Place Matters Research Articles

Investigating sexuality education in South African schools: A matter of space, place and culture

Sexuality education has faced various challenges in being successfully implemented within secondary schools in South Africa. Research points towards barriers thereto, which include teacher bias and limited knowledge as core mediators to socially-just education. Research in the subject of Life Orientation, specifically the theme of sexuality education, has largely focused on teacher responses and challenges within the teaching of sexuality. Scant research, however, exists on how schools as a systemic whole manifest and sustain sexuality education. This research article is guided by the primary question: how do schools, from a systemic level, mediate sexuality education in relation to space, place and culture? As such, the research reported in this article encompasses a systemic approach to understand how sexuality education is maintained within schools. Through purposive sampling, 12 participants from 6 schools in the Free State province were chosen to take part in semi-structured interviews. The sample of participants comprised Life Orientation teachers and school principals and co-managerial staff. Through the framework of cybernetics, it was found that schools face different challenges in relation to their geographical place, as well as the space within which they reside socio-economically. Core themes that emerged from the data include curriculum boundaries and teacher knowledge. We further found that culture influences how sexuality education manifests within a specific context.

Rethinking the Geographies of Diplomacy

Space and place matter to diplomacy, yet surprisingly little analytical attention has been paid to geographical approaches and questions. This intervention sketches out the potentially productive lens that a geographical approach to diplomacy can offer in terms of diversifying conceptual framings, widening the empirical lens so that a broader range of practices, actors and objects come into view when we consider “diplomacy,” and embracing an open and integrative approach to interdisciplinary thinking about diplomacy.

Flourishing in fragile academic work spaces and learning environments: feminist geographies of care and mentoring

In this article we discuss the ways in which a feminist ethos of care and the associated practice of mentoring allows feminist geography to flourish in teaching, working and learning spaces. We argue that our working relationship – based on care, mentoring and friendship – is crucial in order to survive and deflect structural inequalities. Our working relationship spans across undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate and early career stages at a single university. We offer our personal stories as examples of establishing and maintaining collaborative mentoring and caring work relationships. Further, our commitment to a feminist ethos of care and mentoring is vital for our selfcare and causes trouble for structural power differentials. First, we share stories about how our working relationship began and developed within the critical, caring and fragile spaces of the Geography Programme at the University of Waikato and other feminist geography networks. Second, literature on care, mentoring and collaboration is discussed, with a focus on feminist politics of mentoring and collaboration. Third, we return to our own experiences to illustrate the ways embodied and emotional subjectivities and associated power dynamics shape mentoring and care relationships. Examples of joint supervision and research are offered to illustrate complex sets of spatially significant emotions, feelings and subjectivities. Finally, we highlight the ways in which place matters if feminist geography is to flourish.

Regional development: Why places matter for better policies

Regional development: Why places matter for better policies

From the ‘What’ and ‘How’ to the ‘Where’: Class Distinction as a Matter of Place

Research on the symbolic boundary work of upper- and middle-class actors has placed a greater emphasis on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of cultural consumption than on the ‘where’. However, the spaces where actors move are important: the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of marking distinction vary according to national class cultures and cultural fields. This article focuses on the ‘where’ arguing that interaction settings shape actors’ boundary work. Based upon research on Argentinean Pentecostalism, the study shows that middle-class Pentecostals switch between distinction-marking and ‘omnivorous’ performances of Pentecostalism depending on the social permeability of the spaces where they move. These insights suggest that the contextual conditions in which actors present themselves as ‘omnivores’ or ‘snobs’ deserve more attention.

Rummaging through the Attic of New England

The concept of the circular economy has taken off, gaining momentum along with concerns about resource depletion, waste, and the impending ‘end of cheap nature’ (Moore 2014). Environmentalists and industrialists alike have promoted the benefits of reuse as a means toward improved efficiency and reduced resource pressure. Some have called for a new ‘culture of reuse’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Stokes et al. 2014). It is in this context that we explore repair, resale, and reuse as practices with deep historical precedent and contemporary continuity. Are there lessons to be learned from places that are already home to circular economies and strong cultures of reuse? And are there dangers inherent in a stronger, more formalized reuse sector? This paper draws on an historical and ethnographic analysis of vibrant reuse practices in the rural northeastern state of Maine. While there is a popular tendency to explain Maine’s persistent reuse practices as a response to economic and geographic marginality, our empirical observations suggest that these explanations do not adequately capture the complexity of reuse markets, discount the power of human agency and sense of place, and preclude important lessons for reuse policy in other contexts. Insights from Maine suggest that any effort to promote reuse would benefit from looking beyond purely economic rationales to attend to matters of place, sociality, and market relationality.

The body language of place: A new method for mapping intergenerational “geographies of embodiment” in place-health research

Research on place and health has grown rapidly in recent years, including examining the physiological embodiment of place-based exposures. While this research continues to improve understanding of why place matters, there is particular need for work capable of revealing: 1) which places matter, i.e. spatially-specific notions of “place”); 2) how these places matter—processes and mechanisms of the physiological embodiment of place; and 3) potential intergenerational and life stage differences in place-embodiment experiences/perceptions. The research presented here seeks to make contributions in each of these areas through developing the “geographies of embodiment” concept. Drawing from a multi-method intergenerational community-based participatory research project examining place and health, the research presented here specifically highlights X-Ray Mapping as a new methodology to elucidate subjective notions of place-embodiment within place-health research. Participants were recruited as parent-child dyads and trained in four participatory research methods, including X-Ray Mapping. Participants used X-Ray Mapping and a multimedia-enabled web-based mapping platform to map their “geographies of embodiment”. X-Ray Mapping results revealed that 49% of youth place-embodiment locations were spatially outside of their residential census tract—with 75% of positive place-embodiment locations outside, and 66% of negative place-embodiment locations inside. Overall, 67% of youth and adult positive place-embodiment locations were outside of their residential census tract. Through mapping “geographies of embodiment” via participatory methods like X-Ray Mapping, we can gain greater insight into what is embodied (i.e. specific experiences/exposures), and where (i.e. spatially-specific). These gains could improve development of quantitative place-health metrics and enhance efforts to uncover/intervene on the “pathways of embodiment”—specifically, those elements of local social, political, economic, and environmental contexts that constitute expressions of social inequality.

Cyber Literacy for GIScience: Toward Formalizing Geospatial Computing Education

The unprecedented availability of geospatial data and technologies is driving innovation and discovery but not without the risk of losing focus on the geographic foundations of space and place in this vast “cyber sea” of data and technology. There is a pressing need to educate a new generation of scientists and citizens who understand how space and place matter in the real world and who understand and can keep pace with technological advancements in the computational world. We define cyberliteracy for GIScience (cyberGIScience literacy) and outline eight core areas that serve as a framework for establishing the essential abilities and foundational knowledge necessary to navigate and thrive in this new technologically rich world. The core areas are arranged to provide multiple dimensions of learning ranging from a technological focus to a problem solving focus or a focus on GIScience or computational science. We establish a competency matrix as a means of assessing and evaluating levels of cyberGIScience literacy across the eight core areas. We outline plans to catalyze the collaborative development and sharing of instructional materials to embed cyberGIScience literacy in the classroom and begin to realize a cyberliterate citizenry and academe. Key Words: big data, computational thinking, geographic education, GIS, spatial thinking.

Midwestern History: Today and Tomorrow

Midwestern HistoryToday and Tomorrow John E. Miller (bio) History moves in mysterious ways. Paraphrasing that great philosopher Yogi Berra, who said, “I just want to thank everyone who made this day necessary,” I would like to note here that I had a role in making this symposium possible. Jon Lauck was a student of mine at South Dakota State University—one of the best I had in three decades as a professor there. When I left teaching in 2003, his return to SDSU to teach my classes, including South Dakota History, led in a roundabout way to his later launching the Midwestern History Association (MHA). It occurred to him that, unlike all of its counterparts in the United States, the Middle West lacked an umbrella organization focusing upon the history of the region as well as having conferences, scholarly periodicals, college classes, textbooks, and other such accoutrements. Numerous scholars and writers were doing midwestern history, but little consensus existed among them regarding identity, subject matter, goals, and methods. Lauck wrote two influential books describing how what once had been a flourishing regional historical and literary consciousness and a network of regional thinkers had gone into decline. In the meantime, he spearheaded the drive to establish the Midwestern History Association, which has borne excellent fruit during its brief history. The questions now facing the organization are: Where are we? and Where are we headed? This is an opportune time to creatively consider those and other issues concerning the direction in which we are going, five years into the development of the MHA. Lest we assume that other regions of the country—New England (or the [End Page 1] Northeast), the South, and the West—got started quickly, assumed a distinct identity, and established a clear set of goals and procedures for themselves, we should consider a statement by Donald Worster, who wrote in 1992 in Under Western Skies, “For a field that has been around so long, western American history can be frustratingly difficult to pin down.” He went on to observe that “as for clarity of purpose, the field is still groping about in adolescence. It doesn’t quite know who it is or what it wants to be when it grows up. What are its boundaries? Where is ‘West’ and where is not? There is no settled, mature answer.” Noting the “wonderful ambiguity” surrounding the field, Worster suggested that “the West is just about anything that anyone has ever wanted it to be.” Participants in this symposium bring their own backgrounds, assumptions, and goals to the table. Doubtless, considerable diversity characterizes their visions, as well as significant overlap. One advantage of organizing a group like this is the variety of viewpoints and diversity of talents that it brings together. At the same time, it reveals some of the common assumptions and purposes that bind us together. In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013), Douglas Rushkoff points out that “pattern recognition is a shared activity.” In the process of collaboration, he observes, “a network of people is better at mapping connections than a lone individual. As author and social critic Steven Johnson would remind us, ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups, or what he calls ‘liquid networks.’” However we choose to conceive of it—as “liquid networks,” “collective groupthink,” or “collaborative imagination”—the combined insights of the company assembled here will operate like ripples in a pond, emanating outward from a rock thrown in the water to combine with numerous other ideas percolating in the minds of our participants and readers, who will bring their own thoughts and interests to the subject. Philosophers going back to the ancient Greeks identified space and time as crucial components of the conceptual apparatus that allows us to comprehend the world around us. Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason placed those two ideas at the heart of his critical philosophy. Since then, historians and historical geographers have depended upon them to help direct their inquiries. Regionalism as an approach to knowledge builds upon the insight that “place matters.” In the process of establishing the MHA, the question of boundaries defining the extent of the region has...

Child Obesity and the Interaction of Family and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Context

The literature on neighborhoods and child obesity links contextual conditions to risk, assuming that if place matters, it matters in a similar way for everyone in those places. We explore the extent to which distinctive neighborhood types give rise to social patterning that produces variation in the odds of child obesity. We leverage geocoded electronic medical records for a diverse sample of over 135,000 children aged 2 to 12 and latent profile modeling to characterize places into distinctive neighborhood contexts. Multilevel models with cross-level interactions between neighborhood type and family socioeconomic standing (SES) reveal that children with different SES, but living in the same neighborhoods, have different odds of obesity. Specifically, we find lower-SES children benefit, but to a lesser degree, from neighborhood advantages and higher-SES children are negatively influenced, to a larger degree, by neighborhood disadvantages. The resulting narrowing of the gap in obesity by neighborhood disadvantage helps clarify how place matters for children’s odds of obesity and suggests that efforts to improve access to community advantages as well as efforts to address community disadvantages are important to curbing obesity and improving the health of all children.

1.E. Workshop: Place matters! Local assessments for the development of healthy public policies and actions

1.E. Workshop: Place matters! Local assessments for the development of healthy public policies and actions

1.E. Workshop: Place matters! Local assessments for the development of healthy public policies and actions

1.E. Workshop: Place matters! Local assessments for the development of healthy public policies and actions

Thinking geographically with wombs

How can we think geographically with wombs, especially in relation to labour? This is my reading of the question posed by Sophie Lewis in this article ‘Cyborg uterine geography’. The article is challenging not just because the author sets an ambitious task but also because it addresses ‘messy’ bodies long associated with femininity and because it contains terms, phrases and theories that will likely be unfamiliar to some readers. Woven into these theoretical ideas are some helpful examples of how geographers might use the uterus to deromanticize care and social production and instead proliferate that which is often considered to be queer and counter-intuitive. These examples could be developed in future work. So too could how space and place matter to the uterus, and how discourses of the ‘bad’ mother might add weight to arguments about deromanticizing care and social reproduction.

Place, Injury Patterns, and Female-Victim Intimate Partner Homicide.

Research demonstrates place matters in the study of intimate partner violence (IPV) and intimate partner homicide (IPH) with rural women experiencing more severe IPV and a higher risk of IPH. In addition, research points to variations in injury patterns with intimates characterized by more wounds and facial injuries. Little is known whether injury for female IPH victims differs across place; however, research suggests that abuse is a product of a larger social context. Using data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, results indicate that some variations exist based on degree of urbanicity of the county in which the IPH occurred.

Place matters to birth outcomes: A life-course perspective.

Place matters to birth outcomes: A life-course perspective.

Wellbeing across individuals and places: How much does social capital matter?

Subjective wellbeing has been linked, by studies at the national level, to incomes above the median, to frequent contact with friends and relatives, and to life stage, with a strong U-shaped function for subjective wellbeing over the life cycle. These national studies also have provided important thinking about the links between social capital and subjective wellbeing. Much less research has investigated the links between place satisfaction and local measures of social capital, and the effect of local (community and neighbourhood) characteristics on place satisfaction and subjective wellbeing. Thus, this paper examines social capital and social cohesion at the local level using Australian survey data with respondents’ evaluations of their community and neighbourhood relationships. The paper links measures of life satisfaction and place satisfaction to indices of local social capital. The results show that local social capital is strongly associated with place satisfaction and modestly associated with life satisfaction. The results add to the national studies by improving the understanding of how place matters in generating subjective wellbeing.

PATRIARCHAL IDEOLOGY IN WORKS OF VISUAL ART OF BALINESE CONTEMPORARY WOMEN ARTISTS

Human problems are faced faced by Indonesian contemporary visual artists. However, the most typical are the problems faced by contemporary women visual artists, including those faced by Balinese contemporary women visual artists. Other than social problems, their personal problems also arise as women visual artists amidst patriarchal cultural construction. Balinese contemporary women visual artists, like Indonesian contemporary visual artists, are facing social problems and their personal problems as women. But, Balinese contemporary women visual artists also face very strong patriarchal (purusa) cultural ideology. This study aimed at revealing and describing the form of the subject matter of woman’s body as an expression of opposition in the works of visual art of the Balinese contemporary women visual artists; revealing and describing ideologies that operate behind the sexual representation of the Balinese contemporary women visual artists and revealing and describing the contestation of meaning in the ideological sexual representation of Balinese contemporary women visual artists. This study using interpretive qualitative method produced, first, works of Balinese contemporary women artists which have traditional visual elements comprising contour, repetition, rythm, dialect.
 The works of Balinese contemporary women visual artists also have modern visual elements comprising spatial awareness,distortion, stylization, material character, unity, and personal identity. In addition, the works of Balinese contemporary women artists also have post-modern visual elements of trans-aesthetics, dialogism, and disorder. Secondly, the ideologies that operate behind the works of Balinese contemporary visual artists can be classified into three ideologies based on the forms and contents of the works of art. The ideologies are patriarchal ideology that is related to the theme of superiority,phallus symbol, and weak group; feminism ideology that is related to the theme of subordination, equality, and subjectivity construction, and aesthetical ideology concerning with style, which is related to the classification of styles based on time, place, form, technique, and subjject matter. Third, meanings which can be developed from Balinese contemporary women visual artists are the meaning of domestic body and the meaning of open body in the sexual representation of Balinese contemporary women artists. The meaning of domestic body is found in the works of Cok Mas Asiti, Ni Nyoman Sani, and Sutrisni. Sani while the meaning of open body in the works of IGK Murniasih and Nia Kurniati Andika.

Does place matter? A multilevel analysis of victimization and satisfaction with personal safety of seniors in Canada

Studies on the victimization and abuse of seniors in Canada have largely ignored the influence of place-based variations in social bonds and socioeconomic characteristics. Using the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) data on Canadians’ safety, we examine neighborhood, social capital, and socioeconomic characteristics as predictors of the incidence of victimization among seniors and their satisfaction with personal safety from crime. Generally, seniors with poor neighborhood ties and social capital were more likely to have experienced victimization and have a lower satisfaction with personal safety. Seniors who viewed people in their neighborhood as unhelpful were more likely to have experienced some form of victimization and more likely to have a lower satisfaction with personal safety. Highly educated and high-income seniors were also more likely to have experienced some form of victimization. Paradoxically, such seniors were less likely to have lower satisfaction with personal safety. The results also show that place, defined as population centers (urban and rural) may have a significant influence on variations in victimization and satisfaction with personal safety. A significant proportion of the variance in victimization (38%) and satisfaction with personal safety (23%) are largely the result of differences in place of residence (urban and rural). Our findings suggest that there is the need to improve neighborhood social capital, reduce neighborhood disorder and improve the socioeconomic status of community-dwelling seniors in order to minimize their susceptibility to victimization as well as to improve their sense of safety from crime.

Encounters in the workplace: everyday diversity in a multinational professional firm

ABSTRACT This paper provides a theoretically driven discussion about the need to take the workplace, rather than social group identities, as the point of entry into studying encounters at work. Broadening the lens beyond these identities allows an appreciation of the multidimensional elements that constitute the workplace – this being the institutional, material, social and discursive, and how they shape everyday encounters with difference at work. This understanding is vital if we are to effectively enhance the potential of workplaces to facilitate ‘meaningful’ contact in cities. Drawing on two case studies of professional workplaces in Melbourne and Singapore, I illustrate how the multidimensional workplace gives rise to the performance of place-based identities that intersect with ethnicity, nationality and gender, but the salient intersections and their impacts on encounters are influenced by the context in which the workplace is situated. I thus conclude that the workplace as well as the broader place matters in how encounters play out at work. The paper therefore contributes to the existing literature on encounters at work specifically, and urban encounters more generally, by articulating the multidimensionality of the workplace and its importance in shaping everyday contact.

Mapping hot spots of breast cancer mortality in the United States: place matters for Blacks and Hispanics.

The goals of this study were to identify geographic and racial/ethnic variation in breast cancer mortality, and evaluate whether observed geographic differences are explained by county-level characteristics. We analyzed data on breast cancer deaths among women in 3,108 contiguous United States (US) counties from years 2000 through 2015. We applied novel geospatial methods and identified hot spot counties based on breast cancer mortality rates. We assessed differences in county-level characteristics between hot spot and other counties using Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Spearman correlation, and stratified all analysis by race/ethnicity. Among all women, 80 of 3,108 (2.57%) contiguous US counties were deemed hot spots for breast cancer mortality with the majority located in the southern region of the US (72.50%, p value < 0.001). In race/ethnicity-specific analyses, 119 (3.83%) hot spot counties were identified for NH-Black women, with the majority being located in southern states (98.32%, p value < 0.001). Among Hispanic women, there were 83 (2.67%) hot spot counties and the majority was located in the southwest region of the US (southern = 61.45%, western = 33.73%, p value < 0.001). We did not observe definitive geographic patterns in breast cancer mortality for NH-White women. Hot spot counties were more likely to have residents with lower education, lower household income, higher unemployment rates, higher uninsured population, and higher proportion indicating cost as a barrier to medical care. We observed geographic and racial/ethnic disparities in breast cancer mortality: NH-Black and Hispanic breast cancer deaths were more concentrated in southern, lower SES counties.