bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Voices and Visions from the Streets: Gender Interests and Political Participation among Women Informal Traders in Latin America
Authors: Hays-Mitchell Maureen
Published: October 2006

The extreme social and economic crisis affecting most Latin American countries has precipitated the expansion of a vast network of collective social movements as a means to cope with the increasing difficulty of life throughout the region. This paper is an examination of the collective struggle of women informal traders as they challenge, through workplace politics, the Peruvian state to address issues of family survival and social reproduction. Although the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the street-trader union movement limits women's participation, a ‘critical consciousness’ has developed among women traders both in the rank-and-file and in low-level leadership positions which utilizes both direct and subtle strategies to influence the course of union politics. It is argued that the actions of these ‘grass-roots feminists’ to address their practical gender interests presupposes a commitment to strategic gender interests. Hence, their activism not only recasts Molyneux's gender-interest model but also transcends the artificial bifurcation that falsely characterizes the Latin American feminist movement. The experiences of women traders in Peru suggest that women's agency in social movements, such as informal sector trade unions, is introducing new ways of organizing social relations and political activity as it transforms entrenched and hegemonic meanings of politics, influence, and power.
The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space
Authors: Kirsch Scott
Published: October 2006

This paper is about the role of technology in the transformation of space, and the ways in which these changes are represented. These processes are explored principally through critical analysis of the work of Harvey and Lefebvre; more specifically, I contrast the place of technology as expressed through their varied emphases on the annihilation of space, and the production of space. The dramatic restructuring of space and time in recent decades, associated with new high-speed geographies of production, exchange, and consumption, has been theorized against the backdrop of a ‘shrinking world’, The popular conception of the world shrinking to a global village is generally seen as the product of technological advances in telecommunications, transportation, and ‘information’. For Harvey, these innovations arc seen as the means through which capital has freed itself from spatial constraints. By placing the ‘collapse of space’ jargon alongside Marx's phrase, the annihilation of space by time, these spatial metaphors serve Harvey as shorthand for the complexities of time-space compression; the shrinking world is seen as a midpoint between a regime of accumulation and a mode of representation. I argue that, although these metaphors help to theorize the relativity of space—as the global impinges on the local—they only do so by obfuscating the relative space of everyday life, and the increasingly technical means through which it is produced. Through an interpretation of Lefebvre's discussion of technology in The Production of Space, I suggest how the role of technology in the transformation of space is not limited to those globalizing processes through which the world has been made increasingly interconnected in space and time. So too, technology has been critical to the domination of conceived space over lived space as social relations are spatialized at the scale of experience. As a foundation for these arguments, the social relations of technology and technological change are theorized through the incorporation of ideas from the social studies of science and technology and from critical human geography.
Space, Time, and Media Theory: An Illustration from the Television-Advertising Nexus
Authors: Clarke David B
Published: October 2006

The constitutive role of the media in relation to society has, arguably, not received the attention it deserves from those interested in the spatial constitution of society, A case could be made, for example, that the most dramatic manifestation of the relation between the media and space—viz globalisation—has led to a failure to appreciate the multifaceted scales and dimensions of this relation. Thus, though sometimes sensitive to the local scale, notions of globalisation have seemingly indirectly caused the neglect of a more thoroughgoing examination of space and time within media theory. Rather than develop such a critique, however, I seek here to demonstrate the difficulties involved in such a reconsideration of media theory. Accordingly, in the paper I provide an analysis of the temporal bias in existing media theory—examining, in particular, Jhally's political-economic analysis of the television-advertising airtime market—and proceed to offer an alternative spatial analysis of television advertising, using a case study of the United Kingdom. The difficulty of integrating the two accounts serves to question the adequacy of existing media theory, thus demonstrating the importance of detailed theoretical and empirical work in helping to understand the increasingly significant role of the media in relation to society, space, and time.
Archaeologies of City Life: Commercial Culture, Masculinity, and Spatial Relations in 1980s London
Authors: Mort Frank
Published: October 2006

Studies of contemporary systems of consumption across the humanities and social sciences are frequently shadowed by a recurrent problem. Difficulties centre on the tendency to construct a set of general theories, pitched at high levels of abstraction, about the economic and cultural transformations which have been associated with recent shifts in the structure of demand. It is argued that such a synthetic use of the concept of consumption cannot grasp the specificities of particular market sectors and their attendant forms of cultural and spatial relations. In this paper I propose a more precise and grounded focus to study the formation of a particular regime of gendered commerce in one area of London during the 1980s. The study demonstrates the ways in which a distinctive grouping of media professionals and cultural entrepreneurs occupied a pivotal role in the transformations taking place in Soho during this period. Shifts in the material and symbolic structures of social space were central to this process of urban change, which drew on earlier representations of city life to claim cultural authority. It was this metropolitan regime which actively shaped the production of a series of identifiable masculine identities. Such personas were plural and diverse, rather than unified and monolithic. The product of different masculine communities in the area, they were linked by consumer culture, but differentiated by their access to heterosocial or homosocial space.
Spaces of Adventure and Cultural Politics of Masculinity: R M Ballantyne and The Young Fur Traders
Authors: Phillips Richard S
Published: October 2006

Masculinities reflect the characteristics of the spaces—real and imaginary, material and metaphorical—in which they are constructed. Mapmakers, ranging from academic geographers to popular storytellers, chart masculinist geographies: Spaces in which masculinities are mapped. One important genre of masculinist geographical narrative is adventure. I explore the masculinism of adventure through a detailed, contextual reading of one particular adventure story. The Young Fur Traders—a British Victorian boys' adventure story set in Canada, written by the Scottish writer Robert Michael Ballantyne. In the setting of The Young Fur Traders, Ballantyne mapped a form of masculinity known generally as Christian manliness. Literal journeys through the spaces of adventure constituted metaphorical journeys through adolescence, from white, middle-class boyhood to white, middle-class manhood. Settings—liminal, largely unknown but broadly realistic, male-dominated, primitive, simplified, and idealised spaces—were imprinted upon this masculinity. The settings of adventure stories arc cultural spaces in which hegemonic masculinity is mapped and, in some cases, unmapped.
Making a Melodrama out of a Crisis: Reinterpreting the Collapse of Barings Bank
Authors: Tickell Adam
Published: October 2006

In February 1995 Britain's oldest merchant bank, Barings, was put into administration after a series of disastrous losses on trading complex financial instruments. In this paper it is argued that the collapse of Barings symbolises the profound transformation in the City of London and the international financial system since the 1960s. The author analyses the response to the collapse by Barings' senior management, the British regulatory authorities, and the British media, arguing that they all misinterpreted the nature of the crisis. It is argued that criticisms of the Bank of England's actions by sections of the media signify wider changes in British society.
Sex, Geography, and Death: Metropolis and Empire in a Fascist Writer
Authors: Galbo Joe
Published: October 2006

This paper is an historical and cultural analysis of the work of a Fascist writer, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and of how Italian concerns with empire are expressed in his geographical tropes. D'Annunzio was one of the leading intellectual practitioners of what Walter Benjamin called the aestheticisation of politics. His texts are distinctly tied to a national discourse which is both consciously and unconsciously imperial, and in his narratives the political map of the nation is overlaid with a tissue of imperial and sexual symbols. I examine how the geographic signs of empire are inscribed in his first novel Il Piacere and his screenplay Cabiria, and how the metropolitan experience is foregrounded whereas the peripheral ‘other’ is both devalued and made exotic. I also examine how D'Annunzio aestheticised the warrior ethic, whereby death itself is rendered an aesthetic experience.
Dukes, Earls, and Ersatz Edens: Aristocratic Nature Preservationists in Colonial Africa
Authors: Neumann Roderick P
Published: October 2006

In this paper I examine the role of members of the British aristocracy in the movement to create national parks in colonial Africa. Aristocratic hunter preservationists established the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) and used their access to the Colonial Office to help direct colonial conservation policies. Focusing on the Earl of Onslow, SPFE president from 1926–1945, I suggest that the aristocratic experience with the landscape of rural England influenced conservationists' ideas for preserving an idealized wild Africa. I explore the ways in which social and cultural constructions of African nature embodied by the SPFE's proposals reflected and helped to legitimate British imperialist ideology. Ultimately, the history of aristocratic involvement in conservation is critical to understanding the development of an institutional global nature-preservation movement.
Naming as Norming: ‘Race’, Gender, and the Identity Politics of Naming Places in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Authors: Berg Lawrence D , Kearns Robin A
Published: October 2006

The process of naming places involves a contested identity politics of people and place. Place-names are part of the social construction of space and the symbolic construction of meanings about place. Accordingly, we argue that the names applied to places in Aotearoa assist in the construction of the symbolic and material orders that legitimate the dominance of a hegemonic Pakeha masculinism. Attempts to rename (and in doing so, reclaim) places are implicated in the discursive politics of people and place. The contestation of place-names in Otago/Murihiku, one of the southernmost regions of New Zealand, is examined. We present a discursive analysis of submissions made to the New Zealand Geographic Board in 1989–90 concerning a proposed reinstatement of Maori names in the area. In interpreting objections to renaming we suggest these objections articulated with and through a number of ‘commonsense’ notions about gender, ‘race’, culture, and nation which discursively (re)produced a hegemonic Pakeha masculinism in New Zealand.
Rediscovering Spatial Inequality in Europe: Building Blocks for an Appropriate ‘Regulationist’ Analytical Framework
Authors: Moulaert Frank
Published: October 2006

Regulation theory is of Marxian inspiration, has been strongly influenced by historical analysis and institutionalism, and can be applied to the study of accumulation in and regulation of societies in all eras, of capitalism. But these features of the theory have not prevented many geographers from applying it primarily to the study of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Moreover, many of them have narrowed the research agenda even more by focusing on the feasibility of fashionable but economistic ‘flex spec prof high-tech’ production models for the development strategies of privileged areas. Research efforts have drifted away from the study of ‘undefended cities and regions’. This evolution is, I believe, all the more deplorable given the creation of the Single European Market, with its permissive social charter and the spatially biased reorganization of the structural funds of the Commission of the European Communities.

In this paper a methodological viewpoint is defended which contends that progress in the social sciences can be accomplished only through the confrontation of experience and action-orientated research needs with existing theoretical frameworks capable of leading the research in the right direction. Then, an examination is made of the research needs of agents (policymakers, planners, academics, and so on) involved in action which is orientated towards achieving greater intraspatial and interspatial equality in Europe. The extent to which regulation theory is capable of guiding such research, given the ideological influences as well as theoretical refinements it has undergone, is discussed, and it is concluded that further improvements to regulation theory could make it more appropriate for action-orientated research in socioeconomic geography. This conclusion is illustrated for the application of the analysis of socioeconomic development in depressed areas.
Locality, Housing Production, and the Local State
Authors: Page Mark Wilson
Published: October 2006

This paper is a contribution to the debate about the local state and its activity in the relations and practices of regulation. Housing production programmes are examined at the level of the municipality, as a way of shedding light on the institutional structuring of the activity of agents in housing production. Changes in the characteristics of these programmes are located within the broader field of central–local state relations. A case study focuses on the relations surrounding council housing production in one particular locality—the north London borough of Haringey—during the 1980s. Detailed attention is given to the activity of Haringey's own building capacities through its direct labour organisation. A model of municipalised construction in housing production is proposed as providing an insight into the structure and form of the social relations of housing provision. In conclusion, this approach is put forward as a way of understanding the characteristics of local state restructuring beyond municipal housing production.
Genderbashing: Sexuality, Gender, and the Regulation of Public Space
Authors: Namaste Ki
Published: October 2006

In this paper I address the relations between gender and sexuality in violence generally known as ‘gaybashing’. I argue that a perceived transgression of normative sex-gender relations motivates most aggressive incidents. In practical terms, this means that men who are judged to be ‘effeminate’ and women deemed to be ‘masculine’ are those most at risk of assault, I also consider the implications of this insight for those individuals who live outside normative sex-gender relations (‘transgenders’). In this paper the ways in which public space is defined through gender arc also examined, such that an attack on gender outlaws or gays and lesbians is often an attempt to police one's self-presentation, Though gender and sexuality are thus intertwined, I investigate the ways in which these variables can be juxtaposed. An analysis of antiviolence activism in the city of Montréal provides the focus for this study. I conclude with a call for research and education on violence, which recognizes the role that gender plays in incidents of aggression, and which therefore accounts for the different experiences of violence faced by men, women, and transgenders.
Off Road: Four-Wheel Drive and the Sense of Place
Authors: Bishop Peter
Published: October 2006

In this paper I argue that the popularity of four-wheel drive vehicles has important consequences for contemporary notions of place and should he considered in the context of the upsurge in high-tech, especially communication, systems. Four-wheel drive culture encompasses both a literal mobility and a fantasy relationship between urban or suburban regions and those of the great outdoors, especially wilderness. By using the Australian experience as a case study I show that four-wheel drive culture plays a crucial part in the construction of what could be called the deep outback and the deep suburbs. It thereby plays a significant role in a renegotiation of the iconography of national identity.
Popular Music in Singapore: Exploring Local Cultures, Global Resources, and Regional Identities
Authors: Kong Lily
Published: October 2006

As an area of geographical inquiry, popular music has not been explored to any large extent. Where writings exist, they are somewhat divorced from the recent theoretical and methodological questions which have rejuvenated social and cultural geography. In this paper one arena which geographers can develop in their analysis of popular music, namely, the exploration of local influences and global forces in the production of music, is focused upon. In analysing the music of Dick Lee, a Singaporean artiste, I illustrate how music is an expression of local/national influences. At the same time I discuss how Lee's music is also reflective of the power of globalising forces, illustrating the ways in which local resources intersect with global resources in a process of transculturation. Then I discuss the ways in which musical analysis offers a handle on larger political, economic, and sociocultural developments in Asia. Lee's search for a regional sound parallels the shift in many other spheres of Asian existence whereby a new cultural assertiveness has emerged, founded on the notion of Asian values and an ‘Asian Way’.
The Power of Commemorative Street Names
Authors: Azaryahu Maoz
Published: October 2006

Street names are ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious. This might be the reason why social scientists have hardly addressed the issue of street names in their studies of the structures of authority and the legitimation of power. In this paper the author explores the semiotic and political operation of commemorative street names. He sheds light on the procedures of the naming and the renaming of streets and the utilization of street names for commemorative purposes as a fundamental feature of modern political culture. Further, he elaborates on how street names, in addition to their fundamental role in the spatial organization and semiotic construction of the city, are also participants in the cultural production of shared past. In addition, the author uncovers commemorative street names as a powerful mechanism for the legitimation of the sociopolitical order. Commemorative street names provide for the intersection of hegemonic ideological structures with the spatial practices of everyday life. Therefore they are instrumental in rendering natural the official version of history which they incorporate into the urban setting. The author concludes that the power of (commemorative) street names stems from their ability to implicate the national narrative of the past, though in a fragmented manner, in numerous narratives of the city.
Urban Design and Dilemmas of Space
Authors: Madanipour Ali
Published: October 2006

My aim in this paper is to find an understanding of the concept of space which could be used in urban design, but which could also be shared by others with an interest in space. Social scientists, geographers, architects, urban planners, and designers use the term space in their academic and professional involvement with the city. But when they meet each other their discourse seems to be handicapped partly because of a difference in their usage and understanding of the concept of space. I will argue that to arrive at a common platform in which a meaningful communication can become possible, we need to confront such fragmentation by moving towards a more unified concept of space. I will argue for a concept of space which would refer to our objective, physical space with its social and psychological dimensions, a dynamic conception which accommodates at the same time constant change and embeddedness, and that can only be understood in monitoring the way space is being made and remade, at the intersection of the development processes and everyday life.
Becoming-Deleuzian
Authors: Massumi Brian
Published: October 2006

The writings of poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze are intentionally designed to defy summary. Their ‘rhizomatic’ (infinitely bifurcating) form renders it impossible to generate a totalizable, self-consistent system from them. They are nevertheless highly ordered and produce concrete effects, including situated meanings and verifiable propositions. It is, in fact, the particular form of their openness which, far from consigning them to slippery irrelevance, charges them with pragmatic power. The pragmatic dimension of the works of Deleuze can be brought out by analyzing the process of their reception, rather than attempting to isolate their content as a closed system. In the encounter between the reader and the work, the work can be seen as performing its own content. That ‘content’ is conceptual, understood in a way that sharply distinguishes ‘concept’ from ‘proposition’. For Deleuze, the concept is a dynamism. It conveys a force that is real without ceasing to be ideal. This makes the encounter with the work a literal ‘event’ in which something always new transpires. Thus alongside situated meanings and verifiable propositions, the work also produces ‘becomings’. Becoming, for Deleuze, can only be grasped as a function of an open system, and with reference to an ontological distinction between the actual and the virtual. Deleuze's emphasis on the ideal as a literal force that enters actual experience without being contained in it, that is actualized without ceasing to be virtual, that cannot but be felt but always escapes, earns his philosophy the paradoxical label of ‘transcendental empiricism’.
Outback
Authors: Muccke Stephen
Published: October 2006

This paper is written in such a way that the style reproduces the epistemological problems, Memories, sounds, and feelings are part of the analysis of subjective relations to Australian spaces, accordingly these are reproduced ‘ficto-critically’. The aesthetic is both nomadological and immaterial. Apprehensions of Australian space are constructed as movement through them. Accordingly the reader is taken on a journey from the backyard to the Outback, and it is explained why these two spaces have a certain homology. Anteriority, it is claimed, is a central category for a non-Aboriginal Australian imaginary. But some accounts of Aboriginal apprehensions of space are brought out for the purposes of contrast (for Aboriginal people there is no ‘Outback’). The textual status of these Aboriginal accounts is contingent upon the structures of their knowledge and ways of obtaining it. Instances of the author's ‘capture’ on a tape recorder of stories by an Aboriginal woman, Bonnie Edwards, indicate the divergence of the form and purpose of her texts from the ‘textual suburbs’ of theory that the author usually inhabits. As he leaves her country, his practical solution to the material weight of theory and the self-presence of narrative subjectivity is an immaterial one. He gets lost.
A Hundred Thousand Lines of Flight: A Machinic Introduction to the Nomad Thought and Scrumpled Geography of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Authors: Doel Marcus A
Published: October 2006

What is space? What is spacing? And how does spacing itself hold together? The author pursues these questions, which continue to haunt and transfix geographers, by drawing upon the collaborative work of two exemplary thinkers: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What emerges from such an encounter is a fundamental shift in the way space, place, and spacing are configured; a shift which will have enormous implications for anyone concerned with unfolding the relationship between society and space. Particular emphasis is placed on the radicalization of relations, of the spacing of relations, and of relational space. Such a radicalization effectively deconstructs the field of geography as we know it, and demands that we reconfigure both the world and our theoretical-practices ‘from the middle’. This yields a world of continuous variation, becoming, and chance, rather than one of constancy, being, and predictability; and it is populated solely by hæcceities, singularities, and events, strung together through joints, intervals, and folds. Accordingly, a fractal world of infinite disadjustment, destabilization, and disjointure is what is meant by the term ‘scrumpled geography’, and it constitutes the horizon on which one should situate deconstruction, postmodernism, and poststructuralism more generally. Unfolding the joints, intervals, and folds of such a world is precisely the task undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari. However, the author reworks their own undertaking by giving it a much more explicitly spatial inflexion and consistency. Thus, the paper not only clarifies the scrumpled geography embedded within the work of Deleuze and Guattari, it also demonstrates the revolutionary implications of a rigorously deconstructive and poststructuralist consideration of space, place, and spacing.
A Guided Tour of the Kitchen: Seven Japanese Domestic Tales
Authors: Buckley Sandra
Published: October 2006

Beginning with an account of the kitchen by the novelist Yoshimoto Banana, this author journeys through a series of Japanese domestic tales, as articulated in various sites of popular culture: homeware advertising, political campaigns, garbage disposal practices, architectural magazines, and pornographic comics. The kitchen operates in this paper as far more than a functional site in the home. It is a multifaceted concept which shows the nexus of the flow of energy between body politics, the state, and its key organ, the family. Official discourses of gender, family, motherhood, education, and employment flow through this unbound space of the kitchen. Here the kitchen is far more than architecture, it is a concept which defies material limits to become a space of domestic fantasies, both homely and unhomely, of the family and the nation-state.
Towards Minor Theory
Authors: Katz Cindi
Published: October 2006

In this essay I develop the notion of ‘minor theory’ following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Kafka's ‘minor literature’ as a way of reconfiguring the production of knowledge in geography. I will explore the politics of producing theory that is, for example, interstitial with empirical research and social location; of scholarship that self-reflexively interpolates the theories and practices of everyday historical subjects—including, but not restricted to, scholars; and of work that reworks marginality by decomposing the major. I will discuss the ways that by consciously refusing ‘mastery’ in both the academy and its research practices, ‘minor’ research strives to change theory and practice simultaneously, and I will suggest that these practices can be conjoined with the critical and transformative concerns of Marxism, feminism, antiracism, and queer theory to pry apart conventional geographies and produce renegade cartographies of change.
Postmodernism and the Crisis of the Intellectual: Reflections on Reflexivity, Universities, and the Scientific Field
Authors: Bassett Keith
Published: October 2006

In this paper the author takes up the issue of the social responsibilities of academics, raised in recent articles in this journal, through a discussion of the crises facing contemporary intellectuals. The paper begins with a plea for a reflexive sociology of intellectuals, and after a brief review of early debates on the role of intellectuals, the author concentrates on Gouldner's grand vision of intellectuals as a ‘flawed universal class’. In the next section the forces that have undermined such grand visions in the past few decades, precipitating the current crises, are discussed. The author then categorises a range of positions that have been recently developed to justify some continuing role for intellectuals as a social category in contemporary society. This discussion leads on to a focus on the work of Bourdieu, which seems to the author to offer the most productive framework for thinking about these issues. But in the last section he raises a number of problems that might be tackled through the incorporation of some feminist approaches.
Mapping Edward Said: Geography, Identity, and the Politics of Location
Authors: Kasbarian John Antranig
Published: October 2006

The recent postmodern turn and concomitant reconceptualization of space in social theory have encouraged numerous investigators, cultural theorists especially, to augment, even to replace, material with metaphorical space; one whereby ‘geographical imaginations’ play constitutive roles in space-society relationships. A leading contributor has been Edward Said, who aims at refashioning spatial sensibilities not only in traditional ‘geographic’ terms but in a broader epistemological sense. Committed to transgressing established borders, Said invites us to imagine new topographies, in which units heretofore deemed separate—cultures, professions, realms of experience—become inescapably hybrid and interpenetrating. At the same time, Said's geography can be as opaque as it is suggestive—betraying an eclectic form often left unstituatrd vis-à-vis material practices. I invoke Aijaz Ahmad's work to situate Said's, tracing its affiliations to his trajectories as diasporan intellectual, Palestinian activist, and disciple of European High Philology. Ahmad thereby renders a portrait which is both enabling and self-cancelling, in which Said's generosity, complexity—and untenability—inhere from an unwillingness to vacate any spaces he has occupied; seeking instead to span often irreconcilable positions. Ahmad's stringency, however, fails to acknowledge possibilities inherent in Said's eclecticism; particularly the commitment to build bridges, oppose orthodox rigidities, and gain enrichment from that which one opposes. In this light, I invoke David Harvey's work as emblematic of a growing oeuvre that does not deny postmodernism its radical potential, but instead situates it within a revamped materialism designed to reconnect the Left. Harvey's work represents a serious—though not unproblematic—attempt to rework modernity, viewed here as an unfinished project capable of galvanizing new and varied energies.
Where's the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alterity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan
Authors: Blum Virginia , Nast Heidi
Published: October 2006

It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing political relations, Lefebvre implicitly repudiates at the same time that he builds upon Lacan's distinctions between real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of subjectivity. For Lefebvre, Lacan's registers give primacy to visuality and heterosexualized familial dynamics while lived material, spatial, and political experience arc incidental to subject formation and systems of meaning Lefebvre transforms Lacan's registers by historicizing them in spatially dialectical terms, loosely replacing them with distinct forms of evolutionary spatialities which he calls natural, absolute, and abstract, In the process, he both subverts and reproduces Lacan's paternal–maternal (heterosexual) order. We hold that Lefebvrc's critique provides powerful theoretical tools for understanding how alterity and signification are always and inevitably politically and materially mediated through corporealities and ‘space’. Nonetheless, Lefebvre can only work out his spatial dialectic of history in heterosexist terms: although he usefully identifies maternal–paternal metaphors in different Western social formations over time, he fails to interrogate directly the very hetero-sexuality that gives these metaphors their relational significance and force. In short, he brings us to the brink of a nonheterosexist domain, but never enters it. In this paper then, we outline the striking parallels in the theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Lacan in order to illustrate how both theorists focus on gender construction as the fundamental social process through which alterity is achieved. At the same time, we unpack the underlying phallocentrism and heterosexism that sustain their versions of alterity, subjectivity, and agency, in the process showing how Lefebvre deftly undermines the apolitical stance of Lacan. In conclusion, we strive to recuperate the crucial liberatory aspects of Lefebvre's project through considering how we might go on to dislocate received versions of capitalism and sexual difference.
Angels and Devils: Moral Landscapes of Childhood
Authors: Valentine Gill
Published: October 2006

What it means to be a child varies over space and time. Historically, the dominant Western construction of childhood has oscillated between representing children as the bearers of original sin—devils—or as innocent—angels, in the United Kingdom in the 19th and for much of the 20th century it was this latter imagining of childhood that took hold. But the murder of toddler Jamie Bulger by two 10-year-old boys in 1993 has been pivotal in reengaging a demonised conceptualisation of what it means to be a child. The author begins by considering some of the contested meanings of childhood and then goes on to explore the contemporary ‘othering’ of children and some of the spatial restrictions being imposed on young people by adults in an attempt to (re)draw boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Publicity, Privacy, and Women's Political Action
Authors: Stacheli Lynn A
Published: October 2006

Interpretations of women's activism depend on the ways in which analysts conceptualize the relations between privacy, publicity, and politics, in this paper the relationship between women's standing in the public sphere and their activism is problematized. Women's activism is shaped by strategic, and sometimes opportunistic, choices to locate their activism either in public or in private spaces. These choices point to the importance of reconceptualizing publicity and privacy in ways that separate the content of actions from the spaces in which action is taken. Such a distinction creates the possibility of taking private actions into public spaces and of taking public actions in private spaces. When the content of action is separated from the spaces of action, women's activism is evaluated in terms of the efficacy of various actions in either public or private spaces, rather than in terms of women's presumed lack of access to the public sphere.
Object-Ions: From Technological Determinism towards Geographies of Relations
Authors: Bingham Nick
Published: October 2006

In spite of the recent proliferation of theoretically informed writings on all things ‘cyber,’- it remains the case that much of the literature on ‘electronic spaces’ is characterised by a strong current of technological determinism. That is to say, it assumes and reproduces a stable and matter-of-fact distinction between the material/technical and the social such that changes in the former are supposed somehow to ‘impact’ on the latter. In those accounts which eschew this position, authors tend to employ an approach towards technology that might broadly be termed social constructionist. After Latour, I argue that, in that they operate according to the same ‘logic’, both these positions—technological determinism and social constructionism—remain within a ‘modern’ worldview. I propose that if we are to (and I argue that we must) tell stories of a world in which what the moderns refer to as the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ are always already bound together, always already binding together, we require other vocabularies than those which divide and ‘black box’ the world into easy categories, vocabularies that are able to grant all sorts of things their rightful place in the (co)construction of the world. Drawing on a variety of writers, I suggest that one element of these other vocabularies might be what I term a ‘materialist semiotics’. Having elaborated certain strands of what this could mean, I offer some tentative accounts of what our ‘virtual geographies’ might look like from an a modern perspective.
Nature and the Reproduction of Endangered Space: The Spotted Owl in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California
Authors: Proctor James D , Pincetl Stephanie
Published: October 2006

Recent efforts to protect biodiversity in the United States often reproduce the literal and figurative divisions of space that have originally endangered target species. Nature as redefined by these efforts is as much a social construction as it is some biophysical entity under siege by humans, We focus on the categorical and spatial distinctions between landscapes prioritized for protection and landscapes given less priority or ignored altogether. These distinctions, we wish to demonstrate, reflect pragmatic considerations of habitat quality and political expediency, but they also are enmeshed in dualist nature–culture ideologies that serve to legitimate and ultimately to reproduce the different practices that occur on these landscapes. We focus on protection of spotted owl habitat, one of the most important cases of biodiversity conservation in the United States since the passage of the Endangered Species Act. We consider recent spotted owl protection efforts in the Pacific Northwest and southern California. In the Pacific Northwest, spotted owl protection plans on public forests have been cited as justification for casing habitat protection on private lands, in spite of the major historical biodiversity role of these forestlands. In California, spotted owl policy deliberations for the urbanized forests of southern California have lagged far behind those in the Sierra Nevada, even though owl populations have declined faster in southern California than anywhere else in the state. These cases are indicative of a nature epistemologically understood and ontologically constructed as separate from culture, of what Latour would call an act of purification set up against the undeniably hybrid character of nature–cultures in late modernity. It is precisely this recognition of nature–culture intertwining, however, that will prove central to the creation of sustaining habitats for nonhuman life.
In Search of Authenticity off and on the Beaten Track
Authors: May Jon
Published: October 2006

Recent years has seen increasing academic concern with constructions of authenticity, much of it focused upon the travel industry and the emergence of the ‘real holidays’ market in particular. Of appeal to independent travellers moving off the beaten track, such holidays have been located within a sociology of tourism that draws strict distinctions between the desires and activities of an independent traveller, drawn from the new cultural class, and working-class package tourists. Here it is suggested that accounts tracing the emergence of this market have tended to conflate two often related, but analytically distinct, discourses of authenticity which, when held apart, undermine the usual tourist typologies and considerably extend our understandings of the search for authenticity. Drawing upon qualitative interviews undertaken both with ‘travellers’ and with ‘tourists’ it is suggested that our understandings of this search be extended, to consider the ways in which a concern for authenticity is negotiated by a range of tourists enjoying a variety of holidays. Offering a critical intervention in debates around authenticity I champion a method capable of mapping the ambiguities of individual experience, rather than forcing that experience through the restrictive categories of various ideal types.
Inquiry into Environment and Body: Women, Work, and Chronic Illness
Authors: Moss Pamela , Dyck Isabel
Published: October 2006

The recent call for the reorientation of analysis in medical geography to more critical approaches has been met with both enthusiasm and caution. Critical theories of health and health care services are emerging, which complement the well-developed focus on the spatial aspects of disease and service delivery. Yet in reconceptualising the links between place, space, and health, care must be taken in theorising in context experiences of health and illness. By context we mean the richly textured social formation wherein social relations are threads of a tapestry woven together. One topic which lends itself to such an inquiry is how material and discursive bodies combine to create identities for women with chronic illness around issues of gender and (dis)ability within the context of the wider social political economy. In this paper, we propose a feminist political economic analysis of environment and body as an addition to the critical frameworks emerging in medical geography. We first discuss what a radical body politics entails conceptually. Then we make suggestions with regard to undertaking such inquiry, using in illustration empirical work on women's reshaping of their environment in response to chronic illness. This type of investigation extends previous work on the formation of women's identities, experiences of chronic illness, and the materiality of everyday life. Last, we recast the concepts of environment, body, and identity formation while maintaining a commitment to the fluidity of conceptual and material boundaries.
Back to the Good Life: Towards an Enlarged Conception of Social Justice
Authors: Smith David M
Published: October 2006

Social justice has returned to the geographical agenda, but in an intellectual environment different from that in which ‘radical geography’ emerged more than two decades ago. The author attempts to (re)integrate the notion of social justice with some broader conception of the good life. An egalitarian formulation of distributive justice is posited, to set the scene for an argument that its application requires reference to the way of life in which it is embedded. Postapartheid South Africa is used for illustrative purposes. It is argued that the interdependence of distributional and relational aspects of justice might find fruitful expression in a universal ethic of care, as a central feature of a good way of life.
Spatialities of Power and Postmodern Ethics—Rethinking Geopolitical Encounters
Authors: Slater David
Published: October 2006

There is still a tendency in contemporary currents of political theory to marginalize the spatialities of power. In this paper I argue that the development of a critical geopolitical imagination can help to illuminate issues of inside and outside, the transgression of borders, and the subversion of sovereignties, and that these issues are vital to our global understanding of democracy, justice, and ethics. I consider three interrelated questions. First, I emphasize the importance of situating the discussion of justice, equality, and power in a context which is not only transnational but in which a consideration of the geopolitics of power over other non-Western societies is also in the foreground. Second, I examine critically those treatments of ethics and politics that tend to isolate the national from the international, especially when the West is represented as a self-contained entity. Third, in the context of recent discussions on politics and the postmodern, I explore aspects of the ethics of difference and intersubjectivity. This is done against a general background of West–non-West relations, and the impact of geopolitical encounters.
Decoding the Globe: Globalism, Advertising, and Corporate Practice
Authors: McHaffie Patrick
Published: October 2006

The current graphical rhetoric of advertising includes everything from images of the globe borrowed from the US space program (for example, Hewlett-Packard Corp. computer systems), to pseudotribal renderings of a very different sort [for example, Minute Maid's (The Coca Cola Co.) Fruitopia]. The use of these images are part of what Goldman calls the economy of ‘commodity signs’, where produced meanings are linked to commodities through the medium of the print or broadcast advertisement. The increased incorporation of global images in Western advertising presents an opportunity to analyze the ideological underpinning of the ‘new global economy’. The sheer volume of purchased advertising space places these often confusing images before our eyes at an increasing pace, producing meanings which tend to obfuscate and fetishize discourse related to globalism. A decoding of specific advertisements with the use of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation as a case study, juxtaposed against the real spatial practices of the company will reveal ruptures, contradictions, and incoherence in advertising messages which appropriate the symbolic power of global images.
“Sing along with the Common People”: Politics, Postcolonialism, and other Figures
Authors: Barnett Clive
Published: October 2006

Recent interest amongst critical human geographers in postcolonial theory has been framed by a concern for the relationship between ‘polities’ and ‘theory’. In this paper I address debates in the field of colonial discourse analysis in order to explore the connections between particular conceptions of language and particular models of politics to which oppositional academics consider themselves responsible, The rhetorical representation of empowerment and disempowerment through figures of ‘speech’ and ‘silence’, respectively, is critically examined in order to expose the limits of this representation of power relations. Through a reading of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's account of the dilemmas of subaltern representation, contrasted to that of Benita Parry, and staged via an account of their different interpretations of the exemplary postcolonial fictions of J M Coetzee, it is argued that the deconstruction of the conventional metaphories of speech and silence calls into view the irreducible textuality of the work of representation. This implies that questions about institutional positionality and academic authority be kept squarely in sight when discussing the problems of representing the struggles and agency of marginalised social groups. It is suggested that the continuing suspicion of literary and cultural theory amongst social scientists for being insufficiently ‘materialist’ and/or ‘political’ may serve to reproduce certain forms of institutionally sanctioned disciplinary authority.