Going unscripted: A call to critically engage storytelling methods and methodologies in geography and the medical‐health sciences

Geography and the medical‐health sciences have long histories of engaging the humanities. The last decade has seen for both disciplines a significant growth in theoretical frameworks, pedagogic strategies, and research methods that draw upon visual and literary arts, critical self‐reflection, creative tools and expressions, and even direct engagement or partnership with artists, curators, authors, theatre‐practitioners, and other professionals in the arts. Both geographers and medical‐health professionals, then, are increasingly (re)making and understanding various worlds through the humanities. In this paper we explore the histories of humanities in both geography and the medical‐health sciences, especially medicine: we argue the two disciplines have much to learn from each other's engagement and work with the humanities. Focusing on the increasing use of narrative and storytelling in both disciplines, we argue that deployment of humanities‐based frameworks and impulses must not be taken up without careful and critical analytical reflection. Finally, we ground our theoretical explorations with empirical examples from recent community‐based work about the risks and benefits of storytelling and visual arts when looking at the health geographies of Indigenous and settler peoples in Northern British Columbia.

De manière impromptue : vers une démarche critique sur les méthodes de mise en récit et les méthodologies en géographie et en sciences médicales et de la santé

L'intérêt pour les sciences humaines par la géographie et les sciences médicales et de la santé s'inscrit dans une longue tradition. Au cours de la dernière décennie, les deux disciplines ont connu une importante croissance de cadres théoriques, de stratégies pédagogiques et de méthodes de recherche qui font appel aux arts visuels et à la littérature, à l'autoréflexion critique, à des outils et modes d'expression novateurs, voire même à une participation directe ou à des partenariats avec des artistes, conservateurs, auteurs, praticiens de l'art dramatique et d'autres professionnels du domaine des arts. Autant les géographes que les professionnels de la médecine et de la santé contribuent de plus en plus à (re)constituer et comprendre divers mondes à travers les sciences humaines. Cet article brosse un tableau historique des sciences humaines tant en géographie qu'en sciences médicales et de la santé, en particulier la médecine : nous soutenons que les deux disciplines ont beaucoup à apprendre l'une de l'autre sur l'intérêt que chacune porte aux sciences humaines. En mettant l'accent sur le recours grandissant par les deux disciplines à la narration et à la mise en récit, nous faisons valoir l'idée que le déploiement des cadres et des impulsions fondés sur les sciences humaines ne peut pas être envisagé sans mener au préalable une réflexion analytique minutieuse et critique. Enfin, nous fondons cette étude du champ théorique sur des exemples empiriques tirés de travaux réalisés à l'échelle communautaire sur les risques et les avantages de la mise en récit et des arts visuels quand on se penche sur les aspects géographiques de la santé des peuples autochtones et colonisateurs dans le nord de la Colombie‐Britannique.     

Who does the work in sustainable households? A time and gender analysis in New South Wales,Australia

Households in the affluent West have become an important target of government and NGO campaigns to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviours, but there has been little research into the gender implications of such policies. This article investigates the role of gender and time in the sustainability practices of six heterosexual households with young children, committed participants in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge programme in 2009. Women spent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so more often. Men's contributions related mostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks of time. In these households, sustainability became a highly gendered practice because of the different roles in homemaking. Women resisted constructions of themselves as being closer to nature, and shouldered expectations of sustainability as part of their roles as mothers and household managers. They experienced time as overlapping and fragmented, with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of time. Our temporality lens also illustrates the gendered ways that old practices become deroutinised and new practices reroutinised. While men were often responsible for the labour and upfront time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation and habit-changing commonly fell to women. These findings illustrate how gendered analyses help identify both opportunities for, and constraints against, change towards sustainability. Opportunities include the strong connections between both mothers' and fathers' understanding of good parenting and the importance they attach to household sustainability. Constraints include the temporal challenges faced by households, and how these interact with wider structural and labour roles.     

Digital gravity? Firm birth and relocation patterns of young digital firms in Germany

This paper analyses the spatial patterns of young (<10 years) digital firms in Germany between 2008 and 2017 on county level. Determinants of firm birth locations as well as relocations are considered jointly to understand differences in location choices within firms' life cycles. I match commercial register data of 107,321 firms with county-level administrative data to capture local characteristics. Using an OLS model with fixed effects, I find that the local knowledge base—that is, universities, research institutes, and colocated incumbents—are significant key determinants of digital firm birth when controlling for a host of local characteristics. My results indicate that for five firms per 1000 inhabitants, there is around one firm birth. Second, using a fixed effects gravity model for the analysis of relocations, I find that the most dominant explanatory factor for firm relocation across specifications is distance, that is, relocation costs. Relocation flows are more than twice as high to neighboring counties relative to other locations which shows that digital firms are not as footloose as their business model may suggest. Jointly, my results reflect economic activity's regional persistence, particularly for new firms. My paper provides evidence for policies targeting homogenous digital clusters based on strong colocation and that digital economic activity is not shifted over long distances, but the regional entrepreneurship capital is crucial for local growth.     

Radiocarbon chronology and the correlation of hunter–gatherer sociocultural change with abrupt palaeoclimate change: the Middle Mesolithic in the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt area of northwest Europe

Recent refinements in radiocarbon sampling procedures have enabled a more robust absolute chronology for the Mesolithic in the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt area of northwest Europe. These refinements have allowed for a new chronological sub-division of the Early and Middle Mesolithic periods. Results of this research have indicated that the Middle Mesolithic period was bound by two Early Holocene cooling events, one at 9300 cal. BP and the other at 8200 cal. BP. These results enable a critical evaluation of the role of chronological precision in the investigation of contemporaneity between abrupt climate change and hunter–gatherer sociocultural change. In this paper we focus on the variable chronological resolution of the Early to Middle and Middle to Late Mesolithic transitions in the RMS area, and the role of this variable resolution in our ability to investigate the contemporaneity of these two transitions with different Early Holocene abrupt cooling events. This paper highlights two central challenges facing archaeological investigations of the relationships between climate and culture change: first, the requirement of tight chronological overlap between climate and culture change events and consideration of leads and lags in ecosystem and subsequent human responses to climate change; second, the equifinality problem and the separation of the impact of gradual from punctuated environmental change on human societies.     

Boundary-making in feminist research: new methodologies for ‘intimate insiders’

In the past 20 years, feminist geographers have gone to great lengths to complicate notions of ‘the field’ and make clear that the field is not an easily bounded space. This body of work has demonstrated the complexity of field spaces, explored ways to destabilize boundaries, and traced the power relations between researchers and participants. Ultimately, this work takes the breaking down of boundaries as an inherent good in field research, and, subsequently, little work has focused explicitly on the utility of physical and emotional boundaries that develop in field research. Our experiences as feminist geographers who reside in our fields show there is much left to understand and subsequently disrupt regarding the boundaries of ‘the field.’ In this article, we build on the concept of ‘intimate insiders’ to discuss the complex negotiation of doing research in the places where we have created personal lives and our sense of community. We often found ourselves struggling to define the physical and emotional boundaries of ‘the field’ on the outside for the sake of our participants and ourselves. In this article, we reflect on boundary-making as a specific feminist methodological practice for addressing the complexity of fieldwork. We discuss the techniques and strategies we used for conducting research in the communities in which we are long-term community residents. In the tradition of feminist methodology, we draw from our research experiences in State College and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to reconsider how producing distance through boundary-making has the potential to benefit our participants, our projects, and ourselves.     

A preliminary study of ceramic pastes in the copper age pottery production of the Rome area

This paper presents the preliminary results of an analytical study on domestic pottery samples originating from the Copper Age sites of Casetta Mistici, Tor Pagnotta, Osteria del Curato-Via Cinquefrondi, Torre della Chiesaccia and Valle dei Morti, all of which are located in the Rome area (Latium, Italy). The aim of this research is to define the compositional features of the ceramic pastes and to reconstruct the main technological choices characterising pottery production in these contexts. The importance of these archaeological sites lies in their geographic position, being located in an area bounded by the Tiber and Aniene rivers and the Colli Albani volcano, and in their stratigraphic sequence, spanning from the mid-fourth to the end of the third millennium bc. This research, based on a petrographic and chemical investigation of pottery samples, led to the distinction of eight petrographic groups that reflect specific choices in pottery production. Moreover, the analytical results provide indications about the prehistoric pottery production of the Rome area in relation to the ceramic recipes used, the pastes that were obtained and their sourcing areas.     

Leaving the War Popular Violence and Judicial Repression of ‘unpatriotic’ behaviour in Belgium (1918–1921)

After four years of occupation, Belgium emerged ruined at the end of the Great War. The King returned from Yser, leading the army and acclaimed by the population. In contrast, the government and the exiles came back discreetly and the absence of the dead was felt strongly. Part of the population felt itself to be the victim of the occupation and sought revenge: shop windows were broken and houses sacked, men were molested and women's heads shaven. Manufacturers who had closed their businesses sought the severe repression of those who had pursued their activities. Journalists who had stopped writing called for harsh treatment of the newspapers that submitted to German censorship. A fraction of the population stigmatised those who profited from the occupation and demanded justice. In 1918, Belgium was already confronted with problems that most European countries only discovered at the end of the Second World War. How does one move on from a war of occupation? How does one reconstruct a state weakened by occupation? How does one handle collective vengeance and respond to calls for justice? This article will study successively the wave of ‘popular’ violence accompanying the country's liberation in November and December 1918 and the state's answer through the judiciary repression of collaboration with the enemy conducted between 1919 and 1921, mainly by military and civil tribunals.