Organic Public Geographies: “Making the Connection”

Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape ( Fuller 2008 ) in geography's mainstream journals. While much is “traditional”, with intellectuals disseminating academic research via non‐ academic outlets ( Castree 2006 ; Mitchell 2008 ; Oslender 2007 ), less visible is the “organic” work and its “more involved intellectualizing, pursued through working with area‐based or single‐interest groups, in which the process itself may be the outcome” ( Ward 2006 :499; see Fuller and Askins 2010 ). A number of well‐known projects exist where research has been “done not merely for the people we write about but with them” ( Gregory 2005 :188; see also Cahill 2004 ; Johnston and Pratt 2010 ). However, collaborative writing of academic publications which gives research participants authorial credit is unusual ( mrs kinpainsby 2008 ; although see Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006 ). This paper is about an organic public geographies project called “Making the connection”. It is written by a diverse collection of (non‐)academic participants who contributed to the project before it had started, as it was undertaken, and/or after it had finished. This is a “messy”, process‐oriented text ( Cook et al. 2007 ) working through the threads (partially) connecting the activities of its main collaborators, including a referee who helped get the paper to publication.     

THE IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON REGIONAL WAGE INEQUALITY: A SEMIPARAMETRIC APPROACH

According to economic theory, regional migration is a primary mechanism through which regional wage convergence is predicted to occur. However, this does not necessarily imply that regional migration has an equalizing effect on regional inequality. Despite considerable literatures on regional migration and regional wage inequality, little attention has focused on the relationship between the two. This paper investigates one of the primary mechanisms through which migration affects individual region's wage distributions. It adopts a semiparametric procedure to examine how the regional wage distributions in Great Britain have changed as a result of migration using British Household Panel Survey data for 1991–2007.     

"An object of vulgar curiosity": legitimizing medical hypnosis in Imperial Germany

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gain a therapeutic and epistemological monopoly over hypnosis. In order to do this, however, these physicians were required to engage in a complex multi-dimensional form of boundary-work, which was intended on the one hand to convince the medical community of the legitimacy and efficacy of hypnosis and on the other to demarcate their use of suggestion from that of stage hypnotists, magnetic healers, and occultists. While the epistemological, professional, and legal boundaries that medical hypnotists erected helped both exclude lay practitioners from this field and sanitize the medical use of hypnosis, the esoteric interests, and sensational public experiments of some of these researchers, which mimicked the theatricality and occult interests of their lay competitors, blurred the distinctions that these professionals were attempting to draw between their "legitimate" medical use of hypnosis and the "illegitimate" lay and occult use of it.     

“I spent the first year drinking tea”: Exploring Canadian university researchers’ perspectives on community‐based participatory research involving Indigenous peoples

Community‐based participatory research (CBPR) is generally understood as a process by which decision‐making power and ownership are shared between the researcher and the community involved, bi‐directional research capacity and co‐learning are promoted, and new knowledge is co‐created and disseminated in a manner that is mutually beneficial for those involved. Within the field of Canadian geography we are seeing emerging interest in using CBPR as a way of conducting meaningful and relevant research with Indigenous communities. However, individual interpretations of CBPR's tenets and the ways in which CBPR is operationalized are, in fact, highly variable. In this article we report the findings of an exploratory qualitative case study involving semi‐structured, open‐ended interviews with Canadian university‐based geographers and social scientists in related disciplines who engage in CBPR to explore the relationship between their conceptual understanding of CBPR and their applied research. Our findings reveal some of the tensions for university‐based researchers concerning CBPR in theory and practice.     

With a Little Help from Our Feds: Understanding State Immigration Enforcement Policy Adoption in American Federalism

Since 2001, state governments have adopted 287(g) cooperative immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government that authorize their law enforcement personnel to assist in detaining violators of civil federal immigration law. Employing a theoretical framework drawn from theories of policy adoption, intergovernmental relations, and immigration research, we test which state‐level political, sociodemographic, geographic, and economic determinants influence states to enter into such a cooperative agreement. In addition to finding that the partisanship of a state's governor, a state's effort on public welfare, and an increase in a state's percentage of Hispanics are related to the adoption of a cooperative immigration enforcement policy, we found evidence of “steam valve federalism” working not at the state level as Spiro (1997) first theorized but at the local level. When a state's localities adopt immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government, the state itself is far less likely to adopt their own. Understanding the reasons states would adopt this type of policy sheds light on current trends in state immigration policy and their effect on future state/federal intergovernmental relations.     

A Filtered Past: Interpreting Salt Production and Trade Models from Two Remnant Brine-Enrichment Mounds at the Ancient Maya Paynes Creek Salt Works,Belize

The mounds at Witz Naab and Killer Bee are the only known remaining aboveground evidence of a once-thriving salt industry in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, a large saltwater system in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Over one hundred ancient Maya salt works dated to the Classic period (a.d. 300–900) have been submerged by sea-level rise in the lagoon. We have hypothesized that mounds were once numerous features on the landscape prior to a sea-level rise that occurred in the area during the Terminal Classic period. Lacking at these underwater sites are earthen mounds formed by discarded soil from the leaching process in which the salinity of seawater was enriched by leaching brine through salty soil. Enriching the salinity of seawater by leaching or by solar evaporation is virtually universal in ethnographic case studies. Data from the excavations are evaluated to interpret the ancient activities that produced the earthen mounds, scales of production, and how the coastal Maya of southern Belize participated in the larger Classic Maya economy.     

A feminist geographic analysis of perceptions of food and health in Ugandan cities

Abstract

This article contributes to a feminist geographic analysis of how urban food and health environments and non-communicable disease experience may be being constructed, and contested, by healthcare professionals (local elites) in two secondary Ugandan cities (Mbale and Mbarara). I use thematic and group interaction analysis of focus group data to explore material and discursive representations. Findings make explicit how healthcare professionals had a tendency to prescribe highly classed and gendered assumptions of bodies and behaviours in places and in daily practices. The work supports the discomfort some have felt concerning claims of an African nutrition transition, and is relevant to debates regarding double burden malnutrition. I argue that a feministic analysis, and an intersectional appreciation of people in places, is advantageous to food and health-related research and policy-making. Results uncover and deconstruct a dominant patriarchal tendency towards blaming women for obesity. Yet findings also exemplify the co-constructed and malleable nature of knowledge and understandings, and this offers encouragement.