Instagram photography and the geography field course: snapshots from Berlin

Although geography has long associated itself with photography, the rapid advancement of technology has created a clear divide between the visual practices regularly used in wider society and the way photography is utilized by critical geographers in their teaching. We suggest the door is ajar for new modes of (geo)photographic thinking, and one visual tool at our disposal is social media applications that allow images to be instantly shared, analysed, and discussed. This article critically reflects on the use of Instagram to enhance student participation, engagement, and learning on a geography field course in Berlin. Based on interviews with students, their field journals, and our own critical reflections, this paper looks at some advantages of using Instagram in teaching geography, but also promotes caution and presents drawbacks to relying on instant visual digital methods.     

Automobility and masculinities between home and work: trucks as the ‘new normal’ in Newfoundland and Labrador

Automobiles are ubiquitous objects of private consumption and their meaning and use are shaped by different aspects of identity, including gender. The gender dimensions of automobility associated with particular types of vehicles have not been extensively researched. This article studies pickup trucks and masculinities in relation to home and work in the industrial construction sector in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. There, like in much of North America, trucks have become the most commonly purchased new vehicles over the last decade. Their widespread popular appeal contrasts with their historical development for manual labour gendered as masculine, such as farming and fishing, in rural places and environments conducive to such labour. Drawing on interviews with construction industry actors and workers, the article shows how new, expensive trucks have come to reflect the hegemonic masculinity at male-dominated industrial construction projects, while also showing how the meanings and uses of trucks are complex and contested. Trucks are understood to be functional for work and driving, but they are also status symbols, often used only sparingly for commuting, masculinized domestic work and leisure activities. The article unpacks the new and expanding popularity of the truck and its positioning in practice in relation to masculinities, work, and to the landscape in a place-based gender regime. In doing so, it contributes to efforts to contextualize masculinities in place, while also revealing how they are related to gender constructs in other places and at other scales.     

Beach body work: Australian women’s experiences

This article examines Australian women’s complex relationship with the beach through a focus on affect and on what bodies do. Interviews with ten participants of diverse backgrounds and of different ages reveal that women understand the beach as a mediated and surveilled space where their bodies are foregrounded. In this environment, there is an intersection of women’s knowledge of the popular constructions of the archetypal Australian beach body, real women’s bodies, and interviewees’ experiences of the beach as a place of shame and pride. As a means of managing this affective landscape participants detail a range of bodily strategies enacted prior to going to the beach and once at the beach. This bodily labour demonstrates that for Australian women the beach is a dynamic and complicated site of both leisure and labour.     

On the service frontline: Israeli Arab-Palestinian men in a call-center

Intersectionality is applied to gender-occupation-minority inconsistent hierarchies, to as to explore the workplace-experience of Israeli Arab-Palestinian men service workers and unveil the multiple-geographies it contains. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 24 suchlike men emphasize complexity as the key feature of their intersectional experience. Whereas masculinity and Israeli-Palestinianess are forged against the feminine and Israeli-Jewishness Others, service work is de-feminized and restructured as a welcome modern development whose traditional Other is cherished. The disadvantages of their national-minority status are compensated by cross-national amity and routine occupational practices in the modern workplace, whereby some of their Othering markers are prized. The national difference appears as a multiple-discursive resource which mainly separates the ethnic component from the political one by which the effects of gender, modern work and class structure, weaken. Four geographies, periphery, home-work links, the sociability of the place of work and the MENA world-region are identified, suggesting that geography is integral to the intersectional experience.     

霸伯治盐与西周井田

西周霸伯铜器铭文显示,位于今山西翼城大河口的霸国伯主不仅有为西周王室治盐之责,而且兼有御戎守护盐池安全的使命。霸伯簋铭文记载了井叔专来霸国辨定盐卤的种类和等级,并命霸伯征伐,提供其美田一百井之井田中央百亩公田所产的两种谷物作为军粮,补其军资。文章结合相关铭文资料讨论了西周井田制和军賦,并就与井田相关的官制官氏等问题提出了看法。     

Commentary: New Directions in the History of Ethology

This welcome set of original and instructive papers illuminates and enriches the history of twentieth-century ethology in multiple ways. It adds a wealth of actors, animals, methods, and places to those featured in previous treatments of ethology's development. Some of the papers extend the chronology beyond the heyday of ethology's disciplinary construction to consider exciting developments in the 1970s and beyond. Others consider animal behavior research programs pursued contemporaneously with but independently of mainline ethology's development from the 1930s through the 1960s. Another paper takes us inside an ethologist's archive of visual images to examine the importance of such images (and such a setting) for ethological practice. Collectively, the papers provide new opportunities to contemplate how research programs and disciplines evolve; the relations between concepts, practices, and places; ethology and politics, and much more. At the same time, the individuality of the papers is conspicuous. They have not been constructed on the same model. The authors have followed their own approaches, corresponding to their own, respective interests. A short commentary is not sufficient to do justice to each of them. Rather than attempt to review them one by one, I will consider a pair of themes that may help relate the papers to each other and to the history of ethology: (1) the ongoing challenge of defining ethology and identifying who the ethologists were (or are); (2) the practices and places of animal behavior study.     

Introduction

This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the well-being of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field.     

Digitalising sex commerce and sex work: a comparative analysis of French,Greek and Slovenian websites

The aim of this article is to explore the complexity of the online sex trade and work by analysing sexuality-related commercial websites, with reference to three European states, France, Greece and Slovenia. The article compares websites in each specific sociocultural context, in order to provide insights into the various types of networks and services that emerge, and to explore how they operate, how they communicate and how sex is being merchandised. We have conducted a two-tier analysis: The first part discusses results of a quantitative macro-analysis exploring 149 websites, while the second part is a micro-analysis analysing the visualisation of egocentric network of three selected websites. The focus is on understanding how gender relations develop in digital environment and how within cyberspace sectorial and national divides are dealt with. While there is evidence to suggest that in some sectors the Internet has opened avenues for sex workers to work independently of the control networks, there are also many forms of exploitation that arise from new media. We observe that sex commerce online is not particularly attentive to the agency of sex workers but is, to the contrary, oriented to provide opportunities and a forum for businessmen and clients.     

‘You just have to be smart’: spatial practices and subjectivity among women in sex work in London,Ontario

Social science research on the relationship between space and sex work, specifically among women in street-based settings, demonstrates the spatialized nature of risk and how different forms of civic and legal governance contribute to their socio-economic marginalization. However, these studies rarely consider the women’s spatial practices and gendered subjectivities beyond the sex trade, which is problematic because sex work is not their singular life activity or the only impetus for their spatial movements through the urban landscape. Using social mapping and interview data from 33 women in sex work in London, Ontario, this article explores how our participants navigate the spaces where they work and live alongside those regarding health care, social services, violence and places they avoid. Findings reveal that the women traverse diverse spaces as they access health services, especially for crisis issues that necessitate travel to hospitals located beyond the inner city. The spaces used to access social services and those they avoid (i.e. to not be emotionally triggered or under police surveillance) overlap significantly, which presents unique challenges for our participants who depend upon these services for their socio-economic survival. The theoretical contributions these data make to the feminist geography literature on gender and space are discussed, particularly with respect to the issues of nomadic subjectivity and the relationality between city spaces and marginalized bodies.