Still methodologically becoming: collaboration,feminist politics and ‘Team Ismaili’

This article mobilizes a feminist analytic to examine team research and collaborative knowledge production. We center our encounter with team research – a collectivity we named ‘Team Ismaili’ – and our study with first- and second-generation East African Shia Ismaili Muslim immigrants in Greater Vancouver, Canada. We draw upon feminist politics to highlight the ways in which ‘Team Ismaili’ at once destabilized and unwittingly reproduced normative academic power relations and lines of authority. A ‘backstage tour’, of ‘Team Ismaili’ shows the messiness and momentum of team research and sheds light on how collaborative knowledge production can challenge and reconfirm assumed hierarchies. Even as we are still methodologically becoming, through this discussion we strive to interrupt the prevailing silence on team research in human geography, to prompt more dialogue on collaboration and to foreground the insight garnered through feminist politics.     

Wissenstransfer auf dem Prüfstand. Europäische Mediziner im Kampf gegen die Pest von Moskau 1771

Foreign knowledge being tested: European physicians fighting the Moscow plague of 1771. – The transfer of Western medicine to Russia increased significantly in the Eighteenth century. Foreign doctors were employed, their writings translated, their education standards copied. But who regarded that knowledge as superior and why? Taking the Moscow Plague of 1771 as a case study, this article examines the crucial role foreign and Russian medical practitioners played during the epidemic. It argues that especially those ideas and practices that were useful for social control filtered into politics and public discourse, but failed to convince the majority of the population.     

历史性的地理陈述与阅读

我们基本上是通过对文本或文献的阅读,才可能重构关于历史时期的地理景观和地理知识,才可能理解历史时期地理景观与地理知识对于古人和今人的意义。因此本文考察了历史文本或文献中地理陈述与地理景观和地理知识之间的各种关系,以及当前对这些地理陈述的不同阅读方法。     

ALGONQUIN NOTIONS OF JURISDICTION: INSERTING INDIGENOUS VOICES INTO LEGAL SPACES

ABSTRACT. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal notions of geography, nature and space sometimes compete, and these differences can create barriers to joint environmental problem-solving. This paper examines the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation and Allies (AAFNA) and the strategies they used in juridical and legislative settings to make their voices heard. In the Tay River Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal (2000–2002), AAFNA attempted to introduced their knowledge of the environmental deterioration which would be caused by a Permit To Take Water issued to a multinational corporation by the Ontario Ministry of Environment. The paper is divided into two parts: first, it describes the concepts of Algonquin knowledge, jurisdiction and responsibility; second, it explores the strategies used to integrate their perspective into legal proceedings constructed by the Canadian government. This case reveals how some Algonquin people conceive of space and responsibility in deeply ecological, rather than narrowly juridical, terms. It establishes that their broad concepts of knowledge, land and jurisdiction are incompatible with existing Euro-Canadian divisions of legal responsibility and ecological knowledge, but at the same time can serve as the means by which they challenge the current structure of Aboriginal and Canadian relations.     

The making of a city campus

Campus spatial development has attracted relatively little scholarly research, yet through time major moves reflect and interact with broader policy, design, and societal trends. The city campus as a high‐density, mixed‐use knowledge precinct has emerged as a distinctive type. Its growing prominence points to the convergence of interdependent trends in urban life, higher education, and economic growth. This article describes, contextualises, and reflects upon the physical evolution of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in central Sydney. The narrative identifies several distinct development phases: from the urban renewal of a rundown inner‐city precinct through comprehensive replanning following the tenets of high modernism, then adaptive reuse and heritage conservation, to architectural design excellence. In the process, it has become an Australian exemplar of a “tech transformed” contemporary city campus.     

Proceeding through Colonial Past-Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability,Refusal, and Autonomy

This article examines how the colonial past manifests within the present through an analysis of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Drawing on feminist geographic scholarship for decolonising knowledge production, I argue that geographers have a responsibility to the people they work with and the places where they conduct research to know what came before. Through an analysis of how the colonial past surfaced in everyday and ongoing experiences of negotiating consent during fieldwork, I show how reflecting on the colonial past-present offers insights into the colonial power geometries of knowledge production. Proceeding through the colonial past-present offers useful lessons on being accountable to people and lands, recognising refusal, and making autonomy. While this article is focused on my experiences as a white settler scholar from the USA who did research in a Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico, proceeding through colonial past-presents offers lessons to any and all geographers who struggle to unsettle the persistent colonial power geometries of knowledge production.     

EPISTEMIC WOUNDED ATTACHMENTS: RECOVERING DEFINITIONAL SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH COLONIAL LIBRARIES

Postcolonial theorizing on empires and subjects focuses on governance and infrastructure as relevant geographies of relation. However, when governance-driven knowledge production migrates from colony to metropole, what postcolonial subjectivity formations are recovered from colonial archives, particularly if these archives are structured by epistemic difference? We theorize a wounded attachment to a colonial library, or the construction of subjectivity through colonial archival recovery, as a means of transforming a colonial library of governance into an academic discipline. Through the case study of Sikh studies, a discipline originating out of colonial governance of Sikhs, we argue that epistemic difference is transformed into epistemic distancing as a tool by which scholars pursue legibility to the Euro-American academy. We contextualize the ongoing investment in measures of academic legibility (for example, objectivity, distance, and validity) as how area and region are tied to the production of universal knowledge; these measures result in the elision of embodied knowledge as a valid framework for intellectual pursuit.     

浅论知识经济社会与社区发展

知识经济的迅猛发展使人类社会进入全新的知识经济时代,表现出不同以往的社会特征,同时也面临新的发展困境。社区作为解决各种社会问题、体现人文关怀的基层社会单元,其发展日益为各界所瞩目。本文立足知识社会的时代背景,在概述其相关特征及社区发展内涵的基础上,分析了知识社会社区发展的新动态,并进一步提出我国社区发展的新举措。     

上海元代水闸遗址出土木构件无损冻干初探

传统的冷冻脱水过程通常需要将电阻温度传感器(RTD)插入到物料中以监测温度变化从而确定干燥终点,这种方式对于处理木质文物来说具有一定的破坏性,无法做到无损或微损。本研究尝试采用无损方式对定型加固剂浸渍液即时浓度进行分析,并对冷冻干燥终点进行预测。采用这种无损技术成功地对志丹苑元代水闸遗址出土的30件木构件进行真空冷冻脱水定型处理,既达到了预期的定型保护效果,又确保了木构件的安全。     

UNDERPOPULATION, TELEVISION ECONOMIES, AND THE POWER OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION

This article addresses the power of popular geographical ‘imaginations’ and ‘knowledges’ to foreclose public debate and, in the process, to reinforce often contentious policies or practices. It argues that historically, a prominent example of such a powerful geographical knowledge has been that of ‘ overpopulation’. The concept of ‘underpopulation’, meanwhile, has been much less discussed, but in this article I argue that it, too, needs to be queried in much the same way that critics have examined claims of overpopulation. I make this case first at a generic level, describing some of the main situations in which notions of underpopulation are popularly invoked, before substantiating it in much greater detail in one specific context: that of the television economy in New Zealand, a country, it is frequently said, with ‘too few people’ to support a publicly funded broadcaster. I show that in this particular instance the underpopulation thesis is backed by flawed arguments, but that none the less it is widely accepted and seldom countered, hence serving to protect its protagonists from disclosing in public debate the real reasons for the television policies they pursue and which the idea of underpopulation actively allows.