Personal Geographies Research Articles

‘Making space’ in Cairo: Expatriate movements and spatial practices

This paper examines what it means to be an ‘expatriate’ in Cairo through the lens of movement and space-making. Inquiring into a set of migrant (im)mobilities, spatial practices, relations, and imaginations, it argues that as a ‘spatialised’ identity category ‘expatriate’ narrates and enacts migratory privileges linked to wider hierarchies of social difference. It contributes to a growing literature examining the social and political dimensions of ‘expatriate’ migration and further engages scholarship thinking space and movement in relational and socio-historical terms. Rather than denoting an easily distinguishable group of migrants, ‘expatriate’ emerged as a contingent and ambiguous category of practice. As such, ‘expatriate’ stands in a productive relationship with privileged movement and socio-spatial processes. Like other migrants, respondents skillfully navigated the global differences in wealth, power and status they were presented with. Yet, unlike many other migrants, they did so from a privileged position within the global power-geometries of international migration. Migrants’ personal geographies were further shaped by how bodies were racialised and gendered in entangled, intersecting and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. This diversity and complexity of ‘expatriate’ geographies highlights the necessity of intersectional and situated analyses of privilege.

Evaluations of diaries and GPS-enabled trackers to plot young peoples’ geographies – asking the participants what they think

ABSTRACTInsights into the personal geographies of young people can be gained in many ways, but there is not always a focus on the effectiveness of the methodologies used, through a comparison of the different approaches, nor is there often an examination of how the participants in the study perceive the effectiveness of the research methods. Two methodologies are explored in this study: self-completion mobility diaries and the wearing of global positioning system-enabled tracking devices. The study focuses on the perceptions of the teenage school student respondents in the study (n = 15) with relation to the user friendliness, the perceived accuracy, and the ease with which travel patterns can be recreated from the data. The participants were able to evaluate the two methodologies and to make judgements on the criteria provided. We argue that participants can contribute significantly to post-research methodological reflection.

Personal Geographies and Liminal Identities in Three Early Modern Women's Life Writings about War

Throughout literary history, war has been a recurrent theme in life writing. This article discusses life writing as an important aspect of comparative literature or world literature, and focuses on three early modern women’s geographical experiences and liminal identities as found in their life writings: Marguerite of Valois (1553-1615), a Catholic and Queen consort of Navarre who served as a supporter of Protestants during the French wars of religion, Queen Henrietta Maria of England (1609-69), and Lady Brilliana Harley (1598-1643), the wife of a Parliamentarian representative of England. These three noblewomen used their writings as means of constructing their identities in the public sphere.

An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World by Ernesto Bassi

Reviewed by: An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World by Ernesto Bassi Karl Offen An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World. Ernesto Bassi. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. xiii + 360 pp. Maps, figs., tables, notes, bibl., index, and appendices. $94.95 cloth (978-0-8223-6220-3), $26.95 paper (978-0-8223-6240-1). In An Aqueous Territory, Ernesto Bassi explores the everyday and lived construction of a space he calls the transimperial Greater Caribbean during the Age of Revolution. By steeping his study in geographic theory, Bassi informs his fellow historians what geographers have long known: that spaces are not pre-determined but continually made through social interaction and material processes, and that geopolitical imaginations reflect mental maps that people create to understand their place in the world and envision their future. I especially appreciated how Bassi demonstrates the necessity of viewing the world from the point of view of historical subjects, a position that exposes the problems inherent in what he calls “methodological nationalism,” the unquestioned use of today’s national borders as spatial units of historical analysis. For Bassi, the uncritical use of geographic terms such as Caribbean can “result in the production of historical narratives that unconsciously silence key aspects of the lived experiences of the subjects we study and, unconsciously or not, tend to transform history into a teleological narrative that forecloses [End Page 167] the possibility of thinking [about] geographical spaces (and history) otherwise” (p. 9). The book’s many spatial insights will not be surprising to geographers, and so the work’s overall strength may lie with its introduction of a rich body of geographic thought – from Soja and Massey to Agnew and Ó Tuathail – to a broader audience of historians of Latin America. Following an introduction, the book is divided into two parts and six chapters. The bulk contains a series of stand-alone chapters that illustrate how the transimperial Greater Caribbean was made and imagined by sailors, ship captains, planters, merchants, indigenous leaders, revolutionaries, and politician-geographers of a newly independent New Granada – without exception all of them men. In Part I, Spatial Configurations, Bassi covers routes, cargos, and frequency of travel for vessels arriving at and departing from New Granada in the last quarter of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. Besides Cartagena, Bassi is careful to include what he calls “minor” ports such as Santa Marta, Riohacha and Portobelo, as well as “hidden” ports such as Chagres, Sabanilla, and San Andrés. Ports trading with New Granada include Curaçao, St. Thomas, Les Cayes, Havana and, above all, Kingston. In this way, Bassi shows that the transimperial Greater Caribbean was simultaneously Dutch, Danish, French, Spanish, British, and Anglo-American. A separate chapter in Part I covers the sailors on these voyages whom Bassi calls the “border crossers and region makers.” The focus here is on the mobility of six Spanish captains. He shows how the circulation of people and information, for example spreading news of the Haitian uprising, reached New Granada and other Atlantic ports. The combination of personal geographies, including the routes and networks these sailors traversed, constructed a space of social interaction, a process Bassi calls “everyday acts of region formation” (p. 81). It is important, however, to understand that neither the sailors, nor anyone else, saw themselves doing this: it was the everydayness and aggregation of their acts that made possible the emergence and consolidation of a geographic space that we can describe in hindsight as the transimperial Greater Caribbean. In Part II, Bassi shows how less mobile subjects used the transimperial space as a figurative whiteboard on which they imagined potential futures. Bassi explores these individual and collective mental maps and geopolitical imaginations in the final four chapters, each covering a different theme: maritime Indians (Cuna [sic] and Wayuu); Jamaican planters and Loyalist adventurers; Simón Bolívar’s Caribbean travels; and politician-geographers of New Granada who imagined Colombia an Andean-Atlantic nation. Maritime Indians is a term Bassi takes from a nineteenth-century French traveler, but he uses it to imply indigenous transimperial mobility, multilingualism (including Spanish and...

Personal Geographies: Poetic Lineage of American Poets Elizabeth Coatsworth and Kate Barnes

This paper examines the relationship between two 20th-century American poets, Elizabeth Coatsworth and her daughter, Kate Barnes. Both women mined their physical and personal geographies to create their work; both labored in the shadows of domineering literary husbands. Elizabeth’s early poetry is economical in language, following literary conventions shaped by Eastern poets and Imagists of her era. Kate’s work echoes her mother’s painterly eye, yet is informed by the feminist poetry of her generation. Their dynamic relationship as mother and daughter, both struggling with service to the prevailing Western patriarchy, duties of domestication and docility, also inform their writing. This paper draws from Coatsworth’s poems, essays, and memoir, and Barnes’ poems, interviews, and epistolary archives, which shed light on her relationship with her renowned mother.

Unsettled citizenship: National projects and personal geographies in Vietnam

Unsettled citizenship: National projects and personal geographies in Vietnam

Smugglers (review)

small canvases, her ambitions are large; she uses wide-angle lenses, and her feet cover vast tracts of landscape, roving from sharply delineated details of objects at hand to remembrances from her childhood , stamped in her personal geographies in Sudan, England, India, and the US. In addition, she draws from Hindu, Christian, and other mythologies to offer literary and historical precedents as textual testimonies. Her favored spots are sites of carnage, violence, and death. These images are slung at readers at a velocity that makes them duck for cover. They may flinch, but she will not spare them from facing what she has witnessed. Atmospheric Embroidery is divided into five sections, leading off with the header “Fragments in Praise of the Book,” naming what is to follow: “Book of alphabets burnt so that truth can be told.” The lyrical impulse is strong here, and I feel it should be allowed more play in her poetry. It would also counterbalance the angst-ridden world she has so assiduously cultivated in book after book. “Aesthetic Knowledge” offers another lovely example of sensory touches: “landscape becomes us . . . an interior space bristling with light”; “tears from the domes, like droplets of milk”; “gold leaf pasted on paper / Utterly fragile.” The reference in the title poem is to Alighiero Boetti’s artwork The Thousand Longest Rivers, but the connections among “Wads of ice-cream glisten on Route 6,” “fissures in magma,” and “Season of snipers in the heartland” remain unclear. Obscurities cloud “Children of the House” even as “Ars Poetica” and “Tarawood” create magic and beauty. A fine example of how an authentic political poem ought to be written is “Moksha II,” about the Delhi woman raped by six men in a moving bus. Alexander reworks old material in new contexts. The Indian Ocean blues and Darfur poems revisit her crossings of the Indian Ocean since the age of five. The poems in the Darfur section were inspired by drawings by children who lived in the refugee camps. Scattered pieces of life are crystallized in univocity. Alexander has also remained faithful to her signature technique and style: the language and syntax in the symbolic space of the poems mirrors the fractured, torn, wounded, and disjointed reality of the world and our shared life, and the poems serve as devices to force the reader to confront this world. Saleem Peeradina Siena Heights University Aleš Debeljak. Smugglers. Brian Henry, tr. Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2015. 108 pages. Slovenian poet Aleš Debeljak’s new bilingual volume, Smugglers, contains five cycles and four nonrhymed quatrains. Each of the individual poems pulses with emotional intensity inspired by various streets and squares of the poet’s hometown of Ljubljana —its bars, cinemas, or cemeteries—with dedications to close friends and writers from the former Yugoslavia. In the map of Smugglers, intertextual references function as explicit quotes. The unique tone of the collection approaches prose diction, with lightning-like associative leaps characteristic of Debeljak’s use of poetic images. These quotes and dedications appear as markers with which the reader gets back to an old private or political story of the urban chronicle of Ljubljana or any other city. The lyrical voice intuitively summons it as a witness of the moments that link the poet’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to the present era: “I was there; if you want, / call it a place of private memory, if you want, the end of the road.” Nostalgia for a former life thus turns into nostalgia for all such persons, places, and situations that shaped the poet’s personal identity but also the anguish and Ali al-Muqri Hurma T. M. Aplin, tr. Darf Hurma, meaning sanctity in Arabic, serves as the female protagonist of this novel, indicating immediately the paradoxical position of women in Yemen, where they are seen as sacred objects and as inferior beings. While discussing this controversial topic, Ali al-Muqri creates a real and psychologically complex character who defies the limitations of her name. Sinéad Morrissey Parallax Farrar, Straus & Giroux The unique metaphors around which Sinéad Morrissey constructs many of her poems also contain a classic character that remind one of metaphysical poets such as Donne...

Space invaders - A netnographic study of how artefacts in nursing home environments exercise disciplining structures.

This study aims to present culturally situated artefacts as depicted in nursing home environments and to analyse the underlying understandings of disciplining structures that are manifested in these kinds of places. Our personal geographies are often taken for granted, but when moving to a nursing home, geographies are glaringly rearranged. The study design is archival and cross-sectional observational, and the data are comprised of 38 photographs and 13 videos showing environments from nursing homes. The analysis was inspired by the methodological steps in Roper's and Shapira's description of conducting ethnography. The results are presented in four categories: (i) public areas, (ii) orderliness, (iii) staff's places and (iv) devices. The rearrangement of geography implies a degrading of agency and loss of authority over one's place. The places should be understood in their relation to the agents and their temporarily claims upon them. The material and immaterial artefacts, that is the items, people and behaviours, transform the nursing staff into 'space invaders'. Future inquiries may take into consideration the ways that space invasion in participative space intersect and construct the identities of the agents it invades upon.

Spaces of dissociation: the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the personal geographies of adult survivors

The experiences of survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) have received almost no attention in geography. However, activists and therapists working with survivors have long recognised that CSA has spatial impacts and that finding some sense of control over one's environment is an important step in recovering from this trauma. By bringing the stories of three adult women who are survivors of CSA into conversation with debates in human geography about the habitation of space and place, this psycho‐social paper goes some small way towards addressing this oversight. Set in the context of the high prevalence of CSA in all communities, we argue that efforts to understand everyday, domestic and marginalised geographies need to consider the potential impact of abuse. By understanding psycho‐social pathways by which abuse impacts on individuals we highlight how violence and trauma can impact on personal geographies in a myriad of ways.

Alcohol, Young People and Urban Life

AbstractMoving beyond the current academic pre‐occupation with the night‐time economy and drinking venues, this paper highlights the specificities of outdoor drinking cultures in streets and parks. Instead of viewing outdoor drinking as morally transgressive – as promoted in the popular press – it is contended that outdoor drinkscapes are distinctly appealing over commercial premises for some young urbanites. Streets and parks enable young people to feel socially and physically unrestricted whilst consuming alcohol; provide a space where young people can drink with friends who are not old enough to consume alcohol in commercial premises; and allow drinkers a chance to consume relatively cheap alcohol. Accounts of young people in urban public spaces are typically one of intergenerational conflict, whereby adults seek to exclude or marginalise young people or, at least, try to control their presence and activities. However, in attempting to understand young people's alcohol consumption experiences in outdoor urban spaces, a series of complex personal geographies emerge in which not only adult–young people relations but also young people–young people relations play an important role. Whilst some progress has been made in exposing the diversity of young people's drinkscapes, it is argued that much of the existing literature renders young people's drinking spaces static, bounded terrains. This paper turns to suggest that the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ can be drawn upon to develop and enrich the geographies of young urbanites' outdoor alcohol consumption experiences. It is argued that the extant literature on alcohol‐related mobilities is predominantly concerned with a ‘pointillist’ understanding of mobility. It is contended that Bissell's () alternative conceptualisation of mobility as a ‘loop’ is a more apt means of capturing the more pointless every night mobilities of many young people; particularly the mobilities of those who are not old enough/choose not to consume alcohol in commercial premises, and choose instead to spend their evenings traversing outdoor drinkscapes. It is also asserted that the embodied, emotional and affective elements of young people's alcohol‐related im/mobilities need to be much more prominent if understandings of the lived experiences of young urbanites' drinking geographies are to be unearthed.

Making Gender Ma(R)King Place: Youthful British Pakistani Muslim Women's Narratives of Urban Space

This paper draws on a case study of youthful British Pakistani Muslim women located in one of the largest Pakistani Muslim communities in the UK, in the city of Birmingham, to examine their narratives of urban space. These narratives illuminate the performance of gendered, Muslim, public spatialities, a term I use to refer to the spatial practices and personal geographies of the body and territory. I explore the ways in which the everyday life world that cuts across South Asian Muslim society and a public realm encoded with secular liberal democratic values configures the spatial ranges, practices, and personal geographies of youthful Pakistani Muslim women. I identify the ideological, material, and affective modalities through which these are given form at the intersection of place, ‘race’, gender, and religion. Finally, I illustrate the ways in which the dynamic multiethnic, multicultural milieu of Birmingham's ‘Little Pakistan’ localities offer youthful Pakistani Muslim women alternative repertoires for remaking the self, promoting cultural change and a greater sense of inclusiveness and belonging In doing so I foreground the fluidity and dynamic character of British South Asian Muslim cultures, contesting their representations as fixed and bounded

Mharmon, katharine, ed. (2004). You are here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. New york: princeton architectural press

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What is Global Engineering Education For? The Making of International Educators, Part I & II

Global engineering offers the seductive image of engineers figuring out how to optimize work through collaboration and mobility. Its biggest challenge to engineers, however, is more fundamental and difficult: to better understand what they know and value qua engineers and why. This volume reports an experimental effort to help sixteen engineering educators produce "personal geographies" describing what led them to make risky career commitments to international and global engineering education. The contents of their diverse trajectories stand out in extending far beyond the narrower image of producing globally-competent engineers. Their personal geographies repeatedly highlight experiences of incongruence beyond home countries that provoked them to see themselves and understand their knowledge differently. The experiences were sufficiently profound to motivate them to design educational experiences that could challenge engineering students in similar ways.

'Tis Like They Never Left: Locating “Home” in the Music of Sliabh Aughty's Diaspora

AbstractThis article, which builds on research in the fields of Irish traditional music, place, and diaspora, focuses on a community of diasporic musicians from Sliabh Aughty, an upland region of approximately 250 square miles that encompasses the musical storehouses of east Clare and southeast Galway in the West of Ireland. It examines the importance of home for these musicians, who have been resident in the United States for many decades. Their personal music geographies are explored to ascertain how traditional Irish music plays a critical role in transcending their sense of dislocation and reconnecting them with “home.”

Autistic Autobiographies and More-Than-Human Emotional Geographies

This paper draws on an analysis of forty-five published autobiographical accounts of individuals with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to highlight the important role of their, often intense, emotional relations to ‘natural’ things and places. In doing so, it offers a partial corrective to clinical and popular views of people with autism as almost entirely asocial and unconcerned with the beings and doings of others. A textual hermeneutic of the phenomenal insights reported by authors reveals instead that their personal geographies are characterized by rich, rewarding, and meaningful relationships with the wider more-than-human world, and that aspects of their lives can be undeniably, agreeably, ‘social’ in this broader sense. Such an analysis may offer important, albeit methodologically limited, insights into experiences of ASD while also challenging dominant understandings of ‘sociality’—in the sense of ‘being-with-others’—and of emotional involvement, that focus entirely on interactions between human beings. Indeed, to some extent, these emotionally charged experiences of the ‘natural’ world resonate with the feelings of many more neurotypical individuals.

Buenos aires and the aesthetics of defamiliarization

When I arrived in Buenos Aires for the first time in 2002, I was profoundly disoriented by the various levels of representation that informed my experience of the city. I knew certain versions of t...

Children's personal geographies and the English primary school geography curriculum

There is limited recognition of the role that children's geographies play in the English primary school geography curriculum. Children's personal geographies of the classroom and playground are largely unnoticed by teachers and their impacts and potential are ignored. While this is less the case in relation to children's personal geographies of the local environment, the requirements of national curriculum geography for younger children are enacted largely through an adult interpretation of the world-at-hand and only in a limited way make use of children's experience, perspectives and interpretations to deepen a largely descriptive geography of place. It is argued that this discontinuity between real lives and the school curriculum can be challenged and overcome in both the formal and informal school geography curriculum. The danger, though, of turning children's geographies into an alternative content for geography is countered through the involvement of children in the decision-making processes about their geographical studies, even within the context of a national curriculum. This demands a greater trust, openness and flexibility in curriculum making with primary teachers.

Landscape Meanings and Personal Identities: Some Perspectives of East Anglian Children

Landscape meanings raise questions about the relationships between people and place. The extent to which a given view can be associated with long-term residence in a particular locality is a matter of considerable curiosity for environmental education. In 1996 as part of the Land Use UK project (Robertson & Walford, 2000) young surveyors of the British landscape displayed quite distinct landscape preferences that were partly national but also to some extent specific to their regional location. To further test these findings a subsequent study has been conducted which focuses on children in one UK region – East Anglia. Twenty-one schools participated in this follow-up study. From the sample of nearly 800 individual pupils some clear generalisations are possible. While there are notable response differences associated with age and school location, the overall trends suggest personal geographies strongly linked to traditional cultural values.

Witness Intimidation, Forced Migration and Resettlement: A British Case Study

Situated within the context of geographical research on forced migration, this paper focuses on the experiences of prosecution witnesses who have had to flee their homes because of life‐threatening intimidation. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with witnesses, it examines the nature of the threat they were under, their decision to leave home, their life in temporary accommodation and their experiences of permanent resettlement away from the danger area. The paper highlights the impact of intimidation and forced migration on witnesses' personal geographies and, in particular, their sense of ontological security and self‐identity.

‘Bearing the burden’: towards a restructured geography of caring

Summary This paper focuses on the ways in which demographic, social and environmental factors, combined with differential emphases on priorities and patterns of spending between local authority jurisdictions, are contributing to a changing spatial geography of caring. This is examined firstly by highlighting how macro factors contribute to a restructured landscape of care, and secondly by examining the personal geographies of carers located within the Scottish environment. Finally, the paper suggests that as care moves from institutional space to the homespace, it may be creating a blurring of the boundaries between what has traditionally been public/institutional space, and the homespace.1