Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook

Digital platforms have changed how property is sold and valued in the Global North, yet little is known about digital tools in emerging land markets. Drawing on in situ and digital ethnography, we argue that Facebook plays a key role in making a new kind of market in Myanmar, one in which land is transformed into a speculative asset, exchanged across ever-expanding networks. While commodification is familiar within longer histories of capitalism, this case highlights the significance of digital platforms to the contemporary remaking of property relations. Unlike classic cases of market-making enabled by active state regulation, Myanmar’s digital land markets were forged in the context of state absence by brokers who harnessed the technological affordances of social media to increase the scale, scope and speed of transactions. This creative re-appropriation of the platform forged new, unregulated digital markets that ultimately accumulated corporate profits and intensified participant risk.     

Breaking ground—marginality and resistance in (post) unification Germany

Drawing on postcolonial theory and recent geographical debates on subaltern speech and marginal positioning this paper asks what the relevance of ‘place’ is for attempts to ‘transgress’ and ‘resist’ the marginalisation of (former) East Germans in (post)unification Germany. My intention is not to equate the postcolonial situation with that of East Germany after unification, but rather to engage the theoretical and political insights of postcolonial critiques to highlight the conflicts and contradictions that emerge from attempts to move ‘beyond’ oppressive binary constructions. Questions of speaking and listening, as well as seeing and being seen are attended to with a strong focus on the paradoxical places and spaces within which they come to matter in contradictory ways. How do the practices of listening/speaking, seeing/being-seen function to place particular groups in the social margin or centre of ‘(re)united’ Germany? Does ‘power’ reside less with the speaker than with the listener, or is it still important to claim voice (rather than being ‘given’ voice) as an ‘other’?The paper tries to work through some of the tensions, conflicts and concerns that have emerged from my PhD research on the construction of East German marginality through media practices, but also in German social, cultural, political and academic discourse. Perhaps the most significant of these conflicts is that of having lost one’s politically bounded place (as a GDR citizen) and yet finding oneself reconstituted in the (symbolic as well as socio-economic and political) margin of a nation that, to this date, is described as ‘divided within itself’. The sense of placelessness becomes politically relevant when ‘resistant’ or ‘transgressive’ acts are (to be) performed that have no ‘proper’ place from which to embark or in which to be staged. Similar to the post-colonial situation, where no ‘original beyond’ exists, and despite being frequently posited as a symbolically separate entity, ‘East Germans’ have no place for return, only an impossible situation of being constantly ‘out-of-place’ even in the locales that used to be ‘home’.     

The Social Production of Latin@ Visibilities and Invisibilities: Geographies of Power in Small Town America

This paper explores the sociospatial dynamics unfolding in Perry, a rural Iowa town that has been facing rapid change since the 1990s due to growing Latin@ settlement. We focus on what we call the social production of Latin@ visibilities and invisibilities: spatialized practices by individuals, families, communities, and institutions that render different Latin@ groups visible or invisible, with repercussions for survival, community integration, and political praxis. We discuss the border within as an extension of border politics and borderlands rhetorics to the US “heartland”, and how the entrenchment of a regime of deportability creates racialized and gendered conditions for the in/visibility of Latin@ immigrants and Latin@s more broadly. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical and political implications of our analysis for such geographies of power and the social relations, locations, and discourses that constitute and are constituted by them.     

Domestic destinies: colonial spatialities,Australian film and feminist cultural memory work

Elsa and Charles Chauvel's 1955 film Jedda was the first Australian feature film to cast Aboriginal actors in lead roles. The film was also unusual in the context of Australian film of the time for its rural domestic setting. Because the film explored the experiences of its lead character – Jedda – as an Aboriginal child adopted by a white woman, it is also one of the few films of the period to deal with colonial legacies in its attention to policies and practices of assimilation. The twin processes of racialisation and gendering of space in Jedda have been responded to by Tracey Moffatt in her surrealist short film Night Cries. This article uses the notion of intimate geographies to examine the production of relationships of power within domestic space that both films explore. The temporal and spatial practices deployed by the female figures within each film make visible a set of possible transformations of, as well as continuities within, enduring colonial power relations. Moffatt's retelling and respatialising of the Jedda narrative, however, is ultimately understood as a specifically feminist practice of cultural memory work, suggesting that struggles over memory are also struggles over place.     

Rethinking grassroots campaigners in the digital media: The ‘grassroots orchestra’ in Italy

The diffusion of digital media allows the emergence of new types of relations between grassroots campaigners and organisers. This article presents the results of a comparative qualitative study of two Italian cases of grassroots online participation: a local electoral campaign and a single-issue social movement. The first case is ‘Tell your Milano’, a project that took place during the electoral campaign for Mayor of Milan in the spring of 2011. The second case is the ‘Purple People’ (Popolo Viola), an Italian social movement started in 2009 to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The article introduces the concept of a ‘grassroots orchestra’: a grassroots campaign aimed at a short-term objective, coordinated by a non-grassroots political actor and performed by a community sharing a uniform and coherent context.

数字媒体的扩散导致了草根运动家与组织者之间新型关系的出现。本文对两个意大利草根在线参与案例——一为地方选举运动,一为独立议题社会运动——做了对比定性研究。前一个案例是所谓“告诉你一个马力诺”,是2011年春米兰市长选举中的一项活动。另一个“紫色人民”始于2009年,是一个要求贝卢斯科尼总理辞职的社会运动。本文引进了“草根乐队”的概念,意即短期目标的草根运动,由非草根政治主体协调,并由处在同一语境中的一个社群来完成。     

Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

Changing children's geographies

This keynote explores the changing nature of children's geographies as an academic project. It proceeds in four parts. Part 1 considers the shift away from research on children's spatial cognition which envisaged the child in largely biological terms, and contemplates contemporary efforts to rework the nature/culture dualism. Part 2 traces the incorporation of new social studies of childhood into geography, emphasising the importance of children's voices, their positioning within axes of power, and the need for quantitative and qualitative methods. Part 3 explores how feminist research led to interest in parents, educators and other actors/institutions which shape, and are shaped by, children's lives. Part 4 ponders what children's geographies might add to, and learn from, broader interdisciplinary debates, and the benefits and pitfalls of research impact. The conclusion argues that a well-informed appreciation of sub-disciplinary history provides a strong vantage point from which to engage with new ways of thinking.     

党校图书馆的数字资源建设

适应时代发展的需要,加强党校图书馆数字资源建设意义重大。然而,目前党校在图书馆数字资源建设的进程中还存在一些具体的困难和问题,需要着重处理好数字资源与传统文献资源、自建数据库与外购数据库、共建与共享、硬件与软件建设之间的关系。     

Food,feeding and the material everyday geographies of infants: possibilities and potentials

This paper forges an agenda for researching geographies of infants. Scholars have tended to overlook the everyday geographies of very young children. However, outside of geography, infancy is seen as a specifically dynamic period of life, and is subject to sustained research and policy intervention. In particular, early childhood is viewed as a key point in which to intervene to transform enduring, interconnected, societal, educational, and health-based inequalities. Food and feeding are seen as critical both to the health of infants now and of the children and adults they become . However, much policy and research under-theorizes the importance of socio-spatial contexts and the subjectivity/agency of infants. There is, then, an urgent need for geographers to put infants onto the agenda, to inform and challenge these dominant accounts. Researching with infants necessitates not just critiquing modern, liberal notions of an autonomous subject/agent, but developing a new way of understanding subjectivity and agency. Drawing upon Lupton’s (2013) notion of infant–carer interembodiment, I suggest a way forward with reference to the material geographies of infant feeding.     

Inaccessible childhoods: evaluating accessibility in homes,schools and neighbourhoods with disabled children

Accessible built environments are a critical component of Canada’s commitment to disabled children’s ‘right to enjoy full and decent lives’ [United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York. [Google Scholar]. Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York.] . Although valid, reliable research data about the accessibility of built environments are key to developing related policies, these data currently do not exist. To begin to redress this gap, we conducted a case study series followed by a survey to determine the accessibility of schools, homes and neighbourhoods directly from disabled children (The ScHaN Project). To present a concise summary of the findings that can inform equitable, evidence-based policies, we developed a scoring system for their homes, schools and neighbourhoods. Although our findings illustrate that eliciting and interpreting data from these children were complex undertakings, it is clear that none of these central environments met Canada’s obligation to enhance equity by enabling their access, inclusion and participation.