Gendered Spaces of Terror and Assault: The Testimonio of REMHI and the Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala

On 25 February 1999, Guatemalans received the much anticipated report of the United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), Memory of Silence, which detailed wartime atrocities and decades-long American support of the Guatemalan army. This document followed the earlier release of the Catholic church's own REMHI report (Recuperation of Historical Memory Inter-diocesan Project), Guatemala: never again . Using the recently released reports and databases of the CEH and REMHI, we explore the significant use of testimonio as a tool of shared witnessing, collective remembrance, and individual recollection of the special brutality directed against Maya women. Through testimonio, the outcomes of visible and invisible terror and violence in Guatemala are articulated as personal, social and geographic spaces of terror, all of which are gendered and racialised. With the civil war officially over, Maya women of Guatemala see the spaces of terror diminish. Given debates over testimonio, however, the grounds for assault and denial remain fertile.     

Sites and sanctity: revisiting the cult of murdered and martyred Anglo-Saxon royal saints

The cults of the murdered and martyred royal saints of Anglo-Saxon England have been interpreted as political in origin and this view has received widespread acceptance. This article, which discusses the cults of the kings, Oswald, Oswiu and Edwin of Northumbria, and Edward the Martyr and those of the princes, Kenelm of Mercia and Æthelred and Æthelberht of Kent, puts forward a new interpretation, suggesting that their cults originated in lay and non-élite devotion to the innocent victims of unjust and violent death, before being taken up for political and other purposes. It addresses the problem of popular religion in Anglo-Saxon England and seeks to show how these cults may be used to shed light on the beliefs of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon laity.     

Anarchy in Our Churches? The American Architectural Press, 1944–65

In the mid-twentieth century American architectural journals, including Architectural Forum, Architectural Record, and Progressive Architecture, routinely ran features on the state of contemporary church architecture in the United States. Rapid suburban expansion and the revival of religious life in the post-Depression, postwar era generated tremendous amounts of construction, with a great deal of work available for architects. This article examines the concerns and hopes of modernist editors in the 1940s–1960s, as they sought to stabilize a “direction” for church architecture. Specifically, it examines the role of the architectural press as the self-established gatekeepers for acceptable church design, and their relationship with theologians, liturgists, and building commissions within the Catholic Church. Questions of authority (who was competent to determine whether a church design was successful?) and expertise (whose theological knowledge should be weighted more heavily?) lay behind the stark assertions commonplace in these discussions. Editors, generally not themselves Catholic, used their professional positions to weigh in on hot debates within the Catholic Church over the purpose of a church building, the relationship of the Church to modernity (and modernism), and the appropriateness of new materials and engineering techniques.     

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.     

Children’s participation: moving from the performative to the social

The body of work on children’s participation has been valuable in asserting its importance. Nonetheless, participation is a contested concept and key challenges arise relating to its emphasis on age and voice, its focus on socialising the participative responsible citizen, and its failure to sufficiently recognise the range of participatory activities of children in their everyday lives. This article presents findings of a study on children’s experiences of participation in their homes, schools, and communities including the importance of the relational context, how everyday interactions rather than ‘performative’ formal structures for participation are valued by children and how their participation is limited by adult processes based on notions of competence and voice. It concludes with an argument for recognising and facilitating children’s informal and social participation as well as new forms of democratic processes being developed by children to address the possibility of governance and over-responsibilisation of children.     

Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid

Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi-sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non-profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As these reforms weakened state capacity and liberalised economies, the downsized Madagascar and US governments became reliant on conservation actors to mobilise political support for their programs. This reinforced the need to maintain strategic relationships with capital-city actors, undermining prior efforts to devolve forest management to local communities. By isolating deforestation as a peasant problem “over there” and by expanding protected areas to meet global biodiversity targets, the conservation alliance created an avenue to be green that did not threaten extractive industries or key constituents. In this manner, saving the environment via protected areas expansion offered politicians a pathway through the inherent contradictions of green neoliberalism.