Geographical Literature Research Articles

Literary Geography

Literary Geography

Take root among the stars? Emancipatory homemaking as critical worldbuilding in Octavia Butler’s Parables

This paper draws on geographical literature on home to explore two strategies of emancipatory homemaking in the Science Fiction novels of Octavia Butler. It examines, homemaking as a strategy, first, of persistence and, second, of adaptability. Analyzing these two strategies in the way they combine, we argue, allows us to define the home as a critical place that links various geographical scales, from the most intimate to the planetary. We build our argument by tracing the ways in which the protagonists of Butler’s Parables build homes in respect of a necessary negotation between persistance vis-a-vis violence and threats on the one, and the necessity to adapt to the precarious social institutions that surround them on the other hand. Such critical, multiscalar geography of home is proposed as a middle ground between extraterrestrial escapist tendencies, and the introvert isolationism of the homely enclave. Butler’s novels help critical geographers frame the paradoxical space of the home as a productive tension: Home is as much a place of loss, instability, and uncertainty as it is a locus of political agency, counteracting violence and liberating (inter)subjective kinship.

A Survey of Researcher Perceptions of Replication in Geography

Replications confront existing explanations with new evidence by retesting prior claims using new data and similar research procedures. Publishing replication studies remains uncommon in the geographic literature. Place-to-place variations make it unclear whether the results and claims of a study should be expected to replicate across locations, and a lack of experimental control makes it challenging to implement replications that can provide clear evidence about those same results and claims. The small number of studies that have attempted to replicate geographic research suggest that many studies cannot be fully replicated or are simply missing information needed to attempt a replication. Accordingly, it remains unclear how geographic researchers view replication and its role in the knowledge accumulation process. To address this question, we surveyed geographic researchers about their understanding of replicability, beliefs about what factors affect the chances of replicating a study, motivations to attempt replication studies, and experiences conducting replications. The results of our survey suggest that researchers are familiar with replication and believe that replication studies can serve a range of epistemic purposes. Nonetheless, only a small percentage of geographic researchers attempt or publish replications due to a lack of incentives. Researchers are similarly uncertain whether it is currently valuable to replicate geographic research. These findings could in part be due to differences between research traditions, and it might be fruitful to further examine how researchers working in different subfields perceive and use replication in their work.

Advocating a place-space duality for an accounting research agenda

PurposeThe paper proposes a place-space duality, rather than a dualism, for accounting research.Design/methodology/approachThe discussion is informed by the literature in human geography, which, while developing the concept of space, has made an important distinction between abstract space and place as a site of experiential learning and memory.FindingsThe lack of a concept of place is a serious omission in the accounting literature and perpetuates an abstract sense of space, which can restrict the scope of accounting research.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper calls for further research to study accounting in place and to explore both the collective and individual senses of place, as well as conscious and unconscious place associations. We recognise that there is limited prior accounting research on this topic and that there are challenges in conducting such interdisciplinary research, especially as there is a lack of common ground between research in human geography and accounting and little integration of the two literatures.Practical implicationsThe paper proposes an accounting research agenda based on a place-space duality, which reflects the strength of people-place relationships, including place identities, place attachment and place dependence.Originality/valueThe paper provides a critique of the conceptualisation of space in accounting research, identifies place-space as a duality (rather than a dualism) and suggests a novel distinction between studying accounting in context and in place.

Literary geography and the problem of the formation of geo-cultural texts (using the example of the Black Sea texts of Russian literature)

The article is devoted to the problem of the formation of geo-cultural texts within the framework of literary geography. An important part of literary and geographical studies is the study of geographical images presented in literary works. The concept of a geo-cultural text makes it possible to typologize literary and geographical images in relation to different geo-cultures. Local geo-cultures with a developed literary tradition usually have a number of representative geo-cultural texts that characterize the landscape and figurative features of the development of a given territory. The evolution of the Black Sea text is considered using the concepts of geo-culture and geo-cultural text. Images of the South, exoticism, and antiquity are explored as key images determining the development of the Black Sea text. Special attention is paid to the formation of interrelations between the images of the Crimea and antiquity. The marine “exoticism,” combined with the “atmosphere” of antiquity, the marginal antiquity of European culture, turned out to be the strongest emotional stimulus for the formation of both southern and Black Sea images in Russian literature. In the geo-cultural context, the “crystallization” of the Black Sea text of Russian literature takes place by the end of the 19th–beginning of the 20th century (I. Bunin, A. Kuprin). This is due to the rich landscape descriptions, which make it possible to talk about the “Black Sea aura” of these texts and the emergence of a kind of “Black Sea ontologies.” Further, the substantial core of the geo-cultural Black Sea text in the 20th century is determined by the works of M. Voloshin, O. Mandelstam, I. Babel, A. Green, K. Paustovsky, V. Kataev. Through the “crystallization” of the Crimean and Black Sea texts and the modern re-creation of its own image of “Black Sea antiquity” throughout the 20th century, Russian culture created its geo-cultural “antiquity” within the framework of the European geo-cultural space. Thanks to the work of I. Brodsky (“Roman” and “imperial” loci), the Crimean and Black Sea texts expand their semantic field, turning out to be a “node” of metaphorical assimilation, uniting the Mediterranean geo-cultural area and geo-cultural zones of influence of Russian literature.

Land on fire: The spatial production of the mafia

“Land on Fire: The Spatial Production of the Mafia” proposes to address a major lacuna in geographic literature: How mafia groups are socially and spatially reproducing themselves through the intentional setting of fire. Analyzing the 2021 and 2023 wildfire seasons in Sicily, this research proposes that the Sicilian Mafia is operationalizing both rural and urban space in novel ways that reflect a transformation in their organizational structure. This work engages with Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space but also uses ethnography in Sicily to reorient our understanding of mafia crime, suggesting that the Sicilian Mafia’s operationalization of the landscape reflects not only an evolution of the Mafia but also an altered relationship with the land itself.

Transitions across borders: Migration aspirations of young people from Kinmen, Taiwan

AbstractThis paper examines the migration aspirations of young people from the remote border area of Kinmen, Taiwan and their migratory trajectories—internal migration to the main island of Taiwan and cross‐border migration to China. Located between Taiwan and China, Kinmen is an offshore island with a long history of migration. Based on multi‐site ethnographic data from 30 young people, this paper explores their migratory trajectories and aspirations concerning the instability of socio‐political context and the growing social and cultural inequalities of today's globalised world, China's rise in particular. It contributes to the population geography literature by using migration aspiration as a critical lens to analyse how young people negotiate their borderland identity through mobility under the changing cross‐strait political economy. The paper emphasises the importance of considering the transformation of regional economy and culture when analysing youth migration experiences. In recognising the socially grounded aspects of migration aspiration, it highlights the fluid and transformative nature of migration to enrich our knowledge of how marginalised youth form subjectivities and negotiate complex identities through migration. The distinctive experiences of peripheral youth shed new light on the conceptualisation of border crossing, place and desires under the sway of globalisation.

‘Is this the city of beauty?’: facilitating critical student subjectivities through a creative place-based urban geography workshop in Florence, Italy

ABSTRACT The way that the relationship between university students and the city is conceptualised in geographic literature is strongly determined by the studentification debate, which risks subjectifying students in redundant and unilateral ways. This paper suggests that geographic education and its spatialities can inform this debate with an alternative subjectification, by emphasising the students’ capacity to construct their own criticism on the urban phenomena that they experience. It draws empirically from a place-based workshop conducted within a master’s programme at the University of Florence, which aimed at exploring the students’ sense of place through creative methods. Life charts, mental maps, urban diaries and short films, analysed together with textual material, showcase the complexity of sense of place: for students, visuality and affect contribute significantly to their feeling of alienation and its expression, but at the same time become instrumental to negotiating it by seeking a sense of belonging in the touristified and spectacularized city. When approached as “revealed” and “claimed” space, the spatialities creatively produced through the films prove that geographic education is capable of fostering the shaping of students as critical subjectivities, thus restoring the problematic subjectification performed by the studentification debate.

Place identity: a generative AI’s perspective

Do cities have a collective identity? The latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have enabled the creation of realistic representations learned from vast amounts of data. In this study, we test the potential of generative AI as the source of textual and visual information in capturing the place identity of cities assessed by filtered descriptions and images. We asked questions on the place identity of 64 global cities to two generative AI models, ChatGPT and DALL·E2. Furthermore, given the ethical concerns surrounding the trustworthiness of generative AI, we examined whether the results were consistent with real urban settings. In particular, we measured similarity between text and image outputs with Wikipedia data and images searched from Google, respectively, and compared across cases to identify how unique the generated outputs were for each city. Our results indicate that generative models have the potential to capture the salient characteristics of cities that make them distinguishable. This study is among the first attempts to explore the capabilities of generative AI in simulating the built environment in regard to place-specific meanings. It contributes to urban design and geography literature by fostering research opportunities with generative AI and discussing potential limitations for future studies.

Placing (the absences of) West African sardinellas in Senegal on the animal geographies map

ABSTRACT Starting from the vantage point that animal geographies remain primarily concerned with present animals, what might we learn from an attentiveness to the absence(s) of animals in the context of human-nonhuman relations as approached by the subdiscipline? This prompt is addressed in this commentary by placing (the absences of) West African sardinellas – small pelagic fish – in Senegal on the animal geographies map. Focusing on a derivative of sardinellas, keccax (artisanally smoked and dried fish), and its traces in fish-processing infrastructures in one fishing town on the Senegalese seaboard, the following remarks address twofold absences of the fish: sardinellas’ absence in the animal geographies literature; and sardinellas’ absence in certain locales in Senegal at the current moment. Against these absences, I argue that animal geographies would significantly benefit, both empirically and theoretically, from more deliberate inquiries into how humans experience animals as absent, across their life and death cycle. Such an attentiveness to animal absences, their diverse and always situated manifestations, and the ways they are being experienced by humans entangled in transforming more-than-human political economies, affords inquiring into ways of remaining ‘afloat’ in such post-colonial geographies of protracted extractivism as the one presented in this intervention.

Anti-tourism activism and the inconvenient truths about mass tourism, touristification and overtourism

Over the last decade, the debate on tourism has become remarkably polarised. For some, tourism represents the stalwart of neoliberal capitalism, nested in strongly skewed power relations, characterized by exclusionary and resource-degrading agency, which need taming. For others, it remains genuinely coherent with its original promise to be a ‘force for good’. This dichotomy is per se an eye-opener for critical reflections. Drawing on anthropology and critical geography literature and informed by longitudinal qualitative ethnographical research conducted in Barcelona between 2017 and 2024, this paper provides a set of critical reflections on the inconvenient truths about mass tourism, touristification and overtourism in the context of the current rising of anti-tourism activism in Southern European destinations. By offering a bird’s eye view on the well traversed debate, the purpose of this state of the art paper is to stimulate further critical considerations on the uneven dynamics of tourism capital accumulation, the deep-rooted inequalities associated with it and the effects of tourism excesses, with mass tourism being investigated as a phenomenon, touristification as a process and overtourism as a regime.

“The Country We Built Up”: Geocriticism, Rhodesian Places and the Nefarious Bush in John Eppel’s The Holy Innocents

This article discusses John Eppel’s Bulawayo novel, The Holy Innocents, in order to see how space and place are constructed. By deploying geocriticism as a spatially oriented theory, the article shows how attention to literary geography reveals political insights into histories of race and Zimbabwean belonging. The city of Bulawayo and the literature it inspires provide a unique commentary on the cultural imagining of place. It is demonstrated that the suburb, as a locale in John Eppel’s writing, is a key unit of analysis in exploring the literary city. The political transition and cultural metamorphosis of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe are discussed through the prism of geography. Through recognising the power of space and the arguments about place Eppel makes, our understanding of Zimbabwean literary culture and its interactions with spatiality is developed.

Citational politics in and through animal geographies: interrogating onto-epistemological diversity

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to geographic literature on the effects of inequity in citational practice and politics, focusing in particular on onto-epistemological diversity (or lack thereof) in animal geographies’ citational structures. Through a bibliometric analysis of journal articles in Anglophone animal geographies (as a subdiscipline of human geography), we examine the intersections between citational trends, the contours of knowledge in the field and everyday academic lives. Our goal in this paper is to highlight some of the ways in which citational inequities are fueled. Specifically, our analysis shows that within Anglophone animal geographies, citational esteem can accrue through institutional networks and shared onto-epistemologies, which often go along with ethical and political orientations that refrain from explicitly contesting the status-quo of anthropocentrism. We ground our analysis with a reflective discussion of everyday academic practice to understand the multi-scalar dynamics and implications of citational politics and prompt heightened reflexivity among geographers concerning how animal and other geographies are constructed and reproduced – and how these reproductions can be contested.

Literary Geography and the Native American Urban Imaginary in Tommy Orange's There There

Ever since Tommy Orange’s novel There There was published in 2018, Native American urban experience has been pointed out as the novel’s crux. The characters in the novel are Native American but most of them feel estranged from the community since they do not live on reservations, whereby the general implication is that reservations have become ossified as identity markers for many Native Americans. This paper aims to analyze how the novel’s characters use urban areas to create spaces of belonging, thus debunking the myth of the “reservation Indian”. Aided by Edward Soja’s theories on Thirdspace and Robert Tally’s theory of topophrenia, the paper discusses regional powwows, non-profit organizations, American Indian cultural centers, and digital storytelling/narrativization as specific examples of the subject’s awareness of space, their engagement and inscription into space through the practices mentioned above.

L’esprit géographique dans les romans de Xavier-Laurent Petit : l’appel du dehors

Travel literature for young people provides an opportunity to follow the construction of identity around a double didactic knot: the here and the elsewhere. Geographical space is a key element of the novel, and places are the foundation of the narrative. As part of a humanist heritage, the writer creates a journey and an experience of the living: space and species. Xavier-Laurent Petit's work naturally suggests to readers that they belong to the world. In this literary geography, the author weaves together the perceived, experienced and represented space. He highlights landscapes and a geographical gaze that is very reminiscent of Kenneth White's geopoetic approach. This approach anchors our thinking in a triple perspective: scientific, philosophical and poetic. What is this world we live in? This question seems to be entirely contained in this call from the outside and the experience of movement. At the frontier between literature and geography, and drawing on different types of knowledge about the living world around us, travel writing for young readers has the power to question the world. Through language, it gives a space, a landscape, and even sometimes a path to read.

LITERARY TRAVELS IN CHINA DURING THE TANG DYNASTY

The article discusses literary travels in the historical period of the Tang Dynasty, which entered the history of the country as a period of flourishing culture - science, painting, literature, and especially poetry. Two great Chinese poets Li Bo and Du Fu created during this period. Literary and cultural-geographical approaches to the study of travelogues developed in Western, Chinese and Russian literary geography are presented. The historical and cultural contexts of literary travels are discussed. The cultural and historical specificity of the travelogues of the Tang Dynasty period is that many of them were made not out of interest in learning new lands and cultures, but out of necessity. For the most part, the authors of travelogues were applicants for the position of an official who had to submit a literary work at the state exam. Routes, vehicles, stopping places and other elements of travel are analyzed. The role of literary travel in the development of literature of the period under consideration is discussed. Special attention is paid to the anisotropy, or the disparity of different directions, of the cultural space of China of this historical epoch. This is due to the historically low cultural status of Southern China compared to other regions. Travelogue materials reflect this cultural phenomenon well.

260 Barriers to the Delivery of Obstetric Care Within Primary Health Centres (PHC) in India- a Scoping Review

Abstract Aim This scoping review aimed aims to identify challenges in delivering obstetrics care within PHCs in India, using the 6 WHO healthcare building blocks. Method A literature search covered PubMed, MEDLINE databases, and Google Scholar. Studies published from 2012 to 2022, discussing PHC-based obstetrics care in India, were included based on predefined criteria. Title, , and full-text screenings were conducted using Covidence, involving 2 reviewers for screening and 1-2 reviewers for conflict resolution. Data extraction on the 6 WHO building blocks was performed by 4 reviewers. Results Twenty-two studies were included for final review, mostly cross-sectional (59%), mainly from the state of Bihar (23%). Service delivery (77%) and health workforce (73%) were the most extensively discussed building blocks. Leadership and governance were the least discussed (14%). Challenges in service delivery encompassed limited antenatal care uptake, inadequate emergency obstetrics care and adjunct services, inadequate infrastructure, equipment and space and poor transport, and onward referral services. Health workforce issues included staffing levels and competency and training deficiencies in existing staff. Conclusions This review highlights significant challenges in obstetrics care delivery within Indian PHCs in India, primarily related to service delivery and health workforce. Our scoping review identified literature gaps within the four building blocks outside service delivery and health workforce, and geographical literature gaps from the Northeast of India. PHCs play a crucial role in the equitable delivery of obstetrics services that can reach the most underserved population across India. It is imperative that surgical and obstetrics plan strategies include primary care within them.

Blooming activism in a drying land: Water justice movements along river Tigris in Iraq

This paper explores water justice struggles in the understudied region of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan through a focus on two water justice movements, one civil society campaign, and a related event. While most of the relevant literature in geography and cognate fields has thoroughly dissected inter-State hydropolitical quarrels, discussed water justice from a legal perspective, and analysed water conflicts, less attention has been paid to bottom-up movements, to their visions and actions within a materially and socially challenging environment, and to their engagement with the state. Relying on published material as well as primary research, we show how Iraqi water activists seek to strike a balance between engaging institutions and moving beyond them, across ethno-religious divides and advocacy registers, in their quest to re-signify and re-common waterscapes. We argue that it is not despite all odds, but rather because of all odds, that Iraqi activists showcase such a developed awareness of their role and transformative potential along the rugged path of democratisation.

Challenges and Pathways in Sustainable Rural Resiliencies or/and Resistances

The concept of ‘sustainable rural resiliencies’ has an umbrella consideration for multiple situations. Against the main stream of rural geographical literature, the concept of resistance associated with the concept of resilience is used. The concept of resistance is linked with processes of social and spatial tensions and change in the rural community, while the concept of resilience is linked to periods of relative stability in the place at different scales. But, little research uses resistance and resilience as a spatial-time process in a complementary way. In this contribution we use resistance and resilience in this perspective, with socio-spatial manifestations at global, national, regional, and local levels, in form of four scalar spheres and styles of complementarity: resilience model of stability, mix model bottom up, mix model from above and resistance model associated with tensions.

Bayesian cluster geographically weighted regression for spatial heterogeneous data.

Spatial statistical models are commonly used in geographical scenarios to ensure spatial variation is captured effectively. However, spatial models and cluster algorithms can be complicated and expensive. One of these algorithms is geographically weighted regression (GWR) which was proposed in the geography literature to allow relationships in a regression model to vary over space. In contrast to traditional linear regression models, which have constant regression coefficients over space, regression coefficients are estimated locally at spatially referenced data points with GWR. The motivation for the adaption of GWR is the idea that a set of constant regression coefficients cannot adequately capture spatially varying relationships between covariates and an outcome variable. GWR has been applied widely in diverse fields, such as ecology, forestry, epidemiology, neurology and astronomy. While frequentist GWR gives us point estimates and confidence intervals, Bayesian GWR enriches our understanding by including prior knowledge and providing probability distributions for parameters and predictions of interest. This paper pursues three main objectives. First, it introduces covariate effect clustering by integrating a Bayesian geographically weighted regression (BGWR) with a post-processing step that includes Gaussian mixture model and the Dirichlet process mixture model. Second, this paper examines situations in which a particular covariate holds significant importance in one region but not in another in the Bayesian framework. Lastly, it addresses computational challenges in existing BGWR, leading to enhancements in Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation suitable for large spatial datasets. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated using simulated data and is further validated in a case study examining children's development domains in Queensland, Australia, using data provided by Children's Health Queensland and Australia's Early Development Census.