meaning in the lives of social actors. This article seeks to elucidate just how the contexts of specific institutions in an urban enclave will impact upon patterns of conflict and cooperation among different subgroups practising two religious traditions. Historical discourses of ethnic community and ‘race’, shifts in migration patterns and the changing nature of the Little Tokyo enclave provide the formative patterns of social spaces, in which ethnic actors seek to create lives of spiritual and material meaning and security. Barth's concept of the social organization of cultural difference encourages analysis of ethnic identities as a dynamic and mutable enterprise. Because the maintenance of boundaries is crucial to identities, the manner in which a group seeks to maintain difference is intermeshed with the social terrain of particular places. Through qualitative methods of semi‐structured and informal interviews and participant observations, this project engages Japanese American identities within the context of two religious communities in an urban enclave. Fieldwork was conducted in two institutions, a Protestant church and a Buddhist temple, with the aim of exploring how Japanese American identities are expressed and (re)negotiated within different ethno‐spiritual communities. Such communities are fundamental to the expression of ethnic identities, and to the emotional lives of worshippers, particularly seniors and new immigrants.     

Girls,consumption space and the contradictions ofhanging out in the city

Geographers have effectively examined girls' reactions and resistances to adult control in public space, but the ways that girls learn about and reinscribe social differences like race and class through ‘hanging-out’ practices in public, urban space have yet to be sufficiently explored and theorized. Therefore, in this paper I consider the normative productivity of girls' spatial practices, as well as girls' resistances to adultist space. I examine the case of consumption space and focus on how girls utilize, create and reproduce myriad social identifiers as they hang out in public, urban space. Consumption space and consumerism dominate the urban spaces and hanging-out practices of teenagers, and while girls complain about the ubiquity of consumption space, girls' public social-spatial activities inevitably involve consumption space. Therefore, consumption's symbols and spaces are central to the normative production of girls' identities like class and race, and of social difference more generally in urban space.