Canada and the political geographies of rights

For some observers, liberal rights are politically disempowering, while for others they can provide a basis for mobilization, resistance and the formation of counter-publics. Yet neither of these claims says much about the geography of rights, which provides the focus for our discussion. Rights are geographical in several senses: rights are often about access to space or place; in liberal societies, geographies of private and public shape access to rights; space naturalizes social relations; the politics of scale open up new debates about and strategies for attaining rights within and beyond Canada; and places are both defined and called upon in struggles over rights. In an exploration of two Canadian case studies - gentrification in Vancouver and the status of Filipina domestic workers - we examine the ways in which the geography of rights proves consequential to dominant and oppositional rights claiming. We briefly lay out the meaning and significance of rights, before a discussion of their political significance in the Canadian context.     

Seismologies of emotion: fear and activism during domestic violence

This paper explores the relation of fear to activism in private and constrained circumstances of chronic risk and anxiety. Asking how people contest domestic violence, given the intensity of the fear that it generates, the paper reframes their responses as practices of activism. It draws on qualitative research that charts the nature, experience and effects of fear over time. Using seismology as a metaphor for this process, the analysis describes complex and often hidden shifts in emotions over periods of years, as interviewees describe being simultaneously constrained by fear and actively using fear to manage and contest violence. Their practices of resistance are small scale, largely invisible to others, and have a messy and non-linear relationship with the process of leaving that some eventually undertake. Such action is only necessary in a social and political climate which continues to place more emphasis on individual than social responsibility for domestic violence. I examine what this resistance adds to recent accounts of activism, concluding that isolated actions constitute activism when they anticipate or engender collective social and political change at other scales.     

基于面板模型的城市居民国内旅游消费实证分析

本文通过整理面板数据并构建面板模型,分别以出游率、人均旅游花费与旅游购买力衡量旅游消费,引入虚拟变量区分收入水平与SARS危机的影响,从而揭示了收入对城市居民国内旅游消费的决定作用。模型估计结果表明：第一、对不同的旅游消费指标,收入的决定作用存在差异,其中,旅游购买力与出游率的收入弹性远大于人均旅游花费的收入弹性;第二、与低收入城市居民相比较,高收入城市居民国内旅游的出游率收入弹性减小,人均旅游花费收入弹性增大;第三、SARS对高收入城市居民国内旅游消费的负面影响更大。最后,根据面板数据的描述性统计结果与模型估计结果,从供给角度,建议在全国层次注重发展观光旅游,在旅游目的地层次注重细分目标市场。     

Medullary Bone in Goose Remains: A Reliable Indicator of Domestic Individual in Non‐Breeding Regions

The ideal indicator of domestic individuals is the presence of traits that must appear in the first generation of the domestic lineage. Most wild geese are migratory, breeding in the subarctic zone and wintering in the temperate zone. If goose remains from archaeological sites in a non‐breeding region are from individuals shown to have died during the breeding season, the bones are likely to be from domestic birds. Medullary bone is secondary woven bony tissue formed in the marrow cavity of breeding female birds. It develops 1 or 2 weeks before the first egg is produced and disappears 1 or 2 weeks after egg production. As wild geese remain in their breeding regions for about 3 months after egg production, medullary bone would be expected to disappear before birds arrive at the stopover and wintering areas. Therefore, the presence of medullary bone in goose remains found in non‐breeding regions would be a reliable indicator of domestic birds. In this study, we examined goose (Anserini spp.) remains from 15 archaeological sites in Japan (3400 bc to 1912 ad ) using binocular observation and histological analysis. We found medullary bone in two femora from the Oranda–shokan–ato site (1650–1850 ad ). The results indicate that the two femora were from domestic geese. By using secondary bone as an indicator of the domesticity of geese, knowledge regarding the origins of domestic geese can be expanded, and the morphological and/or genetic changes, as well as the domestication process, can be revealed. According to the literature, domestic geese were kept in Japan from the early eight century ad and were popular after the 17th century ad . The scarcity of medullary bone in the samples can be explained by the small number of domestic geese in Japan and/or by butchering practices that excluded the eating of breeding female geese. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Safe Places in Domestic Spaces: Two-Year-Olds at Play in their Homes

This paper contributes to the growing research literature on children's ‘intimate geographies’ by focusing on two-year-old children's explorations and play within the domestic spaces of their homes. It draws on video data showing three young girls playing in selected home spaces i.e. a family grocery shop in Peru, the upstairs rooms of a house in America, and the balcony of an apartment in Italy. Through analysis of short video sequences the paper describes the way children use and invest meaning in these spaces. It is argued that the three domestic locations can be seen as ‘safe places’, in both material and personal senses; and that they enable children's sense of belonging, foster their ‘emplaced knowledge’ and build on their confidence to explore spaces further afield.     

Sheltering from domestic violence: Women’s experiences of punitive safety and unfreedom in Cambodian safe shelters

This paper explores the experiences of Cambodian domestic violence survivors who have fled their abusive partners to live in NGO-run safe shelters. Through in-depth interview research undertaken in 2016, we explore the stories of seven women whose experiences speak to tensions between having safety from violence and freedom to live as they choose. The pervasive impunity of the legal system means that Cambodian society operates as a safe space for perpetrators of domestic violence and spatially excludes survivors from it to guarantee their safety from injury and even murder. Just as violence against women has been described as a major area of ‘unfreedom’, we contend also that safe shelter provision in Cambodia, albeit essential, does not necessarily afford freedom from violence, but rather a punitive safety from it which can curtail women’s bodily integrity. Survivors are too often being excluded from decision-making processes in the shelter and treated as passive recipients of physical safety. Making the argument that safety and freedom are not coterminous, we contribute to recent feminist scholarship in geography and aligned disciplines focused on the significance and workings of safe space for marginalised groups. As such, the paper complicates singular viewpoints of safe spaces as enabling environments which can challenge oppressive forces both inside and outside of them.     

Intersectionality and planning at the margins: LGBTQ youth of color in New York

Through an intersectional lens, this article reflects on the dialog between planning and gender, feminist, and queer studies to analyze the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color (YOC) community in New York City (NYC). The community is subject to multiple disenfranchisements, given their ethno-racial status, class, age, gender, and sexual orientation. This community's limited access to safe public spaces and amenities, housing, health services, job training, and other opportunities is an urban planning challenge insufficiently understood or addressed. Our methodology includes participant observation and analysis of an LGBTQ YOC tour of West Village in NYC, interviews with LGBTQ individuals and NGO staff, life stories, observations in LGBTQ-friendly meetings and facilities, and content analysis of LGBTQ reports and media coverage. The research shows the agency of an LGBTQ youth group as a resilient community organization effectively participating in planning processes and exerting rights to public space and services. Finally, it offers recommendations to planners and policy-makers to facilitate the recognition and expansion of rights to the city for LGBTQ, particularly YOC, by committing to understanding their unique conditions and needs and expanding their access to safe housing and public spaces, poverty reduction programs and job opportunities, and health and social support services.     

Economic Globalization and its Problems: A Response to Eaton,Herpel, and Moe-Lobeda and Spencer

Abstract

Building on the other papers in this issue, I offer a theological critique of economic globalization. The theory, or "theology" that supports it leads people of good will, despite the many negative consequences of the globalized pursuit of growth, to pursue such growth, as measured by GDP, as the goal of economic policy. This economistic theology takes no account of human community or ecological sustainability. Until it is changed economists will continue to direct us toward catastrophe.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.