Law and the historical geography of the Galilee: Israel's litigatory advantages during the special operation of land settlement

This article contributes to a re-evaluation of the role of law in historical geography. It focuses on Israeli officials' application of the complex legal process of ‘settlement of title’ to land in the all-Arab central Galilee during the 1950s and 1960s, which was aimed at transforming Jewish–Arab socio-spatial power relations in the region. Expanding Israeli conceptions of state land and the government's focus on contesting land claims of Arab citizens transformed the process into an overwhelmingly litigatory one, triggering thousands of legal disputes between state agencies and Galilee Arabs. Drawing on Galanter's work on repeat player advantage and Kritzer's work on government litigants, this article characterizes the state as a ‘government compound repeat player’, enjoying advantages that not only won cases in the Haifa District Court but that also had direct impact on the subsequent geographical transformation of the region. On a more general level, this article argues that law has played a greater role in shaping historical geographies than the literature might suggest and encourages additional work on the subject.     

从地理文献看明代地理学的发展趋向

以表现方式和取材方法为主,结合现代学者对古代地理文献类型的划分以及明代的具体实情,可以将明代的地理文献划分为传统地志类、广义游记类、西传地理文献类和舆图类。它们在明代均得到了较快的发展。虽然都是地理文献,但它们之间又存在着诸多差异。通过对这些文献的分析研究,我们可以窥见明代地理学的发展趋向。     

Forum: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies

This forum discusses linkages between cultural geography and allied ‘cultural’ disciplines. A symposium on this topic – held at the 2005 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in Armidale – was triggered by the targeted inclusion of geography in a cross‐disciplinary network funded by the Australian Research Council. Although non‐geographers in the network have articulated strong interest in and an enthusiasm for geography, their knowledge of, and everyday participation in its disciplinary travails have been limited. Given this, the papers in the forum review geography's long and dynamic consideration of the relations between place and culture, and raise a set of key issues for geographers to consider: how we might interact with other disciplinary debates about the ‘cultural’, retain distinctiveness as the home of intellectual inquiry around issues of space and place, and leverage opportunities to forge more permanent connections to geographers working not in our traditional institutional settings, but in a range of research centres, schools and disciplinary homes.     

China and Geography in the 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is to help the subdiscipline at large develop a more international and inclusive approach, it must be driven by questions of significance in China, yield constructive answers of relevance to China, and at the same time derive theoretical ideas that diversify the collective geographical imagination.     

Unruly topographies: unemployment, citizenship and land settlement in inter-war Wales

Between 1934 and 1939, over 5000 people, mainly ex-miners and their families, were settled in government-owned land settlements in England and Wales. This policy emerged as a response to mass unemployment, and complemented other schemes for the unemployed developed by the inter-war National Government. This paper will consider the geographical conditions that were imagined, realized and contested in these settlements. Acknowledging the hybrid and liminal nature of these spaces, the paper mobilizes new work in cultural and historical geography and draws out the heterotopic potential of the settlement programme.     

GIS Methods in Time-Geographic Research: Geocomputation and Geovisualization of Human Activity Patterns

Over the past 40 years or so, human activities and movements in space‐time have attracted considerable research interest in geography. One of the earliest analytical perspectives for the analysis of human activity patterns and movements in space‐time is time geography. Despite the usefulness of time geography in many areas of geographical research, there are very few studies that actually implemented its constructs as analytical methods up to the mid‐1990s. With increasing availability of geo‐referenced individual‐level data and improvement in the geo‐computational capabilities of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), it is now more feasible than ever before to operationalize and implement time‐geographic constructs. This paper discusses recent applications of GIS‐based geo‐computation and three‐dimensional (3‐D) geo‐visualization methods in time‐geographic research. The usefulness of these methods is illustrated through examples drawn from the author's recent studies. The paper attempts to show that GIS provides an effective environment for implementing time‐geographic constructs and for the future development of operational methods in time‐geographic research.     

A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.     

《人文地理》100期刊用文章统计分析

截至2008年4月,《人文地理》出版满100期,在出版100期之际对该刊22年来刊发的2102篇论文、论文第一作者和引文进行了统计分析,以揭示载文量的时空分布特点,展示该刊作者群的基本特点,确定该刊活跃作者群的数量和比例,归纳出人文地理科学工作者利用文献的基本特点和规律,掌握我国人文地理研究队伍的变化及发展状况,并对《人文地理》期刊的发展提供有益的参考。     

Ethnogeography: towards liberatory geography education

In the context of education in England, an argument is put forward that Geography, as it is conceptualised in the National Curriculum, does not connect to either primary school pupils or their teachers. Reasons for this are explored and a proposal is made for a new paradigm for primary geography: ethnogeography. This proposal parallels work on ethnomathematics, which provides a political agenda to the study of maths and itself draws from Paulo Freire's politicization and consciousness raising through adult literacy. This pattern is applied to learning in geographical education. Drawing on the findings of a recent research project, a case is argued for ethnogeography and the implications for primary Initial Teacher Education courses, learners and the curriculum in primary schools and are considered.