bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Psychosocial morbidity associated with patterns of family functioning in palliative care: baseline data from the Family Focused Grief Therapy controlled trial
Authors: Kissane David W , McKenzie Maria , McKenzie Dean P , Forbes Andrew , O'Neill Imogen , Bloch Sidney
Published: November 2003

Family Focused Grief Therapy (FFGT) is a new model of brief intervention, which is commenced during palliative care for those families shown to be at high risk of poor adaptation, and continued preventively into bereavement with the aim of improving family functioning and reducing the morbid consequences of grief. In this paper, baseline data on 81 families (363 individuals) selected by screening from a palliative care population are explored to confirm our previously reported observation that high levels of psychosocial morbidity are positively associated with worsening family dysfunction.

The Family Relationships Index (FRI) was used for screening and the Family Assessment Device (FAD) as an independent family outcome measure. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and Social Adjustment Scale (SAS) were the psychosocial measures. Families were classified according to their functioning based on the FRI. To allow for correlated family data, statistical analyses employed the generalized estimating equation (GEE) method, controlling for gender and depression (BDI).

Screening of 257 families (701 individuals) revealed 74 (29%) well-functioning families and 183 (71%) at some risk of morbid outcome. Of the latter, 81 (44%) gave informed consent to enter a randomized controlled trial of FFGT. Patients had a mean age of 57 years, 51% were male and they suffered from cancer, with a median length of illness from diagnosis to death of 25 months. In accordance with the FFGT model, their family types were identified as Intermediate 51%, Sullen 26% and Hostile 23%. These were significantly associated with steadily increasing levels of distress (BSI) and poor social adjustment (SAS). The FAD confirmed the concurrent accuracy of the FRI.

As significantly greater levels of psychosocial morbidity were present in families whose functioning as a group was poorer, support was generated for a clinical approach that screens for families rather than individuals at high risk. The predictive validity of the FRI as a screening measure was confirmed. Overall, these baseline data point to the importance of a family-centred model of care.
Building bridges in palliative care: evaluating a GP Facilitator programme
Authors: Shipman Cathy , Addington-Hall Julia , Thompson Margaret , Pearce Alison , Barclay Stephen , Cox Ivan , Maher Jane , Millar David
Published: November 2003

The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of the Macmillan GP Facilitator Programme in Palliative Care on the knowledge, attitudes and confidence in symptom control of general practitioners (GPs), communication with patients and out-of-hours practice. GP Facilitators work on average for two sessions a week with practices in their locality. The design included a before and after study, with geographical controls matched on type of area (inner city, urban and rural) and broadly on Jarman scores using postal questionnaires sent to GPs. Scores measured change in GP awareness, attitudes and practice over two years of the intervention, derived from Likert scale responses to the postal questionnaires. Although overall few significant results were found, we did identify an increase in the use of palliative care guidelines in Facilitator districts, together with an increase in awareness of day care. The programme was associated with increased positive attitudes towards specialist palliative care services and results suggested increased satisfaction with out-of-hours services for patients. No change was found for confidence in symptom control and communication over diagnosis with cancer patients was less than in control districts. The design also incorporated a qualitative component, and from this we found the Facilitator programme to be popular with local GPs who valued the support of a colleague who knew the demands and constraints of general practice. In conclusion, we have demonstrated an impact of the GP Facilitator programme on GP awareness of, use and increased positive attitudes towards specialist palliative care services. By improving communication between primary and specialist palliative care, the programme should contribute substantially to improved care of the dying at home.
Depressive symptoms in advanced cancer. Part 2. Depression over time; the role of the palliative care professional
Authors: Meyer H A Martine , Sinnott Claire , Seed Paul T
Published: November 2003

Objective: To survey changes in depressive symptoms over time in patients with advanced cancer using the Mood Evaluation Questionnaire (MEQ), and explore how effective Palliative Care Professionals (PCPs) are at assessing this.

Method: Forty-five advanced cancer patients were followed monthly for up to six interviews (108 interviews in total). Selected clinical variables were recorded.

Results: At first interview, 26 (58%) patients were depressed using MEQ, seven (16%) severely. Attrition rates were high, with 28, 13, nine, seven and six patients available for subsequent interviews. A > 12-point increase in MEQ over sequential interviews was associated with reduced survival (Hazard ratio 3.2, CI 1.2–8.4). PCPs recognized depressed mood, but underdiagnosed severe depression in 9% of patients (CI 3–16%, P = 0.002). A past history of depression was a strong indicator of current depressed mood on the MEQ.

Conclusion: Change in depressive symptoms over time is related to mortality in this patient cohort, patients with marked deterioration in mood dying earlier. PCPs usually recognize patients' depression but underestimate the severity of depressed mood.
Symptoms and concerns amongst cancer outpatients: identifying the need for specialist palliative care
Authors: Lidstone V , Butters E , Seed P T , Sinnott C , Beynon T , Richards M
Published: November 2003

This study aimed to define and prioritize the need for specialist palliative care (SPC) in cancer outpatient clinics. A validated assessment tool, the Symptoms and Concerns Checklist, was used to determine the prevalence and severity of symptoms and concerns. The checklist was completed by 480 outpatients with a cancer diagnosis. Sixty patients from each of eight primary tumour groups (lung, breast, gastrointestinal, gynaecological, urological, head and neck, brain and lymphoma) were recruited. The majority of patients (over 90%) rated 27 of the 29 checklist items, reporting a mean of 10 items as current problems. The influences of disease site and status, demographic factors and treatment on the number and type of symptoms and concerns reported were investigated. The highest number of symptoms and concerns and most severe problems were reported by patients with lung cancer, followed by those with brain tumours; the lowest by those with lymphoma and urological tumours. A high proportion of patients (83%) reported one or more items likely to benefit from SPC intervention. The results of this study suggest an extensive need for better symptom control in all cancer outpatients and in centres where SPC resources are limited, priority could be given to patients attending lung and brain tumour clinics.
Reconsidering the legacy of urban public facility location theory in human geography
Authors: DeVerteuil Geoffrey
Published: November 2003

In 1968, Michael Teitz initiated a new locational theory, focusing on how best to locate urban public facilities given the need to balance efficiency and equity. This locational problematic would evolve into a coherent set of geographical concepts steeped in normative, neoclassical and quantitative assumptions. Building on Teitz's original formulations, quantitative geographers and regional scientists focused on operationalizing efficiency and equity concerns according to distance, pattern, accessibility, impacts and externalities. The legacy of these concepts in human geography, however, has not been systematically traced. While both reflecting and bolstering wider stances in welfare, urban and behavioral geography during the quantitative era, the legacy of urban public facility theory in the postquantitative era is decidedly uneven. On the one hand, the legacy was effectively refuted by situating location theory within a much broader political, economic and social matrix. Adopting a more conflictual framework, geographers shifted the focus of locational theory to larger questions of how costs and benefits are spatially distributed in urban society. On the other hand, the legacy was sustained by retaining the normative interest in balancing equity with efficiency within a model-building paradigm, while jettisoning the reliance on neoclassical economics and universalistic assumptions for more nuanced, socially embedded accounts. In this sense, the legacy of urban public facility location theory emerges as a nested sequence of normative models that grew increasingly sophisticated, inclusive and contextualized over time. The rise of the nonprofit and privatized sectors, however, threatens to erode the existence of a distinctly public facility location theory.
‘The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space
Authors: Koskela Hille
Published: November 2003

This article discusses how ever-increasing video-surveillance is changing the nature of urban space. The article evaluates whether surveillance can be seen as a means of making space safer and ‘more available’. The main focus is on surveillance in publicly accessible spaces, such as shopping malls, city streets and places for public transport. The article explains how space under surveillance is formed, and how it is related to power structures and human emotions. Space is conceptualized from various viewpoints. Three concepts of space are postulated: space as a container, power-space and emotional space. The purpose is not to construct a meta-theory of space; rather, the concepts are used as ‘tools’ for exploring the issue of surveillance. It is argued that video-surveillance changes the ways in which power is exercised, modifies emotional experiences in urban space and affects the ways in which ‘reality’ is conceptualized and understood. Surveillance contributes to the production of urban space.
Moral progress in human geography: transcending the place of good fortune
Authors: Smith David M.
Published: November 2003

Recognition of the place of good fortune in people's lives occupies an important place in the liberal egalitarian perspective on social justice. Elaboration of this notion sets the scene for a discussion of three senses of moral progress in human geography. The first is the creation of a more equal world, in which the morally arbitrary contingencies of good or bad fortune are transcended. The second is the undertaking of geographical research which might promote a process of equalization. The third is the pursuit of professional practice and institutions sensitive to the needs of persons in places of misfortune. Moral progress in human geography involves a spatially extensive ethic of care, to combat contemporary forces encouraging parochialism and the perpetuation of inequality.
Arguments within geographies of movement: the theoretical potential of migrants' stories
Authors: Lawson Victoria A.
Published: November 2003

In this article, I engage the ways in which migrants' experiences are socially constructed and situated in particular political-economic and cultural contexts in meaningful ways. Drawing on migrants' own stories, I examine the ways in which social relations of gender and ethnicity shape their experiences. The analysis examines the interplay of desires, identities and subjectives in multiple sites in order to understand processes of belonging, exclusion and affiliation that are produced through migration. Secondly, I examine the ways in which migrants' social positionings allow them to question dominant narratives of neoliberal development. Thirdly, I take seriously the idea that questions about mobility only take on meaning in particular political-economic contexts which have produced those migrations and discourses. I suggest that these complex questions about identity, subjectivity and context call for critical ethnographies of migration, and I explore the potential of this approach for a case study of urban-bound migrants in Ecuador.
Representations and identities in tourism map spaces
Authors: Del Casino Vincent J. , Hanna Stephen P.
Published: November 2003

Tourism maps remain underexamined in geography. Despite recent trends in critical cartography and tourism studies that redefine the relationship between space and representation, these geographic texts are rarely explored for their intertextual relationships with the spaces they claim to represent. In this article, we argue that tourism maps and other representations play an important role in the production of tourism spaces. We begin with an examination of the parallel trends in critical cartography and tourism studies and then push these intial theoretics further by integrating theories of identity, space and representation. We define tourism maps, spaces and identities as inter-related processes rather than final products. The creation of maps as processes inevitably includes the ambiguities introduced in the production of spaces and the formation of identities by changing social contexts. These ambiguities are readable in maps and they permit us, and potentially other map readers, to understand the spaces and identities of tourism in ways not fully circumscribed by a map's immediate production context and purpose. To explore this theoretical argument further we read one tourism map for the inter-related, ambiguous and therefore contested processes reproducing, but never fully fixing, tourism spaces and identities.
Inside, outside, upside down, backward, forward, round and round: a case for ethnographic studies in migration
Authors: McHugh Kevin E.
Published: November 2003

This article calls attention to the potential of ethnographic studies in furthering our understanding of migration and circulation systems. The dominant conceptualization of migration and migrant adjustment as a one-way journey is inadequate, as many individuals and groups forge connections and social fields across expanses of space and time. There has been insufficient attention directed toward understanding migrations as cultural events rich in meaning for individuals, families, social groups, communities and nations. Three recent ethnographic studies of disparate migrant groups in North America are presented as exemplars. A careful reading and interpretation of each brings to light key ideas in migration and culture, culminating in four overarching themes that serve as prolegomena for a research agenda in migration and postmodernity: dislodgement from place, entrainment in migrant cultures, the ambivalence of migration, and identity construction and change.
Social and ecological resilience: are they related?
Authors: Adger W. Neil
Published: November 2003

This article defines social resilience as the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental change. This definition highlights social resilience in relation to the concept of ecological resilience which is a characteristic of ecosystems to maintain themselves in the face of disturbance. There is a clear link between social and ecological resilience, particularly for social groups or communities that are dependent on ecological and environmental resources for their livelihoods. But it is not clear whether resilient ecosystems enable resilient communities in such situations. This article examines whether resilience is a useful characteristic for describing the social and economic situation of social groups and explores potential links between social resilience and ecological resilience. The origins of this interdisciplinary study in human ecology, ecological economics and rural sociology are reviewed, and a study of the impacts of ecological change on a resource-dependent community in contemporary coastal Vietnam in terms of the resilience of its institutions is outlined.
A reappraisal of gentrification: towards a ‘geography of gentrification’
Authors: Lees Loretta
Published: November 2003

The gentrification literature since the mid-1990s is reappraised in light of the emergence of processes of post-recession gentrification and in the face of recent British and American urban policy statements that tout gentrification as the cure-all for inner-city ills. Some tentative suggestions are offered on how we might re-energize the gentrification debate. Although real analytical progress has been made there are still ‘wrinkles’ which research into the ‘geography’ of gentrification could address: 1) financifiers – super-gentrification; 2) third-world immigration – the global city; 3) black/ethnic minority gentrification – race and gentrification; and 4) liveability/urban policy – discourse on gentrification. In addition, context, temporality and methodology are argued to be important issues in an updated and rigorous deconstruction of not only the process of gentrification itself but also discourses on gentrification.
Local governance and local business interests: a critical review
Authors: Valler David , Wood Andrew , North Peter
Published: November 2003

Since 1980 the dominance of elected municipal government in Britain has given way to a broader local governance. While the precise configuration of this change has been debated in detail, approaches to the processes of restructuring and the operation and relative efficacy of new arrangements remain empirically limited and theoretically underdeveloped. We explore the usefulness of a range of contemporary theoretical accounts including regulationist approaches in responding to these lacunae. In developing our analysis we argue first that explaining the restructuring of local governance requires (amongst a range of developments) further theoretical and empirical work on local business interest representation; and, secondly, that attempts to move beyond partial evaluations of the new local governance must be predicated upon appropriate and rigorous theoretical foundations.
Are international journals of human geography really international?
Authors: Gutiérrez Javier , López-Nieva Pedro
Published: November 2003

The aim of this article is to research the extent to which ‘international journals’ of human geography are really international. The analysis is based on the affiliation data (work centre) of the authors of articles and of members of editorial boards of a group of international journals; the results so obtained are related to the impact factors of these journals. The indicators used show that human geography journals in general have still not attained a high degree of internationalization. This may be interpreted as a sign of fragmentation within the discipline: human geographers do not constitute a proper international scientific community or, rather, a global community that makes use of certain common media of expression (international journals) but are fragmented into national or regional (linguistic) communities.
Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda
Authors: Martin Ron
Published: November 2003

The past two decades have seen a wholesale rethinking and reworking of public policy, and have provided geographers with a major opportunity to enter and help shape the policy debate. Yet, disappointingly, the impact of geography on the policy realm has been limited. Increasingly, it seems, other social, political and environmental scientists, and even media pundits, shape public perception and government policy in areas where we as geographers could – indeed should – be having much greater influence. In this article I examine the reasons for this state of affairs. The fundamental problem, I argue, is that for a variety of reasons much contemporary social and economic geography research renders it of little practical relevance for policy, in some cases of little social relevance at all. The more significant reasons for this lack of relevance to, and influence on, the policy realm include: the effects on the subject of the postmodern and cultural ‘turns’; the consequential emphasis on ‘sexy’ philosophical, linguistic and theoretical issues rather than on practical social research; the retreat from detailed, rigorous empirical work; the intellectual bias against policy studies; and the lack of political commitment. The article makes a plea for a new ‘policy turn’ in the discipline, and concludes with some tentative suggestions for how we might move towards a ‘geography of public policy’.
Maps as social constructions: power, communication and visualization
Authors: Crampton Jeremy W.
Published: November 2003

Two developments in cartography mark an epistemic break with the assumption that maps are unproblematic communication devices. These are 1) investigations of maps as practices of power-knowledge; and 2) ‘geographic visualization’ (GVis) which uses the map's power to explore, analyze and visualize spatial datasets to understand patterns better. These developments are key components of a ‘maps as social constructions’ approach, emphasizing the genealogy of power in mapping practices, and enabling multiple, contingent and exploratory perspectives of data. Furthermore, this approach is an opportunity for cartography to renew its relationship with a critical human geography.
Conceptualizing sunk costs in economic geography: cost recovery and the fluctuating value of fixed capital
Authors: Melachroinos Konstantinos A. , Spence Nigel
Published: November 2003

Several studies in economic geography have attempted to understand the spatial implications of sunk costs. In this paper it is argued that, although these efforts are most valuable, issues remain that deserve closer examination. The first begs the question whether the introduction of this concept into economic geography has occurred with due regard to the contexts set by the academic fields where the notion originates. If this is not the case, then perhaps some doubt should be cast on the suitability of the imported definition and theoretical frameworks for the geographical purposes envisaged. The second issue concerns the regional dimension of sunk costs, given that most of the literature focuses on their importance at the corporate level. A final concern relates to the empirical measurement of these costs. These issues serve as the starting point of the formulation of an alternative view of sunk costs. It is suggested here that the issue of sunk costs is, in the final analysis, a problem of realizing value. Concepts of fixed capital measurement and depreciation offer the basis of an alternative theoretical framework for conceptualizing sunkness.
The effacement of early modern geography (c.1600–1850): a historiographical essay
Authors: Mayhew Robert J.
Published: November 2003

This article examines the ways in which geographers have written about the history of geography in the early modern period ( c. 1600–1850). It is argued that geography was a clearly defined practice in that period, but that a century of writing about the period by geographers has consistently effaced that definition. This practice began with modern geography's ‘founding fathers’, of whom Mackinder, Hartshorne and Sauer are considered. They developed an ‘essentialist’ historiography – postulating what geography is as a science ‘in essence,’ judging geography's history in the light of this essence and placing the early modern period in a precritical era. This model proved highly influential with historians of geography, and even contemporary work has not escaped from its framework to take on board the alterity of the early modern conception of geography.
In the territory of knowledge: state-centred discourses and the construction of society
Authors: Häkli Jouni
Published: November 2003

The concept of society is of fundamental importance in social science research. Yet there is little explicit theorization among the mainstream social sciences of how society should be conceived of geographically. The dominant tendency is to take a state-territorial definition of society for granted. While an increasing reflexivity has recently emerged regarding the relationship between social science discourses and the states' agency and projects, the role of state territorial boundaries in structuring the production of knowledge of society has not received equal attention. This article seeks to make a contribution to ongoing work which focuses explicitly on the interrelationships between governmental practice, bodies of knowledge, and territory.
‘In the beginning was economic geography’ – a science studies approach to disciplinary history
Authors: Barnes Trevor J.
Published: November 2003

Science studies are an increasingly prominent interdisciplinary body of work. Now a diverse literature, one of its most consistent and common themes is a reluctance to accept the standard model of scientific explanation (‘internalism’) that conceives scientific knowledge, and the disciplines with which it is associated, as the product of a rationality that is progressively realized over time. Instead, science studies emphasize the importance of local circumstances in shaping knowledge, which, in turn, makes such knowledge messy and context-dependent. The purposes of this paper are twofold. The first is to provide a selective review of science studies. In particular, the paper recognizes three subtraditions within the larger genre: Mertonian institutionalism, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and cultural studies of science. The second purpose is to begin developing a case study in order to apply such literature, that of the institutional origins of economic geography during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and linked to a series of wider social processes around commercial trade and imperialism. To make the case study manageable, I concentrate on only two authors and their respective key books: the Scottish geographer George Chisholm, who wrote the first English-language economic geography textbook, A handbook of commercial geography (1889); and the American geographer J. Russell Smith, author of the first US college text in economic geography, Industrial and commercial geography (1913).
Transnationalism and the spaces of commodity culture
Authors: Crang Philip , Dwyer Claire , Jackson Peter
Published: November 2003

This paper presents a critical assessment of the concept of transnationalism and its place within the current refiguration of cultural geography. Identifying three specific concerns with current theorizations of transnationalism (regarding the concept's scope, specificity and politics), the paper discusses the widely perceived need to ‘ground’ the study of transnationalism in specific empirical research. It argues that this discussion has been unhelpfully dominated by an overemphasis on identifying transnational migrant and diasporic communities. The paper highlights the authors' research with a range of food and fashion firms working between Britain and the Indian subcontinent to argue that an analysis of commodity culture provides an alternative way of advancing our understanding of contemporary transnationality. This approach suggests that transnational space can be recognized as both multidimensional and multiply inhabited. The paper concludes by outlining the alternative ways in which attention to commodity culture helps ‘ground’ the concept of transnationalism.
Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States
Authors: Wright Richard , Houston Serin , Ellis Mark , Holloway Steven , Hudson Margaret
Published: November 2003

This review highlights geographical perspectives on mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States, explicitly calling for increased analysis at the scale of the mixed-race household. We begin with a discussion of mixed-race rhetoric and then sketch contemporary trends in mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the US. We also weave in considerations of the public and the private and the genealogical and social constructions of race. Our challenges to current thought add to the landscape of scholarship concerned with race and space. By presenting mixed race in fresh ways, we offer new sites for intervention in this evolving literature.
World city topologies
Authors: Smith Richard G.
Published: November 2003

This paper develops ideas from poststructuralism, actor-network theory, nonrepresentational theory and complexity theory to begin to produce a topological consideration of cities in global networks. In other words, the paper argues that fluids and flows, actant networks, performances and practices fold the spaces and times of cities in ways that question the privileging of geometrical space (near and far) and linear time (now and then) in explanations of global and world cities. To reach a conceptualization of world city topologies, the paper is in four parts. First, space is set free and rethought as everywhere and folded into everything. Second, time is rethought as non-linear, multiple and folded into everything. Third, these new conceptualizations of space and time are mobilized to challenge the spatialities and temporalities produced through the political-economy approach of a writer such as Saskia Sassen. Finally, my rethinking of space and time in globalization is worked through to portray global and world cities as ‘Bodies without Organs’. This spatial formation is seen to be one that connects and disconnects through networks and folds. Overall, my rethinking of space, time, globalization and cities produces a spatiotemporal pattern or topology that defies familiar geographical borders and temporal frames to point to the spaced and timed quality of relations that stretch.
Contrasts in agglomeration: proto-industrial, industrial and post-industrial forms compared
Authors: Phelps N. A. , Ozawa T.
Published: November 2003

For geographers and economists, urban agglomeration remains an enduring feature of the industrial landscape and a perennial source of theoretical and empirical interest. Curiously, despite this long-standing interest, there has been a remarkable tendency to explain agglomeration with reference to Alfred Marshall's trinity of external economies and industrial district model. In this paper, we seek to draw some contrasts in the form and causes of agglomeration. Our discussion proceeds by developing a simple and highly schematic taxonomy of what could be considered the emblematic forms of agglomeration in proto-industrial, industrial and post-industrial urban contexts. Highly simplified though they are, such contrasts highlight the changes in the spatial extent of agglomeration, the contribution of particular industrial sectors and types of external economy and of exports to the process of agglomeration over time. As such, there is an urgent need to reconcile the perspectives of economists and geographers in a renewal of the theory of agglomeration.
Critical realism and realist research in human geography: a method or a philosophy in search of a method?
Authors: Yeung Henry Wai-chung
Published: November 2003

Recent philosophical debates in human geography tend to misappropriate critical realism as a method per se. Drawing upon an extensive review of the realist philosophy and method in social science, this article argues that critical realism is a philosophy in search of a method. It first delves into recent debates about critical realism within the wider geographical discourse. It then suggests three useful guidelines in executing realist research in human geography: iterative abstraction, qualified grounded theory method and methodological triangulation. The article ends with a detailed empirical example for the readers to work through of the ways in which realist research can be practised in human geography.
(Dis)embodied geographies
Authors: Longhurst Robyn
Published: November 2003

Geographers are beginning to show interest in corporeality. The body is becoming evident in numerous geographical studies. It is timely, therefore, momentarily to ‘step back’ and address the question ‘what is a body?’ This article begins with an examination of some recent approaches to understanding embodiment – for example, phenomenological, psychoanalytic and ‘inscriptive’ approaches. Secondly, it reviews the work of geographers who claim that a Cartesian separation between mind and body underpins geographical discourse. Also discussed in this section are some of the ‘costs’ of this dualism underpinning geographical discourse. Finally, readers are alerted to a range of recent geographical literature in which the body is made explicit. This literature has the potential to prompt new understandings of power, knowledge and social relationships between people and places.
Understanding spatial concepts at the geographic scale without the use of vision
Authors: Kitchin Robert M. , Blades Mark , Golledge Reginald G.
Published: November 2003

In this article we review the literature that has sought to determine the spatial understanding of people with visual impairments or blindness. In particular, we examine the arguments surrounding whether people with visual impairments or blindness can understand geographic relationships such as distance, configuration and hierarchy. At present, the conclusions of researchers can be divided into three camps. One group suggests that vision is the spatial sense par excellence. This group suggests that congenitally blind individuals (blind from birth) are incapable of spatial thought because they have never experienced the perceptual processes (e.g., vision) necessary to comprehend spatial arrangements. Another group suggests that people with visual impairments can understand and mentally manipulate spatial concepts, but because information is based upon auditory and haptic cues this knowledge and comprehension is inferior to that based upon vision. The third group suggests that visually impaired individuals possess the same abilities to process and understand spatial concepts and that any differences, either in quantitative or qualitative terms, can be explained by intervening variables such as access to information, experience or stress. To date, most of the research which has led to these conclusions has been conducted using small-scale, laboratory environments and, as yet, we are still unsure as to how people with visual impairments and blindness learn, store and process spatial information at the geographic scale. We suggest that more research is needed to understand more fully the ‘mental landscapes’ of people with blindness or visual impairments. Such research is necessary, particularly given the rapid growth of orientation and navigation aids in recent years aimed at increasing independent mobility. However, research must move out of the laboratory to examine spatial thought within the geographic environments that people with visual impairments or blindness interact with on a daily basis.
Picturing practices: research through the tourist gaze
Authors: Crang Mike
Published: November 2003

Geographers have shown the centrality of representations of landscape to understanding social geographies. This article suggests that so far more attention has been paid to the representations than the practices that create these representations. Using the example of popular photography, this article suggests that such a focus on representations misses some important processes and reproduces some social ideologies. First, perhaps surprisingly, focusing on the practices of photography serves to reinstate the corporeality of experience often claimed to be lost in visual theory. Secondly, this embodied experience serves to highlight the mediation of visual worlds through technologies and epistemologies. Thirdly, it is suggested studying practices displaces some of the ways geography has posited an ‘authentic’ popular experience against its commodified forms. These ideas are pursued with reference to popular and principally tourist photography. In total it is suggested that such an approach focuses attention on the times and spaces of tourist experience in novel ways. The article insists on the subtle forms of time involved in touristic practices – through the idea of future perfect experience. It also suggests the spatialization of time through the juxtaposition of tourist spaces through pictorial technology. In order to reconcile these developments, the article further suggests that we need to look at not the visual perception of sights but their embodied, technological proprioception; and, to escape the authentic/commodified trap, we must think through a displaced idea of experience not through presence. Finally, it is suggested that this may be important in thinking through appropriate research strategies for mediated experience.
Engaging sustainable development: some observations on progress in the UK
Authors: Munton Richard
Published: November 2003

Continuing criticism of the term ‘sustainable development’ deflects attention from the political project that has to underpin shifts in human behaviour. It is more important to redefine the roles and functions of public and private institutions in ways that legitimate sustainable actions in the belief that latent public support for environmental protection can be converted into a widening range of new but customary behaviours. A brief review of the UK government's response to the Rio declaration demonstrates faltering purpose, reinforcing and reflecting public distrust of government and those commercial interests that benefit from the status quo. Only very modest comfort can be taken from its limited initiatives which range from the greater dissemination of information to the setting of some environmental targets. The unwillingness of government to promote major fiscal or financial reforms, or significantly to decentralize power and initiative, or to recognize the limitations to scientific knowledge when seeking the bases to ‘rational’ decision-making in the face of uncertainty, reveal the inadequacy of the steps so far taken.
Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics
Authors: Rose Gillian
Published: November 2003

This article addresses the discussion, particularly prominent among feminist geographers, of reflexivity as a strategy for marking geographical knowledges as situated. It argues that, if the aim of feminist and other critical geographies is to acknowledge their partiality, then the particular form of reflexivity advocated needs careful consideration. Feminist geographers most often recommend a kind of reflexivity that aims, even if only ideally, at a full understanding of the researcher, the researched and the research context. The article begins with the author's failure at that kind of reflexivity, and that particular reflexivity is then discussed and described as ‘transparent’ in its ambitious claims to comprehensive knowledge. The article then goes on to explore critiques of transparent reflexivity, many of which have been made by feminist geographers themselves. The article concludes by suggesting that some recent discussions of the uncertainties of research practice offer another model of feminist reflexivity that may succeed more effectively in questioning the researcher's practice of knowledge production.
Towards a holistic approach to geographic research on film
Authors: Kennedy Christina , Lukinbeal Christopher
Published: November 2003

Geographers' interest in film has increased during the last 20 years. Methodological and theoretical perspectives tend, however, to be bipolar and reflect either cognitive or social approaches. Work reflecting these approaches is reviewed with geographic research grounded in transactionalism and postmodernism as examples. A geographic view of film that recognizes the importance of more than one theoretical framework, positions the cognitive and social in a continuum reaching from the individual to the societal, and makes traditional notions of scale antiquated is recommended. Research by geographers contesting the assumed objectivity in documentaries is reviewed as are geographers' contributions to understanding the construction of meaning of urban and natural settings in films. Suggestions for future directions in film research are made.
A walk on the wild side: a critical geography of domestication
Authors: Anderson Kay
Published: November 2003

Against a backdrop of growing interest in animal geographies and the genetic engineering of species, this article critically examines the process of animal domestication. To date, the social selection and breeding of animals have received little deconstructive effort from human scientists. The article begins by reviewing earlier schools of geographic thought on domestication, including the work of Carl Sauer, for whom domestication was a transhistorical process of evolution's unfolding. In working away from that perspective, I historicize animal domestication within a narrative politics of ideas about human uniqueness, savagery and civilization through which the process was conceived and conducted from at least classical times. The article thus develops a cultural critique of technologies that have been fundamental to the transformation of landscapes. Integral to the story are concepts of ‘domus’ and ‘agrios’, the ‘bringing in’ of ‘the wild’, and associated notions of containment, fixity, settling and improvement. These ideas, I argue, became threaded into the relations of not only humans and certain animals but also raced and gendered relations in European-derived societies. The article concludes with appeals to the imagining of more animal-inclusive models of social relations; the relaxation of rigid oppositions of civility and wildness; and a ‘human’ Self more conversant with its own wild side, dedomesticated and unbound.
Community care and disability: the limits to justice
Authors: Gleeson Brendan
Published: November 2003

This article considers the distinctive injustices experienced by disabled people and assesses recent institutional strategies which have sought to reduce these inequities and exclusions. A principle of ‘enabling justice’ is proposed. This is to emphasize that the attainment of a just society which respects social difference is dependent upon the creation of human environments which satisfy the material and cultural needs of all who occupy them.

The article reviews a critical area of state policy practice in capitalist societies – the establishment of community care networks for socially dependent persons. While the policy of community care cannot alone produce enabling environments, it may well lessen one dynamic of oppression which disabled people experience: their sociospatial exclusion in remote, often dehumanizing, institutional settings. However, an examination of the practice of community care in particular national contexts reveals several problems which may frustrate the realization of its policy aims, including opposition to care facilities from nearby residents and structural changes to social policy by neoliberal governments. The article considers these challenges to community care using recent research which has examined the relationship between deinstitutionalization, urban regulation and social policy.
Beyond geography's visible worlds: a cultural politics of music
Authors: Smith Susan J.
Published: November 2003

Within human geography, the meeting between art matters and cultural politics has been a predominantly visual affair. However, this article argues that sound is as important as sight for the project of geography, and that music has as secure a place as the visual arts in the study of social life. For example, while cultural studies of Renaissance Italy have focused on the way that landscape painting encapsulates the political economy of the period, I consider why the ‘truths’ of the time were nurtured as much by filling space with sound as by depicting place on canvas. Similarly, although painters are able vividly to depict the impact of industrialization on the English landscape, by exploring the spaces of music – a more neglected route into the historical geography of modern Britain – I suggest there is more to the link between art and industrialism than first meets the eye. Finally, building on maps of race and racism drawn up from ethnography, narrative and visual representation, I tease out the contested terrain of music, and identify it as a medium through which those whose condition society tries its best not to see can begin to make themselves heard.
Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography
Authors: Newman David , Paasi Anssi
Published: November 2003

State boundaries have constituted a major topic in the tradition of political geography. Boundary analysis has focused on the international scale, since international boundaries provide perhaps the most explicit manifestation of the large-scale connection between politics and geography. The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in boundaries, both within geography and from the wider field of social theory. Geographers have sought to place the notions of boundary within other social theoretical constructs, while other social scientists have attempted to understand the role of space and, in some cases, territory in their understanding of personal, group, and national boundaries and identities. Recent studies include analyses of the postmodern ideas of territoriality and the ‘disappearance’ of borders, the construction of sociospatial identities, socialization narratives in which boundaries are responsible for creating the ‘us’ and the ‘Other’, and the different scale dimensions of boundary research. These can be brought together within a multidimensional, multidisciplinary framework for the future study of boundary phenomena.
Rural–urban interactions, agriculture and wealth: a southeast Asian perspective
Authors: Rigg Jonathan
Published: November 2003

The forces of economic and social change are reworking rural areas of the developing world, sometimes fundamentally so. Agriculture is being squeezed by nonagricultural pursuits, aspirations are increasingly informed by a wish to avoid farming and the ‘household’ is being restructured as the genders and generations contest and renegotiate their respective roles. The diversification of the household economy and the interpenetration of rural and urban have created multiple hybridities where individuals and households shift between agricultural and industrial pursuits and cross between rural and urban areas. Farm is in thrall to nonfarm, and industry is often dependent on ‘rural’ labour. Drawing largely on work from southeast Asia, the article reviews these changes to rural life and livelihood, discusses their impacts on agriculture and reflects on their implications for rural development.
Geography, paradox and environmental ethics
Authors: Proctor James D.
Published: November 2003

As a diverse and divided discipline, geography embodies tensions central to the para doxical nature of human dwelling on earth, from which questions of environmental ethics arise. The article reviews major ontological and epistemological tensions within geography – that between nature and culture, and objectivism and subjectivism – emphasizing the ways in which common resolutions to these tensions often represent flawed strategies of avoiding paradox. It then connects these tensions to important philosophical dimensions of environmental ethics. I argue that normative environmental ethics must be built on an adequate sensitivity to the nature/culture tension, and that environmental meta-ethics – specifically, the problem of relativism as applied to environmental discourse – must be similarly informed by the object/subject tension. The most fundamental contribution geography can make, therefore, lies in establishing a philosophical space for environmental ethics that takes paradox seriously and avoids its simplistic resolutions.