Moral Geographies Research Articles

"I Am Isabel, You Know?": The Antipodean Framing of Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady

"I Am Isabel, You Know?": The Antipodean Framing of Jane Campion’s <i>Portrait of a Lady</i>

Producing ‘decent girls’: governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922–1937)

In this article we examine the mode of governmentality constructed in Ireland with regard to the regulation and disciplining of sexuality in the post-independence era up to the writing of the Constitution (1922–1937). Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault, we document how Ireland became an intense site of applied, national bio-politics with a panoply of government commissions and legislation, accompanied by new sites of reform (Magdalene Asylums and Mother and Baby Homes), which together were designed to mould and police the sexual practices of its citizens and create a sanitised moral landscape. Whilst a thoroughly gendered project, with nearly all legislation and sites of reform targeting women, we contend it was also a highly spatialised endeavour. The modes and practices of governmentality produced a dense spatialised grid of discipline, reform and self-regulation, seeking to produce ‘decent’ women inhabiting virtuous spaces by limiting access to work and public spaces, confining women to an unsullied (marital) home, and threatening new sites of reformation, emigration or ostracisation.

Ethical and critical dimensions in learning and teaching: the case of geodemographics

AbstractGeographers face a challenge in reconciling the more formal signalling of ethical and moral dimensions in our practice, with the growing emphases on business relevance and graduate employability. This is most strongly felt in the sub-field of geodemographics, a valuable modern skills vehicle with a clear pedigree in quantitative social geography dating back to the 1970s. This paper asks how the students of this sub-field might be enabled to construct their own ‘moral geographies’ after recounting the very different attitudes and conceptions of the GIS ‘cheerleaders’ and their academic critics. It suggests, finally, a simple starting point for discussing and classifying critical and ethical issues.

Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries and the American Frontier ‐ by Amy Derogatis

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 32, Issue 1 p. 124-125 Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries and the American Frontier - by Amy Derogatis Meredith Lake, Meredith Lake University of SydneySearch for more papers by this author Meredith Lake, Meredith Lake University of SydneySearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 February 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2008.00622_7.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue1March 2008Pages 124-125 RelatedInformation

Livable City/Unequal City: The Politics of Policy-Making in a « Creative » Boomtown

There is a tendency in contemporary North American urban policy-making to uncritically connect specific ideals of urban ‘livability’ with efforts to cater to the whims of the so-called ‘Creative Class.’ The paper engages with this tendency through an analysis of the politics of urban policy-making in Austin, Texas – a place regarded as an exemplar of ‘livability’ and ‘creativity.’ With reference to the Austin case, the paper identifies and describes two related spatial frames that underpin the ‘Creative Class’ thesis and its relationship to a certain conception of urban livability – an idealization of the vibrant urban neighbourhood and a moral geography of competing ‘livable’ and ‘creative’ cities. The paper then addresses the question of inequality and its relationship to policies aimed at nurturing, attracting, and retaining the ‘Creative Class.’ This is done through a discussion of Austin’s experience of rising economic inequality and declining housing affordability just as the city became ‘creative’ and ‘livable.’ The paper’s core argument is that policy-makers must acknowledge and address the inequality that seems to result from the implementation of narrow ‘livability’ and ‘creativity’ policies and that advocates of the ‘Creative Class’ thesis must address, with more than hand-wringing and platitudes, evidence that ‘creative cities’ are becoming increasingly less livable for most people.

Music from the Wrong Place: On the Italianicity of Quebec Disco

Music from the Wrong Place: On the Italianicity of Quebec Disco Will Straw One of my favorite compilation CDs of the last few years is Unclassics: Obscure Electronic Funk and Disco, 1975–1985, released in 2004 on the Environ label. The thirteen tracks on Unclassics were collected and remixed by house/techno artist Morgan Geist, who offers them as all-but-forgotten dance music gems from just outside an Anglo-American musical axis, from places like Spain and Italy. The style that ostensibly unites these tracks is “Eurodisco,” though, as we shall see, that label does not accurately subsume all of them. “Italo-disco” seems an even cruder reduction, but circulates among critics, fans, and collectors as a meaningful label for much of the music gathered here. While some of the cuts on Unclassics have long been the idiosyncratic favorites of DJs or dance music collectors, more is going on here than the resurrection of cultish or neglected treasures. Unclassics is one milestone within the significant rehabilitation of European and Italian disco [End Page 113] that has unfolded over the last decade. Mixed Up in the Hague, Vol. 1, a compilation first released privately in 1999, was a key event in this rehabilitation; other collections, like I-Robots: Italo Electro Disco Underground Classics and Confuzed Disco: A Retrospective of Italian Records, have followed. Zyx, the Germany-based label that dominated the field in the 1980s and early 1990s, is actively marketing dozens of compilations of its own Italo-disco from that period. The garish red and green covers of Zyx’s Italo anthologies, which filled the discount cassette bins of European airport stores fifteen years ago, have been redesigned so that they now look authoritative and curatorial. Radio and DJ sets devoted to this music now abound on the Internet. Think Italy. Without claiming mind-reading powers, it’s a comfortable prediction you’ve already got tacky piano sample records and frenzied all-night clubbing in mind, a nation that when it isn’t knocking out club records by the cartload likes nothing more than to party all night on a hillside by the sea. Italian music has been in and out of style more often than the flares revival. — “Flying Italia,” DJ Magazine, January 1992 There are enough piew-piew-piew zaps during these 55 minutes to wipe out a small nation of roller skaters. — Andy Kellman, review of Unclassics, All Music Guide For almost two decades, tracks like those collected on Unclassics held the status of morbid symptoms, reminders of the decay and dispersion of dance music in the years between disco and house music. Even as they reclaim these tracks as lost gems, the liner notes to Unclassics embrace that morbidity, relishing the ways in which so many of these pieces are seen to have gotten things wrong. My favorite track on Unclassics is a Spanish cut from 1979, “Margherita,” whose guiltless dishing out of pleasures betrays the compilation’s broader sensibility. Piercing little synth notes alternate with thick, rolling movements that could drive an army forward. Mariachi horns interweave with tinny keyboard glissandos in rounding out sections. Changes come precisely when we want them; each gimmicky sound or flourish dutifully returns just as we start to miss it. As “Margherita” moves in unstoppable fashion around its wheel of styles and sections, it is easy to think that this is music trying too desperately to be liked. Dominant understandings of the European contribution to disco read its influence selectively, focusing on the robotic, synthesized sounds of Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder. These versions of Eurodisco’s history link such figures as Can, Patrick Cowley, Afrika Bambaataa, and Juan Atkins in a heroic story that sends disco to Europe so that it may return, reinvented, to an American underground able to realize its radical potential. When Eurodisco is remembered for its sleek mechanical control, however, what gets forgotten is the lush extravagance that seemed to mark so much of it. As early as 1977, North American critics had recourse to a well-entrenched moral geography in characterizing disco music from continental Europe as “florid,” given to flamboyant passion and bombastic overlays of effects.1 Arguably, the peculiarity of so...

Turf wars: discourse, diversity, and the politics of place

Series Preface. List of Figures. Acknowledgments. Part I: The Ethnography. 1. Sketching the Landscape. 2. Mt. Pleasant History and Social Geography. 3. The Moral Geography of Mt. Pleasant. 4. The Politics of Filth. 5. La Loca vs. the Cultural Vampires. 6. Keeping it in the Family. 7. Home Ties, Winds of Change. Part II: The Making of Turf Wars. 8. Theorizing Discourse. 9. Geography and Social Locations. Addendum: Defining Terms. Bibliography. Index.

Centre and Edge: Pilgrimage and the Moral Geography of the US/Mexico Border

This essay posits two forms of pilgrimage – to the centre and to the edge – as forms of meaningful movement that contribute to the moral geography of peoples and nations. This model is applied to a variety of disparate, current movements through the desert borderlands of the United States and Mexico, all of which can be read as employing pilgrimage in the task of inscribing versions of America on a highly contested landscape.

Fear in Paradise: The Affective Registers of the English Lake District Landscape Re-visited

ABSTRACTDuring the summer of 2004, the artist Graham Lowe and I undertook a research project entitled Nurturing Ecologies within the Lake District National Park (LDNP) at Windermere. This landscape, considered as an icon of “Englishness,” is revisited through the embodied and sensory experiences of post-migration residents of Lancashire and Cumbria in an attempt to unravel multiple relationships embedded in visitor engagements with this landscape and thus disrupt the moral geography of the landscape as embodying a singular English sensibility, normally exclusionary of British multi-ethnic, translocal and mobile landscape values and sensibilities. The research led to the production of a series of drawings and descriptions made in visual workshops by participants, and a set of forty paintings produced by the artist. These paintings are examined in this paper as representing the values, sensory meanings and embodied relationships that exist for migrant communities with this landscape. These groups include the Asian community from the Lancashire town of Burnley and a “mixed” art group living in Lancashire. The initial drawings and subsequent paintings produced operate as a testimony to the Lake District landscape as a site for engendering feelings of terror, fear as well as representing a paradisiacal landscape.

Citizenship and the problem of community

This essay explores the relationship between citizenship and community in contemporary western societies in an attempt to put the theories of philosophers, academics, and agents of the state into conversation with the theories of activists. I argue that community is a “problem” not because it is inherently “bad”, but rather, because it is a site where contests are waged over citizenship and the terms of membership in society. Community is, therefore, the object of struggle in which different moral geographies are imagined. The entry point into this discussion is a recognition that community is constituted by contradictions that operate simultaneously. As such, community is the terrain that is negotiated as particular constructions of citizenship are put forward. It is not, however, a settled terrain, as theories and experiences of citizenship and community are always in competition, being constituted as they are by different rationalities, moral values, and imaginations of what is possible.

Securing the 'Civilised' Enclaves: Gated Communities and the Moral Geographies of Exclusion in (Post-)socialist Shanghai

Moving beyond conventional accounts of gated communities typically devoted to issues on housing choices and urban segregation, this paper offers a nuanced perspective by demonstrating how the moral ordering of urban spaces is fundamental in shaping territoriality and exclusion in Shanghai's gated communities. Specifically, the paper argues how territoriality in Shanghai's gated communities is invariably bound up in a moral distinction between the 'urban(e)' and 'rural' that revolves around the moral discourses on civilised modernity. Such a moral order, as the paper contends, parallels the logic of hegemony such that class and social exclusion are refigured and depoliticised while the defence of luxury and privileges are simply recast as questions of differing civilised lifestyle and morality.

Mobilizing Piety: Gendered Morality and Indonesian–Saudi Transnational Migration

This paper focuses on the emotional discourses invoked in efforts to frame and control Indonesian women's labor migration to Saudi Arabia. Based on interviews with migrant recruiters, state officials, and migrants in West Java, as well as data collected by migrant rights activists, the paper examines the emotional vocabularies and imagined geographies of gendered piety that are deployed in attempts to mobilize, direct, and discipline women's transnational labor migration. It explores articulations of women's virtue as a key dimension of the moral geographies of Indonesian women's overseas migration. More broadly, it suggests that such attention to struggles over the regulation of emotion can serve as a lens onto the ways in which gender articulates with the religiously‐inflected transnational labor market linking Indonesia with Saudi Arabia.

“America is Safe While its Boys and Girls Believe in its Creeds!”: Captain America and American Identity Prior to World War 2

In this paper I engage with the literature on nationalism and popular culture to discuss the role of Captain America Comics in the production of American national identity and national interest prior to World War 2. The character of Captain America is introduced as an example of a rescaling icon, or a bridge between collective identity and the individual. Additionally, the impact of the context in which the comic was produced is discussed as a force in the construction of American identity before the 1941 entry of the United States into the war. The empirical portion of the paper is a content analysis of the first ten issues of Captain America Comics, all predating the attack on Pearl Harbor. The analysis focuses on the ways in which American behavior is disciplined through the narratives in the comic book, as well as the ways in which nationalities are scripted into a moral geography.

Moral Geography of Focus Groups with Participants Who Have Preexisting Relationships in the Workplace

Focus group interviews have become increasingly popular in the past three decades, but ethical issues related to conducting focus groups with participants who have preexisting power relationships in workplaces has received scant attention in the methodological qualitative literature. In this paper the authors offer three propositions to strengthen the moral geographical space between researchers and participants: (a) prior to data collection: highlight the risks and benefits of the method and stress that confidentiality cannot be assured outside the group; (b) during data collection: document group dynamics and encourage participants to share insights after the session; and (c) ongoing: researchers to research and write about the dynamics of the moral space between researcher-participant.

Antinomies of generosity: Moral geographies and post-tsunami aid in Southeast Asia

The Indian Ocean Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 generated a wave of private donations from Western countries – a paradigmatic case of generosity. However, more than a year after, a number of evaluation studies conclude that post-tsunami aid has achieved ambivalent results and that recipients of aid felt excluded from the reconstruction process, reduced to passive observers. This paper argues that there is a link between the abundance of generosity and the practices of aid: the practices of gift giving after the tsunami have developed a humiliating force for those who were at the recipient end of the gift chain, because the marketing of Western generosity by media and aid agencies reinforced those affected by the tsunami as “pure” victims, as “bare life” – passive recipients devoid of their status as fellow citizens on this planet. In a second step, the paper discusses the meta-ethics of these practices of generosity, thinking about the ambivalences inherent in bridging distance in encountering the “distant” other in our aid practices. Various forms of virtue ethics reflect this emphasis on the generous person, while neglecting the perspective of the person in need, and therefore implicitly reproduce those asymmetries of gift giving. In contrast to these conceptions, I want to argue that we need to ground our duty to help distant sufferers in their moral entitlement to be aided. This requires a meta-ethical approach that seeks a combination of a theory of justice with virtue ethics.

BOOK REVIEW:Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, by James Buzard

Reviewed by: Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels Catherine Gallagher (bio) Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, by James Buzard; pp. vi + 320. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, $24.95, £15.95. A book we have been waiting for—a serious, careful, and original study explaining how nineteenth-century British world hegemony shaped major Victorian novels—has finally appeared. James Buzard's Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels is not a survey of little-known fictional depictions of imperialism, nor is it yet another inquiry into the attenuation or complete absence of such depictions in canonical novels. Instead, it explores how well-known British novelists (Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and surprisingly, William Morris) adopted the perspective of outsiders in depicting their home cultures. The implied authors of Bleak House (1852–53) , Villette (1853) , and Middlemarch (1871–72) seem to have left home and returned; they evince a combination of intimacy with and estrangement from English culture, which figures itself in narrators resembling ethnographers and protagonists resembling native informants. Rather than being stuck in the evolutionary assumptions of Victorian ethnology, which allegedly turned spatial and cultural difference into a temporal continuum surveyed from its highest point of development, the novelists explored England through complex, doubled, and self-interrupting narrative modes. Indeed, Buzard demonstrates that nineteenth-century British novelists developed the ethnographic concept of culture as well as the procedures of the participant observer before anthropologists did and that both were used first at home rather than in some exotic locale. And yet English presence in foreign lands was the condition that both enabled and required the novelists' autoethnographic labors. The formal features that Buzard identifies as belonging to this stage of the novel were first developed in the national tales of the Celtic fringe and brought to early maturity in Scott's novels. In his analysis of Waverly (1814), Buzard concedes that Scott gave his metropolitan English audience the thrill of penetrating into self-contained and otherwise inaccessible milieus. But Buzard demonstrates that the tendency to consolidate Britain through "touristification" of its alien enclaves was also a strategy by which an ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and politically various Scotland could become a cultural whole, for only efforts to create a supra-Caledonia could save the country from "becoming nothing or no place distinctive in accommodating itself to English ways and expectations" (101). The consolidation of Scottishness into a particular culture (rather than a collection of disparate factions) increasingly became Scott's aim, and the impression of giving complete surveys of all Scottish types in, for example, Heart of Midlothian (1818), set a representational pattern through which the wholeness of a culture was associated with the boundedness of the book describing it. Moreover, the characters who best personified the wholeness of the [End Page 109] country in Scott's later novels were metropolitan persona with cosmopolitan experience, neither entirely limited to the local perspective nor completely deracinated from it. Thus another of the formal traits of what came to be (in Buzard's phrase) metropolitan autoethnography was a strong but elastic bond between an unplaced narrator outside the story world and a diegetic persona within—a form of narratorial doubling anticipating the pairing of the ethnographer and the native informant. The transference of these national narrative strategies to the south of the island, even to the cosmopolitan center of London itself, served a similar purpose for the English, who feared that their specific culture was disappearing into a general "imperial statehood" (107). Both the expansiveness and the coherence of Bleak House arose from the need to proliferate "a series of discontinuous and seemingly irreconcilable spaces within Britain," to set in motion a narrative that not only connects them but also isolates "the single moral geography in which all these connections obtain against an expansive backdrop of other possible connections" (107). The seeming completeness and locality of the novel's world protects the metropolis against the very forces of global amalgamation it has set in motion. Moreover, Bleak House neatly illustrates the doubling of narrative responsibility between the nameless, detached third-person, present-tense narrator and...

The production of tyrannical space

Bullying is an internationally pervasive problem that impacts significantly on the behaviour, health and wellbeing of children. Drawing on ideas developed in both the abundant psychology literature, and the landmark study by Percy-Smith and Matthews Tyrannical Spaces (2001), this paper examines the psychosocial dynamics of bullying as they interrelate with various environments. The key groups involved in bullying are considered particularly with respect to their spatial rituals, actions and interactions. In the absence of sustained geographical research in this field, some broad directions for future geographies of bullying are suggested as the basis for future inquiry. Some initial indications are provided as to how these might involve, and connect to, existing disciplinary interests in geographies of exclusion, moral and emotional geographies.

‘Out of Place’ in Auschwitz? Contested Development in Post-War and Post-Socialist Oświęcim

Over the past 20 years the Polish town of Oświęcim, the site of the most infamous death camp, has seen a series of well-publicised disputes over land use around the Auschwitz Museum. Each of these disputes has featured certain groups making certain claims for the ‘appropriate’ use of land. The public's perception outside Poland of these disputes has been guided by Jewish groups prioritising their claims above all others. There has been a failure to recognise how far Polish claims are rooted in other equally valid moral geographies, not least those shaped both by Polish Catholic and communist traditions.

Mapping Moral Geographies: W. Z. Ripley's Races of Europe and the United States

Racia and anthropometric cartography produced and reinforced biological, intellectual, and moral hierarchies and was situated within wider scientific racial discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The practice of mapping “race” based on the widespread collection of anthropometric measurements occupied both European and New World anthropologists and geographers. My discussion centers on the work of American economist and anthropogeographer, W. Z. Ripley, who in 1899 published a widely acclaimed text on The Races of Europe. This work is contextualized and informed both by Victorian obsessions with categorizing racial hierarchies and by specifically American racial discourses that included concerns over increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe and the threat immigration posed to the Anglo-Saxon ruling elite. Using the conceptual framework developed by J. B. Harley and other recent contributions to critical cartography, this article focuses on Ripley's use of cartographic images to support his tripartite racial scheme for Europe, and explores his projection of a “moral geography” onto European and, in turn, American landscapes and populations. Central to this analysis are the links between anthropogeography, environmentalism, heredity, and American immigration, all key elements in Ripley's racial science.

Moral Geographies of Restraint in Nursing Homes

Moral Geographies of Restraint in Nursing Homes