Moving with practices: the discontinuous,rhythmic and material mobilities of leisure

When considering mobilities within social life, researchers have emphasized the importance of enactment and embodied practices. Yet such understandings of practice as praxis—human action in general—have often left the relationship between practices and mobilities vaguely characterized. This paper therefore engages with an understanding of practices as praktik—distinct patterns of social action made up of interconnected elements—in order to explore how people move not only with cars and trains but also with practices. Praktik provides a context for studying the multiple mobilities of people, objects and ideas, highlighting important dynamics of performance and units of study. Leisure subcultures, the empirical focus of the paper, are important social practices and yet limited attention has been given to how they rely upon and are constituted by mobilities. Drawing upon a qualitative study of patchwork quilting and bird watching, the paper demonstrates that enacting leisure is inextricable from enacting discontinuous mobilities. Enthusiasts' goals lead to common experiences of travelling-in-anticipation and travelling-in-disappointment, while the systematic circulation of objects, such as bird lists and bird books, shape travel even when they are not moving alongside participants. In this way, leisure practices unfold through temporally marked patterns of mobility.     

Tracing Teams,Texts, and Topics: Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand Archaeological Knowledge Production at Çatalhöyük

Social network analysis (SNA) is an analytical technique rapidly gaining popularity within archaeology for its applicability to a wide variety of issues relating to past communities. Using the 20-year project at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, as a case study, I demonstrate how SNA can be helpfully used to understand knowledge production in archaeology. Balancing network visualization and computation with contextual knowledge, combining SNA with topic modeling, and concentrating on social structures all work to provide a diachronic view of how information flows between disparate research teams at Çatalhöyük as well as the social structures and specific individuals promoting this flow. SNA has the undeniable potential to provide new perspectives on how dispersed datasets are assembled to produce archaeological knowledge, illustrating the value of retaining focus on the social conditions of scientific practice even as significant insights are being derived from instead investigating objects and ontology.     

Exploring the daily geographies of diverse men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions

Within Canada, it has been estimated that almost half of all family, also known as informal, caregivers are now men. However, the contributions and experiences of these caregiver men have received relatively little attention, particularly from geographies of care and caregiving researchers. This analysis hopes to shed light on the unique, yet diverse, experiences of men caregiving for persons with multiple chronic conditions in Canada. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nineteen men caregivers in two provinces of Canada, this analysis aims to explore how social and physical axes of difference shape men’s daily lived geographies when providing care. Our thematic findings reveal that caregiving is experienced by participants at the three scalar levels of the body, the home and the community. Our intersectional analysis reveals that at each scalar level, being a man was not the only variable shaping caregiving experiences. Rather, it was also age, physical capacity, culture, socio-economic status, marital status, housing status, social connectedness, relationship to the care recipient and care recipients’ physical and mental capacity that shaped experiences and meanings of place during the caregiving process. Accounting for this diversity at each scale, our findings point to the unique stresses and challenges experienced. We conclude by emphasizing the significance in acknowledging the diverse challenges that exist for all caregivers in order to inform comprehensive and inclusive social policy that ultimately will produce equitable caregiver supports.     

“sche hungryd ryth sor aftyr Goddys word”: Female Piety and the Legacy of the Pastoral Programme in the Late Medieval English Sermons of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54

The pastoral programme guiding the content of most Middle English sermons had a gendered side effect: it encouraged treating female parishioners as individual souls rather than emphasising the subordinate status of women. A close study of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54, a fifteenth‐century pastoral manual containing two sequences of Middle English sermons, shows how these sermons reached out to women through gender‐inclusive language, pastoral directives that regarded women as distinct from men, and didactic narratives that both encouraged female participation in devotional activities as well as highlighting women as exemplars for all Christians. Thus Greaves 54 models how Middle English sermons could have appealed to ordinary women and affected their piety, even to the extent of encouraging the extreme devotional behaviour of Margery Kempe.     

Feelings of distance and proximity: exploring the emotional geographies of men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions

Care exchanges are imbued with emotion, yet few geography of caregiving researchers have explored how emotions shape such experiences. Furthermore, the emotions of caregiver men have been largely overlooked. As such, this secondary analysis aims to geographically explore the emotion discourse of a diverse group of men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nineteen men caregivers in Canada, our thematic findings reveal that the men’s discourse portrayed emotions experienced relationally at three levels: Between the caregivers and their own selves, others and the wider community. It was also found that the men commonly expressed their emotional experiences using geographic notions of distance (e.g. feeling far, isolated) and proximity (e.g. feeling close, connected) and that these emotions were further complicated by the participants’ diversity or situated ‘place-in-the-world’. Overall, our findings demonstrate the importance of emotional geographies in caregiver men’s lived realities and how they move between distance and proximity in order to manage their emotions as caregivers. By considering caregiver diversity and the role emotions play in shaping caregiver experiences, programs, services and best practice can become better informed on ways to enhance the provision of more context sensitive and equitable caregiver support.     

Regionalism, Regional Structures and Security Management in Central Asia

The security dimension of regionalism and regional structures in Central Asia and Azerbaijan has been limited by Russia's influence as a regional hegemon, aswell as by various other constraints specific to the region and the local states. Moreover, as a peripheral zone in the world system, Central Eurasia has not shown much evidence of regionalization as a process. But in response to the proximity of hegemonic power the smaller states have tried to adopt bandwagoning and balancing strategies in regional formats. Although their fixation on 'regime security' has encouraged them to accommodate Russia through CIS structures, this is changing as new bilateral security relationships develop with the United States. The Russian-sponsored Collective Security Treaty Organization is unable to address the most serious challenges for regional security management in Central Asia. Yet the local states have been unable on their own to establish a regional security consensus and to institutionalize cooperation on that basis. The diffuse GUUAM grouping (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova) has not offered a basis for selfsustaining regional security cooperation. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has created a venue to engage China in the security dialogue on Central Asia, particularly over counterterrorism, but has otherwise failed to tackle security challenges among and within the Central Asian states. Overall, the current focus of these states and their sponsors on bilateral relations to provide security assistance continues to displace security-related regionalism.     

Introduction: space,place and the geographies of women's caregiving work

The vast majority of caregivers, whether formal or informal, paid or unpaid, are women. Health care restructuring across the West, inspired by a shift from the welfare to neoliberal state, has greatly impacted caregiving. The idea for this collection arose as a result of a special paper session on the geographies of caregiving, held as part of the Association of American Geographers Meeting (Chicago, 2006). In hearing the papers presented, it became clear that geographers are engaged in interesting and innovative research in this area, much of which involves women's caregiving work in particular. As both unpaid informal family caregiving and paid formal practitioner-provided care are mainly addressed in this collection, they are briefly discussed in this editorial. This is followed by a discussion of the geographical contributions to the growing caregiving literature, which provides the foundation for an overview of ongoing and new research directions. The four articles that make up this special issue are then reviewed in brief. Finally, we identify issues that cut across all four articles, leading to a discussion of future research directions.