消费地理学研究述评与展望

随着全球化与经济一体化的推进,中国社会已经从生产型社会进入消费型社会,生产与消费的关系也逐渐成为地理学绕不开的研究话题。消费活动以超出我们想象的方式将地方与我者、他者联系起来。消费实践如何与在地化的商品实现连接与互动,是作为人文地理学的子学科消费地理学需要回答的问题。消费地理学是通过消费与其他空间相联系的内在逻辑来解释地方中蕴含的复杂含义。本文回顾了消费地理学的源起与研究脉络,借助消费地理学关于消费空间性、主体性、社会性的分析框架回顾了西方消费地理学的研究概况,并梳理了我国消费地理学的学科基础与研究框架,最后提出了从地理学视角解读消费研究热点话题的新思路与研究范式。     

Inside and outside the school lunchbox: themes and reflections

We examine here the discourses surrounding the lunchbox taken to school by children: aspects both of the contents and of how children consume and understand these.1 The observations presented here form part of the preliminary stages of a broader project examining ‘Men, Children and Food’. The project itself is part of a large research programme – ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ – funded by the Leverhulme Trust (award number F/00118/AQ) from 2006 to 2008, and situated at the University of Sheffield, working in collaboration with colleagues at Royal Holloway University of London. Our aims, in ‘Men, Children and Food’, are to explore the experiences of fathers (and other male figures in the household) and of children, in relation to food practices, including ways in which the two interconnect. View all notes Examples within and beyond the UK suggest that the lunchbox is a container for various aspects of the private and public. What traces can be found inside of wider social relations, including processes of care and surveillance? We argue that the lunchbox consists of intersecting spatialities, within which children constitute a public face, and create identities, relationships and subjectivities; this perspective frames opportunities for priorities in future empirical research with children.     

Turn your trash into… Rubbish,art and politics. Richard Wentworth's geographical imagination

This paper analyses the photographs and installations of artist Richard Wentworth in order to examine his urban imagination and the cultural politics of rubbish that underlie it. In doing so this paper contributes more broadly to understandings of rubbish and material culture, and to geography's attention to artistic understandings and inhabitations of urban spaces. Central to this analysis are the geographies of Wentworth's work, its production, consumption and circulation. The paper attends to three nested sets of practices: the ‘everyday’ practices of people which draw Wentworth's eye, the potential of creative cultural practices for developing critiques of space and place, and the practices of the artist. As a result the paper pushes forward debates around the relationship between geography and art, reflecting on the analytical value of art practice to contemporary social-cultural geographies.     

Book reviews

Mobile phones have invited a number of dystopian understandings, particularly as far as young people are concerned. They have been variously argued to contribute to poor spelling and grammar, disturb attention to school work, facilitate text bullying, lead to brain cancers and promote the destruction of face-to-face relationships. Despite these concerns, text messaging is by far the most common form of mobile communication between young people in New Zealand. Drawing on actor-network theory and qualitative research conducted with New Zealand teenagers, we explore how teenagers, cell phones, socio-spatial relations and discourses exist within a hybrid and interdependent network which we have termed digital sociality. This network seems to facilitate rather than destroy proximal contact. The machine and the human, in a cyborgian sense, meld to develop new and complex workings of space and the social which suggests mobile technologies are not as damaging to young people as many have suggested and calls for preventative approaches to this technology might need therefore to be rethought.     

‘Unlocking the cage door’: the spatiality of counselling

This paper examines the spatiality of counselling, focusing on ideas about positions, boundaries and spaces emerging from practitioners' accounts. Counsellors describe counselling as a practice within which the relative positions of self and other are explored and negotiated. To that end, counsellors adopt a contradictory position in relation to expertise, claiming to be experts in not being experts. Counselling transgresses bureaucratic boundaries between different forms of care, and normative boundaries of secrecy. In their place, counselling works with spatio-temporal, confidentiality and ethical boundaries, which are simultaneously concrete and specific, fluid and illusory. These boundaries create spaces within which the interplay of reality and fantasy can be explored. These spaces can be understood in terms of processes of exteriorizing the inner worlds of clients and interiorizing external spaces including those made available by counsellors and counselling services. The spatiality of care associated with counselling strategically invokes binary distinctions, for example, between reality and fantasy, but also disrupts dualistic conceptualizations of space in favour of an understanding of space as simultaneously real, imagined, material and symbolic.     

Overcoming obstacles on the peri‐urban fringe: young people making new geographies

Understanding contemporary youth lifestyles is a challenge for urban planners and geographers. Young people's everyday needs are complex, and urban spaces in new outer city developments offer unique spaces for shaping their identities. Juxtaposed with affordances of digital technologies, the physical location of home exists in a fluid landscape. Overcoming obstacles, such as access to public transport, places to socialise, and meet their peers, is characteristic of the everyday young person's experience. Knowing how young people decide where to go for personal space, as well as who to ask for personal advice, was the aim of this study. The study was conducted with samples of young people growing up in the rapidly growing peri‐urban northern suburbs of the Australian city of Melbourne. A survey questionnaire was administered to a gender‐balanced sample aged 12–15 years (n = 523) with follow‐up interviews to better inform the results. Logistic regression and factorial analyses of variance reveal their favourite places to be ‘my’ bedroom, being with friends, the park, and the café. Although not the focus of this study, some gender differences were noted. In addition to innovative use of space, the results show the positive influences on their well‐being of trusted family and friends. Young people's geographies offer transdisciplinary insights that highlight their creative usage of these new urban spaces. They offer a new imaginary for geographical education and research.     

'GLOCAL' MOVEMENTS: PLACE STRUGGLES AND TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZING BY INFORMAL WORKERS

This paper investigates the scalar practices of collectively organized informal workers and the political implications of such practices. It illustrates how the studied group organizes across scales – hence, a 'glocal movement'– and stresses the importance of an analysis that integrates these multiple scales of collective organizing, as they may have a bearing on each other. In so doing, it contests a common tendency to analytically privilege one or other scale of resistance and agency. In particular, I argue that networking across scales may be of significance for local struggles and thus play a role in local politics. The transnational activities of the studied group assist it in challenging local power relations and dominant place projects that repress informal livelihood activities. This paper comprises a conceptual discussion of notions of scale, of conceptions of the spatialities and scales of resistance as well as of place, followed by an empirical illustration that refers to an association of informal vendors in Maputo, Mozambique, and its international connections. The analysis is based on interviews with vendors, leaders of the association and with the international partners of the association.