Jewish spaces and Gypsy spaces in the cultural topographies of a New Europe: heritage re-enactment as political folklore

The European phenomenon of Jewish spaces was first described in the mid-1990s. They were then defined as themed environments initiated and operated by non-Jews, often located in historical Jewish neighbourhoods. Since then Jewish spaces have become a well-established concept in the media and among academics. This article explores Gypsy spaces as analogous to Jewish spaces. The paper compares two cases, the Gypsy pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in southern France and the Jewish Culture Festival in the Polish town of Kraków. There are striking parallels between the thriving Gypsy music festivals, Gypsy horse fairs and Gypsy pilgrimages on the one side, and Jewish Culture Festivals on the other. The author formulates some hypotheses as to why Gypsy spaces have not yet been recognised and dealt with more extensively. To conclude, the Jewish and Gypsy spaces are situated in a European landscape of remembrance and interpreted as heritage re-enactment within the framework of European integration.     

Recalling the War in China： The Dahoufang Project in Chongqing and the Restoration of a Legacy

This article presents a rare inside view of a unique project currently underway in China to study and preserve the memory of possibly the single most seminal event in Chinese modern history, the War of Resistance against Japan （1937-45）. The article introduces a multi-faceted program to preserve the wartime cultural heritage; the work is ongoing in the thriving western metropolis of Chongqing, once China＇s bomb-torn wartime capital and international Allied command center. It describes how, seven decades after World War II, scholars, cultural workers, government experts, and artists in China are joining hands in an unprecedented, all-encompassing project to record, restore, and recount the extraordinary legacy of China＇s War of Resistance in its local, as well as national and global contexts.     

社交媒体对广州饮食文化空间的建构与重塑

研究选取国内四大社交媒体——新浪博客、新浪微博、豆瓣网和土豆网作为研究案例,通过文本分析的方法,探讨了社交媒体对广州饮食文化空间的构建与重塑,得出以下结论:①社交媒体构建了广州饮食文化空间的结构以及全球地方特征。社交媒体将广州饮食文化空间结构塑造为承载饮食内容、饮食文化及其相关社会活动的物质和社会文化空间,具有全球化和本地化交融的特征;②基于网民对社交媒体空间的生产,及其之间的社会互动,社交媒体消解了广州饮食文化空间原有的社会文化意义,并将其重塑为一个承载多元社会文化、消费文化、权力和情感的空间,而且这些空间意义具有流动性。研究结论丰富了现有媒体和饮食文化空间地理研究成果,同时为广州饮食文化发展和地方品牌构建提供了参考。     

江苏省地理景观与美丽乡村建构研究

乡村审美空间蕴含着内在和深刻的人地关系理念内容,比经济效应有更深的自然情怀,是可持续发展的思想感情基础,也是现代景观规划的重要研究课题。城市化发展过程中自然地理脉络破坏对于乡村景观是致命的。探讨以多尺度层面的地理景观建构乡村审美空间:在区域大尺度范围内设计地理视域观赏空间;在镇域中尺度范围内将生态文明和社会经济发展要求安排在景观空间格局配置中;在乡村小尺度范围内造就素雅含蓄的村落景观。江苏省乡村具有四千年的历史,留下珍贵的人地关系文化遗产和审美烙印。从地理景观形态结构、格局演化进程与机理响应对照乡村审美空间景观,建构和谐安宁的画面境界;最终造就广阔地域的"美丽乡村"。     

Historical geography and early Canada: a life and an interpretation

The first section of this two‐part paper describes my historical geographical career, particularly the topics and issues I have pursued and the changing intellectual environment in which they have been situated. The second section offers a summary interpretation of the emerging human geography of early‐modern Canada followed by some reflections on its contemporary implications. This interpretation stresses the extent to which boundaries and discontinuities marked early Canada, and contrasts a pinched Canadian experience with the land with a far more expansive American one. It shows how deeply difference was constructed and ingrained in the Canadian past, and suggests some challenges and opportunities that follow from this inheritance.     

In Search of Free Spaces to Breathe: Turkey's United June Movement,Social Uprising,and Spatial Maintainability

This study examines the socio-spatial practices of the United June Movement (UJM), a grassroots movement that drew inspiration from the neighbourhood forums of the Gezi Park protests. We argue that the counter-sites of politicisation and symbolic places engraved on the social movements’ memory formed the socio-spatial base of solidarity networks and the long-term political organising of UJM. Secondly, we suggest that in an authoritarian context, activist organisations nourishing from full-scale protests such as UJM need to form, reshape, and sustain free spaces where they feel protected. For testing these arguments, we designed fieldwork around UJM with an ethnographic approach. We concluded that the desire for social change has the potential of generating alternative visions in a spatiotemporal context, but in the medium term, it can turn into a feeling of self-enclosure or being besieged. Even so, such attempts leave a perpetual legacy, tagged to certain spaces and geographies.     

The Ordinary City

As debates on globalization have progressed from an earlier phase in which commentators saw the intensification of world-scale flows and processes as the negation of local identities and autonomies, the city has been 'rediscovered' as the powerhouse of the globalized economy. Against the view that questions, for example, the continued specificity of the urban in an era increasingly mediated by locationally liberating, advanced telecommunications and rapid transport networks, some strands of urban research assert that cities are becoming more important as the key creative, control and cultural centres within globalizing economic, cultural and social dynamics. Building on these strands, this paper evaluates the assets that cities and metropolitan regions provide in an era of globalization. It attempts to develop an alternative perspective on the city based on the idea that contemporary urban life is founded on the heterogeneity of economic, social, cultural and institutional assets, and concludes by using this perspective to develop implications for urban policy and the quest for social and territorial justice.     

American graffiti: deconstructing gendered communication patterns in bathroom stalls

Bathroom graffiti, in both its text and pictorial form, represent viable means for strangers to communicate with each other. The text or drawings in the bathroom stalls, while written or drawn in a private space and presumably during a very private moment, are meant to be public, as they transmit ideas, images, and even responses. Using data collected in 10 bathroom stalls at a university (five men's bathrooms and five women's bathrooms), this study examines differences in communication patterns in women's and men's bathroom stalls through an analysis of graffiti content and style. Findings reveal that while communication patterns tend to be supportive and relationship-focused in women's bathrooms, the graffiti in men's bathroom walls are replete with sexual content and insults, in the course of the construction of hegemonic masculinity. In addition, an analysis of the response-and-reply chains suggests that, in the bathroom stalls, hierarchies of power are established and reinforced even in anonymous, unmoderated spaces, and even when no humans are physically present.     

Digging up Unearthed down-under: a hybrid geography of a musical space that essentialises gender and place

Hybrid geographies are well developed in studies of human–nature relations and environmental humanities, but less so in geographies of music and gender. In this article, we use hybrid geographies to frame our critical engagement with Australia's triple j's Unearthed, a publically funded website and radio station that presents new music. Hybrid approaches enable us to understand gendered power relations in music by deconstructing the ways power differences are built on cultural, social, spatial and technological relations. Engaging netnographic and mixed-method approaches we critique Unearthed as a democratic music cyberspace. We identify the limited constructions of gender and geographic location, some of which are unique to this online presence, while others are shared with broader musical spaces. We argue that the interactions between technology, artists, fans and the online spaces, as mediated by Unearthed, situate emerging artists in relation to gender, geography and genre, and thus constrain possibilities for a more democratic musical space. Unearthed manifests as a musical space where rurality is exoticised while urban origins are diminished, and hegemonic masculinities remain dominant. We suggest that the potential of Unearthed can be realised if gender and geographic hegemonies are recognised and otherness is de-essentialised.     

Late Iron Age transculturalism in the northern “periphery”: understanding the long-term prehistoric occupational area of Viinivaara E,Finland

The Late Iron Age of northern Finland is often approached through an ethnic perspective. Archaeological sites are defined as local or foreign and, accordingly, linked to either Sámi or non-Sámi groups. In recent decades, the concept of transculturalism and mixing of cultural traits has been discussed by several researchers, and their work has shown that such categorizations can be questioned. Correspondingly, certain sites and artifacts found in the northern parts of Finland seem to relate to interactions and contacts instead of ethnic backgrounds. One such site was excavated at Viinivaara E in 2013 and 2014. Based on the fieldwork, the site can be linked to encounters and cultural exchange between local groups and visitors. The entangled nature of the site is understood by taking into consideration its location and landscape, but also by examining the archaeological and historical conception of Late Iron Age northern Finland in general. Further, transcultural dynamics present at the site are also tied to social development on a broader temporal and spatial scale.