《鄂城六朝墓》读后

时间与空间是解读考古材料的基本概念,在魏晋南北朝考古研究中更有其特殊的内涵,如在墓葬的断代与分期、区域文化因素的分析、遗存属性探讨等方面,时空背景是对材料进行深入研究的基础,也是历史考古学研究方法论的基本内容。新近出版的《鄂城六朝墓》报告不仅充实了魏晋南北朝考古材料,而且对于魏晋南北朝考古研究中的时间与空间两个基本概念,也带来了新认识。     

Tracing children’s politics

This article sets out to conceptualize children’s political agency and the spaces of children’s politics by addressing children’s politics in official settings and everyday contexts. The study is based on research concerning child and youth policies and the politics played out in children’s everyday life practices. To demonstrate how childhood policies typically seek to involve children in politics, we discuss recent legislative developments related to building a parliamentary apparatus for children’s participation in Finland. We propose that not all children are able to, or willing to, participate actively in this kind of political action, and that all issues important to children can not be processed through (semi)official arenas such as school councils, children’s parliaments and civic organizations. Thus, we agree with scholarship portraying children as political agents also in their everyday environments and on their own terms. To further conceptualize these mundane politics, we propose a model for identifying different modes and spaces of children’s agency in terms of political involvement and political presence. We conclude by discussing the challenges of studying everyday political geographies in childhood.     

The violence of space and spaces of violence: Peace as violence in unequal and divided spaces

Peace is a spatio-social and temporal experience, dependent on a number of variables that are influenced by positionality and privilege. Often “peaceful” spaces are inherently violent due to racism, sexism, classism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and agism among other forms of oppression. This article presents the conceptualisation of the violence of space, as a means by which inequalities are maintained spatially and socially, and demonstrates how in Cape Town, South Africa this exacerbates displacement and reinforces the persistence of violence in townships and informal settlements or temporal and physical spaces of violence. Empirically, through thematic analysis I evidence the conceptualisation of peace without justice as a form of violence through participant narratives of movement and use of space in the post-apartheid city. Using a spatial lens, I demonstrate how these inequalities perpetuate violence and observe the work still to be done in addressing maintained transgenerational inequalities. I utilise interviews with a range of actors working across different city spaces to demonstrate the violence of maintained divides with a specific focus on materialisations of violence, both structural and direct violence, in the areas of housing and transport. In this paper I also highlight organisation and resistance to inequalities, while overall, arguing that the product of the violence of space and spaces of violence is a violent peace whereby engineered poverty and systemic inequalities are maintained.     

On the Cultural Heritage of Robots

Cultural heritage management is an inherently retrospective discipline. To the detriment of future heritage management, some heritage places were not recognised and managed even though they had instant global significance after their creation (e.g. sites of the Apollo space programme). The current revolution in robotic technologies, coupled with the developments in artificial intelligence, suggests that the creation of self‐reflective robots capable of semi‐independent thought (processes) is not too far away. This paper explores the conceptual and ethical issues that heritage managers face when dealing with the heritage such robots will create.     

尖首刀流通区域的历史地理考察

尖首刀是先秦时期刀币系统中铸行最早的货币。其币形的演进特征与流通空间的变化大体相对应。尖首刀流通区域的范围较广,且区域内存在着显著的空间差异,这一流通区域的形成与演变与春秋战国时期民族地理的分布格局有密切的联系。     

Gender, Public Space and Social Segregation in Cairo: Of Taxi Drivers, Prostitutes and Professional Women

Abstract:  Cairo's cityscape has transformed rapidly as a result of the neoliberal policies that Egypt adopted in the early 1990s. This article examines the spatial negotiations of class in liberalizing Cairo. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of neoliberal policies on global cities of the South, few studies have adopted an ethnographic focus to examine the everyday negotiations of such transformations. I examine the ways young female upper-middle-class professionals navigate Cairo's public spaces, both the safe spaces of the upscale coffee shops and the open spaces of the streets. Their urban trajectories can be read as the footsteps of the social segregation that has increasingly come to mark Cairo's cityscape. I conclude that the bodies of upper-middle-class women have become a battleground for new class configurations and contestations, literally embodying both power and fragility of Cairo's upper-middle class in Egypt's new liberal age.     

Reassessing Kant's geography

This article offers a critical reassessment of Immanuel Kant's lectures on Physische Geographie and his contribution to geographical thought more generally. There are a number of reasons why this reassessment is needed: the lectures are finally about to be published in English translation; careful philological work in German has exposed how corrupted the standard text of the lectures is; and philosophers are finally beginning to critically integrate an understanding of the Geography into their overall assessment of Kant's work. English speaking geographers will therefore soon have access to the lectures in a way that they have not done before, but they need to be aware both of the problems of the edition being translated and the work philosophers have undertaken on their situation in Kant's work and their impact. More broadly, the reassessment requires us to reconsider the position Kant occupies in the discipline of geography as a whole. The article examines the history of the lectures and their publication in some detail; discusses Kant's purpose in giving them; and looks at the way in which he structured geographical knowledge and understood its relation to history and philosophy. In terms of the broader focus particular attention is given to the topics of race and space. While these lectures are undoubtedly of largely historical interest, it is for precisely that reason that an examination of them and Kant's thought more generally is of relevance today to the history of the discipline of geography.     

Temporary organisations and spatial embeddedness of learning and knowledge creation

It is the overall aim of this article to investigate theoretically how spatial embeddedness of learning and knowledge creation might be challenged by alternative organisational forms (i.e. temporary organisations). The article presents development coalitions as an alternative to projects as a form of temporary organisation. They are potentially able to combine the promotion of radical change with collective and localised learning, thus eliminating some of the characteristic shortcomings of project organizations with regard to collective learning and transfer of knowledge.     

Micro-spaces: church porches in pre-modern England

The ‘spatial turn’ in some recent historical and historical geographical writing has been theoretically invigorating. The concern with the representation of space – the discursive emphasis – has collided with ideas about the social production of space. Do these notions have to be dichotomous? Indeed, should we restrict ourselves to one or the other? This examination of a micro-space – the porch, predominantly the south porch, of English pre-modern parish churches – attempts to interpret the range of meanings and actions which were accorded to and took place within this small, but significant, space. In dissecting a considerable, if disparate, amount of empirical material, it acknowledges the complexities, even contingencies, of space. It suggests not a return to Kantian notions of space as container, but the varying influences of impositions of the representation of space and of social action on the production of space, without privileging either. Whilst recognizing that both acted upon and within space, we should allow for the differences and diversity within them.     

Colonial conquests and the politics of normalization: The case of the Golan Heights and Northern Cyprus

The space of exception has been extensively discussed as a location in which governing technologies are deployed through the suspension and manipulation of the norm. The scholarship on the subject has underscored the ways in which various localities can be encamped, which alludes to the dynamic in which spaces of exception can be shaped through the application of various means of sovereign violence that produces new and unpredictable norms. Building on this literature, the article analyzes the ways in which the exception is intentionally used in order to spatially construct the norm. Two case studies are discussed: Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights and the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus. The article's main aim is to show how the state of emergency, which provided the justification for deploying exceptional means—occupation and subsequent colonization—was domesticated. By domestication I mean a situation whereby the state of emergency is not fully negated, but rather rearticulated and redeployed in order to reshape the space and transform it so that it is concomitantly both threatening and normal. I go on to show, however, how despite the processes of spatial normalization the state of exception always resurfaces.