ROMANCE,PRACTICE AND SUBSTANTIVENESS: WHAT DO LANDSCAPES DO?

Although Torsten Hägerstrand is not known primarily as a landscape geographer, he made significant contributions to the understanding of landscape in Swedish geography. This paper argues that Hägerstrand examined the importance of representation for the understanding of landscape as place and territory, which is a key ingredient in current engagements with landscape within (Nordic) geography and the broader European political context. The current debate on landscape, however, reaches beyond Hägerstrand's rather “scientistic” approach and brings out a stronger sense of the cultural, social and political powers conveyed by landscape and representation. We show that this is made explicit in recent scholarly work on the so‐called substantive landscape. The paper also provides an introduction to the essays of this theme issue, which reflects a selection of the landscape research presented at the Inaugural Meeting of Nordic Geographers at Lund, Sweden, in May 2005.     

Feminist geographies in Norway from the turn of the millennium

Abstract

Based on an overview of feminist and gender research over two decades, this article reflects on feminist geographies in Norway within a wider political and social context. We identify eight broad, partly overlapping themes of feminist geography: rurality; development policies and practices; entrepreneurship and economic change; migration and mobility; children and youth; sexuality and health; landscape and place; and emotions and autobiography. We find that much of the research has been collaborative, interdisciplinary, multicultural, and transnational. Feminist geographies in Norway are characterized by increasing emphasis on multiple realities and situatedness, and focus on rights and power relations among men and women in all spheres of society, including academia. Yet the gender dimension has tended to focus on geographies of women, with few studies of masculinity. Inspired in part through feminist critiques of research practices in social sciences, a recent development has been autobiographical approaches examining the significance of personal lives and emotions for the research process. We conclude that feminist geographies in Norway are diverse, empirically and contextually informed, and have become embedded within several fields of human geography.