Sheltering from domestic violence: Women’s experiences of punitive safety and unfreedom in Cambodian safe shelters

This paper explores the experiences of Cambodian domestic violence survivors who have fled their abusive partners to live in NGO-run safe shelters. Through in-depth interview research undertaken in 2016, we explore the stories of seven women whose experiences speak to tensions between having safety from violence and freedom to live as they choose. The pervasive impunity of the legal system means that Cambodian society operates as a safe space for perpetrators of domestic violence and spatially excludes survivors from it to guarantee their safety from injury and even murder. Just as violence against women has been described as a major area of ‘unfreedom’, we contend also that safe shelter provision in Cambodia, albeit essential, does not necessarily afford freedom from violence, but rather a punitive safety from it which can curtail women’s bodily integrity. Survivors are too often being excluded from decision-making processes in the shelter and treated as passive recipients of physical safety. Making the argument that safety and freedom are not coterminous, we contribute to recent feminist scholarship in geography and aligned disciplines focused on the significance and workings of safe space for marginalised groups. As such, the paper complicates singular viewpoints of safe spaces as enabling environments which can challenge oppressive forces both inside and outside of them.     

“Godforsaken hole called … called …”: place,nation, and spatial crisis in Beckett’s fiction and drama

This essay explores how the figuring of place throughout the fiction and drama of Samuel Beckett registers and critiques narratives of place in Irish nationalist discourse. The Irish place-names of Beckett’s texts are read in relation to a toponymic re-territorialisation in post-independence Ireland, a process which enervated place identities synonymous with a Protestant culture and history. In this way, the essay argues that the celebrated “placelessness” of Beckett’s work and the collapse of spatial agency experienced by his protagonists is informed by the construction of nation-space in the country of the author’s early life. The preponderance of scatological place-names in the Beckett oeuvre is approached in these terms and read as a mode of resistance to the self-sacrifice to nation demanded in emplacement.     

Four Alien Priories in Monmouthshire

Abstract

Inigo Jones is conventionally seen as an isolated genius who had little direct effect on contemporary architects and builders. This is true if his early, elaborately Classical, buildings such as the Banqueting House, are examined in isolation. However, after 1630 Jones developed a very different, astylar domestic manner which proved highly influential among contemporary architects and builders both in London and the countryside.     

Middle‐east,Midwest

Barbara C. Asward, ed. Arabic‐Speaking Communities in American Cities. New York: A joint publication of the Center for Migration Studies of New York, Inc., and the Association of Arab‐American University Graduates, Inc., 1974. vii + 191 pp. Appendix.     

Juvenile Travellers: Priscilla Wakefield's Excursions in Empire

While most discussions of juvenile imperial literature relate to the mid-nineteenth century onwards, this article draws attention to an earlier period by examining the children's books of Priscilla Wakefield. Between 1794 and 1817 Priscilla Wakefield wrote sixteen children's books that included moral tales, natural history books and a popular travel series. Her experience of the British Empire's territories was, in the main, derived from the work of others but her use of interesting characters, exciting travel scenarios, the epistolary form to enhance the narrative and fold-out maps added interest to the information she presented. Her strong personal beliefs are evident throughout her writing and an abhorrence of slavery is a recurring theme. She was also the grandmother and main caregiver of the young Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his immediate siblings. In contrast to his grandmother, Edward Gibbon Wakefield's experience of the empire was both theoretical and practical. He drew on, and departed from, the work of political economists to develop his theory of systematic colonisation and was active in both Canadian and New Zealand affairs. He began writing about colonisation in the late 1820s and his grandmother's influence can be seen in his wide use of existing sources and attractive writing style to communicate with his audience.