Hidden Geographies Research Articles

Caring for Indebted Migrant Workers: Financial Literacy Training, Debt, and Filipino Migrant Workers in Dubai

This article explores the politics of care that undergird state and private initiatives that seek to assist overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Dubai. In addition to their precarious work conditions in the city, levels of debt are believed to be on the rise even among those categorized as professional, skilled, and semiskilled. These workers thus become the ideal subjects of financial literacy training programs aiming to turn them into “financially mature” individuals free from debt and capable of becoming future entrepreneurs if and when they return to the Philippines. This article highlights the ways in which financial literacy education, despite being framed as an act of care, can still work to obscure the specific political economic and structural conditions that produce and maintain debt among Filipino migrant workers in Dubai. Following Raghuram (2016), I “trouble care” to shed light on the “hidden geographies” of migrant worker debt and the challenges and complexities that need to be taken into account in caring for them. This article seeks to empirically and theoretically contribute to discussions on how debt can be viewed and used to constitute and shape future migrant solidarities.

Makeshift camp geographies and informal migration corridors

Makeshift camps have increasingly become a permanent presence along border areas and in cities around Europe and elsewhere, constituting a ‘hidden geography’ that is crucial to overland mobilities of thousands of migrants each year and essential to understanding contemporary informal migration. While there is rich and burgeoning scholarship on makeshift camps, substantial gaps remain in the understanding of these informal geographies which have not yet been conceptualized in terms of the key roles they play in the production of informal migration corridors nor the unique forms of daily life en route that they support, as this paper intends to do.

Hidden Geographies: Migration, Intersectionality, and Social Justice in a Global Contemporaneous Space

In June 2020, a group of transnational scholars responded to an invitation to participate in a themed issue on migration and social justice, following the American Association of Geographers statement against discrimination and hate crimes resulting from COVID-19 (May 2020; followed by a 2021 statement against anti-Asian racism and violence) and its statement on Racism and the Death of George Floyd (June 2020). The six articles bring together an exceptionally diverse scholarship on hidden geographies of migration, immigration, and transnational migration; the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, and citizenship in creating systems of oppression and discrimination; and social justice in a global contemporaneous space. This article (1) introduces the context shaping the birth of this Focus section, including the conjuncture of events, embodied effects, and the disciplinary past; (2) discusses its echoing with antiracist and feminist geography scholarship and race and ethnicity scholarship (primarily by women of color), and its creative contribution, as a collection, to connecting the conceptual theme of “hidden geographies” with the epistemological thinking of “contemporaneous geography;” and (3) highlights the analytical tool of intersectionality and summarizes all six articles and their contributions to the Focus section themes as the global “hidden geographies” project continues to empower more.

La population urbaine au Brésil : statistiques surestimées, géographie occultée.

Cet article propose une critique des catégories territoriales utilisées dans les recensements brésiliens par l’Institut brésilien de géographie et statistique (IBGE). Les études de cas présentées illustrent la difficile compatibilité entre des données localisées de population et une approche géographique du peuplement. De nombreux écarts apparaissent lorsque l’on confronte des images de terrain (photographies) et satellitaires rendant compte des formes réelles d’occupation du sol aux découpages officiels distinguant les territoires urbains et ruraux. Ces décalages sont liés à plusieurs facteurs : la définition légale de l’urbain, l’agrégation des données, ainsi qu’une confusion entre population de la ville (ceux concentrés au chef-lieu du município) et population urbaine totale municipale. De tels écarts sont également la conséquence de processus historiques et d’enjeux politiques, économiques et fonciers. Ils affectent les résultats agrégés des données de recensements (population urbaine, taux d’urbanisation…), ainsi que les résultats locaux, pour chaque município. Les exemples analysés dans cet article montrent que la richesse statistique et cartographique diffusée par l’IBGE pourrait être mieux utilisée notamment pour obtenir des mesures plus cohérentes des « degrés d’urbanité » ainsi qu’une meilleure connaissance des différentes formes et densités du peuplement dans le pays.

Book Review: The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago by Alison Mountz

Book Review: <i>The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago</i> by Alison Mountz

Book Review: The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago

Book Review: The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago

Review of Mountz’s The Death of Asylum: The Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago

Review of Mountz’s The Death of Asylum: The Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago

Sixteenth-Century Hispaniola: A Hidden Geography of Solidão

Sixteenth-Century Hispaniola: A Hidden Geography of Solidão

In-between spaces in the Levant: Conceptual reflections

ABSTRACT In-between border spaces are numerous in the Levant region and are usually of two types: those resulting into buffer zones as a result of demilitarized spaces and those turning as a region under the occupation of a foreign state. But there is a lack of clear theoretical and analytical framework as they stayed somehow understudied territories and spaces that are generally located at the edges of the states and thus are poorly documented and sometimes can even be described as hidden geographies. This introduction explores three key concepts – space, power, and identity – as they provide three directions of investigation that are interlinked in this problem: the territoriality, the political power, and the issue of the relationship between the Self and the Others. Therefore, the general questioning aims at understanding what are the reasons for the appearance, the existence, and the persistence of in-between border spaces. The paper provides with various tools in several disciplines in order to shape and suggest ways of delineating the issue of in-between spaces in border regions.

Hidden geographies: design for neurodivergent ways of hearing and sensing

ABSTRACT Autistic people may share a similar neurological dysfunction in regulating perception and integration of complex sounds. Acoustics are a dominant sensory component of the city and may significantly impact Autistic people’s experience of the urban environment. In this reflection, I propose a research project comprising (1) a qualitative evaluation of Autistic adults’ sensory and acoustic experience of urban space through an embodied ethnographic study, (2) a systematic review of existing literature, (3) a comparative analysis of the ethnography and the review, in order to develop (4) guidelines for inclusive design which accommodate the auditory and sensory needs of Autistic people.

Violence, the Body and the Spaces of Intimate War

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between domestic violence and rurality through the theoretical lens of intimate war. It argues for a geopolitical perspective that foregrounds issues of space and scale and emphasises the ‘entwined geographies of corporality and violence’. Drawing on recent empirical research in the UK, I explore the ways in which the body is contained and controlled both physically and emotionally through intimate war. In doing so I focus on three key aspects of domestic violence: hidden geographies, tactics of entrapment and surveillance and the wounding of the body. The context of rurality provides a set of spatial and social characteristics that need to be taken into consideration in understandings of the experience of domestic violence and the responses by agencies and professionals.

Topographical Art and the Rediscovery of Lost Landscapes: Understanding Ligurian Rewilding 1850–2020

ABSTRACT This paper examines how useful nineteenth and early twentieth century topographical art can be as a source to help rediscover former cultural landscapes obscured over the last 60 years by ‘spontaneous re-wilding’. It assesses whether the analysis of images and comparison with present day landscapes and intervening historical maps may be of value in demonstrating the extent of landscape changes. The paper considers paintings of three ‘every day’ landscapes in north west Italy and the changes that have taken place over the last 150 years or so in three case study areas at Savignone, Andora and Sant’Andrea di Foggia. Can such paintings provide insights into forgotten and hidden geographies and generate ideas about how lost landscapes might be recreated? We consider whether the systematic analysis of different evidence for the same study areas allows subtle and deep interpretations of environmental change. We also consider whether such art can be used to improve landscape understanding and management.

The Hidden Geography of Network Datasets in Social Science

The Hidden Geography of Network Datasets in Social Science

Narratives of Public Art: Yellow Peril, Vault and a Large Yellow Object

In 1980 a large yellow steel sculpture by the Australian sculptor Ron Robertson-Swann was installed in the City Square in Melbourne, Australia. Commissioned by the Melbourne City Council, the sculpture attracted enormous media scrutiny and its tenure in the Square was a regular agenda item on City Council meetings from the time that a maquette of the proposed work was first displayed. Over the next 20 years the sculpture, later named Vault, was twice dismantled and reassembled at other sites. In this article I approach the sculpture through an object-oriented method, one that attributes agency to the human and nonhuman actors in these events. In so doing I seek to locate what Bruno Latour might have described as the “hidden geographies” of the sculpture. This close examination of the life of the work, and the many and varied interactions with the sculpture on the part of the people of Melbourne, demonstrates how Vault far exceeded Robertson-Swann's intentions for it.

Book review: Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. 2008. vii + 376 pp. $25.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780816649266

Book review: Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. 2008. vii + 376 pp. $25.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780816649266

Navigability and the improvement of the river Thames, 1605–1815

Through ‘improvement’ the Thames was subjected to a bureaucratic regime of engineered discipline that was brought into effect by the early nineteenth century. Over recent years, rivers have been explained with reference to their materiality and their social identity, and the Thames of the past can perhaps best be understood as a discursively produced materiality. In the medieval and early‐modern periods, the Thames was perceived as a gift or as a burden by those who used it, its socioecology administered by a series of overlapping administrations. From the seventeenth century it was administered and re‐engineered by regulating organisations – in particular by the Corporation of London, the Oxford Authority, and the Commissioners of the Thames – that established a comprehensive system of locks as part of creating an improved river. The new socioecological order of the Thames provided an engineered resolution to the conflicting uses of the river by the milling and barging industries, and enabled an accommodation to be reached with the new canals. It represented the work of the ‘hidden geography’ that had expressed itself in the remaking of the river in accordance with the requirements of capital.

Mental mapping the ‘creative city’

Please click here to download the map associated with this article. Cultural researchers are increasingly turning to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies for visualising spatially-oriented qualitative data. This paper discusses one example, where mental maps have been employed in interviews with creative industry workers and the results accumulated in a GIS for visualisation and analysis. This technique extends on participatory and qualitative methods that counteract overtly economic and empiricist techniques regularly employed in creative industry mapping studies. Collating together creative workers' mental maps within a GIS provides a means for exposing ‘high traffic’ areas—hot spots of creative activity—and other hidden geographies that comprise the ‘creative city’. Key spaces, known within creative communities but understood by researchers only anecdotally, can be visualised with a GIS. The methodology was carried out in Darwin, the capital city of Australia's Northern Territory, which has sought to re-imagine itself as a creative city. Results from two mental mapping questions form the focus of this paper: on where ‘creative epicentres’ and ‘spaces of inspiration’ exist in Darwin. The former tend to centre on popular suburban sites and inner city spaces while the latter privileges open space and iconic harbourside settings. The differences and similarities between responses to interview questions are best revealed through 3D visualisation. Outputs from this method incorporate vernacular voices into policy-making, and can henceforth inform spatial planning, allowing for the development of more spatially literate creative city policies that reflect creative workers' actual spatial proclivities.

Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. E. Balibar, ‘The Borders of Europe’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, trans. by J. Swenson (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998) pp. 216–233. 2. Y. Lapid, ‘Introduction: Identities, Borders, Orders: Nudging International Relations Theory in a New Direction’, in M. Albert, D. Jacobson, and Y. Lapid (eds.), Identities, Borders, Orders: Re-Thinking International Relations Theory (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001) p. 8. 3. A comprehensive survey of this literature is beyond the scope of this deliberately short position piece. However, some examples symptomatic of the critical shift to which we refer include: L. Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 336–351; M. Coleman, ‘A Geopolitics of Engagement: Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, and the Reconfiguration of US Immigration Enforcement’, Geopolitics 12/4 (Oct. 2007) pp. 607–634; S. Elden, ‘Contingent Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity, and the Sanctity of Borders’, SAIS Review of International Affairs 26/1 (2006) pp. 11–24; H. Van Houtum, O. Kramsch, and W. Zierhofer (eds.), B/ordering Space (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate 2005); D. Johnson and S. Michaelson (eds.), Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 1997); P. Kumar Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press 2007); W. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000); D. Newman, ‘Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue’, European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2006); N. Parker, ‘From Borders to Margins: A Deleuzian Ontology for Identities in the Postinternational Environment’, Alternatives 34/1 (2009) 17–39; C. Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos’, Geografiska Annaler 88B/4 (2006) pp. 387–403; C. Rumford (ed.), ‘Global Borders’, of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Special Issue (forthcoming); M. Salter, ‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31/2 (2006) pp. 167–189; R. B. J. Walker, Before the Globe/After the World (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming); N. Vaughan-Williams, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2009); W. Walters, ‘Border/Control’, European Journal of Social Theory, Special Issue (ed. by C. Rumford) 9/2 (2006) pp. 187–193; J. Williams, The Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006). 4. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press 1976); J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1982); J. Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1988). 5. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). 6. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998). 7. C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press 2001).

Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge. Edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr.

Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge. Edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr.

Grounding the virtual: The material effects of electronic grocery shopping

This paper addresses the materiality of computer-mediated retailing. The paper uncovers the “hidden geography” of e-commerce, considering how the seemingly simple act of doorstep food delivery is explicated in urban form, and in transportation and communication infrastructures. The paper categorises electronic grocery shopping (EGS) enterprises into three types: “bricks and clicks”, “pure-play” and the “infomediary”, and examines how each type of operation has been materialised in the urban landscape, and the infrastructure upon which each draws. The paper then considers the strategies EGS operations have used to offset the “killer costs” of logistics for electronic commerce. The paper concludes by considering how electronic grocery shopping is embedded within broader trends in consumer behaviour, and how these trends are manifested in the materiality of urban life. The paper argues that online grocers are in the vanguard of ventures habituating customers to the remote ordering and delayed delivery of products to the home. Through controlling this “last mile”, online retailers hope to extend the product offer to higher-margin and more problematic products, which are in themselves unprofitable to distribute direct to the customer, but which can be profitably combined with a grocery shop.