Troubling Positionality: Politics of “Studying Up” in Transnational Contexts

Drawing on research conducted in India's software industry in Bangalore, this article explores the multiple positionalities of differently situated people in the project—state officials, software firm managers and owners, software professionals, and researcher as critic. Challenging conventional notions of positionality centered on individual scholars' negotiations of their own identities, I trace the institutional, geopolitical, and social relations within which all participants are embedded. I argue that moments of tension and uncertainty are not just symbolic of multiple positionalities of both researcher and researched but also indicate the fraught nature of information technology–led development in neoliberal India. This article thus provides a particular opportunity to trouble notions of power, positionality, reflexivity, and feminist commitment to untangling the politics of knowledge production while “studying up” in transnational contexts.     

The Asian Economic “Flu”: A Geography of Crisis

This paper examines the recent economic turmoil in East Asia which has been linked to the convulsive nature of global capital movements. East Asia, once the site of rapid capital accumulation, lost its economic momentum beginning in July 1997 with a series of currency devaluations, culminating in a net outflow of private capital within a year. International capital's ability to disembed the region, however, has been highly uneven over space. That China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan are far more territorially resilient while others like Indonesia, Thailand, and South Korea initiated major political changes suggests that the geography of crisis is far more complex than is currently presented.     

A Review of “Economic Geography: Places,Networks, and Flows”

Landing a rescue helicopter in a wilderness environment, such as Yosemite National Park, requires suitable areas that are flat, devoid of tree canopy, and not within close proximity to other hazards. The objective of this study was to identify helicopter landing areas that are most likely to exist based on available geographic data using two GIScience methods. The first approach produced an expert model that was derived from predefined feature constraints based on existing knowledge of helicopter landing area requirements (weighted overlay algorithm). The second model is derived using a machine learning technique (maximum entropy algorithm, Maxent) that derives feature constraints from existing presence-only points; that is, geographic one-class data. Both models yielded similar output and successfully classified test coordinates, but Maxent was more efficient and required no user-defined weighting that is typically subject to human bias or disagreement. The pros and cons of each approach are discussed and the comparison reveals important considerations for a variety of future land suitability studies, including ecological niche modeling. The conclusion is that the two approaches complement each other. Overall, we produced an effective geographic information system product to support the identification of suitable landing areas in emergent rescue situations. To our knowledge, this is the first GIScience study focused on estimating the location of landing zones for a search-and-rescue application.     

“The Corner of Avenue A and Twenty-Third Street”: Geographies of Street Numbering in the United States

The designation of streets by number is one of the hallmarks of North American urbanism, yet very few studies have examined the geographies of street numbering in U.S. cities and towns. This article provides one of the first comprehensive, nationwide assessments of the spatial distribution of street numbering and lettering practices across the United States. Drawing on data collected from Google Maps, census records, state almanacs, and related sources, we analyze the proportion of incorporated places in all fifty U.S. states that have adopted some form of street numbering or lettering; the regional variation in the prevalence of alphanumerical systems of street designation and the relationships between the occurrence of street numbering, population size, and date of incorporation. In doing so, the broader aim of this study is to undertake the empirical groundwork needed to develop a more nuanced critical theory of the social production of calculable space.     

A Review of “Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat,Science, and Society”

This study is motivated by insufficiencies in two areas in the literature. First, some technical barriers have hindered investigations of changing job–housing patterns over time. Second, traditional dichotomous studies (black–white) of ethnically divided commuting patterns are insufficient to paint the big picture of such dynamics in a multiethnicity metropolitan area. This research fills the gap by presenting an approach to the spatio-temporal analysis of commuting patterns by ethnicity. A case study is performed to track changing commuting patterns for whites, blacks, and Latinos in Atlanta over the last two decades. The results shed light on our understanding of the changing job–housing dynamics, particularly that of Latinos.     

Immigration,Polarization, or Gentrification? Accounting for Changing House Prices and Dwelling Values in Gateway Cities

Past research has identified immigration, social polarization, and gentrification as factors with significant impacts upon price movements and other housing characteristics in gateway cities. This study attempts to compare the effects of these three factors in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada's primary gateway cities, over the period from 1971 to 1996. The paper describes house price changes from Multiple Listing Service rolls and changes of dwelling values in census tracts, and interprets visual evidence for the effects of the three factors. The observed centralization of price gains is then sharpened in a univariate and multivariate analysis of changes in dwelling values for census tracts in each metropolitan area. While there is consistency in the spatial patterns of changes in housing prices and dwelling values between the two cities, there are differences in the importance of the three processes at different times and places. Moreover, strong effects at the metropolitan scale become much more blurred with spatial disaggregation.     

A Review of “War,Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count”

An understanding of the contemporary biogeography of a region must be predicated not only on the current environmental conditions that influence species distributions but also on historical factors including anthropogenic disturbance regimes. Increasingly, researchers are using historical data, such as the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) records, to create baselines from which subsequent biogeographic changes can be gauged. The present-day state of Oklahoma is unique in that two separate PLSS surveys were conducted in the state during a relatively short time span. We compare these two historical data sets, from the 1870s and 1890s, respectively, to quantify changes in landscape structure and woody plant assemblages corresponding to rapid demographic changes occurring within the Arbuckle Mountains in Oklahoma. During this period, the PLSS data show a landscape that became increasingly fragmented, as well as differences in stand composition and density. The documentation of these important historical anthropogenic changes occurring on the western fringes of the eastern deciduous forest could serve as a valuable guide for conservation and restoration initiatives.     

A Review of “Small Town Sustainability: Economic,Social, and Environmental Innovation”

Books Reviewed

Colbert C. Held, Middle East Patterns: Places, People, and Politics

Barbara A. Weightman, Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East, and Southeast Asia

Henry J. Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico

Brian W. Blouet, Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth Century

M. A. B. Siddique (ed.), International Migration into the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of Reginald Appleyard

Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (eds.), A Population History of North America

Emilio Moran, Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology

Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era

Susan B. Marriott and Jan Alexander (eds.), Floodplains: Interdisciplinary Approaches

William S.Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City

Alex Krieger and David Cobb (eds.) with Amy Turner, Mapping Boston

Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape

Carl Abbott, Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest

Arthur D. Murphy, Colleen Blanchard and Jennifer A. Hill (eds.), Latino Workers in the Contemporary South

Yanek Mieczkowski, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections     

Estimating Population Attribute Values in a Table: “Get Me Started in” Iterative Proportional Fitting

Iterative proportional fitting (IPF) is a technique that can be used to adjust a distribution reported in one data set by totals reported in others. IPF is used to revise tables of data where the information is incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, or a sample. Although widely applied, the IPF methodology is rarely presented in a way that is accessible to nonexpert users. This article fills that gap through discussion of how to operationalize the method and argues that IPF is an accessible and transparent tool that can be applied to a range of data situations in population geography and demography. It offers three case study examples where IPF has been applied to geographical data problems; the data and algorithms are made available to users as supplementary material.     

A Review of “Turf Wars: Discourse,Diversity, and the Politics of Place”

The spatial correlation, or colocation, of two or more variables is a fundamental issue in geographical analysis but has received much less attention than the spatial correlation of values within a single variable, or autocorrelation. A recent paper by Leslie and Kronenfeld (2011) contributes to spatial correlation analysis in its development of a colocation statistic for categorical data that is interpreted in the same way as a location quotient, a frequently used measure in human geography and other branches of regional analysis. Geographically weighted colocation measures for categorical data are further developed in this article by generalizing Leslie and Kronenfeld's global measure as well as specifying a local counterpart for each global statistic using two different types of spatial filters: fixed and adaptive. These geographically weighted colocation quotients are applied to the spatial distribution of housing types to demonstrate their utility and interpretation.     

“Story-Networks” of Livestock and Climate Change: Actors,Their Artifacts,and the Shaping of Urban Print Media

Despite widespread media coverage of livestock-related issues and growing scientific evidence linking meat production and climate change, systematic content analysis of this relationship in media coverage has been surprisingly minimal. In this article, we combine actor-network theory with framing theory to develop the basis for “story-networks”—networks of actants and artifacts that shape how a media report or “story” is framed. We coded livestock-related articles from a major U.S. newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, over the 1999–2010 period to understand how various actants and artifacts shaped different story-networks. Just 5% of all livestock articles addressed connections with climate change; these articles focused on technology, lifestyle, or policy. Distinctive story-networks characterized each category, framing the livestock–climate change linkage as an issue to be addressed through either technological innovation, individual lifestyle choices, or policy action. In each story-network type, varying configurations of actants and artifacts were involved, including the cattle themselves.     

Sustaining the “Societal and Scriptural Fence”: Cultural,Social, and Political Topographies of Same-Sex Marriage in Alabama

In June 2006, voters in Alabama overwhelmingly approved a statewide referendum that added a prohibition against same-sex marriage to the state's constitution. This research examines the Alabama vote by “placing” the politics of sexuality within the state's multifaceted web of cultural and social space. We fuse a traditional electoral geography approach with an overall postpositivist cultural and social perspective, beginning with an assessment of the politics of place by situating Alabama as a place with a long history of battles over the so-called culture wars. The cultural politics of the legislative debate and the geographic distribution of the actual vote are also examined within a socio-demographic context, drawing some comparisons from a similar vote in Georgia in 2004, another state in the American Deep South. Those opposed to same-sex marriage in Alabama made effective use of various social constructions that are deeply embedded within a “moral” geography, situating the state as a fenced-off bastion of “religious traditional values,” a common theme throughout the American South. In this vein, social boundaries and territory were demarcated as a powerful political act in Alabama, a strategy that situated the state as hetero-normatively “in place,” while deeming sexual minorities as “out of place.”     

Competitive Productivism and Australia's Emerging ‘Alternative’ Agri-food Networks: producing for farmers' markets in Victoria and beyond

This paper advances the theoretical argument for moving beyond the conventional/alternative divide in the analysis of emerging ‘alternative’ agri-food networks (AAFNs). In order to understand how ‘place’, ‘nature’ and ‘quality’-based food networks emerge and develop, we argue that careful attention needs to be paid to the way in which specific political-economic environments shape the options available to farmers and consumers. Australia's ‘competitive productivism’ is the outcome of an export-oriented economy and a neoliberal political orientation, and this environment affects the development of AAFNs in various ways. Most notably, a case study of farmers that sell at farmers' markets in the State of Victoria shows that the competitive-productivist policies pursued by Australian governments entice some farmers who participate in AAFNs to develop their ideas into higher output businesses tailored to compete in emerging export markets. Other farmers deliberately choose to keep marketing through alternative channels despite competitive-productivist pressures to expand. These findings demonstrate the centrality to the experience of AAFN participants of negotiating productivist pressures, adding nuances to the story of the complex relations between AAFNs and conventional supply chains.     

Geopolitics and “The Courage to Teach”: Identity,Integrity and the Subject of Political Geography

Abstract

Previous literature discussing and exemplifying the teaching of political geography has emphasized the material to be disseminated. Building upon those contributions, this paper offers a means of connecting student, teacher, and subject matter. Using the perspective of Parker Palmer, as illustrated in his book The Courage to Teach, it is suggested that placing the subject at the center of the classroom will result in the effective teaching of political geography. Two classroom exercises are used to exemplify the argument.     

A Review of “Managing the Infosphere: Governance,Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion”

The antiquated and undemocratic rules operating in the United Nations Security Council do not reflect and serve today’s integrated global society, nor does the institution adequately represent the diversity of member states. Despite General Assembly discussions that have lasted a quarter-century, no result has materialized on the expansion issue. The author concludes that regional rivalries, the veto, the onerous Charter amendment process, and the failure to devise a truly representative model are responsible for the lack of progress. A model with eighteen rotating seats, based on population, area, and regional position, and four elected seats deserves consideration as an alternative. Key Words: metageography, political geography, population and area ratings, United Nations Security Council.     

Undocumented Students’ Narratives of Liminal Citizenship: High Aspirations,Exclusion, and “In-Between” Identities

This study illustrates how national immigration policy relegates undocumented immigrant children to spaces of liminal citizenship, which shape their aspirations for higher education. Recognizing the power of migrant narratives, and the importance of privileging youths’ voices through children's geographies, we present the narratives of undocumented high school students from several rural North Carolina communities. Despite various barriers facing undocumented students, most have high academic aspirations. Students construct new forms of citizenship, legitimating their claims to higher education access through their achievement. Their liminal status, however, contributes to the formation of conflicted, “in-between” identities.