Gender and geography in the Netherlands: from separation to integration

Abstract

This article reports on the development of feminist geography in the Netherlands in the past forty years. In response to critical feminist students, feminist geography originally developed in a strategy of separation with the appointment of university lecturers specialized in ‘women’s studies’, the introduction of elective courses and research projects, and the creation of national networks. Gender is currently more and more integrated in core geography teaching and mainstream geographical research and separate networks are dissolved. Although feminist geographers in the Netherlands are successful in teaching, publishing and acquisition of research funding, gender issues and perspectives are still not firmly rooted in geography curricula and research programs. Integration is highly dependent on the feminist commitment of individual lecturers and researchers and gender perspectives are at risk of marginalisation or disappearance. Feminist geographers in the Netherlands must still be vigilant to preserve the achievements of forty years of Dutch feminist geography.     

In defence of Australian foreign policy: common themes,assumptions, and challenges

ABSTRACT

While interrelated issues and challenges can only expand, the study of foreign policy in Australia is not a very healthy discipline. While not wholly wedged on life-support, there are genuine grounds for concern about the decline of Australian foreign policy (AFP) as a subject for serious academic concentration and its position as a marginalised topic of analysis. Unfortunately, attempts to reinvigorate the field continue to contend with a number of ingrained biases. AFP can be incorrectly dismissed as muddled and marginal while major debate points in the field are often glibly portrayed as broadly settled. This is despite the that fact that it can provide unique insights into policy-making in the twenty-first century while teaching students the benefits of problem-solving through a multi-disciplinary lens. Additionally, there is an ever-changing, contested set of knowledge that future leaders will need to consider in order to be successful, critical thinkers in a multi-agency environment. This will continue to incorporate an evolving variety of significant issues that constitute both conventional and unconventional threats to national interests.     

Appropriation,Absence and the Canadian Studies Classroom

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on “appropriation of voice” or “cultural appropriation” in the Canadian Studies classroom. It is aimed at instructors who teach Canadian Literature outside Canada, in places where Canada is itself a strange, foreign or even exotic country. Keeping classroom practice in mind, I divide the article into three sections. The first provides a classroom-oriented overview of appropriation debates; the second looks at tokenism on reading lists; the third reflects on problems of absence or of dealing with canonical texts that skim over Canada’s Indigenous Peoples—specifically, by analyzing two brief examples from Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and one from Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996).     

Searching for feminist geography in Thailand: mapping trails of inspiration

Abstract

Feminist geography in Thailand is not generally recognized in the academic landscape. Instead, feminist geography is limited to those scholars located in Women’s Studies who have a research or personal interest in the theoretical, conceptual or empirical issues taken up in feminist geography. Although the discipline of geography has been part of the Thai academy since 1935, in both the Thai Geographical Association and its flagship journal, (Geographical Journal), feminist geography has still not made significant inroads into the discipline. However, once Women’s Studies was established, and then expanded its influence, gender and feminism affected every other social science program, including Geography. Even though only a few, if any, students enrolled in feminist geography courses across Thailand, the work that did exist took on a postcolonial form. Thus the feminist geography literature that would introduce (some part of) the theories, concepts and practice of feminist geographers came through both compulsory and elective courses through a postcolonial lens. In this report, we provide a brief history of the challenges around, and progress of, feminist geography across the country through an analysis of key Thai geographical institutional shifts, journal publications and curricular offerings.     

Feminist geographies in Greece: a personal trajectory between ‘local’ and ‘international’

Abstract

Feminist debates in the context of an active women's/feminist movement found their way into the Greek academy in the second half of the 1970s, initially in history. Urban studies and geography were ‘late-comers’ in these debates which took place in different disciplinary environments where geography courses were taught. The article presents a personal account in and through the development of feminist approaches in urban geography, drawing from my teaching and research experience since 1982 in a department of urban and regional planning. This experience has been accumulated as a hard exercise in navigating through the denial and reluctant consent of various levels of administration, students’ changing acceptance, some women’s valuable active support, in the university and beyond, and other colleagues’ opposition or indifference. In this process, recent and longer-term developments have contributed to form a (continuously negotiated and contested) space for feminism, for tolerance, diversity and difference, in which a ‘we’ has been tortuously formed which speaks across worlds, participates in a plurality of communities, communicates in more than one languages and in a plurality of voices between ‘local’ and ‘international’.     

The Catholic Neoconservative Misreading of John Paul II's Centesimus Annus Revisited

ABSTRACT

In the twilight of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, Catholic theologians and journalists who identified as members of the neoconservative political movement crafted a narrative of John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus as a representing a sea-change in Catholic social teaching. In this neoconservative reading, the Catholic Church embraced a specifically American style of late twentieth century laissez-faire capitalism. However, an examination of Centesimus Annus reveals that the text is consonant with the teaching of twentieth century popes. What is more, recent publications enable us to get a clearer view of how neoconservatives were able to craft their narrative of the encyclical.     

Neon bright: Cool Places,youth cultures and hopeful political-theoretical futures

ABSTRACT

This article provides a reflection on Skelton and Valentine's (1998. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge.) book ‘Cool Places’. The article focuses upon the excitement, vitality and sense of challenge that the book afforded when the two authors first encountered it. From these personal memories, the article then offers two sets of wider considerations. In the first, and prompted by the authors’ use of the book in their teaching, it articulates how useful, relevant and engaging even contemporary students find the book, and how it offers a key point of reference within and beyond the teaching of ‘children's geographies'. In the second, the authors seek to re-engage the book's lively, hopeful, yet critically-political orientations, offering a series of challenges for future scholarship in the geographies of childhood and youth. Like the rest of the article, these orient around a sense of what ‘matters’ in and to geographical scholarship on childhood and youth.     

Improving the learning processes of Physical Geography through the use of landscape photographs in class

The use of alternative teaching methods to lectures is one of the keys to develop a more participatory and effective education. In the teaching of Geography, greater interaction of students with elements of the landscape through the active use of photography could be one of the ways to achieve this efficiency. This article describes an experiment conducted in 2016 with students of the subject Physical Geography of the Iberian Peninsula. Two different teaching methodologies were applied to two groups of students. The first one was based on dividing the time of each class between participatory comments of landscape photographs and imparting theoretical knowledge through lectures. The second methodology consisted only of lectures, following a more traditional approach. Additionally, some students from the first group actively participated by uploading and tagging their own field pictures to a photographic repository of the University of Seville. The effectiveness of the different activities in each group was assessed through four tests, performed monthly. The results indicate that the use of landscape photographs as a participative teaching resource allows a more efficient learning of theoretical concepts. Therefore, the proposed methodology should be considered by those interested in improving the quality and effectiveness of their teaching of Geography.     

Mapping feminist geographies in Spain

Abstract

Based on our experience of years of research, teaching and academic administration, this text gathers reflections on the past, present and future developments of feminist geography in Spain. We first show how a gendered perspective was introduced into geography in the late eighties. We then reflect on what we call ‘the stage of consolidation’ alongside territorial inequalities at the turn of the century. And we finally present some notes what the current situation is and identify future challenges. Despite the difficulties, we offer a positive vision of a long journey that has no turning back.