Counterfactual geographies: worlds that might have been

This paper argues for a renewed consideration of counterfactuals within geography. Drawing upon Doreen Massey's emphasis on notions of ‘possibility’, ‘chance’, ‘undecidability’ and ‘happenstance’, we argue for an engagement with approaches in the humanities that have addressed such issues directly. We review previous uses of counterfactual method in historical geography, particularly as related to cliometrics and the ‘new economic history’ of the 1960s, but argue that a recent upsurge of interest in other disciplines indicates alternative ways that ‘what-if’ experiments might work in the sub-discipline. Recent counterfactual work outside of geography has had a notably spatial cast, often thinking through the nature of alternative worlds, or using counterfactual strategies that are explicitly concerned with space as well as temporal causality. We set out possible agendas for counterfactual work in historical geography. These include: consideration of the historical geographies within existing counterfactual writings and analyses; suggestions for distinctive ways that historical geographers might think and write counterfactually, including experiments in geographies of happenstance, and the exploration of more-than-human possibilities; analyses of the geography of and in counterfactual writing; and study of the political, ethical and emotional demands that counterfactuals make. This discussion and framework provides an extended introduction to this special feature on counterfactual geographies.     

“全球的地方感”理论述评与广州案例解读

关于地方文化意义的研究在西方人文地理学研究中占据着重要的地位.全球化背景下,地方的意义正在被全球性力量中和与消解.在这种断裂之下,原有的对于“地方性”的想象反而在认同形成的过程中被不断加强.本土社会力图在一个“时空压缩”的“超空间”时代中,保存其自身基于地方意义的身份认同.哈维认为,一切基于地方意义形成的认同都是反动与禁锢的.他提出,应从资本运作的角度出发,理解地方差异的形成,从而理解地方建构中的社会关系与权力关系的建构.但马西则在批判哈维理论的基础上提出了全球(进步)的地方感理论,指出应从多样的社会建构出发,理解地方性的形成过程.马西认为,地方的本质特点包括:开放以及与外界密切的社会联系;地方本身是一个过程,认同在不断的再建构过程中;地方内部具有其认同的多样性;进步的地方感并不否认地方性的存在等.基于马西的进步地方感理论,研究通过对广州关于移民以及粤语传承问题讨论中出现的话语进行的文本分析,指出广州本地社会在上述讨论的过程中,其少部分话语已经呈现出进步地方感所批判的禁锢性,因此需要在重新认识地方的过程中加以修正.     

Linking cultural policy from Great Britain to Canada

The Canada Council marks its fiftieth anniversary in 2007. The third national arts council to be established after the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946, it was created on the recommendation of a Royal Commission chaired by Vincent Massey, a Canadian philanthropist and diplomat. While it differed from the ACGB in its early scope and organization, it was and is an arm’s‐length body. Using unpublished and published sources, I track Massey’s social contacts during his tenure as High Commissioner to London from 1935 to 1946, where he served on the war‐time boards of the National Gallery and the Tate. This work put him in social contact with Samuel Courtauld, J. M. Keynes, and Kenneth Clark, who were engaged in the governance of British national arts organizations. My findings illustrate the influence that friendships and social networks played in arts policy formulation in these early years of the arts council model.     

PUTTING MASSEY'S RELATIONAL SENSE OF PLACE TO PRACTICE: LABOUR AND THE CONSTITUTION OF JOLLY BEACH,ANTIGUA, WEST INDIES

Place is a central concept in geographical thought. Though places continue to play an important role as a scale and site of research, place is not widely used as a method of analysis. Doreen Massey's efforts to conceive of, first, a global and then a relational sense of place provide the foundation for such an analytic frame. However, she does not provide a research methodology. This study has two goals; the first is to provide a methodology for the application of a relational sense of place in field research. I develop that methodology through a review of Massey's epistemology of place. In accord with Massey's concerns with the imposition of more global perspectives, the proposed methodology prioritizes a weak theory perspective and balances deduction with induction. I then provide a case example of this methodology through research into labour relationships negotiated by people in a specific place, Jolly Beach in Antigua, West Indies. My second goal is to demonstrate that the particularistic findings produced through that research can contribute uniquely and critically to geographic knowledge and theory. The findings produced by this research bear importantly on a number of propositions in the current literature, including but not limited to what has been called new work, enclave economies, gendered performativity of labour, and tourist–worker dialectics in the Anglophone Caribbean. These specific findings are of interest, but are not limited to tourism studies.