Neoliberalising Education: New Geographies of Private Tuition,Class Privilege,and Minority Ethnic Advancement

Geographic research on neoliberalism has explored the restructuring of educational landscapes wrought through marketisation of preschool, school and higher-education provision and considered the responsibilisation of parents and children for educational outcomes. This study develops understanding of the contingent emergence of neoliberal educational reform, and its progressive and regressive impacts, through an examination of the burgeoning private tuition market in England and Wales. The paper outlines the contours of the previously hidden supplementary education industry, demonstrating that it reinforces regional and classed inequalities, while opening possibilities for ethnic minority advancement. Conceptually, the paper advances debate about socio-spatial specificity in neoliberal change, showing that the intersection of policy, free markets and consumer behaviour reshapes the educational landscape in ways that extend beyond state intention and control. Through these processes, contingent market forms are produced that offer social mobility for some, but ensure the social reproduction of enduring regimes of power.     

Female Personifications and Masculine Forms: Gender,Armour and Allegory in the Habsburg–Valois Conflicts of Sixteenth-Century Europe

This article examines the visual and material culture of sixteenth-century elite ceremonial armours and the paradoxes inherent in using images of women to decorate them between 1525 and 1550. It argues that foreign invading forces and their allies exploited or inverted traditional gender binaries associated with the classical and humanist iconography of the Italian Renaissance, particularly its female allegorical forms, to visually signify power relationships between combatants during the Italian Wars. Rather than simply embodying masculinity, elaborate ceremonial armours with images of women are revealing of both ideals of masculinity and femininity during times of war. These portrayals were part of wider conversations about gender and power, about the strength and weaknesses of women, and, ultimately, women's inferior status to men, which were utilised in allegorical forms to make claims to authority on these elite forms of male dress.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Exchange on the quantitative measurement of ethnic and national identity*

In recent decades, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of quantitative techniques in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, without, however, a sufficient amount of reflection on how these techniques have contributed to our understanding of ethnic and national identities. As such, in this exchange three sets of authors answer questions about the degree to which it is possible to use quantitative data to measure ethnic and national identities, which types of methods are most suitable in measuring these identities and what the major research findings of this quantitative research are that were not possible using qualitative approaches.     

Investigating self-reported food allergy prevalence in Waterloo Region,Canada

While food allergy prevalence has been studied at the national level, we know little of food allergy prevalence or perceptions of prevalence/management at the local level. This paper uses Waterloo Region as a case study to 1) document self-reported individual and household food allergy and sensitivity prevalence at the local level; 2) investigate perceptions of food allergy prevalence; and 3) explore perceived confidence in anaphylaxis management. Survey data were collected from January to March 2019. Respondents (n = 500) self-reported individual and household food allergy and sensitivity, estimated the percentage of Canadians with food allergy, and were queried about their knowledge of food allergy management. Prevalence estimates were weighted to the structure of the 2016 Canadian Census, and univariate and bivariate analysis were conducted. Prevalence of self-reported food allergy was 12.1% (95%CI, 8.8%-15.3%), and prevalence of self-reported food sensitivity was 26.3% (95%CI, 21.9%-30.7%). When asked to estimate the percentage of Canadians with food allergy, the mean perceived percentage was 35.1% (SD = 22.96). Self-reported prevalence of food allergy appears higher in Waterloo Region, and the estimated percentage of Canadians with food allergy is inflated. Understanding prevalence and perceptions at the local level is important for targeted allocation of public health resources to ensure safe spaces for individuals with food allergy.     

Book Reviews

Ken Booth and Steve Smith (eds), International Relations Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. xii + 367pp. $39.95 (paper).

Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xi + 265pp. $47.50 (paper).

Stephanie Lawson (ed.), The New Agenda for Global Security: Cooperating for Peace and Beyond. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin/Department of International Relations, RSPAS, Australian National University, 1995. xi + 217pp. $24.95.

Anne O. Krueger, Economic Policies at Cross‐Purposes: The United States and Developing Countries. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993. xii + 253pp. $US36.95 (cloth).

Robert L. Paarlberg, Leadership Abroad Begins at Home: U.S. Foreign Economic Policy After the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995. xxv + 115pp. $US28.95 (cloth); $US10.95 (paper).

Tony Brenton, The Greening of Machiavelli: The Evolution of International Environmental Politics. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs/Earthscan, 1994. xvii + 282pp. $UK14.95 (paper).

John Charmley, Churchill's Grand Alliance: The Anglo‐American Special Relationship, 1940–1957. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995. xv + 427pp. $55.00 (cloth).

Victor A. Kremenyuk, Conflicts In and Around Russia. Nation‐Building in Difficult Times. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. xiv + 159pp. $US49.95 (cloth).

Alexander Johnston, Sipho Shezi and Gavin Bradshaw (eds), Constitution‐making in the New South Africa. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1993. viii + 272pp. $UK 39.50.

Ramesh Thakur, The Politics and Economics of India's Foreign Policy. London: Hurst and Company; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. xi + 306pp. No price given.

Francis Seow, To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew's Prison (with a foreword by C.V. Devan Nair). Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 42, New Haven: Yale Centre for International and Area Studies, 1994. xxxiii + 293pp. $50.00 (paper).

Brij Lal, Robert Kiste and Kerry Howe (eds), The Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the 20th Century. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. xviii + 475pp. $34.95 (paper).

LaMond Tullis, Unintended Consequences—Illegal Drugs and Drug Policies in Nine Countries. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995. ix + 229pp. $US42.00 (cloth).

The United Nations and Cambodia 1991–1995, The United Nations Blue Books Series, Vol. II. New York: Department of Public Information, United Nations, 1995. 352pp. $US29.95 (paper).

‘Atu Emberson‐Bain (ed.), Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women. Suva, Fiji: Marama Publications, 1994. 290pp. No price given.

Payam Akhavan and Robert Howse (eds), Yugoslavia, the Former and Future: Reflections by Scholars front the Region. Washington, DC and Geneva: The Brookings Institution and The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995. xxviii + 188pp. $US32.95 (cloth) $US 12.95 (paper).

David Camroux, ‘Looking East’ . . . and Inwards: Internal Factors in Malaysian Foreign Relations during the Mahathir Era 1981–1994. Australia‐Asia Papers No. 72. Griffith University: Centre for the Study of Australia‐Asia Relations, 1994. iii + 62pp. $10.00.     

Feminist digital geographies

At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the resounding whiteness and heteronormativity of these theoretical origins. In the second half of the article, we trace new horizons of contemporary digital geographies scholarship that engage queer and critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, and black and queer code studies. These theoretical moves give voice to longstanding silences and are indispensable to a political and ethical digital geographic scholarship and praxis, as well as to re-making our technologies and ourselves as digital subjects.