Collaboration as feminist strategy

I discuss my collaboration with Susan Hanson, which spanned a decade, culminating in our book, Gender, Work and Space. I focus on the productivity of our research collaboration. It led us to combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and economic geography and feminist cultural theory, in ways that allowed us to find an audience amongst, not only feminist geographers but also non-feminist political economists and planners. Our collaboration involved a large number of research assistants as well, and though this kind of collaboration is typically hidden in most research accounts, these research assistants were active producers of survey data. I consider this, as well as how they helped us to localize and situate our knowledge claims. Finally, I highlight the support that comes from a feminist collaboration.     

Introduction: the feminist politics of refugee migration

The interdisciplinary field of refugee studies includes gender analyses, but feminism is not its forte. Scholarship in the field has neglected the development of feminist frameworks to trace the power relations that shape the gender and other politics of forced migration. Specifically, the underplayed concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’ is elaborated as a form of globalization where the social and political intersect in particular ways.     

Electoral salience and the costs of voting at national, sub-national and supra-national elections in the UK: a case study of Brent, UK

This paper considers the impact of distance to polling station upon electoral turnout. Using polling station level data from a London borough, it examines three types of election – parliamentary, European and local elections – over a twenty year period. The UK is notable among western liberal democracies for its relatively large turnout gap – the percentage point difference between turnout at elections for the Westminster parliament compared to that for other institutions, including local councils and the supra-national European parliament. This research considers the hypothesis that in high information, high salience elections for the national parliament the costs of voting associated with travelling to a polling station to vote in person are perceived as either low or insignificant but that in low information, low salience elections, those costs are perceived as higher and may act as a deterrent upon voting. A series of multi-level models consider the relationships between the dependent variable, percentage turnout, and a range of independent variables, including socio-economic characteristics, marginality as well as the spatial context. We show that there is indeed a relationship between distance and voter turnout, and other spatial and contextual variables, which are stronger for the lower salience European and local elections than for the higher salience national elections. Hence we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the siting of polling stations.     

Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

The extent of farm desertion in central Sweden during the late medieval agrarian crisis: landscape as a source

The effects of medieval agrarian crisis on settlement and population were considered in a major interdisciplinary research project in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s. Within this project, there were significant differences in methods used to calculate the extent of farm desertion between historians in the participating countries. The reliance on written source material within the Swedish team reflected the dominant approach amongst historians who made less use of map and landscape evidence than others. In this renewed investigation of the magnitude of farm desertion in the Late Middle Ages, focussing on the province of Jämtland in central Sweden, field survey of the physical landscape and some three thousand historical maps are used as evidence, alongside conventional written sources, such as official letters and taxation documents. The results indicate that the extent of farm desertion in medieval Sweden has been underestimated because Swedish scholars generally eschewed the use of the retrogressive method, which their Norwegian counterparts had been using since the 1940s. There is therefore good reason to reassess the desertion rates of medieval farms in other parts of Sweden as well, using traditional geographical source materials together with the documentary sources usually favoured by historians This may also hold for other parts of Europe as well. The rate of desertion is discussed in a wider context of settlement contraction and expansion in central and peripheral areas of Sweden, including the long drawn-out process of reclamation of the deserted farms (ödesbölen).     

Placing the Personal in Pedagogy: Engaged Pedagogy in ‘Feminist’ Geographical Teaching

This paper attempts to unravel the complexities of including the personal in geographical teaching. Drawing on email responses from 10 academics and her reflective teaching diary, the author differentiates the ‘personal’ as experiential and ‘personal’ as private in these accounts of teaching practices, revealing the contingent (re)constitution of ‘geographical knowledge’. In recognizing the negotiation of our positionalities, interactions with individuals and class groups, and broader academic settings (i.e. geographical discipline, university contexts and broader educational trends) the unquestioning employment of ‘the personal’ is further problematized. The paper concludes by contending that rather than dismissing the personal in teaching contexts or reverting to (or even maintaining) traditional disempowering pedagogies, a more nuanced and contextualized pedagogical politics is necessary both within, and beyond, geographies.     

Pedagogical declarations: feminist engagements with the teaching statement

To produce a teaching statement, current and aspiring teachers undertake the ostensibly straightforward task of putting their teaching philosophy onto paper. But upon close examination, the teaching statement – a seemingly simple object – is much more complex. The teaching statement is full of dual functions, many of which can be conceived of as working at cross-purposes. This paper draws on the teaching statement's history along with a collaborative and feminist mentorship methodology to highlight these dual functions. We discuss how teaching statements can be negotiated and inhabited from our perspective as early career scholars.     

The intimate politics of secularism and the headscarf: the mall,the neighborhood,and the public square in Istanbul

The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situating this politicized debate in the everyday material contexts of the public square, the street, and the mall. By introducing popular culture (notably the film Bü?ra) and my own fieldwork on the veil, I argue that the headscarf represents the intersection of politics of place and individual agency in a way that renders ideological debates contingent on everyday practices. Reducing the headscarf to a sign of Islamism fails to take into account the ever-shifting meanings of this object across time and space. The differences within and between the everyday urban sites I examine reveal much more complex, often contradictory, and discontinuous geographies of secularism and Islam. This analysis reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies, one that is intimate and political.     

The Pervasive Nature of Heterodox Economic Spaces at a Time of Neoliberal Crisis: Towards a “Postneoliberal” Anarchist Future

Abstract: Re‐reading the economic landscape of the western world as a largely non‐capitalist landscape composed of economic plurality, this paper demonstrates how economic relations in contemporary western society are often embedded in non‐commodified practices such as mutual aid, reciprocity, co‐operation and inclusion. By highlighting how the long‐overlooked lived practices in the contemporary world of production, consumption and exchange are heavily grounded in the very types and essences of non‐capitalist economic relations that have long been proposed by anarchistic visions of employment and organization, this paper displays that such visions are far from utopian: they are embedded firmly in the present. Through focusing on the pervasive nature of heterodox economic spaces in the UK in particular, some ideas about how to develop an anarchist future of work and organization will be proposed. The outcome is to begin to engage in the demonstrative construction of a future based on mutualism and autonomous modes of organization and representation.