A place to transform: creating caring spaces by challenging normativity and identity

Like all spaces, concrete caring places both shape and are shaped by understandings and constructions of normativity and identity. The traditional understanding of care for older people, imagining clearly demarcated dyadic roles, is firmly embedded in heterosexual logics of relationships within families, the own (family) home and institutional support. Social and residential places for older people thus both assume particular gender and sexual identities and contribute to a (re)production of the very normativity. But how can this interlinkage between the construction of caring spaces and the normativity of identities be understood and, possibly, challenged? In this article we discuss the transformative potential of the social (and partly residential) space of La Fundación 26 de Diciembre, in Madrid, Spain, which opened up to specifically support older LGBT people. Drawing on an in-depth case study we explore a space that allows visibility of different forms of living and caring practices of people with different genders, sexual preferences, origins, classes or political backgrounds. Through the daily life narratives of the people who work, volunteer or simply use the centre we discuss the potential of challenging the restricted notions, assumptions and constructions through which particular places gain both social and political meaning. The article highlights the transformative power of the active and collective making of caring spaces through which narratives of care, collective sexual and gender recognition and practices of caring relationships can replace both traditional/informal forms of living together and institutional spaces that provide professional care.     

Feminist digital geographies

At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the resounding whiteness and heteronormativity of these theoretical origins. In the second half of the article, we trace new horizons of contemporary digital geographies scholarship that engage queer and critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, and black and queer code studies. These theoretical moves give voice to longstanding silences and are indispensable to a political and ethical digital geographic scholarship and praxis, as well as to re-making our technologies and ourselves as digital subjects.     

Intersectionality in feminist geographies

This paper introduces a special themed section that arose from an International Conference on Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality: Places, Identities and Knowledges, held in 2016 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Six scholars of Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States seek to deal in five short papers with the intersectional dynamics of power structures and the central role of place within them. Here we situate the developments of intersectionality in feminist geographies in relation to the role of place and space in constituting intersectional relations, the relevance of context for the development of intersectionality and the use of different methodologies for research on it.     

Connected feminists: foregrounding the interpersonal in connective action

New social movement theories have been developed to address the organisational structures of activism in the age of digital platforms, but have tended to focus on structural questions rather than interpersonal dynamics. This paper engages with Bennett and Segerberg’s theory of connective action but uses a feminist lens to foreground the interpersonal dynamics between digitally equipped activists to develop a uniquely feminist account of connective action. It draws on Jo Freeman’s ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ to illustrate how informal organisation pervades new forms of connective action and continues to hamper the feminist movement. However, it also introduces and identifies the ‘feminist manager’ as an attempt to address the problematic practices of structurelessness and informality, and paves the way for consciously recognising the organisational structures required to advance the movement beyond consciousness-raising initiatives.     

Performing space across time: a 520-year anniversary in a western Ukrainian village

Abstract

Festivals and celebrations have special significance for the foundation of community and collective memory. They are part of social practice and, at the same, also reveal much about current and historical social structures, traditions and rituals. Festivals contrast with everyday life, taking participants away from it; celebrations, conversely, celebrate and reinforce social hierarchies, the role of individuals in the community and the characteristics of the community. This is clearly demonstrated in this contribution on the example of the festivities of two western Ukrainian village communities celebrating 520 years of existence. The communities’ notable peculiarity lies in the fact that they were founded as a single village. Due the partitioning of Poland along the Zbru? River, however, the two sides were situated in Austria-Hungary and Russia, respectively. In the interwar period, they were located in Poland and the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Second World War, they were part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Although they did not have borders for the first time in 150 years, they nevertheless continued to exist as independent villages. Given this starting point, a celebration of the 520th anniversary of the founding of these communities obviously has very complex historical contexts within different past state regimes. The following analysis of the village festival will first demonstrate how such a celebration was achieved. Further, it will examine the extent to which a socio-spatial demarcation was reproduced just as efforts were simultaneously made to eliminate it. The village is a striking example of the manifestation of the experience and perception, design and imagination of present and past spaces.     

Feminist geopolitics,everyday death,and the emotional geographies of Dang Thuy Tram

Women's everyday experiences in war remain occluded; moreover, the bodily impacts of war remain hidden, masked by masculinist accounts of warfare that too often glorify heroic male combatants. In this article, we contribute, first, to the ongoing project to understand violence in everyday life and, second, to the understanding, specifically, of women's experiences in warfare. We do so through a reading of the diaries of Dang Thuy Tram, a female Vietnamese doctor who lived and died in the Vietnam War. By drawing on feminist geopolitics, coupled with the insights from emotional geographies – and specifically, those of love – we focus on two main themes: the emotional transformation of death and life, and the care of life amidst pervasive death. We conclude that an emotionally grounded feminist geopolitics is necessary to challenge masculinist accounts that normalize, naturalize, and glorify war.     

Uncovering a Painful Past: Archaeology and the Holocaust

Abstract

Places connected to the Holocaust, and the physical evidence that lies within them, survive as reminders of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. Both the treatment of these sites and attitudes towards them have varied considerably in the years since the Second World War. In recent years, a number of archaeological investigations have been instigated by curators at Holocaust sites in a direct attempt to enhance visitor experiences and education programmes. Archaeologists have initiated investigations at other forgotten and dilapidated sites in an attempt to raise awareness of these places. This paper will discuss two case study sites where archaeological investigations have been undertaken and where attempts have been made to inform conservation, heritage management, and education strategies. It will highlight the various challenges that may arise in the course of developing dissemination tools and discuss strategies that have been adopted to account for them. Specifically it will focus on how archaeologists can present novel means by which to locate, record, and re-present the physical evidence of the Holocaust and how they can tell the stories of difficult heritage sites even when traditional forms of memorialization/muzealization is not wanted or practical.     

智慧博物馆的发展路径探析

智慧博物馆是传统实体博物馆发展到一定阶段所产生的一种新的博物馆高级形态,具有主体的人本性、资源的整合性和数据的再生产性等基本特征。与数字博物馆相比,智慧博物馆的"智慧化"主要体现在数据来源的多样性、数据传输的多向性和数据交换的普遍性上。建设智慧博物馆需要警惕走入载体离心化、技术泛滥化、内容娱乐化、数据固态化和建设盲目化的误区,抓住"数据"这一核心要素,围绕数据生成、数据加工、数据运用和数据共享诸环节,科学系统地推进展开。     

A love story: for ‘Buddy System’ research in the academy

This article makes a case for a ‘buddy system’ approach to research and scholarship, or a kind of ‘caring with’ our colleagues, as feminist praxis and as an intentional, politicized response to the neoliberalization of the academy. Through autoethnographic writing on our travels together into farmed animal auction yards, we explain the buddy system as a mode of caring, solidarity, and love that differs from collaborative research, focused as it is on caring for and about our colleagues and their research even (or especially) when we have no direct stakes in the research being conducted. We contribute to three feminist conversations with this approach: feminist care ethics in geography; emotional geographies; and critical perspectives on the neoliberalization of the academy. We advocate the buddy system as an extension of feminist care ethics, enriching how feminists think about ‘doing’ research. We draw on feminist geographies of emotion and our own emotions (grief especially) experienced while witnessing processes of nonhuman animal commodification to politicize the act of researching and to develop a more caring way of inhabiting the academy. This is particularly important, we argue, in the context of deepening neoliberal logics that turn the academy into a place where care and love become radical acts of resistance and transformation.     

3D Digital Survey of Iron Tie-Rods in Masonry Buildings: Cross-Sections Analysis and Error Estimation

Ancient iron tie-rods are handcrafted elements with large geometric irregularities, due to production techniques (they are shaped by hammering and linked by hot-forging) and corrosion processes. In common practice, their cross section (that is one of the main parameter to assess their strength) is manually measured on site with a manual caliber. By analyzing a set of detailed three-dimensional (3D) digital surveys of real ancient tie-rods, this study provide an evaluation of the errors made by in-situ manual geometric measurements. In particular, it shows that, in some cases, manual on-site survey is sufficiently reliable and has errors that fall below 10%. Moreover, it shows that when tie-rods have high corrosion levels in hidden zones (typically those close or within the retaining walls) the on-site survey of visible parts only may produce far greater errors that exceed 100%, leading to a strong overestimation of the cross-section of the tie. The ongoing study is a first step toward the definition of correction coefficients to be applied to the on-site manual measurements of ancient tie-rods, with the final aim to improve the reliability of structural analyses.