Islam and the rural landscape: discourses of absence in west Wales

This paper explores the relationship between the presence and absence of Islamic communities in western Wales. Commencing with a discussion of the literatures on the geographies of Islam and rural exclusion, I argue that both sets have neglected research on rural religious communities. Discussion is centred upon the visual absence of Islam in the area, as local mosques are predominantly housed in contingent or non-purpose-built buildings. Using interview data, I examine the implications of these absences for local Muslims' experiences of rural landscapes, and discuss the juxtaposition between the visual absence of cultural indicators of Islam and the contingent strategies these communities employ to meet their religious needs. Adopting Nancy Fraser's concept of a subaltern counterpublic, I argue that the contingent presence in the landscape brings organisational possibilities. However, the lack of visibility of these counterpublics also brings challenges, fragmenting the community and creating difficulties for individuals to access particular services. This subterranean ontology has implications not only for liberal ideas of publicity and privacy, but also for inclusive citizenship in an era when debates about multiculturalism centre on accommodating religious needs.     

Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: Bilingual road signs in Wales

The paper focuses on Billig's (Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage) notion of banal nationalism. While Billig's work is to be commended for demonstrating the way in which nationalism is an endemic political ideology in all states – and not merely an extreme or hot political ideology that is based upon “blood and belonging” (Ignatieff, M. (1993). Blood and belonging: Journeys into the new nationalism. London: BBC Books) – we suggest that his work tends, perhaps unwittingly, to reinforce an unwarranted separation of the banal and hot processes that reproduce nationalism. Some empirical work has implicitly and explicitly begun to question the distinction between banal and hotter forms of nationalism. We argue that one way in which such an agenda can be furthered is through a promotion of the idea of everyday nationalism, which combines banal and hot elements in more complex and contingent ways. We elaborate on the benefits of adopting such an approach through an empirical discussion of the campaign in favour of bilingual road signs in Wales between 1967 and 1975. We focus, first, on how monolingual English road signs were constructed by Welsh nationalists as part of an everyday landscape of oppression and, second, on the everyday politics of road signs within the spaces of government. We conclude the paper by reaffirming the need to move beyond notions of banal and hot nationalism and to focus on the everyday contexts within which nationalism is reproduced.     

Spatializing the ecological Leviathan: Territorial strategies and the production of regional natures

This paper explores a dual absence — the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of the state and nature, this paper combines work on the production of nature and state strategy with Lefebvre's recently translated writings on state space and territory. By focusing on the production of territory (or state space), we explore the interaction of the state and nature in the context of the political management of social and ecological space. We unravel the spatial entanglements of the state and nature through an analysis of the British state's territorial strategies within the West Midlands region. By considering three key historical periods within the history of the West Midlands we reveal how the emergence of the regional space called the West Midlands is a product of the ongoing spatial dialectics of state and nature therein.     

Young children’s use of an augmented reality sandbox to enhance spatial thinking

ABSTRACT

Augmented reality (AR) technology is being introduced in educational settings for its ability to overlay virtual information onto physical environments. The AR Sandbox is a conventional sandbox with depth coloured representations projected onto the sand’s surface. This research investigates how 4- and 5-year-old Australian children use an AR Sandbox to enhance their spatial thinking through play. Participants were four children, their two educators and the first author as a participant-observer researcher. Data were collected over an 8-week period during 2015 and included observation, child conferencing, photography, educators’ perspectives, and the researcher’s perspectives. Vignettes are presented to demonstrate how children’s spatial thinking was enhanced through exploration and representation in the AR Sandbox. Children’s active and dynamic manipulation of the space of the AR Sandbox, along with a range of socio-cultural contexts and tools, assisted in enhancing their spatial abilities.     

The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804

ABSTRACT

The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) sought to manage revolutionary time by practising a politics of temporal dilation. The embryonic institutions of the Consulate – from the Légion d’honneur to the lycées – were designed to decompress popular perceptions of time, at least as they related to political life, by charting a verifiable pathway for the nascent regime to develop steadily and incrementally through history. The collective perception of the present was made to expand, re-validating the notion of historical experience and slowing the unruly onset of the political future. Time would cease to be the medium of rupture. This article examines how the temporal assumptions embedded within the regime discourses and political practices of the Napoleonic Consulate were central to the construction of its own legitimacy.