Geographical Margins Research Articles

Navigating Contested Winds: Development Visions and Anti-Politics of Wind Energy in Northern Kenya

State-led development visions and the accompanying large-scale investments at the geographical margins of Kenya rest on the potential of public–private partnerships to fast-tract sustainable development through accelerated investments. Yet, the conceptualisation, planning and implementation of these visions often deploy a depoliticising development discourse that reinforces and expands long-standing misconceptions about the margins primarily directed at pastoral livelihoods and related communal land tenure. This paper illustrates how the implementation of a wind energy project employs the corporate strategies of depoliticising both land claims and development interventions. In Northern Kenya, private sector participation in large-scale wind energy infrastructure has created a complex development apparatus in which players are empowered to undertake the accelerated investments required to shape the delivery of the Kenya Vision 2030 in the region. An analysis of corporate actors’ strategies in the implementation of the contested wind farm presents a depoliticised framing of “low-cost green energy”, representations of pastoral land tenure and corporate social responsibility strategies through which dispossession is justified and legitimised. This case underscores the extent to which corporate counterresistance is shaped by the reproduction of a historical depoliticised discourse about pastoralism and communal tenure and challenges the traditional narrative of government hegemony against local resistance to large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs).

Scholarship on and from the Margins: Festschrift in Honor of Resil B. Mojares

A motif that runs through the articles in this special double issue in honor of Resil B. Mojares is the fecundity of the geographic and social margins. Mojares himself celebrates the margin as a “good place to be in” for a writer, who, he emphasizes, must not lapse into isolationism and parochialism. The articles in this issue exemplify scholarship from and on the margins, which are expansive in orientation, yielding fresh insights that challenge current interpretations and giving rise to new historiographies. KEYWORDS: MARGIN • PERIPHERY • HISTORIOGRAPHY • RESIL MOJARES

Impact of marginalization on tobacco use in individuals diagnosed with head and neck Cancer

BackgroundConsiderable evidence now indicates that individuals living in underprivileged neighbourhoods have higher rates of mortality and morbidity independent of individual-level characteristics. This study explored the impact of geographical marginalization on smoking cessation in a population of individuals with a diagnosis of head and neck cancer. The aims of this study were twofold: (1) assess the prevalence of smoking cessation in those with a previous diagnosis of head and neck cancer, (2) analyze the determinants of smoking alongside area-based measures of socioeconomic status.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study. We administered a self-reported nicotine dependence package to participants between the ages of 20–90 with a previous mucosal head and neck cancer diagnosis and with a history of tobacco use. Using the Canadian Marginalization (CAN-Marg) Index tool based on 2006 Canada Census data we compared the degree of marginalization to the smoking status. For those individuals who were currently smoking, nicotine dependence and readiness to quit were assessed. A summative score of marginalization was compared to smoking status of individuals.ResultsThe results from this study indicate that the summative level of marginalization developed from the combined factors of residential instability, material deprivation, ethnic concentration and dependency may be important factors in smoking cessation.ConclusionsThis analysis of determinants of smoking alongside area-based measures of socioeconomic status may implicate the need for targeted population-based smoking cessation interventions.

Off the Beaten Path

This article offers a reflection on the ways in which the representation of gays and lesbians in contemporary French cinema has mostly focused on specific and limiting traits. With their choice of locales (Paris and other cities) and bodily characteristics (young, fit), these films convey a restrictive view of homosexuality. Such portrayals have gained traction due to their numerous iterations in films and in the media. By focusing on the works of three directors who have adopted a radically different perspective in their portrayals of homosexuality, this article will highlight the close ties that exist between sexuality and topography. Providing a more true-to-life account of homosexuality, the films move away from cities to investigate the geographical margins. In so doing, they question the tenets of France’s republican ideals, where differences tend to be smoothed out in favor of unity and homogeneity. These films reinstate diversity and individuality at the heart of their narratives.

Social Justice, Sport, and Sociology: A Position Statement

ABSTRACTAmidst widespread inequality, advocates of sport and physical activity have proposed ways in which sport might support those on the social, economic, and geographic margins. In this essay, we consider the place and role of sport in responding to various forms of inequality, and reflect upon its place in pursuing social justice. In so doing, we bring a perspective of critical sociology to the question(s) of whether and how sport can play a role in responding to inequality. Our main argument is that sport has had, and continues to have, a place and role in the pursuit of social justice, but only in so far as sport’s advocates are willing and able to differentiate between justice and charity. To build this case, we draw on the differentiation between the dominant and transformative models of sport for development.

Margin to Margin: Arts-Based Research for Digital Outreach to Marginalised Communities

This article discusses the artistic activity titled ‘Conversations with the edge’ that was executed by communities in Australia, Russia and Finland, and curated for an exhibition at the Helinä Rautavaara Museum in Espoo, Finland in 2017. This activity was created in the context of Margin to Margin: Women living on the edges of the world, a larger arts-based research project that took place between four geographical margins: outback South Australia, Finnish Lapland, Russian Kola Peninsula and Namibia. Margin to Margin was a collaboration between artist communities with the aim to explore the relationship between art-making and empowerment of makers living and working ‘on the edges’. The aim of the project was to understand the realities marginalised communities face whilst giving voice to these communities by exhibiting their art in various formats, stimulating digital participation and utilising technology for digital inclusion. The purpose of the article is to develop a model that will guide virtual arts-based project mediation for digital outreach in both urban and regionally situated marginalised communities.

The trickster as a semiotic figure for construing postcolonial experience: Kwakye’s “The Clothes of Nakedness”

This essay examines an instance of the use of folklore by writers in postcolonial African societies to problematize postcolonial systems in fiction. The essay discusses how Benjamin Kwakye exploits the trickster character as a semiotic figure to construe the themes of survival and social and economic insecurity in The Clothes of Nakedness. The features of the trickster deployed include the spider imagery and his webbing across geographical margins, the use of trickery and manipulation as survival and power-building strategies, and the role of the trickster as a “hero-scamp” and villain. Towards the end of the narrative, the trickster is removed from focalization, and villainous events he engineers are construed as happening in spite of him. He remerges at the end as the ubiquitous spider in whom all mysteries make sense. These strategies are related to postcolonial issues of corruption, socioeconomic marginalization, and international aid.

Corrigendum: Geographical range margins of many taxonomic groups continue to shift polewards

Corrigendum: Geographical range margins of many taxonomic groups continue to shift polewards

The effect of geographical margins on cereal grain size variation: Case study for highlands of Kyrgyzstan

Archaeobotanical research in prehistoric Central Asia and beyond has repeatedly reported highly compact wheat and barley varieties found along piedmont sites of the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC). The morphotypical variation of wheat caryopses across Eurasia generated the Liu et al. (2016) publication pointing out a decrease in grain size relative to eastward dispersal into China; the decrease in wheat caryopses was explained as human selection of smaller grain sizes for better culinary properties.In this study we discuss the possible effect of geographical margin, mountains in particular, on grain morphotypes. By understanding the patterns and reasoning of crop morphotypical variation in mountain zones we can better understand their subsequent dispersal patterns into lower altitudes. Here we present both wheat and barley grain measurements from four Bronze Age sites in Kyrgyzstan, located in the central Tian Shan mountains of average elevation 2000 masl. The data reveals that sites located in mountain valleys at higher elevations display a higher variability in crop dimensions. By analysing grain size variation within and between the sites in Kyrgyzstan and comparing our dataset with published metadata by Liu et al. (2016), we argue that variation in grain size was driven by environmental factors, while compact grain forms in particular could have formed in geographical margins such as mountains.

Indigenous illusionism and the global magic system

ABSTRACTA spectacular commodification of pure illusion, the modern magic of conjuring’s golden age was also part of a loose assemblage of cultural industries – including colonial anthropology – involved in visualizing ethnic differences in ways that tended to naturalize imperialist models of globalization by denying coevalness to cultural others. Inspired by the work of scholars who emphasize multiple, alternative and indigenous forms of global modernity, I ask whether it might be possible to decenter modern magic as a category and genre, writing its history from geographical and cultural margins, and speaking in the plural about contemporaneous, but not necessarily contiguous, ‘golden ages’. Shifting attention from the metropolitan theater as the iconic site of golden-age magic performance to other synchronic settings of visual display and cultural production more closely linked to colonial peripheries, I focus on the elaboration of intercultural magic performance as a form of tourist attraction and imperial spectacle in colonial contact zones. The resulting interpretation underscores the importance of power, conflict and resistance in magic performance.

Encounters with Ovid: Gavin Douglas's The Palis of Honoure and Derek Walcott's “The Hotel Normandie Pool”

Encounters with Ovid: Gavin Douglas’s The Palis of Honoure and Derek Walcott’s “The Hotel Normandie Pool” CAROLE E. NEWLANDS In sixteenth-century Rome, humanist scholars of ancient material and religious culture were exploring the ruins and inscriptions of ancient Rome with a copy of Ovid’s Fasti in hand.1 In London at the same time, Shakespeare was entertaining audiences and inspiring other poets with plots and characters drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses . Reception studies of Ovid often focus on these great metropolitan centers. In this article, however, I will explore transformative encounters with Ovid by two poets living on the geographical margins: Gavin Douglas, the Scottish poet whose major work, the Eneados, completed in 1513, was the first translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in the British Isles, and Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel-prize winning poet best known for his epic poem Omeros, published in 1990. As a poet of a small northern country that had fraught political and cultural relations with its much more populous neighbor , England, Douglas can be considered to some extent, like Walcott, within a postcolonial critical paradigm. For despite their stark differences in geographical locale and in period of time, these poets have significant commonalties. Both men were natives of places geographically distant from the major metropolitan center of London. Both were also classically learned poets. They thus shared anxieties relating to their temporal distance from Graeco-Roman culture as well as to their physical distance from the powerful English-language literary center of their day. And significantly, both Douglas and Walcott present transformative visions of Ovid in indiarion 26.3 winter 2019 vidual, early poems, The Palis of Honoure and “The Hotel Normandie Pool” respectively. These imagined but direct encounters with the Roman poet occur in poems before Douglas and Walcott composed the works for which they are chiefly known, in Douglas’s case the translation of the Aeneid, and in Walcott’s Omeros. Ovid appears in both the Palis of Honoure and “The Hotel Normandie Pool” initially, at least, as an outsider, a poet of exile, but not, however, as a self-pitying poet in decline or, as recent scholarship would have it, as a skilled manipulator of the tropes of poetic decline .2 Rather, in Douglas’s and Walcott’s poems Ovid is a figure who authorizes marginality as a vital source of poetic re-creation. As both insider and outsider Ovid can offer positive redirection to these authors whether within or beyond their geographical boundaries. Through their visions of Ovid, both Douglas and Walcott are offered the possibility of personal change and generic innovation. For each poet the encounter with Ovid is a form of poetic initiation that leads him to his more ambitious work in the heroic genre. gavin douglas’s THE PALIS OF HONOURE i will start with Gavin Douglas (c. 1474–1522). Douglas is generally classed as one of the “Makars,” a term used to refer to a cluster of brilliant, experimental Scottish poets of the late 15th and early 16th century. Among these were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas, three poets who thrived under the rule of King James IV of Scotland, an active patron of the arts who sought to make his court a center of cultural excellence that would rival the English court.3 Douglas’s Palis of Honoure is a youthful, ambitious poem, composed in 1502, twelve years before his major achievement, his translation of the Aeneid.4 Dedicated to King James, The Palis comprises 2169 decasyllabic lines with several demanding rhyme schemes.5 It is written in a manner that combines the “aureate” style, that is elegant and Latinate, with down-to-earth Scottish vernacular 74 encounters with ovid diction and forms of expression, and it is also suffused with Ovidian myth and concepts.6 Its format derives from the medieval dream vision, a form employed notably, for instance, by Douglas’s famous English predecessor Chaucer.7 Scholars tend to find The Palis of Honoure less polished than Douglas’s mature work, the Eneados. Conor Leahy, however, describes the youthful poem as bold and dynamic: “In the hundred years following the death of Chaucer, no other dream vision...

Marges géographiques, marges scientifiques ? Contribution ruraliste à une approche réflexive des enjeux théoriques et sociopolitiques de la territorialité

Les etudes rurales constituent un cas particulierement ancien et fortement inscrit dans les pratiques de l’effet miroir de la notion de « marge » dans la recherche en sciences sociales. De fait, si les etudes rurales, et singulierement la geographie rurale, n’ont cesse de prophetiser la mort du rural et leur propre effacement, elles n’ont cesse egalement de dire la « renaissance » marginale de leur objet et leur propre regeneration - par l’amenagement, la territorialite, aujourd’hui l’environnement ou le patrimoine. C’est ainsi tout le paradoxe des etudes rurales que d’avoir ete un champ d’experimentations methodologiques particulierement riche sur les approches des marges tout en s’etant constamment representees elles-memes comme un domaine marginal et precaire du savoir. Cet article propose un exercice de reflexivite scientifique interdisciplinaire, a la fois historiographique et epistemologique, sur les usages de la notion de marge dans le champ des etudes rurales, non de maniere autocentree, mais dans la perspective de contribuer au debat emergent sur la notion de marge en sciences sociales et sur la validite heuristique de sa lecture spatiale.

Camping it out in the Never Never: Subverting Hegemonic Masculinity in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994)

The critical and popular success of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994) helped to put the Australian film industry on the world map and made Stephan Elliott’s feature a cult film in its own right. The article explores how the aesthetics and politics of kitsch, which allow the film to balance subversion and conservatism, may have been the recipe for success. Priscilla belongs to the Australian subgenre of the “Glitter cycle” which charts the rise of ordinary nobodies to fame, affirming aesthetic tackiness against elitist good taste. Yet the film takes the consensual optimism of the glitter comedy further back to the societal and geographical margins of Australia. Leaving behind the urban gay scene, the film subversively relocates two icons of queer culture, the drag queen and the transsexual, in the sublime landscapes of the Outback that have helped forge the Australian myth of heroic masculinity. Although this queering of the myth does not do away with the hostile stereotypes traditionally projected on women and other marginalized groups, it does bring out the camp quality of the Australian sublime.

Variation in density, size, and morphology of the pulmonate limpet Siphonaria lessonii along the Southwestern Atlantic

The density, size, and morphology of coastal invertebrate species often predictably vary with latitude. In this study we evaluate whether the density, size, and morphology of the pulmonate limpet, Siphonaria lessonii, in the Southwestern Atlantic varies in agreement to the predictions of the abundance-centre hypothesis (i.e., higher densities by the center of the species range), Bergmann's rule (i.e., increasing body size with latitude), and Allen's rule (i.e., decreasing body surface to volume ratio with latitude). Our results indicate that the upper density bounds of S. lessonii decrease with latitude across our study range, which may either contradict expectations of the abundant-centre model (i.e, if assuming a Temperate Southwestern Atlantic/Magellanic distribution; 27°S in the Atlantic to 42°S in the Pacific) or represent a partial trend within a broader scale, abundant-centre pattern (i.e., when considering a panmictic distribution from the Temperate Southwestern Atlantic to the Temperate Southeastern Pacific; 27°S in the Atlantic to 5°S in the Pacific). Limpet shell length (i.e., a surrogate of body size) was not significantly related to latitude (cf. Bergmann's rule). The two principal components of morphological variation in limpet shells – which increased with decreasing shell surface to volume ratio – showed positive and negative relationships with latitude (i.e., contradictory support to Allen's rule). From these analyses, we conclude (a) that the size and morphology of S. lessonii are primarily controlled by local conditions rather than broad-scale climatic or environmental gradients and, (b) that geographic marginality does not means reduced performance in this species at least as it concerns to abundance and maximum size.

‘The right to immobility’ and the uneven distribution of spatial capital: negotiating youth transitions in northern Sweden

‘Successful adulthoods’ are associated with mobile professionals, higher education and cosmopolitan lifestyles. This paper takes an interest in how this discourse is adopted or altered by young people living far away from big cities. Based on interviews in a traditional woodland community in northern Sweden, the study examines how young people in the second and final years of upper secondary school negotiate their transition from education to work. It draws on the two-dimensional concept of ‘spatial capital’. It sheds light firstly on a range of local possibilities underpinned by ‘position capital’, such as proximity to mining districts as well as to educational institutions. These possibilities compete with ‘situation capital’ in the form of young people’s dispositions towards mobility where they consider alternatives in other cities in Sweden and sometimes – although rarely – abroad. I argue that spatial capital is an indication of young people’s habitus, where the geographical marginality of the study location influences perceptions of the future in divergent and sometimes contradictory ways. The paper also problematizes contemporary society’s privileging of mobility, which should be viewed in relation to youth’s perceived ‘right to immobility’.

‘Gypsies’ in Fascist Italy: from expelled foreigners to dangerous Italians

Italian research on the persecution of Rom and Sinti under Fascism is still incomplete (in terms of exploitation of the archival sources) and marginal (in terms of the national academic context). This article analyses new sources for the development and application of anti-Gypsy policy during the Fascist era. The central focus is on developments in the new border provinces of Venezia Giulia and Venezia Tridentina, acquired from the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World War. As a result of the transfer of sovereignty over the resident populations, the nationality status of ‘Gypsies’ had to be addressed, while the significant presence of Rom and Sinti communities in those territories challenged the symbolic meaning they had for the Fascist regime. The outcome was that Fascism marked ‘Gypsies’ as both ‘undesirable foreigners’ and ‘dangerous Italians’, thereby creating a dual rationale for placing them in police confinement and interning them after Italy’s entrance into the war. An approach that combines archival research and field work with Sinti and Rom reveals the transformations, continuities and contradictions in the categorization of ‘Gypsies’. This article thus presents a case study of the place of social and geographical margins in the construction of the nation state.

“WALANG-WALA” (“Nothing is left”): Rituals for Collective Grieving, Disaster Memory, and Social Repair

Super typhoon Yolanda (internationally named Haiyan)—the strongest storm in recorded history—ravaged through the Visayan Islands of the Philippines on 8 November 2013. In this article I examine the transformative power of collective grieving in translocal and transnational contexts postdisaster. Having served as a disaster relief worker across the Visayas, and now writing as a transnational Filipina scholar, I inquire: How is disaster memory shared from body to body, from the geographical margins of a nation-state to the rest of an archipelago, and across the ocean to global diasporas? How might acts of remembering and grieving together enable new forms of political agency in the wake of a super typhoon? In exploring the relationship between disaster memory and social repair, I consider the creation of ritual as an art practice, performance, and protest. I outline how my creative-critical engagement with ritual in three different forms has facilitated the co-creation of spaces for the individual to grieve together with the collective. This series of projects, together called “WALANG-WALA,” explores the embodiment and experience of a state of absolute emptiness and nothingness one is left with after catastrophic disasters such as Yolanda. In these rituals, I approach disaster memory as a cultural practice of collective and active remembering of what we love and lost.

Peripheral Nationhood: Negotiating Israeliness from the Margins of the State

Like many development towns that were established in the aftermath of Israel's founding, Kiryat Shemona is situated on the demographic and geographic margins of the state: it sits on the border with Lebanon, and is in the Galilee region that has historically been a major center of Israel's Palestinian population. Particularly in moments of cross-border violence, Kiryat Shemona becomes a central margin, a place that is crucial to imagining the Israeli nation. For this reason, its inhabitants are imagined by others and often by themselves as steadfast and strong—qualities said to be at the center of Israeliness. At the same time, like other development towns, Kiryat Shemona's residents are mainly Mizrahim who were pushed to populate these marginal regions, and who constitute a majority of the Israeli Jewish population but also in many respects constitute an underclass vis-à-vis the historically Ashkenazi elite. Mizrahim, in such development towns, are thus marginal to the center of power, and vulnerable to the insecurity and poverty associated with these towns. While inhabiting precarious borderlands, they are crucial to the imagining of a bounded Jewish Israeli nation that must defend itself. This article demonstrates how Mizrahim strived to move themselves symbolically from the margins of exclusion to the center of inclusion by calling upon the nation and cosmopolitan connections. In everyday life, mizrahim marked ethicized boundaries against differentiated others, thus reinforcing the ethnoreligious logic of Israeli nationalism that historically pushed them to the margins of the state.

The space of conflict: Aboriginal/European interactions and frontier violence on the western Central Murray, South Australia, 1830–41

Colonialism was a violent endeavour. Bound up with the construction of a market-driven, capitalist system via the tendrils of Empire, it was intimately associated with the processes of colonisation and the experiences of exploiting the land, labour and resources of the New World. All too often this led to conflict, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Overt violence (the euphemistic 'skirmishes', 'affrays' and 'collisions' of the documentary record), clandestine violence (poisonings, forced removals, sexual exploitation and disease) and structural violence (the compartmentalisation of Aboriginal people through processes of race, governance and labour) became routinised aspects of colonialism, buttressed by structures of power, inequality, dispossession and racism. Conflict at the geographical margins of this system was made possible by the general anxieties of life at, or beyond, the boundaries of settlement, closely associated with the normalised violence attached to ideals of 'manliness' on the frontier.

Increasing understanding of the relationship between geographic access and gendered decision-making power for treatment-seeking for febrile children in the Chikwawa district of Malawi.

BackgroundThis study used qualitative methods to investigate the relationship between geographic access and gendered intra-household hierarchies and how these influence treatment-seeking decision-making for childhood fever within the Chikwawa district of Malawi. Previous cross-sectional survey findings in the district indicated that distance from facility and associated costs are important determinants of health facility attendance in the district. This paper uses qualitative data to add depth of understanding to these findings by exploring the relationship between distance from services, anticipated costs and cultural norms of intra-household decision-making, and to identify potential intervention opportunities to reduce challenges experienced by those in remote locations. Qualitative data collection included 12 focus group discussions and 22 critical incident interviews conducted in the local language, with primary caregivers of children who had recently experienced a febrile episode.ResultsLow geographic accessibility to facilities inhibited care-seeking, sometimes by extending the ‘assessment period’ for a child’s illness episode, and led to delays in seeking formal treatment, particularly when the illness occurred at night. Although carers attempted to avoid incurring costs, cash was often needed for transport and food. Whilst in all communities fathers were normatively responsible for treatment costs, mothers generally had greater access to and control over resources and autonomy in decision-making in the matrilineal and matrilocal communities in the central part of the district, which were also closer to formal facilities.ConclusionsThis study illustrates the complex interplay between geographic access and gender dynamics in shaping decisions on whether and when formal treatment is sought for febrile children in Chikwawa District. Geographic marginality and cultural norms intersect in remote areas both to increase the logistical and anticipated financial barriers to utilising services and to reduce caretakers’ autonomy to act quickly once they recognize the need for formal care. Health education campaigns should be based within communities, engaging all involved in treatment-seeking decision-making, including men and grandmothers, and should aim to promote the ability of junior women to influence the treatment-seeking process. Both mothers’ financial autonomy and fathers financial contributions are important to enable timely access to effective healthcare for children with malaria.