Cocoons as a space of their own: a case of Emirati women learners

This article focuses on ‘cocooning’ as a spatial practice of Emirati higher education women learners in a single-sex learning context, which emerged from exploring the intersectional and intertwined relationship of gender, place and culture with its unique cultural formation that informs women learners’ spatiality. To understand women’s spatiality and explore these intersecting relations, I conducted an ethnographic qualitative inquiry, applying multiple levels of data gathering and analysis. I also utilised social theories of space as a theoretical framework, specifically the social construction of space and Lefebvre’s triad of perceived, conceived and lived space. Cocooning, represented in these women learners’ unique spatial appropriation in their quest for a space of their own, emerged as a pervasive socially constructed spatial theme. As a spatial practice, it was largely influenced by the women learners’ cultural model, including socio-cultural status and gender roles, rooted in their national, historical colonial and traditional past as well as current economic, political, demographic, academic-institutional and global positions and demands. Furthermore, cocooning is a spatial representation of what also seems a universal longing among women, beyond context and culture, for a space of one’s own. Such a spatial need is manifested differently in the perceived space while shared in the conceived and lived.     

GIS支持下的古窑址与地理环境关系研究——以福建省为例

为了研究福建省古窑址的分布和演变,以福建省南朝至宋元时期窑址分布为例,建立了古窑址分布地理信息系统,运用GIS的空间叠置、缓冲区、坡度和高程模型等分析方法,分析了古窑址与地理环境之间的关系。结果表明:从南朝至宋元时期福建省窑址发展经历了从起步到发展再到鼎盛的整个过程;各个时期窑址发展情况不一,侧重点不同;水源、坡度和高程是古人选择窑址时考虑的重要地理环境因素;古窑址大部分分布在距河流4千米以内,坡度小于15度,海拔400米以下区域。此外,GIS技术具有传统考古学无法比拟的优势,为考古学研究提供了一种重要参考方法。     

Quantifying the defensiveness of defended sites on the Northwest Coast of North America

Defensive architectural features are used to evaluate the scale and pervasiveness of conflict in antiquity around the world, but in the archaeology of conflict on the Northwest Coast, the relationship between physical landscapes, built defensive features and warfare has never been tested using quantifiable measures. We argue here that the syntax of biomechanical control, reflecting the universality of the parameters of the human body, is inherent in architectural analyses of conflict, and develop an index of defense (DI) based on commonly invoked constituent measures of defensiveness. The DI is represented in a single value, derived from four individual measures (visibility, elevation, accessibility and area), each with constituent variables. We test this quantitative measure using a sample of identified defensive and non-defensive sites on the Northwest Coast of North America in order to evaluate this system of quantifying the contribution of site location and architectural features to the overall defensiveness of communities and discuss some of the implications of this measure on interpreting the role of conflict on the Northwest Coast.     

Destroying Nahr el-Bared: Sovereignty and urbicide in the space of exception

During the summer of 2007, Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon was the scene of a fierce battle between the Lebanese Armed Forces and a militant Islamist group called Fateh al-Islam. When Palestinian evacuees returned after the conflict, they found Nahr el-Bared utterly destroyed, houses smashed first by shells and bombs, then by vandalism and arson, possessions stolen and broken, offensive graffiti daubed on walls. I argue in this paper that the battle of Nahr el-Bared, and particularly the month of looting and arson that followed the battle, was a case of urbicide in a space of exception. The seemingly unrestricted destruction of homes, the theft of possessions and arson, went beyond any possible military necessity and became the deliberate and systematic erasure of the camp. This urbicide was made more possible by the very nature of the political spaces of the camp, which are in Lebanon but not of Lebanon, in which Lebanese sovereignty and law are not fully enforced, in which a whole range of non-Lebanese actors exercise political power outside the control of the Lebanese state. In these spaces of exception in which the rule of law is suspended, the looting, arson and vandalism took place without sanction. Palestinian homes and lives had become sacred in the sense that they could be destroyed without sanction, without recourse to legal redress, because there was no law.     

The Trump administration and outer space: promoting US leadership or heading towards isolation?

In a relatively short period of time, the Trump administration has been fairly active in the field of space. The reconstitution of the National Space Council, under the direction of Vice President Pence, the President’s signing of Space Policy Directive 1, that calls for the return of humans to the Moon, and the announcement of a National Space Strategy that calls for an ‘America first’ approach in space, have been the highlights of this process. A key component of the administration’s approach has been the promotion of commercial (private) space activities through an effort of regulatory reform intended to facilitate free enterprise and individual initiative in space.

Overall, it is evident that the Trump administration views a consolidated US leadership in space as instrumental to ‘Make America Great Again’. However, due to the lack of cohesion in the management of the US space program, the controversial interpretation of international principles and the US-centred view of space endorsed by the administration, doubts remain as to whether the space policy of the Trump administration will foster US leadership in space or lead to its progressive isolation.     

Spatialities and the feeling of doing

Recent discussions of non-representational theory and expressive/sensuous embodied practice have provided new orientations for rethinking how people live and feel, and inform notions of spatialities and lay geographies. These arguments I develop in this paper through a consideration of an ethnography of recreational caravanning in the UK. I consider how spatialities may be developed in practice in relation to a refiguring of contexts and embodied semiotics.     

'Walking the walk and talking the talk': Bodies,conversation, gender and power in higher education in England

Combinations of speaking, listening and bodily behaviour have been neglected in accounts of the operation of power. Although often described as fluid and interactionally produced, power has been the subject of few empirically based analyses at micro-interactional scales. Drawing on interviews with undergraduates and extracts from teaching interactions at higher education institutions in England, this article focuses on talk as a situated practice. It describes how verbal and bodily behaviours together are fundamentally involved in the enactment of instructor and student roles and power relations, and the collective interactional (re)production of teaching spaces. It discusses two broad types of teaching interaction in terms of gendered differences in the structure of talk, drawing attention to how these are shaped by differences in how instructors enact power. I suggest that men may routinely engage in conversations with 'feminine' structures in teaching spaces without this compromising heterosexual masculinity, and present reasons why it may be more likely that women be problematized for using 'masculine' verbal styles. I also argue that rather than simply being inscribed on to instructors' bodies in ways that accord with the hegemonic discourses of gender, authority and respect have to continually be earned from students, and verbal behaviour is deeply involved in this process. It is not enough to 'walk the walk', instructors must also 'talk the talk', in ways that students deem legitimate.     

‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality,Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves,South‐Eastern Australia

European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creation of an individual subject – with its success measurable through observation and documentation, especially photography. Central to the administration’s conception of these settlements, and to its vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the indigenous population within modern settler society. But this regime overlooked or denied disjunctions with the residents’ profoundly different cultural orientation, in which vision was subordinated to aurality, and in which collective forms of personhood took precedence over the individual, allowing for the persistence of tradition.     

The Conventillo,the Department Store,and the Cabaret: Navigating Urban Space and Social Class in Argentine Silent Cinema, 1916–1929

This article examines an understudied film genre that some Argentine early film periodicals labeled cinedrama porteño. Porteño cinedramas portrayed a bleak Buenos Aires, a dark metropolis of massive immigration and accelerated urbanization in which opulence was reserved for the few and misery was all around, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods. Centering on ‘fallen women’ and well-dressed wastrels, the genre foregrounded social instability by confronting emerging and established social actors in several locations, including tenement housing, department stores, and cabarets and garçonnières. Based on surviving film fragments, this article argues that porteño cinedramas rendered visible varying degrees of sociocultural proximity and separation in urban space. In doing so, the genre traced sociocultural cartographies and identitary strategies to confer narrative and visual saliency to mobile subjects, most noticeably urban outcasts. Porteño cinedramas warned against the dangers of upward mobility while at the same time denouncing gender and class inequality in Buenos Aires. Films discussed include Hasta después de muerta (Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche, 1916), La chica de la Calle Florida (José A. Ferreyra, 1922), and La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928).     

零售商业空间组织的市场分析

本文从市场地理学的角度上,对零售空间组织的决策过程--市场分析过程进行了研究。指出该过程应包括区域社会经济分析,即提供发展背景;贸易区分析,即确定区位发展可行性;消费者研究,即确定组织经营形式。