Using Facebook as a Space for Storytelling in Geographical Research

Geographers have long been alert to the ways space matters to knowledge production and the stories participants choose to share. Despite such understandings, however, geographers remain surprisingly absent from discussions regarding the ways these concerns play out across online spaces. This article reflects on the employment of one online space, Facebook, as a site for storytelling in research exploring return journeys to two Australian festivals – the Big Day Out and Mardi Gras Parade. This article argues that insight over longer temporalities and shifting spatialities afforded through Facebook facilitates heightened understandings of the nuances, repetitions, differences and paradoxes of identities, encounters, and politics. Facebook, therefore, has the potential to allow for different ways of knowing that cannot be ascertained in more orthodox research spaces. Moreover, the slipperiness of conceptualisations of privacy and consent in this space draws attention to the necessity of understanding consent as fluid and ongoing, rather than antecedent to fieldwork commencement. Crucially, however, reconceptualisations of privacy and consent in this space expose potential obstacles university ethics committees may meet in responding to research moving online.     

Embodied Discourse: On gender and fear of violence

This article advances an interpretation of gender and fear of violence based on feminist post-structuralist theory. The authors explore the interweaving of 'embodied discourses', 'investments' in subject positions, and emotion. They illustrate their discussion through an exploratory analysis of the ways in which a sample of male and female university students describe their experiences of physical and sexual danger in urban space. The authors interpret the accounts they offer in terms of multiple subject positions embodied in the context of gendered power relations. In so doing they offer a fresh perspective on the geography of women's fear.     

The Legendary Commander: the construction of an Albanian master‐narrative in post‐war Kosovo*

ABSTRACT. The ongoing, post‐war construction of Albanian martyrs, memory and the nation in Kosovo has produced iconic tropes of militant resistance, unity and national independence. This critical interpretive account, based on years of the authors' ethnographic and political engagement with Albanians in post‐war Kosovo, focuses on the making of a master narrative that is centred on the ‘sublime sacrifice’ of the insurgent KLA leader Adem Jashari, known as the ‘Legendary Commander’. It also aims to trace voices of discord with this master narrative, testing contestations in terms of the rural–urban, political and gender divides in Kosovo‐Albanian society. It concludes that the narrow international view of Albanians as either ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’ has contributed to the consolidation of this powerful narrative, its celebration of Albanian agency in militant resistance and the closing of public debate within Albanian society.     

5. CONTROVERSIAL CHRONOLOGIES: THE TEMPORAL DEMARCATION OF HISTORIC EVENTS

In everyday language and in historiography, influential events are commonly described as “historic” but are rarely defined from a theoretical standpoint. Discussing temporal demarcations of events by scholars—in particular William H. Sewell Jr.'s foundational study of the Storming of the Bastille—this article considers the contemporary urge to define the event's temporal boundaries to better evaluate the alleged importance of certain events in history. Rather than perpetuating the constructivist idea that any event possesses a fundamentally interpretable character, it crafts a theoretical definition of the historic event that distinguishes between its flexible fringes and its rather stable core. Fixing an event as an anchor point on the timeline of history is thus presented as a process that provokes political, social, and—last but not least—financial controversies. As this article shows with examples from the history of revolutions reaching from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty‐first century, such epoch‐making events are essentially shaped by their flexible beginning and ending points. Although the cores of these events remain strikingly stable, their temporal fringes become objects of highly controversial discussions.     

The Changing Value of Australian Tropical Rivers

Until recently the objectives of tropical river management were narrowly construed: the development imperative drove resource policy. During recent decades, community attitudes to river and water management have changed considerably and the national program of water reform, the National Water Initiative, is accelerating alterations to the way that water is used, managed and priced. A broader range of values and imperatives is now influencing water resource management policy. Not least is the concern over the ecological impacts and economic inefficiencies of the large‐scale hydrological schemes that once excited the public's imagination. This paper reports on a recent study of social and economic values of tropical rivers conducted by the authors for an Australian statutory research and development corporation. The study shows that the values associated with tropical rivers have changed and diversified over time with growing societal awareness of the contribution made by unregulated, healthy river systems to human wellbeing and cultural identity. As a consequence of substantial social change, tropical river management must now contend with a more complex array of societal values and water management objectives.     

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS: CHILDHOOD MORTALITY AND BURIAL PRACTICE IN LATE NEOLITHIC ATLANTIC EUROPE

Towards the end of the fifth millennium BC, a new funerary tradition developed in Iberia and elsewhere in Atlantic Europe involving the use of megalithic tombs and natural or artificially constructed caves for the collective burial of the dead. Ancestor worship has been the most common theoretical framework used to explain this Neolithic burial tradition, despite demographic information which indicates that these burials house the remains of a significant percentage of children and adolescents. Using data from Late Neolithic (3500–2500 BC) tombs in south‐western Iberia as a departure point, in this paper we suggest that by reconsidering the impact that childhood mortality had upon burial and grave visitation practices in Neolithic communities, archaeologists can gain valuable phenomenological information which will allow for a more robust, multivocal interpretative approach.