bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Empire Theatres and the Empire: The Popular Geographical Imagination in the Age of Empire
Authors: Crowhurst Andrew
Published: October 2006

The role of the emerging mass media in informing popular attitudes towards imperialism in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain is explored through a case study of music hall. It is argued that, in contrast to practices adopted in other media, music hall songs and sketches contributed little to the nurturing of an imperialist popular imagination. I take issue with the assertion first made by J A Hobson in The Psychology of Jingoism that music halls promoted militarist and imperialist activities and fostered a popular chauvinism. I also suggest that although music hall songs and sketches purveyed images of racial difference they did not contribute to the discourse of racial supremacy upon which the moral justification of British imperialism rested. Rather, the halls celebrated the emergence of a culture of consumption that transcended social and ethnic boundaries and confronted the dominant ascetic value system of the Victorian bourgeoisie.
Gender, Movement, and History: Social and Spatial Transformations in 20th Century Maradi, Niger
Authors: Cooper Barbara M
Published: October 2006

Analyses of gender and space have been brought short by our awareness of the sterility of the familiar public-private binary, our difficulty gaining purchase upon local spatial practices through feminist abstractions insisting upon the importance of global ‘location’, and our growing realization that women are often implicated in the very gender ideologies that constrain them. In this paper, focusing upon historical changes in Muslim women's access to and occupation of different kinds of space in the Sahelian city of Maradi, Niger, the author shifts attention away from the spaces themselves and towards women's active movement through and transformation of the spaces of the body, the home, and the city. Women define themselves, their social status, and their economic possibilities by acquiring and transforming what the author calls ‘internal spaces’ and by entering into previously inaccessible ‘external spaces’. More concretely, they locate themselves socially and economically through the decoration of their rooms in their marital homes, through the acquisition of urban property, and through the adoption of veiling. By renegotiating their spatial position women reconfigure their economic and social options. In so doing they subtly and unconsciously alter the character of the urban terrain, the nature of local marriage, and the configuration of local gender relations. Women's attempts to reposition themselves have had complex and contradictory implications. They nevertheless make clear that gender analyses fixing upon reified spaces or scales are inadequate and that common Western assumptions about Muslim women's experience of internal spaces and veiling need to be rethought.
The Hidden Histories and Geographies of Neotraditional Town Planning: The Case of Seaside, Florida
Authors: Al-Hindi Karen Falconer , Staddon Caedmon
Published: October 2006

The neotraditional resort development of Seaside, Florida merits special attention from geographers and urban planners because of the normative claims made by its designers and because it has garnered widespread attention from practising architects, planners, anti social critics, Under the banners of ‘neotraditionalism’ and ‘community planning’ the principles implemented in Seaside have also been employed in numerous other developments in North America. Central to Seaside's appeal and normative content is the deliberate attempt to resurrect an idealised past of uniquely American communitarianism through the skillful manipulation of urban form. We develop our critique of neotraditionalism through a deconstructive analysis of the physical and ideological spaces of Seaside. Specifically, we discuss the origin and development of Seaside, the centrality of its urban and architectural codes, the paradoxical deployment of public and private spaces, and the emergence of a distinctively neotraditional subject. Our basic claim is that neotraditionalism is actually a carefully veiled form of what Foster has called “postmodernism of reaction”.
On Reassembling One's Life: Overcoming Disability in the Academic Environment
Authors: Golledge Reginald G
Published: October 2006

In this paper I discuss my process of academic rehabilitation after suffering severe disruption after the (sudden) onset of severe vision impairment (legal blindness). The paper is somewhat anecdotal, I give examples of specially designed assistive technologies that helped rehabilitation in various phases of academic teaching, research, student advising, and paper presentation at academic conferences. A particular view on the nature of the concept of disability is offered and dissatisfaction is voiced with the current social theory view of disability as the result of social oppression. The theme emphasized in this paper is one of searching for independence and self-help to facilitate reintegration into academe and society. Exception is taken to the red herrings of political correctness and power politics as relevant schema for examining disability concepts.
Bodies and Spaces: An Exploration of Disabled People's Experiences of Public Space
Authors: Butler Ruth , Bowlby Sophia
Published: October 2006

In this paper we consider the ways in which concepts of and attitudes towards ‘disability’ affect disabled people's ability to move freely within public spaces. We first set the paper in context by briefly discussing recent developments in and ongoing debates on the conceptualisation of disability which have accompanied the growing disability rights movement. Next we examine feminist literature relating to the links between biology and the body and the social status of women and draw out parallels for the analysis of disabled people's social situation. We then discuss a possible framework for the analysis of disabled people's experience of public space. Finally, to illustrate the reflexive relationship between bodily and social experience, we draw on in-depth interview material from a case study of visually impaired people in Reading and Leeds, England.
Seeing People Differently: The Sociospatial Construction of Disability
Authors: Dear Michael , Wilton Robert , Gaber Sharon Lord , Takahashi Lois
Published: October 2006

In this paper the authors develop the concept of difference as it applies to people with disabilities. The production of difference is characterized as necessarily a social and a spatial process which allows the self to be partitioned from the Other. In the aggregate, such processes facilitate the stigmatization of whole classes of people and the institutionalization of rules for boundary maintenance between different groups. One important consequence among the population at large is a ‘hierarchy of acceptance’, that is, a structure of preferential ranking among various disability categories. A metaanalysis of 44 acceptance hierarchy studies since 1968 reveals both stability and change in community preference structures. The largest impetus for change derives from the appearance of new ‘disabilities’ including most especially people with AIDS, and homeless people. Evidence also suggests that significant attitudinal variations occur through space as well as time and when different facility types are considered and that actual behavior may differ from expressed attitudinal preferences. This paper concludes with remarks directed toward a more adequate sociospatial theory of disability.
Multiscaled Interpretations of Urban Change: The Federal, the State, and the Local in the Western Area Strategy of Adelaide
Authors: McGuirk Pauline M
Published: October 2006

My aim is to question the concept of an indisputable hierarchy of scales—global, national, regional, and local—in which processes, outcomes, and responses can be categorised as originating at distinct and discrete levels. Such a concept has allowed regional and local influence to be presented as the context in which the operation of global processes is fine-tuned, rather than as being a formative part of those processes. I aim to apply nonhierarchical modes of thinking about scale to an empirical example by examining a federally funded urban development programme in Adelaide: the Western Area Strategy, a federal initiative, administered in a local setting by a state administration. The relations between processes, institutions, sociocultural, economic, and political conditions at a variety of scales are shown to operate simultaneously and multidirectionally in defining the local outcomes of the programme. These relations are constitutive of scale itself. The ‘local’ outcomes of policy are shown to be formulated at a variety of scales and to be mutually constitutive of outcomes at other, ‘higher’, scales. Accepting the notion that scales are mutually constitutive and questioning the production of scale and interscale relations opens new paths of explanation for the spectrum of economic, sociocultural, and political processes determining the nature of contemporary society and determining their concrete expression in political and social interactions within nation-states and localities.
The Dead, Place/Space, and Social Activism: Constructing the Nationscape in Historic Melaka
Authors: Cartier Carolyn L
Published: October 2006

In Malaysia under state-led economic restructuring, government interventions in cultural heritage landscapes reflect divergent priorities between local place-based conservation interests and forces of political and economic restructuring at broader spatial scales. I examine a major land-use conflict, between economic development interests and a grass-roots preservation movement with links to the national opposition party, to assess how preservation activists mobilised place-based constructions of cultural identity and representations of state nationalism to halt development plans for a historic landscape, These issues arc examined by negotiating the relationship between locally based cultures of place, and political and economic forces seeking to appropriate space, in a piece of historic land in Melaka, Malaysia. I work through two lines of approach. The theoretical framework applies Lefebvre's work on spatial processes and spatial categories to conceptualise the significance of the historic landscape, and utilises Merrifield's reading of Lefebvre to write between the place—space dualism. A social construction approach is adopted to demonstrate how people actively create meaning about place in space, and work out the dialectic of preservationist intervention between local and state-level land-use goals. The social construction approach shows how cultural identity may be place based, and therefore the basis of a powerful localised social movement. Through the movement generated by this debate, a monumental traditional Chinese burial ground became local park and ‘nationscape’, a site-specific distillation of half a millenium of Malaysian history.
Controlling Labor Commitment in Brazil's Global Agriculture: The Crisis of Competing Flexibilities
Authors: Chase Jaquelyn
Published: October 2006

Brazil's ambitions as a competitor in global markets have led to an aggressive policy of investment in new industrial and export agriculture. In the region of central Brazil which I discuss in this paper, capitalist farmers have converted huge amounts of land in former frontier regions to the production of soybeans, largely for Asian and European markets. This integration to the world economy is not automatic or unchallenged, however. The conversion to export-oriented agriculture has created the contradictory demand for a flexible yet dependable and skilled work force to operate and care for costly farm machinery and to conform to the pace and quality of world-class production. I show that urban-based institutions and households in agricultural regions are challenging the crossover to international markets by offering agricultural workers alternative sources of income and political power. Agricultural entrepreneurs in Brazil are being forced to yield many concessions to the families of day laborers and semipermanent wage workers in order to guarantee a supply of predictable and reliable labor.
Mapping the Terrain of Time—Space Compression: Power Networks in Everyday Life
Authors: Bridge Gary
Published: October 2006

In this paper I seek a more comprehensive mapping of the experience of time—space in late modernity. I develop Massey's critique of the work of Harvey and Jameson in their reading of time space compression as a socially uniform experience of disorientation. Building on Massey's notion of ‘power geometry’ I integrate discussions of time—space with an application of different understandings of power (from traditional political philosophy, Marxism, and poststructuralism) and their manifestations—in latent-power conditions, socioeconomic networks, actor networks, ‘local’ interpersonal relations, and the network spaces of subjectivity. Rather than being posited as irreconcilable conceptions, these versions of power and their articulations can be seen as initial coordinates in the mapping of the complexities of the experiences of time and space in late modernity.
Where Do You Draw the Line? Landscape, Texts, and the Politics of Planning
Authors: McCann Eugene J
Published: October 2006

The paper is an attempt to contribute to studies of landscape production in cultural geography and investigations of the role of texts and discourses in critical planning studies. The main argument is that detailed study of contemporary planning processes overcomes the cruder terms of recent debates over idealism and realism or materialism in cultural geography and permits planning studies to loosen the notion of what texts are important in shaping planning decisions. A detailed case study of a prolonged planning dispute over the production of new landscapes around Lexington, Kentucky provides an empirical basis for the three interrelated theoretical arguments that conclude the paper. These are: (1) to understand landscape and the fundamental role the state plays in it, there must be a recognition of the interwoven nature of discourse and materiality; (2) the fact that state institutions are where different landscape interpretations are articulated allows them to overcome crises of legitimacy and accumulation through the rhetoric of liberal planning; (3) the institutional sites of the state, such as the planning commission, are vitally important spaces in any process of landscape production because their procedures tend to create two ‘sides' in any contest and thus legitimate certain discourses while closing off possibilities for other views to be included in state-sponsored policy documents.
Historical Amnesia, or, the Logic of Capital Accumulation: Cotton Production in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique
Authors: Isaacman Alien
Published: October 2006

In this article, the very different cotton production schemes that the state introduced in colonial and post-colonial Mozambique are explored. Three distinct periods in the history of cotton production are examined. In the first, the focus is on the impact of cotton cultivation on the daily lives of peasants trapped in a highly coercive labor regime which Portugal imposed in 1938 and enforced for almost a quarter of a century. An outline of the abortive attempt of the newly independent FRELIMO government to revitalize cotton production from 1977 to 1985 as part of its broader socialist agenda to transform the countryside, is given next, and the study is concluded with a discussion of recent state efforts to promote joint cotton ventures under the guise of the IMF—World Bank structural adjustment program. An analysis of these changing cotton regimes offers a way of exploring a wide set of issues in the sustainability debate, The Mozambican cotton scheme demonstrates the extent to which state development planning often is not only about either social or ecological sustainability but also about control, power, and effectively silencing the rural poor by experts disconnected from the countryside. It is also stressed that the politics of memory is an important dimension of the sustainability debate and the broader ideological struggles which it reflects. Try as they might, neither the colonial state nor the postcolonial state could control how peasants constructed and interpreted the past. The official representations of cotton as a path to progress, whether on a capitalist or a social road, were simply dismissed by most growers who knew better.
Heart of Empire? Landscape, Space and Performance in Imperial London
Authors: Driver Felix , Gilbert David
Published: October 2006

In this paper we address the ways in which global processes of imperialism helped to constitute the cultural geography of the capital cities of Europe. London is our focus, not least because its representation as an imperial city during the modern period was particularly fraught with difficulty. In the first section of the paper we consider the value and limitations of a ‘post-colonial’ perspective, and specifically the extent to which the discourse of imperial cities was European rather than national in character. In the second section we turn to London, widening the conventional focus on the ceremonial core at Westminster to consider a number of alternative ‘hearts of empire’, sites which were also claimed as central places in the landscape of the imperial city. Here we question the assumption that London ‘became’ imperial in a circumscribed area and only for a brief moment in the late-Victorian and Edwardian era. In order to develop the argument that the ‘imperial’ was not merely the preserve of policymakers in Whitehall, we then consider the role of imperial culture in shaping a variety of other urban landscapes, especially the swelling London suburbs. Last, we address the contradictions and tensions in the idea of ‘imperial London’ as it developed around the turn of the 19th century.
‘Ornamenting the Facade of Hell’: Iconographies of 19th-Century Canadian Paper Money
Authors: Gilbert Emily
Published: October 2006

In this paper I explore the iconographies on 19th-century Canadian paper money. Drawing upon the recent debates regarding the intersection of culture, society, and economy, it is argued that the form of paper money conveys not only economic but social and cultural values. The paper is divided into three parts. The first section situates Canadian paper currency in terms of the consolidation of paper monies more generally in the 18th and 19th centuries, but with particular reference to Britain and the United States. I then turn to a more specific analysis of the design and production of paper money, illustrating how monetary images were transferred among artistic media. A third section focuses on some of the spatial aspects of paper money by exploring national and imperial monetary narratives which are in turn related to specific monetary practices. In a brief conclusion the importance of an historical analysis to our contemporary understanding of paper and other kinds of monies is outlined and points to our complicity in economic, social, and cultural networks.
Workfare: A Geopolitical Etymology
Authors: Peck Jamie
Published: October 2006

The author traces the origins, evolution, and contested meanings of the ‘keyword’ workfare (work + welfare) in the United States which, in the space of 30 years, has evolved from a technocratic term deployed in the process of intrawelfare reform, through to powerful signifier of a systemic, postwelfare ‘alternative’. Discursive struggles around workfare are shown to have played a decisive role in reencoding the language of poverty politics, as ‘old’ discourses of needs, decency, compassion, and entitlement have been discredited, while ‘new’ (or more accurately reworked) discourses of work, responsibility, self-sufficiency, and empowerment have been forcefully advanced. This process is a geopolitical one in the sense that local models and stories of workfare have been absorbed—in a transformative way—into the new orthodoxies of policy discourse and practice. The ascendancy of local workfare (represented as the ‘solution’ to the ‘welfare mess’) over federal welfare (itself now a political attack term) has been associated not only with a rolling back of the language, routines, and systems of welfarism, but also with the rolling forward of radically new institutions and vocabularies of regulation. Although it continues to be contested, workfare is becoming the regulatory antonym of welfare; the programme is becoming programmatic. The paper presents a political-economic contextualization of workfare discourse.
“Cracking the Canyon with the Awesome Foursome”: Representations of Adventure Tourism in New Zealand
Authors: Cloke Paul , Perkins Harvey C
Published: October 2006

The authors focus on the rise of adventure tourism in New Zealand and suggest that the growth of adventure-tourism attractions is related to important transformations in the sociocultural geographies of the places concerned. Three issues are addressed: first, the increasing importance of adventure-tourism facilities, practices, and subcultures, which have interconnected with the social spatialisation of places and landscapes; second, the ways in which adventure tourism transcends the metaphor of the tourist ‘gaze’, and suggests attention to the embodiment of tourist practice; and third, the implications for an understanding of nature—society relations inherent in representational texts used to advertise adventure tourism.
Moses/Marianne Parts the Red Sea: Allegories of Liberty in the Bicentennial of the French Revolution
Authors: Bonnemaison Sarah
Published: October 2006

The author critiques the view of spectacle as misrepresentation and proposes that allegory presents a possibility for redemptive readings of spectacle. In a case study of the French bicentennial commemoration of 1989 she explores how Jessye Norman's performance of Marianne—the traditional Republican allegory of French liberty—reconfigured notions of Nation in a way that served the socialist policies of Mitterand.
The Body in Theory
Authors: Callard Felicity J
Published: October 2006

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.
Spaces of Surveillant Simulation: New Technologies, Digital Representations, and Material Geographies
Authors: Graham Stephen
Published: October 2006

In this paper I analyse some emerging socioeconomic applications of information and communications technologies and explore how they support technological systems which increasingly blend surveillance with simulation. In the first part of the paper I explore the technological shifts supporting blended ‘surveillant simulation’ and review how the emerging links between surveillance, simulation, and material geographies have been addressed in recent debates on society, space, and cultural change. In the second part I go on to explore four examples in detail where widespread electronic surveillance systems are providing the captured data and images to produce electronic simulations of the ‘real world’ in near ‘real time’—virtual banking, retailing and ‘reality’, crime control and electronic tagging, road transport telematics, and ‘smart’ utility systems. Attention is focused on how such simulations of the real world are then used to support new spatial practices based on the fine-grained allocation of goods and services, and intimate patterns of attempted social control, in real time, through the time–space fabric of material geographies. I conclude by analysing the implications of surveillant simulation for theories of technology, space, and place, for social polarisation in cities, and for considering opportunities for resisting the spatial practices of dominant organisations.
‘The Cheviot, the Stag … and the White, White Rock?’: Community, Identity, and Environmental Threat on the Isle of Harris
Authors: Mackenzie A Fiona D
Published: October 2006

In this paper I examine the process through which different claims to ‘development’ and ‘sustainability’ were made during a recent public inquiry into an application for a coastal superquarry at Lingerbay, Isle of Harris. On the one hand, a modernist discourse of sustainable development was claimed by a corporation which attempted to frame the debate in terms of jobs versus environment, exploiting rhetorically a difference between islander and incomer. Sustainable development here became the front for an extension of corporate interest and private property. On the other hand, members of the local community drew on historically resilient symbols of collective identity, crofting, the Gaidhealtacht, and observance of the Sabbath, to claim an alternative discourse of sustainability.
Spaces of Democracy: Remapping the Apartheid City
Authors: Robinson Jenny
Published: October 2006

Democracy is associated with particular kinds of spatialities. In this paper I address two aspects of the spatiality of democracy through an assessment of transitional arrangements for local government in South African cities. Political identities, as well as spatial arrangements, involved in democratic politics are associated with instability, uncertainty, and ongoing contestation. In democracies, the contestation both of identities and of spaces is institutionalised and this implies the generalisation of particular spatialities. Drawing on a spatially informed interpretation of the work of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I argue that the transitional phase in the emergence of democracy in South Africa has involved the growth of a democratic culture—even in situations where substantial compromises have been made to keep recalcitrant white interests on board. I question the assertion of a nonracial politics which seeks to erase the possibility of ethnically based political identities and argue that the failure of the left to hegemonise their perspective of a nonracial political project and a nonracial postapartheid city may have ironically assisted in extending the possibilities for democracy. A key conclusion is that democracies are associated with different spatialities which facilitate contestation and representation. A politics of space, given the radical undecidability of spatial boundaries, is supportive of the extension of democracy.
Subversive Spaces: First Nations Women and the City
Authors: Peters Evelyn J
Published: October 2006

A number of researchers have explored how the Western city is gendered, racialized, and seen as an heterosexual space. There is little work which explores how the definition of the city, particularly in colonized countries, excludes indigenous peoples and cultures. In this paper, I wish to turn critical attention to the cultural meaning of urbanism by focusing on the complex geographies of identity and resistance which characterize the meaning of the term ‘urban’ in relation to First Nations women in Canada. I begin with a brief overview of the way colonial practices, which defined First Nations peoples and cultures as incompatible with urban life and First Nations people's negotiation of these practices, helped separate First Nations peoples and the city in imagination and in fact. I then describe the way colonial administration and policy established First Nations reserves as masculinized spaces. Last, I describe the alternative geographies of rights and identity imagined by urban First Nations women.
Miles from Home in the Field of Dreams: Rurality and the Social at the End of History
Authors: Lawrence Mark
Published: October 2006

Considerations of two films set in Iowa frame my attempt in this paper to discuss some of the tensions between the meaningfulness of rurality and the evaporation of history in the region's cultural politics of place, A new regional geography emphasizes the historical formation of places, but how is ‘history’ to be understood and how meaningful a role can it play? These questions are particularly important in light of challenges which claim that, in fact, we have reached the ‘end of history’. Baudrillard, for example, believes that we have entered a ‘hyperreal’ era which suppresses further experimentation with social organization. Instead, collisions of excessively proliferated representations of relationships between rurality, history, and social interaction suggest that the very possibility of social organization in an ahistorical hyperreal era increasingly relies for its expression on the carrying out of deliberately (and often violent) antisocial action.
Enframing the Falklands: Identity, Landscape, and the 1982 South Atlantic War
Authors: Ootids Klaus
Published: October 2006

In this paper I consider the role of landscape representations of the Falklands during the 1982 Falklands War. I suggest that the Thatcher government's attempts to reimagine a neglected and remote colony in the South Atlantic as British sovereign territory was significant in mobilising media and public support for the recovery campaign. The role of rural imagery is considered to be one element in that reimaginative process. The actual experiences of the task force and journalists sent to report on the war campaign often clashed with the published reports of the mainstream media. Although government-imposed censorship played a part in ensuring the positive reporting predominated, negative impressions of the campaign and the islands themselves were significant in terms of forcing some to reconsider the strategic and symbolic value of the Falklands. In the final section of the paper I consider not only how the war dead were commemorated but also the decision by the then government to allow fallen soldiers to be buried in the United Kingdom rather than in the Falklands.
Skeptical Realism: From Either/or to Both-And
Authors: Hannah Matthew G
Published: October 2006

In this paper a rapprochement is attempted between epistemological skepticism and ontological realism, two positions hitherto understood to be incompatible by most sociospatial theorists. It is done by recontextualizing key aspects of these two positions within an analysis of individual human finitude. Avoiding both individualism' and ‘decisionism’, and taking full account of poststructuralist insights concerning fragmented or multiple subjectivity, the analysis calls attention to the constraints imposed upon discourses concerning what is real and how we can know the real by the inherent limitations of the human individuals through which such discourses are unavoidably mediated. After arguing for the continuing relevance of ‘the epistemological subject’, I present an abstract heuristic model of this subject in order to clarify the concepts of ‘finitude of scope’ and finitude of faculties', which are defined with reference to the work of David Harvey, Marcus Doel, Noel Castree, and Donna Haraway. These two concepts are then employed in a critical reading of Roy Bhaskar's ‘critical realism’, where I argue that, in an important sense, critical realism would be more consistent and truer to its founding principles if it were understood as a skeptical realism. In the final section, I sketch some of the implications which might flow from such a rapprochement of skepticism and realism. The most important of these implications would be felt less in the substance of sociospatial research than in the ethics of debate and discourse. I close with a brief discussion of the recent work of J K Gibson-Graham, which implicitly incorporates some of the key components of skeptical realism, and (perhaps) offers a preview of things to come.
Money Cultures after Georg Simmel: Mobility Movement, and Identity
Authors: Allen John , Pryke Michael
Published: October 2006

It is well known that Georg Simmel observed a series of parallels between the circulation of money in a mature economy, in particular its pace and rhythm, and cultural forms of interaction in early twentieth century metropolitan life, In this paper we are concerned to build upon Simmers insights with specific reference to the relationships drawn between mobility, movement, and culture, The intention is not to endorse Simmel's universalistic claims about culture, but rather to use his approach as a way of understanding how, today, processes of circulation are endowed with meaning through peoples interpretation and experience of mobility and movement, The paper falls into three parts. Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the first part seeks to demonstrate the importance of mobility and movement to the formation of subjectivities and to the possibility of shared systems of meaning around money. Following this, Simmel's The Philosophy of Money is used as a starting point to consider how the circulation of money, in particular the deployment of derivatives, has produced a series of cultural identifications on the basis of different impressions of space-time, In the final part, examples of shared systems of symbolic meaning in relation to the movement and mobility of money are outlined in support of the argument and to ground the possibility of money cultures.
Reflections of a ‘Great Port City’: The Case of Newcastle, Australia
Authors: Stevenson Deborah
Published: October 2006

As the material form of the city and its symbols are negotiated and contested, the mobilisation of images and identities of place are central to the legitimisation of urban redevelopment. Frequently, these processes and their outcomes consolidate the status of those interests which have long controlled the urban agenda, In this paper I explore (with reference to the deindustrialising regional city of Newcastle, Australia) the extent to which powerful discourses of urban symbolism and the everyday meanings people attach to the places of their social and cultural worlds arc implicated in the process of selling to local residents the ‘ideal’ of the redevelopment of the inner city.
The New Global Command Economy
Authors: Ould-Mey Mohameden
Published: October 2006

Globalization is becoming one of the most widespread catchphrases attempting to grasp the post-Cold War international reality. In this paper I argue that, although the process of globalization has brought about more liberalization and decentralization of political economies at the national level, it has also created a far more regimented and centralized economy and polity at the international level. This shift of the center of gravity of political economy from the national to the international level is what the phrase the new global command economy attempts to grasp. First, I begin with a definition of geopolitical economy as a conceptualization of the complex interaction between states and the world economy. Second, I show how a few global institutions de facto command the world economy with a level of centralization and regimentation similar to that which the centrally planned economies used to exercise at the national level during the Cold War era. Third, I analyze how the new global command economy continues to perpetuate the core-periphery divide through what the G7 economic summit has labeled a new global partnership between developing countries, developed countries, and multilateral institutions. Fourth, the nonmarket forces are introduced as an often neglected factor (in economic analysis) which strongly shapes market forces and the overall trajectory of the world economy.
To Boldly Go? Place, Metaphor, and the Marketing of Auckland's Starship Hospital
Authors: Kearns Robin A , Barnett J Ross
Published: October 2006

In this paper, we place the naming of the Starship Children's Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, within the context of increasingly consumer-oriented health care provision. This use of metaphor alludes to the hospital's distinctive design features and represents an attempt to de-emphasise connotations associated with institutionalised medicine, thus normalising the place for children. However, those naming the hospital had more than children in mind. Rather, there was a dual intent: to market the hospital as a distinctive place for monetary donors, as well as promoting a more therapeutic environment for youthful users. Through the vehicle of our case study, we raise questions concerning the competition by health care services for public and private funds. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond viewing hospitals as service entities and equating health care consumption with utilisation behaviour. Rather, a merging of insights from the political economy of health care and new cultural geography literatures can aid the development of more finely textured understandings of the meaning of contemporary health care, and the role of metaphor and marketing in selling places of health care consumption.
Space for Gender: Cultural Roles of the Forbidden and the Permitted
Authors: Fenster Tovi
Published: October 2006

In this paper I analyze gender as cultural construction and reconstruction of space amongst Bedouin society in the Negev Desert in Southern Israel I focus, in particular, on changing meanings and boundaries between ‘forbidden’ and ‘permitted’ spaces. These meanings and perceptions are critically analyzed in the light of the ‘modernity planning project’ which has gradually moved Bedouin from spontaneous settlements to government-built towns. My main aim is to analyze cultural construction of space as it relates to women, and to explore how lack of consideration of these perceptions serves to increase control over Bedouin women in modernized towns through the reformulation of boundaries of ‘forbidden’ and ‘permitted’ spaces.
Gender, Class, and Gentrification: Enriching the Debate
Authors: Bondi Liz
Published: October 2006

In this paper I take up the debate about gender, class, and gentrification. I accept the importance of class formation in understanding the relationship between gender and gentrification, and seek to supplement existing empirical studies by further exploring gender and class practices in a range of neighbourhoods, Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative sources I present a detailed analysis of social change in two inner-urban neighbourhoods and one suburban neighbourhood in Edinburgh, Scotland. I emphasise the importance of the patterning of life courses in the articulation of class and gender practices, and draw attention to the different ways in which gender, class, and life course arc interwoven in particular cities and neighbourhoods.
Making Sense of Men's Lifestyle Magazines
Authors: Jackson Peter , Brooks Kate , Stevenson Nick
Published: October 2006

In this paper we document the rapid growth of the British men's ‘lifestyle’ magazine market and explore its significance in terms of men's changing identities and gender relations. By drawing on focus-group discussions with men of different class, age, and regional and ethnic backgrounds, we contrast two ways of thinking about these magazines. The first employs a distinction between ‘surface’ and ‘depth’, and suggests that the magazines signal only superficial changes in contemporary masculinities. The second approach identifies a series of discursive repertoires on which men draw in ‘making sense’ of the magazines. Four such repertoires are highlighted, which involve notions of ‘honesty’, ‘naturalness’, ‘openness’, and ‘harmless fun’. The analysis suggests that although some respondents saw the magazines' commercial success in terms of a backlash against ‘feminist extremism’ and ‘political correctness’, most denied their wider political significance. We conclude that the magazines provide their readers with a form of ‘constructed certitude’ that represents a commodified response to men's current gender anxieties.
The End of Consensus? The Impact of Participatory Initiatives on Conceptions of Conservation and the Countryside in the United Kingdom
Authors: Goodwin Philip P
Published: October 2006

In recent years, local participation has come increasingly to the forefront of the strategies, language, and practices adopted by conservation organisations in the United Kingdom. In this paper I explore what impact the process of participation is having in reshaping conceptions of conservation and the countryside. Based on empirical research in Southeast England, I argue that participation may reveal a new, but contradictory, arena of conservation concern centred on the relevance of place. In laying claim to its own knowledge, language, and values, this concern for place provides a legitimate authority for local people to challenge outside representations of their space. As a result, I suggest that the practice of participation may be bringing about a retreat from the national vision of traditional conservation and a fragmentation of conservation ideas.
Dark Panopticon. Or, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Authors: Doel Marcus A , Clarke David B
Published: October 2006

In the wake of claims that much of critical human geography has succumbed to the dreaded postmodern fatigue syndrome—symptoms include unrelenting tiredness, uncritical social somnambulance, spectral hallucinations, an unnatural preoccupation with the dead, and a tendency to submit to passive and reactive forces—the authors offer a paper that came to them during a dream dreamt alongside insomnia. Borne of exhaustion rather than tiredness, the dream-work lends consistency to a host of fragments drawn from the milieux of spatial science, political economy, poststructuralist philosophy, postmodern sociology, twentieth-century literature, and popular culture. As a work composed in the dead of night, the authors follow Deleuze and Foucault in affirming not the omniscient light of Bentham's generalised, ‘all-seeing’ Panopticon, but the ‘dark light’ of the blind power lurking in the shadowy world of the Dark Panopticon. Surprisingly, the exemplary mise-en-scéne for the resulting foray into the Heart of Darkness turns out to be the greengrocery that is invariably situated at the gateway to every supermarket and hypermarket. It is here that the authors sense the unbearable violence perpetrated against the flesh of the world—the flesh of soft fruit and animals, no less than the flesh of ourselves and the earth—and it is from here that the revenge of the zombie flesh takes hold (fetishistic depersonalisation and deindividuation), The authors argue that the human being is suspended, undone, and disseminated between the information society and the consumer society. Only our ‘en-trails’ are left amidst the flesh of the world. This undead dreamworld is less Orwellian than Kafkaesque: infinite suspense and perpetual regret.
The Power of Distraction: Distraction, Tactility, and Habit in the Work of Walter Benjamin
Authors: Latham Alan
Published: October 2006

In this paper I seek to examine a set of tactile, habitually grounded, bodily modes of perception which lie at the centre of Walter Benjamin's analysis of urban experience under modernity. On first reading of Benjamin's later writings, particularly his various interpretations of Baudelaire, these tactile, distracted modes of perception appear to represent a profound experiential entropy; a dilution of real affective experience which Benjamin sees as defining modernity, However, it is possible to trace the outline of a richer and more far-reaching phenomenology of perception within Benjamin's thought. This is what I seek to do. In seeking to trace out this phenomenology I argue that although such tactile, distracted, habitually grounded modes of perception are intertwined in an economy of self-defence, they also contain within them a whole range of capacities for knowing and getting hold of the urban, Following the lead of earlier interpreters of Benjamin such as Marleen Stoessel, Miriam Hansen, and Jürgen Habermas I also argue that these modes of perception stand in a particular relationship to the ‘auratic’. In exploring this relationship Benjamin outlines a novel theory of intersubjectivity between humans and the nonhuman. This clement of the intersubjective is not only important in understanding Benjamin's work, it also suggests a range of productive avenues for enframing an ethics of encounter within the contemporary city.
A Strategic Sign: The Geopolitical Significance of ‘Bosnia’ in US Foreign Policy
Authors: Tuathail Gearóid Ó
Published: October 2006

Why did the United States government eventually intervene decisively in the Bosnian war in the summer of 1995, first with sustained NATO bombing, subsequently by forging the Dayton Peace Accords, and finally by deploying 20 000 troops to a region its military leaders had long claimed was not strategic? In this paper I seek to provide an answer to this question by arguing that Bosnia became strategic because of its geopolitical location in a Europe supposedly secured by NATO and because of the negative sign value it accumulated over the course of its bloody war. The Bosnian war exposed the limits of the Bush administration's New World Order, the inability of the European Union to impose peace, the weaknesses of the United Nations, the impotency of NATO, and the leadership failures of the United States. It thus became strategically important as a threatening sign of disorder in Europe that the United States needed to confront in order to relegitimate NATO and its plans for expansionism, and to regenerate its national exceptionalist identity as a global power. In this paper I consider the role of the media in helping generate Bosnia as a ‘strategic sign’ by arguing that the videocameralistics of the media play an important role in conditioning the practices of foreign policy.