Labouring geography: Negotiating scales, strategies and future directions

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.     

Community geography for precarious researchers: examining the intricacies of mutually beneficial and co-produced knowledge

At the center of community geography is a commitment to mutually beneficial and co-produced knowledge. While the intricacies of managing these two commitments are often well-articulated for community partners, university faculty and their undergraduate students, the experiences of precariously positioned researchers (such as graduate students or those who work outside the university) remain under-examined. Therefore, through a reflection on the authors’ personal experiences facilitating community geography projects, this paper takes seriously the experiences of precariously positioned researchers. We highlight how the privileging of co-production creates moments of dissonance for precariously placed researcher’s experiences of mutually beneficial research. We argue that precarity, particularly when paired with privilege, results in heightened feelings of risk that may lead researchers to compromise their own ethics or values to ensure both the ongoing continuation of the partnership and the desired goals of the community partners. As we work to further establish community geography, we call for more nuanced considerations of how the entanglements fostered through co-production impact experiences of mutually beneficial research for differently positioned researchers, particularly for those situated within in the neoliberal university.

     

Social geography: its place and formation

The Soviet geographical literature of the last decade has adopted four principal, alternative premises about the place of social geography within the overall system of geography. These are that social geography: (1) does not exist as a separate branch of the subject; (2) belongs to a lower hierarchical order of geography, usually as a sub-division of population geography; (3) belongs to a medium level within the hierarchy of geography, broadly equivalent in status to economic geography; or (4) belongs to the highest hierarchical level of the subject, being synonymous with the geography of human society (sodetal geography). The author stresses the difference between the wider definition of social geography, which takes it to be the geography of society, studying the arrangement of sodetal objects in their geographical interrelations, and the narrow view, which defines ‘social’ as sociological. In this case, social geography is synonymous with sociological geography; it studies sociological objects in their geographical setting. The paper also discusses the process of the sociologization of geography.     

Political geography in the time of cyberspaces: New agendas?

This review paper aims to offer a contribution to debates over theory and subject for political geography. Following a brief review of histories of political geography, the main (though not exclusive) focus is on the way that political geography may confront ‘globalization’ and the multiplicity of flows that constitute ‘cyberspaces’. Notwithstanding the consequences of the resulting transformations, the paper argues that a number of traditional subjects of political geography should remain central to the field. In particular, it is argued that a degree of state-centric focus continues to be a valuable critical project. However, such a focus needs to be supplemented by a stress on the dialectical relationships between the state, territory, culture and economy. The approach taken to this in World Systems-Theory is critiqued and some alternatives are explored. In these explorations the paper also argues for an increased engagement and cross-fertilization between political, economic, social and cultural geographies, and with critical work in political science and international relations.     

Geography and the pragmatic tradition: The threefold engagement

Geography has had only limited interchange with the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. This paper claims that a closer engagement with pragmatism has much to offer to geography, not least in providing an arena within which very different types of geographical inquiry - qualitative and quantitative, human and physical - may find some common ground for useful conversation and debate. However, this will only be fully achieved if geography embarks on a threefold engagement with pragmatism: (1) studies that develop and deploy specific pragmatist ideas and concepts within particular geographical research; (2) studies that attempt to relate geographical research to the wider arena of the pragmatic tradition; (3) historical examination of early links between pragmatism, social science and geography. The history and contemporary revival of pragmatism is described, together with its impacts on social theory and social science. The existing literature on geographical engagement with pragmatism is then examined, and it is argued that there is a much broader relevance within both human and physical geography, not linked to particular styles of research. The question of the history of earlier influences of pragmatism on American geography is then raised, and some linkages charted. The philosopher Hilary Putnam has used the term ‘pragmatist enlightenment’ to describe what he sees as the promise of pragmatism, and the paper concludes by suggesting that this also promises an exciting and fruitful engagement for geography.     

Conflict studies and critical geopolitics — theoretical concepts and recent research in political geography

The political and economic upheavals during the past two decades have led to a new social and political organization of space on all levels of scale. To deal with the obvious changes, political geography had to rethink and to extend its traditional concepts. Transcending its long taken-for-granted radical approaches, the Anglo-American geography developed two conceptional paths, both of which are still relevant for political geography today:— a new awareness of regional differences in political action and culture— a new, constructionist awareness of the instrumentalization of geographical discourses for geopolitical purposes.With these theoretical concepts, political geography is examining a number of both traditional and new fields of research. Their heterogeneity is once again evidence of postmodern diversity and difference. They are characterized by both a new awareness of differentiation and a widening of the traditional viewpoint in three closely related respects transcending the traditional topics of political activity, the traditional political actors and the established levels of scale of politics. Based on the current literature it is possible to outline some major themes and perspectives of current political geography that are closely linked together, like knots in thematic networks:1. ecological politics and resource conflicts 2. territorial conflicts and boundaries 3. geopolitics and the politics of identity 4. globalization and new international relations 5. the symbolic representation of political power 6. regional conflicts and new social movements.     

Social theory and prospects in social geography

There is little doubt that a phenomenological approach in the Husserlian mould is valuable in curbing the excessive positivism and naivety that have characterised much of the social geography undertaken in Britain during the past twenty years. However, the operational value of phenomenology in social geography is more controversial. Ley's formulation of a phenomenologically based social geography focussing on the concept of place suffers from certain methodological and theoretical problems that stem, in part, from his adoption of Schutz's conceptualisation of the social world. A phenomenologically inspired but modified approach, involving the concepts of structuration and power and drawing heavily on the work of Giddens, is suggested as superior. This conceptualisation, which connects human action with structural explanation, permits a valuable reformulation of the geography of mental illness and may have similarly worthwhile applications in other areas of interest to social geographers.     

Crisis? What crisis? Displacing the spatial imaginary of the fiscal state

This paper argues that there is an immanent and evolving relationship between the prevailing form of taxation and the economic geographies of the state. Despite this, the geographic significance of taxation has been obscured by the language in which its historic transformation tends to be couched. Prevailing fiscal systems tend to be presented as essentially static – institutionally and spatially fixed and routinely inscribed within the fixed boundaries and territories of the ‘sovereign’ fiscal state. Any threat to, or change in the nature or geography of the fiscal state tends to be couched in terms of ‘crisis’ – of negative and discontinuous change. This paper contends that these related and essentially conservative discourses of fiscal geography mask the degree to which fiscal spaces are both multiple and continuously evolving. More importantly, it argues, this fluidity and multiplicity does not threaten the stability and viability of state form, but it is an essential process in its maintenance and reproduction. Running counter to the prevailing discourse of the ‘national economy’, the practice of fiscal geography is an under-analysed but key aspect of the historical evolution and transformation of the imagined geographies of economies.     

Firm finances, weather derivatives and geography

This paper considers some intellectual, practical and political dimensions of collaboration between human and physical geographers exploring how firms are using relatively new financial products - weather derivatives - to displace any costs of weather-related uncertainty and risk. The paper defines weather derivatives and indicates how they differ from weather insurance products before considering the geo-political, cultural and economic context for their creation. The paper concludes by reflecting on the challenges of research collaboration across the human-physical geography divide and suggests that while such initiatives may be undermined by a range of institutional and intellectual factors, conversations between physical and human geographers remain and are likely to become increasingly pertinent. The creation of a market in weather derivatives raises a host of urgent political and regulatory questions and the confluence of natural and social knowledges, co-existing within and through the geography academy, provides a constructive and creative basis from which to engage with this new market and wider discourses of uneven economic development and climate change.     

The geography of mineral supply: The mainsprings of future uncertainties

This paper suggests that the major uncertainties overhanging the future geography of mineral supply in the non-Communist world derive from intellectual rather than resource inadequacies. In particular, the paucity of medium-term, macro-economic forecasts of growth in the economies of the OECD seriously undermine the value of mineral-demand forecasts. At the same time, the altered investment climate for mineral exploration and development will have a substantial impact upon mineral supplies, but its magnitude and geography remain a matter for dispute. And, third, the future pattern of mineral trade, shaped by the shifting geography of mineral-processing activities and metal manufacture, continues to elude convincing analysis.     

Political ecology, territoriality and scale

This essay serves as an introduction to this theme issue of GeoJournal and provides a framework for the contributed papers. Territoriality and scale, the essay argues, offer key analytics in approaching the spatiality of the ecological existence of human and non-human beings in their common `house' (oikos), thus of culture-nature relations generally. Such a focus, it bears emphasis, need not reproduce a naturalization of the modern culture-nature binary, but could, as is argued, remind `we moderns' that there is not only one nature (as little as there is only one culture), but a plurality of natures, which can serve the most varied of purposes. However, these spatialities do usually not and can very often not correspond to the spatialities of human activities, particularly to the territorialities and their orders/structures of scale in politico-administrative activities. The scalar literature within political geography, however, has for the most part seen its role as addressing human social relations in its analysis of contestations over power, space, and territory. A political ecology of scale, by contrast, will of necessity need to broaden the terrain of that discussion to include a variety of actors, human and non-human, involved in this broader network. Environmental conservation offers an important illustration of this problematic. A territorial, scalar, and non-modern understanding of ecological regimes is neccesary, argues this essay and the bundle of case studies that follow, because there is no `conservation' outside of a particular politics and geography of ecology.     

GIS and quantitative geography

The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of the GIS revolution within the field of geography in the 1980s and 1990s, taking into consideration the influence of external and internal factors on disciplinary change. Geography is rapidly changing by the impact of external factors on geographical research and also as a consequence of economic recession and cutbacks in higher education. Most geography departments in universities have tried to approach this impact by promoting or shifting to human geography as an applied science, and by offering relevant skills through GIS as an approach to contemporary problems. It is concluded that quantitative geography is essential for the further expansion of GIS within geography and also for the survival of geography. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Teaching GIS in the Gulf Co-operation Council Universities – With a case study of the geography department, University of the United Arab Emirates

Within universities there has developed a clear theoretical convergence between Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geography (Antenuccl, 1991). Studies have revealed that one of the qualified departments to teach GIS within universities is the geography department. This study focuses on: the importance of establishing GIS as a major curriculum element within universities. In geography departments, economic geography students require a strong statistical/mathematical background to allow them to work with major databases. They should know how to design a specific database for economic activities, such as agriculture and manufacturing, and tertiary industry and how to relate this database to a map, so that changes can be monitored more accurately. In any aspect of geography spatial location is a key factor and GIS allows spatial patterns to be interpreted with great facility. Therefore it is important that students have a good knowledge not only of computers and related software on economic geography, but also on GIS systems (Burrough, 1993). The work of geography students from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) geography departments is examined to evaluate the importance of training in GIS technology. This paper evaluates the effects of implementing GIS as a tool in teaching economic geography. At present there are 15 geography departments in the GCC which offer economic geography. Of those 15 departments, only 3 provide GIS courses within their curriculum, and 4 have basic equipment, although 6 additional departments are to introduce GIS in the near future. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

German research in transport geography: Life in the space between objective analysis and political advice1

Transportation has been a bone of public contention for decades, the discussion ranging from traffic-calming measures in individual streets to the continual growth of global transport movements. In the last 20 years transport topics have also received increased attention within the discipline of geography, be it academic, professional or in schools, but the topics addressed by today's transport geography have almost nothing in common with the roots of the field. This means that transport geography is a handed-down, hyphenated sub-branch of geography in name only. In fact, the name refers to a field of geography that is experiencing not only all the birthing pains and uncertainties of a discipline in the process of defining a new direction for itself, but also the sense of excitement and thrill of the new. This paper sets out to show both the role transport geography plays as part of human geography with its concepts and paradigms, and also the role it plays within the political debate on transport. An appeal is made to geographers to become more involved in this branch of our science.     

Time-stilled space-slowed: how boredom matters

This paper aims to fold the increased attention to issues of materiality in social and cultural geography into the more recent attunement to questions of affect. The vehicle for this aim is a discussion of the complex ways in which boredom, and bodies bored, compose time–space. Somewhat surprisingly, and in stark contrast to its experiential ubiquity, boredom has rarely been discussed within the social sciences. The paper therefore performs a geography of how boredom matters by way of a series of examples of the taking place of boredom drawn from research on music and everyday life. Rather than discuss boredom through the critical concepts that underpin the thesis of disenchantment, such as alienation or anomie, I argue that boredom takes place as a suspension of a body's capacities to affect and be affected forged through an incapacity in habit. Through this discussion I argue that the ‘new materialisms' that increasingly populate social and cultural geography struggle to discern the affectivity of profane social-life and, importantly, cannot conceive of the risk of depletion that boredom, via its connection to meaninglessness and indifference, exemplifies. However, attuning to the movement-from that always accompanies boredom discloses the immanent presence of intensities that on-go even as boredom stills and slows time–space. Based on the ambiguity of boredom that results, the conclusion draws on the ‘not-yet' materialism of Ernst Bloch [The Principle of Hope (vols. 1–3) (N. Plaice, S. Plaice, P. Knight, Trans.), Blackwell, Oxford, 1986] to disclose an image of process-matter that draws on Bennett's [The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings and Ethics, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2001] concept of an ‘enchanted materialism' but retains a sense of process as incorporating both plentitude and depletion. The basis to this form of affective materialism is the event of hope.     

Japan's traditional view of nature and interpretation of landscape

Recently a few Japanese geographers became aware that the concept of nature in modern geography differs from that of traditional Japanese thought. As modern geography in Japan was formed by the influence of European geography, most academic geographers in Japan have followed the occidental view that proposed an opposition between cultural and natural landscapes and that, due to the belief in man's power, sees the former as superior to the latter. From an economic view point, in fact, the European concept of nature which is opposed to culture has contributed to land exploitation that caused the destruction of Japan's natural landscape.The time has come to consider the traditional Japanese idea of nature as Kami (gods) in comparison with the binary opposition of nature/culture which derives from modern rationalism. Kami who represent elements of nature belonged to a Pantheon in ancient Japan. Some examples of the Kami's names and their English explanations are as follows: Amaterasuomikami (godess of sun), Oyamatsumi-no-kami (god of the mountain's spirit), Nozuchi-no-kami (god of the field's spirit). In ancient Japan people believed that natural landscapes were created and inhabited by these Kami, and that the will of these Kami controlled the cultural domain. However, people provided shrines for Kami to placate their reckless domination. In this context, culture is in the hands of nature. This idea of nature's superiority to culture can explain the Japanese geographical concept of landscape.     

Dictionaries, disciplines and the future of geography

This essay contributes to the discussions initiated by Setten [Setten, 2008. Encyclopaedic vision: speculating on The Dictionary of Human Geography. Geoforum 39 (3), 1097–1104], about The Dictionary ofHuman Geography. Rather than focusing on the identity and relative exclusiveness of the contributors, I emphasize how successive editions of the Dictionary have helped reshape the discipline in two ways. First, the proliferation of texts, like the Dictionary, aimed squarely at a student market has gone hand in hand with a variety of changes to the political economy of publishing in geography. Second, human geography has increasingly come to be defined in terms of its concepts and theories. The paper ends by considering the implications of these changes for disciplinary unity and the future of geography given the increasing prominence of both of integrated environmental science and of GIS.     

The US army in operations other than War: A time to revive military geography

This paper revisits and interrelates the scope of military geography and the changing role of the military, two themes previously addressed in the 1993 and 1994 special editions ofGeoJournal. I begin by tracing the evolution of military geography in the US from World War I through the end of the Gulf War to reveal the demise of the subfield within American academic geography. Within the context of the post-Cold War era, I describe the military's reorientation and emphasize the need and opportunity to broaden the scope of military geography accordingly. The military's current operating environment is best characterized by operations other than war, undertaken on an unprecedented scale. Military geographers and regional, systematic, and technical experts throughout the discipline now have an unparalleled opportunity to contribute to the success of peacekeeping, humanitarian, and disaster assistance missions with which the military is currently preoccupied. Initiatives by academic geographers would not only enhance mission accomplishment from the military and federal government's perspective, but might also help to revive military geography as a legitimate subfield by demonstrating that military geographic endeavors can be both socially responsible and politically correct, particularly within operations other than war.     

Geography in interdisciplinarity: Towards a third conversation

The ‘era of interdisciplinarity’ heralds collaborative inquiry as effective for addressing complex issues at the nexus of disciplinary interests. Geographers have long argued that they are particularly well-suited to contribute to interdisciplinary endeavors because of the breadth and depth that the discipline enfolds. However, within the literature about geography and interdisciplinarity, we find only two rather limiting conversations. The first conversation is concerned with the role(s) and position of geography within academia and focuses on what geographers can do to distinguish themselves while also improving their interactions with scholars from other disciplines. The second conversation largely revolves around how best to conduct interdisciplinarity ‘in the lab and classroom’ and focuses on practical issues associated with making collaborative research operate smoothly for multiple, disciplinary participants. We propose opening up intellectual space for a third conversation about the benefits, challenges and contributions of individual disciplines in interdisciplinary environments. Using survey data, we analyze how geography was perceived by collaborators from various disciplines in an interdisciplinary Urban Ecology program at the University of Washington. We offer this pilot study as a heuristic for others wishing to perform similar small-scale reflexive exercises and advance this “third conversation”.