Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Pore‐scale multiphase flow experiments in bead packs of variable wettability

The aim of this experimental study is to investigate the impact of wetting characteristics on multiphase flow, sweep efficiency, and residual fluid distribution in unconsolidated porous media. A sequence of oil and water injections was performed on bead packs with uniform porosity and permeability, but different wettability characteristics. Uniform and mixed‐wet bead packs with varying degree of wettability were fabricated to analyze how the residual saturation profiles and the distribution of fluid phases at the pore scale respond to changes in wettability. X‐ray microtomography was used to visualize and analyze the fluid distribution in each bead pack at the end of oil and brine injection. It was found that sweep efficiency was high for the uniform, strongly wetting glass bead pack. For the intermediate‐wet plastic bead pack, we observed evidence of viscous fingering resulting in degenerating sweep efficiency after water injection. In media with mixed wetting surfaces, the spatial distribution of wettability influenced the topology of the saturation profiles and resulted in larger quantities of disconnected fluid blobs. Results also showed that the average blob size was independent of the average residual saturation. In addition, the difference in saturation conditions preceding each injection affected sweep efficiency. The residual saturation after the 1st displacement was higher than the residual saturation after the 2nd displacement.     

Displacement,memory and home(less) identities: Turkish Cypriot women’s narratives

Abstract

This study is an analysis of the narratives of Turkish Cypriot women in the north of Cyprus who were displaced during the ethnic conflict between the 1950s and 1974. We have conducted 21 interviews with Turkish Cypriot women who were living in different parts of Northern Cyprus. We used oral history, both as a method and as an epistemological stance to re-phrase the near past of Cyprus and the Cyprus issue from the perspective of gender/women’s studies. The study follows the traces of modernity, patriarchy, and nationalism in women’s narratives, about the place, home, belonging and homelessness. The narratives describe Turkish Cypriot women’s experiences of being a woman in conflict and displacement (‘göçmen olmak’ in daily talk in Turkish) making a home out of a house and undertaking daily routines for their families. The study also reveals that ethnic conflict and displacement have empowered women to a certain degree.     

Queer Global Displacement: Social Reproduction,Refugee Survival,and Organised Abandonment in Nairobi,Cape Town,and Paris

Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment—marginality, erasure, and invisibility—as they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This paper explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non-state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti-migrant sentiment. In so doing, this paper emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work-related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis-gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city.     

Urban makeovers,homeless encampments,and the aesthetics of displacement

ABSTRACT

This paper brings together geographic literature on homelessness and theories of aesthetics to analyse how city beautification projects in contemporary American cities promote the displacement of homelessness. Based on research conducted in Fresno, California, I argue that the seemingly innocuous realm of aesthetics often undergirds anti-homeless politics. In Fresno, officials sought to create a visual landscape that was conducive to middle-class consumption and leisure, such that the project of building a desirable city was deeply influenced by market pressures. In turn, homeless encampments were framed as unpleasant objects that must be removed to make way for economic opportunities. Efforts to reinforce this ‘live play work’ aesthetic resulted in a politics of displacement and criminalisation. Yet people who resided in encampments championed an alternative aesthetic practice grounded in reuse, survival and collective appropriation of urban space. Thus, the example of Fresno shows that aesthetic norms not only reinforce revanchist politics, but simultaneously present the possibility of resistance.     

The consequences of internal displacement on civil war violence: Evidence from Syria

How do flows of internally displaced persons (IDPs) affect wartime violence? We argue that government and rebel forces respond to IDP flows in different ways, which condition where and when they employ violence. State responses are driven by the need to identify insurgents and their civilian supporters, and depend on how much information they have about where IDPs are coming from and where they are seeking to resettle. Rebel responses are driven by their need to monitor and control civilian movements, which leads to more violence against civilians in transit areas heavily trafficked by IDPs. Drawing on novel subnational data from Syria, we employ social network analysis to examine migration flow characteristics beyond aggregate IDP inflows and outflows. We find that the greater the local clustering of IDP flows – i.e., the less complex and diverse displacement movements are – the more pro-government combatants are able to detect IDPs’ origins and destinations, and the higher the number of civilian killings. Transit locations, meanwhile, become epicenters of rebel violence against civilians. While scholars have found that more information about civilian behavior causes combatants to employ more selective violence, our results suggest that more information about displacement prompts more collective violence from governments. The findings also indicate that governments respond to IDP flows after movement, whereas rebels respond to IDP flows during movement. This underscores the importance of focusing on how armed groups respond to displacement flows in order to better understand the consequences of population movements in wartime.     

‘IT IS MY HOME. I WILL DIE HERE’: TOURISM DEVELOPMENT AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE IN LIJIANG,CHINA

Although “home” is an established topic in the literature, what home means for an in situ, non‐travelling population that nevertheless is confronted by the influx of great numbers of tourists and migrants is an important question that has not been widely researched. This article examines the construction and practice of home in a highly mobile world, in the case of Lijiang Ancient Town, a World Heritage site in Yunnan, China. Situating Lijiang in the context of China's emerging consumer society, this article has two objectives. First, I will sketch a conceptual framework within which to address the construction of home in relation to mobility, displacement and socioeconomic changes. The second objective is to examine the multiple ways in which Lijiang's town residents dwell in displacement. Even as Lijiang ancient town largely falls into the hands of migrant businesspersons, town residents employ spatial strategies to maintain a public–private boundary, reconcile themselves to living under the same roof with tourists, or forsake their homes for economic benefit. Hence, this article contributes to the geographies of everyday life by illustrating individuals' multiple forms of strategic rationalization in handling socio‐spatial transformation.     

DAMS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN MALAYSIA: DEVELOPMENT,DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT

Large dams have proliferated in Malaysia in recent decades. Constructed mainly to meet mounting domestic demand for water and energy, they have destroyed large tracts of species‐rich tropical rain forest and displaced many already poor and marginalized indigenous groups from their homes and ancestral lands without their consent. Evicted indigenes were promised a better life in resettlement villages, but for the most part this has not occurred. Invariably traumatized by resettlement and widely forced into cash‐based economies for which they were ill prepared, many resettled indigenes suffered from frayed social relationships, high rates of unemployment and enduring poverty, in large part because the authorities failed to internalize project costs. The consequences for indigenous groups of dam‐induced environmental change and development‐forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) are explored through a critical reading of the literature on four large dams: Sungai Selangor, Babagon, Batang Ai and Bakun. More large dams are under construction and many others have been proposed, resulting in threats to the future well‐being of many indigenous communities. Generally speaking, the experiences of Malaysia's dam‐affected indigenes mirror those of other indigenous minorities in the greater Southeast Asian region.     

The art of displacement – curating a preschool context in a public transport system

ABSTRACT

This article discusses ways of enabling the youngest children at preschool (1–3 years) to participate in creating space in the public transport system. One researcher, two preschool educators and six preschool toddlers travelled on foot, by bus and by underground train to the Brunkeberg tunnel, a pedestrian tunnel in the centre of Stockholm, Sweden. Drawing on artistic site-specific methods of displacement, this article details three propositions for how to ‘do’ preschool in the public transport system: locations, dimensions and positions. By placing the routines and rhythms of a preschool practice into the urban spaces of transport, the ‘miniature preschool’ comes to curate context. The article proposes methods for a preschool practice to curate context through activating mobile but particular locations within a specific place; creating a vocal mobile architecture; and enabling multiple and mobile positions within one specific situation.     

‘Now they’re coming after our schools’: interrogating urban intimacies of children and displacement

ABSTRACT

Education scholars grappling with policy issues related to community and identity issues may pay attention to the work of emotion. Rationalist, psychological frameworks that bound many educational researchers’ policy analyses are limited in scope: the policy process is seen as a linear cause-and-effect process. A feminist geographic attention to this research offers a more complex understanding of the experiences of policy. Using children’s displacement by gentrification as an example, this commentary will show how a feminist geographic understanding of place attachment offers a more complete understanding of the effects of gentrification. Specifically, using the concept of the ‘intimate city’, I show how the global process of gentrification is entangled with the intimate embodiment of emotions. And in order to effectively study education policy, we must be attuned to how children embody their emotions.