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Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Impact factor: 4.122 5-Year impact factor: 4.275 Print ISSN: 0020-2754 Online ISSN: 1475-5661 Publisher: Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing)

Subject: Geography

Most recent papers:

  • ‘My happiest time’ or ‘my saddest time’? The spatial and generational construction of marriage among youth in rural Malawi and Lesotho.
    Nicola Ansell, Flora Hajdu, Lorraine Blerk, Elsbeth Robson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 19, 2017
    Marriage among African teenagers is currently a central focus of campaigns by UN agencies and international NGOs. Yet marriage has received only limited attention from geographers and has largely escaped the attention of geographers of youth. In this paper we explore the relational geographies of age that underlie young people's motivations for, and experiences of, marriage in two rural African settings with differing marriage practices: matrilocal southern Malawi and patrilocal Lesotho. We draw on participatory research activities and life history interviews conducted with 80 people aged between 10 and 24 years old. While the young people's attitudes and experiences were varied and complex, starkly different accounts emerged from the two settings. In particular, young women in Lesotho offered very negative assessments of marriage, while those in Malawi were very much more positive. Through these examples, we highlight how young people's marriage choices and experiences are relationally produced. Decisions about whether, when and whom to marry reflect socially entrenched expectations concerning generational allocations of resources, labour and responsibilities, which intersect with contemporary social and economic processes including poverty, unemployment, land scarcity and AIDS. Experiences of marriage, too, are produced through practices that are spatially structured and contextually situated in relation to socio‐economic conditions. Thus marriage, as a ‘vital conjuncture’ in young people's lives, plays a key role in the relational construction of individual lifecourses and in (re)constructing relationships of age, gender and, especially, generation.
    October 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12211   open full text
  • Production of space, intercultural encounters and politics: dynamics of consummate space and spatial intensity among the Israeli Bedouin.
    Avinoam Meir, Yuval Karplus.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 16, 2017
    The ‘spatial turn’, represented primarily by the Lefebvrean theory of production of space, fails to internalise insights from the ‘cultural turn’ which delves into high cultural resolutions of minority ethnic or religious sub‐groups within Western culture. These insights suggest that space may be characterised by spatial pluralism that originates in ontological pluralism of place and space. This ontological pluralism originates in the contemporary reality of cultural pluralism within the same space. By deconstructing the classical Lefebvrean theory of production of space as a super concept into finer scales, we facilitate internalisation of these cultural insights through a series of new sub‐concepts of consummate space, spatial imbrication and spatial intensity. These successive concepts are capable of creating a process of production of space with possible political consequences at group level. That is, violation of a space perceived and practised as consummate may lead to political action by group members. This conceptual framework, highlighting at high resolution the agency of space in culture, is demonstrated through a detailed analysis of a unique cultural group, the indigenous Bedouin of the Negev desert in Israel, through three phases of their spatial history over a period of two centuries – semi‐nomadic pastoralism, sedentary farming and urban wage labour. This case may serve to illustrate the value of this theoretical approach for future analysis of other unique cultural groups and a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of production of space.
    October 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12210   open full text
  • Creative geographies and living on from breast cancer: the enlivening potential of autobiographical bricolage for an aesthetics of precarity.
    Clare Madge.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 16, 2017
    This paper is located at the intersection of scholarship on creative geographies and geographies of dying, death and ‘living on’ (survival). It explores the intimate experience of breast cancer through the practice of creative bricolage which uses autobiographical poetry and photographs. Employing a roving writing strategy that allows for multiple entry points and connectivities surrounding the complex meshworks of precarious cancer survival, the paper traverses health, emotional, environmental and political concerns. In so doing, the paper makes three key contributions: first, in considering how a creative sensibility might bring more visceral, emotionally sensitive and politically embedded accounts of death, dying and survival into the realm of geographical visibility; second, in exploring some of the potentials and limitations of using do‐it‐yourself bricolage as a creative practice; and third, in revealing how a geographical mindset, with its attention to multiple intersecting sites and its ability to promulgate holistic relational understanding, can widen the aesthetic terrain of breast cancer beyond dominant tropes of consumerist sentimentality or heroic femininity towards an aesthetics of precarity.
    October 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12215   open full text
  • Talking with the dead: spirit mediumship, affect and embodiment in Stoke‐on‐Trent.
    Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian, Steve Pile.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 16, 2017
    While Spiritualism has attracted much attention in other disciplines, geographers have largely ignored it. However, we agree with Holloway (2006 Enchanted spaces: the séance, affect, and geographies of religion Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 182–7) that Spiritualism presents conceptual challenges that make it worthy of more attention. As Holloway suggests, the themes of affect, embodiment and materiality are particularly helpful in exploring religious experiences. The focus of this paper is on the practice and experience of spirit mediumship in a Spiritualist setting. In mediumship, a specific challenge is to materialise and embody spirit such that spirit communication feels personal and rings true. For us, this suggests that mediumship is routinely successful both because it can produce accurate messages, which are judged empirically, and also because it produces what we call affectual truths, which are judged tacitly on whether they feel right or not. To account for this, we introduce the idea of intermediumship to describe interactions in the space in‐between the medium and the congregation. It is through this space in‐between that the affects associated with mediumship emerge, are experienced and are verified. Rather than seeing spirit communication as somehow enchanted or extraordinary, we assert that talking with the dead is predicated on the ordinariness of the experience: that is, that talking with the dead is emblematic of affect and embodiment in everyday life.
    October 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12207   open full text
  • Legal geographies of labour and postdemocracy: reinforcing non‐standard work in South Korea.
    Jamie Doucette, Susan Kang.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 16, 2017
    This paper engages the literature on the legal geographies of labour and postdemocracy in order to examine the role of law in limiting the labour rights of non‐standard workers. To do so, it analyses the effects of civil suits for obstruction of business against workers and trade union activists in South Korea. First embraced by liberal administrations as an alternative to authoritarian forms of labour control, civil suits for obstruction of business have become a common feature of labour struggles since 2002 and have led to millions of dollars in damage claims and provisional seizure of assets being applied against workers for engaging in collective action. We argue that by treating many ordinary trade union practices as ‘threats of force’ that obstruct business and are thus liable for compensation, the law has been an essential component in the creation of a postdemocratic mode of labour control: one in which many fundamental labour rights are officially recognised, unlike under authoritarian regimes, but undermined in practice by narrowly limiting workers’ ability to pursue lawful collective action.
    October 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12216   open full text
  • Geography and neuroscience: critical engagements with geography's ‘neural turn’.
    Jessica Pykett.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 06, 2017
    Geographers are increasingly interested in understanding the significance of developments in neuroscience, psychology and the behavioural sciences. Indeed, consideration of these disciplines has arguably shaped the trajectories of human geography since at least the 1960s, but its ‘neural turn’ has only recently been acknowledged. This paper provides an original analysis of the intersections of research on neuroscience and geography. With reference to qualitative interviews with cognitive scientists and neuroscientists based in the UK, it identifies how geographical concepts have been approached within contemporary neuroscience while also identifying the broad trajectories of geographers’ engagements with neuroscience. The discussion demonstrates the political implications of these disciplinary trends for a geographical account of brain culture and brain‐based explanations in policy and practice. Specifically it proposes the development of a ‘critical neuro‐geography’ capable of providing an overarching analysis of these phenomena. The paper's novel synthesis of hitherto disconnected engagements between geography, cognitive science and neuroscience establishes the rationale for a more sustained and critical engagement between neuroscience and geography sensitive to issues of situated subjectivity, power, inequality and difference.
    October 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12213   open full text
  • Situating organisational learning and public participation: stories, spaces and connections.
    Helen Pallett.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 26, 2017
    This paper gives one of the first in‐depth ethnographic accounts of organisational learning in a public participation organisation, the UK Government‐funded Sciencewise programme. It develops the concept of ‘organisational spaces’, highlighting the often diverse spaces found within organisational networks, and positing a co‐productionist relationship between these different spaces and the kinds of learning processes that occur. The approach taken affirms the significant and active role of space in organisational learning processes, in a science policy context, as well as demonstrating the importance of connections between different organisational spaces in enabling more transformative learning processes. Two organisational spaces are described based on in‐depth ethnographic and qualitative research in and around the Sciencewise programme 2013–2014. It is argued that informal, temporary and experimental organisational spaces have the potential to co‐produce more transformative instances of learning, making an understanding of their connectedness to more formal and routinised organisational spaces vital for future research.
    September 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12214   open full text
  • The floating churches of Volgograd: river topologies and warped spatialities of faith.
    Iulian Barba Lata, Claudio Minca.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 25, 2017
    This paper explores creative reuse as an alternative modality to upcycle the materiality and documentary capacities of things, beyond the linear entrapments of historical or functional redundancy. Drawing on an amphibious ethnography of Volgograd's riverscapes, we analyse the floating churches inaugurated after the collapse of the Soviet Union to support the revival of faith practices. Acting as mobile centres of religious activity, they morph various temporalities, functions and places into multidimensional operative domains that range from the embodied practices of sailing and engaging in religious rituals to the making of sacred space at a regional level. We conclude by suggesting that their operations and impact rely on topologies of fixed points and shifting spatialities, which provide a salient vehicle for broader geographical interrogations of memory, creativity and mobility.
    September 25, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12208   open full text
  • Unsettling geographies of volunteering and development.
    Nina Laurie, Matt Baillie Smith.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 31, 2017
    This article critically examines the geography of volunteering in relation to international development. We identify the investments involved in sustaining the North–South imaginaries that have come to dominate scholarship in this field and explore new ways of unsettling this geography. We draw together empirical material from five different research projects, conducted with distinct thematic and geographical foci over a six‐year timeframe. We do so in order to show how existing geographies of volunteering and development have produced fixed understandings of agency and experiences in diverse contexts, meanwhile side‐lining the temporalities associated with such fixings. We highlight how the continued privileging of northern mobilities, temporalities and biographies has segregated particular settings and types of volunteering and obscured other, often shared and sometimes co‐produced development processes, relationships and spaces. In developing a new approach, we first emphasise the importance of looking at the ‘hidden geometries’ that shape the individual, institutional and organisational articulations that are central to the relationship between volunteering and development. Second, we introduce the idea of a flattened topography to level the emphasis on difference in the geographies associated with this relationship. We aim to make visible new volunteers and development actors as well as reveal different rhythms and routines of volunteering, and different identities, biographies and forms of career and life‐making connected with volunteering and development.
    August 31, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12205   open full text
  • After neoliberalisation? Monetary indiscipline, crisis and the state.
    Jeremy Green, Scott Lavery.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 29, 2017
    Across the advanced capitalist states, the post‐crisis conjuncture has been characterised by both marked continuity and profound change. While regressive distributional trends in place before the 2008 crisis have intensified, a number of highly unorthodox policy interventions have also emerged. In particular, a new regime of ‘loose’ monetary policy has crystallised, exemplified by record low interest rates and sustained programmes of quantitative easing. Existing approaches within economic geography are, we contend, ill‐equipped to deal with these transformations. Engaging with the ‘variegated neoliberalisation approach’ – associated with Jamie Peck and his collaborators – the article argues that existing conceptualisations of neoliberalisation understate the key significance that central state institutions play in securing advanced capitalist development. They therefore miss the key role that monetary indiscipline has played in sustaining capitalist development since 2008. This argument is substantiated empirically through a case study of state intervention in the UK housing market in the post‐crisis conjuncture. Focusing on the Help to Buy Scheme and the buy‐to‐let market, the article argues that the UK's loose monetary policy regime has produced novel patterns of spatial divergence across the UK regions while simultaneously consolidating the UK's dysfunctional financialised model of capitalism.
    August 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12204   open full text
  • Encountering energy precarity: geographies of fuel poverty among young adults in the UK.
    Saska Petrova.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 21, 2017
    This paper develops the notion of ‘energy precarity’ in order to uncover the governance practices and material conditions that drive and reproduce the inability of households to secure socially‐ and materially‐necessitated levels of energy services in the home. The overarching aim is to foreground a geographical approach towards the study of domestic energy deprivation, by emphasizing the complex socio‐spatial and material embeddedness of fuel poverty. The paper operationalizes these ideas via a field‐based study of a group that has received limited attention in research and policy on fuel poverty: young adults living in privately rented accommodation. In evoking the experiences of such individuals, I employ energy precarity as a means of unpacking the spaces where energy deprivation is produced, experienced and contested. Among other findings, I highlight that people's fluid lifestyles and specific end‐use energy demand patterns mean that energy deprivation metaphorically and physically overflows the limits of home, creating multiple performativities of precarity that have received very little attention to date.
    August 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12196   open full text
  • Fluid geographies: marine territorialisation and the scaling up of local aquatic epistemologies on the Pacific coast of Colombia.
    Paula Satizábal, Simon P J Batterbury.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 21, 2017
    The Pacific region of Colombia, like many sparsely populated places in developing countries, has been imagined as empty in social terms, and yet full in terms of natural resources and biodiversity. These imaginaries have enabled the creation of frontiers of land and sea control, where the state as well as private and illegal actors have historically dispossessed Afro‐descendant and indigenous peoples. This paper contributes to the understanding of territorialisation in the oceans, where political and legal framings of the sea as an open‐access public good have neglected the existence of marine social processes. It shows how Afro‐descendant communities and non‐state actors are required to use the language of resources, rather than socio‐cultural attachment, to negotiate state marine territorialisation processes. Drawing on a case study on the Pacific coast of Colombia, we demonstrate that Afro‐descendant communities hold local aquatic epistemologies, in which knowledge and the production of space are entangled in fluid and volumetric spatio‐temporal dynamics. However, despite the social importance of aquatic environments, they were excluded from Afro‐descendants’ collective territorial rights in the 1990s. Driven by their local aquatic epistemologies, coastal communities are reclaiming authority over the seascape through the creation of a marine protected area. We argue that they have transformed relations of authority at sea to ensure local access and control, using state institutional instruments to subvert and challenge the legal framing of the sea as an open access public good. As such, this marine protected area represents a place of resistance that ironically subjects coastal communities to disciplinary technologies of conservation.
    August 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12199   open full text
  • Assembling geographies of diplomacy under neoliberalism.
    Alun Jones, Julian Clark.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 20, 2017
    There is an enormous gap in our understanding of the state's role in the construction of international markets. Specifically, diplomacy's position in the contemporary entanglement of state and markets has been overlooked. Increasingly, diplomacy's on‐going adaptation to support neoliberalism has led to diplomats operating in a ‘twilight world’ between diplomacy and business. Using assemblage thinking, we investigate the codings, capacities and tendencies emerging in the social spaces of diplomatic possibility in this ‘twilight world’. Drawing on comprehensive empirical materials on the UK–India diplomatic relationship, we show how the material and expressive components of the UK Foreign Office assemblage are being deployed to champion state goals in global markets. We illustrate the ways in which diplomacy struggles in the name of the state's international competitiveness. In particular, we argue that these social spaces of possibility are structured by both diplomatic and business calculations that have the capacity to create new and unpredictable courses that render both an uncertainty and fuzziness to the agential interactions between assemblages.
    August 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12197   open full text
  • Rethinking material cultures of sustainability: commodity consumption, cultural biographies and following the thing.
    David M Evans.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 17, 2017
    This paper advances geographical perspectives on household sustainability by extending the range of insights from consumption scholarship that are brought to bear on the issue. Research that links consumption to the dynamics of variously sustainable practices currently dominate, resulting in a particular and partial reading of material culture. I suggest that geographical approaches to the social life of things may yield new insights into materiality and household sustainability. Specifically, I argue that ‘following the thing’ – which is typically focused on commodity chains – could usefully be extended into people's homes. This is not introduced as a way to acknowledge the connections between points in a network, rather, it is positioned as a set of theoretical and methodological resources that can be utilised to explore the movement and placing of things as they move through a critical juncture – in this case the household. To illustrate, I present material drawn from two empirical studies of households in the UK. The first is an ethnographically‐informed study of how food becomes waste; the second is a quantitative survey of laundry habits. Attention is paid to the ways in which the ongoing categorisation and valuation of things shape their trajectories and move them in directions that give rise to (adverse) environmental impacts. To conclude I sketch out an agenda for future studies, consider how a focus on households can yield more comprehensive biographies of things, and address the implications of this analysis both for consumption scholarship and for engagement with sustainability research and policy beyond human geography.
    August 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12206   open full text
  • Place‐framing against automobility in Montreal.
    Sophie L Van Neste, Deborah G Martin.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 13, 2017
    In this paper, we examine the dynamic processes of place‐framing through struggles against automobility in Montreal, bringing place discourses in dialogue with mobilities scholarship. We explicitly consider the dynamics of place‐frames’ development and emergence from the myriad of different meanings of activists engaged in a mobilisation, in interaction with the hegemonic transportation discourse. We analyse the mobilisation for car traffic‐calming in Montreal through three dynamic moments of place‐framing: naming and blaming (voicing a certain experience of place), claiming solutions in space and practising the desired place. Each moment consists of a discursive struggle through which selective meanings are being given to place in relation to mobility. In Montreal, these moments were crucially associated with new network connections: (1) a coalition around the association of car traffic with vulnerability, (2) the targeting of local regulators for traffic‐calmed places when dismissed by auto‐oriented space regulators and (3) performing a community of practice for walking and cycling in neighbourhoods, with tensions between the utopian local way of life and regional flows. This study demonstrates the relational linkages of mobility and place. Place‐frames are not immutably linked to existing landscapes and experiences, but are shaped through nodal and network articulations that emphasise communities of practice in (imagined and desired) place(s) of everyday movement.
    August 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12198   open full text
  • Everyday proper politics: rereading the post‐political through mobilities of drug policy activism.
    Cristina Temenos.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 03, 2017
    This paper explores the connections between activism for drug policy reform and the post‐political conditioning of urban politics. The emergent literature on policy mobilities is brought into conversation with post‐political analyses on the constitution of the properly political, arguing that there has been much focus on moments of rupture in the seemingly post‐political condition while ignoring ongoing political resistances, what I call ‘everyday proper politics’. Resultant analyses of urban politics are therefore often incomplete. This paper moves to address the gap between rupture and resistance through a global examination of harm reduction; a policy, practice and philosophy that embodies contemporary (post‐) political contradictions. It is an evidence‐based public health policy often enacted through medicalised practices across state, public and private space, yet its history and philosophy are rooted in radical understandings of participatory democracy. Exploring activism for harm‐reduction policies and the ways they are made manifest in cities globally begins to unravel the paradox of radical care practice and liberalised notions of self‐care that harm reduction embodies. Harm reduction, as it is mobilised across cities with divergent histories, localities and political contexts, demonstrates that its post‐political framing does not foreclose a radical politics of public health but rather can enable it. This paper demonstrates that public health and post‐politics intersect at the important points of health, wellbeing and urban development. In a post‐political condition, public health agencies assume the role of technical experts under the auspices of advanced neoliberalisation. Yet when questions arise regarding the management of drug use, drug users’ right to health and resources that engage and facilitate these activities, it becomes apparent that there indeed remain properly political battles to fight, battles that attract extra‐local audiences and coalitions from both sides of the debate that to attempt to influence policy outcomes in places far away.
    July 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12192   open full text
  • Cattle in the Anthropocene: four propositions.
    Andrew McGregor, Donna Houston.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 26, 2017
    The ‘Anthropocene’, a proposed geological epoch in which humanity is positioned as the core driver of planetary change, is eliciting proposals oriented at reworking human–nature relations. The more common technoscientific responses call for more investment oriented at further controlling human and non‐human processes, whereas relational responses seek more convivial relations with non‐humans – recognising the diverse agencies present in more‐than‐human worlds. In this paper, we draw from the work of Bruno Latour to develop an approach oriented at identifying and assessing the composition and quality of propositions emerging in relation to the expanding planetary impacts of cattle industries. Four propositions are identified in the Australian context, variously promoting intensification, naturalisation, veganism and artificial beef and dairy production. The composition, agencies and resistances within each proposition are reviewed, as well as the overall quality of their articulation. We discuss each proposition by considering principles drawn from recent work on more‐than‐human geography and lively commodities – particularly the wild lives and world‐making liveliness of the human and non‐human actors involved. Our analysis shows that the most well‐funded and prominent proposition – based on an intensification of meat and dairy industries – reinforces existing human–nature dualisms and is oriented more at perpetuating existing political economies than providing an effective response to Anthropocene challenges. We argue that creative consumption‐oriented responses, which are able to think in the presence of human and non‐human others, are likely to provide more effective and lively ways of addressing planetary concerns.
    June 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12193   open full text
  • The affective right to the city.
    Cameron Duff.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 20, 2017
    This paper investigates the affective and performative aspects of the right to the city with a focus on the materialisation of this right, its corporeal coming into being. In elaborating the idea of an affective right to the city, I will refer to Judith Butler's performative theory of assembly, along with findings drawn from ethnographic research conducted among individuals experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia. My research suggests that the materialisation of the right to the city is embodied in the social, material and affective occupation of urban spaces. This work reveals how the body's inhabitation of place, and the affordances of the material environment, mediate the performative expression of the right to the city. It also calls for a shift from a juridical conception of the right to the city to an affective one, more accommodating of the social and material contexts in which this right is enacted. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this affective conception of rights for performative studies of homelessness in urban space.
    June 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12190   open full text
  • When places come first: suffering, archetypal space and the problematic production of global health.
    Clare Herrick.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 18, 2017
    The rise of global health as a field of study and site of intervention has animated significant critical social science engagements. Of these, medical anthropology has arguably emerged as the ascendant in the field with its growing corpus of writing and advocacy largely animated by the discipline's ‘suffering slot’. This paper thus applies a geographical critique to anthropology's moral, humanitarian impulse to give voice to suffering by exploring the spatial consequences of this mode of scholarship. It argues that the suffering slot inevitably leads global health researchers to certain archetypal spaces and that, in turn, these places: (i) are overwhelmingly biomedical; (ii) come to function as ‘truth spots’ in the production and circulation of global health knowledge and (iii) perpetuate a global health riddled with ‘ignorance spots’. Given this, the paper asks what happens if we look beyond suffering to consider the hidden geographies of global health that might then be revealed. It argues that in order to develop a richer topography of global health knowledge and critique, we must also consider those spaces where pleasure and suffering intersect in ways that challenge the humanitarian impulse and crisis‐led readings of health. These other archetypal spaces of global health – gyms, bars, supermarkets and more – are not flippant distractions from the grave reality of human suffering, but rather spaces that condition the genesis of suffering and where affliction is put aside in favour of pleasure. In arguing that we need to be far more attuned to the non‐medical spaces where global health is produced, experienced and challenged, the paper also articulates how geography might productively meet anthropology in critical studies of global health.
    June 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12186   open full text
  • Linked lives and constrained spatial mobility: the case of moves related to separation among families with children.
    Michael J Thomas, Clara H Mulder, Thomas J Cooke.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 15, 2017
    Following considerable social and demographic change over the past six decades, macro‐social theories have attempted to explain contemporary society through trends of weakening traditional institutions (e.g. state, church and family) and certainties (e.g. life‐long full‐time work and marriage) and growing self‐articulation, individualisation, destandardisation and uncertainty. At the same time, new theories and discourses on population movement have emerged, in which emphasis is placed on mobility as both an empowering personal choice and a dominant process of modernity. The contemporary ubiquity of separation, and the corresponding rise of single‐person and lone‐parent households, is often proposed as one of the clearest articulations of instability, individualisation and weakening of the family. However, through regression‐based modelling of geocoded British Household Panel Survey data, we use the compelling case of moves related to separation among families to demonstrate how: (1) links between related individuals can simultaneously trigger, shape and constrain (im)mobility; (2) linked lives can intersect in important ways with social, institutional and geographical structures; and (3) linked post‐separation (im)mobility outcomes can often contradict individually‐stated pre‐separation preferences. Controlling for a range of multilevel characteristics, we find significant gender distinctions, with fathers more likely to leave the family home than mothers, and mothers less likely to break with post‐separation familial proximity than fathers. Structural factors including housing‐market geographies and population density are found to further shape these (im)mobility patterns. Together, our empirical analysis suggests that family dissolution will rarely herald a period of heightened individualisation, self‐determination and unencumbered mobility. Indeed, a wider appreciation of the rise of non‐traditional households, their complex linked lives and associated constraints could contribute to more realistic explanations of modern (im)mobility patterns and processes.
    June 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12191   open full text
  • The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence.
    Stian Rice, James Tyner.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 15, 2017
    Over the last 20 years, urban political ecology has made substantial contributions to the study of urban ‘socionatures’, part of the field's aim of applying political ecology to urban space. At the same time, urban political ecology has been limited by a perspective that tends to confine urbanisation to urban spatial forms; a conflation of process and site. The city is seen to be made by and for urban metabolism, disconnected from both rural and global socionatures. This paper offers a small, empirical corrective, based on a case study of Cambodian re‐urbanisation under the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide began with the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge forces in April 1975. According to the standard narrative, the subsequent destruction of urban infrastructure and forced evacuation of residents is a historical case of ‘urbicide’ and reflects a broader interpretation of the Khmer Rouge as ideologically ‘anti‐urban’. Using documentary evidence, this paper reconstructs the functional role of Cambodia's network of cities under the Khmer Rouge. Contrary to the narrative, we find that cities were not destroyed. Rather, urban sociospatial practices, forms and rural–urban relations were reorganised to support the demands of rice production for foreign exchange and facilitate the administration of violence. This pragmatic reconstruction challenges claims of urbicide and contradicts the narrative of ‘dead cities’ and ‘ghost towns’. Most importantly, it challenges urban political ecology's city‐centrism: the processes that reanimated Cambodia's cities were the same ones that transformed rural space and motivated the evacuation of cities in the first place. Cambodian re‐urbanisation accompanied re‐ruralisation, a dialectic propelled by the transition to state capitalism. In this light, we encourage an urban political ecology that looks beyond the city's cadastral limits and engages those political ecologies within which the urban is situated.
    June 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12187   open full text
  • Parasites, ghosts and mutualists: a relational geography of microbes for global health.
    Jamie Lorimer.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 15, 2017
    Scientific research on the microbiome offers an ecological model of the human, comprised of myriad forms of microbial life. The composition and dynamics of this human microbiome are increasingly implicated in discussions of health. Attention has focused on missing microbes and their links to a range of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Pathological dysbiosis is understood to result from both the excessive presence and the absence of microbes. Microbial declines have been indexed to modern hygiene and healthcare practices and there is a growing interest in the therapeutic use of beneficial microbes. This reappraisal of the salutary potential of microbes challenges the negative associations prevalent in health geography and the field of global health. This paper develops relational and multispecies approaches to health geography to examine situations of microbial excess, absence and controlled reintroduction. The analysis focuses on human relations with hookworms. Hookworms are animal members of the microbiome. They co‐evolved with humans, live in us and are understood to manage the human microbiome to enable immunological tolerance. Both the excessive presence and the absence of hookworms can be pathological. They are currently the subjects of concurrent, but spatially discrete, programmes to deworm and reworm a variegated world. Focusing on this seeming spatial paradox, the analysis examines three types of human–hookworm relation: the parasite, the ghost and the mutualist. The conclusion reflects on the implications of this analysis for the human and nonhuman subjects of global health and the microbiopolitics of prevalent forms of antibiotic and probiotic healthcare.
    June 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12189   open full text
  • Uncertain futures and everyday hedging in a humanitarian city.
    Léonie S Newhouse.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 09, 2017
    In this paper, I take up diverse ways in which the uncertain future mobilises action in the now, and consider what kinds of socialities and economies such actions toward the future produce. Thinking from the vantage point of Juba, South Sudan, I show how the openness of space and time to emergence shape the everyday practices of anticipating, hedging for and living through a future and present that is radically uncertain. I argue that the defining features of such everyday hedging are (i) an implicitly spatial frame of comparison, (ii) a fraught interdependence between lack of reliable knowledge and calculative practices and finally (iii) their capacity to generate value in the face of risk. I consider futurity and elsewheres as modalities of difference – that is, as conditions for the unfolding of becoming and the emergence of the new, as well as requirements for surprise. Although Juba may be considered a limit case, I argue that practices of everyday hedging – whatever their particularities – are critical to better understanding futurity and the complex socialities on which the economic relies.
    June 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12188   open full text
  • Reassembling the city through Instagram.
    John D Boy, Justus Uitermark.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 07, 2017
    How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into people's uses of the city? To answer these questions, we develop a relational approach that relies on a combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. Based on in‐depth interviews and a dataset of over 400 000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam, we analyse how the city is reassembled on and through the platform. By selectively drawing on the city, users of the platform elevate exclusive and avant‐garde establishments and events, which come to stand out as hot spots, while rendering mundane and low‐status places invisible. We find that Instagram provides a space for the segmentation of users into subcultural groups that mobilise the city in varied ways. Social media practices, our findings suggest, feed on as well as perpetuate socio‐spatial inequalities.
    June 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12185   open full text
  • Beyond the subterranean energy regime? Fuel, land use and the production of space.
    Matthew T Huber, James McCarthy.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 29, 2017
    In this paper, we argue that energy should be seen as a critical aspect of changing historical regimes in the social production of space. We suggest the common definition of energy as the ‘capacity to do work’ ignores key aspects of the space required for energy in the first place (particularly the concept of power density). Articulating the basic spatial concept of power density with a historical–geographical materialist understanding of energy regimes, we argue that industrial capitalism is defined by an intensive vertical reliance upon subterranean stocks of energy that require relatively little surface land to harness. Previous modes of production were characterised by a more ‘horizontal’ reliance upon extensive territory (e.g. forests) to meet fuel needs. While attentive to the spatialities of overall energy complexes, we focus in particular on how the spatialities of energy sources affect the production of space in major and distinctive ways. Drawing from environmental and economic history, we argue the use of fossil fuels ushered in a ‘subterranean energy regime’ that not only relied on underground stocks of energy, but substantially relieved the societal demand for land‐based and spatially extensive sources of fuel (i.e. wood and other organic sources). The use of subterranean fuel (first coal) not only powered machines, but revolutionised ‘heat‐process’ industries like iron smelting that dramatically expanded the steel and other metal industries; thus, transforming the built environment. We then consider the spatial and land‐use implications of a transition away from this subterranean regime to renewable energy sources (solar and wind). A return to the surface for energy would not be biological as in pre‐industrial times, but industrial in the sense that these systems require industrial production. Moreover, the spatially extensive nature of such energy technologies should raise important political questions about existing land‐use patterns and livelihoods, particularly in rural areas.
    May 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12182   open full text
  • Maintenance and repair beyond the perimeter of the plant: linking industrial labour and the home.
    Chantel Carr.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 15, 2017
    Dominant political economic accounts of manufacturing labour draw on an intellectual heritage that has tended to over‐emphasise production culture within the industrial workplace, at the expense of other work cultures such as maintenance and repair. When the latter are foregrounded, new links emerge between work undertaken within the paid workplace, and that undertaken in the home and community. Work that occurs outside the bounds of an industrial site is co‐constituted by materials and skills engendered within, raising timely political and geographical questions around the visibility and mobility of these prosaic restorative cultures. Empirically, the paper brings together two perspectives to illustrate: first, an auto‐ethnographic account of the author's experience as an apprentice industrial electrician in an Australian steel mill in the early 1990s. Emboldened by the work of feminist geographers, I reflect on the spaces occupied by maintenance and repair workers, with an interest in how they cultivate socio‐material cultures that transpire across the bounds of paid and unpaid work. Second, qualitative interviews conducted two decades later, in the homes of retired maintenance trades workers from the same plant. Throughout long careers, these workers have embraced – in both attitude and praxis – the labour of maintenance and repair both at work and at home. Their case demonstrates modes of living thoughtfully with materials that have the potential to reanimate the industrial city as a site of geographical enquiry. The paper urges labour researchers to return to the industrial city and to look beyond the production paradigm, to explore more deeply the heterogeneity of shop‐floor cultures, in order to account for the full value, and thus the potential, of industrial life.
    May 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12183   open full text
  • Measuring the scales of segregation: looking at the residential separation of White British and other schoolchildren in England using a multilevel index of dissimilarity.
    Richard Harris.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 02, 2017
    Within the segregation literature there has been a movement away from measuring ethnic segregation at a single scale, using traditional indices, to instead treating segregation as a multiscale phenomenon about which measurement at a range of scales will shed knowledge. Amongst the contributions, several authors have promoted multilevel modelling as a way of looking at segregation at multiple scales of a geographical hierarchy, estimating the micro‐, meso‐ and macro‐effects of segregation simultaneously. This paper takes the approach forward by outlining a multilevel index of dissimilarity that combines the advantages of using a widely understood index with a means to identify scale effects in a way that is computationally fast to estimate with freely available software to do so. To demonstrate the method, a case study is made looking at the residential separation of White British pupils from six other ethnic groups in England in 2011. It examines a claim made by the Casey Review into opportunity and integration that schoolchildren are more residentially segregated than the population at large. The results suggest that schoolchildren were indeed more residentially divided but comparison with earlier data and the general uplift in the scales at which patterns of segregation are evident suggest a trend of decreasing segregation overall and the spreading out of ‘minority’ groups.
    May 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12181   open full text
  • ‘The ice edge is lost … nature moved it’: mapping ice as state practice in the Canadian and Norwegian North.
    Philip Steinberg, Berit Kristoffersen.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 01, 2017
    This paper explores how ‘ice’ is woven into the spaces and practices of the state in Norway and Canada and, specifically, how representations of the sea ice edge become political agents in that process. We focus in particular on how these states have used science to ‘map’ sea ice – both graphically and legally – over the past decades. This culminated with two maps produced in 2015, a Norwegian map that moved the Arctic sea‐ice edge 70 km northward and a Canadian map that moved it 200 km southward. Using the maps and their genealogies to explore how designations of sea ice are entangled with political objectives (oil drilling in Norway, sovereignty claims in Canada), we place the maps within the more general tendency of states to assign fixed categories to portions of the earth's surface and define distinct lines between them. We propose that the production of static ontologies through cartographic representations becomes particularly problematic in an icy environment of extraordinary temporal and spatial dynamism, where complex ocean–atmospheric processes and their biogeographic impacts are reduced to lines on a map.
    May 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12184   open full text
  • Education, race and empire: a genealogy of humanitarian governance in the United States.
    Katharyne Mitchell.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 30, 2017
    Much of the recent scholarship in critical philanthropy and humanitarianism focuses on the relationship between the origins of humanitarian governance and the development and expansion of imperialism. Imperial exploitation and dispossession were frequently linked in paradoxical ways with the protection and management of colonised populations. This paper explores these types of connections as they pertain to the relationship between humanitarianism, imperialism and the governance of African Americans in the United States (US). I focus, in particular, on how humanitarian initiatives in black education were mobilised in relation to differing moments of international and domestic colonialism, nation‐building, national security and global aspirations at the heart of American empire. The paper advances this line of inquiry through a genealogy of humanitarian reasoning and webs of belief about the proper intellectual development of African Americans at three historic moments of national development: the periods of Reconstruction, the Efficiency Movement and Pax Americana. In each different context, philanthropic foundations and humanitarians sought to provide education to African Americans, who were disenfranchised and disconnected in different ways in each period. But although the specific moral reasoning and techniques of care employed in the provision of education were particular to time and place, the underlying rationalities of a ‘progressive imperial agenda’ connecting African American enfranchisement and connection to national development and imperial aspirations, was manifest. The paper employs a genealogical method in order to link the excavations of the past to the present, indicating some of the ways that these interconnected logics continue to affect humanitarianism in the US today.
    March 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12180   open full text
  • Spatial dialectics and the geography of social movements: the case of Occupy London.
    Sam Halvorsen.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 14, 2017
    This paper develops spatial dialectics as an analytical method capable of exposing and explaining the contradictions, dilemmas and tensions that cut through the spatialities of social movements. Despite scholarly recognition of internal divides in movements such as Occupy, there is greater need to conceptualise the inherently contradictory nature of social movements, in particular by reflecting on the role of spatiality. Building on recent work on multiple spatialities of activism, the paper shifts attention to contradiction as a key factor in spatial mobilisation, further arguing that the recent turn to assemblage thought is ill equipped for such a task. Dialectics is introduced via Bertell Ollman's influential account of its ontological and epistemological bases, before turning to Edward Soja's reading of Henri Lefebvre to incorporate spatiality. Spatial dialectics disrupts the linearity of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, placing contradictions not only within the historical unfolding of relations but also within co‐dependent yet antagonistic moments of space, through Lefebvre's ‘trialetic’ of perceived, conceived and lived space. Building on ‘militant research’, which combined a seven‐month ethnography, 43 in‐depth interviews and analyses of representations of space, spatial dialectics is put to work through the analysis of three specific contradictions in Occupy London's spatial strategies: a global movement that became tied to the physical space of occupation; a prefigurative space engulfed by internal hierarchies; and a grassroots territorial strategy that was subsumed into logics of dominant territorial institutions. In each case, Occupy London's spatial strategies are explained in the context of unfolding contradictions in conceived, perceived and lived spaces and the subsequent dilemmas and shifts in spatial strategy this led to. In conclusion, the paper highlights broader lessons for social movements’ spatial praxis generated through the analysis of Occupy London.
    March 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12179   open full text
  • Family‐based food practices and their intergenerational geographies in contemporary Guangzhou, China.
    Chen Liu.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 07, 2017
    Social geography research on familial spaces and intimate relations has generated valuable literatures on parenting and grand‐parenting in modern nuclear families. However, the complex intergenerational relations and geographies of multi‐generational households remain under‐researched, limiting geographers’ understanding of familial spatialities. This paper reports on research exploring intergenerational relationships through the lens of family‐based food practices in temporary three‐generational households of Guangzhou, the largest city in south China. It draws on five case studies with Xiaokang (middle‐level) households. It examines how intergenerational relations are performed through everyday food practices, exploring their geographies in terms of both domestic space and wider family geographies. The key arguments suggest that domestic spaces are significant to cultural transmission and transition and emotional communication across generations, and key sites for intergenerational segregation and integration.
    March 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12178   open full text
  • The enchanted path: magic and modernism in psychogeographical walking.
    Alastair Bonnett.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. February 28, 2017
    Geographers have a developing interest in the place of enchantment and the ‘extra‐ordinary’ in the modern city. The paper shows that magic has a significant role in the work of many psychogeographical writers, artists and activists, and argues that this phenomenon needs to be understood in the context of the wider use of magic as a site and symbol of creativity and subversion in modernist cultural expression. Drawing on a survey of British psychogeographical forms and a more detailed study of three London literary examples, it examines how psychogeographical walkers have expanded and developed ‘magical modernism’. Across the varied terrain of psychogeographical walking, magic is used to conjure an openness and vulnerability to voices ‘hidden’ in the landscape. As well as providing more in‐depth discussion of these themes, the three examples of London psychogeography that I explore complicate them by illustrating further specific and diverse uses of magic – namely, magic as environmentalist critique, magic as humour/humour as magic and magic as activism.
    February 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12177   open full text
  • On the colonial frontier: gender, exploration and plant‐hunting on Mount Victoria in early 20th‐century Burma.
    Nuala C Johnson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. February 09, 2017
    In April 1922 Charlotte Wheeler‐Cuffe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. This honour was in recognition of her contribution to plant hunting and exploration, botanical illustration and anthropological knowledge accumulated about Burma during the quarter of a century (1897–1922) she spent there with her husband as part of the colonial service. While historical geographers have acknowledged that the colonies, in particular, often afforded women the space for practising science, the work of female naturalists in the field has received limited detailed scholarly attention. For Charlotte Wheeler‐Cuffe, her plant‐hunting expeditions across Burma allow us to extend the epistemic reach of a spatial perspective developed by geographers and to demonstrate how the web of connections she developed in the colonies enabled her to circulate scientific knowledge across the globe. By focusing on a major expedition to Mount Victoria undertaken by Wheeler‐Cuffe, this paper unravels the complexity of the practice of natural history within a global imperial framework through an examination of the private correspondence and pictorial archive maintained during her time in Burma.
    February 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12176   open full text
  • Navigating the city: dialectics of everyday urbanism.
    Colin McFarlane, Jonathan Silver.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 30, 2017
    How might we conceptualise and research everyday urbanism? By examining the making of everyday life in a low‐income neighbourhood in Uganda, we argue that a dialectics of everyday urbanism is a useful approach for understanding urban poverty. This dialectical approach examines how marginalised urban dwellers navigate the city in the relative absence of formal infrastructure systems, service provision and state welfare, and in turn exceed those limitations through forging connections, capacities and opportunities. We reveal the ‘social infrastructures’ that people put together to sustain life, as well as the limits of and placed on these infrastructures, from the legacies of structural adjustment to ongoing forms of demolition and disinvestment. We identify a set of practices that operate alongside social infrastructure – ‘coordination’, ‘consolidation’ and ‘speculation’ – important in the composition of everyday urban life. In doing so, we reflect on how we might research the dialectics of everyday urbanism, and here a ‘follow‐along participant observation’ (FAPO) methodology has significant potential. Our arguments emerge from research with residents in Kampala, but open out questions for how we conceive and research everyday life and urban infrastructure more generally.
    January 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12175   open full text
  • Rethinking international financial centres through the politics of territory: renminbi internationalisation in London's financial district.
    Sarah Hall.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 25, 2017
    This paper revisits canonical thinking on international financial centres (IFCs) that understands them as being primarily sustained through market liquidity, economies of competition and cooperation between financial and related professional services, and acting as interpretative nodes within global finance. In contrast, I explore the implications of foregrounding questions of power and politics in the (re)production of IFCs. Drawing on the case of the development of offshore renminbi markets in London's financial district, I argue the state plays a vital, yet comparatively neglected, role in shaping the development and changing nature of IFCs. In so doing, the paper calls for work in economic geography and cognate social sciences to understand finance as a political as well as an economic, social and cultural relation.
    January 25, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12172   open full text
  • State transformation and the evolution of economic nationalism in the East Asian developmental state: the Taiwanese semiconductor industry as case study.
    Jinn‐yuh Hsu.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 18, 2017
    This paper empirically highlights the role of nationalism in the development of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. First, it demonstrates how the pre‐1980s Taiwanese developmental state mobilised Chinese economic nationalism against Japanese colonialism and Chinese communism and adopted the strategies of graduated sovereignty, selectively subsidising certain areas and sectors, and promoting national (homogeneously imagined) territorialisation to integrate with the international market. Second, the paper exhibits how in the late 1980s, when the outflow of capital to Mainland China became a compelling phenomenon and Taiwan democratised, popular sovereignty became the norm and Taiwanese nationalism emerged. In response, the democratised state started employing Taiwanese economic nationalism and implementing populist territorial policies to consolidate the support of ‘us’ (the Taiwanese/Taiwan) versus ‘them’ (the Chinese/China). This made China and everything related a security concern that had to be excluded as ‘the other’. This paper responds to the appeals of political geographers to give nationalism a central place in contemporary theories of the nation‐state and contributes to the theory of the developmental state by bringing ‘the nation’ back. While most of the existing developmental state literature focuses on how the roles and effects of ‘the state’ influence economic development, taking ‘the nation’ seriously can provide more accurate explanations for how and why the state focuses on development or not. Accordingly, through valuing the nation this paper promotes a theory of the developmental nation‐state.
    January 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12165   open full text
  • Tears of time: a Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis approach to explore the mobility experiences of young Eastern Europeans in Spain.
    Silvia Marcu.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 18, 2017
    This paper explores the rhythm of temporary mobility experiences of young Eastern Europeans in Spain, after the European Union (EU) enlargement towards the East. Following Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis approach, and drawing on 60 in‐depth qualitative interviews, this paper investigates how rhythms are linked to youth mobility and how different interplays of rhythms are connected and disconnected in multiple ways. I argue that both the EU socio‐economic context and the personal and professional life‐course circumstances of young Eastern Europeans who practice mobility create different, uneven rhythms that influence their everyday lives and their perceptions of mobility. This paper highlights the issue of rhythmic change in temporary mobility, uncovering ‘arrhythmic’ mobility, reflected in the loss and insecurity in the lives of those who practice it; ‘polyrhythmic’ mobility, practised by people looking to study and/or work and expressed through uncertainty on the one hand and the possibility of establishing a certain rhythm in their lives on the other; and ‘eurhythmic’ mobility, used by those with a stable professional status in one of the EU countries, in this case, Spain. The conclusions provide a better comprehension of Lefebvre's thinking, offering insights for wider applications. They show the need to advance the theoretical and empirical understandings of rhythm in relation to mobility during the lifecourse.
    January 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12174   open full text
  • The Anthroposcenic.
    David Matless.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 18, 2017
    This paper presents the ‘Anthroposcenic’ as a geographical contribution to debates around the Anthropocene, deploying the insights of cultural and historical geography to ask how thinking through landscape and time might shape understanding. The paper begins by elaborating on the term ‘Anthroposcenic’, foregrounding the ways in which landscape becomes emblematic of environmental transformation, and reflects further on geological wordplay in science and the humanities. The role of historical enquiry in addressing the times of the Anthropocene is considered, in terms of the dating of a proposed Anthropocene epoch, and the resonance of past geological debate. The possibilities of the Anthroposcenic are then demonstrated through studies of eroding coastal landscapes, drawing on contemporary and historical material from the English coast. Landscape here becomes emblematic of the Anthropocene, and shows how processes of environmental change are articulated through different geographical scales. Coastal studies also show past landscape achieving present resonance, and thereby how the Anthroposcenic may encompass historical material anticipatory of current debate. The paper reflects too on the ways in which questions of inheritance may frame Anthroposcenic enquiry. A specific Anthroposcene serves to open and close the paper.
    January 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12173   open full text
  • Purging the nation: race, conviviality and embodied encounters in the lives of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women.
    Anoop Nayak.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 12, 2017
    This paper critically engages with debates on race, conviviality and the geography of encounters. Where much of this work is undertaken in multicultural places, far less is known about the doing and undoing of conviviality in mainly white localities. The study further contributes to this work by offering a richly embodied account of racism and belonging based on the biographical testimonies of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women. Through these accounts, I identify topographies of power, social inequality and forms of exclusion that disrupt the melody of multicultural conviviality. I demonstrate the visceral aspects of race as it is summoned to life in live encounters, where it is lived on the body, bleeds into the locality and congeals around imaginary ideas of the nation state. I argue that antagonistic encounters that serve to mark out British Bangladeshi Muslims as ‘Other’ perform a bigger role: purging the nation, detoxifying it from encroaching multicultural intimacies and stabilising it as white. Despite this ritual cleansing I demonstrate how respondents are implicated in new forms of civic belonging, laying claim to nationhood, locality and rights to the city that subvert and hollow out the fantasy of a white nation.
    January 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/tran.12168   open full text
  • Taxidermy workshops: differently figuring the working of bodies and bodies at work in the past.
    Merle Patchett.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 23, 2016
    Geographers have long demonstrated an interest in charting the geographical and bodily dynamics of work and employment. However, within this scholarship very little attention has been paid to historical geographies of craftwork. This paper seeks to address this deficit while also engaging with the evident and evidentiary methodological issues associated with the historical study of practices worked through the body. To do so, the paper experiments in the recuperation of the working spaces and working practice of three Scottish taxidermists. The creative challenge of this type of recovery work is to ascertain what can conceivably be said from those things that remain to mark the working of bodies and bodies at work at these sites. Yet from curated remainders we glean vital insights into the practices and class politics of 19th‐century natural history enquiry, the silenced agencies of a workshop devastated by the First World War and the more‐than‐human histories of elite blood sports and land ownership in the Scottish Highlands. And this is to emphasise that these materials, even in their textual representation in this paper, count: that they can create knowledge and invite affective experience of the past. Overall the paper seeks to emphasise the serious commitment to conceptual and methodological innovation required when geographers engage in researching bodies (both human and animal) ‘at work’ in the past.
    December 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12171   open full text
  • Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: the geographies of a lively commodity.
    Maan Barua.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 22, 2016
    This paper maps into geographies of ‘lively commodities’, commodities whose value derives from their status as living beings. In an era where life itself has become a locus of capitalist accumulation, picking apart the category of ‘liveliness’ underpinning commodification has important analytical and geographical stakes. To this end, by tracking historical geographies of commodifying lions in political economies of ecotourism in India, this paper shows how more‐than‐human labour and lively potentials affect commodification and influence accumulation, not simply through recalcitrance, but as active participants within political economic organisation. The paper advances and develops a triad of relational concepts – nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation – through which the political economic potency of lively commodities might be articulated and grasped. It concludes by discussing the analytical potential of this approach and its future purchase for rethinking commodity geographies.
    December 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12170   open full text
  • The gaps of architectural life: the affective politics of Gordon Matta‐Clark's Conical Intersect.
    Thomas Dekeyser.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 11, 2016
    This paper contributes to a burgeoning concern with the ‘critical geographies of architecture’. The central argument is that recent architecture–geography encounters – inspired by non‐representational approaches to material mutability and affective inhabitation – are failing to connect with socio‐political framings of the architectural. In this light, the paper aligns Gordon Matta‐Clark's architectural artwork Conical Intersect (1975) with the Deleuzo‐Guattarian axiom of micropolitics and macropolitics to re‐insert the architectural subject as a microtexture of political forms imbued with (1) asymmetrical assemblages of material volatility, (2) restricted capacities of ‘dwelling or being with’ architecture and (3) bounded notions of living affectively. I suggest Conical Intersect foregrounds architectural space as a meeting of dreamworlds and institutional effects. In its piercing of that space of interaction, the artwork produces an architectural form freed from the conventions of legal and physical constraints to suggest the potency of alternative modes of living with and living in architecture that should be of primary interest to critical geographies of architecture and beyond.
    December 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12166   open full text
  • Desiring the data state in the Indus Basin.
    Majed Akhter.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 11, 2016
    The distribution of water between co‐riparian regions in the Indus Basin has been an extremely contentious issue since at least the early 20th century. The reliability of water measurements, in particular, has caused much controversy at multiple scales. This hydropolitical tension has catalysed a key social group – the hydraulic bureaucracy or ‘hydrocracy’ – to enact strategies of depoliticisation. These strategies aim to suppress political contest by calling on external expertise and/or technology to assure the objectivity of water measurement data. This paper draws on archival data and interviews with water engineers to argue that technocratic depoliticisation operates in distinct but related ways at different scales. Further, I argue that to analyse the technocratic desire for a data state – a state that governs primarily or exclusively by number and calculation – a multi‐scalar theoretical framework that connects the politics of technocracy, territory and nationalism is needed. The paper develops such a framework by situating hydrocrats and their strategies in the broader context of state formation. This framework is offered as a way for critical scholars of resources, development and expertise to engage with depoliticisation and repoliticisation of resource governance as complex geographic processes.
    December 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12169   open full text
  • The role of semiotics in connecting the spaces, words and embodied experiences of refugee politics.
    Georgia Cole.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 08, 2016
    Despite the every‐day prevalence of the term ‘refugee’, fundamental questions often remain unasked. What meanings do actors associate with the label? What intentions might be driving the word's use and/or manipulation? And what implications might the existence of multiple interpretations have for the persons under discussion and the processes within which they sit? Though this is evidently important in popular accounts, where the term's misuse fuels anti‐immigration sentiments and societal mistrust, the ramifications of these multiple interpretations for assisting refugees and negotiating durable solutions have lacked critical exploration. Existing approaches to understanding the politics of the refugee regime have tended to focus on physical sites of contestation, such as refugee camps. This article re‐introduces semiotics as a heuristic framework through which to understand how the word ‘refugee’ in itself constitutes a disputed arena, and to explore what impacts this has on negotiations over their future. This approach is used to explain the controversial negotiations surrounding the invocation of the Cessation Clause for Rwandan refugees in Uganda. Extensive resistance to the cancellation of Rwandan refugees’ statuses has not been met by commensurate attempts to explain when, why and how this process unfolded. Through conceptualising the word ‘refugee’ as a sign according to the Saussurean and Barthean models of semiotics, this piece charts the multiple meanings that this label signified alongside its established legal‐normative definition, and discusses what implications this had for how durable solutions were negotiated. Disaggregating the label provides a route through which to explore what enables the conceptual and spatial dissonance that plagues certain attempts to conclude protracted refugee situations. The piece concludes by discussing the analytical possibilities that emerge from re‐engaging with socio‐semiotic approaches, including through proposing greater engagement with the political geographies of words and their meanings.
    December 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12164   open full text
  • Domesticating transnational education: discourses of social value, self‐worth and the institutionalisation of failure in ‘meritocratic’ Hong Kong.
    Johanna L Waters, Maggi W H Leung.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 07, 2016
    This paper explores the changing spatialities of education in response to processes of internationalisation, through the lens of transnational education (TNE). It argues that rather than producing outward‐looking education, international credentials are becoming ‘domesticated’ – that is, they form an indistinguishable feature of existing local education systems. The paper explores the importance of discourses of meritocracy and the production of value (suzhi) in East Asian societies and how TNE fits into a wider ideological system of biopolitical governance, for which examinations represent a key technology. It demonstrates, through data collected from interviews with students in Hong Kong, the ways in which young people have internalised their own identities as failures and argues that studying for a transnational qualification serves only to accentuate this subject positioning. We also uncover some counter‐narratives to dominant discourses, or examples of ‘biopolitics from below’, where nascent political identities were expressed by some individuals. These exceptions offered some exciting possibilities for an alternative existence – such that the majority of young people, as well as a more privileged minority, are able to escape the damaging classification imposed by the pathologising of educational failure. The paper concludes with some reflections on why a more expansive definition of international education is now required, one that not only takes account of the spatial extension that occurs through internationalisation, but is also sensitive to domestication, and the profound ways in which foreign credentials are being enlisted in wider governance projects within their host communities.
    December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12163   open full text
  • Sensing visceral urban politics and metabolic exclusion in a Chinese neighbourhood.
    C P Pow.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 05, 2016
    Insofar as the production of space is intimately bound up with the bodily senses, it would be reasonable to posit that the politics of space is also at the same time a politics of the senses. In this context, the theoretical remit of this paper is to extend our analysis of the role of the senses in theorising a visceral politics of urban exclusion. Using the case study of a middle‐class neighbourhood or xiaoqu in Shanghai, the paper interrogates how class‐based sensory ‘othering’ is deployed to preserve and regulate the socio‐metabolic environment of the neighbourhood sensorium and justify urban exclusion. Such revanchist (sensory) urbanism, however, is irreducible to the cultural politics of neoliberalism, but also deeply implicated in actually existing metabolic inequalities in contemporary urban China. In particular, those whose metabolic needs are devalued are often stigmatised and cast as ‘sensorial others’ with repulsive sensory and metabolic bodily practices that are at odds with the urban middle‐class. By bringing together critical literature on sensory urbanism and urban metabolism, a key contribution of this paper is to advance the theorisation of visceral micro‐politics of urban exclusion that is experienced and ‘sensed’ through everyday metabolic inequalities in urban China.
    December 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12161   open full text
  • Living precariously: property guardianship and the flexible city.
    Mara Ferreri, Gloria Dawson, Alexander Vasudevan.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 30, 2016
    In this paper we examine the precarious everyday geographies of property guardianship in the United Kingdom. Temporary property guardianship is a relatively new form of insecure urban dwelling existing in the grey area between informal occupation, the security industry and housing. Young individuals, usually in precarious employment, apply to intermediary companies to become temporary ‘guardians’ in metropolitan centres, most notably in London. The scheme allows guardians to pay below market rent to live in unusual locations while ‘performing’ live‐in security arrangements that are not considered as a form of ‘work’. The experiences of becoming and living as a property guardian can be ambivalent and contradictory: guardians express economic and social advantages to being temporary, while also exposing underlying anxieties with ‘flexible living’. In this paper we offer a detailed description of the various practices of property guardianship and how they must be understood, on the one hand, in light of recent geographical scholarship on housing insecurity and, on the other hand, as an example of a precarious subjectivity that has become normalised in recent decades in cities of the global North. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with long‐term property guardians in London, we unpack the narratives and rationales of university‐educated and highly skilled individuals for whom the city is a site of intensified insecurity and flexible negotiation. In the end, we conclude that the form of permanent temporariness experienced by property guardians needs to be understood as a symptom of wider dynamics of work and life precarisation in urban centres and argue that it is imperative to extend recent geographical debates around work and life insecurity to include new housing practices and their role in co‐constituting urban precarity.
    November 30, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12162   open full text
  • Missing women: policing absence.
    Olivia Stevenson, Hester Parr, Penny Woolnough.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 29, 2016
    This paper considers the neglected mobilities associated with a sample of UK women reported as missing. Refracted through literatures on gendered mobility and abandonment, the paper argues that the journeys of these women in crisis are not well understood by police services, and that normative gender relations may infuse their management. By selectively exploring one illustrative police case file on Kim, we highlight how reported and observed socio‐spatial relationships within private and public spaces relate to search actions. We argue that Kim's mobility and spatial experiences are barely understood, except for when they appear to symbolise disorder and danger. We address the silences in this singular case by using the voices of other women reported as missing, as collected in a research project to explore the agency, experience and meaning of female mobility during absence. We argue that women reported as missing are not abandoned by UK policing services, but that a policy of continued search for them may be at risk if they repeatedly contravene normative socio‐spatial relationships through regular absence mobilities. By way of conclusion, we address recent calls for research that explores the relationships between gender and mobility.
    November 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12160   open full text
  • Illicit economies: customary illegality, moral economies and circulation.
    Nicky Gregson, Mike Crang.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 28, 2016
    This paper is concerned with how to think the illicit and illegal as part of economies. Economic geography has only recently begun to address this challenge but in limited ways. The paper shows the difficulties with those approaches, chief among which is a reassertion of the legal/illegal binary of products and actors that is contested by the more open term illicit economies. We draw on work in cultural economy to move economic geography beyond this impasse by seeing economy as practice. The paper develops a conceptual account of illicit economies connecting moral economy and the opacities produced by logistically complex global trade to highlight the importance of customary illegality in doing business. Customary illegality is the tolerance or practice of illicit activities by largely legal economic actors rather than just a focus on illegal goods or criminal actors. Illicitness is thus shown to be neither a property of goods nor of particular economic actors, but rather a transient quality often linked to circulation. The argument is illustrated empirically through three examples drawn from the food sector. The conclusion makes suggestions for future research that are empirical, methodological and conceptual.
    November 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12158   open full text
  • Dancing bodies and Indigenous ontology: what does the haka reveal about the Māori relationship with the Earth?
    Vincent Clément.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 21, 2016
    This essay seeks to explore the extent to which the haka can be seen as an unparalleled source for approaching Māori understandings of the world and their relationship with the Earth. Taking into account the growing interest in the ontological turn and post‐humanist phenomenologies, the main focus of this paper is to examine how the haka could be a way of demonstrating Māori ontology. One of the merits of the ontological turn has been to destabilise colonial forms of thinking. After discussing the need for decolonising research related to Indigenous issues, the haka is regarded as a discourse of the earthly human experience in which the meaning of places for Māori plays an important part in the construction of the message. Later, the narrative of the body is re‐contextualised in terms of its spatiality. Three interlocked spatial scales of analysis reveal different aspects of the ontological significance of the haka. Beyond its first aim of intimidating enemies, the haka is addressed as a performative experience of the relationship between Māori and the natural environment. Non‐human and inanimate things in the surrounding environment are regarded as relatives by Māori, and as with songs and stories, the dance renews the strong bonds of kinship that exist between Māori and the natural world.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12157   open full text
  • Beyond improvisation? The rise and rise of youth entrepreneurs in north India.
    Stephen Young, Satendra Kumar, Craig Jeffrey.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 14, 2016
    This paper draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2004–5, 2010 and 2012 to examine the recent expansion of higher education markets in north India. It focuses on a group of young men who attended university in the city of Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. Faced with dismal job prospects, they began to improvise, making money ad hoc by acting as small‐scale political brokers on campus. However, some of them subsequently utilised these improvisational skills to try and attain loftier economic ambitions. As India's education sector was liberalised, they honed in on an opportunity to establish their own profitable colleges. Our paper points to a paradox that resonates far beyond India; namely, that the continued expansion of private education is, in some cases, happening in spite of and even because of poor job growth. We also extend recent work on the theme of improvisation. By examining long‐run changes, we show that improvisation is not indelibly linked to the activities of ‘youth’, but rather a set of practices that they may perform and abandon as they move through the life course. As such, improvisation can serve as a staging post in the efforts of young people to obtain a more secure foothold in the economy.
    November 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12151   open full text
  • Finding a scientific voice: performing science, space and speech in the 19th century.
    Diarmid A Finnegan.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 14, 2016
    Taking as a point of departure recent scholarly interest in the geographies of spoken communication, this paper situates the cultivation of a scientific voice in a range of 19th‐century contexts and locations. An examination of two of the century's most celebrated science lecturers, Michael Faraday and Thomas Henry Huxley, offers a basis for more general claims about historical relations between science, speech and space. The paper begins with a survey of the geography of Victorian oratory in which advocates of science sought to carve out an effective niche. It then turns to a reconstruction of the varying and variously interpreted assumptions about authoritative and authentic speech that shaped how the platform performances of Faraday and Huxley were constructed, contested and re‐mediated in print. Particular attention is paid to sometimes clashing ideals of vocal performance and paralinguistic communication and to the ways in which these were inflected by convictions about gender and class. This signals an interest in the performative dimensions of science lectures rather more than their specific cognitive content. In exploring these concerns, the paper argues that ‘finding a scientific voice’ was a fundamentally geographical enterprise driven by attempts to make science resonate with a wider oratorical culture without losing distinctive appeal and special authority.
    November 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12159   open full text
  • The circumstances of post‐phenomenological life worlds.
    Derek P McCormack.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 09, 2016
    This paper contributes to the development of a post‐phenomenological account of worlds through a discussion of the concept of circumstance. This account is developed initially through a consideration of how the concept of world figures in two important strands of contemporary thinking, namely, speculative realism and theories of affective life. By making connections across these approaches, the paper argues for a circumstantial sense of worlds irreducible to the status of surrounds for human‐centred forms of life and experience. This account of worlds is post‐phenomenological insofar as it does not assume the already constituted subject as the condition for worlds to take shape: instead, it attends to the circumstantial worlding of forces excessive of the subject. At the same, via a scenographic orientation it remains attentive to the affective force of life worlds, to how they are felt as a kind of circumstantial palpability.
    November 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12146   open full text
  • Liminal geopolitics: the subjectivity and spatiality of diplomacy at the margins.
    Fiona McConnell.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 06, 2016
    This paper argues that the lens of liminality has the potential to enrich scholarship in critical geopolitics by offering a nuanced approach to the geographies and ambivalence of political subjectivity. In the context of a perceived proliferation of ‘new’ actors the paper turns critical attention to what happens at the threshold between the categories of state and non‐state, official and unofficial diplomacy. It asks what such a perspective on diplomacy might mean for understandings of who is, and who should be, a legitimate actor in international politics by turning to the notion of liminality as developed in cultural anthropology. This is a concept that surprisingly has been overlooked in political geography and this paper asks how geographers might engage more productively with it, particularly in light of emergent critical international relations research on liminality as a paradigm for understanding stability and change in institutionalised orders. Empirically, the paper focuses on the articulation of liminal political subjectivities and spatialities through the lens of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a coalition of almost 50 stateless nations, indigenous communities and national minorities that currently are denied a place at international diplomatic forums. Drawing on this case study, the paper examines three areas of geopolitical enquiry that the notion of liminality opens up. First is the spatiality of diplomacy in terms of the out‐of‐placeness of liminal actors and the construction of transformative spaces of quasi‐official diplomacy. Second are particular qualities of political subjectivity, including the blurring of boundaries between diplomacy and activism, and the notion of geopolitical shapeshifters. Finally, attention turns to the notion of communitas to draw out the politics of belonging, recognition and legitimacy. The paper concludes by suggesting that the idea of ambivalence that underpins liminality is a useful provocation to take creativity and aspiration seriously in geopolitics.
    November 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12156   open full text
  • Navigating veterinary borderlands: ‘heiferlumps’, epidemiological boundaries and the control of animal disease in New Zealand.
    Gareth Enticott.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 04, 2016
    This paper analyses the importance of boundaries in the control of animal disease. On the one hand, establishing geographical and disciplinary boundaries is seen to be vital to the control of disease. In practice, however, boundaries are unstable, disrupted and frequently transgressed. Disease and its diagnosis vary in space, while disciplinary boundaries between epidemiology, laboratory and clinical practices can collapse from the non‐coherence of disease. Drawing on the concepts of ‘disciplinary borderlands’ and fluid space, the paper analyses how uncertainty over disease diagnosis establishes a veterinary borderland in which disciplines are merged and combined and difficult to tell apart. From archival research and interviews of key informants, the paper describes the history of the control of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in New Zealand. Focusing on disputes around the diagnosis of bTB in the West Coast region, the paper shows how the problem of non‐specificity (locally referred to as ‘heiferlumps’) undermined attempts to impose a universal version of disease and control policy. In this new veterinary borderland, attempts to manage the non‐coherence of disease shifted from denial to viewing disease as a moral problem in which farmers’ own knowledges were central to the definition and management of disease. In doing so, boundaries between traditional disease disciplines were broken down, and new hybrid veterinary practices established to create geographically variable disease control rules and procedures. In conclusion, the paper considers the wider consequences for the management of animal disease arising from greater farmer involvement in animal disease management.
    November 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12155   open full text
  • Plagiarists, enthusiasts and periodical geography: A.F. Büsching and the making of geographical print culture in the German Enlightenment, c.1750–1800.
    Dean W Bond.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 27, 2016
    This article contributes to recent scholarship on the geography and history of the book by arguing for greater attention to ‘periodical geography’, which refers to the geographical knowledge contained in periodicals, and the geographies that shaped the ways periodicals were produced, circulated and read. To illustrate the potential for such work, the article discusses geographical periodicals in the context of the German Aufklärung (Enlightenment). It focuses in particular on the Wöchentliche Nachrichten von neuen Landcharten und geographischen, statistischen und historischen Büchern und Schriften (Berlin 1773–87), edited by the prominent geographer Anton Friedrich Büsching. The story of Büsching's periodical merits attention because it throws valuable light on the practical making of geography's print culture and moral economy of knowledge in the Enlightenment. Büsching's story reveals that there were competing geographies of trust, authority and credibility at work within Enlightenment geography. It reveals that Büsching's periodical played a central role in reshaping geography's moral and epistemological order in the later 18th century. In recounting this story, my broader agenda is to argue that the very periodicity and materiality of periodicals transformed the character of geographical print culture in the later 18th century.
    October 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12153   open full text
  • (Dis‐)ordering the state: territory in Icelandic statecraft.
    Julian Clark, Alun Jones.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 27, 2016
    Foucault and Lefebvre's writings have rekindled interest among geographers in territory–state relations, with recent work conceptualising territory as a state strategy to control space, and on the state as a socio‐natural relation. However, what is lacking is how these debates intersect with post‐human understandings of nature's materialities, and how the resulting ‘material territory’ mediates state periodisation. Drawing on a case study of Iceland, we address this issue to show how pre‐modern territorialisation shaped state territorialities, and how state periodisation arises from political order imbricating with the materialities of territory. The originality of the work is threefold. First is to show how territory as a material category resists or reinterprets political ordering through longitudinal examination of a single case. Second is to reconceptualise state periodisation as an evolutionary material‐political, as much as socio‐economic, process. Third is to establish empirically the unacknowledged tensions between the state's use of territory to order ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ affairs. We analyse the implications of a material conception of territory for state periodisation and for wider understandings of contemporary statecraft. The state is revealed as a site of multiple territorialities in space, and territorial multiplicities over time.
    October 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12154   open full text
  • Landscapes of extended ruralisation: postcolonial suburbs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
    Claire Mercer.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 18, 2016
    African cities are becoming increasingly suburban, yet we know little about suburban spaces, how they are historically produced and by whom. This paper argues that African suburbs can be usefully understood as postcolonial suburbs. The postcolonial suburb de‐centres the Anglo‐American suburban model and pays attention to the historical co‐constitution of suburban space across colony and metropole. It draws attention to the colonial and post‐colonial policies on land and housing that make suburban development possible, but also attends to the everyday ways in which suburban spaces are built through the efforts of self‐builders and their house‐building projects. Using the case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the paper shows how these low‐density residential spaces towards the edge of the city are being shaped by the new middle classes with their appetite for large houses and private cars. But these are not copies of suburban forms from elsewhere. Architecturally they are dominated by bungalows and villas, but these buildings are self‐built rather than part of large planned housing schemes. Socially the suburbs are dominated by the middle classes, but these middle classes are oriented towards the countryside rather than towards the city. Drawing on interviews with suburban residents in Dar es Salaam, I show how self‐build housing projects straddle the suburban and the rural in terms of economic investments, land security and social relations. The paper concludes by arguing that the colonial and postcolonial making of the suburbs produces landscapes of ruralisation.
    October 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12150   open full text
  • Mobilising affinity ties: Kachin internal displacement and the geographies of humanitarianism at the China–Myanmar border.
    Elaine Lynn‐Ee Ho.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 09, 2016
    This paper considers how webs of connection bridge people from different social worlds and engender affinity ties that can be mobilised to nurture caring relationships, despite the physical and cognitive borders that exist within and between societies. Territorial contestation between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army has precipitated internal displacement in Kachin state (Myanmar). The situation of Kachin internally displaced people in camps at the China–Myanmar border directs attention to how geographical and geopolitical constraints deter international humanitarian assistance yet provide opportunities to engage a different set of humanitarian actors. The paper first argues that Kachin internally displaced people are treated as surplus populations by the sovereign states in both Myanmar and China. Surplus populations come into existence when nation‐states impose punitive measures that compromise the survivability of populations that are considered threatening to national sovereignty. Second, the paper examines how mobilising affinity ties enables Kachin humanitarian workers to leverage the citizenship resources of empathetic Chinese nationals to negotiate humanitarianism constraints at the China–Myanmar border. Affinity ties refer to connections emanating from a dynamic constellation of cultural attributes to do with history, ethnicity, religion and place among other malleable identity constructs. Interlocking constellations form webs of connections that transverse essentialising categories of social difference and contribute to shared biographies that allow for cultivating emotional attachments to a place and its people. Affinity ties may congeal into durable ties of solidarity and activism, but no less significant are vernacular expressions of affinity that prompt empathy for proximate or distant strangers and a predilection to act on behalf of those experiencing oppression. The paper proposes that conceptualising affinity ties draws out transversal webs of connections that bridge people of differential social positionings. This approach provides a potential ethical stance and productive analytical lens for advancing wider migration and citizenship debates.
    October 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12148   open full text
  • Apparatuses of occupation: translocal social movements, states and the archipelagic spatialities of power.
    Sasha Davis.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 26, 2016
    There has recently been an abundance of scholarly attention in geography to the assemblage‐like nature of contemporary social movements. While assemblage theory has rightly emphasised the performative, translocal, discursive‐material and affective aspects of social movements, less attention has been focused on the way these flexible assemblages territorialise power and attempt to order social activities in place. Through an analysis of contemporary anti‐militarisation protests in Okinawa, this paper interrogates how translocal social movements use direct action tactics such as the occupation of land and sea spaces to not only resist state power, but to produce their own governance over places. Driven by different globally circulating normative perspectives on the value of national security versus personal security, these social movements have engaged in contests with states over the construction of military facilities and the practice of military activities in local environments. Analysing Foucauldian and Deleuzean perspectives on governing apparatuses, this paper investigates the spatial practices of both Okinawan social movements and the American and Japanese governments to demonstrate how occupation functions as a tactic of political praxis for both state and non‐state actors.
    September 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12152   open full text
  • Sustainable flood memories, lay knowledges and the development of community resilience to future flood risk.
    Lindsey McEwen, Joanne Garde‐Hansen, Andrew Holmes, Owain Jones, Franz Krause.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 22, 2016
    The paradigm shift to more distributed flood risk management strategies in the UK involves devolved responsibilities to the local, and the need to enhance risk ownership by communities. This poses questions about how communities build resilience to future flood risk, and how agencies support these processes. This paper explores results from interdisciplinary research on ‘sustainable flood memory’ in the context of effective flood risk management as a conceptual contribution to a global priority. The project aimed to increase understanding of how flood memories provide a platform for developing and sharing lay knowledges, creating social learning opportunities to increase communities’ adaptive capacities for resilience. The paper starts by conceptually framing resilience, community, lay knowledge and flood memory. It then explores key themes drawn from semi‐structured interviews with floodplain residents affected by the UK summer 2007 floods in four different settings, which contrasted in terms of their flood histories, experiences and kinds of ‘communities’. Sustainable flood memories were found to be associated with relational ways of knowing, situated in emotions, changing materiality and community tensions. These all influenced active remembering and active forgetting. The paper reflects on varying integrations of memory, lay knowledges and resilience, and critically evaluates implications of the sustainable flood memory concept for the strategy, process and practice of developing community flood resilience. Given the concept's value and importance of ‘memory work’, the paper proposes a framework to translate the concept practically into community resilience initiatives, and to inform how risk and flood experiences are communicated within communities.
    September 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12149   open full text
  • Waging peace: militarising pacifism in Central Africa and the problem of geography, 1962.
    Jake Hodder.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 20, 2016
    Despite the discipline having undergone a ‘peace turn’ in recent years, the history of the peace movement itself remains curiously under explored by geographers. This paper retraces the World Peace Brigade and its collaboration with the Northern Rhodesian independence movement in 1962. I argue that the Brigade offers geographers important insights into how ideas of peace have been circulated, adapted and even resisted. The paper suggests that geography poses a distinct conceptual problem for peace movements, which must simultaneously operate beyond conventional forms of territorial politics while remaining sufficiently flexible in the political arena for their strength and relevance. In Central Africa this meant the Brigade developed two, ultimately incompatible, conceptions of peace: an internationalist one that stressed world community, and a local one that adapted pacifism for nationalist movements. I suggest this case study has two implications for peace research in geography. First, it encourages us to remain attentive to the big stories of peace and, specifically, the way in which the peace movement has been a historically important conduit for a range of internationalist ideas. Second, the histories of waging peace (peace armies, civil disobedience, etc.) allow us to critically interrogate the co‐constitutive geographies of violence and nonviolence while retaining peace as a distinct category around which to promote political engagement.
    September 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12145   open full text
  • Racialised dissatisfaction: homelessness management and the everyday assemblage of difference.
    Michele Lancione.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 19, 2016
    Faced with increased waves of refugees, economic migrants and internal vulnerable groups, the challenge for the contemporary European city is to welcome, assist and manage these populations in ways capable of fostering a positive and productive articulation of difference. The paper tackles this issue by investigating the ways in which difference is perceived, negotiated and performed among Italian and migrant homeless people in Turin, Italy. Through the presentation of detailed ethnographic material, the paper proposes a processual and affective take on the everyday assemblage of race and it questions the role of normative spaces in its making. The notion of racialised dissatisfaction is advanced in this sense, signalling how street‐level racism among the homeless poor is deeply connected to the broader machinery of homelessness management and the material and affective components of life on the street. Despite its contextualised ethnographic nature, the paper offers insights that encompass the analysed case and advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of everyday life at the urban margins.
    September 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12133   open full text
  • Post‐colonial careering and urban policy mobility: between Britain and Nigeria, 1945–1990.
    Ruth Craggs, Hannah Neate.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 07, 2016
    This paper sets out the value of the concept of ‘careering’ to understanding the global mobility of urban policy across historical and contemporary contexts. Through a case study of one colonial and post‐colonial career in urban development, we demonstrate the material and ideological connections between late colonial development in Nigeria, British reconstruction and international consultancy. Empirically, the paper provides novel post‐colonial perspectives on Britain's post‐Second World War reconstruction spanning the mid‐ to late 20th century, globalising the geographies of the British new town. Conceptually, the paper argues that careering provides a valuable tool for progressing the study of urban expertise and its mobility in four ways. First, it provides a tool for connecting geographically distant urban development projects. Second, careering allows us to explore intersections between urban development policies and geopolitical transformations. Third, careering allows us to see the impact of ideas, skills, experiences, affiliations and contacts formed at different stages of a career on later professional practice, slowing down and lengthening out our understandings of the processes though which urban policy is made mobile. Fourth, careering as a method demonstrates the continued value of biographical approaches to urban policy mobility, highlighting in particular professional lives worked with colleagues and contacts rather than in isolation, and foregrounding the everyday embodied nature of urban expertise. The article concludes by suggesting such approaches could be productive for the writing of new post‐colonial histories of geography and its allied disciplines.
    September 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12147   open full text
  • Commemorative atmospheres: memorial sites, collective events and the experience of national identity.
    Shanti Sumartojo.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 25, 2016
    In Australia as elsewhere, shared annual commemorative ceremonies such as those on Anzac Day, 25 April, help to connect residents to particular versions of the nation, to the past and to each other. This article investigates what can be gained by pairing the concept of commemoration – a set of practices and narratives that draw together national identity, collective and individual memory, grief and mourning, regular ritual, collectivity and material, aesthetic representations of war and death – with atmosphere and its dynamic combination of space, sensory experience, affect, individual memory and experience and the material environment. It introduces the notion of ‘commemorative atmospheres’ to explore how such events ‘feel’, arguing that spatially‐specific affective experience can work to connect individuals to the nation. The article builds on scholarship that explores how memorial sites symbolically express aspects of national history and memory, linking this to accounts of how atmospheres can be constituted by architectural form and the material and aesthetic aspects of space. It uses recent research on Australian Anzac Day ceremonies to identify the different spatial elements that contribute to the moods of these events, and explores how these interweave with first‐hand experience of the ceremonies and established national narratives. It also considers the sensory perception of commemorative events, identifying how these aspects link to discursive elements, helping to frame national identity for attendees at these ceremonies and potentially for a wider national audience.
    August 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12144   open full text
  • Geographies of peace and the teaching of internationalism: Marie‐Thérèse Maurette and Paul Dupuy in the Geneva International School (1924–1948).
    Federico Ferretti.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 22, 2016
    Drawing on recent thorough‐going debates on ‘geographies of peace’, this paper addresses the experience of the French geographer Paul Dupuy (1856–1948) and his daughter, Marie‐Thérèse Maurette (1890–1989), in the Geneva International School between 1924 and 1948. Working with primary sources, I reconstruct their teaching of ‘synthetic geography’ and ‘international culture’, which aimed to establish didactic methods for peace education employing current geopolitical issues. I discuss this early experience in geographies of peace in order to put it in its historical and international contexts and to give a contribution to present geographies and geopolitics of peace, by underscoring the importance of internationalism and voluntarism. The main arguments of this study are the importance of multilingualism and cosmopolitan mentality, and the problems that politically committed geographies often found with institutions and ‘national schools’: the context of Dupuy's and Maurette's teaching was completely exterior to academia and marked by a strong voluntarism. In this, it joined former examples of extra‐institutional and engagé geographical networks, like those of the anarchist geographers Reclus and Kropotkin and of anarchist education, a tradition which played a role in inspiring Paul Dupuy's works.
    August 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12143   open full text
  • Anticipating service withdrawal: young people in spaces of neoliberalisation, austerity and economic crisis.
    John Horton.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 19, 2016
    This paper considers some key impacts of public sector neoliberalisation and austerity measures for everyday geographies of childhood and youth in England. The paper develops three claims, with reference to qualitative research conducted at a youth group in 2007, 2009 and 2013. First, I outline a range of ways in which long‐run processes of public sector neoliberalisation, and more abrupt cuts to public sector expenditure ‘in the current climate’ of austerity politics, have substantially transformed geographies of childhood and youth in many minority world contexts. However, I argue that extant research on these transformations has tended to reproduce some rather partial understandings of impacts of service withdrawal, which I critique via a reading of recent geographical work on anticipatory politics. Second, I evidence how political‐economic contexts of neoliberalisation and austerity have constituted a particular atmosphere and sense of the future, tangibly affecting everyday relationships, spaces and the efficacy of service provision at the case study youth group. In particular, I emphasise the significance of anticipated futures, noting that the anticipation of funding cuts is having manifold everyday, lived consequences that are arguably more wide‐ranging, intractable and troubling than the impacts of funding cuts themselves. Third, in particular, I argue that spaces of anticipated funding cuts and service withdrawal are frequently characterised by an intensification of anxieties about, and hopes for, young people's futures. I note that young people are diversely affected by, and engaged in, the circulation of these anxieties and hopes – but also recognise that young people's geographies go on, and sometimes offer hopeful ways on, ‘in the current climate’.
    August 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12134   open full text
  • Becoming big things: building events and the architectural geographies of incarceration in England and Wales.
    Dominique Moran, Jennifer Turner, Yvonne Jewkes.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 18, 2016
    This paper advances geographies of architecture beyond frequently studied ‘signature’ buildings by drawing attention to non‐iconic, non‐utopian, banal counterpoints – in this case, new prisons. It argues that by attending to ‘signature’ buildings, architectural geographies have overlooked the critical and underexplored circumstances and contingencies of more quotidian constructions, neglecting the mundane processes of procurement, commissioning, tendering, project management and bureaucratisation – here termed ‘architectural assembly’. Advancing scholarship in carceral geography by considering the processes and assemblages that shape (what will become) carceral spaces, it focuses on what happens before a building takes physical form. The paper draws on a major RCUK‐funded study of prison architecture to move architectural geographies more meaningfully towards a consideration of the bureaucratisation of architectural practice, as underexplored aspects of building ‘events’. It calls for geographers to pay greater attention to the banal geographies of architectural assembly, and to the banalities of production more widely.
    August 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12140   open full text
  • Macro‐scale stability with micro‐scale diversity: modelling changing ethnic minority residential segregation – London 2001–2011.
    Ron Johnston, Kelvyn Jones, David Manley, Dewi Owen.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 12, 2016
    Most studies of ethnic residential segregation that address the issue of spatial scale make it implicit – if not explicit – that segregation is greater at smaller than larger scales. Such studies, however, invariably measure segregation separately at those scales, and take no account of the fact that measures at the smaller scale necessarily incorporate that at any larger scales. The present paper rectifies that situation by, for the first time, modelling ethnic segregation in London at the 2001 and 2011 censuses within a Bayesian statistical framework at three scales, which allows for the statistical significance of any changes to be formally assessed – something not possible before. It finds that for many of the groups studied segregation was as great, if not greater, at the macro‐scale as at the micro‐scale, with both measures larger than at the meso‐scale, with significant reductions in segregation across the decade, especially at the micro‐scale.
    August 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12142   open full text
  • Indoor versus outdoor running: understanding how recreational exercise comes to inhabit environments through practitioner talk.
    Russell Hitchings, Alan Latham.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 11, 2016
    Starting with a series of perspectives on why and where humans run, this paper considers how running comes to happen in some environments instead of others and how it is experienced thereafter. More specifically, we are interested in the processes by which contemporary recreational running has come to take place either indoors on treadmills or outside on pavements and paths. Running has been recently positioned as an obvious target for those hoping to encourage public health among increasingly time‐pressured populations and running outdoors can often lead to additional benefits. Yet how it is that runners and environments come to coalesce has yet to be examined in any great detail. This paper responds by drawing on theories of how embodied practices spread through society to further an emergent geographical interest in the speech patterns of everyday life. With reference to a project involving accompanied runs and interviews with groups of both indoor and outdoor recreational runners in London, we ask what the subtleties of their running talk tells us about how exercisers become attached to the environments they currently occupy and how they might feasibly be encouraged elsewhere.
    August 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12138   open full text
  • Governmentality and the conduct of water: China's South–North Water Transfer Project.
    Sarah Rogers, Jon Barnett, Michael Webber, Brian Finlayson, Mark Wang.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 11, 2016
    Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer (SNWT) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through a governmentality lens. It aims to examine the SNWT project's machinery, mentality and spatiality, including its narrative, its constitution of objects and subjects in space, its multiple techniques of government, and its physical and administrative assemblages. In decentring the problem of the state in relation to the SNWT project we can learn much about both the politics of water and the nature of Chinese governmentalities. This article shows how the SNWT naturalises water scarcity, normalises the pre‐eminence of North China, sustains engineering over regulatory solutions and reconfigures hydrosocial relations, while also outlining the limits to and endemic conflicts within this vast programme of government.
    August 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12141   open full text
  • Building transitions to post‐capitalist urban commons.
    Paul Chatterton.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 11, 2016
    This paper opens up a novel geographical research agenda on building transitions beyond the capitalist present. It brings into conversation two previously disconnected areas of academic debate: socio‐technical transition studies and more radical work on post‐capitalism. The paper offers empirical evidence of real‐life socio‐spatial practices that build postcapitalist socio‐technical transitions through a case study of the daily experiences, motives and values of residents in a community‐led cohousing project in the UK. I begin by exploring definitions around post‐capitalism and transition thinking, and then introduce the notion of the urban commons to point towards the geographies of post‐capitalist transitions and illustrate the kinds of social and spatial relations that underpin them. The paper then provides empirical substance for a geographical agenda around post‐capitalist transitions through the case study, highlighting themes of experimentation, transformation and direct democracy. The paper concludes with some strategic future reflections and makes a claim for a geographical research agenda that elaborates the possible radical geographies and place imaginaries of post‐capitalist transitions in our teaching, research and policy work. Unless geographers forge direct and necessary links between transitioning and moving beyond capitalism, our ability to take decisive and meaningful action on the challenges that lie ahead will be limited.
    August 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12139   open full text
  • Going public? Re‐thinking visibility, ethics and recognition through participatory research praxis.
    Luke Dickens, Melissa Butcher.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 18, 2016
    Recent work in human geography has articulated the principles of an emerging ‘participatory ethics’. Yet despite sustained critical examination of the participatory conditions under which geographical knowledge is produced, far less attention has addressed how a participatory ethics might unsettle the conventional ways such knowledge continues to be received, circulated, exchanged and mediated. As such, the uptake of visual methods in participatory research praxis has drawn a range of criticism for assuming visual outputs ‘tell their own stories’ and that publics might straightforwardly engage with them. In response, this paper develops an argument for adopting an ethical stance that takes a more situated, processual account of the ways participants themselves might convene their own forms of public engagement, and manage their own conditions of becoming visible through the research process. To do so the concept of an ethics of recognition is developed, drawing attention to the inter‐ and intra‐subjective relations that shape the public research encounter, and signalling ways that participants might navigate such conditions in pursuit of their intuitive desire to give an account of themselves to others. This ethical stance is then used to rethink questions of visibility and publicness through the conditions of reception, mediation and exchange that took place during the efforts of a London‐based participatory research project to ‘go public’. Drawing in particular on the experiences of one of the project participants, we suggest how a processual and contingent understanding of public engagement informed by such an ethics of recognition might be anticipated, approached and enacted.
    July 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12136   open full text
  • Palm oil not polar bears: climate change and development in Malaysian media.
    Kate Manzo, Rory Padfield.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 12, 2016
    To date, debates about climate change reporting in national media focus largely on Western democracies. We aim to broaden the scope for cross‐national comparison by looking at climate change reporting in Malaysia – an emerging economy in the global South facing developmental tensions common to many, specifically an ambitious national climate change agenda in the face of an economy largely reliant on the extraction and export of primary commodities. Our questions are: How is climate change framed in Malaysian media? How do Malaysian narratives compare with those found elsewhere? How do climate change and development narratives interact in a ‘second tier’ emerging economy? And lastly, what do these interacting narratives say about the salience of neoliberal and North–South perspectives on climate change and development? To answer these questions, we undertook a content analysis of climate action stories published over a three‐year period (2009–2011) in five English‐language news sources. In addition to a high proportion of environmental‐framed articles across all the news sources, our findings show that climate change has been framed as both a multi‐scalar responsibility and a positive opportunity for two key stakeholders in development, i.e. neoliberal market forces and geopolitical actors keenly interested in restructuring the international political economy along lines reminiscent of the new international economic order (NIEO) demands of the 1970s. We label the key themes emergent from our analysis as climate capitalism and green nationalism (neither of which are unique to Malaysia), while demonstrating that debates about palm oil are particularly illustrative of the interaction of these themes in the Malaysian context. In the final section we suggest thinking of the interacting elements as a singular, structuralist model of green development – one reminiscent of discourses at work in other emerging economies.
    July 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12129   open full text
  • Regional surnames and genetic structure in Great Britain.
    Jens Kandt, James A Cheshire, Paul A Longley.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 07, 2016
    Following the increasing availability of DNA‐sequenced data, the genetic structure of populations can now be inferred and studied in unprecedented detail. Across social science, this innovation is shaping new bio‐social research agendas, attracting substantial investment in the collection of genetic, biological and social data for large population samples. Yet genetic samples are special because the precise populations that they represent are uncertain and ill‐defined. Unlike most social surveys, a genetic sample's representativeness of the population cannot be established by conventional procedures of statistical inference, and the implications for population‐wide generalisations about bio‐social phenomena are little understood. In this paper, we seek to address these problems by linking surname data to a censored and geographically uneven sample of DNA scans, collected for the People of the British Isles study. Based on a combination of global and local spatial correspondence measures, we identify eight regions in Great Britain that are most likely to represent the geography of genetic structure of Great Britain's long‐settled population. We discuss the implications of this regionalisation for bio‐social investigations. We conclude that, as the often highly selective collection of DNA and biomarkers becomes a more common practice, geography is crucial to understanding variation in genetic information within diverse populations.
    July 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12131   open full text
  • Emotional citizenry: everyday geographies of befriending, belonging and intercultural encounter.
    Kye Askins.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 30, 2016
    This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as a process grounded in the complexities of places, lives and feelings, exceeding any fixed status of citizenship to be achieved in the formal political sphere. Drawing on encounters between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in a befriending scheme in Newcastle, England, it focusses on the emotional geographies of intercultural interactions produced through everyday spaces. Contact in the scheme involves difficult negotiations of difference, yet it is precisely the emotional that opens up the potential of/for making connections, and through which nuanced relationships develop, dualisms are destabilised, and meaningful encounters emerge in fragile yet hopeful ways. I argue that these emotional encounters evidence desires to (re)make society at the local level, beyond normalised productions and practices of citizenship as bounded in/outsiders, in which a politics of engagement is enacted. Analysis suggests that the felt, interpersonal dimensions of such praxis, the emotionality of these specific notions belonging and relationality, push at the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship to register something more. This paper contributes to debate on everyday practices of citizenship as already taking place, and poses questions to how individual relations may anticipate collective change in how we live together in an era of super‐diversity.
    June 30, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12135   open full text
  • Relationalities and convergences in food security narratives: towards a place‐based approach.
    Roberta Sonnino, Terry Marsden, Ana Moragues‐Faus.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 27, 2016
    This paper addresses emerging calls for an enhanced relationality and convergence across different food security discourses. Based on a critical analysis of different narratives and concepts that have, over time, been deployed to address the food security problem, this paper asks: How, and to what extent, can the different narratives on food security and their different postulates be integrated to create a context that fosters closer connections between food system activities and more empowered relations between its actors? To address this question, the paper focuses on the governance frameworks embedded in different narratives on food security – i.e. the role attributed to different food system actors, their diverse views of rights and responsibility, and the types of interactions that are prioritised to achieve collective goals. The analysis exposes the limitations of conceptual frameworks as diverse as productivism, food sovereignty, livelihood security, the right‐to‐food, food democracy, food citizenship and community food security, which, we argue, tend to be locked into fixed levels of scale and generalised as well as oppositional assumptions. As the paper concludes, efforts to refine the food security agenda should start with a recognition of place as key and active meso‐level mediator – that is, as a progressive canvass for reassembling resources around more effective food production–consumption relations and as a multiscalar theoretical lens that offers the conceptual advantage of building far more complexity and diversity into aggregated food security debates.
    June 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12137   open full text
  • The neoliberal culturalist nation: voices from Italy.
    Marco Antonsich.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 17, 2016
    The impact of neoliberal globalisation on the nation‐state has been extensively studied in terms of politico‐economic restructuring and forms of governmentality and securitisation. While the former speaks of a process of de‐nationalisation, the latter brings about a re‐nationalisation process. In both cases, though, the focus has only been on one component of the nation‐state, that is, the state. The nation has either been treated as a given backdrop or merely ignored. This paper aims to bring the nation back as a way to better contextualise practices of socio‐spatial exclusion associated with one particular aspect of neoliberal globalisation, namely international migration. By analysing parliamentary debates in Italy between 1986 and 2014, the paper explores the intersections between neoliberalism and cultural essentialism as they conflate in what I call the ‘neoliberal culturalist nation’. This construct sheds light on the roles that a national culturalist imaginary plays in prompting and justifying governmental practices of securitisation, which in turn are implicated in the production of a vulnerable and expendable labour force. Moreover, it reveals how a neoliberal workfarist and individualised logic is functional to the ‘normalisation’ of the foreign immigrant, and the reproduction of the national titular group. My argument is that a national culturalist imaginary exists in a mutually reinforcing relation with, rather than in opposition to, neoliberalism. Far from keeping nation and state as ontologically distinct or theorising their decoupling, the paper points to a renewed spatial isomorphism between nation and state, which comes to epitomise the very process of current re‐nationalisation.
    June 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12132   open full text
  • New economy, neoliberal state and professionalised parenting: mothers’ labour market engagement and state support for social reproduction in class‐differentiated Britain.
    Sarah L Holloway, Helena Pimlott‐Wilson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 14, 2016
    Contemporary economic, political and social shifts in the Global North are reconfiguring the resolution of productive and reproductive labour. This paper explores how the emergence of the New Economy, the rolling out of the neoliberal state, and the professionalisation of parenting are transforming: (i) the landscape in which mothers with primary‐school‐aged children make decisions about how to secure a living and care for their children and (ii) what role they think the state should play in facilitating the provision of childcare to support working parenthood. The paper makes two innovative contributions to knowledge. First, it pinpoints strongly class‐differentiated changes in women's reconciliation of paid employment and caring work in contemporary Britain. The academically dominant one‐and‐a‐half breadwinner model is commonly reflected in middle‐class lifestyles, but has little analytical purchase for working‐class women in this study, as they are more likely to mother full‐time in state‐dependent family households. It is vital that we understand these changes in women's labour‐force participation and their implications for class inequality. Second, the paper concentrates academic attention on the sweeping expansion in the state's role in social reproduction through the provision of wraparound childcare (breakfast and afterschool clubs) in primary schools. Novel insights into parental attitudes reveal that middle‐class women demand choice and feel entitled to state‐sponsored childcare provision which underpins the feminisation of the labour force. Working‐class women value provision for others, but fear being coerced into using childcare instead of mothering in the home. Their responses reveal competing understandings of what counts as equality for women, and stark variations in different women's abilities to achieve this.
    June 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12130   open full text
  • Theorising suburban infrastructure: a framework for critical and comparative analysis.
    Jean‐Paul D Addie.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 07, 2016
    Suburban infrastructure holds a position of increasing geographic, political and conceptual importance in a rapidly urbanising world. However, the analytical significance of ‘suburban infrastructure’ risks becoming bogged down as a chaotic concept amid the maelstrom of contemporary peripheral urban growth and the explosion of interest in infrastructure in critical urban studies. This paper develops an open and flexible comparative theory of suburban infrastructure. I eschew concerns with definitional bounding to focus analytical attention on the relations between ‘the suburban’ (broadly considered) and multiple hard and soft infrastructures. These relations are captured in two ‘three‐dimensional’ dialectical triads: the first unpacks the modalities of infrastructure in, for and of suburbs; the second discloses the political economic processes (suburbanisation), lived experience (suburbanism) and dynamics of mediation internalised by particular suburban infrastructures. Bringing these conceptual frames together constructs a nine‐cell matrix that: (1) functions as a heuristic device providing conceptual clarity when discussing the suburbanity of infrastructures; (2) promotes comparative analysis across diverse global suburban contexts; and (3) develops tools to foreground the dialectical relations internalised in the concrete sociospatial modalities of suburban infrastructure. The paper shows that suburban infrastructure can only ever be partially suburban as a result of its co‐constituted and over‐determined production. I conclude by suggesting how the proposed approach may be mobilised to reimagine and reclaim suburban infrastructure as a crucial context and vital mechanism underpinning a progressive polycentric suburban spatial polity.
    June 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12121   open full text
  • Mapping coastal land use changes 1965–2014: methods for handling historical thematic data.
    Alexis J Comber, Huw Davies, David Pinder, John B Whittow, Adrian Woodhall, Sarah C M Johnson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 07, 2016
    This paper describes a national analysis of coastal land use change in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It compares a survey conducted by volunteers in 1965 with the 2014 update created using digital topographic data and aerial photography in an open source GIS. The paper reviews the origins and impacts of differences in the way that land use classes are measured and reported, and highlights a generic issue when comparing thematic data. This is, that thematic data are frequently subject to changes in the way that classes are conceived, measured and classified with the result that similarly named classes in different datasets may have very different spatial extents with very different meanings and underlying semantics, even when there is little difference in reality. The sources and nature of such variation in landscape conceptualisations are discussed and placed into the context of historical GIS (HGIS) analyses of thematic change. The critical issue is the need to separate actual differences on the ground from artefactual differences arising from methodological inconsistencies to support robust statistical analyses. A set of rubrics for updating historical thematic data is suggested to minimise the potential for such inconsistencies. These are applied to the National Trust's 1965 Neptune coastal land use survey and its 2014 update to quantify land use changes. The results describe the magnitude and direction of change, provide insights into the developmental pressures experienced at the coast and demonstrate the positive impacts of the Trust's management. Of potentially wider research interest to the HGIS and related research communities is the consideration of methods for mapping and quantifying thematic and areal changes. This is an underdeveloped research area in HGIS, when compared with the extensive methods for dealing with counts and boundary changes (e.g. census areas), but one that is critical for robust analysis of historical cartographic data.
    June 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12128   open full text
  • ‘Mortgaged lives’: the biopolitics of debt and housing financialisation.
    Melissa García‐Lamarca, Maria Kaika.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 01, 2016
    The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the need to move beyond a policy‐ and macroeconomics‐based analysis of housing financialisation. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to how funnelling land‐related capital flows goes hand in hand with signing off significant parts of future labour, decisionmaking capacity and well‐being to mortgage debt repayments. The paper offers two key insights. First, it exemplifies how macroeconomic and policy changes could not have led to the financialisation of housing markets without a parallel biopolitical process that mobilised mortgage contracts to integrate the social reproduction of the workforce into speculative global real‐estate practices. Second, it expands the framework of analysis of emerging literature on financialisation and subjectification. Focusing on the mortgage defaults and evictions crisis in Spain, we document how during Spain's 1997–2007 real‐estate boom the promise of mortgages as a means to optimise income and wealth enrolled livelihoods into cycles of global financial and real‐estate speculation, as home security and future wealth became directly dependent on the fluctuations of financial products, interest rates and capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. When, after 2008 unemployment escalated and housing prices collapsed, mortgages became a punitive technology that led to at least 500 000 foreclosures and over 250 000 evictions in Spain.
    June 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12126   open full text
  • Geographic space: an ancient story retold.
    Oleg A Smirnov.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 31, 2016
    Location, as the fundamental concept in geography, is important for all sciences that study objects and behaviours in geo‐space. Although other disciplines are capable of formulating definitions of location and geo‐space, they nevertheless look up to geography to devise and articulate a comprehensive and practical concept of ‘everything geographic’. Essentially quantitative in its concern, geography has yet to quantify the concept of geo‐space in order to both fulfil the ancient Greeks' vision of geography and advance it for use in other disciplines. We revisit the epistemological and broader philosophical principles of geo‐space and apply these principles to identifying and quantifying the key aspects of geo‐space: topos, choros and geos. Rather than following the narrow numerical tradition of quantitative geography and GIS, we adopt broader philosophical perspective of Kant on Quantity (Unity, Multiplicity, Totality) and argue that the ‘natural’ extension of the classical approach to geo‐space necessitates its further philosophical quantification. We show that the ancient Greeks' concept maps into locations (topos), spatial relations (choros) and topology (geos). Extending the concept further necessitates the use of the language of set theory for defining basic concepts. We show that the result is both tractable and quantifiable, connects classical with modern and completes the definition of geo‐space on all three levels of Quantity (unity, multiplicity, totality). We demonstrate the tractability of thus defined concept by reinterpreting Tobler's First Law of geography in theoretically sound terms. We show that a refined, modern concept of geo‐space is both philosophically fulfilling and practically useful – some properties of geo‐space are too important to be ignored or distorted.
    May 31, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12127   open full text
  • Geography and the new social contract for global change research.
    Noel Castree.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 19, 2016
    Anxious about the failure of decisionmakers to significantly reduce ‘the human impact’ on Earth, many global change researchers are looking for ways and means to influence public policy, business strategy and civil society more strongly. As part of this, there is a greater emphasis on understanding and altering the ‘human dimensions’ of global environmental change. A number of physical and society‐environment geographers are involved in this endeavour, building on some valuable past achievements. But what lies ahead? I address this question by examining the rich idea of a ‘social contract’ – one little used in disciplinary debates about Geography's past, present and future, but now relatively common in certain wider discussions of anthropogenic global change. I suggest that there are currents of thinking in contemporary Geography that can offer something both new and much needed in the world of global change research. That ‘something’ is not ever more integrated, accurate analysis of dynamic, coupled human–environment interactions – as if we live in just one world requiring ever more ‘joined‐up’ and granular description, explanation and prediction. Instead, it is an approach to research that eschews ontological holism, epistemological monism and the fact–value dualism. This approach suggests that taking the human dimensions of environmental change seriously requires a new kind of global change research that is at once overtly political and intellectually plural. Far from being a charter for ‘bias’ or ‘relativism’, I show that this approach expresses the rich senses of responsibility, accountability and representation contained in the version of a new social contract I advocate here. A wider implication of my argument is that Geography needs new stories about the nature and merits of ‘intra‐disciplinarity’, ones better attuned to the role of research in fostering democracy in our ‘post‐normal’ times. Thinking afresh about how research should influence society promises to alter many geographers’ sense of self while usefully repurposing global change research across several disciplines.
    May 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12125   open full text
  • Africa's passive revolution: crisis in Malawi.
    Andrew Brooks, Alex Loftus.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 06, 2016
    Recent protest movements in sub‐Saharan Africa have generally failed to effect progressive transformations. Efforts to achieve social change have been frustrated by governing elites that continue to utilise their vacillating and unequal relationships with the external environment to sustain power. Although the leading figures may change, the dominant African class can re‐establish leadership through new alliances with domestic and international networks of capital. To understand such ‘change‐without‐change’, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature on Antonio Gramsci's development of ‘passive revolution’. The comparative character of Gramscian analysis enables his philosophy of praxis to be translated into very different historical and geographical settings. With this in mind we draw together recent engagements with passive revolution from Geography, Politics and African Studies. In particular we develop Jean‐François Bayart's notion of extraversion, while considering it in relation to more recent philological engagements with Gramsci. Our empirical focus is the politics of transition in Malawi. In his second term in office, the autocratic and unpopular president, Bingu wa Mutharika, implemented economic policies that ran against neoliberal orthodoxy and suppressed protest during a period of crisis. Mutharika was replaced, following his death in 2012, by Joyce Banda, a previously marginalised vice‐president, who nurtured a re‐engagement with transnational capital. Working through the state, Banda led a transformation from on high and moved to impose new economically liberal policies, including a major currency devaluation, which reduced living standards for many. We draw our empirical material from Chancellor College, a major site of protest against Mutharika in 2011. Evidence from interviews with staff and students demonstrates how two episodes of revolution/restoration in Malawi, a country distant from the western historical experience, can be interpreted through Gramsci's socially differentiated understanding of politics.
    May 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12120   open full text
  • Modelling the duration of residence and plans for future residential relocation: a multilevel analysis.
    Michael J Thomas, John C H Stillwell, Myles I Gould.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 28, 2016
    Among the multitude of studies of factors that determine residential (im)mobility, relatively little attention has been paid to the length of time that people spend in a particular location and the importance of duration of stay for future relocation propensities. This study uses a large and detailed commercial survey sample of individuals in England and Wales and an appropriately tailored statistical approach to uncover new insights into the multilevel and spatially heterogeneous interactions that exist between residential duration, place attachment and plans for future residential relocation. We demonstrate how an individual's residential duration, as an essential ingredient for the accumulation of social capital and place‐based attachment, is critical for informing plans for future (im)mobility. After controlling for a range of individual and contextual covariates, the predicted probability of planning a residential relocation is found to increase initially with duration of stay, to a peak after 4–5 years, and then to decline as the length of duration increases. However, there is evidence of strong geographical variation in this relationship, with some neighbourhoods being characterised by stable or even increasing propensities for movement with duration. The paper pays particular attention to the importance of wider neighbourhood dynamics (composition, selective sorting and population (in)stability), suggesting that they too play an important role in mediating duration‐of‐stay effects for individuals. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for researchers and policy practitioners interested in community dynamics, the development/accumulation of social capital and place attachment/rootedness, to give due consideration to multilevel durations of residence and, more broadly, the inherently spatial and temporal ties that bind individuals to place.
    April 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12123   open full text
  • Time, rhythm and the creative economy.
    Phil Jones, Saskia Warren.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 25, 2016
    Creative practice is fetishised in the policy discourse of post‐industrial economies as a driver of growth and social inclusion. Conceptually, we advance Lefebvre's incomplete rhythmanalysis project by combining the ideas of dressage and arrhythmia to give novel insights into contradictions within the contemporary creative economy. Our analysis shows dressage (practices learned through repetition) being used as a means to impose unsustainable (‘arrhythmic’) patterns of working within the creative sector. Cultural intermediaries, practitioners whose work focuses on engaging communities with the benefits of the creative economy, are today finding themselves chasing short‐term, bureaucratic demands on their time, which operate counter to the rhythms of creative production. This paper draws on interviews and activity diaries kept by intermediaries collected as part of a large AHRC‐funded project. We conclude that the rhythmic regimes being imposed on intermediaries by policymakers and funders are in fact driving out the very creative practices they are intended to foster. This contradiction has major implications for growth, social inclusion and wellbeing in an age of neoliberal austerity.
    April 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12122   open full text
  • Institutional thickening and innovation: reflections on the remapping of the Great Bear Rainforest.
    Alex Clapp, Roger Hayter, Julia Affolderbach, Laura Guzman.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 24, 2016
    As a response to forest conflict, contemporary remapping refers to re‐evaluations of resource values, new and diverse forms of governance among stakeholders, and compromises within patterns of land use that give greater emphasis to environmental and cultural priorities. This paper elaborates the processes of remapping by examining the role of institutional innovation in conflict resolution, with particular reference to the iconic Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia. After years of conflict and protest, peace in the Great Bear Rainforest was heralded by an interim agreement in 2006, with final ratification likely in 2016. Conceptually, a four‐legged stakeholder model identifies the main institutional interests and their interactions through learning and bargaining. New forms of governance were created to bring the stakeholders together in constructive dialogue and then to reach and implement acceptable bargains. Analytically, the paper examines how this agreement has worked in practice by reflecting on the emergence of novel institutions that integrate the interests of key stakeholders. The discussion identifies six bilateral negotiations between: industrial and environmental interests; federal and provincial governments and aboriginal peoples; government and environmental interests; government and industry; industry and aboriginal peoples; and environmental groups and local communities. The remapping process has produced a thickening architecture of institutions that remain experimental even as they seek to promote sustainability, resilience and legitimacy.
    March 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12119   open full text
  • Privatising asylum: neoliberalisation, depoliticisation and the governance of forced migration.
    Jonathan Darling.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 23, 2016
    This paper critically examines the political geography of asylum accommodation in the UK, arguing that in the regulation of housing and support services we witness the depoliticisation of asylum. In 2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers, meaning the end of local authority control over asylum housing. This paper explores the impact of this shift and argues that the result is the production of an asylum market, in which neoliberal norms of market competition, economic efficiency and dispersed responsibility are central. In drawing on interviews with local authorities, politicians and asylum support services in four cities, the paper argues that the privatisation of accommodation has seen the emergence of new assemblages of authority, policy and governance. When combined with a market‐oriented transfer of responsibilities, depoliticisation acts to constrain the possibilities of political debate and to predetermine the contours of those policy discussions that do take place. In making this case, the paper challenges the closures of work on post‐politics, and argues for an exploration of the situated modalities of practice through which forms of depoliticisation interact with, and are constituted by, processes of neoliberalisation. In this context, the framing of asylum seekers as a ‘burden’ emerges as a discursive and symbolic achievement of the neoliberal politics of asylum accommodation. Framing asylum seekers as a burden represents both a move to position asylum as a specific and managerial issue, and at the same time reiterates an economic account of asylum as a question of resource allocation, cost and productivity.
    March 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12118   open full text
  • Beyond the nation and into the state: identity, belonging, and the ‘hyper‐border’.
    Paul Benjamin Richardson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 15, 2016
    The case of the disputed Southern Kuril Islands/Northern Territories is used to introduce the term ‘hyper‐border’ in order to examine the instrumental and pragmatic nature of identity. It seeks to capture how, on one of Russia's most isolated borders, the quotidian realities and challenges of life ‘beyond’ the state had profound implications for how discourses around state, nation, sovereignty and identity are conceived. During the 1990s these islands became a site neither fully within, nor without the state. As the functions of the Russian state diminished and the border with Japan dematerialised, it was the Japanese state that came to provide welfare, infrastructure and economic opportunities for the islanders. This paper attempts to capture how the identity of islanders became articulated not on ethnic, religious or linguistic grounds, but on a purely pragmatic desire for a better life. Among some Kuril islanders an alternative vision of belonging was formulated, which sought to take them beyond the nation and into the state. This paper also traces the counter‐function of the hyper‐border and how an immense material and discursive response to these circumstances by the Russian state led to the recovery of the meaning of these distant islands. On a site between sovereignty regimes, this idea of the hyper‐border attempts to capture how the fluctuating political authority of the state can render identity as contingent, malleable and instrumental.
    March 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12116   open full text
  • Urban civic pride and the new localism.
    Tom Collins.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 15, 2016
    Civic pride relates to how places promote and defend local identity and autonomy. It is often championed as a key value and aspiration of local government. This paper argues that civic pride has been under‐examined in geography, and in particular the emotional meanings of pride need to be better understood. In response, I present an emotional analysis of civic pride and discuss its role in British cities, particularly in the context of urban regeneration and the UK's new localism agenda. In the latter part of the paper I provide a case study of Nottingham in England, where I employ a discourse analysis of recent urban policy and local media to examine how civic pride is being mobilised and contested in the city. Examining civic pride is important because it shapes and reflects the political values that local governments stand for and provides a basis for thinking about how emotions are used strategically (and problematically) in urban policy. This paper complements and challenges existing literature on cities by showing how civic pride shapes, but also obscures, the ideological politics of local government and how, as geographers, we might consider more seriously the ways forms of power, identity and inequality are reproduced and contested through emotions such as pride.
    March 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12113   open full text
  • Divided we rise: politics, architecture and vertical cityscapes at opposite ends of Jerusalem.
    Gillad Rosen, Igal Charney.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 15, 2016
    This paper explores how planning, politics and architecture work together to socially produce new vertical cityscapes. Our contention is that the inception and development of high‐rises are interlocked into the narrations of cities, reflecting cultural values and social cleavages, political interests and planning agendas, symbolic connotations and everyday life experiences. By using a mixed‐method approach, which includes the analysis of official documents and interviews with decisionmakers, planners and observers, we examine two trajectories of tall‐building development at opposite ends of Jerusalem. In Israeli West Jerusalem, the development of high‐rises is part of a neo‐liberal growth package that seeks to stimulate economic activity, rebrand the city and increase the city's competiveness at national and global scales while evading highly contentious religious‐cultural cleavages. At the other end of the city, the construction of tall buildings in grey spaces symbolically represents a Palestinian revolt against Israeli restrictive planning and development policies, but also addresses day‐to‐day needs and changing preferences of the Palestinian population. Our analysis uses verticality as a representation of social relations demonstrating manipulations of power and legitimacy. In Jerusalem, planning and development of ordinary high‐rises next to recently completed icons, the Bridge of Strings and the Separation Wall, epitomises a dialogue that unmistakably promotes political agendas and produces symbolic meanings. This dialogue can either support the original values and aims of urban icons or challenge them.
    March 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12112   open full text
  • ‘A band of public‐spirited women’: middle‐class female philanthropy and citizenship in Bolton, Lancashire before 1918.
    Francesca Moore.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 15, 2016
    In the 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the cultural ideal of private and public as separate spheres and a lack of formal voting rights, many middle‐class women engaged in philanthropic and social work outside the home. Taking as its focus a group of middle‐class women in Bolton, Lancashire, this paper conducts a prosopography, or group biography, in order to shed light on female citizenship and make a historical contribution to literature on citizenship beyond voting rights. The paper uses archive traces to reconstruct the experience of the female philanthropist and understand her motivations. The focus of the paper is a new theoretical approach to women's citizenship in the early 20th century. Using Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, or life politics, the paper reconceptualises women's social work as a form of biopolitical patriotism that was the basis of a scalar claim to citizenship. This historical evidence from Bolton reveals that biopolitical action was not solely the preserve of the state. Women claimed fitness for citizenship and the vote by nation‐building, carrying out work that shaped children into the citizens of the future and safeguarded the moral and physical health of the nation.
    March 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12114   open full text
  • Assemblage thinking and actor‐network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross‐fertilisations.
    Martin Müller, Carolin Schurr.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 15, 2016
    This paper shows that assemblage thinking and actor‐network theory (ANT) have much more to gain from each other than debate has so far conceded. Exploring the conjunctions and disjunctions between the two approaches, it proposes three cross‐fertilisations that have implications for understanding three key processes in our socio‐material world: stabilisation, change and affect. First, the conceptual vocabulary of ANT can enrich assemblage thinking with an explicitly spatial account of the ways in which assemblages are drawn together, reach across space and are stabilised. Second, each approach is better attuned to conceptualising a particular kind of change in socio‐material relations: ANT describes change without rupture, or fluidity, whereas assemblage thinking describes change with rupture, or events. Third and last, assemblage thinking could fashion ANT with a greater sensitivity for the productive role of affect in bringing socio‐material relations into being through the production of desire/wish (désir). We demonstrate the implications of these cross‐fertilisations for empirical work through a case study of the global market for assisted reproduction.
    March 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12117   open full text
  • Border militarisation and the re‐articulation of sovereignty.
    Reece Jones, Corey Johnson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. February 11, 2016
    This paper identifies a global trend towards hardened, militarised borders through the use of military technologies, hardware and personnel. In contrast to claims of waning state sovereignty, drawing on detailed case studies from the United States and European Union, we argue the militarisation of borders represents a re‐articulation and expansion of state sovereignty into new spaces and arenas. We argue that the nexus of military‐security contractors, dramatically increased security budgets, and the discourse of threats from terrorism and immigration is resulting in a profound shift in border security. The construction of barriers, deployment of more personnel and the investment in a wide range of military and security technologies from drones to smart border technologies that attempt to monitor, identify and prevent unauthorised movements are emblematic of this shift. We link this increasing militarisation to dehumanisation of migrant others and to the increasing mortality in border spaces. By documenting this trend and identifying a range of different practices that are included under the rubric of militarisation, this paper is both a call for nuanced interpretation and more sustained investigation of the expansion of the military into the policing of borders.
    February 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12115   open full text
  • For real: land as capital and commodity.
    Brett Christophers.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 28, 2016
    With the aim of helping to revivify a stalled geographical literature on the place of land in capitalist political economies, this article presents a critique of the popular idea that land can be usefully conceptualised as a ‘fictitious’ form of capital or commodity. The critique is based primarily on a close and critical consideration of the grounds on which the identifiers and theorists of such fictitiousness – Marx/Harvey in the case of capital, Polanyi in the case of the commodity – distinguished it from ‘real’ variants. Those grounds, the article argues, are tenuous. And, far from disabling us, treating land as no more or less real than other forms of capital and commodity can empower us in productively revisiting and centring the question of land's political economy – a crucial undertaking in a world where the materiality of land to social relations is writ increasingly large.
    January 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12111   open full text
  • Self‐annihilation, nuclear play and West Germany's compulsion to repeat.
    Ian Klinke.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 22, 2016
    This article investigates Fallex 66, the first of a string of NATO war games that the West German government played in its command bunker between 1966 and 1989. During this exercise, the Bonn Republic simulated nuclear strikes on its ‘own’ targets and the resupply of NATO forces after a nuclear war on German territory. While in line with West German deterrence at the time, Fallex was read in East Berlin as an excessive game of playful self‐annihilation in ways that invite a psychoanalytic interpretation. This article explores Fallex 66 not simply as an enactment of Cold War deterrence, but a Freudian ‘fort–da’ game, a traumatic re‐enactment that was tellingly set in the subterranean space of a German bunker. West Germany's compulsion to self‐abandon, I suggest, has important implications for how we understand the nature of geopolitical games.
    January 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12108   open full text
  • Encountering geopolitical pasts in the present: young people's everyday engagements with memory in the Falkland Islands.
    Matthew C Benwell.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. January 20, 2016
    Young people's geopolitical subjectivities are heavily informed by past events in ways that have not been sufficiently acknowledged in the existing literature on youth geopolitics. This paper demonstrates how work on memory can be brought into dialogue with critical geopolitics to identify the assemblage of socio‐spatial practices that shape how young people learn about geopolitics. It interrogates what memories and their attendant landscape manifestations and rituals ‘do’ to young people growing up in the Falkland Islands, a society that continues to live with the legacies of a sovereignty dispute that triggered the Falklands War just over 30 years ago. Young Islanders’ embodied and relational encounters with memory through the surrounding environment and adults are shown to play an important role in shaping their perceptions of contemporary geopolitical relations with Argentina. These can both reproduce and/or rework collective memory narratives, emphasising the importance of looking beyond mnemonic discourses manifest in institutional and official spaces. The paper makes a conceptual contribution to debates about young people's agency in relation to geopolitics. While children and young people are considered active agents capable of forming their own views, they are also presented with potent memories of past geopolitical eras that propagate certain understandings of international relations. Engaging scholarship on memory can help address the tensions inherent to recognising children and young people as social and (geo)political actors, within the context of structures, institutions and relationships that have a strong bearing on how their agency is expressed. In a methodological sense the paper illustrates how research might productively incorporate the adults who are influential in the formation of young people's geopolitical subjectivities.
    January 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/tran.12109   open full text
  • Mobilising the elective diaspora: US–German academic exchanges since 1945.
    Heike Jöns, Elizabeth Mavroudi, Michael Heffernan.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 28, 2014
    This article responds to recent calls by geographers for more critical, non‐essentialist and flexible conceptualisations of diaspora by developing the notion of an ‘elective diaspora’. This concept is elaborated using the case study of a specific knowledge diaspora, namely visiting researchers from the USA in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who were funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a research agency re‐established by the FRG in 1953. The analysis shows how the Humboldt programmes for transnational academic mobility and collaboration drew disproportionately on US‐based academics with biographical ties to German‐speaking central Europe, which has contributed to the proliferation of US–German knowledge networks in the post‐war period and prompts us to reconsider existing notions of diaspora in two ways. First, we emphasise the nuances of the researchers' emotional attachment to German language and culture. We point out that this cannot only be caused by biographical ties through birth and ancestry but also by other family relations, partnerships, friendships, work/living experiences, language skills and cultural knowledge. Second, we stress the elective nature of diasporic identities and belonging by emphasising that individuals can choose whether they wish to support diasporic networks of one or more communities and cultures they feel connected to. We suggest that this civic rather than ‘ethno’‐territorial understanding of diasporic networks has wider relevance for theorisations of diaspora, for studies of transnational mobility and knowledge transfer, and for university and public policies seeking to attract talent from abroad.
    May 28, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12062   open full text
  • Assessing the spatial structure of population variables in England and Wales.
    Christopher D Lloyd.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 20, 2014
    Areas within England and Wales have population profiles that make them distinct from other locales; some areas have lower unemployment rates than others, while, in some places, there is a greater mix of ethnic groups than elsewhere. Thus, the degree of difference between areas differs geographically and between population sub‐groups. Being able to measure change in these differences is crucial in assessing whether the population has become more or less similar over time. The spatial distribution of the population by, for example, ethnicity or employment status can be characterised and the resulting measures show how the population is geographically organised, and how this changes through time. For example, spatial concentrations of the population by age may be less obvious locally (e.g. within a town or city) or regionally (e.g. the north west of England) than by housing tenure. This paper makes two key contributions: (i) it introduces methods for the analysis of spatial distributions of population sub‐groups and (ii) enhances our understanding of the characteristics of population sub‐groups in England and Wales and how they have changed over time. Based on Census data for Output Areas, the analysis uses the index of dissimilarity, Moran's I autocorrelation coefficient and the variogram to measure (spatial) variation in variables representing population sub‐groups by age, ethnic group, housing tenure, car or van ownership, qualifications, employment, limiting long term illness and National Statistics Socio‐economic Classification. The analysis shows that, between 2001 and 2011, unevenness in most population sub‐groups reduced and the populations in individual Census zones across England and Wales became more similar. Neighbouring Census zones also became more similar (more ‘clustered’). The findings suggest that there were decreased differences both within and between regions for many population variables between 2001 and 2011.
    May 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12061   open full text
  • Capitalism and the production of uneven bodies: women, motherhood and food distribution in Britain c.1850–1914.
    Sébastien Rioux.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 20, 2014
    This article argues that processes of social reproduction are central to our understanding of body formation under capitalism. Articulated through a feminist historical materialist framework founded on a social ontology that recognises the material foundation of social life as constituted of both productive and reproductive activities, this paper develops the concept of uneven body as a more holistic approach integrating into corporeal geography a social reproduction lens. I explore the social and historical analytical capacity of the concept through a study of food distribution in Britain c.1850–1914 in order to reveal how certain bodies absorbed, mediated and embodied capital contradictions between production and social reproduction.
    May 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12063   open full text
  • Migration, society and globalisation: introduction to Virtual Issue.
    Adrian J Bailey, Brenda S A Yeoh.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 14, 2014
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    May 14, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12056   open full text
  • On the matter of forgetting and ‘memory returns’.
    Hamzah Muzaini.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 08, 2014
    Much geographical attention is paid to issues of memory and its relationship to place. Yet, there has been less disciplinary interrogation of what goes on when one forgets. This paper argues that forgetting, as it involves active embodied, material and spatial practices of producing absences, is just as salient as its counterpart, and worthy of analysis on its own terms. Drawing on the personal experiences of individuals who went through the Second World War in Malaysia, this paper first examines individuals' strategies for obscuring if not obliterating memories that are personally traumatic and injurious to well‐being. The paper then shows how these memories can re‐emerge, frequently in an involuntary or unexpected fashion, despite attempts to render them passé. In doing so, the paper espouses forgetting as a ‘productive’ practice; yet such practice is frequently incomplete as the material limits – as well as supports – explicit efforts to keep the past in the past. More broadly, it challenges the valorisation of ‘presence’ in human–landscape interactions to expose the ways ‘absence’ too is imbricated in the everyday milieu.
    May 08, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12060   open full text
  • ‘Peopling’ geographies of peace: the role of the military in peacebuilding in the Philippines.
    Chih Yuan Woon.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 30, 2014
    Geographical forays into peace research have flourished in recent years. Without denying the value of these works in highlighting the discipline's normative and practical contributions towards peace, this paper calls for further interrogations into the peoples who are involved in the (re)making of peaceful geographies. Using the case study of the military in the southern Philippines, I showcase the efforts of a particular group of soldiers in harnessing coalitional formations with local communities and NGOs for peaceful outcomes. Specifically, such collaborative partnerships enabled meaningful dialogues and negotiations to take place so as to pave the way for the attainment of truly sustainable peace. Hence, I contend that moving towards ‘peopled’ accounts of peace can proffer insights into the relationships and interactions between actors and how these facilitate transformative possibilities for peace. This will in turn create space for reflecting on the motivations and pathways in practising and realising peace. Such an actor‐centred approach to peace is particularly important at this political juncture when attempts are made to shift geography away from its traditional interest in warfare so as to grant new visibility to alternative peace cultures – it not only highlights the discipline's ethical responsibility towards peace and nonviolence but also facilitates academic action that is embodied and engaged.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12059   open full text
  • Culturally articulated neoliberalisation: corporate social responsibility and the capture of indigenous legitimacy in New Caledonia.
    Leah S Horowitz.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 30, 2014
    This paper expands our understandings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a form of roll‐out neoliberalism, building on analyses of CSR initiatives as elements of a capitalist system actively working to create its own social regularisation – to secure a socio‐politico‐economic context supporting capitalist development. Using an ethnographic analysis of the rise and fall of an indigenous protest group that targeted a multinational mining project in New Caledonia, this paper has two theoretical aims. First, it builds on literature that analyses neoliberalism as ‘articulating’ with particular politico‐economic conditions in order to argue that such articulation is also, necessarily, cultural. I describe how the mining company undercut and ultimately co‐opted local resistance, largely by successfully capturing culturally‐based ideologies of customary and indigenous legitimacy. Thus, neoliberalisation's articulations may involve attempts to capture not only formal but also informal regulation or regulators, through direct personal benefits and also indirectly through the capture of culturally valued ideologies. These ideologies, in turn, are caught up in culturally grounded hegemonic processes. This leads to the paper's second theoretical aim, which is to explore what happens when different forms of hegemony, based in distinct cultural formations, encounter each other as well as counter‐hegemonic forces. In engaging directly with customary authorities rather than exclusively with activists, the company re‐legitimised itself by delegitimising its activist opponents, repositioning them as subordinates within their own culturally informed social hierarchy, and reinstating customary authorities’ privileged hegemonic status. Thus, multiple, culturally distinct hegemonic processes may co‐exist and interact; here, they reinforced each other by suppressing counter‐hegemonic activities. However, some customary authorities still sympathised with the protestors’ aims and perceived potential threats from the company's expanding economic power. I end by suggesting that counter‐hegemonic possibilities reside in the perpetual dynamism of cultures.
    April 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12057   open full text
  • The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process.
    Nicholas Blomley.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 28, 2014
    Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in settler societies, such as British Columbia, Canada. To understand the work that property does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (ethical, practical, historical, semantic and so on). Yet for property to function, some of these relationships must be bracketed. That which is designated as inside a boundary must be partly disentangled from that identified as outside. Property practice and theory helps organise these exclusions. Yet this is not disinterested: Property's frames, therefore, can become political battle lines. Drawing from a modern‐day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial governments in British Columbia, Canada, I trace the ways in which the state has sought to disentangle property from its recently re‐emergent colonial entanglements. One of the ways in which it has tried to do this is to insist that First Nations hold their treaty settlement lands as a form of fee simple, this being bracketed as a clear and certain entitlement, replacing a messier ‘Aboriginal title’. First Nations negotiators, however, have pushed back, re‐entangling fee simple in culture, politics and place. I explore the performative use of categorisation on the part of the Crown in their attempt at re‐framing fee simple as ‘simple’. Apart from documenting this understudied postcolonial moment, I also encourage geographers to recognise the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorise property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments.
    April 28, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12058   open full text
  • Who lives, who dies, who cares? Valuing life through the disability‐adjusted life year measurement.
    Emma Whyte Laurie.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 13, 2014
    Agamben's work on bare life, sovereignty and spaces of exception has become widely drawn upon by those seeking to understand the topologies of abandonment within contemporary society. While the majority of work has focused on the spectacular forms of violence and extraordinary spaces of exception, neoliberal ideology has been germinating a new version of biopolitics and as such creating new sacred populations, new camps and new sovereign powers. This paper seeks to bring Agamben out from the battlefield, to employ his thinking as a means to understand the systemic violence conducted through a biopolitical regime increasingly governed by the logic of profit accumulation. Focusing on vector‐borne diseases, the paper demonstrates a perpetual devaluation of lives within a prevailing economic system that searches out, and targets, ‘profitable’ populations, as exemplified by the current pharmaceutical industry and supporting apparatus that pursues the protection of profits over the preservation of lives. This abandonment within economic markets has spilled over into the arena of global health where equity is increasingly superseded by a goal of efficiency. Through a wider critique of the disability‐adjusted life year (DALY) measurement (a calculation drawn upon to justify interventions, and frequently invoked under the rubric of ‘cost‐effectiveness’), this paper argues that DALYs are symptomatic of a wider shift within global health governance and constitutive of a new biopolitical regime – where the body is incorporated within political and economic systems – by judging an individual's ‘worth’ through their economic productivity.
    April 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12055   open full text
  • Claiming spaces: British Muslim negotiations of urban citizenship in an era of new migration.
    Deborah Phillips.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 31, 2014
    This paper seeks to complicate understandings of British Muslim citizenship that have so far largely been framed in terms of British Muslim negotiations with the majority white British population and its institutions. Building on the notion of the city as a lived space, the paper explores how, in an era of growing international migration and social difference, everyday negotiations between British Muslims and new migrants bring formal constructions of citizenship (as status) and the performative expression of citizenship (as a lived experience and the practice of belonging) to the fore. Inspired by the work of theorists on urban citizenship, living with difference and emerging constructions of emotional citizenship, the paper underscores the salience of the neighbourhood as a performative space implicated in citizenship formation and the sedimentation of feelings of belonging. Drawing on encounters between established British Muslims and new Eastern European migrants to Bradford, the paper emphasises the significance of neighbourhood as a site of struggle, citizenship claims, and a social, political and emotional space of citizen formation at a time of geopolitical change. Central to the argument are the challenges posed to British Muslims' understandings of ‘self as citizen’ that arise from encounters with mobile, white, Christian bodies settling in spaces appropriated and marked as Muslim. The findings engage with debates about the place of British Muslims in shifting constructions of British citizenship and explore implications for politicised discourses on community, security, integration and the capacity to live with difference for those who are all too often discursively cast as ‘not good enough’ British citizens.
    March 31, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12054   open full text
  • Mapping genres and geopolitics: the case of Israel.
    Izhak Schnell, Christine Leuenberger.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 20, 2014
    Maps have long been used as tools to dispossess the colonised, establish sovereign control over territories and help engineer states. They not only serve as national logos that encourage commitment to a nation, but cartographic representations also inform scientific and engineering knowledge and practices that are crucial for state‐building. With the rise of neoliberalism and the increasing dissemination of open‐source mapping software since the 1980s, however, more and more governmental and non‐governmental organisations and interest groups are designing maps and disseminating geopolitical visions. Controversies over the territorial contours of Israel among Israeli governmental and non‐governmental organisations exemplify how maps can become discursive repertories in political debates over the contours of national territory in a neoliberal mapping environment. Their cartographic claims‐making reveal cartographic mapping genres that are commonly used by map designers who work in politically contentious regions, in which cartography has become a widespread tool to make politics. This paper draws on various conceptual traditions, ranging from the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, sociolinguistics, visual studies and critical cartography in order to identify recurring genres of maps that are used in territorial and geopolitical controversies. The types of maps produced embody different levels of institutional and scientific authority; they possess different substances and designs, and they fulfil varied functions. Given the ever more varied and increasingly user‐defined mapping environment in neoliberal economies, it is important to understand generic map‐types and their use of visual rhetoric in order to persuade a public of certain geopolitical visions.
    March 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12052   open full text
  • A realistic assessment of fluvial and coastal flood risk in England and Wales.
    Edmund C Penning‐Rowsell.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 20, 2014
    Accurate national‐scale economic assessments of flood risk should, first, allow policy and resource allocation to be determined sensibly by relating both to the scale of that risk and, secondly, provide a benchmark against which any possible future changes in risk can be assessed. This paper critiques the UK's National Flood Risk Assessment (NAFRA), its development for England and Wales over a decade, and its evaluation of economic fluvial and coastal flood risk. We find, when comparing the results with other data on flooding and the damage caused over 20 +  years (including insurance claims), that NAFRA appears to overestimate the economic risk by between four‐ and five‐fold (i.e. at c.£1.1bn p.a., as opposed to a central estimate here of £0.25bn p.a.). The flood problem faced is still serious, and may be increasing, but we suggest that an exaggeration has become embedded. The assessment models and their data need further enhancement if this situation is to be corrected and a realistic assessment made of the scale of the current fluvial and coastal flood risk. Only then will the results be adequately credible and hence useful.
    March 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/tran.12053   open full text
  • New spaces for nature: the re‐territorialisation of biodiversity conservation under neoliberalism in the UK.
    William M Adams, Ian D Hodge, Lindsey Sandbrook.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 18, 2013
    Biodiversity conservation is a fundamentally spatial practice. For more than a century, conservation's leading strategy has been the establishment of protected areas. Governance by the state has been central to conservation's claim to territory. In the UK, the established approach to biodiversity conservation concentrated on spatial strategies of territorialisation to secure particular outcomes in relatively small pieces of land, set aside as protected areas. However, this strategy has begun to change, and conservation's expanding territorial claims have been expressed through new models of large‐scale conservation. A series of projects developed by non‐governmental conservation organisations seek to extend conservation management over larger areas of land. In this paper we consider these developments as a form of re‐territorialisation, a reframing and extension of conservation's spatial claims. We describe how conservation's ambitions have been reformed and extended and discuss evidence on the growth of large‐scale biodiversity conservation projects in the UK. We then consider the implications of these changes in the light of the neoliberalisation of conservation.
    December 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12050   open full text
  • Shrinking the welfare state: the structure, geography and impact of British government benefit cuts.
    Chris Hamnett.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 18, 2013
    Welfare spending is currently a key element of government expenditure in western countries and it has grown considerably since the Second World War. But there have been calls for cuts in spending that have intensified since the onset of the financial crisis and the stress on austerity. This has been associated with a shift in the nature of welfare policy to what has been termed ‘workfare’, where benefits are increasingly means tested, time limited or financially capped and contingent on recipients seeking work. This shift has been seen in Britain since 1997 but has intensified since the election of the coalition government, who have instigated the most radical reshaping of welfare policy since 1945. The paper argues that geographers should pay more attention to the geography of welfare spending. The paper examines the structure of welfare spending in Britain and its geography, the nature and rationale for the welfare reforms and cuts, especially the stress on ‘fairness’, and the social and geographical impact of the benefit cap. It argues that the cuts point to a re‐orientation of the welfare state and pose political problems for the Opposition, given the shift in social attitudes to welfare.
    December 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12049   open full text
  • Governing emotions: citizenship, neuroscience and the education of youth.
    Elizabeth A Gagen.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 18, 2013
    Schools are one of many sites to incorporate emotional literacy into their institutional agenda in recent years. Alongside broader changes in social, economic and political practice, schools have welcomed emotional education as a necessary element in the training of young people. In 2007, the government introduced Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) to secondary schools across England and Wales. The aim of the programme is to integrate emotional literacy into the secondary school curriculum, following the successful implementation of SEAL at primary level. In this paper, I argue that rather than being about the encouragement of happy, content or well‐adjusted individuals, it is, more crucially, about a new form of citizenship. Forms of self‐government predicated on emotional management have been made possible since the widespread popularisation of neuroscientific understandings of emotions. By tracing the transposition of these ideas from popular brain science to education policy and finally to the curricula delivered via SEAL, I suggest that educating emotions has become central to the way citizenship is currently being defined for young people. By bringing together recent insights from geographies of education, emotion and citizenship, I suggest that the relationship between governmentality, education and youth requires closer critical attention.
    December 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12048   open full text
  • Public taps and private connections: the production of caste distinction and common sense in a Rajasthan drinking water supply project.
    Kathleen O'Reilly, Richa Dhanju.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. December 18, 2013
    This paper analyses a drinking water supply project in rural Rajasthan, India, that deliberately sought to create greater equality across caste for water users through a combination of public taps and payment for water. Later, in the post‐construction phase of the project, those goals were undermined by the counter‐technologies of upper caste households and the village‐scale institutions that supported them. The paper brings together geographic research on neoliberal water governance and caste processes in modern rural India to illuminate how neoliberal subjectivities deepened in the post‐project phase. It shows the ways that caste norms, village water governance and state power converged to produce ‘new’ ways of thinking about water access and payment that undermined the social goals and the physical infrastructure of the project. The paper contributes to research on neoliberalisation and the creation of subjects by demonstrating the mutual constitution of caste inequalities and successfully marketised drinking water over the construction and post‐construction phases of the project.
    December 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12039   open full text
  • Normative geographies and the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine.
    Reecia Orzeck.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 31, 2013
    In recent years, there have been several calls for geographers to engage more closely with the normative in their work. This paper supplements those calls by suggesting that geographers turn their attention to popular understandings of and discourses about justice. In the first part of the paper, I make a case for such scholarship and argue that it should be undergirded by two premises. The first premise is that understandings of justice depend not only on abstract ideas about the just, but on the geographical and historical frames – geographical imaginaries – through which we understand the world; the second is that understandings of justice (including both abstract ideas and geographical imaginaries) are deeply historical and social. In the second part of this paper, I demonstrate the centrality of historical and social geographical imaginaries to assessments of justice by examining the discourse surrounding the controversial 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine. Put in place at the behest of British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, the Regulations restricted the areas in which Jews could buy land in Palestine. While Jews in Palestine condemned the Regulations as racially discriminatory, MacDonald defended them as necessary if the British were to fulfil the British Mandate Government's obligations to the Palestinians as well as to the Jews. A close look at the positions of each side reveals that their differences lay not in their abstract principles of justice but in the geographical imaginaries through which they viewed Palestine and the Palestinians.
    October 31, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12036   open full text
  • Nihilism and modernity: Louis‐Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the end of the night.
    José Luis Romanillos.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 30, 2013
    This paper explores Louis‐Ferdinand Céline's 1932 Journey to the end of the night within the context of growing work on the literary geographies of modernity. The paper argues that Céline's novel can be productively aligned with other texts such as Ulysses or Heart of darkness as a way of thinking about the experiences of modernity in terms of a spatial disorientation that provokes new kinds of writing. At the same time, Céline's novel is distinctive because it presents the experience of modernity as one of nihilism. In particular, the novel diagnoses the ‘creative‐destructive’ project of modernity through a narrative of abjection and disenchantment, asking readers to question the dialectical promise, and idealist pretensions, of the term. This paper explores how this nihilistic writing is expressed spatially through the parodic ‘journey’ that structures the narrative, and the different nihilistic landscapes dramatised across the novel. The paper proceeds by examining understandings of modernity within literary geographies, and interpretations of nihilism, before exploring some of the central spatial moments of the novel: the deathscapes of World War I, French Colonial Africa and New York. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ways in which Céline's writing could be said to make manifest the spatial experiences of modernity.
    October 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12046   open full text
  • Intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood poverty: an analysis of neighbourhood histories of individuals.
    Maarten Ham, Lina Hedman, David Manley, Rory Coulter, John Östh.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 29, 2013
    The extent to which socioeconomic (dis)advantage is transmitted between generations is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. However, few studies have investigated whether there is a spatial dimension to this intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. Drawing on the concept of neighbourhood biographies, this study contends that there are links between the places individuals live with their parents and their subsequent neighbourhood experiences as independent adults. Using individual‐level register data tracking the whole Stockholm population from 1990 to 2008, and bespoke neighbourhoods, this study is the first to use sequencing techniques to construct individual neighbourhood histories. Through visualisation methods and ordered logit models, we demonstrate that the socioeconomic composition of the neighbourhood children lived in before they left the parental home is strongly related to the status of the neighbourhood they live in 5, 12 and 18 years later. Children living with their parents in high poverty concentration neighbourhoods are very likely to end up in similar neighbourhoods much later in life. The parental neighbourhood is also important in predicting the cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods over a long period of early adulthood. Ethnic minorities were found to have the longest cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods. These findings imply that for some groups, disadvantage is both inherited and highly persistent.
    October 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12040   open full text
  • Gated/gating community: the settlement complex in the West Bank.
    Ariel Handel.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 29, 2013
    The claim that the settlements in the West Bank are gated communities might seem trivial. Those settlements are an explicit example of a community featuring, on the one hand, social cohesion based on shared values, while, on the other hand, self‐isolation with the help of fences and a stress on the ‘security of the community’. The argument of this paper, however, is different. The paper suggests that the settlement layout in the West Bank is not just an aggregate of 124 ‘legal’ gated communities and a similar number of ‘illegal outposts’, but rather a single, contiguous gated community gating, in turn, Palestinian ‘islands’ within it. The reading I will offer seeks to look at the space in question through a careful reading of its use values. The emphasis is put on the question of mobilities in order to show how the fortressed points turn into an exclusionary web by means of separated roads and movement restrictions. By analysing the combined system of settlements, roads, military legislation, spatial design and applied violence, the paper shows how the few hundred points consolidate into one coherent spatial system. The paper wishes to contribute to the spatial analysis of the now 45‐year‐old Israeli occupation of the West Bank, to the growing study of politics of mobility and to the discourse of gated communities by adding colonialism and violence to the mostly neoliberal explanations of the phenomenon.
    October 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12045   open full text
  • Circulating elephants: unpacking the geographies of a cosmopolitan animal.
    Maan Barua.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 28, 2013
    Cosmopolitanism has emerged as an important concept in geography and the social sciences. The rise of mobility, circulation and transnational networks has been paralleled by academic scholarship on un‐parochial others: diasporas, travellers and itinerant social groups. However, the role of nonhumans as participants in and subjects of cosmopolitanism has received scant attention. This paper seeks to develop a ‘more‐than‐human’ cosmopolitanism that accounts for the presence of nonhuman animals and entities in stories of circulation and contact. Through a multi‐sited ethnography of elephant conservation in India and the UK, the paper illustrates how animals become participants in forging connections across difference. Through their circulation, elephants become cosmopolitan, present in diverse cultures and serving banal global consumption. The paper then illustrates how cosmopolitan elephants may be coercive, giving rise to political frictions and new inequalities when mobilised by powerful, transnational environmental actors. It concludes by discussing the methodological and conceptual implications of a more‐than‐human cosmopolitanism.
    October 28, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12047   open full text
  • Wild experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: rethinking environmentalism in the Anthropocene.
    Jamie Lorimer, Clemens Driessen.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 18, 2013
    This paper draws together recent literatures on the geography of experiments and the potential of experimental modes of conducting science and politics. It examines their implications for environmentalism in the Anthropocene. We differentiate between two different conceptions of an experiment, contrasting the singular, modern scientific understanding of an experiment with recent appeals for deliberative public experiments. Developing the concept of wild experiments we identify three axes for critical enquiry. These relate to the status of the nonhuman world as found or made, the importance afforded order and surprise in the conduct of any experiment and the degree and means by which publics are included in decisionmaking. We then illustrate the potential of this framework through a case study investigation of nature conservation, critically examining efforts to rewild and de‐domesticate a polder landscape and its nonhuman inhabitants at the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. This is a flagship example of the wider enthusiasm for rewilding in nature conservation. In conclusion we reflect on wider significance and potential of these wild experiments for rethinking environmentalism in the Anthropocene.
    September 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12030   open full text
  • Financial wizardry and the Golden City: tracking the financial crisis through Pforzheim, Germany.
    Reijer P Hendrikse, James D Sidaway.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 17, 2013
    The global financial crisis is complex and uneven. This paper focuses on the propagation and mediation of the crisis via a case study of the city of Pforzheim, in southwest Germany. In 2004 the municipality signed a number of derivative contracts with Deutsche Bank, aiming to limit interest payments. However, since the early days of the crisis these contracts have produced heavy losses. Attempts to restructure them (involving the world's largest derivatives dealer JPMorgan Chase) compounded losses. This study explores the making, unfolding, interpretation, negotiation and contestation of this crisis, enabling wider critical analysis of state–finance relations across the bounded spaces of local government, through transnational firms and intersecting varieties (and scales) of capitalism.
    September 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12024   open full text
  • Plotting practices and politics: (im)mutable narratives in OpenStreetMap.
    Chris Perkins.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 17, 2013
    It has been argued that crowd‐sourcing offers a radical alternative to conventional ways of mapping, challenging the hegemony of official and commercial cartographies. In this view mapping might begin to offer a forum for different voices, mapping different things, enabling new ways of living. Instead of the Latourian notion of the map as immutable mobile, fixing knowledge and bodies and facilitating governance, the wikification of mapping might facilitate a more mutable politics. This paper focuses on these possibilities by examining OpenStreetMap (OSM), arguably the most significant and emancipatory of neo‐geographic assemblages. While not underplaying the importance of a political economic understanding of the Geoweb, it suggests we need to attend more to the contexts through which emergent knowledge communities enact alternatives, and that notions of practice are central in any evaluation of changing politics of representation. Communities involved in OSM contest the geographies that they call into being, and this process can be narrated through a consideration of local action, in different map spaces and places. A processual view of mapping reveals the extent of mutability of OSM, and highlights many of the tensions evident in collaborative remapping. New ways of mapping reciprocally create and reinforce newly expert knowledge communities that may be emancipatory, but that may also reify power relations. Crowd‐sourced mapping is likely to comprise a hybrid of mutable and immutable elements.
    September 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12022   open full text
  • Making country good: stewardship and environmental change in central Australian pastoral culture.
    Nicholas Gill.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 17, 2013
    Rural stewardship has been a focus of much natural resource management policy in Australia and elsewhere. Despite landowners professing stewardship, some researchers have cast doubt on the utility of the concept due to its vagueness and difficulties of associating attitudes with behaviour. In contrast I argue that stewardship should remain an important concept for understanding rural cultures, landholder practices and the politics of land. Stewardship, however, needs to be understood as emergent, as a ‘dwelt achievement’, as having temporal depth and as being part of the production of socio‐natures. Moreover, as a key vernacular practice, its capacities and vulnerabilities require critical interpretation. I pursue these issues through an analysis of 20th‐century pastoral stewardship in central Australian rangelands where land‐use ideals have long been tested by aridity and low productivity. Arid zone pastoralism has also been subject to on‐going critique and re‐evaluation as ecological and other values challenge pastoral practice and the very presence of pastoralism. Pastoralists have responded with varying articulations of stewardship. These share consistent foundations even as their form changes. I use Anderson's idea (1997) of ‘critical domestication’ to underpin this analysis and show that pastoral stewardship has been, and continues to be, characterised by interpolations of order and chaos in nature and of continuity and discontinuity. With its focus on humanist ontologies of human distinction from the natural world rather than specific land‐use ideals, critical domestication provides a framework for critically interpreting these interpolations in landscapes where ideals such as cultivation and closer settlement have not been achieved. Allying this framework with recent perspectives on the agency and materiality of nature, I also show that stewardship is not solely a human achievement, but is co‐produced by environmental variability, plants and domestic and feral animals such as cattle and rabbits.
    September 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12025   open full text
  • In‐work poverty and the living wage in the United Kingdom: a geographical perspective.
    Jane Wills, Brian Linneker.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 11, 2013
    Drawing on new empirical data from the UK, this paper takes a geographical perspective on the living wage. It highlights the extent to which the living wage is a geographical intervention to tackle in‐work poverty that reflects the cost of living and social reproduction in a particular geographical area, aiming to set a new minimum across the labour market. The paper further argues that there is a scalar geography to understanding the impact of the campaign and the arguments made to defend it. Whereas the living wage has major cost implications for the particular employers and clients affected – increasing wages by approximately 30 per cent above the national minimum wage – it also has the potential to reduce costs across the wider society. There is thus a scalar dimension to making the argument for a living wage that can help to inform the future direction of the campaign. The paper concludes by raising some wider questions about the contribution that geographers can make to the study and alleviation of poverty.
    September 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12020   open full text
  • Surfing between the local and the global: identifying spatial divisions in surfing practice.
    Jon Anderson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 17, 2013
    Geography emphasises the spatial influence on human identity; however, this influence is often seen as exclusively terrestrial in nature. This paper focuses on a group of individuals for whom geographical identity is both terrestrial and littoral in constitution. It introduces how surfers’ identities are not only defined by the terrestrial co‐ingredience of the shores that support their surfing activity, but also by the littoral space of the surf zone itself. However, due to advances in transport, communication and surf forecasting, surfers are increasingly global in their search for waves. The paper goes on to demonstrate the effect of this mobility on surfer identity. It outlines how mobility dislocates surfer identity from its ‘surf‐shore’ moorings and produces in its place a routed but rootless ‘trans‐local’ surf identity. The paper examines the tensions and contradictions that arise between these spatially divided surfing practices before commenting on how surfers’ shared affiliation to the littoral zone may offer the potential to reconcile them.
    August 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12018   open full text
  • ‘No more of this macho bullshit’: drug treatment, place and the reworking of masculinity.
    Robert Wilton, Geoffrey DeVerteuil, Joshua Evans.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 17, 2013
    Health geography has largely failed to engage with the topic of masculinity. This absence is surprising for several reasons, not least because health geography has close ties to social geography, where a burgeoning scholarship on masculinity has developed in recent years. In this paper, we contribute to what Thien and Del Casino () envision as a more robust health geography for men. We do so through a detailed analysis of men's experiences within one form of health care setting, drug treatment programmes, drawing on qualitative data from participant observation and interviews at multiple treatment sites. Particular attention is given to understanding the ways in which the delivery of health care is dependent upon treatment programmes’ ability to problematise masculinities associated with the heavy consumption of drugs and alcohol, while concurrently showing men how to practise an alternative model of healthy masculinity. These objectives are accomplished through the structured domesticity of treatment programmes and through intensive relational work aimed at reworking the masculine self.
    August 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12023   open full text
  • Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration.
    Bradley L Garrett.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 26, 2013
    Urban exploration is a practice of researching, rediscovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas within built environments without permission to do so. Drawing from four years of ethnographic research with a group of urban explorers in the United Kingdom who undertook increasingly brazen forays into off‐limits architecture, this paper argues that while urban exploration can be connected to earlier forms of critical spatial engagement, the movement also speaks to the current political moment in unique ways. Urban explorers are one of many groups reacting to increased surveillance and control over urban space, playfully probing boundaries and weaknesses in urban security in a search for bizarre, beautiful and unregulated areas where they can build personal relationships to places. The results of this research both complement and complicate recent work within geography around issues of surveillance, subversion, urban community building and critical engagement with cities.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12001   open full text
  • Beastly minds: a topological twist in the rethinking of the human in nonhuman geographies using two of Freud's case studies, Emmy von N. and the Wolfman.
    Steve Pile.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 26, 2013
    This paper takes its cue from recent work in nonhuman geographies that has sought to think about the relationship between the human and nonhuman topologically. While nonhuman geographies have well‐developed analyses of the topologies of regions and networks, recent work is supplementing these with other topological understandings. Yet, this work can be taken further. To this end, this paper explores the relationship between the human and nonhuman, through a discussion of animals, affects and psychic space. It offers a topological reading of two of Freud's case studies: Emmy von N. and the Wolfman. The paper highlights the twists and turns of affect and psychic space in these cases. It shows that the difference between the human and the nonhuman can be radically uncertain at the very same time that human distinctiveness is being given certain forms. Using the topological figure of the Möbius strip, this paper shows that, while animals and humans might appear on the same topological surface, distinctions between them are not collapsed or fused or flattened. This has implications for how humans are understood to be entangled in nonhuman worlds; entanglements that, it is argued, are always filtered through the beastly mind.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12017   open full text
  • Green governmentality and swidden decline on Palawan Island.
    Wolfram Dressler.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 26, 2013
    Environmental governance initiatives increasingly extend to the rural Philippines as ‘devolved’ programmes that progress livelihood change, differentiation and market‐based investments. This paper examines how the origins, rise and consequences of environmental governance initiatives in Palawan Island, the Philippines, facilitate forms of governmentality that intersect with, and rearticulate through, the local political economy to influence swidden‐based livelihoods, social relations and landscape composition. Drawing on recent scholarship, I describe how the rise and substance of this governance agenda manifests spatially as a form of discursive green governmentality. I argue that this scaled, discursive process involves diverse institutions that decentre and deploy technical knowledge, values and rules in local spaces, influencing how farmers self‐govern their behaviour and use of nature toward ‘sustainability’ (Goldman 2001). I draw on a case study to show how Tagbanua swidden farmers negotiate such green governmentality by adopting new landscape ideals through anti‐swidden narratives inflected by local politics, economy and environmental change in villages around the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. I focus on how green governmentality has become systemic across scales to converge with local politics and economy, where governmental discourse is pliable, flexibly interpreted, though followed to affect the shift from long fallow to permanent cultivation. I conclude by showing that the ways government, non‐governmental and local actors communicate and invest in such discourse facilitates convergence with the local political economy, reinforcing swidden decline, livelihood risk and marginalisation.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12026   open full text
  • Styling the nation: fear and desire in the South Sudanese beauty trade.
    Caroline Faria.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 26, 2013
    Feminist scholarship on emotion and the ‘global intimate’ offers innovative ways to rethink nationalism as embodied, affective and lived in the everyday. This approach also brings into focus the significance of the transnational: flows of commodities, bodies and ideas that cross state boundaries and are taken up, reworked, celebrated and worried over as part of nation‐making. I approach nationalism here in this way, centring the beauty salon industry in the newly independent Republic of South Sudan. Beauty salons are owned, staffed and supplied by inherently transnational subjects: migrant workers and entrepreneurs as well as members of the returning diaspora. They are also stocked with transnational material objects: hair weaves, cosmetics and beauty technologies from across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the USA. The fashioning of the nation through these salons is thus cosmopolitan in style: orientated outward, embracing the modern and privileging a sense of worldliness and affinity with distant people and places. However, this styling of nationalism is ambivalent and contested. Clients clamour for new fashions, the latest technologies in hair and beauty, and the know‐how brought by migrant ‘saloonists’, as they are referred to in the region. Yet this desire interweaves with a growing panic around the foreign: foreign styles, migrants, capital and commodities. Through this case study I argue that nation‐making in South Sudan is fundamentally transnational – constructed not in isolation from, but explicitly through, cosmopolitanism and the modern exterior. In connection I argue that nationalism is emotional – marked at once by contradictory feelings of fear and desire that require, and indeed depend on, a foreign other. In this way I demonstrate how quotidian spaces and subjects, transnational flows of bodies, commodities and styles, and analyses of emotion can all be richly explored to better understand and theorise the operations of nationalism.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12027   open full text
  • Community participatory appraisal in migration research: connecting neoliberalism, rural restructuring and mobility.
    Rebecca Maria Torres, Lindsey Carte.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 26, 2013
    This article argues for a ‘participatory turn’ in migration research – one that incorporates participatory methods as a complementary or principal means for examining transnational migration. We make the case for using participatory appraisal (PA) in migration studies by presenting illustrative examples of how this approach enriched research we conducted in Veracruz, Mexico, on neoliberalism, agrarian transformation and migration. We facilitated workshops with 23 adults, 57 elementary school children and 45 secondary school youths employing a range of participatory ‘tools’ that are highly visual and interactive, including, community histories, diagramming, matrix rankings and ‘photovoice’. We provide concrete examples from this experience to illustrate the potential power of PA in migration research to elucidate the connections between neoliberal rural restructuring and migration, to facilitate fruitful contrast of community typologies and to include underrepresented and marginalised voices such as those of children and youths who are often silent in migration research. Through the workshops we gained grounded, multi‐scalar and diverse understandings of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ as participants untangled the complex relationships between neoliberal practice, rural and agrarian restructuring, and migration. This allows richer and more nuanced understandings and theorisation of diverse factors shaping migration and its effects across multiple scales, while also empowering local people as co‐producers of knowledge with the possibility of envisaging alternative futures.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12019   open full text
  • Negative governance: vulnerability, biopolitics and the origins of government.
    Mitch Rose.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 26, 2013
    This paper develops the concept of negative governance, an idea that describes (1) a unique and specific modality of governance and (2) a way to think about the concept of governance in general. In terms of the former, negative governance describes a way of governing that works by refusing to govern. This refusal is not simply a denial of state provision (since this assumes a governing agent), but a denial of state management. Negative governance is a system of governing paradoxically predicated on the withdrawal of all positive procedures of state and a delegation of power to those forces that are by definition outside the state's capacities. It governs by allowing ‘life itself’ – life in all is chaotic unpredictability – to rule. In terms of the latter, negative governance raises questions about the origins of governance. Specifically, it asks ‘what is it that calls for governance?’ My answer is that the ‘call to govern’ emanates from a place wholly outside the state and the state's own representational logic. Expanding upon Levinas’ concept of the elemental, I argue that the state is not the agent that makes subjects vulnerable. On the contrary, vulnerability is a human condition: the body demands food, our loved ones come and go, death is always present. It is this basic vulnerability that calls for governance. And government is a response to this negative condition.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12028   open full text
  • Multicultural learning: parent encounters with difference in a Birmingham primary school.
    Helen F Wilson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 26, 2013
    In the UK, schools are considered vital to the realisation of intercultural cities, to the strengthening of community relations and to the development of new forms of social learning. This paper brings work on the geographies of education and learning together with work on the challenges of living with difference, to examine how the routines and repetitive interactions of everyday school life shape the capacities of parents to live with difference. Utilising research with white British parents at a multicultural primary school in Birmingham, UK, the paper builds on the growing interest in the spaces and theories of urban encounter to extend work that has examined the value of shared school spaces. While attending to the (re)production of social difference and the problematic accounts of anxiety, hierarchy and belonging that fracture the school community, the paper also examines the shared parental commitments and aspirations that underpin the motivations for intercultural dialogue and learning. In so doing, the paper details how existing knowledges and ways of living are called into question and gradually altered through personal work, pragmatic negotiation and the development of practical competencies and calls for much greater emphasis on these small and incremental changes in future work.
    April 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12015   open full text
  • The senses as direct theoreticians in practice.
    Ashley Dawkins, Alex Loftus.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 25, 2013
    The senses are relationally produced through, in part, the everyday activities of making urban space. This reciprocal relationship suggests new ways of exploring the conditions of possibility for an urban politics. In seeking to chart such possibilities, we turn to the twofold understanding of aesthetics found within Marx’s critique of political economy, using this as a lens through which to learn from the practices of insurgent artists and anarchitects as they perform ‘relational urban interventions’ in the cities of London and New York. Just as Marx railed against the anaesthetising tendencies of capitalist society, and saw within communism the possibilities for the liberation of the senses and the freeing of creative activity, so relational urban interventions develop a twofold aesthetic model. Nevertheless, recent scholarly attempts to consider the political life of sensation and to theorise the relationship between space and politics have been filtered through a post‐Althusserian lens that is less attentive to emergent possibilities within critical spatial practice. Taking a different tack, we call for a philosophy of praxis that builds on an understanding of relational sensuousness and a Marxist aesthetics in order to prise open the conditions of possibility for an urban politics.
    April 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00551.x   open full text
  • Disabilities in academic workplaces: experiences of human and physical geographers.
    John Horton, Faith Tucker.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 16, 2013
    This paper considers the experiences of 75 university‐based human and physical geographers who define themselves as disabled. We explore how diverse disabilities intersect with academic careers, lifestyles and workplaces, focusing on some common disciplinary and institutional spaces of human and physical geography. We identify two self‐selecting groups of geographers who participated in our research. First, we discuss the experiences of those geographers who are active and politicised in relation to their disabilities, and have worked to effect inclusionary change in their institutional and disciplinary spaces. Second, we highlight the less ‘hopeful’ experiences of geographers with mental health conditions that are undisclosed in workplace contexts. We suggest that these data should prompt reflection on the institutional and disciplinary spaces we inhabit and constitute: especially how (to quote one respondent) spaces of academia may be ‘conducive to poor mental health … [i]t is practically the norm to be sleep‐deprived, working until the early hours, behind with deadlines, underpaid, on short contracts, full of caffeine and alcohol'.
    April 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12009   open full text
  • Consultants and the global assemblage of culture and creativity.
    Russell Prince.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. April 01, 2013
    Culture and creativity have been increasingly instrumentalised in policy programmes worldwide in recent decades. This has been associated with the rapid development of techniques for quantifying and measuring the sector. This paper argues that the development of these techniques has been central to the mobility of policies and policy concepts that instrumentalise culture and creativity. Using Ong and Collier's notion of global assemblage, it is argued that culture and creativity have been rendered technical in relation to the invention and circulation of a number of interlinked global forms, such as the ‘creative industries’ and the ‘creative class’, which are embedded in abstract, placeless, technical systems that provide them with an apparent universality. How this is achieved is examined in detail through a discussion of the work of a London‐based consultancy specialising in cultural knowledge. The consultancy helps to produce this assemblage by doing the work of producing technical, calculative measures of culture and creativity that translate a messy social world into a set of ordered, rationalised representations that can be compared to similarly produced representations from elsewhere. Their work helps to convert topographical connections between places into topological relations across which appropriate global forms can move with relative ease.
    April 01, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12012   open full text
  • Hindu space: urban dislocations in post‐partition Calcutta.
    Romola Sanyal.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 26, 2013
    This article explores the relationship between refugees and urban segregation, using Calcutta as a site of analysis. Using interviews and other sources, it shows how refugees displaced Muslims in the process of squatting in the post‐partition period. The aims of the article are two‐fold. First, it aims to investigate the ways in which refugees, often considered ‘victims’ of persecution, can in fact become hegemonic forces within the urban environments to which they are displaced. This complicates their subject positions within larger geopolitical and urban discourses. Second, it aims to historicise current discussions of communalism in India by linking them to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and to interrogate the ways in which the latter continues to haunt urbanisation in India. The article thus reveals some of the ways in which various ‘marginal’ groups displace and dominate each other enabling the spatialisation of Hindu hegemony.
    March 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12000   open full text
  • Seeing power in international development cooperation: environmental policy integration and the World Bank.
    Matthew Cashmore, Tim Richardson, Anna Axelsson.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 22, 2013
    The aim of this paper is to sharpen the ways in which power dynamics can be analytically ‘seen’ in complex governance contexts where particular ways of governing, and their associated horizons of thought, shape and are in turn shaped by intricate interactions between actors. A theoretical approach is proposed, combining a governmentality perspective with Stewart Clegg's theory of circuits of power. The framework is applied in a case study of experimentation by the World Bank with a new tool for Environmental Policy Integration (EPI). Rather than conceptualising the EPI tool as a governmental technology through which the World Bank could promote its favoured vision of political culture in a local setting (here urban planning in Dhaka, Bangladesh), an alternative account is generated that reveals a will to power among the international development community, realised through the construction of knowledge. This alternative approach suggests that the primary motivation for the will to power is not, as a neo‐colonial perspective might suggest, power over developing countries, but relational power at the international scale. It is concluded that the narrative generated through our hybrid analytical perspective demonstrates the usefulness of multi‐theoretic approaches and offers a useful extension to the analytical purchase of governmentality.
    March 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12011   open full text
  • Geography and the Paris Academy of Sciences: politics and patronage in early 18th‐century France.
    Michael Heffernan.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 21, 2013
    This essay considers the politics and patronage of geography in early‐modern France. It examines how the Paris Academy of Sciences, widely acknowledged as the 18th century's pre‐eminent scientific society, came to recognise geography as an independent science in 1730, a century before the establishment of the first geographical societies. Although the Academy was centrally concerned with cartography from its inception in 1666, it initially afforded no official status to geography, which was viewed either as a specialised form of historical inquiry or as a minor component within the hegemonic science of astronomy. The rise of Newtonian mathematics and the associated controversy about the shape of the earth challenged the Academy's epistemological foundations and prompted a debate about the educational and political significance of geography as a scientific practice. The death in 1726 of Guillaume Delisle, a prominent Academy astronomer‐cartographer and a popular geography tutor to the young Louis XV, led to a spirited campaign to elect Philippe Buache, Delisle's protégé, to a new Academy position as a geographer rather than an astronomer. The campaign emphasised the social and political utility of geography, though the Academy's decision to recognise this new and distinctively modern science was ultimately facilitated by traditional networks of patronage within the French Royal Court.
    March 21, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12008   open full text
  • Street‐naming, tourism development and cultural conflict: the case of the Old City of Acre/Akko/Akka.
    Noam Shoval.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 18, 2013
    Extensive research has been conducted on place names because they are one of the most significant markers of the intimate relationship between people and territory. Several studies on street names have already noted the use of place names as a form of symbolic capital in order to create and sell place distinctions for the purposes of prestige and profit. The literature, however, has not yet adequately addressed a different motivation in place‐naming: the promotion of places for the purpose of tourism development. Furthermore, research in this field has yet to examine the ways in which local residents interpret and contest official street names with their own oral system of naming, focusing instead on the process of selecting and affixing place names and the cultural conflicts that arise from these political decisions. This article explores place‐naming in the Old City of Acre (Israel) in light of tourism development processes, focusing not only on the motivations for the naming but also on the responses of local residents to the naming and to the struggle on the symbolic identity of the city that develop as a result. The first section of the article examines the historical process of bestowing official street names in the Old City of Acre as well as the existing system of place names used by the local Arab inhabitants of the Old City. The article's second section studies the reactions and attitudes of the local population in the Old City to the relatively recent initiative of the Acre Development Company to assign official street names, chosen in the past, to the streets and alleys of the Old City.
    March 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12003   open full text
  • Tourism, modernity and the consumption of home in China.
    Xiaobo Su.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 18, 2013
    Tourists have long been neglected in the literature on home and mobility, although they constitute a massive mobile population within and across national borders. Addressing this gap, this paper advances geography's critical engagement with home in relation to mobility and modernity, and questions the binary distinction between home and unhomeliness in tourist mobility. It focuses on the alienation of Chinese modernity and how one group of domestic tourists negotiates this alienation through their imagination and consumption of home in a popular tourist site (i.e. Lijiang, a World Heritage site in Yunnan province) within the context of China's transformation, which started in 1978. This paper has two objectives. First, it examines why home is woven into the touristic imagination of Lijiang; and second, it links tourists' personal experiences with China's broad sociospatial transformation in order to explore individuals' resistance against and compliance with modernity. I argue that the imagination and consumption of home generates intensely contradictory configurations of struggle that simultaneously push tourists towards an ideal of home for inner freedom and premodern paradise, yet pull them back into the whirling vortex of ‘modern’ life and commercial forces. The paper sheds light on micro‐geographies of people's lives in the context of China's rapid transformation.
    March 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12013   open full text
  • The role of social memory in natural resource management: insights from participatory video.
    Jayalaxshmi Mistry, Andrea Berardi, Lakeram Haynes, Delano Davis, Rebecca Xavier, Johnny Andries.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 18, 2013
    This research looked at the role of social memory for adaptive natural resource management within indigenous communities of the North Rupununi social‐ecological system (SES) in Guyana. Secondary data from historic texts and archives were first used to build a social and ecological history of the North Rupununi SES. Current social memory ‘in use’ was then surfaced through a participatory video (PV) process led by the indigenous community. From this, a compendium of key narratives of the communities' social memory was identified and modes of social memory creation, transmittance and modification were revealed. These highlighted the role of social memory in identity formation and self representation, how social memory maintains and reinforces community connectedness and collectiveness, and how PV supports indigenous ways of communication, especially the visual. The study provides some valuable insights into the dynamic nature of the North Rupununi SES social memory, how it is used to make sense of the world, and how PV can be used as a tool for surfacing and recording social memory.
    March 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12010   open full text
  • Re‐specifying geographical quantification: problems of order in street interviews.
    Ignaz Strebel.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 16, 2013
    This paper deals with quantitative geography, adopting the perspective of ethnomethodology. Rather than deliver another definition or critique of quantitative geography, it examines activities through which quantification is locally produced and accomplished as phenomena that can be accounted for as a form of scientific and geographical order. It begins by discussing how geography has examined quantification as a problem of how data move between the field of investigation and a so‐called centre of calculation, thereby overlooking the many practices that contribute to its epistemic configuration. To empirically document instances of quantification as a locally organised accomplishment, it then turns to video‐recorded street interviews that were carried out in the course of a European research project on the sense of well‐being felt by users of urban open spaces. Analysis of interview conduct reveals that the adequacy and relevancy of the questionnaire is not given per se, but is produced in the encounter between the interviewer and the passer‐by respondent.
    March 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12014   open full text
  • Branding natural resources: science, violence and marketing in the making of teak.
    Raymond L Bryant.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 11, 2013
    This paper explores the branding of natural resources using a case study of teak. While scholars write about brands and branding as well as natural resources, few of them connect the two, let alone trace geographical and historical patterns of development. Yet studying the intersection of brands, natural resources, geography and history yields rich insights about how both brands and natural resources have come to be defined. Rejecting narrow understandings of branding, the paper instead builds a broader appreciation of this phenomenon using a Foucauldian framework that sees it as a form of government. It identifies three tools – science, violence and marketing – that inform the genesis of brands, exploring their deployment in the making of teak with reference to selected historical and geographical entanglements of the British Empire and former colonies (notably Burma as prime country of origin).
    March 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12006   open full text
  • Growing up an orphan: vulnerability of adolescent girls to HIV in Malawi.
    Paul Mkandawire, Isaac Luginaah, Jamie Baxter.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 08, 2013
    Based on a qualitative study conducted in the township of Chibavi in Mzuzu City, Malawi, this paper seeks to contribute to the emerging debate as to why orphans may be more vulnerable to the AIDS epidemic through the lens of an informal labour relation locally known as ganyu. The paper argues that although ganyu has deep roots in the country's history and has served as an escape from extreme poverty in rural areas, its transition to the urban landscape is associated with an emergent practice of sexual exchange between those who seek ganyu and those who recruit the workers. While youth in Chibavi generally work ganyu, the particularly oversized domestic roles of encumbered orphans against a backdrop of extremely deprived material circumstances and weak kin ties propelled them into prolonged ganyu contracts and compelled them to more readily concede to sexual demands ‘imposed’ by those who offered them ganyu. Drawing on geographic perspectives from political ecology of health and tracing the historical and geographic interconnections of ganyu, this study adds to the understanding of how the spatial transformation of this enduring ad hoc labour makes it a relation that potentially shapes vulnerability to HIV in Malawi. This study also wrestles with the question of why current policy debates do not reflect these realities in a country with one of worst AIDS epidemics, and in turn, makes relevant policy recommendations.
    March 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12002   open full text
  • The spatial modalities of evangelical Christian growth in Sri Lanka: evangelism, social ministry and the structural mosaic.
    Orlando Woods.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. March 08, 2013
    This paper incorporates a melange of ideas into a new understanding of evangelical Christian growth. Existing explanations of growth are well rehearsed within the social sciences, and draw clear distinctions between the characteristics of evangelical organisations and the structural contexts in which they operate. A number of theoretical and empirical assumptions render such explanations applicable in some countries, but not others. Drawing on empirical data from Sri Lanka, I argue that closer examination of the recursive relationship between organisation (agency) and context (structure) will lead to recognition of the fact that growth is a spatially defined process, with evangelical organisations being tied to localities in complex and multifarious ways. A heuristic device – the structural mosaic – is proposed and developed in order to account for the growth of evangelical Christian groups in hostile environments around the world.
    March 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12004   open full text
  • Neither presencing nor absencing: the stagnation of sensing‐towards‐presence in the call centre.
    Georgie Urry.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. February 04, 2013
    This paper contributes to debates that consider the affective nature of immaterial labour practices upon the working subject. Drawing on call centre work as an example of immaterial labour – specifically in relation to Hardt and Negri's definitional typology – it explores a different way of theorising the subject in order to reconsider our sensory relation to the world. Going further than Hardt and Negri's attunement to our material engagement with the world, the paper uses Jean‐Luc Nancy's conceptualisation of human subjectivity, apprehended as a motioning between pre‐cognitive sensation and meaningful signification. Sense, for Nancy, is that which is felt non‐consciously, thus creating a vital political space whereby the world itself becomes affectual aside from interpretation. Contrastingly, signification is that which makes meaningful, and hence adjusts the subject's relation in and to the world, transforming what is sensed into a representation. It is the motion between the two, for Nancy, that makes us alive beings‐in‐the‐world but immaterial labour practices hinder this movement for capital gain, reducing possibilities for sensing while simultaneously overloading the being with signification. As such, this paper asks whether the call centre can have a stultifying affect upon the agent's capacity to ‘live’. Furthermore, it asks how this dampening is resisted through subtle and vivacious tangents out of routine by those living the labour of the call centre.
    February 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/tran.12005   open full text
  • The complexity of evidence for sustainable development policy: analysing the boundary work of the UK Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee.
    John Turnpenny, Duncan Russel, Tim Rayner.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 30, 2012
    The relationship between evidence, governance and institutions in the pursuit of sustainable development is notoriously complicated. Studying organisations whose roles include managing boundaries between evidence and policy is one way to better understand this relationship. But in spite of the complexity, such organisations often appear – officially at least – to have rather limited remits, with very sharply drawn boundaries. This paper investigates this puzzle through study of the United Kingdom Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee (EAC), established in 1997 to scrutinise government departments’ efforts to integrate environment and sustainable development into policymaking. Gathering and deployment of evidence are critical to its work, and it is able to call as witnesses both members of the executive and experts from outside government. Drawing on Jasanoff’s work on issue framing and boundaries, and Owens and Rayner’s work on Royal Commissions, this paper employs a broad definition of boundary work to allow potential identification of multiple boundaries shaped by different sorts of boundary work. It investigates what boundaries are drawn, how, why and by whom. Through analysis of EAC reports, and elite interviews, the paper examines the context, consultation processes, roles played and influence of the EAC. The committee is found to play many roles, including analyst, forum for debate and political lever, all of which provide potential for influence on specific policies, and on the nature and space of political debate. The EAC shapes many boundaries using various mechanisms, both informal and institutionally‐sanctioned. The rich and subtle variety of these boundaries, and different work carried out around them, confirms that a simple reading of the EAC’s remit of government scrutiny falls short of understanding how it works in practice. The results vividly illustrate the politicised nature of sustainable development policy, and informs prospects for ‘filling’ any gap between evidence and policy.
    November 30, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00549.x   open full text
  • Malls without stores (MwS): the affectual spaces of a Buenos Aires shopping mall.
    Jacob C Miller.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 02, 2012
    As shopping malls have become increasingly common in urban and suburban landscapes, retail and consumer sciences have made these spaces more affectively intense by targeting the body of the consumer directly. Through a case study of a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, I suggest that non‐representational theory offers advantages in studying spaces like malls for two reasons. First, shopping malls offer an opportunity to study the engineering of affect that is central to this emerging literature on materiality, politics and technology. The analysis, then, will lead to a discussion of the mall’s capacity to function as a biopolitical technology as well as an economic one. Second, this approach sutures a false binary in the consumption literature between strong theories of producer power and the creativity of consumers. Interviews with mall visitors, participant observation and findings from ethnographic field work inform the figure of malls without stores (MwS), an analytic concept adapted from Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs (BwO) that reconfigures a binary reading of the consumption literature and expands the purview of what is political about these spaces.
    November 02, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00553.x   open full text
  • Missing the point? Urban planning and the normalisation of ‘pathological’ spaces in southern Africa.
    Amin Y Kamete.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 02, 2012
    In this paper I consider ‘normalisation’ as a response to urban informal livelihoods in urban southern Africa. I demonstrate that urban planning systems have been mobilised to correct or eliminate ‘spatial pathologies’. Using illustrative cases from southern Africa, I argue that the authorities’ obsession with ‘normalising’ urban spaces they have designated as ‘pathologies’ is misplaced because it glaringly defies the reality on the ground. Interrogated in the paper is the reasoning behind, and effectiveness of, ‘corrective’ measures that exclude and marginalise informality through technicalisation, ‘expertisation’ and depoliticisation. I evaluate the basis, workings and deleterious outcomes of normalising technologies and question the relevance and efficacy of normalisation at a time when it is increasingly becoming clear that African urbanisation is – and will possibly continue to be – simultaneously driven and cushioned by informalisation.
    November 02, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00552.x   open full text
  • Heidegger, event and the ontological politics of the site.
    Mikko Joronen.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. November 01, 2012
    This paper scrutinises the possibilities Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘the event of revealing’ (Ereignis) poses for spatial theory. It shows how Heidegger’s work on ‘the event’ and its ‘fourfold’ constitution (between earth, sky, mortals and divinities) affords a spatial understanding of ontology as a site revealed around the assemblage of things. Accordingly, spatial ontologies do not grow from the multiplicity of human constructions and social relations, but from the radical ontological finitude constitutive for the revealing of the material site of the thing. Through such post‐human understanding of the event, it becomes possible to think spatiality, not just in accordance with the influence Heidegger’s thought could have on the material understanding of spatiality, but in accordance with the rich understanding we could gain by exploring the politics of finite ontologies, the politics intrinsic for the different happenings of revealing.
    November 01, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00550.x   open full text
  • ‘In the heart, there’s nothing’: unruly youth, generational vertigo and territory.
    Sara H Smith.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. October 10, 2012
    Young Ladakhis have grown up along disputed borders between Pakistan and China in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. During their lifetimes, conflict in Kashmir and in their hometowns (between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority) has highlighted the region’s geopolitical vulnerability; in words overheard in the schoolyard and kitchen, religion is always already political and territorial. This article traces how young Muslim and Buddhist Ladakhis in Ladakh’s Leh District are constituted as a category and site of territorial potential, and how the young people I spoke with navigate and elude this positioning. Their grandparents married across religious lines and their parents used family planning enthusiastically, but these practices are now political problems. Youth alternate between cynicism and hopeful visions of the future. Meanwhile, parents see education in distant urban centres as a path to a desired ‘modernity’, but also as a dangerous site where unruly love, lack of supervision and immorality might compromise religious identity. Building on geographies of young people and religion, and on anthropologies of the future, this research draws on two youth projects, a survey and interviews. I suggest that parents, political actors and religious leaders conceive of the young as crucial to the constitution of future territories. This makes their bodies a site of intense anxiety and regulation, as well as hope and potential. Beyond this case study, I offer the concept of generational vertigo, a mixture of apprehension and anticipation regarding the future, and suggest that attending to how and why this vertigo is manifest provides a way to think through relationships between young people, time and territory. The future is located in the volatile bodies of young people; hence the desire to defend territory and shape the future is manifest in attempts to manage the potential of these bodies.
    October 10, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00547.x   open full text
  • ‘Refugee’ or ‘returnee’? The ethnic geopolitics of diasporic resettlement in China and intergenerational change.
    Elaine Lynn‐Ee Ho.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 24, 2012
    The interrelationship between forced migration, return migration and ethnicity remains relatively unexplored in current scholarship. By using the case of China’s resettlement policy towards diasporic Chinese descendants expelled from Southeast Asia during 1949–1979 and examining their contemporary situation, this paper highlights the way scholarship on forced migration and ethnically privileged (return) migration can mutually enrich one another. The paper, first, examines the geopolitical context of Chinese forced migration and the premises of China’s preferential policy towards co‐ethnics, which labelled the ‘refugees’ as ‘returnees’ intentionally. It argues that metaphors of extraterritorial ethnic kinship and ‘return’ are used to justify ethnic privilege but the co‐ethnics experienced socio‐spatial exclusion in China because of their cultural distinctiveness. Second, the paper explores the impact of the post‐1980s reforms on the rural overseas Chinese farms in which the co‐ethnics were resettled. This discussion suggests that the rescaling of governance brought about policies that capitalise upon their distinctive Southeast Asian identities to reinvent the farms as economic zones and tourism sites. The sustainability of this economic strategy is, however, questioned in the third part of the paper, which considers intergenerational change now happening on the farms. It argues that international migration histories are transitioning to new internal migration flows. Such migration succession trends may transform the ethnically privileged status of the farms and their inhabitants. The qualitative findings in this paper direct broader inquiry into the complex ethnic geopolitics underpinning mobilisations of diasporic belonging and also the implications of intergenerational change.
    September 24, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00548.x   open full text
  • Creating geographies of hope through film: performing space in Palestine‐Israel.
    Elizabeth Mavroudi.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 11, 2012
    This paper explores the value and role of critical notions of space in the current impasse in Palestine‐Israel through a case study on two films and their creative use of space. The main aim of the paper is to illustrate that it is useful for geographers to use analyses of performance in order to theorise space in more hopeful ways, particularly in areas of conflict, by stressing the importance of space as open‐ended and performative. Through a discussion of two films, one by Elia Suleiman and the other by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, the paper argues that space, if imagined as dynamic, in‐between and potentially connecting Palestinians and Israelis, can be transformative and have a positive role to play in interrogating us/them relationships, power inequalities and Othering in the region. The paper highlights the value of using third space and performance to help create a spatial politics of affect, which may in turn lead to changing perceptions of the Other in conflict regions. Therefore, the paper makes a contribution, not only to the geographical literature on how space is appropriated and constructed in Palestine‐Israel, but also to geographical work on hope, film and performance.
    September 11, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00546.x   open full text
  • New regional geographies of the world as practised by leading advanced producer service firms in 2010.
    Peter J Taylor, Ben Derudder, Michael Hoyler, Pengfei Ni.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. September 07, 2012
    This paper reports a new type of world regionalisation based upon the location strategies of leading advanced producer service firms. To generate these ‘global practice’ regions, a principal components analysis of the office networks of 175 service firms across 138 cities is used to identify 10 common location strategies. These are interpreted as fuzzy (overlapping) and porous regional formations each consisting of two parts: a home‐region and a global‐outreach. The results indicate five overlapping pairs of regions: (i) intensive and extensive globalisations based upon the USA plus London (USAL); (ii) Americas and Latin America regions; (iii) Pacific Asia and China regions; (iv) Europe and Scandinavia regions; and (v) Australasian and Canadian ‘Commonwealth’ regions. All regions have worldwide global‐outreaches but they differ significantly in their respective sizes and importance. Discussion of these findings elaborates upon two key points: first, globalisation is not a ‘blanket’ process creating a homogeneous world, and second, the resulting fuzzy and porous regionalisation counters the traditional ‘territorialist’ regional geographies that can provide a framework for global conflict with a more complex geography of multiple global integrations.
    September 07, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00545.x   open full text
  • New spatial media, new knowledge politics.
    Sarah Elwood, Agnieszka Leszczynski.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 28, 2012
    New spatial media – the informational artefacts and mediating technologies of the geoweb – represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups to leverage web‐based geographic information technologies in their efforts to effect social change. Drawing upon evidence from an inductive analysis of five online initiatives that engage new spatial media in activism and civic engagement, we explore new dimensions of the knowledge politics advanced through new spatial media and the mechanisms through which they emerge. ‘Knowledge politics’ refers to the use of particular information content, forms of representation or ways of analysing and manipulating information to try to establish the authority or legitimacy of knowledge claims. The five new spatial media initiatives we analyse here introduce new dimensions to the modes of collecting, validating and representing information, when considered against practices of many activist/civic encounters with other kinds of geographic information technologies, such as GIS. The significance of these practices is not in their (arguable) newness, but rather their role in advancing different epistemological strategies for establishing the legitimacy and authority of knowledge claims. Specifically, these new knowledge politics entail a deployment of geovisual artefacts to structure a visual experience; a prioritisation of individualised interactive/exploratory ways of knowing; hyper‐granular, highly immediate, experiential cartographic representations de‐coupled from conventional practices of cartographic abstraction; and approaches to asserting credibility through witnessing, peer verification and transparency.
    August 28, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00543.x   open full text
  • Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography.
    Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, Martin Dodge.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 14, 2012
    In recent years there has been a turn within cartographic theory from a representational to a processual understanding of mapping. Maps have been re‐conceptualised as mappings that ceaselessly unfold through contingent, citational, habitual, negotiated, reflexive and playful practices, embedded within relational contexts. In this paper, we explore what this rethinking means for cartographic epistemology, contending that attention needs to be focused on understanding cartography through the lens of practices – how mappings are (re)made in diverse ways (technically, socially, bodily, aesthetically and politically) by people within particular contexts and cultures as solutions to everyday tasks. We detail how these practices can be profitably examined using a suite of methods – genealogies, ethnographies, ethnomethodology, participant observation, observant participation and deconstruction – that are sensitive to capturing and distilling the unfolding and contextual nature of mapping. To illustrate our argument we narrate the unfolding production and consumption of a set of mappings of so‐called ‘ghost estates’ in Ireland, a public geography project that has been covered over 300 times in local, national and international media and that has contributed to Irish public discourse and policy debates.
    August 14, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00540.x   open full text
  • Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code.
    Mark Graham, Matthew Zook, Andrew Boulton.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 10, 2012
    With the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced information and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities’, this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmented realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re‐makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power‐laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.
    August 10, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00539.x   open full text
  • Biosecurity and the topologies of infected life: from borderlines to borderlands.
    Steve Hinchliffe, John Allen, Stephanie Lavau, Nick Bingham, Simon Carter.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. August 10, 2012
    Biosecurity, as a response to threats from zoonotic, food‐borne and emerging infectious diseases, implies and is often understood in terms of a spatial segregation of forms of life, a struggle to separate healthy life from diseased bodies. While an ensuing will to closure in the name of biosecurity is evident at various sites, things are, in practice and in theory, more intricate than this model would suggest. There are transactions and transformations that defy easily segmented spaces. Using multi‐species ethnographic work across a range of sites, from wildlife reserves to farms and food processing plants, we argue for a shift of focus in biosecurity away from defined borderlines towards that of borderlands. The latter involves the detachment of borders from geographic territory and highlights the continuous topological interplay and resulting tensions involved in making life live. We use this spatial imagination to call for a different kind of biopolitics and for a shift in what counts as a biosecurity emergency. As a means to re‐frame the questions concerning biosecurity, we argue for a change of discourse and practice away from disease ‘breach points’ towards the ‘tipping points’ that can arise in the intense foldings that characterise pathological lives.
    August 10, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00538.x   open full text
  • Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change.
    Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Castán Broto.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 10, 2012
    In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio‐technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change in the city. Drawing on three different concepts – of governance experiments, socio‐technical experiments, and strategic experiments – we first develop a framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of urban climate change experiments. We use this conceptual analysis to frame a scoping study of the global dimensions of urban climate change experimentation in a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in 100 global cities. The analysis charts when and where these experiments occur, the relationship between the social and technical aspects of experimentation and the governance of urban climate change experimentation, including the actors involved in their governing and the extent to which new political spaces for experimentation are emerging in the contemporary city. We find that experiments serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics. These findings point to an emerging research agenda on urban climate change experiments that needs to engage with the diversity of experimentation in different urban contexts, how they are conducted in practice and their impacts and implications for urban governance and urban life.
    July 10, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00535.x   open full text
  • Long‐term environmental monitoring in the UK: origins and achievements of the Plynlimon catchment study.
    M Robinson, J C Rodda, J V Sutcliffe.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. July 03, 2012
    The Plynlimon catchments are the UK’s most intensively studied long‐term research basins, with 40 years of hydrological and hydrochemical observations. Used to study the impacts of land cover, their establishment, progress and achievements is a complex story of scientific advances in response to national needs, set against a background of academic controversy and competing stakeholder pressures, that remains relevant today. Established to answer the important practical question ‘Do forests use more water than grassland in our climate?’, these research basins helped to revolutionise our fundamental understanding of forest hydrology in Britain, and became a multi‐disciplinary ‘outdoor laboratory’ encompassing floods and droughts, acidification and water chemistry, process studies and climate change used by many universities and research organisations. The findings of the studies there have been widely published, with over 500 papers in refereed journals, and the measurements shared with the international research community. Nevertheless, many data users remain unaware of how and why the catchments were established, the challenges that were overcome, and the ways in which the research programme evolved to meet changing needs. As the study enters its fifth decade, this paper takes the opportunity to look back at its establishment, assess the outputs and offer guidance to other researchers wishing to embark on new catchment or observatory studies.
    July 03, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00534.x   open full text
  • Affective investments in the Manila region: Filipina migrants in rural Japan and transnational urban development in the Philippines.
    Lieba Faier.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 27, 2012
    Over the past few decades, remittances from overseas migrant labourers have come to play an important role in fuelling demand for new residential developments in countries like the Philippines. This paper draws attention to how financial flows enabling this urban development are tied to transnational migrants’ experiences abroad. Drawing on more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan and the Philippines, it considers how, why and to what ends some Filipina wives of Japanese men in rural Nagano, Japan, aspire to build houses in the Manila region, and it explores how these real estate investments are linked to the affective processes through which these women transnationally craft lives and selves. Approaching affect as a site of subject‐making, this essay suggests these houses are best understood as ‘affective investments’ that are shaped not only by capitalist practices and state policies, but also by the discourses of hope, frustration, shame, fear, desire and longing through which these women make sense of their transnational lives. The paper thereby illustrates how affect and political economics can intertwine in migrants’ investment decisions and, thus, the transnational role affect can play in articulating hegemonic urban development plans.
    June 27, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00533.x   open full text
  • Towards geographies of ‘alternative’ education: a case study of UK home schooling families.
    Peter Kraftl.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. June 08, 2012
    In this paper, I argue for the development of geographies of ‘alternative’ education. In light of growing geographical interest in education, I argue for a focus on sites that explicitly offer non‐mainstream, non‐state‐sanctioned forms of learning in contexts where it is assumed that children will go to school. I exemplify my discussion through interviews with 30 UK‐based homeschooling families. In seeking to advance geographical research on education, I make three key contributions. First, I exemplify how focusing on learning itself – and not just spatial contexts for learning – uncovers how spatial experiences and discourses are key to the constitution of alternative educational practices like homeschooling. Second, I consider the multiple and contradictory ways in which homeschooling constituted an ‘alternative’ educational space, discuss whether and how geographers should seek to affirm (all) such spaces and attend to some of the potential political/moral dilemmas that are provoked by the place of emotion in homeschoolers’ accounts. Third, I outline briefly some implications of this paper for further research on geographies of education, and family/inter‐generational relations.
    June 08, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00536.x   open full text
  • Faith and suburbia: secularisation, modernity and the changing geographies of religion in London’s suburbs.
    Claire Dwyer, David Gilbert, Bindi Shah.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 22, 2012
    Spectacular new religious buildings on London’s outskirts are often cited as evidence of London’s multicultural diversity. However, the suburban location of these new buildings is usually dismissed as incongruous, drawing on familiar tropes of the suburbs as sites of modernisation, materialism and secularism. This paper uses this assumed incongruity to address the complexity of relationships between religion and suburban space by tracing the significance of religion in changing suburban geographies through a focus on London’s suburbs. The paper begins with a critique of the absence of religion in suburban studies, which emphasise secularisation and homogeneity. The rediscovery of the creative potential of the suburbs gives little consideration to religious creativity. Similarly recent work on diasporas and religion have little to say about the significance of the suburban. Our paper uses three case studies, of different faith groups, from North and West London to explore three distinctive articulations of the relationship between religion and suburban space that we call ‘semi‐detached faith’, ‘edge‐city faith’ and ‘ethnoburb faith’. These examples are not intended as ideal types but as analytical categories that open up the relationships between space, faith and mobilities. We argue there is a need to more carefully theorise the ways in which faith communities have engaged with the challenges of suburban geographies including processes of secularisation and suggest that the study of faith in suburbia offers new ways of thinking about the complexity of suburban space.
    May 22, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00521.x   open full text
  • Mobile nostalgias: connecting visions of the urban past, present and future amongst ex‐residents.
    Alastair Bonnett, Catherine Alexander.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 22, 2012
    Drawing on interviews with ex‐residents of Tyneside (United Kingdom), this paper builds on recent reappraisals of nostalgia as a ‘productive’ and ‘living’ disposition, to show how fond memories and a sense of loss shape and sustain engagement with the city. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, or to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non‐official’ nostalgia, the paper demonstrates that nostalgias are mobile and interwoven. It is shown that ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ forms can co‐exist and state‐led practices of conservation be maintained in a complex and mutually sustaining relationship with more personal, less official, visions of the value of the past. Thus it is argued that urban nostalgia for the city needs to be acknowledged as a potentially critical intervention that draws together different modes of attachment and yearning.
    May 22, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00531.x   open full text
  • Hidden histories made visible? Reflections on a geographical exhibition.
    Felix Driver.
    Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. May 16, 2012
    This paper addresses the potential of public exhibitions to challenge long taken‐for‐granted assumptions about the history of exploration and geography. The Hidden Histories of Exploration exhibition, originally held in 2009, was based on historical research in the Royal Geographical Society’s extensive collections, including manuscripts, books, maps and atlases, artefacts, artworks, photography and film. The exhibition was designed to reveal the agency of indigenous peoples and intermediaries in the history of exploration, as reflected especially in the recruitment of guides, interpreters, porters and pilots. By highlighting and to some extent celebrating the role of such individuals, it sought to prompt questions about what is made visible and what is obscured in standard narratives of exploration, especially when seen from a metropolitan perspective. However, the relationship between research and exhibition was by no means one‐way, as is implied by the language of ‘dissemination’ and ‘output’: the process of bringing the exhibition into being raised questions about the structure of the archives on which the exhibition depended, as well as prompting further reflection on the biographical mode in which the work of recovery of ‘hidden histories’ is often conceived in the heritage sector. Particular attention is devoted to the impact of collaboration with designers on the presentation and interpretation of materials in the exhibition. The paper focuses on three design strategies reflected in the exhibition space: ‘role reversal’ (celebrating the role of intermediaries and presenting the explorers as dependent); ‘juxtaposition’ (emphasising the importance of partnership and the co‐production of geographical knowledge); and ‘re‐scaling’ (transforming anonymous archival fragments into documents of a truly human history).
    May 16, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00529.x   open full text