Geographical Discourse Research Articles

Calculating ‘climate migrants’: An emerging topology of power

On what basis can it be said that climate change contributes to human migration? What are we to make of new statistical models used to construct the relationship between these two epochal phenomena? This article proposes Collier’s conception of topology to characterize the novel politics of gravity modelling, a technique increasingly used to calculate numeric estimates of ‘climate migrants’. These models do not simply signify a revival or repetition of political sovereignty, nor an affirmation of biopower, but a novel recalibration of power arising in response to the climate crisis. This recalibration signals the early stages of a new topology of power organized around intuitive calculation. To make this claim, the article draws on recent discussions in geography on the relationship between calculation, number and the political to first situate the models within contemporary critical scholarship on climate change and migration. It then examines the models’ statistical logics, in particular how intuition, inference and the incalculable shape three facets of this emerging topology: the correlation of Earth science data with population-level economic data; the calculation of mobile populations; and the unique spatiality at stake in gravity modelling.

The geography of eco-innovations and sustainability transitions: a systematic comparison

Abstract The need to address environmental challenges through innovation-based transformative change has become more urgent than ever and the spatial dimension of pathways towards sustainability has attracted increasing scholarly interest. Over the last decade, research on environmentally oriented innovation has entered the geographical discourse from different directions. This paper starts with the premise that, among other contributions, two main directions of research can be identified within the current geographical discourse that do not yet interface much – a broad, yet conceptually more traditional debate on eco-innovation and a newer discourse around socio-technical transitions that adds a further perspective. Having justified this assumption by a short literature review, we perform a keyword-based literature search, which confirms that there are indeed two distinct bodies of literature and few studies to date that integrate features from both fields. Following this, an in-depth review of the sources clarifies the differences in perspective and the common object of analysis of the basic systemic elements of actors, institutions and technologies. While this juxtaposition illustrates why the two fields of research have hardly cross-fertilised each other so far, it also shows that they are in substance far from irreconcilable. On the contrary, the nuanced synthesis of research findings reveals numerous complementarities that constitute promising avenues for future geographical research. These are considered necessary to improve the understanding of the geography of innovation-based transitions towards sustainability.

Balzac et les géographes : reconversion d’un discours scientifique

The paper is an attempt at showing how the mentions and quotations of contemporary geographic discourses inserted in the Balzacian texts and paratexts are there to outline the features of a new novelistic æsthetic. We will start from the following observation: the Balzacian novel and its encyclopedic ambition are contemporaneous with the first attempts of some geographers to found a unified science from a diversified set of knowledges and practices. Therefore, modern geography may appear as an adversary of Balzac’s own ambition of totalization and we will show that geographic discourse, rather than being a model for him as other scientific discourses are, is distorted in his novels, deprived of its epistemological value and reduced to a science without knowledge.

Shifting Geographies and Literary Space in Pierre d'Avity’s The Estates, Empires, & Principallities of the World (1615)

This essay examines the English translation by Edward Grimestone of Pierre d’Avity’s The Estates, Empires, & Principallities of the World (1615), in relation to the French original, entitled Les Estats, Empires, et Principautez du Monde (1614), in order to show the interpenetration and contamination of geographic discourse in French and English. The argument is based on the notion of “literary space”—as in Maurice Blanchot's L'espace littéraire (1955)—which is the space developing "violently" (Blanchot 29) during the mutual contestation between the power of saying (“pouvoir de dire”) and the power of hearing (“pouvoir d’entendre”). D’Avity's geographic and cultural treatise is a metatext, combining human geography (sociology, history, religion, arts and literature) with economic geography, as well as demography and ethnography, as texts cross-polinate with other classical and early modern historical and geographic discourses. Literary space in d’Avity’s treatise is closely related to word, text, and image, so the French original and the English translation work like shifting and overlapping tectonic plaques, which interpenetrate with each other. Whereas the English version focuses pragmatically on European culture and its avatars, adding or omitting several places, according to the translator’s experience, the treatise in French offers a hugely comprehensive view of the world’s geographic space through the territories and the peoples it evokes. The treatise is inscribed in the niche of emerging seventeenth-century literary geography discourses, and the fact that its popularity has not survived for too long after this period is not a result of the text’s shortcomings, but of the competitive development of geographic and ethnographic knowledge.

Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands

Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands

Kritisches Kartieren als reflexive Praxis qualitativer Forschung

Abstract. Both qualitative research in geography and visual geographies have an ambivalent relationship to maps and cartographic methods. Reasons for this include discourse-theoretical approaches to maps and cartography since the 1980s, the tension between the self-images of modern cartography and the methodological perspectives of qualitative approaches, the relationship between map and image, or the role of technology in cartography and GIS. On the one hand, this ambivalent relationship can be well explained historically. On the other hand, a number of possible connections can be pointed out. Based on current discussions in geography and beyond, the article therefore explores and systematizes practices of critical mapping in order to explore new possibilities of connection between visual approaches of qualitative geographies and maps.

ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ РЕГЕНЕРАЦІЇ ВІДВАЛЬНИХ КОМПЛЕКСІВ КРИВОРІЖЖЯ

The transformation of urban spaces is one of the key issues that should be addressed in the geographical discourse in Ukraine, taking into account both the ongoing processes of war-induced urbicide and the need of a scientifically based framework for post-war reconstruction. At the same time, urban regeneration should have a multi-vector nature and take into account various aspects of urban functions. One such aspect is a regeneration of industrial spaces (browfields), which cover significant areas in Ukrainian industrial cities. This is confirmed by the significant experience of leading countries in Europe and throughout the world in providing “a second life” to their former industrial areas. The article discusses the use of somewhat synonymous concepts, which, however, reflect different aspects of urban regeneration: reorganization, reconstruction, renovation, redevelopment, brownfield, revalorization, and revitalization. The empirical study focuses on the prospects for the regeneration of dump complexes as a component of the mining landscapes in Kryvyi Rih. The author analyzes possibilities for their transformation and groups the dumps according to their potential for regeneration. Presenting the current state of the dumps and prospective for their regeneration, the author focuses on their potential use for recreation and tourism, as well as for various types of leisure activities. The author's own methodology for rating the suitability of the most attractive city dumps for regeneration is proposed. According to this methodology, the selected dumps received rating points for each of the specified criteria, which resulted in the identification of their overall rating place. The article outlines a project for the creation of an industrial landscape park on the site of the Burshchytsky dump, highlighting possibilities for its future use as a touristic attraction.

Encounters? The De missione dialogus, its Cosmographic Discourses, and the Global Projection of Christian Europe’s Alleged Superiority

This essay analyses the epistemological foundations of the use and functions of cosmography, geography and cartography in the De missione dialogus as a way to sustain the European moral and scientific alleged superiority with respect to all other civilizations. Since the padre visitador Alessandro Valignano S. J. (1539-1606) outlined the geographical discourse of the De missione by following Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), this study will also allow to analyze a specific use of the Theatrum for Catholic missionary purposes. On the basis of extant research on the reception of Western iconography in Japan, we will discuss the possible role of De missione in the appearance and production, since the late sixteenth century, of a hybrid pictorial corpus of cosmographic images depicted by Japanese painters on folding screens (the so-called sekai chizu byōbu, or ‘world map’ folding screens), in particular of those of the Jōtoku-ji type, displaying the sea routes of circumnavigation of the whole globe.

"Old friend and powerful cadre": Doctor-patient relationships and multi-dimensional therapeutic landscapes in China's primary hospitals.

A positive doctor-patient relationship is believed to play a key role in the healing process in clinics. While challenges to the doctor-patient relationship are a global concern, complex social contexts which introduce familial collectivism and totalitarian bureaucracy to maintain a doctor's authority have complicated doctor-patient relationships in China. This study delineates a multi-dimensional therapeutic landscape of hospitals in China, focusing on the doctor-patient relationship performances used to improve patients' healing experiences. Based on fieldwork in two primary hospitals in Eastern China, we find that primary hospitals in China are not only professional spaces, but hybrids of professional and non-professional spaces. In these spaces, both professional and other discourses in various forms of social-environmental engagement affect therapeutic experiences. Varying time and space in hospitals allow doctors to construct multi-dimensional therapeutic landscapes vis-a-vis patients to secure patients' compliance with their recommendations, and thus improve health outcomes. We argue that these dimensions may also cause negative therapeutic experience such as unnecessary health care. This study contributes to the literature on therapeutic landscapes of health care by providing a critical view on the construction of multi-dimensional therapeutic hospital landscapes. Furthermore, it links the critical health geographies literature with China's broader social context to explicate the cultural and social transformation of health care spaces in contemporary China. Findings from this study inform both theoretical and empirical debates regarding therapeutic landscapes of health care by embedding the professional spaces of health care into broader geographical discourses. This calls for health professionals to reflect on ethical concerns in multi-dimensional health care landscapes.

“Between Japan and California”: Imaginative Pacific Geography and East Asian Culture in Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves

Penelope Aubin’s mixed-up representation of Japan and the Pacific in The Noble Slaves (1722) has long been considered as an indication of the author’s insufficient geographical knowledge. In this essay, I reassess the East Asian setting of The Noble Slaves in the context of eighteenth-century geographical discourses. By examining Herman Moll’s maps as possible source materials, I argue that Aubin’s imaginative geography reflects not her personal ignorance but the limitations and uncertainties of contemporary cartographical knowledge about the North Pacific. Aubin uses the speculative nature of early Enlightenment geographical discourses for a narrative experiment and reimagining of East Asia. Aubin’s unique representation of East Asian cultures, such as Japanese Christian “Indians” and the ancient pagan temple, hinges on the emotions of wonder and curiosity, which can be read as a criticism of Robinson Crusoe’s hostile attitude toward the Far East in Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). This essay ultimately situates Aubin as a significant participant in early eighteenth-century knowledge production about the world.

Place matters: geographical context, place belonging and the production of locality in Mediterranean Noirs

Scholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.

Chasing Giants: Simulation and the United Nations’ Trompe l’oeil Games

This essay examines how François Debrix’s <em>Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology</em> “revisions global politics” and complicates scholarship in international relations and human geography by situating his analysis at the level of simulation, conceptualizing United Nations peacekeeping efforts as trompe l’oeil games that “fool the eye.” Specifically, it analyzes how Debrix’s analysis pushes the borderlines of scholarship in human geography by going beyond the critique of Cartesian perspectivalism with its attendant masculine mind/body dualism that is often levied at mainstream geographical discourses by critical and feminist geographers. After doing this, this essay outlines how Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping casts a critical light on the foreign policy analyses disseminated by scholars such as Samantha Power and Thomas Weiss, who ascribe specific “moralizing intentions” to international institutions like the UN. This essay ultimately argues that Debrix’s analysis of the “New Word Order” and disciplinary neoliberalism is increasingly relevant in the contemporary setting, where YouTube and TikTok videos and images contribute to the proliferation of individualizing empty frames.

Use of the Subjunctive Mood in Polish Historical and Geographical Discourse

Use of the Subjunctive Mood in Polish Historical and Geographical Discourse

Spiritual homes on the move: narratives of migrations from Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries

ABSTRACT This paper explores the process of the creation of home as a constellation of faith and migration. Building on discussions in geography and anthropology describing home as being in-between mobile and fixed, a hybrid entity-in-construction, the paper challenges the antimonies between place-based or placeless, real or imagined homes common in migration research. Building on the analysis of historical narratives of 18th- and 19th-century migration from Scotland, it highlights the ways in which migrants were involved in the construction and performance of homes through faith and movement. It draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore not only the material, imagined and relational nature of spiritual homes, but also attends to performative acts of faith, affective dimensions and openness to the otherworldly being. Using the concepts of multiplicity, affect and the collective, it considers spirituality as a part of the fluidity of homes and an uncertain movement between them. It explores fusion and heterogeneity of spiritual attachments and connections that bring unexpected actors together in more or less intensive states of spiritual co-belonging ‘at home’. The paper concludes with conceptual reflections about spiritual homes as dispossession and exposure in an impossible relation with the foreign and otherworldly in migration.

Fra Mauro's map of the world from the 15th century - toponomastics of the Balkans

Fra Mauro's world map was created in the middle of the 15th century and at that time it represented a great progress in relation to Ptolemy's geographical and cosmographic representations, which until then had been the starting point for every geographical discourse. This map is one of those epochal works from the era of Humanism and the Renaissance, which illuminated the world with new light and thus moved scientific thought forwards. Fra Mauro's map represented the affirmation of geography and cartography, which at that time had not yet been constituted as sciences, and directed at new geographical discoveries and research. The aim of this paper is to analyse the geographical representations of the Balkan Peninsula on Fra Mauro's map. This paper provides the toponym list of the Balkan Peninsula and some surrounding areas and countries, systematised in its original form and identified in its current meaning. Special attention is given to the identification of the map as a text document, as well as to the explanation of the context, symbolism and contemporary meaning of certain geographical names.

A pandemia e a "ambientalização" da Geografia Um desafio epistêmico-político

The purpose of this article is to extract from the COVID-19 pandemic a lesson for geographers: although without intending (or being possible) to simply go back to the past, it is necessary to re-value, nevertheless, the very quintessence of the identity of the geographical discourse, which has been characterised by a way of building epistemic objects that is committed to a dialogue between social research (represented by what we usually call‘human geography’) and natural research (represented by what we usually call ‘physical geography’). This project, presently called ‘environmentalisation,’ does not aim at anything overly ambitious: there is no case here for an exclusionary thesis in the style ‘geography should be this, and nothing else’; in fact, it just defends the idea that an approach such as that of environmental geography, resulting from an attempt at ‘environmentalisation,’ must have its place assured. Environmental geography, being committed to the construction of hybrid epistemic objects, allows us to mobilise the interfaces and knowledge necessary to deal with complex tasks such as the analysis of the short and long-term effects of the pandemic (among many other issues). However, the environmental geography project not only has to deal with intellectual challenges (integrating what knowledge, how and for what purpose?), but, in the end, it must also face political obstacles: the concrete power relations in the academic world and the zeal with which ‘borders’ and ‘territories’ are patrolled and defended, not to mention the resistance of many researchers to leave their thematic and theoretical-methodological comfort zones.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “Maps,” Natural Law, and the Enemy

Although it may appear that geography is distinguished by an objective, neutral subject, a genealogy of geographical knowledge reveals that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European polemics over the demarcations and legal representations of space were imbued with polemos itself, war and conflict. In this article, I examine the polemical nature of Robinson Crusoe’s spatial experience and constructions, maritime and insular. Most readers know Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for the shipwreck and the island. This sells short the novel’s formal spatial design, which contrasts its hero’s early mobility with his subsequent settlement(s), while concurrently encoding ideas about law, enmity, and sovereignty into geographic constructions. In Defoe’s space, theory and practice of empire are intermeshed. As I shall argue, Defoe’s representations of his hero’s achievements—both Crusoe’s astute seafaring and his later claims to sovereignty and possession of “his” island—build on extraliterary systems of knowledge in which war offers blueprints for grasping colonial encounters and global space. Defoe exploits two related imperial geographical discourses, natural law (and its derivative the Law of Nations, forerunner of today’s International Law and Law of War), and cartography, drawing on them for both verisimilar and fantastical representations in his novel.

Unschooling motherhood: caring and belonging in mothers’ time-space

For mothers, time is experienced in unique patterns reflecting mother-child relationships shaped by caring responsibilities and producing notions of belonging. The temporal and spatial rhythms of mothers’ lives are determined by interembodiment and co-presence; particularly apparent when offspring are infants and incapable of independent mobility and self-care. For most mothers these rhythms evolve as children grow and develop, with a particular increase in independence experienced by many mothers when their children reach school age. However, for home educating mothers, the constant interembodiment and co-presence of the mother-child relationship extends into late childhood resulting in alternative habitus to mothers who attend to school and to work. This paper draws on blogs authored by unschooling mothers in the UK, Australia and the USA – mothers whose children engage in a child-led form of home education - to explore a geography of motherhood that contrasts with the mainstream experiences that determine socio-cultural and policy-generating expectations. In so doing, this paper contributes to geographical discourse concerning the way in which motherhood impacts on experiences of time and space whilst also challenging mainstream representations of motherhood and particularly the widespread problematisation of caring. This paper demonstrates the way that caring relationships embed an individual in complex reciprocal networks leading to a particular identity-in-space which in turn influences, and is influenced by, temporal rhythms.

Truth and Wonder in Richard Head’s Geographical Fictions

In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel writing, Richard Head explored the limits of verisimilitude associated with geographical discourse in his three fictions The Floating Island (1673), The Western Wonder (1674) and O-Brazile (1675). In them he argues in favor of the existence of the mysterious Brazile island and uses the factual discourse of the travel diarist to present a semi-mythical place whose very notion stretches the limits of believability. In line with recent critical interpretations of late seventeenth-century fiction as deceptive, and setting the reading of Head’s narrations in connection with other types of travel writing, I argue that Head’s fictions are a means of testing the readers’ gullibility at a time when the status of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, is subject to debate.

Capitals of the Korean Meta-nation: An archipelago of Hyperand Shadow-Capitals

This paper discusses the Korean urban space by focusing on capital cities and how they structure the Korean “meta-nation”, i.e. this very unique cultural space, attached to the locus of the Korean peninsula and coherent over the historical longue duree, currently split into two States and fragmented into great diasporic communities, which positions are determined by political polarization. It is based on the analysis of geographical discourse on Korean “capital cities”, and “capitalness”, as the quality of some cities able to take on the power that comes with a central political role, even if they are not or no longer the current capital, in various secondary sources in English and Korean. Next to the great capitals of Korean geo-history (hyper-capitals of the present States, Pyongyang and Seoul, or legitimizing historical capital cities such as Kaesong and Kyŏngju), de-capitalized cities such as Suwŏn, forgotten or marginalized capitals, such as Puyo, or Kongju) form an archipelago of capitals. This archipelago of “hyper-capitals” and “shadow capitals” is scattered not only across the peninsula itself, but is also connected to many capital cities of the Korean diaspora: from the North American diaspora’s Koreatown in Los Angeles to the Central Asian diaspora’s Almaty in Kazakhstan.