‘Well weather is not a girl thing is it?’ Contemporary amateur meteorology,gender relations and the shaping of domestic masculinity

Although there is a growing scholarship on the history of amateur meteorology, contemporary amateur meteorology has tended to remain a largely invisible social phenomenon. Moreover, questions of female involvement and gender relations therein have tended to be overlooked. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on interviews with members of one of the most important amateur meteorological networks in the UK—the Climatological Observers Link. The research identifies a predominantly male bias within amateur meteorology in the UK, offers insight into why and how this bias has emerged and explores the implications of this bias for gender politics in the home. It also considers the way in which, as a pursuit that is very much situated within the domestic sphere, amateur meteorology complicates traditional framings of the home as a female realm and contributes to a domestic masculinity.     

How environments speak: everyday mobilities,impersonal speech and the geographies of commentary

This paper examines commentary as a mode of speaking that has not received sufficient attention by social and cultural geographers. In contrast to a representational understanding of commentary, where commentary is the expert interpretation of an environment, this paper develops a more passive understanding of commentary where the commentator is a figure through which the affective, material forces that constitute environments become expressed. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, the paper examines three modes of everyday commentary related to commuting. The commentaries of reportage, anecdote and autoventriloquy each demonstrate in different ways how the affective, material environments of commuting become spoken. The paper shows, first, how commentary is a constitutive rather than derivative aspect of the experience of commuting. Second, it shows that commentary is an expression of affective, material environments, rather than either the willed self-expression of the speaker, or the manifestation of socially and historically contingent discourses. Third, it shows that commentary can both close down and draw out specific affective, material environments. Fourth, it shows how commentary modulates the powers of existence in the zone of the commute, transforming the affective possibilities immanent to different situations.     

Liquid Assets: Madeira Wine and Cultural Capital among Lowcountry Planters, 1735–1900

This article explores the history of the South Carolina and Georgia elites’ passion for madeira wine. It describes the nature of madeira and the characteristics that made the wine unique. By historical accidents, planters and merchants developed an ardent taste for madeira and over time this fondness became elevated to a tradition for collecting. Employing Bourdieu’s concepts of multiple forms of capital, the article demonstrates that madeira became an important form of cultural capital as an elite consumer good. However, reduced circumstances resulting from the economic disruptions of the Civil War brought an end to madeira culture by 1900.     

The Negotiated Hibernian: Discourse on the Fenian in England and America

During the 1850s and 1860s, the British Empire faced a threat from nationalists advocating self‐rule for Ireland. Known as the Fenians, the English press quickly identified them as a monolithic terrorist organization and blamed them for all manner of threats against the Empire; furthermore, they argued that elements in the United States, for reasons of their own, supported the separatists. However, the image of the Fenian was far more complex than the simple rhetorical image constructed in the British press, especially when an alternate stream of pro‐Irish rhetoric is considered. Indeed, the Fenian was as much a rhetorical cultural construct as it was a transnational independence movement.