Health and safety in garment workers’ lives: Setting a new research agenda

Amidst new global initiatives to promote garment workers’ health and safety following a spate of deadly factory disasters across the Global South, this critical review calls for an expanded research agenda that looks beyond the workplace to examine the complex politics, spatialities, and temporalities of garment workers’ health and wellbeing. Drawing on ethnographic research on garment workers across South Asia, we argue against a narrow, technocratic, and depoliticised emphasis on physical infrastructures and building safety, and advocate instead a more holistic and politically-engaged research approach to the everyday health and wellbeing of workers. A conceptual focus on health and wellbeing offers a window onto workers’ employment experiences and reveals how routine work pressures, exhaustion and ill health are shaped by the dynamics of global supply chains, even well after workers have disengaged from these global circuits. Understanding how garment work affects workers’ wellbeing and their prospects for a fulfilling life requires research that moves beyond the workplace and covers the entire life course.     

The urban land debate in the global South: New avenues for research

The global ‘land grab’ debate is going urban and needs a specific conceptual framework to analyze the diverse modalities through which land commodification and speculation are transforming cities across the globe. This article identifies new avenues for research on urban land issues by drawing on an extensive body of academic literature and concrete cases of urban land transformations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These transformations are analyzed by focusing on three types of urban investments – investments in property, investments in public space and public services, and investments in speculation, image building and ‘worlding’ – and the way these investments are intermingled with and enhanced by processes of gentrification and speculative urbanism. Addressing real estate and infrastructure investments, speculation and gentrification through a land-based lens allows us to deepen the discussion on urban land governance in the global South. We argue that urban land acquisition cannot be thoroughly understood in isolation from the workings of urban real estate markets, public policies, and displacement processes. The urban land grab debate needs to consider the dialectic interplay between land use change and general socio-spatial transformations both in central – or recentralized – and peripheral areas. This is why we plea for a kaleidoscopic perspective on urban land governance by uncovering the complex patchwork of urban land acquisitions and their diverse temporalities and spatialities, their hybrid character in terms of actors involved, and the multiple and often unpredicted ways in which urban dwellers try to gain control over and access to urban land.     

Mining and extractive urbanism: Postdevelopment in a Mozambican boomtown

Mozambique has attracted international attention in recent years following the discovery of huge reserves of coal and gas deposits. A major focus of Mozambique’s extractives boom is the province of Tete, once a remote outpost but now a hub of power generation for the southern African region and an emerging centre of global investment in coal extraction. Some of the world’s largest mining firms from both established and emerging economies have descended on Tete, investing billions of dollars in developing concessions to extract some of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves with wide-ranging implications for the region’s political economy and effecting significant shifts in relations between state, capital and territorial control. At the urban scale, Tete city and its expanding periphery are increasingly characterised by enclaves and spaces of enclosure, as some groups benefit from and are integrated into global circuits of production whilst others suffer displacement and dispossession. In seeking to trace the emergence of Tete’s resource economy, the paper contends that three distinctive spatialities have resulted from these developments, including the infrastructure networks being constructed around the extractive industries, the enclave spaces arising from the coal boom (and the particular labour geographies that shape them) and the new and distinctive urban geographies that are the product of Tete’s rapid urbanisation. The paper seeks to assess the impacts, stakes and challenges linked to investments in extractive activities and looks at how the costs and risks are being differentially distributed within and between the affected communities.     

Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the sociospatial dimensions of ‘big data’

Digital social data are now practically ubiquitous, with increasingly large and interconnected databases leading researchers, politicians, and the private sector to focus on how such ‘big data’ can allow potentially unprecedented insights into our world. This paper investigates Twitter activity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in order to demonstrate the complex relationship between the material world and its digital representations. Through documenting the various spatial patterns of Sandy-related tweeting both within the New York metropolitan region and across the United States, we make a series of broader conceptual and methodological interventions into the nascent geographic literature on big data. Rather than focus on how these massive databases are causing necessary and irreversible shifts in the ways that knowledge is produced, we instead find it more productive to ask how small subsets of big data, especially georeferenced social media information scraped from the internet, can reveal the geographies of a range of social processes and practices. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can uncover broad spatial patterns within this data, as well as understand how this data reflects the lived experiences of the people creating it. We also seek to fill a conceptual lacuna in studies of user-generated geographic information, which have often avoided any explicit theorizing of sociospatial relations, by employing Jessop et al.’s TPSN framework. Through these interventions, we demonstrate that any analysis of user-generated geographic information must take into account the existence of more complex spatialities than the relatively simple spatial ontology implied by latitude and longitude coordinates.     

Nano-art,dynamic matter and the sight/sound of touch

This paper offers an auto-ethnographic account of Midas, an immersive bio-media installation created by artist Paul Thomas. The experiences of the installation provide a stepping-off point for a discussion of the corporeal geographies and the nano-imaginaries that the work develops. Understanding the senses as a principle means whereby the body mingles with the world and with itself, we begin from a focus on Midas’s presentation of the inter-relations of touch, vision and hearing, thereby extending geographical thinking on aurality, but also reworking the immersive geographies that are implicated within ontologies of touch. We draw out these geographies by way of the depths and passages of Irigaray’s (1993) fluid ontology of touch. From here we explore the ‘creative rethinking’ of matter that the installation develops, exploring the organismic topographies that it develops which stand against nano-imaginaries of matter that are focused either on the corporeal violence of nano-splatter, or the understanding of nanotechnologies through the mastery and control of matter.     

Sharing as sociomaterial practice: Car sharing and the material reconstitution of automobility

Sharing has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary urban life and scholarship, as cities and social lives are transformed by the share economy and collaborative consumption. This paper advances critical analysis of sharing economies through an investigation of the ways in which objects are mobilized in the practice of sharing. Drawing on an empirical base of 35 interviews conducted with Sydney residents using car sharing as a form of transport, we explicate the material entanglements that constitute car sharing in order to highlight the complex intersections of the object being shared, the constellations of objects brought into the orbit of the practice, and the code that flows through each. Bringing together a material-focused analysis into conversation with the concepts of share economies as both performed and hybrid, we advance the concepts of sharing as a set of socio-material entanglements. We argue that the divergent spatialities and temporalities of objects and humans both hold together and tear apart the experiences of sharing, which in turn underpins car sharing’s implications for the reconstitution of automobility.     

‘A place for everything’: Moral landscapes of ‘swiftlet farming’ in George Town,Malaysia

This paper is based on 6 months of ethnographic, multi-sited research in Malaysia, and investigates the relatively recent phenomenon of edible birds’ nest farming in urban areas (‘swiftlet farming’). Swiftlet farms are typically converted shophouses or other buildings which have been modified for the purpose of harvesting the nests of the Edible-nest Swiftlet (Aerodramus fuciphagus). I use the controversy over urban swiftlet farming in the Malaysian city of George Town, Penang, to examine discourses used by key stakeholders to shape debates over the place of non-human animals in cities. By considering everyday experiences of urban swiftlet farming, I explore how this burgeoning industry is perceived amongst residents, and how it is deemed to be (in)appropriate within the political, economic and cultural landscape of George Town. Yet, I also consider how farmers have sought to contest these discourses on ideological and normative grounds. In so doing, I place the cultural animal geographies literature in conversation with emergent literature on landscape and urban political ecology. Such a framing allows for a critical evaluation of the controversies surrounding this case, and their implications for human-animal cohabitation in cities. The paper reflects on the implications of this case for how we regulate human-animal relations and live in contemporary cities, and the crucial role of animals in altering urban form, aesthetics and everyday life, particularly in non-Western contexts.     

Sibling caringscapes: Time–space practices of caring within youth-headed households in Tanzania and Uganda

This paper investigates the time–space practices of young people caring for their siblings in youth-headed households affected by AIDS in Tanzania and Uganda. Based on qualitative exploratory research with young people heading households, their siblings, NGO workers and community members, the article develops the notion of sibling ‘caringscapes’ to analyse young people’s everyday practices and caring pathways through time and space. Participatory time-use data reveals that older siblings of both genders regularly undertake substantial caring tasks at the very high end of the caregiving continuum. Drawing on rhythmanalysis, the paper explores how young people negotiate emotional geographies and temporalities of caring. The competing rhythms of bodies, schooling, work and seasonal agricultural production can result in ‘arrhythmia’ and time scarcity, which has detrimental effects on young people’s health, education, future employment prospects and mobility. Young people’s lifecourse transitions are shaped to a large extent by their caring responsibilities, resulting in some young people remaining in a liminal position for considerable periods, unable to make ‘successful’ transitions to adulthood. Despite structural constraints, however, young people are able to exercise some autonomy over their caring pathways and lifecourse transitions. The research sheds light on the ways that individuals embody the practices, routines and rhythms of everyday life and exercise agency within highly restricted broader landscapes of care.     

Geographies of citizenship and everyday (im)mobility

This introduction and the collection of papers it introduces seek to progress debates on the intersections between citizenship, practice, materiality, and mobility. In contrast to more static framings of formal citizenship where subjects are considered equal in terms of enjoying the same safeties and freedoms, in this introduction citizenship is conceived of as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens that ebbs and flows. Through the papers that comprise this collection we see the process of citizenship becoming fragmented in both urban and rural mobility spaces. We also see it as being shaped by particular technologies and artefacts which construct and relate mobile subjects to each other and the state in particular ways. Our key contribution lies in outlining three related areas where work informed by the mobilities turn could focus: Firstly we seek to demonstrate that far from being a product of citizenship status, mobility must be seen as actively constituting citizenship relations. Secondly we seek to demonstrate the roles that styles of movement and the ‘stuff’ of mobility play in shaping the extent of citizenship for particular mobile publics. Thirdly we illustrate the ways in which cross-border flows relating to concepts such as cosmopolitan and ecological citizenship can act through mobility practices to challenge locally held notions of appropriate mobility and inevitably citizenship. Ultimately what we argue and intend to demonstrate is that mobility is such an important, pervasive and politicised element of late modernity that the ways in which we move and confer meanings on movement, cut across and even over-ride more established relationships between social and cultural identity, citizenship and the state.     

The realm of freedom in new rural governance: Micro-politics of democracy in Sweden

Voluntary associations are at the heart of Swedish rural policy and strategies for governance as partners in bringing about ‘development from below.’ Examining the implications of this new responsibility being placed on the civil society in new modes of multilevel governance, I ask: do these changes presage greater political space for individuals vis à vis the state or is Swedish rural policy premised on ideas about an institutional context that might be disappearing? In comparative research in rural Sweden, I discuss state and civil-society relations at the macro level in light of the gendered micro-politics of associational life on the ground. Through ethnographic research with people involved in development work of different kinds, I examine how ideas about community associations are used to mobilize rural policy. I analyze its’ political implications and argue for the importance of analyzing macro in relation to the micropolitics on the ground for a better theoretical understanding of democracy and power in rural governance, in particular its gendered implications. I argue that past collaborative relations between the civil society and the state’s administrative apparatuses as well as the current focus of rural policy have enabled the state to hand over service functions to the civil society and diluted their ‘voice,’ incongrously endangering the institutional basis of rural policy itself. Further, attention to the gendered micropolitics of associational life makes apparent cleavages within civil society and its underlying relations of gender and power that challenge current conceptualizations on the neoliberalization of rural policy.     

Globally engaged farmers as transnational actors: Navigating the landscape of agri-food globalization

Farmers are not commonly included in studies of transnational actors, but with the globalization of agricultural markets, and the neoliberal reform of national agricultural sectors, an increasing number of family farm-entrepreneurs have become engaged in transnational activities. Drawing on interviews with ‘globally-engaged’ farmers in Australia – a country in which expansion into transnational activities has been encouraged by the radical deregulation of domestic markets – this paper explores the transnational mobilities of farmers who have sought to capitalize on the advantages of globalization by directly trading with international partners, establishing international business contacts, and learning international best practice in farm efficiency and environmental performance. In particular, the paper examines the varying spatialities and forms of mobility executed by farmers and observes how different patterns of mobility are executed in response to the particular exigencies of their respective industries as well as the ongoing imperatives of maintaining a farm business. By analyzing the farmers’ own narratives of these different spatialities, the paper develops a more critical and reflexive perspective on globalization and its impact on rural producers, with travel becoming both an opportunity to be enjoyed and a compulsion to be endured by those forced to operate in a climate where state-based support structures are absent.     

Young adult households and domestic sustainabilities

Young adults in the Global North occupy a contradictory environmental identity: they are purportedly more environmentally concerned than older generations, but are also labelled hedonistic consumers. Most studies have focused on young adults still residing in parental homes, neglecting that Generation Y (born between 1975 and 1991) has ‘grown up’. The consumption patterns and environmental implications of their newly established households demand scholarly attention. Through a large-scale household sustainability survey, conducted in Australia, we have uncovered important inter-generational differences in environmental attitudes and everyday domestic practices. We found that generational cohorts hold distinct environmental attitudes. Younger households were most concerned with climate change, and least optimistic about future mitigation. However, generational differences influenced everyday domestic practices in more complex ways. All households engaged extensively with those ‘pro-environmental’ practices that reflected established cultural norms, government regulations and residential urban form. For other pro-environmental practices there were clear differences, with Generation Y households being the least engaged. A widening ‘value-action gap’ was apparent across our sample population, from oldest to youngest. However, rather than reflecting Generation Y’s supposed hedonism, we argue that this gap reflects generational geographies: how lifecourse intersects with housing and labour markets and norms of cleanliness to shape everyday domestic practices. Our research illuminates the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all approach to household sustainability. The young adult stage is a time of transition during which homes and independent lifestyles are established, and practices are altered or become entrenched, for better or worse.     

‘A citizen of all the different bits’: emotional scaling of identity

Scale is a debatable term in the humanities and social sciences. Conceptualized in human geography as spatial categories of thought, as the arenas where social processes occur, as bounded political-economic frames or as unhelpful binaries privileging either the local or the global, scale intersects a significant body of geographical research. The unfolding and intermeshing of topological connections that help to share moments and experiences are important sources for the differentiation, renewal and recalibration of individual identities, but they often work as co-components to scalar identifications. Engaging with the recent discussion on scale and the upsurge of emotional geographies, I seek to understand how people contextualize space through situated scalar perspectives and how they realign and recognize their identities through embodied emotions. The analysis of the empirical material, that comprises 23 focus groups with locally and universally-orientated civic organizations in Finland and England, focuses on the ways people use landscapes and communities as emotional signposts in their scalar identification. I argue that scale is a situated category, whose spectrum individuals negotiate through the performance of social discourses and cultural practices. In such negotiation, people scale their identity narratives to overcome or emphasize the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘others’.     

Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’

Through the lens of the dancing body, this paper examines practices of health and wellbeing produced in response to City of Vancouver urban governance policies. In particular, it calls attention to the legislative onslaught by city government in the years abutting the 2010 Winter Olympics to cultivate and manage healthy people, communities, and environments. In an effort to sell Vancouver’s ‘liveability’, I argue City of Vancouver endorsed a new legislative alliance that merged a conspicuously Anglo-American wellbeing lexicon, favouring individual responsibility and self-governance, with the performing arts industries. Drawing upon interviews and performance-based research, the paper illustrates how Karen Jamieson’s community dance project Connect, created for the In the Heart of the City festival, embodies Vancouver’s tri-level legislative ambitions to nurture A Healthy City For All. This materialised through the crafting of a dance-health body practice (healthy people), by choreographing a sense of belonging among ‘at risk’ communities (healthy communities), and in the uniting of the arts and health professions in the process of ‘cleaning up’ disenfranchised neighbourhoods (healthy environments). In bringing together scholarship on cultures of wellbeing and creative dance practice, the article contributes to understandings of how the health-seeking subject is embodied and performed. It also offers a productive critique of the exclusionary nature of urban health legislation, and of the contested role artists and arts festivals can play in nurturing urban wellbeing and normalising inequalities.     

The mosquito’s umwelt,or one monster’s standpoint ontology

Mosquitoes are able to vector malaria and other diseases across the planet, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Not only is this a challenging management problem, we also find it to be underlined by an important philosophical problem, namely: the impossibility of controlling “life”. Influential Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll wrote that every creature on Earth, from sea urchins to spiders, lives within a unique sphere of existence called an “umwelt”, or “surrounding world”. The umwelt defines the specificity of relations shared between an organism and its environment. Using this concept we complement existing work on monstrous natures in geography by arguing that “monstrosity” arises in the excesses and discontinuities between the mosquito’s umwelt and the human efforts that seek to eliminate it. This finding arises from fieldwork undertaken with public health and vector control officials in the US state of Arizona over several years. Their focus on reducing mosquito breeding sites suggests the complex and emergent spatialities of the monstrous.     

Place of life stories in labour geography: Why does it matter?

Labour geography foregrounds the role of workers in shaping geographies of work by paying attention to the larger actions of labour in response to the capital and state. It however pays less attention to the everyday geographies of labour and the complexities of the ‘social being’ in trying to understand workers motivations and responses. This review argues for labour geography to look beyond the factory gates to understand the nuanced politics of labour as relations get ‘reworked’ within a patriarchal-capitalist society. It argues for paying close attention to the life stories and experiences of workers, to create linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside, without losing sight of the larger struggles of labour and global processes, to develop a more grounded understanding of worker’s agency and actions.     

Systems of provision: Fast fashion and jeans

Using the example of jeans and the fast fashion sector, this critical review explores how systems of provision analysis can be used to understand geographical connections between spaces of production and places of consumption. The study of global commodity chains and production networks has proliferated in economic geography, yet the focus on transactions between places frequently omits to consider the material culture that surrounds processes of making and buying. In contrast, in cultural geography the meanings and transformations associated with ‘following things’ has explored the shifting meanings of commodities as well as personal experiences of shopping with a focus on signifying culture. Ben Fine’s systems of provision approach can offer a more comprehensive analysis. Fine considers how the role of the consumer has emerged as well as the economic processes through which value is established in goods and is an inclusive way of examining the activities that connect consumption and production. Through discussing some of the recent and emerging work on denim jeans this review shows how a systems of provision approach can effectively map a ‘fast fashion’ system and provides a framework that can be applied to other economic geographies.     

Detailing spaces and processes of resistance: Working women in Dundee’s jute industry

Recent and ongoing calls within labour geography and social and cultural geography have highlighted the importance of resistance, its spatial productions and manifestations. However, within this work, the geographical history of the factory system has been largely overlooked. Drawing upon Foucauldian theorisings in the fields of management and organisation, together with recent writings on the geographies of resistance, this paper takes Dundee’s jute industry at the turn of the twentieth century as its focus and explores how the workplace itself, and the very workplace discipline used to ensure a productive, efficient and hardworking workforce, engendered workplace protest among the industry’s working women. Writing through a number of modes and scales of protest within the workplace, within and between work groups, departments, mills and factories, and across the city, this paper adheres to an approach that carefully details the spaces and processes of resistance, paying careful attention to how union and non-union resistances operated and the geographies they worked through and created.     

Geography and postgenomics: how space and place are the new DNA

For many geographers, postgenomics is a relatively new perspective on biological causality. It is a non-dualistic way to conceptualize DNA, genes and environment. It also presents an opportunity for a broad critical engagement with biology through geography’s insights into socionature and the fallacies of spatial inference. In postgenomics, mapping of the spatial and temporal contexts and circumstances surrounding DNA, rather than DNA sequence alone, has become prioritized. Consequently, scientific and economic value in postgenomics accrues through the enclosure and mapping of the ‘omes’. These include the more familiar epigenome and microbiome, but also the interactome, the phenome, and the exposome among many others. The omes represent the cartographic translation of biological spatialities that modify the outcomes of DNA sequence from within as well as from outside of human bodies. In this article, we show how postgenomics leverages this omic ontologicalization of space and puts it to productive use. Drawing upon recent studies of the human microbiome, we illustrate how problematic geographies of difference arise through the way this omic mapping unfolds.     

Child sponsorship,ordinary ethics and the geographies of charity

Charitable donation, far from being done in a vacuum, is practised inseparably from the messy spatialities of everyday life. Drawing on literature from the geographies of care, this paper analyses the practices and experiences of giving that surround child sponsorship, a popular charitable scheme that directly links each donor with a child somewhere in the Global South. Through this, the paper argues for a more nuanced approach to the spatialities of charity. It affirms the significance of donation not just as a one-off response to a tear-jerking campaign, or as a mundane regular commitment, but also as a deeply personal engagement that draws into play multiple different aspects of people’s everyday lives and intersects with existing identity- and community-building projects. Throughout, therefore, the paper focuses specifically on the micro-geographies of donation, engaging with the messy details of everyday performances of charitable ethics and identity. To achieve this, it draws empirically on interviews with a small number of British sponsors, most of whom expressed an affiliation with the Christian faith. The paper therefore foregrounds a particular focus on the dialogic relationship between the spatialities of charity and the landscapes of faith, religion and spirituality.