Geographical Work Research Articles

‘Making Change’ in the memorial landscape to the Dakota–US War of 1862: remembrance, healing and justice through affective participation in the Dakota Commemorative March (DCM)

The Dakota–US War of 1862 led to the removal and exile of Dakota people from their ancestral homeland. Integral to this process was the forced march of 1,700 women, children and elders from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Despite the siting of numerous memorials related to the war and its aftermath, few mark the forced march and its legacies. Since 2002, however, the seven-day Dakota Commemorative March (DCM) has been held biennially to remember and honour Dakota ancestors on the original forced march. Following a brief overview of extant place-based memorials at sites along its path, we draw on documentary sources to explore the significance of the DCM as a distinctive Dakota intervention in the commemorative landscape. Through a process we call ‘affective participation’ – an intense bodily, emotive and transformative engagement in an event – participants on the DCM not only seek to remember but also strive towards healing and justice in the present and the future. Our hope is to expand the focus of current geographical work on discrete site-based memorials to consider the social- and cultural-geographical significance of alternative (particularly Native) forms and scales of commemoration.

A Maps of meaning hatása a kulturális földrajzra

Cultural geography is barely, if not entirely, unknown in Hungary. There was some interest in recent years, but the authors of the very few published papers about the subject couldn’t answer the most fundamental questions about it, especially about the connection between traditional and new cultural geography. After describing this shortcoming in the first section of this paper, I present a brief history of cultural geography. By the middle of the 20th century, the work of the Berkeley School, under the direction of Carl Ortwin Sauer, raised cultural geography to one of the most highly recognised areas of human geography. The shifts in science after the Second World War marginalised the field, which drifted further away from the mainstream of geography in the following decades. Inspired by British cultural studies, from the late 1970s some young geographers questioned the main concepts of cultural geography, mainly criticising its theoretical poverty. The first extensive, synthetic work about the new approach was Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning (1989). To counter the shortcomings of the earlier attempts by Hungarian geographers to introduce the subject, I emphasize the importance of these criticisms by using this book’s story as an example. Firstly, I present the context of the book with regard to the uncommon conditions of its production. Secondly, I investigate the importance of the approach represented by this work in the scientific scene of the period. Thirdly, I analyse the narrative structure that helped the book gain widespread recognition. Finally, I chart its legacy to contemporary cultural geography over the past 27 years. As the last of a few highly critical cultural geographic works in the past decade it sparked a heated debate that divided the field into the American “traditionalists” and the mainly British “new” cultural geographers. The debate proved to be formative in establishing a mutually beneficial relationship between the two sides (eventually allowing the dissolution of the dichotomy), and simultaneously drawing attention to the revitalised cultural geography. The book became the primary source of inspiration for yet another generation of cultural geographers, who themselves published their own textbooks in the following decade. Although after 27 years the book is rather outdated as a “contemporary” cultural geographic textbook, it is still useful as teaching material mainly for its significant historic value. As one of the most influential books written on the subject, which represents both the scientific plurality of the field and the momentum of theoretical criticism in the 1980s, its story presented in this paper would be an ideal gateway to cultural geography for the Hungarian audience.

And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh.

America and the American Revolution in British Geographical Thought, c.1760–1830

Abstract This article investigates British ideas about ‘America’ in the years before and after the American Revolution. What characteristics and qualities were thought to distinguish the continent from other parts of the globe? How did the Revolution affect ideas about ‘American’ space? Existing studies tend to present the Revolution as a disruptive moment in British intellectual life. Instead, this article analyses mainstream geographical works—sources which, due to their popularity and summative nature, can help expose the longstanding, formative ideas about America circulating widely in British literate culture. Collectively, these books interpreted America both as a novel space literally and conceptually outside the ‘Old World’ and as a space defined in terms of Britain and its European neighbours. Significantly, the books’ responses to the Revolution were shaped by the same conceptual frameworks. This means that, far from signalling a comprehensive shift in British perceptions of the continent, Revolutionary events were inserted into established narratives; they were used to reinforce and amplify existing structures and terminologies for understanding America in British literate culture.

Viewing the World: Women, Religion, and the Audience for Maps in Early Modern Venice

Marietta Morosini’s home contained seven maps among her collection of over fifty images. Elisabette Condulmer displayed a map of the world next to images of the Madonna and Mary Magdalene. Cornelia Bellon also paired her map of Italy with religious images. These women lived in sixteenth-century Venice, the center of the cartographic world. This article assesses women as an audience for cartographic and geographic works by placing maps into their early modern context: the home. As this article will show, living with maps in early modern Venice often meant reading them through a religious lens.

Some aspects of the history and geographical study of the main objectives of researching of place names in Uzbekistan

Тhe brief history of geographical research of toponyms in Uzbekistan. The main objects of toponymic investigations which outgo alter the accepting the lan of the rep. of Uzbekistan. “About the nominatia of geographic objects” considered in this article the main scientific works of geographers — toponimist were analysed.

Blown out: the science and enthusiasm of egg collecting in the Oologists' Record, 1921–1969

This paper offers an 'almost-animal' geography of egg collecting, also known as 'oology', through a sustained engagement with the contents of the Oologists’ Record (OR), a specialist journal published between 1921 and 1969. It seeks to investigate egg collecting as a 'culture of nature', organised and represented in the print spaces of the OR through which egg collectors, often widely separated geographically, could convene to define, celebrate and defend their chosen pastime. This paper contributes to existing geographical work on 'cultures of enthusiasm' by discussing how, in the OR, birds' eggs were the focus of scientific enquiries and more visceral forms of enthusiasm, coming together in a leisure practice whose validity was increasingly contested by oppositional lobby groups. By considering how the ambiguous status of birds' eggs - on the boundary of the animal and not-animal – was important in ethical contestations about egg collecting, this paper also raises wider ontological questions about the 'almost-animal' that should extend the reach of animal geographies. Finally, the case of the OR presents the unusual spectacle of a special interest community that was declining and dying in print: as its individual members reached the end of their lives; and collectively, as oology changed in status from being a respectable pastime to a wildlife crime.

Breaking the bundle of rights: Conservation easements and the legal geographies of individuating nature

This paper bridges critical legal geography and geographical work on neoliberal natures to illustrate the vital role that US law has played in reimagining the values of nature as divisible from their supporting contexts and the spatial outcomes of this “individuation.” The development and widespread use of conservation easements by nonprofit land trust groups serves as a precedent-setting case study. I review the two major pieces of enabling legislation: the Uniform Conservation Easement Act, and the addition of Section 170(h) to the federal tax code, to argue that these legal changes mark a pivotal moment of reregulation that has been significant for regularizing the separation of conservation values from their socio-ecological contexts. Finally, I offer three examples of the spatial manifestations of the legal foundations of conservation easements: shifting geographies of conservation prompted by highest and best use valuation and tax deductibility, an altered public/private divide in protected areas, and the creation of new spaces of accumulation, through the use of easement law by entrepreneurial forest carbon firms.

Celebrations and challenges: the international at the 16th International Conference of Historical Geographers, London, July 2015

This paper addresses how Élisée Reclus's geographical work was read and circulated by two important activists, intellectuals and exponents of ‘transnational anarchism’ in the twentieth century, the father and daughter Luigi and Luce Fabbri. Using both their published work and unpublished archival sources, the paper analyses the various translations, multilingual studies and interpretations of Reclus that the Fabbris undertook in Italy and later Latin America, and the role they played in the international circulation and reinterpretation of Reclus's ideas. This paper contributes to current studies of the circulation of geographical knowledge and historical geographies of science, as well as to the transnational turn in the social sciences and, in particular, its application to ‘anarchist studies’. It draws on the recent international literature devoted to the historical and epistemological relations between geography and anarchism, stressing the intimate relationship between intellectual and political work among anarchist geographers.

Geografías en disputa: Los cambios en los discursos geográficos de la Argentina (1852-1905)

This paper discusses four key geographical works published between the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries in the context of competing proposals about creating an “official national geography.” The analyzed corpus has been selected on the basis of its impact on Argentine geography, cartography, and nation-building. The works of Victor Martin De Moussy and Woodbine Parish were the first important geographical and statistical descriptions of the Confederación Argentina and the Provincia de Buenos Aires respectively. The work of Francisco Latzina built upon these two works and was the first to unite the country into its approximate territorial whole. In the early 20th century, the erudite scholarship and cartography of Carlos Urién were selected by the Ministry of Education to be used in primary schools and to fulfill the role of official geography. These four works stand out for their processual and geographic construction of the modern Argentine nation-state.

Responsible Geographies and Geographies of Response - Educating Geographers in an Era of the Anthropocene

This dissertation engages with university geographers at work and their explication of the role of geography in shaping socio-environmental debates in an era of the anthropocene. Situating sustainability concepts in a historygeographical context the dissertation examines responses and responsibilities concerning academic fights over representing global environmental change. A major part concerns the theoretical basis and draws inspiration from a series of critical geographical work on the marketization of universities, and relates this tincture to the wider education for sustainability in higher education literature. The methodological framework is based on the social nature approach that tangles these quite distinct epistemological communities by consulting the socio-natures produced. It is concluded that though geographers find sustainability themes important to geography, sustainability is more often implicit than it is explicit. This produces a number of dilemmas and contradictions since geographers both seek to distance themselves from produced politics while at the same time elucidating them. Geographies of response and responsibilities address the battleground over the reading and writing of global environmental change.

Fear, feminist geopolitics and the hot and banal

In this paper we bring together Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and recent feminist geopolitical examinations of fear in order to analyze two cases studies of fear among U.S. college students and U.S. soldiers experiencing sexual violence. Putting banal nationalism and feminist geopolitics into conversation, we argue, reveals both their compatibilities and important pathways for political geography and critical geopolitics to build on Billig’s work. In this regard, the paper makes three key contributions. First, we demonstrate how the insights and imperatives of banal nationalism intertwine in critical ways with the work of feminist geographers, as the banal is often rendered feminine and apolitical and as gender itself is often treated as banal despite its role in the reproduction of the nation. Second, we argue that the multi-scalar analytic of feminist geopolitics offers a valuable intervention into banal nationalism, as relational feminist approaches to binaries like intimate/global provide a useful model to account for hot and banal nationalism as a single, intertwining complex. Finally, through an analysis of fear in relation to sexual violence, the paper illustrates both the inseparability of banal and hot nationalism and how they are deeply gendered, as certain forms of deeply hot violence and fear are depoliticized through their banalization (e.g. sexual assault on college campuses), and as violence that is recognized as hot (e.g. war) is maintained through processes that are deemed banal (e.g. gender).

Space-time approach in social geography: foreign and Russian experience

The article deals with history of time-geography formation as independent scientific direction in social geography and space-time approach’s conceptual foundations, based in works of foreign and Russian geographers. For more than 40 years space-time approach is used widely in foreign researches of various directions, but until now hasn’t received wide recognition from Russian geographers. Main stages of time-geography development, feature of new time-geography and causes of its appearance (development of information and communication technologies, their increased role in individuals’ everyday life), examples of research areas in various geography fields are given. Prospects and possible application of time-geography in Russia are sketched. Role of visualization and graphic-analytical Method as a common approach to analyzing spatio-temporal data about life and activities of individuals is underlined.

Marine Environmental Management: Formation of the Concept, Modern Problems and Ways of Their Decision within Ecosystem Approach

The article describes the history of the formation of geo-ecological foundations of marine economic activities, i.e. marine natural resources use, in Russian Federation. Sequentially, beginning with the classic work of Russian geographers, authors show the growth of interest in the problem. Different approaches and methods used in the organization of integrated management of marine activities, such as the concept of “large marine ecosystems”, “marine spatial planning”, and others, are examined thoroughly. The contribution of outstanding researchers of seas and oceans in the development of marine natural resources – A.D. Dobrovolsky, K.K. Markov, N.N. Zubov, V.L. Lebedev, K.M. Khailov and others is marked. The need to create plans of marine environmental management, strategic analysis of its current problems and risks are noted. The ways of improvement of the legislative framework of integrated management of marine activities are proposed.

Geographers and the Russian Geographical Society in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)

Main directions of activity of geographers and Russian Geographical Society in the Second World War are described. There were military geographical support of the armed forces, the activity of geographers to rear, and the work of geographers in the war – research, educational, and pedagogic. The role of the participants of the war (both who has become geographers before the war and veterans who came in geography after the Victory) in the post-war development of geographical science is shown. The necessity of future study under aegis of the Russian Geographical Society, as well as at the level of regional geographic and research centers is underlined.

A Russian geographical tradition? The contested canon of Russian and Soviet geography, 1884–1953

The paper defines a ‘geographical canon’ as those texts and authors which have been regarded as authoritative by geographers active at particular points in time. The focus is on the development of a geographical canon in Russia and the Soviet Union between the establishment of the first university geography departments in the 1880s and Stalin's death in 1953. A key 1949 meeting of the Academy of Sciences, held at a crisis point in Soviet history, is initially highlighted. The meeting's purpose was to define a canon or list of ‘founding fathers’ for each of the Soviet sciences, including geography, accenting the Russian provenance of each science. In geography's case, the ‘founding father’ selected was the eminent soil scientist, V. V. Dokuchaev (1846–1903). The paper discusses Dokuchaev's scientific achievements and questions why he was considered such an important figure by the geographers of the late Stalin era. It then analyzes some of the key works of a number of prominent geographers of the pre-revolutionary and Stalinist periods to discover how far Dokuchaev's work was emphasized. The main finding is that, although Dokuchaev and his school did have an indirect influence on geographical work from early on, only from about 1930 was his importance emphasized whilst that of the Germans was largely erased by Stalinism. The conclusion is that the geographical canon defined in 1949 was less a genuine attempt to describe the history of the discipline than a response to the priorities of the late Stalin era.

To read or not to read? The politics of overlooking gender in the geographical canon

Wherever there is an established ‘canon’ within an established scholarly arena, this is near universally dominated by texts written by men. Whilst historical contextual reasons may account for the gendering of such knowledge production in relation to publications dating from the nineteenth and preceding centuries, one has to ask why this has persisted in an era of equal access to education and academia in the twentieth century. Why is women's work, highly influential in its day, overlooked in subsequent histories of the discipline and therefore marginalised in discussions of key works? These questions are particularly pertinent to any notion of a geographical canon, given the subject's relatively late arrival as a degree award in the UK from 1917 onwards. This paper draws on an analysis of the significance of lineage, reviewing, reputation and genre in the contextualised production and reception of selected work to explore the merits and demerits of a geographical canon – and the implications for gendered geographical knowledge. It goes on to suggest i) a more inclusive and dialogic relational approach to understanding past and present geographical work based on Kilcup's notion of the ‘soft canon’; ii) a broadening of the cast and range of outputs considered ‘influential’; and iii) encourages greater critical reflection on contemporary practices of canonization within sub-disciplines.

Mapping Human Terrain in the Joint Army–Navy Intelligence Study of Korea (1945)

The concept of human terrain has become a prominent element of U.S. military strategy. It is a means to capture the cultural–geographical qualities of an enemy or target population. An early effort to map human terrain is found in the Joint Army–Navy Intelligence Study (JANIS) of Korea (1945). We argue that the JANIS report on Korea was paradigmatic for the U.S. military's contemporary geographical work and offers insights into the cultural politics of human terrain mapping. This explains why the JANIS text is cited by the National Geospatial-Intelligence College (NGC) today as an historical model. This article not only offers a window into the history of geography counterinsurgent but also shows that geography has been entwined with empire.

A survey of the breast care nurse role in the provision of information and supportive care to Australian women diagnosed with breast cancer.

AimTo explore the role of the Australian breast care nurse in the provision of information and support to women with breast cancer, with a focus on the differences experienced depending on geographic work context.DesignA cross‐sectional study.MethodsThis study conducted in 2013, involved surveying BCNs currently working in Australia, using a newly developed self‐report online survey.ResultsFifty breast care nurses completed the survey, 40% from major cities, 42% from inner regional Australia and 18% from outer regional, remote and very remote Australia. Patterns of service indicated higher caseloads in urban areas, with fewer kilometres served. Breast care nurses in outer regional, remote and very remote areas were less likely to work in multi‐disciplinary teams and more likely to spend longer consulting with patients. Breast care nurses reported they undertook roles matching the competency standards related to the provision of education, information and support; however, there were barriers to fulfilling competencies including knowledge based limitations, time constraints and servicing large geographical areas.ConclusionsThis was the first Australian study to describe the role of the breast care nurse nationally and the first study to investigate breast care nurses perceived ability to meet a selection of the Australian Specialist Breast Nurse Competency Standards. Important differences were found according to the geographical location of breast care nurses.

Field recording and the sounding of spaces

This paper concerns the spatial functions of field recordings, defined as audio recordings of the myriad soundings of the world. I suggest that field recordings are doing geographical work outside the usual academic repertoire of texts, numbers, maps, and images, and develop this idea through four arguments. First, I amplify the diversity of ways in which field recordings are used, distinguishing between four styles with different spatialities. Second, I argue that field recordings are both representational and performative, their playback doubling or hybridising space in the present through sound performed by an ensemble of audio machines. Third, following Elizabeth Grosz, I suggest that this performative reiteration of worldly vibration can be affectively potent. Field recordings thus demonstrate that representation and affect need not be opposed. Finally, I argue that field recordings can be understood as contributing to the production of space. Drawing on Lefebvre, I make a political-economic analysis of field recording, drawing attention to underlying processes of labour. The paper includes audio clips to demonstrate some of these arguments.