bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Reconstruction of Social Ecology and Neighborhood Change in Brooklyn
Authors: Warf B
Published: October 2006

Social ecology, despite the grave errors made by the Chicago School, still offers insights into the mechanics underlying the formation of urban residential geographies. A reconstituted social ecology, properly grafted to a conception of the division of labor and informed by structuration theory, reveals much about neighborhood formation and dissolution, urban sociospatial mobility, and the neglected issue of ethnicity. In this paper such a project is outlined, and then utilized empirically with a case study of the historical and current evolution of Brooklyn, New York, illustrating that the formation and dissolution of neighborhoods is a function of the changing types of jobs at successive historical moments, the structure of the housing market, the geography of preexisting residential formations, and the cultural and ideological characteristics of immigrant communities.
Depth Hermeneutics and Critical Human Geography
Authors: Pile S
Published: October 2006

Initially, the author draws on the debate between Habermas and Gadamer about the methodology of the social sciences. Although there are substantial differences in their positions, together they form the basis for elaborationg a depth hermeneutics which deploys the opposing attitudes of explanation and understanding into a comprehensive interpretive methodology. Thompson has set out a three-phase procedure which collectively constitute a depth hermeneutics. In the second section, these three phases and the way in which this method was applied in a field study of Somerset dairy farmers are described. It is shown that farmers' experience is both spatially and temporally organised through language. By means of examples from this analysis, it is suggested that Thompson's depth hermeneutic procedure may help one appreciate the way in which structures are reproduced through people's everyday (inter)actions. The paper concludes with an exploration of the implications for a critical human geography.
The Theory of Land Rent at the Crossroads
Authors: Haila A
Published: October 2006

A critical survey is offered of various recent positions in the theory of land rent. An attempt is made to strip rent discourse of those peculiarities that have alienated some of its potential audience, thereby turning the theory into the esoteric property of an academic coterie. The discussion of the last fifteen years is divided into three phases, namely consensus (in the 1970s), transition (at the turn of the decade), and rupture (in the 1980s). The typical beliefs, claims, and tenets of each phase are reconstructed and discussed, and the transition from one phase to another is analyzed. In order to facilitate and incite further discussion the present, that is third, phase is purposefully construed in terms of two rival lines of thought: the idiographic line (that denies the possibility of a general theory of land rent, advocating instead the analysis of concrete situations), and the nomothetic line (that searches for general laws). The first line is rejected in favour of the second.
Reflections on “Homeownership, Accumulation, and Restructuring”: A Response to King
Authors: Badcock B A
Published: October 2006

A response is developed to King's charge that the estimates of capital gains obtained for Adelaide housing in the 1970s and 1980s do not reflect the most favourable conditions prevailing in Australia at the time; and, therefore, that one is not really in a sound enough position to challenge the contention that homeownership is an enduring source of real wealth. His related criticism is that the attempt to link intraurban differentiation in rates of house price change to processes of urban restructuring is too restrictive. It is argued that his prescription, by contrast, runs the real risk of degenerating into theoretical eclecticism.
Ethnicity, Patriarchy, and Incorporation into the Nation: Female Migrants as Domestic Servants in Peru
Authors: Radcliffe S A
Published: October 2006

Patriarchy, racism, and nationalism are all lived forms of oppression for the peasant female migrants who become domestic servants in Peru, who, on migrating into the major cities, take up work in middle-class homes as juniors in the existing racial, class, and family hierarchies. Their incorporation into the household in a subordinate position in terms of class, ethnic, and gender ranking entails the systematic denial of peasant ethnic identity and the substitution of middle-class norms of the mestizo nation. The blurring of ethnic-cultural distinctions through the suppression of peasant characteristics takes place in the employers' homes, into which the migrants are ‘adopted’ as the ‘daughters' of a patriarchal family. The social and spatial divisions of labour which underpin domestic service in the this Latin American country thus hold ramifications for the practices and ideology of nationhood and family life both for employers and for employees.
The US Trade and Budget Deficits in Global Perspective: An Essay in Geopolitical-Economy
Authors: Corbridge S , Agnew J
Published: October 2006

The disturbances in the global economy induced by the US trade and budget deficits are widely recognised by economists, even if the precise causes and effects of these deficits remain a topic of debate, What is less widely understood is that the deficits are pregnant with geographical implications for the world economy and that the production of the deficits can be explained in part by the changing and asymmetrical location of the USA in international economic and geopolitical relations. In this paper, both of these points are expanded. In section 2, competing accounts of the production of the US trade and budget deficits are considered. Particular attention is paid to ‘Reaganomics’ as an economic and geopolitical discourse. In section 3, the implications of the twin deficits for the US space-economy are considered. The regional impacts of increased military (and other) spending under Reagan are noted, as are the likely effects of the alienation of US real assets and of the buildup of debt-servicing obligations for future generations. In section 4, the implications of the US deficits for the rest of the world, and for the less developed countries in particular, are examined. Attention is drawn to the emerging links between the geography of international trade and the geography of international debt. The regional implications of a debtors' surplus are discussed in section 5, which serves also as a conclusion.
A Theory and Practice of Regions: The Case of Europes
Authors: Taylor P J
Published: October 2006

1989 is interpreted as the end of a particular region, Atlantic Europe. This position is derived from a theoretical argument centred on the concept of historical region and drawing on ideas from world-systems analysis and modern social theory. An historical region is defined in space and time; it is constituted of both place and period. The theory is briefly illustrated by different space-time definitions of Europe and then the rise and demise of the most recent ‘Europe’, Atlantic Europe made up of the noncommunist countries of Europe during the Cold War, are considered.
State Policies, Land Control, and an Ethnic Minority: The Arabs in the Galilee Region, Israel
Authors: Yiftachel O
Published: October 2006

The study is an analysis of the influence of Israel's land-use policies in the Galilee on the political behaviour of the region's Arab population, between 1975 and 1988. Theories pertaining to human territoriality, ethnic regionalism, and ethnic spatial mix are used to analyse the consequences of four key land-use policies implemented by Israeli authorities in the Yehiam region, which forms a large part of the Galilee. The four policies examined in the paper cover the areas of landownership, Jewish settlement, municipal boundaries, and unauthorised dwelling construction. These policies are shown to pursue the goal of controlling the Arab minority through territorial containment, in an attempt to maintain political stability, that is, prevent the possibility of irredentism. However, the detailed analysis of Arab reactions to the implementation of the four policies shows that the long-term influence of these land-use policies may be counterproductive: Arab reactions have become increasingly militant, thereby challenging Jewish control and political stability.
The Military-Industrial Divide
Authors: Markusen A
Published: October 2006

In the debate on the incidence and dynamics of new industrial complexes, technological innovation has been treated as exogenous, and endogenous entrepreneurial growth forces have been stressed at the expense of state actions, interregional interactions, and geographical transfers of capital and labor. In this paper it is argued that technological paths are deliberately chosen and that the state, through its commitment to cold-war armament, has been a major source of demand for and underwriter of the new flexible technologies and new product lines so central to the new industrial districts phenomenon in the USA. The emergence of specific agglomerations, such as Los Angeles, Orange County, Silicon Valley, and the Boston area's Route 128, and the parallel failure of the industrial heartland cities to host military-related high-tech development, are the products of concerted locational choice and developmental efforts by military personnel, politicians, boosters, and military-industrial corporate managers, Military-led innovation has furthermore contributed to the rise of accelerated and institutionalized innovation and to the emergence of new macroeconomic pathologies, such as state debt, accelerated deindustrialization, and a worsening income distribution.
Postmodernism in Economic Geography: Metaphor and the Construction of Alterity
Authors: Barnes T J , Curry M R
Published: October 2006

From the premise that economic geography is shot through with metaphors, it is argued that there is very little difference in the way modernist and postmodernist economic geographers semantically approach metaphor within their discipline. This argument is illustrated by examining within economic geography the use both of ‘big’ metaphors, such as the gravity model, and of ‘little’ metaphors such as those that pepper individual pieces of writing. Although there are few semantic differences with respect to metaphor use between the two groups, there are pragmatic differences; that is, in the way metaphors are used to create community, and its obverse, otherness or alterity. In their quest to develop foolproof methods that could be applied by everyone, modernist geographers proposed a democratic view. In contrast, for postmodernist economic geographers understanding the world requires an act of transcendence; this view is Homeric or heroic, wherein the world is divided into those who possess the depth of sensitivity to grasp complexity, and those who cannot and are thus merely ‘other’.
All or Nothing? Politics and Critique in the Modernism-Postmodernism Debate
Authors: Pile S , Rose G
Published: October 2006

The abstract for this paper is presented in the form of a preface:

Preface. In this paper we are concerned with the structure of the debate over modernism and postmodernism in geography. We feel we are being asked to take a position, for (or against) modernism and against (or for) postmodernism. We have different reasons for refusing the politics of this choice. Both of us take a separate route to this refusal, as shown in this paper. Some words of warning are necessary before we begin. Given the broad scope of this paper, it will be obvious that some liberties will have to be taken in the presentation. We hope that these limitations will be excused by readers sympathetic to the underlying purpose of the paper, which is to invite the most general of debates on this topic(1). In this vein, we conclude that there are more possibilities for critical and subversive geography than we are being allowed.
‘Invisible Threads’: Homeworking, Labour-Market Relations, and Industrial Restructuring in the Australian Clothing Trade
Authors: Peck J A
Published: October 2006

By way of an examination of the contemporary reemergence of homeworking in the Australian clothing industry, some of the links between industrial and labour-market restructuring are explored. The growth of homeworking reflects not only the pressures placed on clothing firms to reduce costs and enhance production flexibility (increasingly, the ‘conventional wisdom’ explanations), but also represents an attempt on the part of these firms to reconstruct their urban labour-market relations. It is argued that labour-market considerations warrant attention alongside those considerations pertaining to the labour process which are usually prioritised in the literature on industrial restructuring. The case of homeworking reveals some of the ways in which labour-market processes (such as the gendered nature of labour supplies, the ethnic segmentation of the labour force, and the contours of interindustry competition for labour) exert a powerful influence upon the nature of industrial change. Moreover, questions about the development, by firms and by industries, of characteristic urban labour-market relations are also raised.
Representing Urban America: 19th-Century Views of Landscape, Space, and Power
Authors: Schein R H
Published: October 2006

Approximately 5000 lithographic views of cities across America were produced and copies were widely disseminated in the century after 1825, In this paper, urban lithographs are examined as landscape texts in light of contemporary notions of space, vision, representation, and power. A major shift in the genre of urban representation from ‘pictorial’ to ‘bird's-eye’ views is presented as capturing the story of an emerging industrial-capitalist order; as embodying the place of the individual within that order; and as actively legitimating/promoting particular visions of change and progress. Interpreting urban views illustrates the problematic nature of representation and the need to examine particular landscapes/representations within their cultural contexts.
Ideological Hegemony and the Political Symbolism of Religious Buildings in Singapore
Authors: Kong L
Published: October 2006

Cultural geographers have for too long ignored the association between the ‘religious' and the ‘political’, concentrating instead on separating the ‘religious' from the sociopolitical and economic forces in society, The challenge is taken up in this paper in an analysts of the contemporary meanings and values of religious buildings in Singapore as invested by the state. Attention is paid to the state's conceptions of religion and religious space and the roles it plays in influencing such space, The ways in which, through its various roles, the state in Singapore plays a significant part in influencing context and hence in shaping the constraints to the construction of meanings are demonstrated. Also discussed are the ways in which religious groups respond to state policies which have direct and indirect implications for their space.
The Cultural Space of Modernity: Ethnic Tourism and Place Identity in China
Authors: Oakes T S
Published: October 2006

In this paper, the relationship between the political economy of tourism and ethnic cultural revival in southwest China is explored. It is suggested that cultural revival is a process of ‘place creation’ whereby identities may be consciously localized as a strategy for engaging structures of political economy which link local actors with broader geographical frameworks and more distant sources of power. Approaching the intersections between tourism and local cultural construction in this way reveals the inadequacy of Marxist analysis in theorizing the spatial relationship between political economy and culture. The theoretical argument has several prongs: (1) the local does not exist as an oppositional reality to the global, but rather constitutes a dynamic cultural negotiation with the changing structures of political economy, a negotiation in which dominant structures are mediated by individual agency; (2) ‘modernization’ is thus as much cultural as it is economic; (3) the traditional ‘space of places’, which a modern ‘space of flows' supposedly supersedes, is an idealistic construct of the past, based on a static conception of culture kept separate from a dynamic conception of economics; (4) historical materialism perpetuates this idealism in its preoccupation with the economic power of capital, relegating the cultural to a ‘response’. Last, the above approach makes it necessary to question the assumption that the ‘confused identities' of postmodernity arc the result of global capitalism's ‘annihilation of space through time’. Rather, a highlight upon the contentious nature of ‘place creation’ within broader systems of power suggests that identity has never been neatly provided by a naturally bounded place, but has always been negotiated within a complex and often confusing mesh of interaction across multiple geographic scales.
(Re)Mapping Mother Earth: A Geographical Perspective on Environmental Feminisms
Authors: Nesmith C , Radcliffe S A
Published: October 2006

The emerging set of discourses around women, nature, and the environment can be identified with the umbrella term environmental or ecological feminisms. In developing a geographical approach to environmental issues, a critical engagement with the questions raised by environmental feminisms is suggested. After a brief introduction to the principles of environmental feminisms for a geographical audience, three broad fields for future geographical work are outlined, namely: nature, culture, and gender; gendered relations of global development and environments; and gendered landscapes and identities. In particular it is argued that feminist and cultural geographical writing provides a critical opening for the further development of environmental feminist approaches.
The Local and the Global in the New Urban Politics: A Critical View
Authors: Cox K R
Published: October 2006

Recent US literature on urban politics has been characterized by significant convergence. There has been a marked focus on the politics of local economic development, and there has also been an attempt to situate that politics with respect to processes of globalization. In particular, the globalization of the economy and correlative hypermobility of capital arc seen as exerting strong redistributive pressures on urban communities. This is the ‘new urban polities’. Evaluation of this thesis proceeds first by a critical interrogation of the related concepts of hypermobility of capital, and immobility of urban communities. This results in a respecification of the question as one of local dependence and the scale at which agents arc locally dependent. This, in turn, allows the new urban politics to be critically linked to arguments about the territorial organization of the state. From this standpoint it also appears that claims for a secular tendency towards the hypermobility of capital lack coherence.
Confronting Representation(s)
Authors: Duncan N , Sharp J P
Published: October 2006

The crisis of representation highlighted by recent postmodern works in the social sciences has exposed the ethnocentric nature of (re)presentations of the world. Although it is recognised that the self-reflexivity which this project introduces has undoubtedly opened up the possibilities for more culturally sensitive work, its rejection of any notion of hierarchy could be read as precluding the deployment of political projects beyond this opening. It is the authors' contention that this need not necessarily be the case, that the postmodern challenge can be met without having to discard a political standpoint. This move is important because the power structures inherent in colonial discourses largely remain in place. Instances are explored where conflicting representations can be brought into collision so that the naturalized assumptions of hegemonic representation can be challenged. This meeting of discourses can facilitate the undermining of certain cultural assumptions in the representative schema which have, until now, remained unquestioned.
New Forms of Geographical Inequalities and Spatial Problems in Greece
Authors: Economou D
Published: October 2006

The dynamics of the restructuring of capital over the last fifteen years produced new territorial realities. One fundamental aspect of this evolution, in the case of Greece, is the relative decrease of interregional inequalities and the strengthening and/or appearance of new intraregional disparities, A second group of developments consist of the intensification of a series of spatial organisation problems that affect both urban and nonurban areas (land-uses' conflicts, environmental conditions, traffic).

As far as the future is concerned, the determinant framework of the 1990s will be the process of European unification. Although the implications of the spatial dimension (regional policy, environmental policy, projected urban policy) of the EC policies will generally be beneficial, the broader implications of the above process seem much more ambivalent. The main fields of concern are: difficulties in the participation of Greek regions in the emerging Mediterranean are of development; retardation of growth in rural areas (as a result of the new CAP) and the increase of intraregional inequalities; and aggravation of the conditions in the fields of land uses and the urban environment (because of the increasing competition between the southern European regions, and between the European cities).
Placing the Market and Marketing Place: Tourist Advertising of the Hawaiian Islands, 1972–92
Authors: Goss J D
Published: October 2006

The advertising of tourist destinations plays an important role in the construction of place imagery and in the constitution of social subjects. In other words, destination marketing creates an image of place to be experienced by specific social subjects in particular ways. This is demonstrated through analysis of a series of advertising texts produced by the Hawaii Visitors Bureau and sponsored by the State of Hawai'i in the period 1972–92. The analysis suggests that the ‘target audience’ has changed during this period along with the projected experience of a Hawaiian vacation, but that the theme of alterity, together with its tropes of paradise, marginality, liminality, femininity, and aloha remain persistent elements of the spatializing discourse. These tropes, and their contradictory components, are analyzed, and it is concluded that, in the advertising discourse, Hawai'i as a place and people is mystified into a signifier of alterity.
The Production of Service Space
Authors: Allen John , Pryke Michael
Published: October 2006

In this paper we attempt to demonstrate the use and limitations of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space as an approach to questions of social space. The City of London provides the service space, as it were, through which Henri Lefebvre's ideas are examined and illustrated. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first section we set out the main ideas of Lefebvre on questions of social space, in particular the notions of representations of space, representational spaces and spatial practices, and how they have been taken up in the work of Harvey, Shields, and Soja. In the second section we use the example of the abstract space of finance to show how a particular dominant coding of space has been achieved through the routine spatial practices and global networks of those who work in the City's financial markets. In particular, the modes of power and the different sets of relationships through which a dominant financial space is secured are highlighted. In the third section we draw attention to the people who disappear within the financial spaces of the City, those who clean, cater within, and secure the abstract space of finance on a subcontract basis. Focusing upon the spatial practices of this contract work force, we show the manner in which they use the dominant space and their ability to subvert or contradict the dominant coding of finance. In short, the two work forces occupy the same place, yet live their everyday lives within different spaces.
(Dis)placing Geopolitics: Writing on the Maps of Global Politics
Authors: Tuathail Gearóid Ó
Published: October 2006

The meaning of geopolitics is a curiously underexamined issue in ‘critical geopolitics’. In this paper I seek to outline and pursue a poststructuralist displacement of the concept, a displacement marked by hyphenization: geo-politics. Using Derrida's critique of Saussure, in the first part of the paper I interweave the problem of meaning with the discourse of geography so as to write on the concepts of ‘the map’ and ‘geography’. In the second part of the paper I explore the implications of this writing on or displacing for the analysis of geographical discourse and/in global politics. I concentrate on three issues: (1) problemattzing the traditional conceptual maps of ‘geopolitics’, (2) speculating on the historical problematic of geography and governmentality, and (3) suggesting a typology for the study of geo-politics which pays particular attention to how places are sighted/sited/cited by governmental institutions (geo-political sites).
Gender and Critical Geopolitics; Reading Security Discourse in the New World Disorder
Authors: Dalby Simon
Published: October 2006

In the early 1990s a new generation of scholars has tackled matters of feminist perspectives on war, peace, and specifically the academic discipline of international relations. A similar confrontation between traditional scholarly themes and gender-sensitive analyses within critical geopolitics is now obviously necessary. Although authors such as Cynthia Enloc have written about global politics and the role of women in international relations in ways that are sensitive to the geographic dimension, many theoretical and practical implications of a gender-sensitive approach to geopolitics remain to be worked out. In this paper I argue that, among other issues, investigating the gendered assumptions in the study of international relations and foreign policy-making, in addition to more explicitly geopolitical reasoning, shows how political spatialisations render women vulnerable. In addition, examining the implications of militarised definitions of (territorial) citizenship, the use of masculinist notions of power, space, and security, and the representation of women in global conflicts, sheds light on the ‘taken-for-granted’ spatial aspects of the routine operation of power. By enlarging the scope of critical geopolitical analysis, greater attention to gender issues enhances the explanatory power of ‘big picture’ political geography, not least by focusing on the practical everyday implications of geopolitics for those who are so often written out of its scripts.
Regulating Japan? Regulation Theory versus the Japanese Experience
Authors: Peck Jamie , Miyamachi Yoshihiro
Published: October 2006

The tensions between the analytical framework provided by regulation theory and the specificities of the Japanese development trajectory are explored in this paper. Superficially at least, the Japanese case would seem to be (regulation-)theoretically intractable, given the country's unique postwar development path and given the apparent inconsistency of its growth pattern with classic notions of (Atlantic) Fordism, As such, the Japanese experience raises questions about conventional treatments of the historical geography of capitalist restructuring within (different readings of) regulation theory. Regulation theory, it is argued, represents an evolving political-economic method, not a rigid transition model. By implication, the idiosyncrasies of the Japanese experience present an opportunity to interrogate and develop regulationist categories. Critically reviewing the recent regulationist literature from and on Japan, the authors argue that the tension between the theory and this ambiguous case can be rendered a creative one.
Ironies of Distance: An Ongoing Critique of the Geographies of AIDS
Authors: Brown Michael
Published: October 2006

Sociospatial distances fostered by recent geographies of AIDS are critiqued in this paper through cultural criticism and my own ethnographic work on AIDS politics in Vancouver, Canada. Specifically I note the tendency of medical geography and spatial science to distance themselves from gay men and their spaces, I argue this distancing is perpetrated by: (1) a focus on the virus, with gay men's bodies serving as vectors of transmission; and (2) an unobtrusive, detached rendering of the travels of the virus across space. In turn, I demonstrate how an ethnographic approach mitigates spatial science's erasure of gay men and space. Turning the critique of distance back on my own ethnographic research I then discuss the ironic benefits of distance in geographic research. I conclude that distance in itself is neither essentially concealing nor revealing, but its implications for research must be constantly considered.
Adolescent Dilemmas of Landscape, Place, and Religious Experience in a Suffolk Parish
Authors: Cooper Adrian
Published: October 2006

Geographers have traditionally discussed adolescence as an experience of turmoil and anxiety, which is often class and gender-specific. Almost invariably, that analysis has focused on the manifestations and interactions of rebellion, violent conflict, and social disadvantage. In this paper, however, elements of stability and less dramatic activity, as well as themes of change and anxiety within adolescence, are emphasised. The experience of dilemma within adolescence is shown to accommodate a plurality of influences and expressions beyond the relatively narrow experiences of violence and aggression. In order to examine these nuances of adolescent dilemmas, I will pursue a critical discourse analysis of data drawn from an extended programme of indigenous ethnography. The central theme of this analysis will consider the ways in which dilemmas within individual religious experience can inform, and remain informed by, the landscape and place interpretations of ten adolescents living in a Suffolk Parish. These interpretations include references to Christian ecumenical festivals. Consequently, this paper may be of interest to social and cultural geographers, particularly those interested in religio-geographical problems, as well as religious leaders and their lay assistants who arc involved in the instigation and organisation of festivals and similar religious events attended by adolescent people.
Transspecies Urban Theory
Authors: Wolch Jennifer R , West Kathleen , Gaines Thomas E
Published: October 2006

Contemporary urban theory is anthropocentric. In an effort to foreground a transspecies urban theory, we critically assess research on the impacts of urbanization on the natural environment, the range of human–animal interactions in the city, dimensions of urban wildlife ecology, and urban wildlife management and conservation practices. An heuristic device designed to guide the future development of transspecies urban theory is proposed, building upon recent social theoretic debates.
The Shifting Stage of Politics: New Medieval and Postmodern Territorialities?
Authors: Anderson James
Published: October 2006

With intensified globalization, and more specifically European integration, the ground is shifting under established political institutions, practices, and concepts. The European Union (EU), however, is usually conceived in traditional ‘realist’ or ‘functionalist’ terms which obscure the possibility that distinctly new political forms arc emerging; or, alternatively, some self-styled ‘postmodernists’ speculate implausably about a ‘Europe of the regions’ replacing the ‘Europe of states’. In contrast, I argue for ‘new medieval’ and ‘postmodern’ conceptualizations of territoriality and sovereignty, which recognize that geographic space is becoming more complex and ‘relative’: Conventional political concepts based on ‘absolute’ space are increasingly problematic for understanding the political complexities of contemporary globalization. Here ‘postmodernity’ may mean something different from what some postmodernists think it means: not, for instance, a federalized ‘United States of Europe’ where regions and regionalism replace nations and nationalism, nor simply an intergovernmental arrangement of sovereign states, but something quite distinct—‘arrested federalization’ and an ‘intermediate’ arrangement distinct in its own right rather than ‘transitional’. In this paper I sketch transformations of sovereignty from ‘medieval to modern’, and from the ‘modern’ to the allegedly ‘postmodern’. I focus on the ‘unbundling’ of territorial sovereignty, which has reputedly gone furthest in the EU. However, even here the process is partial and selective, with globalization affecting different state activities unevenly. Contemporary configurations of political space are a complex mixture of new and old forms, the latter continuing to exist rather than being tidily removed to clear the ground for new politics. The EU itself is still territorial, and in many respects traditional conceptions of sovereignty remain dominant, whether exercised by the member states or by the EU as a whole. Moreover there are problems both with the elusive notion of postmodern, and with the historical analogies of new medievalism. Nevertheless, despite problems and qualifications, these concepts are useful for exploring the possibility of radical transformations, not just with respect to the ‘actors’ of global and local politics, but to the space–time of the ‘stage’ on which they operate.
The Heretical Landscape of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Scopic Regime of European Cinema
Authors: Gandy Matthew
Published: October 2006

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, novelist, and film director, is widely regarded as one of the most significant figures to emerge in postwar European culture. In this paper I focus on four of Pasolini's films, Mamma Roma, Theorem, Arabian Nights, and Saló, in order to explore the innate tension in his work between nature and culture emerging from his search for cultural authenticity and artistic autonomy. I show that his earlier concern with the superiority of rural life evolved into an emphasis on the body and sexuality as an ontologically privileged and prelinguistic source of meaning in his ‘cinema of poetics’. I suggest that Pasolini never successfully resolved the problematic place of the cinematic medium in relation to culture as a contested historical process of ideological signification. I conclude that the contradictions within Pasolini's work have implications for the contemporary critique of occularcentristn under Western modernity.
The Spatial Imaginary of National Practices: Dwelling—Domesticating /Being—Exterminating
Authors: Hage Ghassan
Published: October 2006

The prevalence of a culture of ‘tolerance’ towards ethnic minorities in the West in the face of the practices of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe and of other more general practices of intolerance and extermination in parts of the Third World has led to a popular as well as a sometimes academic conception of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms essentialised into two radically different kinds of nationalism. In this paper I offer a critique of such a differentiation based on an examination of various practices of dealing with otherness in the process of nation building, particularly in Lebanon and Australia. I argue that practices of nation building, ranging from the promotion of ethnic cultures to mass ethnic killings, are guided by national imaginaries which, despite their empirical variety, are basically structured in the same way. This means, first, that such differences are better understood as the historical or contextual privileging of specific nationalist problematics grounded in this common national imaginary. Second, it means that within the nationalist imaginary that guides them there is a space in which, in given circumstances, the practitioners of valorisation and tolerance can turn into practitioners of mass killings and vice versa without them turning into a radically different kind of nationalists. Far from being specific to an ‘Eastern’ nationalism, the logic of extermination is inherent to any form of nation building today.
Dissecting the Autonomous Self: Hybrid Cartographies for a Relational Ethics
Authors: Whatmore Sarah
Published: October 2006

In this paper I focus on the contributions of feminist and environmentalist thinking to the question of ethics in critical geography, I explore creative tensions between feminist deconstructions of the autonomous self, configured as rights-bearing citizen, and environmentalist efforts to extend the status of the ethical subject beyond the human. Critically engaging with Haraway's figure of the cyborg, I examine the implications of notions of hybridity for mapping the spatial configurations of ethical subjects and communities conceived of in ‘relational’ terms.
Coming out of Geography: Towards a Queer Epistemology?
Authors: Binnie Jon
Published: October 2006

In this paper I argue that in order to challenge the marginalisation of lesbians, gay men, and other sexual dissidents within the discipline, we need to pay more attention to how geography has been studied. I consider how different theoretical approaches to the subject have treated sexual dissidence. While positivism has been particularly guilty of ignoring the interests of lesbians and gay men, the new cultural geography, and feminist geography, though enabling a limited amount of work on the geography of lesbians and gay men, may also reproduce heterosexism. This raises the question of which methodological and epistemological frameworks work best in promoting the interests of sexual dissidents within the discipline, and the academy more generally. Last I consider the material components of sexual dissident identity and how these impact upon the production of geographical knowledge.
Mental Health, Public Space, and the City: Questions of Individual and Collective Access
Authors: Parr Hester
Published: October 2006

In recent revisionings of disablement and geography, conceptions of the body, of devinney, and of the social construction of difference have been interrogated. The author argues that it is important not to neglect a critical geography of mental health in this broader rewriting of disability and ableism. Empirical examples are drawn from research in Nottingham, UK. These examples show how people with mental health problems access the public realm through individual (and often disruptive) use of urban spaces, possibly as strategies of resistance to imposed medical identities. In the second half of the paper the author documents a more collective political process occurring through ‘user movements’ which have facilitated patient power and patient influence in the places of therapy spread across the city.
Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity
Authors: Mitchell Katharyne
Published: October 2006

In a progressive attempt to find sites of resistance to dominant hegemonies of race and nation, many cultural theorists have begun to rely on notions of in-betweenness and ambivalence, and terms such as diaspora and hybridity, However, in much of this recent cultural criticism, these concepts have become increasingly disarticulated from history and political economy. The fetishization of these terms, and the general overuse of abstract spatial metaphors such as ‘third space’, can lead to theories and politics which neglect the everyday, grounded practices and economic relations in which social identities and narratives of race and nation unfold. Without denying the potential for resistance, it is argued in this paper that these abstract liminal spaces are easily appropriated by reactionary forces, and can be used for the purposes of capital accumulation quite as effectively as for the intervention in hegemonic narratives of race and nation.
Inhuman/Nonhuman/Human: Actor-Network Theory and the Prospects for a Nondualistic and Symmetrical Perspective on Nature and Society
Authors: Murdoch Jonathan
Published: October 2006

Recently human geographers and sociologists have begun to focus on the prospects for theories without dualisms. As a result of research on technology, animals, and the environment, it has become evident that a human-centred perspective, which continually positions humans as the only significant actors, cannot adequately take into account the various nonhumans which make up our world and upon which we depend. In large part the human-centredness of much social science derives from a sharp divide, a dualism, between nature and society and between the work of natural and human scientists. In this paper I consider one attempt to transgress this divide and assess the prospects for theories of this kind. The focus here is upon actor-network theory (ANT), an approach developed by Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law within social studies of science. I first outline the social studies which form the background to the development of ANT and then go on to elaborate the main contours of the approach, with particular emphasis on its transgression of the nature—society distinction. I conclude with a critical assessment of its strengths and weaknesses and attempt to show how it might be usefully combined with other, more traditional, social scientific concerns.
Reading Financial Services: Texts, Consumers, and Financial Literacy
Authors: Leyshon Andrew , Thrift Nigel , Pratt Jonathan
Published: October 2006

The authors focus upon the changing nature of production and consumption within the retail financial services industry. The perennial problem which faces all producers of financial services is information asymmetry; that is, providers and consumers of financial products have unequal amounts of information about whether or not customers have the wherewithal to make them ‘capable’ purchasers. Thus, the problem of information asymmetry is usually manifested in a priori decisionmaking about the suitability of customers. This problem has traditionally been overcome by forging interpersonal relationships of trust with consumers through copresence. Increasingly, however, trust in consumers is being forged through technologically mediated means of information collection functioning ‘at a distance’ so that financial services producers are coming to ‘read’ consumers as ‘texts’, through the medium of databases. These developments have had a number of effects, such as increased competition in retail financial markets, while branch networks, which acted as durable barriers to entry to the market, have become less important as sites of market intelligence and knowledge. Consumers have also been forced to forge new relations of trust with retail financial service providers. This is increasingly being achieved through the use of various media and through identification with brands. Such developments have served to create social and spatial divisions of financial inclusion and exclusion, as producers use at-a-distance information to discriminate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customers. Those ‘inside’ the financial system are able to use their financial knowledge to take advantage of increased levels of competition between financial service providers. However, those excluded from the financial system are doubly handicapped as they live in both a financial and an information shadow. Such individuals are likely to pay an increasingly heavy price for their exclusion, particularly given the collapse of universal welfare provision and the allied growth of private welfare-related financial products. In recognition of this, in the final part of the paper we consider ways of countering problems of financial exclusion and low levels of financial literacy.
The Event of Space: Geographic Allusions in the Phenomenological Tradition
Authors: Strohmayer Ulf
Published: October 2006

In this essay I analyse the role of space in key texts belonging to the tradition of phenomenology. Starting from the assumption that phenomenology is uniquely positioned to answer the epistemological challenges posed by today's theoretical discourses, works by Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer are examined in light of their respective treatments of space. I assert that much of what passes as phenomenological knowledge is constructed around an unfounded idealisation of the written text and the spatial stability it embodies. In the subsequent development of a spatially open alternative I draw on Heidegger's elaboration of the ‘event’ and attempt to place such thinking within contemporary debates in the human sciences.
Rethinking (post)Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Posttraditionalism: South—North Perspectives
Authors: Simon David
Published: October 2006

Many social scientists and development experts working in the South have dismissed postmodernism and related perspectives as irrelevant in the context of continued poverty and struggles for modernisation. Conversely, Northern authors on postmodernism frequently imply the global salience of the paradigm in a universalising manner redolent of modernist discourse, whereas critics of conventional development(alism) tend to base their arguments on caricatures in which the diversity of real-world experiences and some important improvements in the quality of life over the last 30 years are ignored, Neither approach is tenable, and in this paper the author explores the scope and basis for more fruitful engagements with postmodernism, postcolonialism, and related perspectives, including Southern notions of posttraditionalism, in the context of current developments and popular aspirations in the South. A critical reading of the literature is combined with examples drawn from different regions. In the analysis a pathway is offered through these often confusing fields and the relationships between globalisation, modernisation, and postmodernism, the changing roles and abilities of state and nonstate actors, and the complex ways in which local communities engage with such dynamics in pursuit of a better life, are encompassed.
Complexities of the Margin: Housing Decisions by Female Householders in Mexico
Authors: Miraftab Faranak
Published: October 2006

In this paper I attempt to address complexities that exist in sheltering efforts and housing decisions of household heads among marginal population groups. I try to unfold layers of difference and reveal nuances that exist in housing concerns of low-income household heads, based on gender and age. I deconstruct the categorical grouping of ‘the urban poor’ as a homogenous population and female-headed households as ‘the poorest of the poor’. I show that, as we have to account for gender in the examination of shelter and well being we also have to account for age and household life-cycle position in order to understand the housing concerns of female household heads in their full life cycle, not frozen in time. The questions raised and the issues addressed are grounded in surveys and case studies conducted with low-income household heads in Guadalajara, Mexico.