Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race,” and the Politics of Fieldwork

My experiences combining research and activism within the Japanese-Canadian community reflect a growing concern among feminist and anti-racist scholars with the politics of work among people marginalized by racism and sexism. This concern arises within a context where “other voices” are being heard, but the legitimacy of one individual or group to represent another is being challenged. Such challenges require that essentialism and naturalism be addressed politically and theoretically, a difficult irony given the need to utilize essentialist categories to address the oppressive conditions under which they emerged. To do so, a critical theory of political construction is required.     

Representing “Neighborhood”: Growth Coalitions,Newspaper Reporting,and Gentrification in St. Louis

Newspaper reporters are important actors in promoting gentrification. This study of St. Louis examines their use of a prominent representation of neighborhood in this process: dying neighborhoods in need of middle‐class technical salvationists. We examine its use to help drive two processes to promoting gentrification: legitimating restructuring at actual or anticipated sites and isolating “revitalization‐contaminating” communities. We discover this neighborhood representation is applied primarily to legitimate restructuring at specific sites. Revitalization‐threatening neighborhoods, represented differently, indicates this representation is task specific in this city's “gentrification project.”     

GIS,Cartography, and the “Third Culture”: Geographic Imaginations in the Computer Age*

Geographic information systems (GIS) and cartography have traditionally been regarded as fields for the study of techniques. Yet the past ten years have witnessed geographers' increasing intellectual engagement with GIS and cartography. This essay recaps the recent intellectual discourses on GIS and cartography and speculates on possible development in the near future. Geocomputation, spatially integrated social sciences, social informatics, information ecology, and humanistic GIScience are identified as five areas of intensive new research, and it is argued that creative imaginations under the milieu of the “third culture” are urgently needed to address the challenging issues in this new technological era. Whether geography will become an intellectually more vibrant discipline hinges on the extent to which we can rekindle geographic imaginations in this computer age via GIScience to address issues of great societal concern.     

“WOMEN IN GEOGRAPHY” REVISITED: PRESENT STATUS,NEW OPTIONS

The representation of women on geography faculties did not increase appreciably between 1971 and 1977, but women in other academic disciplines have fared somewhat better. The latter have improved their status primarily as a result of actions taken by professional associations representing their fields. When a professional association ignores its female constituency or refuses to commit itself to improving their circumstances, federal agencies now offer alternative channels for obtaining redress.     

“And a Charming Wife”: Gender,Marriage, and Manhood in the Job Search Process

The academic job search process, and the applications and reference letters that are constitutive elements of that process, are central to the creation and re‐creation of a discipline. Disciplines and departments renew and re‐create themselves — or do not, and merely replicate themselves — through hirings. A job search process can serve to hinder changes in the membership, culture, “look,” and the norms of the discipline, or it can facilitate dramatic and often rapid transformations. Job search materials thus provide an insight into the prevailing norms and conventions of a discipline. A review of a recent set of such materials reveals subtle gendered and racialized differences in the job search process. Such differences are apparent in the composition of referee committees, in the evocation of marital status both by applicants and by referees, and in the surprising persistence of themes of robust manhood. The referee pool, the applicant pool, and the search committee pool in an academic discipline are interlocked constituencies, and the job search process plays a “gatekeeping” role. The extent to which gender or racial differences are inserted into the job process thus has a bearing on the long term social construction of the discipline.     

“Software,Jobs Go Begging,Threatening Technology Boom”: Computer Services Employment in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1982 and 1993

The campaign to promote the networking of America underscores the importance of information infrastructures that can support regional competitiveness. One crucial element of a regional information infrastructure is a computer services (CS) industry that supports computer systems, provides backward and forward linkages among all sectors of the economy, serves as engines for economic growth, enhances production efficiency, and encourages innovation. But research on metropolitan CS has been limited, and where CS are analyzed directly, spatial units of analysis vary and CS are rarely disaggregated. This paper situates CS employment within spatial analyses of producer services, outlines infrastructural characteristics, analyzes CS distribution across metropolitan areas in 1982 and 1993, and considers the implications of the findings. The data suggest that while large metropolitan areas are most likely to have a diverse base of specializations in multiple CS types, many smaller metropolitan areas possess CS specializations. We conclude that ranking in the urban CS hierarchy is more likely to be a function of local economic structure than metropolitan population. The uneven dispersion of CS capacity across metropolitan areas potentially has negative ramifications for implementation of national policy and development of underserved regional economies.     

“TO CIVILITY AND TO MAN'S USE”: HISTORY,CULTURE, AND NATURE*

ABSTRACT. An attempt is made to give a 10,000-year perspective on the relations of history, culture, and the nonhuman world called nature. A Holocene narrative of processes separates human societies and their cultures: things that individuate and pull apart to the point of fragmentation versus those that are binding. These tendencies toward convergence may coalesce, as with the natural sciences or global electronic technology. Equally, they may involve centrifugal processes, as in the creative arts or in forms of representation accessible only to certain groups or cultures. The environment resonates in a series of segmented channels, considerably complicated by a binary Western culture, often with 1 as acceptable and o as the Other. Is a purposeful path laid down by someone else and followed to its predetermined end in Utopia, or do we cherish something more open and contingent?     

“TROPICALISM” IN FRENCH GEOGRAPHY: REALITY,ILLUSION OR IDEAL?

In important respects, the disciplinary field of “tropical geography” is a uniquely French field of study, and Pierre Gourou is conventionally seen as its founder and doyen. Yet Gourou did not see himself as the creator of a new paradigm or research school, and geographers were generally more influenced by his writings than by his teaching or any personal connection. With particular reference to French geographical research in and on tropical Africa during the second half of the twentieth century, it is suggested that the development of tropical geography as a subfield ‐ and tropicalism as a research orientation ‐ can be put down to a variety of factors and circumstances. Geographical research on Africa was pivotal, as was the rise to prominence in French research institutes of some of Gourou's disciples. But African academics also played a part, as did criticism of tropical geography for its marginalisation of issues of development and geopolitics. The paper examines this postwar intellectual history and attempts to draw from it a positive and forward looking legacy ‐ a reinvigorated and interdisciplinary “tropicalism”, the main axis of which would be the analysis of the specific characteristics of tropical ecology, and its use and transformation by the societies that live from it. Such a project may help us to confront the contemporary world ecological crisis, and forge critical research projects on globalisation (altermondialisme) that can discern and deal with the complex local‐global, and rural‐urban, articulations of this phenomenon.     

Property advertising and the representational production of suburbia: “Functional suburbs” and “lifestyle suburbs” in Auckland

This paper joins literature on suburban advertising with Lefebvre's concept of representational space to analyse property advertisements as part of the representational production of suburban space. Based on comparative analysis of advertising material for suburban residential developments on Auckland's “North Shore” in two time‐periods—1950s and 2010s—the paper examines changes and continuities in thematic content. While property advertisements in the mid‐1900s emphasised the “functional suburb,” paying attention to attributes such as quality of utilities and proximity to the central city, more recently advertisements have more strongly emphasised the “lifestyle suburb,” with a focus on middle‐class community and natural amenity.