Debates In Geography Research Articles

Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment

In the context of current decolonial geographical debates calling for action-oriented approaches to changing geographical knowledge construction, we propose cuerpo-territorio as a way to achieve this goal in Anglophone feminist geography. In Anglophone geography, emotions and embodiment have been studied through a range of ethnographic methods. There are intrinsic limitations of verbal and written data, however, because sensitive emotions might be triggered by an interviewer’s questions and participants might be reluctant to share those. Cuerpo-territorio is a distinct geographical, decolonial feminist method grounded in the ontological unity between bodies and territories. We show how this visual, hands-on, and participatory method can overcome these limits and bring about coproduced validated knowledge. By having participants draw the territory on the body, knowledge is cocreated with the voices and experiences of participants having primacy in the research process. This coconstructed knowledge is produced in an accessible format for participants and the general public, facilitating a process of advocacy by participants themselves. We make the case that research in Anglophone feminist geography concerning embodiment can benefit from employing cuerpo-territorio. This article responds to the need for more practical and methodological action toward decolonizing geography and strengthens existing literature in Anglophone feminist, decolonial, and indigenous geographies that make the connection between embodiment and land through the use of the cuerpo-territorio method from Latin America.

Researching Urban Law

AbstractThis Article considers the development of urban law. It suggests that urban law is socio-legal in its exploration of law’s role in the production of the city and urban life, enabling the study of the city as a distinctive legal entity. Addressing the question “why urban law?,” this Article considers similar debates in geography and urban policy before developing three arguments for studying urban law: (i) urbanism is a vibrant field of scholarly research; (ii) socio-legal research can take an explicitly normative focus in pursuit of improving urban quality; and (iii) at a city scale we can investigate governance concepts of territory, sovereignty and jurisdiction. One of the difficulties with urban law is finding the right level of analysis, covering sufficient legal and empirical detail whilst also making the city legible at an urban scale. Although this tension produces imperfect compromises, accepting the limitations means that we can begin the shared task of developing an intellectual infrastructure, a grammar, for the study of urban law.

Feeling Greek, speaking Greek? National identity and language negotiation amongst the Greek diaspora in Australia

This paper uses a qualitative case study of the Greek diaspora in Australia in order to add to debates on the geographies of diaspora and diasporic identity in relation to nation-building and nationalism through an exploration of Greek language usage. Specifically, it contributes to ongoing research in geography, diaspora studies and beyond, which stresses the need to examine and tensions and disunities within diasporic 'communities' through a focus on the materialities and emotionalities of diasporic lives and identities. The paper stresses that although more fluid and in-between diasporic identity negotiations are important, it is also necessary to examine the ways in which those in diaspora attempt to 'hold onto' times and spaces of homeland national identity in order to perform more static, bounded and inflexible notions of diasporic identity. The paper uses the example of language to demonstrate how tensions over the role and importance of homeland language in diaspora reveal different imaginations and emotions around what it means to be, feel and belong in diaspora. The paper contributes to debates over the roots and routes of diaspora, as well as the need for boundary (re)making. In doing so, it stresses the need for geographical research on diaspora, and the important role that geographers can play in critical interpretations of the lives and identities of those in diaspora, 'on the move', within and across borders. It therefore adds to ongoing geographical debates about the need to envisage diasporas in flexible and inclusive ways, but also account for the ways in which nation-building and nationalism continue to form part of diasporic identity articulations.

Consociationalism and the politics of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

Population censuses have symbolic and instrumental importance for ethnic, national, linguistic or religious groups and their political representatives. This is particularly apparent in deeply divided societies, where political institutions are designed to accommodate groups through forms of power sharing. Existing literature posits that consociational power-sharing institutions, which are commonly employed to manage inter-group conflict, are likely to incentivise contestation and mobilisation in relation to the census, but this claim has not been tested empirically. Employing the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, this article tests a proposition about the relationship between consociationalism and the politics of the census: that it is corporate consociational designs that are likely to result in contestation of the census and mobilisation of groups during enumeration, whereas liberal consociational designs will not. The analysis offers support for this proposition, but also suggests that other features of power-sharing settlements, such as the federal nature of the Bosnian state and the majoritarian provision for a ‘border poll’ in the Northern Irish settlement, also play an important role in shaping census politics. These insights contribute to political geographic debates about the census by highlighting the influence of institutional design on struggles over how and where populations get counted, which are applicable beyond the immediate context of deeply divided societies.

Affective platform urbanism: Changing habits of digital on-demand consumption

This paper develops geographic debates on platform urbanism by exploring the overlooked consumption practices that digital on-demand platforms have generated. Extending recent work on the affectivity of platforms which explain how specific bodily experiences are ‘engineered’ into the design of platforms, the paper argues that the onflow of urban life can complicate these logics. In the context of on-demand food delivery platforms, the paper moves beyond the explanatory logic of convenience to provide a richer understanding of how digital on-demand food delivery platforms might be changing everyday habits in the city for people in different circumstances. Through analysis of qualitative interviews with consumers who use digital on-demand food delivery platforms in Melbourne, Australia, the paper investigates how such platforms are ongoingly evaluated by urban inhabitants. Through a micropolitical lens that views bodies in terms of their changing indeterminate capacities, the paper explains how on-demand food platforms can both enhance and deplete bodily capacities in time, and that this changeability is contingent on diverse circumstances of urban dwelling. The political value of this perspective is to acknowledge a more diffuse set of power relations at play and to enhance our sense of the multiple subjectivities that emerge through ongoing immersion in digital worlds.

On Scientific Ontology: A Reply to Gamper

According to Gamper (Sci Ontol Axiomathes 29:99–102, 2019), one function of science is to determine how the world is. Science, Gamper continues, rests on a set of basic assumptions, and the gap between basic assumptions and science should be filled by ontological frameworks that accommodates the modal properties of such assumptions. Different frameworks may surely suggest different modal properties. Thus, in so far as we use different basic assumptions, we can have different ontologies with different modal properties. Ontologies affect, in turn, science, which, however, has the power to falsify the ontological frameworks. The aim of this article is to show a possible trouble of Gamper's proposal, here considered as applied to the geographical debate.

The camp and the question of community

Recent literature in camp geographies has sought to emphasize the significance of political agency among camp residents, particularly in refugee camps, as part of a critical reaction against the highly influential Agambenian conceptual vocabulary of exception and bare life. The concept of community has been integral to this body of work, with diverse accounts of the camp implicitly or explicitly positioning community as the natural scale through which camp resident and inmate agency is formulated, and yet there has hitherto been little research reflecting directly on the meaning that community takes on in the specific context of the camp. In this article we adopt Roberto Esposito's critique of the concept of community to problematize the assumption that camp communities necessarily constitute a space of empowerment and agency for camp residents and inmates. Drawing on Esposito's genealogical account of communitas (2010), whereby community is encountered not in terms of a property shared among individuals but instead as the loss of individuality and other forms of ‘the proper’, we suggest that the implementation of community, while generative of agency, is also fundamental to camp authorities and related regimes of power. Furthermore, we argue that the operation of camp communities includes its own forms of politics that are specific to the exceptional space of the camp and that potentially expose individuals to violence. We develop this argument through an experimental reading of communitas in relation to the two empirical contexts that have been most influential on the trajectory of camp studies within geographical debates, the concentration camp and the refugee camp, represented in this paper by Auschwitz and the contemporary archipelago of Serbian refugee camps respectively. The ambivalent account of power relationships emerging from these readings suggests that Esposito's rendering of community may have important analytic value in investigating the complexity of camp spatialities and the distinctive co-articulation of power and agency therein.

Asia’s changing cities: water, climate and power in the transformation of urban spaces

This introduction to the special issue lays out the key themes and arguments across the five research papers and Viewpoint. Foremost, we highlight how by bringing this research across diverse Asian cities together into one special issue, the work reveals how water is foundational to the city. To illuminate how our work on water urbanisms in Asia has the potential to ‘rethink the way in which cities operate’ (Xiao, 2016, 3367), this special issue examines the central paradigms of ‘water and the city’ by emphasising the ‘water work’ of multiple actors, to identify possibilities and opportunities, in addition to ‘governance failures’ in the production of the urban form (Bakker et al., 2008). In particular, these papers provide compelling evidence that to comprehend fully the future of Asian cities in the Anthropocene, it is necessary to understand their related topographies, their water systems and, also, their practices and politics of water distribution. These contributions are thus well positioned to contribute to engaged debates in geography and planning on development, water and the ‘urban condition’ as linked to environmental change and social justice, through a range of disciplinary approaches.

The institutionalization of the geography of education: An international perspective

Abstract The geography of education is a young field of research. This article makes two innovative contributions to knowledge about the evolution of this body of work. First, it presents a three-fold history of the field, delineating distinct phases in its development. Second, it draws out both linkages across, and disparities between, geographies of education in different language traditions. The analysis includes longer established German-language, Francophone and Anglophone oeuvres, as well as more recent Eastern European and international research. In combination, this attention to the temporality and spatiality of geographical debate about education provides a unique introduction to the field.

Class struggle and the spatial politics of violence: The picket line in 1970s Britain

The late 1960s to the mid‐1980s in Britain was a period of intense industrial struggle, with strike levels at their highest since the 1920s. Concerns surrounding trade union power became central to broader anxieties about British “decline” and “crisis.” These issues took a spatial form in conflicts around the nature of the picket line. This paper discusses the picket line in 1970s Britain in the context of recent debates on the geographies of violence, particularly in relation to questions of class and property, and the mutually constitutive temporalities of structural and direct violence. Rather than focusing on the diffuse processes of an abstract capitalism, I argue for greater attention to be paid to class conflict in shaping experiences and epistemologies of violence. This paper therefore places more emphasis on agency in the production of violence than has been prevalent in recent debates in geography. Drawing on extensive archival research, the paper focuses on three key disputes in this period. Building on work in labour geography, it explores how the assertive working‐class presence of mass pickets were portrayed as violent through an account of the miners' strike in 1972. It then considers a similar process in relation to flying pickets during the 1972 builders' dispute, emphasising the threat of a politicised working‐class mobility. Finally, the paper considers the coercive state response in the violent policing of the picket line during the 1976–8 Grunwick dispute. The radical right‐wing project of neoliberalism emerged in part as a solution to the perceived threat of the labour movement; critical to its success and consolidation was challenging the “enemy within” of militant trade unionism. These violent class struggles around picketing in the 1970s, I argue, are crucial for understanding the long‐term, structural violence of neoliberalism.

Scale in motion? Rethinking scalar production and border externalization

This paper signals how border externalization can inform geographical debates about scale and in turn, foster research on how scale intersects with recent forms of border and migration control. It interrogates what scales are being produced and struggled over, pointing to the contingency of scalar work in border externalization, specifically through the EU Migration Routes Strategy. Debates on scale and changing borders are worked through to arrive at the notion of “itinerant scale”, in order to highlight a very distinct spatial imaginary and implementation of border work. Instead of sitting at the edges of nation-states, staying in designated places for long, or pushing through some sort of region imagined as a buffer or frontline, borders are envisioned and designed to be mobile devices and reiterated along shifting migratory routes. This complex scalar production unfolds through a mix of policies, cartographies, surveillance infrastructures and atypical institutional agreements, reaching and acting simultaneously at local, national and regional levels, aiming at the management and contention of suspicious bodies on the move.

Spatial politics and the spatial contract in Exarcheia, Athens, Greece (1974–2018)

This paper intervenes in recent geographical debates about territory, sovereignty, hegemony, and urban marginality by introducing the concept of a “spatial contract.” The concept emerged from a longitudinal ethnographic engagement with the Exarcheia neighbourhood in Athens, Greece. The neighbourhood's unique concentration of riots during Greece's post‐dictatorial era is theorised thus as manifesting a kind of spatial contract in which local conflict and contestation of state sovereignty endures amid the wider regional and national reproduction of state hegemony. Exarcheia's reputation and sustenance as a place of protest becomes explainable in this way as being made possible by an unstated but enduring state–society contract that the local contestation can be continued so long as it is also spatially contained. The paper first identifies key advances in geographical understandings of the relationship between territory and sovereignty that support such a theorisation. This growing body of scholarship is still largely unable to account for temporal and spatial exceptions in the sovereign control of territory. The paper proceeds to explain how a two‐year ethnographic residence in Exarcheia (2008–2010), and repeat field visits since, have made manifest the emergence of a distinct spatial contract during Greece's immediate post‐dictatorial era (post‐1974), and again since 2008 during the country's three‐fold crisis (economic, political, and of migrant reception). Far from being disconnected from these wider social transformations, the spatial contract actually reflects them, including now as it comes undone during a new and arguably revanchist period of hegemony through coercion. In this way, the changing conflictual relationships in Exarcheia can be interpreted anew as part of a hybrid yet hegemonic sovereign control over territory at large. This hybrid hegemonic mix has critical implications for our understanding of marginality, sovereignty, and territorial control more generally, including our ability to conceptualise agency, resistance, and citizenship within shifting forms of hegemony.

Darkness, glance and reading of spaces. Geographical sensitivity in D'Annunzio's Notturno

This paper aims to contribute to the geographical debate up on the role, in literature , of perception in reading space and landscapes. Here we want to investigate how the darkness, a salient element of the night, determines, in D'Annunzio's poetics, specific readings of spaces. In particular, we want to focus on Notturno , a work written in conditions of blindness. The blindness, comparable - as indicated by the title - to the night, increases the perceptual sensitivity: this way, the spatial readings acquire, from a geographical point of view, particular interest.

Indigenous tales of the Beaufort Sea: Arctic exploration and the circulation of geographical knowledge

On 13th November 1905, the Danish sea captain Ejnar Mikkelsen presented his detailed plans to survey a hitherto uncharted region of the Beaufort Sea before the fellows of the Royal Geographical Society. Although much coveted ‘undiscovered land’ in this icy polar region had been hypothesised within geographical debates across Europe and the United States, no ‘intelligent and scientific’ geographical explorer had yet managed to conduct the essential surveying work required to prove or disprove this theory. With his planned expedition being met with approval, Mikkelsen then ventured into the frozen landscape of the American High North hoping to correct this intriguing geographical lacuna. It is here that the inexperienced Arctic explorer was to have a series of encounters with the indigenous inhabitants of the region from whom he learned more about the hypothetical landmass. Updating the RGS on his progress and communicating the details of these moments of indigenous encounter, Mikkelsen relayed a series of tales that had been gleaned from these local people. Considering these tales in terms of the circulation of geographical knowledge, this article will contribute to the growing body of literature that has highlighted the significant role that indigenous people have played in the exploration of the Arctic regions. More importantly, it will also highlight the ways in which these contributions have regularly been obscured or omitted from the prevailing historical record of Arctic exploration.

Rethinking learning? Challenging and accommodating neoliberal educational agenda in the integration of Forest School into mainstream educational settings

A nation's education system plays a key role in future economic competitiveness. Political attention to education has fuelled geographical interest in the role of formal education and informal learning environments in the cultivation of future citizen‐workers. To date, formal and informal learning have largely been considered separately, but this paper responds by critically evaluating the intersections between the two spheres. This agenda is pursued through in‐depth analysis of two state‐funded, mainstream primary schools in the Midlands, UK, which adopt a Forest School programme. Qualitative in nature, the research involved 37 semi‐structured interviews with teachers and children in the Reception class and Year 4 (ages four to five, and eight to nine, respectively). The findings demonstrate that children understand classroom learning to contribute to their future pathways in a credentialised labour market, yet some struggle to frame Forest School activities as educational. Although presented as an antidote to the regimen of the school day, Forest School can thus be justified by some participants in relation to curriculum alignment and the future efficacy of the skills and knowledge acquired. In conclusion, this paper contributes to debates on the intersections of formal and informal education to examine how alternative education can function to counteract the institutionalisation of mainstream settings, while paradoxically developing skills in children that are valued by neoliberal states. More broadly, this furthers debates in geographies of education about what constitutes valuable learning in the primary school setting, and draws attention to the ways innovations might further exclude children currently disadvantaged in the education system.

Gender and Feminist Geography in Colombia

The article explains how gender and feminist geography as a transversal analytical category to geography have been introduced recently in Colombia. At the beginning of the XXI century, in the geography department of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the first undergraduate thesis to focus on the relationship between gender and processes of social construction of space was presented. Since then, the contributions of geographers and researchers from a feminist geographic perspective have contributed to the feminist geographical debates from their own trajectories. The contemporary geographical landscape in Colombia is linked with the transversal debates on feminisms and gender in social sciences, social movements and Latin-American feminisms. This networks and connections allows today a diversity of themes from the deconstruction of hegemonic spatial representations in different contexts, gender and conflicts related to territory and body, to some new approaches to technologies and virtual social interactions and their connotation in the construction of non-normative spatialities.

Disoriented geographies: Undoing relations, encountering limits

This paper develops the concept of disorientation as a constitutive but overlooked dimension of mobile life, and it explores the significance of disorientation for geographical thought. Conceptually, the paper argues that disorientation is a productive geographical concept for acknowledging how, at times, bodies can lose their orienting relations to other bodies, to actions, and to situations. These losses are explored through the themes of incomprehension, confusion, and disintegration, respectively. Substantively, through research with mobile worker households in Australia, the paper expands our understanding of geographies of mobility by interrogating non‐traditional but increasingly common living scenarios created by intensified mobility. Methodologically, the paper develops a narrative approach to presenting the richly complex experiences of “left behind” mobile worker partners through impressionistic interview portraits. Disciplinarily, contributing to ongoing debates in geography on relationality and encounter, the paper provides a counterbalance to the dominant focus on relation construction, and it opens up space for thinking differently about what, exactly, is being encountered in disorienting experiences.

Empathy at Knifepoint: The Dangers of Research and Lite Pedagogies for Social Justice Movements

AbstractIn this paper, I discuss the ways I have fallen short as a participatory geographer and activist both in my teaching and research practices. I use three critical moments in the development of our PAR collective in Colombia to push debates in geography on participatory research and pedagogy further through reflection on my struggles in the streets and in the university. Additionally, I connect these experiences and previous discussions in participatory geographies with Orlando Fals Borda's discussion of sentipensar (a concept that engages feeling and thinking simultaneously). I draw attention to the Latin American origins of PAR philosophy by placing Fals Borda into dialogue with the protagonists of our social movement in Colombia including human rights activists, homeless drug users and sex workers. In a general sense, this paper is an examination of the challenges I have faced in the contact zones of PAR inside and outside the classroom.

Caring for soil life in the Anthropocene: The role of attentiveness in more‐than‐human ethics

This paper considers the work that attentiveness can and can't do in generating more ethical relations with non‐humans. How to build better relations with non‐humans has been a central debate in geography and cognate disciplines. These concerns include ethical relations with non‐humans who both pervade and create liveable environments, such as soil biota. Scholars have specifically identified attentiveness as key in generating more‐than‐human ethics. However, how attentiveness may arise, and what work attentiveness may be able to do in generating ethical relations, has not been sufficiently explored. Additionally, soils as relational materialities remain underexplored in social sciences. In this paper, I address these two important gaps in scholarship. Investigating the rising concern with soil biota in conventional English farming, I propose the care network as a way of conceptualising and investigating the ethical potential of attentiveness. As concerns grow about soil degradation, and the dangers this is posing to food production and to human survival, land managers are attending to soil ecosystems as part of caring for their farm businesses. While this attentiveness is producing some transformative effects, its potential is limited by the configuration of the soil care network. As long as soil care is configured primarily as farmers’ concern, the potential of attentiveness in generating ethical regard to the needs of soil biota will be limited. In the Conclusions, I suggest ways of expanding attentiveness to soils and of building a wider and practical relational ethic of soil care. I also argue we need more attention in geographic research to attentiveness and care as systemic, unequally distributed, and operating at multiple scales.

Precarious encounters with urban life: The city/psychosis nexus beyond epidemiology and social constructivism

The article analyses the specific sense of precarity experienced in cities by persons living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It aims to bring a social science perspective on precarity as embodied affect into conversation with perspectives on psychosis in the life sciences. To do so the article focuses on two moments in an interdisciplinary research process involving psychiatrists, linguists and geographers. The first is an epistemic moment describing the co-design of a research laboratory across the social and the life sciences to study participants' precarious encounters with urban situations. The second is an ontological moment discussing the results of co-experimentation across disciplines in the research team. It shows how collaboration within the team led to a redefinition of our respective analytical categories and discusses empirical findings concerning factors of urban stress and protection for persons living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The conclusion situates the socio-natural analysis of urban precarity developed in the paper within broader contemporary discussions on the study of bio-social entanglements. Arguing for epistemological plurality and ontological contamination, the paper is both a methodological contribution to contemporary debates in geographies of health and a contribution to studies of urban precarity.