Parents,permission, and possibility: Young women,college, and imagined futures in Gujarat,India

This article advances critical geographies of youth through examining the spatiality implicit in the imagined futures of young women in rural India. Geographers and other scholars of youth have begun to pay more attention to the interplay between young people’s past, present, and imagined futures. Within this emerging body of scholarship the role of the family and peer group in influencing young people’s orientations toward the future remain underexamined. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, my research focuses on a first generation of college-going young women from socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds in India’s westernmost state of Gujarat. I draw on the “possible selves” theoretical construct in order to deploy a flexible conceptual framework that links imagined post-educational trajectories with motivation to act in the present. In tracing the physical movement of these young women as they navigate and complete college, my analysis highlights the ways in which particular kinds of spaces and spatial arrangements facilitate and limit intra- and inter-generational contact, and the extent to which this affects young women’s conceptions of the future. I conclude by considering the wider implications of my research for ongoing debates surrounding youth transitions, relational geographies of age, and education in the Global South.     

Insider or outsider, both or neither: some dilemmas of interviewing in a cross-cultural setting

This paper contributes to the growing literature on methods and techniques for conducting qualitative research in economic geography, as well as to recent feminist debates on the impact that relationships of power between researchers and their informants have on the rigor of the findings of qualitative research. Drawing upon my own experiences whilst conducting interviews with managers and workers in information processing companies in Jamaica, I will examine the ways that inter-cultural perceptions, interactions and representations influenced the fieldwork process, and their ultimate effect on my interpretation and writing of the final text. This paper includes that because of the dynamic way in which identities and their attendant power relations are created and transformed during business interviews, uncertainty will necessarily remain a residual in the evaluation and interpretation of information received. It argues that recognizing and naming these uncertainties is an important step towards not only establishing rigor in the research process, but also to displacing the indomitable authority of the author.     

Looking for the critical geographer, or why bodies and geographies matter to the emergence of critical geographies of Latin America

This paper argues that critical geographies of Latin America begin with an analysis of how and why the bodies and geographies of geographers themselves matter. To focus on the geographer as a producer of knowledge is not to advocate the kind of navel gazing so abhorrent to many scholars. Rather, it is an effort to call attention to and critically assess how the geographer's embodied social position and geographic location inform the production of knowledge about and representations of Latin American people and nature. To illustrate how and why bodies and geographies matter, I draw from feminist and post-colonial theory and include examples from my own experiences and those of other researchers doing fieldwork in Latin American countries. I conclude by exploring the notion of situated knowledge as a tactic that writes bodies and geographies into academic texts. Ultimately, situating knowledge represents a political intervention and contribution to the broader goals of emancipatory politics shared by critical human geographers.     

Anxiety, epistemology, and policy research “behind enemy lines”

Based on my political opposition to neoliberal policies, I elected to conduct dissertation research on a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. This paper explores emotional aspects of this work. Specifically, I describe my fear that research subjects would accuse me of being a spy. I then describe my efforts to cope with these fears and the ways that fear and coping influenced my meaning-making work.     

Engaging the complexities of community: conflict and difference in community-engaged research

This paper engages with the methodological and ethical complexities of conducting research across diverse sites of power and privilege, specifically by drawing upon twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork on the ecological restoration of the Ventura River in Southern California. The design of this project incorporates people from multiple, conflicting positions, including people who are homeless and living in riverbottom encampments, people in the environmental field working to restore the riverbottom, and people in social services working to house the homeless. Throughout my fieldwork various groups attempted to assert agency over my research methods and priorities, pulling me in multiple directions. However, despite this tension, this research design also afforded me the opportunity to develop trusting relationships across difference, which facilitated the opening of a new (and potentially more just) socio-ecological imaginary for the Ventura River. This paper demonstrates how one can create change across diverse positions of power, and the role community-engaged researchers can play in this process.

     

Stuck in a mess (again): A response to Johnston, Fairbrother, Hayes, Hoare and Jones

A response to Johnston et al.’s criticisms of my earlier paper about the Cold War and geography’s quantitative revolution that I am overly deterministic and fail to prove my case.     

Pedagogy, post-coloniality and care-full encounters in the classroom

In this paper, I consider what it means to take up the twin post-colonial commitment to critique and destabilization, and open and ’future-oriented’ practices, in the neglected space of the classroom. I make a case for extending how we conceive of our responsibility to this commitment to include the care-full work of interrogating how we encourage students in developing fresh ways of relating to difference and inequality. Care embraces responsibility yet it usefully forces attention to the mediation and embeddedness of responsible relations in the interpersonal contact zones of the classroom. In its cautionary meaning, care also brings to questions of responsibility a carefulness, which alerts us to the difficulties of exercising such an engaged and indeterminate pedagogy in an institutional setting driven by the norms of assessment, benchmarking statements, disciplinary expectations and the conventions of academic discourse. It draws attention further to the potentially un-caring consequences of framing post-colonial commitments through intersubjective categories of self-other. In this paper I reflect on my own experiences teaching a level three module on the post-colonial Caribbean and, in particular, my use of fiction as a way to initiate more responsive and open-ended encounters with Caribbean peoples and places. I highlight some of the opportunities created by the use of different forms of writing but also the institutional and discursive constraints, including my own mediation of the texts and student expectations, which persistently threaten to settle and reclaim evidence of destabilisation and newness.     

十载共研地动因--忆恩师陈国达院士

以笔者师从陈国达院士十年,学习与研究大地构造理论———地洼学说、壳体大地构造学与构造地球物理问题为线索,介绍恩师陈国达院士在大地构造研究领域里的教学与研究,传道、受业与解惑等方面的情况,特别是笔者与恩师的学术交往中就学术研究的继承与创新,科学理论与研究学派的发展,科学精神、科学思想与科学研究方法等方面的问题曾经进行的许多研讨,至今历历在目、记忆犹新、发人深省、受益终身,可起纪念先人、激励后学之功效。     

‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

Conspiratorial thought has been highly visible in post-September 11th America, manifest through the continued growth of a public ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ as well as at the state-level, through the Bush administration’s conspiracy rhetoric of Islamic terrorists intent on infiltrating the US homeland. In this paper, I demonstrate how conspiracy can be understood as a ‘knowledge-producing discourse’; dialectically engaged across multiple subject positions and through which geopolitical narratives are performatively produced and contested at interconnected scales of bodies, homes, city streets and national ‘homelands’. Through drawing on, and challenging, the conceptual and methodological approaches of a burgeoning feminist geopolitics, I ground my analysis in the embodied performances of ‘patriotic dissent’ by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement in New York City, as well as through my own situated and ethical engagement with positions of political difference.     

Some burning questions remaining unanswered

Writing a book on the geodynamic evolution of India (Valdiya, 2010), which involved going through and perusing voluminous literature, I was confronted with many burning questions for which I could not find decisive answers. Maybe I missed the answers, or perhaps I failed to grasp and comprehend the logics of authors. I also felt that many very crucial problems of the evolutionary history of India await addressing squarely by the new generation of earth scientists. When the President of the Geological Society of India, Dr. Harsh Gupta, kindly invited me to speak at the Annual General Meeting of the Society in October 2010 I could not suppress my urge to voice my ignorance through some questions that tantalizingly tease me.     

The origin of biotite in Archaean meta-sediments near Yellowknife,N.W.T., Canada: A reply to E. H. Brown

Conclusion Dr. Brown's perceptive criticism has emphasised that problems of detail remain and pointed out some deficiencies of presentation in my paper. I hope these have now been rectified. I believe, however, that the above examination of the reaction in the light of his criteria has served only to substantiate its general validity.     

Research dissonance

While academics increasingly recognize the complexity of phenomena that do not easily conform to our reductive understandings, it sometimes remains difficult to reconcile this with a need for clear and conclusive arguments. In this article I share the contradictory forces and unresolved discrepancies in my own work as a means to better understanding the process of coming to terms with empirical and theoretical messiness. In particular, I draw on the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance to better understand the psychological influence this concept has in pushing us to make sense of the world in a way that downplays contradictions, counter-trends, complexity, gaps and unresolved loose ends. Having identified this largely subconscious dynamic, the pursuit for an agentic suspension of the need for cognitive harmony can be a productive means for thinking through the results of our research. Using my own work understanding the impact of the U.S.–Mexico border on the Tohono O’odham, an indigenous group based in Arizona and Sonora, I share how the perspectives of the groups with which I work has helped me think through contradiction in writing up the results of my research. For a more complete understanding I must embrace the counter-currents at play and alternative understandings of these events and places-even if I cannot fully explain away such incongruent forces.     

Making a difference: Forest biodiversity,affective capacities,and the micro-politics of expert fieldwork

Protecting biodiversity requires the practice of making nature values present in natural resource use decisions. In this article, such practices are explored from the perspective of affective capacities for expert fieldwork in forestry. Affective capacities are broadly acknowledged in the literature on embodied knowing, and by the practitioners themselves, as a necessary condition for knowing nature. We will extend this discussion to the politics involved. Drawing on a case study in Finland, the article points out that professional foresters’ affective ways of knowing nature are controlled by institutionalised strategies and practices. Thus, power is exercised through fieldwork, determining how nature can and should be known in forestry. The article concludes that since policy implementation takes place through the intensities present in mundane routines, governance studies would benefit from understanding how the various technologies of governance interact with emergent and embodied capacities.     

Geochronology and geochemistry of Palaeozoic intrusive rocks in the Rockvale region,southern New England Orogen,New South Wales

Palaeozoic intrusive rocks of the New England Batholith from the Rockvale district in the southern New England Orogen form three distinct associations: (i) the Carboniferous Rockvale Adamellite, a member of the Hillgrove Suite of deformed S‐type granitoids; (ii) a small I‐type igneous complex on the northwestern margin of the Rockvale Adamellite: several members of this complex have similar chemical compositions to the most mafic members of the Moonbi Suite of New England Batholith I‐types; and (iii) a suite of dyke rocks ranging in composition from calc‐alkaline lamprophyre through hornblende and biotite porphyrite to aplite. Ion‐microprobe U‐Pb zircon analysis indicates intrusion of the Rockvale Adamellite at 303 ±3 Ma (weighted mean ²⁰⁶Pb/²³⁸U age; 95% confidence limits). Preliminary investigation of zircon inheritance within the Rockvale Adamellite is consistent with chemical and isotopic indications of derivation of New England Batholith S‐type granitoids from a relatively juvenile protolith. Deformation of the Rockvale Adamellite occurred after complete crystallization of the pluton and prior to emplacement of dykes and I‐type intrusives. K‐Ar biotite and hornblende ages show broadly synchronous intrusion of I‐type magmas and lamprophyre dykes at ca 255 Ma, indicating that mantle magmatism associated with lamprophyres was contemporaneous with the crustal production of I‐type melts. Chemical similarities between the most mafic Moonbi Suite members and calc‐alkaline lamprophyres may also indicate a direct mantle contribution to some I‐type magmas.     

War,by Conservation

In this paper I argue that there has been a critical shift towards war by conservation in which conservation, security and counter insurgency (COIN) are becoming more closely integrated. In this new phase concerns about global security constitute important underlying drivers, while biodiversity conservation is of secondary importance. This is a significant break from earlier phases of fortress conservation and war for biodiversity. In order to develop a better understanding of these shifts, this paper analyzes the existing conceptual approaches, notably environmental security which seeks to understand how resources cause or shape conflict, and political ecology approaches that focus on the struggles over access to and control over resources. However, this paper indicates the limitations of these existing debates for understanding recent shifts, which require a fresh approach. I chart the rise of the narrative I call poachers-as-terrorists, which relies on the invocation of the idea that ivory is the white gold of Jihad, a phrase which is closely associated with an Elephant Action League (EAL) report in 2012 which claimed Al Shabaab used ivory to fund its operations. This narrative is being extended and deepened by a powerful alliance of states, conservation NGOs, Private Military Companies and international organizations, such that it is shaping policies, especially in areas of US geo-strategic interest in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a result conservation is becoming a core element of a global security project, with significant implications for conceptual debates and for conservation practice on the ground.     

Sharing academic space

This paper is a personal reflection on my participation in the panel “The Spaces of Critical Geography” at the ICGC in 2002, where my position as an European Americanist working in Asia was helpful in disrupting any tendency towards conflation of location, nationality, identity, and academic practice. These reflections focus on three topics: my interactions with various hegemonies and hierarchies; my relationship with the English language; and the contribution I believe critical geography can make to contemporary academic practice across the disciplines.     

Two different geomentalities,two different gardens: the French and the Japanese cases

The French Renaissance gardens and Japanese hill gardens have constrasting garden landscapes. Japanese gardens are naturalistic and intend to give illusions that they are the beautiful spots of unspoilt nature. In contrast, the appearances of French gardens are not an imitation of nature but boldly reorganised landscapes in geometric forms. These two contrasting types of garden landscapes represent two different sets of geomentalities (frames of mind regarding geographical environment).An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Ninth New Zealand International Conference on Asian Studies, Hamilton, 23–26 August 1991. Its abridged version is published in D. Bing and K. Henshell (ed.)Japanese Perceptions of Nature and the Natural Order (Hamilton, NZ 1992), pp. 1–11. The present paper was developed from the first half of the conference paper, and was completed during my three month's tenure in 1993 as a Japan Foundation fellow. I am grateful to the Japan Foundation for their generous support of my research on the Japanese geomentality.     

Expecting the unexpected: field research in post-disaster settings

The purpose of this article was to examine field research after disasters by focusing on fieldwork challenges in post-disaster research settings. We describe and evaluate post-disaster fieldwork based on three separate research projects: A study of land use change adaptation strategies following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami; a study of long-term housing recovery following the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake in India; and a study of the role of social capital in shelter recovery following the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. The main findings of this study deal with some of the unique set of challenges that accompanies fieldwork in post-disaster settings. Our findings indicate six aspects that researchers might consider prior to undertaking fieldwork in a disaster setting: the critical role of language, logistics of transport and living accommodation, methodological matters, the researcher’s position in the field (i.e., gender, ethnicity), fieldwork blues and ethical concerns. Potential solutions to these challenges include understanding the target community prior to embarking on fieldwork, having flexibility in the field to deal with unexpected issues and problems, planning ahead for institutional review board approvals, forming research collaborations and having strategies in place to manage stress in the field.     

Reflections on interviewing foreign elites: praxis, positionality, validity, and the cult of the insider

Using open-ended interviews to conduct research on foreign elites raises methodological questions which conducting research on non-foreign elites and foreign non-elites does not. In this paper I first reflect upon some of the practical issues I have encountered when conducting interviews with members of foreign elites. I then examine the issue of positionality to suggest that the dualism of “insider” knowledge and status versus “outsider” knowledge and status is not as stable as it is often assumed to be, and that it should not be presumed that an “insider” will necessarily produce “better” knowledge than will an “outsider” simply by dint of their positionality. Indeed, given that the interview process is about constructing social meaning – a process that involves both the researcher and the source – in many ways such a dualism is meaningless.     

Religion and governmentality: Understanding governance in urban Brazil

In this paper I argue that geographies of religion are fundamental to understanding governance and social order in contemporary urban space. More specifically, I show how Foucault’s notion of governmentality characterizes regimes of power beyond the state apparatus, positing that religion and churches also produce and maintain the knowledges, truths, and social order associated with governmentality and self-regulated governance. By considering the geography of religion literature within the context of Foucualt’s work, I illustrate the importance of religious and spiritual practices to contemporary urban space, and the roles they play in producing and maintaining governance and socio-political order. My purpose is not to suggest that governmentality has been misapplied as a theoretical tool for understanding the state and political power, but to show how the term actually describes power more generally, including spiritual moments in addition to political ones. Drawing from my case study in Fortaleza, Brazil, I substantiate my theoretical argument using empirical examples, showing how governmentality is produced through religion and churches and the relationship between spiritual practices and governance in everyday space.