Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated,Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract

Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.     

Reimagining sustainable cultures: constitutions, land and art

Globalisation is about the interconnection of peoples and places in accelerated ways, but it is also about resistance and adaptation in the face of change. Discussions of sustainability now incorporate both dynamic understandings of culture and the recognition that place matters because the practices that are in need of sustaining, as well as those that pose threats, happen in particular communities and in specific geographic contexts. Culture is codified not only in property rights and legislation, but also in the public artistic expressions of peoples and places. Case studies from Nunavut and Scotland show the interrelationships of sovereignty and claims to identity and community. Art, as a result of creative action in the case of Cape Dorset Inuit printmakers and carvers on Baffin Island, and a millennium tapestry telling the stories of the Isle of Harris, complement matters of property rights. Both discussions show that identity is about material culture and property relations in respect of land. Serious discussions of sustainability, in contrast to the technical practices frequently invoked using the term sustainable development, require considerations of the dynamics of complex cultural arrangements in particular places, rather than assumptions of stability of either peoples or their ecological contexts.     

Early Neolithic diets at Baijia,Wei River valley,China: stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of human and faunal remains

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values are presented for faunal and human bone collagen from Baijia, in the Wei River valley region of Shaanxi Province, China. The remains have a calibrated age range of ca. 5709–5389 BC, and correspond with the early Neolithic Laoguantai Period. Stable isotopic results indicate that human diets included millet and probably aquatic foods such as fish and shellfish. Bovid samples are tentatively identified as water buffalo, and have a mean δ¹³C value of −14.6‰, which reflects some millet consumption. Whether bovids were grazing on wild millet, or had diets directly influenced by humans, is not known. The single Sus sample from Baijia had a diet dominated by C3 plants and is thus unlikely to have been a domesticated animal. Overall, the stable isotope results presented here conform to the current concept that the people of the Laoguantai culture were millet farmers, who had subsistence strategies that included hunted wild foods.     

Digging up Unearthed down-under: a hybrid geography of a musical space that essentialises gender and place

Hybrid geographies are well developed in studies of human–nature relations and environmental humanities, but less so in geographies of music and gender. In this article, we use hybrid geographies to frame our critical engagement with Australia's triple j's Unearthed, a publically funded website and radio station that presents new music. Hybrid approaches enable us to understand gendered power relations in music by deconstructing the ways power differences are built on cultural, social, spatial and technological relations. Engaging netnographic and mixed-method approaches we critique Unearthed as a democratic music cyberspace. We identify the limited constructions of gender and geographic location, some of which are unique to this online presence, while others are shared with broader musical spaces. We argue that the interactions between technology, artists, fans and the online spaces, as mediated by Unearthed, situate emerging artists in relation to gender, geography and genre, and thus constrain possibilities for a more democratic musical space. Unearthed manifests as a musical space where rurality is exoticised while urban origins are diminished, and hegemonic masculinities remain dominant. We suggest that the potential of Unearthed can be realised if gender and geographic hegemonies are recognised and otherness is de-essentialised.     

Free ports and steel containers: The corpora delicti of artefact trafficking

Technologies of containment and storage change the materiality and ontology of archaeological artefacts. This article looks at the relationship between ISO shipping containers and the assemblages of values that constitute the illicit trade in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern artefacts. Concealment and revelation are vital properties of this relationship.     

Communists on the Brink: The Gorizian Comrades of the Early Post-War Period

Much is known about the early post-war history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). However, considerably less attention has been directed to its later affiliations; those in regions at the time contested in terms of their national sovereignty and which were consequently integrated to the PCI national party structure at different stages over the course of the late 1940s and 1950s. They include the communist organisations in the former Venezia-Giulia region or the Julian March, on Italy's north-eastern border with Yugoslavia. Drawing on new empirical evidence, this paper looks at the singularly pragmatic nature of the contemporary communist movement in the Gorizian Province, as illustrated in its responses to a series of testing situations and paradigm-shifting developments. It examines these comrades' trajectory from revolutionary pro-secessionists intent on annexing their region to the new People's Republic of Yugoslavia, to ‘Italian’ communists' intent on superseding the majority Christian Democrats in the immediate context. Themes addressed in this analysis include those of agency, geopolitics, political and national identity.     

Guerra civile: experience,memory and contrasting histories of the Resistance in Italy

This article examines the disagreement between two partisans turned historians, Nuto Revelli and Claudio Pavone, on the legitimacy of the term ‘civil war’ to describe the Italian Resistance of 1943–1945. ‘Civil war’ is a controversial term in Italian and European discussions of World War II. Accordingly, ‘civil war’ provokes a study of the intersection of ideology and ethics, experiential memory and history in postwar Europe. But why should Revelli and Pavone, two men who had been on the same side during the Resistance, see things so differently? This article demonstrates that each historian’s experience before and during World War II shaped their participation in the Resistance and their subsequent representation of it. Consequently, their divergent experiences offer an explanation as to why Pavone argues that the Resistance was a civil war and Revelli argues that it was not, without relativizing in political and ethical analysis.     

‘Against the tide’: placing visual art in the Highlands and Islands,Scotland

Within a political context where Gaelic arts are recognised as integral to the configuration of a new Scotland, this paper focuses on the art and artistic practice of a community arts centre in North Uist, Outer Hebrides, and the art of internationally acclaimed Scots artist, Will Maclean, who has worked with this centre, with initiatives to commemorate the land struggle on the Isle of Lewis, and with Gaelic arts. Drawing, at the conceptual level, on ‘the idea of place as a political project’ (Gibson-Graham 2003 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2003. An Ethics of the Local. Rethinking Marxism, 15(1): 53–78.  [Google Scholar]: 35) and a narrative of resistance that suggests a differential rather than oppositional optic (Braun 2002 Braun, B. 2002. The Intemperate Rainforest. Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.  [Google Scholar]), I examine how art and artistic practice contribute to an aesthetics that works ‘against the tide’ and how, as part of this process, place is re-constituted.     

Looters,collectors and a passion for antiquities at the margins of Italian society

Unearthing old objects was for centuries a widespread activity in Italy. Artefacts were removed from the soil and re-incorporated into the social realm as votives, chits and treasure. Women and men knowledgeable about old things and old places were respected repositories of history. The twentieth century brought significant changes to this sphere of cultural activity: archaeology became a professionalized discipline, regulated by the state, and artefacts became scientific objects belonging to the Italian nation. Today, unauthorized excavators risk prosecution, fines and imprisonment. In this paper I ask: What is the effect of state power on the use and circulation of antiquities by unauthorized excavators and collectors? How do the men and women who inhabit the cultural margins distinguish themselves from each other? My analysis draws on ethnographic data and textual analysis of newspaper articles concerning tombaroli or ‘tomb robbers’. I focus on marginalized cultural production, a key dimension that is missing from most accounts of looters.