Intimate colonialisms: the material and experienced places of British Columbia's residential schools

The theoretical premise of this paper is that place is an unbounded material, social and cultural agent within and through which practices of colonialism were enacted in British Columbia. Specifically, the places of British Columbia's 'Indian' residential schools, and the subjects who occupied them, are conceptualized as intimate sites nested within Canadian colonial and nation-building agendas that were predicated on policies of assimilation, enculturation or annihilation of indigenous people. Such conceptualizations allow for an understanding of both how colonialism was actualized against First Nations' peoples and how First Nations' peoples actively navigated and resisted that colonial project. In order to access experiences of residential school places, the article draws from published First Nations' testimonial literatures. It also draws from creative materials produced by students within the schools in order to understand how First Nations' students articulated against assimilative educational processes. The article concludes with a consideration of how nested place, First Nations' resistances, and Euro-colonial concepts of gender are circulating today with reference to a Dakelh woman (and former residential school student) under consideration for beatification in northern British Columbia.     

Local Childcare Cultures: Moral geographies of mothering and the social organisation of pre-school education

Child-rearing has not been a major focus of research in geography despite the fact that its organisation is both spatially and temporally variable. Geographical work on pre-school childcare provision in the 1970s and 1980s tended to focus on the implementation and implications of government policy; more recently there has been a growth of feminist work on child-rearing which has employed a diversity of approaches. These studies have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of how mothers organise the care of their children, often whilst undertaking paid employment; nevertheless they can not always explain how a wide range of mothers negotiate specific aspects of 'maternal responsibility'. This article draws on an empirical investigation of pre-school childcare cultures in two areas of Sheffield, UK, in order to analyse the ways in which mothers' attitudes to their children's educational development and their strategies for accessing non-parental educational care are jointly shaped within the context of different local childcare cultures. The importance of two key components of these local childcare cultures, the moral geographies of mothering and the local social organisation of non-parental educational care, is emphasised.     

POLITIES AND PRINCES AD 400–800: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUNERARY LANDSCAPE OF THE SOUTH SAXON KINGDOM

Burials, borders and boundaries are themes much pursued in early medieval research. Barrow burials, in particular, have been suggested as markers or ‘sentinel graves’; funerary monuments used to define territorial boundaries and entrance points to kingdoms. This paper assesses the burial evidence of the fifth to eighth centuries from West Sussex, England, taking a topographic perspective and examining the uses made of ancient remains and natural topography. Certain distinctive topographic traits in cemetery and burial placement are argued to exist and, when considered alongside the written accounts of the kingdom, are suggested here as evidence for putative early micro‐kingdom structures, centred around the major river valleys, surviving into and perhaps even beyond the seventh century AD.