‘I’m not in it for the money’: Constructing and mediating ethical reconnections in UK social banking

Over the last decade a range of social banks and Community Development Finance Initiatives (CDFIs) have developed a social investment sector in the UK. Some of these organisations emphasise their belief in partnership, association, reconnecting and re-humanising the relationship between investors with borrowers in order to reap social returns. ‘Ethical’ investors are encouraged to take sub-market returns on their investments in order for surpluses to be distributed to the organisations’ beneficiaries. Some key theoretical and political questions include: how are investors enrolled in these initiatives? What discourses of ethics are constructed and how do investors relate to them? How do these discourses relate to debates in geography revolving around ‘caring at a distance’? Drawing on work on the Charity Bank and the Industrial Common Ownership Fund (ICOF), this paper analyses how these discourses are constructed and mediates the relationship between investors and borrowers. It explores stakeholders both investors’ and borrowers’ perceptions of these activities as well as the way investors construct their own reasons for investing.     

Mobilising generosity, framing geopolitics: Narrating crisis in the homeland through diasporic media

This paper provides an account of the humanitarian interventions enacted by the Croatian–American diaspora during the secessionist conflicts in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Whilst undeniably an act of generosity towards ‘distant strangers’, actions such as these also represent a much more complex reality – they are an outcome of a complex set of relations and processes, in which the ethical choices of individuals become bound up with nationalist ideologies, geopolitical questions and, crucially, knowledge and understanding of distant events. In particular, this paper considers the ways in which generosity is mobilised through the framing of Balkan geopolitics through diasporic media. In so doing, it becomes possible to deepen the dialogue between work on geography and ethics on the one hand, and critical geopolitics on the other. In particular, the paper argues that due attention needs to be paid to the ways in which such ‘networks of concern’ are constructed in a variety of banal and mundane ways.     

Revisiting the red light district: Still neglected, immoral and marginal?

Twenty years ago, Ashworth et al. (1988) offered a distinctive and innovative interpretation of a neglected aspect of the urban scene: the red light district. Focusing on the location of female prostitution in a series of Western European cities, their paper suggested that the geographies of sex work are revealing of some of the ‘less obvious’ social and political processes that shape urban space. Here, we revisit Ashworth et al’s paper in the light of subsequent developments in the organisation of commercial sex as well as the study of sexuality and space. Noting important continuities as well as major shifts in the location of sex work, with a significant shift to off-street forms of sex working having occurred, this paper argues that some of the ideas in Ashworth et al’s paper remain highly pertinent, but others appear in need of updating. In particular, we stress the importance of focusing on men as both clients and workers within the sex industry, and flag up a number of connections that might be made with the emerging literatures on the geographies of sex itself. We hence conclude by considering Ashworth et al’s paper as an important early intervention in debates surrounding the relations of sexuality and space, albeit one in which questions of gender, embodiment, and sexual desire remained largely unexplored.     

Ecological restoration, cultural preferences and the negotiation of ‘nativeness’ in Australia

The paper addresses cultural assumptions about ‘nativeness’ and ‘belonging’ to place as they are implicated in notions of ‘ecological restoration’. Given the centrality of complex notions of ‘indigeneity’ to the issue of what ecological ‘restoration’ means in Australia, this is a rich area for cultural and historical analysis. Case materials illustrate the negotiated and ambiguous nature of Australian ideas about what ‘belongs’ ecologically and culturally across the broad continent of this relatively young post-Settler nation. We seek to foreground these issues through consideration of what ‘restoring’ nature might mean in the context of debates about native plants, the re-introduction of an iconic species of ground dwelling bird, the removal of cane toads that are demonised as highly ‘alien’, and the multiple ways in which the dingo is regarded ambiguously as both native and a ‘pest’ that needs to be controlled and culled. By showing how ‘restoration’ can be understood and mobilised in a variety of ways – in terms of the ‘re-naturing’, ‘re-valuing’ and/or ‘repatriating’ of indigenous species, as well as impassioned rejection of ‘exotics’ – we emphasise the importance of social science for building a well-grounded sense of how environmental management priorities and approaches are informed by a wider set of cultural assumptions.     

‘It’s more than just what it is’: Defetishising commodities, expanding fields, mobilising change…

Commodity geographies are politically weak. Geographical pedagogy isn’t particularly engaging. Radical geography should make connections. But it rarely leaves room for interpretation. Too much seems to be too didactic. And to preach to the converted. That’s a problem that needs attention. So, is it possible to develop a radical, less didactic, geography? With research funding, publication and teaching the way they are? To engage more students, more heartily, in the issues studied? To promote social justice, critical citizenship, and participatory democracy? But not by setting out the right ways to think, be, or act. Some film-makers, artists and writers have been able to do this. It seems. Subtly and cleverly. Through projects attempting to de-fetishise commodities. But their politics have been placed largely in the background, between the lines of, or separated out from, the presentation of scenes, things, relations, bodies, lives and voices. Seen and unseen elements of their audiences’ lives. Re-connected. Perhaps. Through communication strategies giving audiences something to think about and to think with, to argue about and to argue with. Putting themselves in the picture, in the process. These less didactic materials may be difficult to master for an exam or an essay. They may not make it clear who or what’s right or wrong or what audiences are supposed to do. But they could engage them in less direct ways. When they’re shopping for petrol or fish, or when they’re doing or thinking about completely different things. Things that may not even come under the heading of ‘production’ or ‘consumption’. This approach might be labelled as ‘weak’, ‘relativist’, a bit too ‘cultural’ ‘post-modern’, or ‘defunct’. But it’s an approach that may be radical in effect because its ‘politics’ aren’t so straightforward or ‘up front’. This paper is about changing relationships between research, writing, teaching, learning and assessment; expanding fields of commodity geographies to include classrooms as sites not only of ‘instruction’, but also of learning, for researchers and their students¹; showing how such learning might usefully shape research and writing elsewhere in these fields for those engaged in this defetishising project.     

Institutional power-geometries: enduring and shifting work relations in cleansing depots

Institutions are objects of study that raise questions about the relationship between continuity and change. Employment is changing and for this reason it presents an opportunity to explore how it is that paid work might be thought of as an institutional ‘space’ that is made up of enduring and shifting power relations. This paper views institutions through a lens of ‘power-geometries’, that is, as complex webs of relations of domination and subordination (Massey, D., 1992. New Left Review 196, 65–84). The paper illustrates these power-geometries by exploring employment in local authority cleansing depots in South East England. I concentrate on how the inequity of employment relations enables the institutionalisation of work practices. Employment relations were found to have shifted to different degrees according to the particular geographies and histories of labour markets, employer strategies, local politics and worker solidarities. Despite these variations the asymmetry of employment relations is seen to have endured. I conclude by arguing that whilst power-geometries are not fixed, when ‘institutionalised’ they are not easily changed during ‘everyday’ interaction.     

Institutional geographies of the New Age movement

This paper is concerned with the production and reproduction of different institutional geographies of the New Age movement. Instead of taking institutional geographies to be given and fixed co-ordinates in the social field, the paper seeks to understand how they are relational outcomes and effects that require constant upkeep. After characterising the New Age movement, in terms of its central cosmology and visions of transformation, the paper takes an actor-network theory (ANT) approach to the understanding of institutional geographies. Through analysing how New Age knowledges and practices travel through time and space, and utilising ANT’s concept of ‘centres of translation’, institutional geographies are taken to be active space-times that are both enrolled into New Age teachers and practitioners programs of action, and space-times that actively enrol teachers and practitioners. It is argued that the intertwining of different engineered actor-networks in and through these space-times maintains the New Age movement itself and thus examining institutional geographies can tell of the movement’s shape or topology. A controversy over the work of David Icke is explored to reveal how institutional geographies are sites for regulation of what counts as New Age knowledge. Finally, this paper seeks, partially at least, to assess in terms of the ANT approach taken, the visions of transformation propounded by the New Age movement.     

Naming the land: San countermapping in Namibia’s West Caprivi

Both ‘indigenous rights’ and environmental discourses brought a NGO-led natural resource mapping project to the West Caprivi Game Park in northern Namibia in the late 1990s. San countermapping elsewhere in southern Africa demonstrates how mapping has been used as a tool for ‘indigenous’ identity-building and asserting authority over land. At the same time, mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have increasingly been used by conservationists in Namibian Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), demonstrating the potential therein for state and NGO surveillance and intervention regarding both natural resources and their users in conservancies and national parks. Mapping in West Caprivi thus embodied a tension between ‘visibility’ and ‘legibility’. This paper explores how mapping activities reflected, and became part of, institutional and ethnic struggles over identity, authority and natural resources. It argues that members of a San group called Khwe used mapping to construct particular histories, promote a unified, exclusive ethnic identity, and bolster their authority in the area. This in turn presented particular challenges for NGO relationships with the state. The mapping project also showed that, in their bid to counteract their own exclusion, Khwe not only opened up the landscape to new forms of NGO and state legibility, but sought to exclude ethnic others. Like other CBNRM projects, mapping often served socio-political, rather than environmental, functions.     

‘Public intellectuals’, geography, its representations and its publics

Recent years have seen academic geographers engaged in a series of debates over the current state of the discipline, its ‘relevance’ to others in the social sciences, to policy-makers, and to those studying geography at school age. This short critical review builds upon an issue raised in this journal [Thrift, N., 2002. The future of geography. Geoforum 33, 291–298], namely the role of geographers as public intellectuals. After reviewing the different ways in which the notion of public intellectuals has been understood, the paper turns to geography’s representations and to its publics. The paper concludes by arguing for an appreciation of the full range of ways in which geographers call forth publics through a range of representational strategies. It suggests that regardless of how geographers perform publicly and intellectually, two things are perhaps worth remembering: it is in the interest of geographers to name what they do as geography and to name themselves as geographers.     

The Caesura: remarks on Wittgenstein’s interruption of theory, or, why practices elude explanation

This paper aims to bring the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein into contact with the growing interest and concerns over the status of practice, performance and non-representational ‘theory’ within human geography. Drawing predominantly on Wittgenstein’s later work, the aim is to use Wittgenstein’s comments to illuminate how certain presuppositions and idealisations over the nature of understanding and meaning are or have been built into our (social scientific) modes and methods of explanation. Thus Wittgenstein’s work is used as a diagnosis––a diagnosis of how the modus operandi of giving an explanation can, and often does, prevent us from acknowledging the practical and the performative, from witnessing the taking-place of meaning and understanding. The paper carries out this task by focusing first on Wittgenstein’s critique of the role of ‘rules’ and ‘rule-following’ in the construction of social scientific accounts and secondly, through a consideration of the implications of Wittgenstein’s ‘scenic’ style of writing through which he attempts to deconstruct the epistemo-methodological idealisations and representationalist desires of social analysis. The claim here is not that Wittgenstein’s work provides the solution to the problematics which confront us in considering the status (or otherwise) of practice, but rather that his work may provide us with other ways of going-on, ones more sensitive to the eventful, creative, excessive and distinctly uncertain realms of action.     

Of tidy gardens and clean houses: housing officers as agents of social control

This paper seeks to contribute to the theme of institutional geographies by exploring how the prevailing socio-spatial order is recreated and legitimated in the ways in which public rented housing is managed and delivered by housing associations and local authorities in the UK. The public rented sector has been increasingly catering for the most vulnerable sections of the population who are dependent on state benefits and cannot afford any other form of housing. As a result, housing staffs have found themselves having to take on a welfare role which entails controlling and policing social tenants who are seen to be causing disorder in society. This paper shows how a dominant housing management discourse reproduced by policies and staff at both front-line and management levels is that of an emerging ‘underclass’ promoted by right wing politicians and the media since the 1980s. According to dominant housing management discourse the members of this underclass are disrupting traditional patriarchal and capitalist institutions and values. Tenants’ houses and gardens not conforming to culturally and socially acceptable standards of cleanliness and tidiness symbolises tenants’ lack of conformity to the prevailing institutional order. Drawing on in-depth interviews with housing officers and managers, and observations of interviews between staff and tenants in six housing organisations, this paper analyses the ways in which housing organisations seek to control social tenants through the imposition of certain norms of cleanliness over their houses and gardens.     

Living through the tsunami: Vulnerability and generosity on a volatile earth

How might geographers respond ‘generously’ to a disaster on the scale of the Indian Ocean tsunami? Critical geographers and other left intellectuals have chosen to stress the way pre-existing social forces conditioned human vulnerability, and have implied that ordinary people ‘here’ were implicated in the suffering of others ‘there’ through their positioning in chains of causality. Critics have also sought to expose the bias, unjustness and inappropriateness of post-tsunami patterns of donation and programs of aid and recovery. A supplement to this mode of critique is offered in the form of a view of disasters and human vulnerability that hinges on the idea of the self as ‘radically passive’: that is, as inherently receptive to both the stimuli that cause suffering, and to the demands of others who are suffering. All forms of thought – including geography and disaster studies should themselves be seen as ‘vulnerable’ and responsive to the impact to disasters. The idea that every ‘self’ bears the trace of past disasters – and past gifts of others – forms the basis of a vision of bodies and communities as always already ‘fractured’ by disaster – in ways which resist being ‘brought to light’. This offers a way of integrating human and physical geographies through a shared acknowledgement of what is unknowable and absent. It is also suggestive that gratitude might be an appropriate response to a sense of indebtedness to others – for who we are, as much as for what we have done.     

The liminality of training spaces: Places of private/public transitions

This paper draws upon research, conducted for the London West Learning and Skills Council, on the training experiences of women with dependent children. One of the striking revelations of the research, we suggest, is the way in which training spaces are used and perceived by women, which are often at odds with government intentions. To help make sense of women’s use of, and motivation for, training we utilise the concept of ‘liminality’ and the private/public imbrication to explain the ways in which women use, or are discouraged from using, training spaces. Further, how the varied and multiple uses women in our research have put training to in their own lives has encouraged us to rethink the relationship between the private and the public more generally. In the light of this, we suggest that training and the places in which training take place, have been neglected processes and spaces within feminist geography and might usefully be explored further to add to an extensive literature on women’s caring and domestic roles and their role in the paid workplace.     

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.     

‘Bringing government to the people’: women, local governance and community participation in South Africa

This paper considers the ongoing political transformations in South Africa in the context of debates about good governance and participatory democracy. It first appraises the current transformations of local government in South Africa, focusing specifically on relationships between gender equality and citizenship on the one hand, and local government policy, legislation, and community participation on the other, and then explores meanings of participation and how they inform approaches towards local socio-economic development. The findings of primary research conducted with civil society organisations and black women in communities in the Cape Town metropolitan area are explored through three interrelated themes. First, the model of structured participation that is central to South Africa’s democratic transformation is assessed from the perspective of black women. Second, cultures of alienation, both within local governance structures and amongst black women and the extent to which recent restructuring is combating or contributing to these are explored. Third, how participation policies are dealing with conflict within and between target groups are analysed, whether stakeholder group politics obliterate important differences in interests and whether alternative structures might be more effective in terms of women’s participation and empowerment. Finally, the findings are interpreted in relation to theoretical concepts of good governance and participatory democracy, and the potential and problems of realising South Africa’s transformation process toward developmental local government are assessed.     

Acacia exchanges: Wattles, thorn trees, and the study of plant movements

Plants are frequently moved around the world, creating new regional landscapes and environmental imaginaries. Building on previous work in environmental history and geography, we develop a three-part approach to analyzing plant movements and apply it to trees from the Acacia genus (sens. lat.) exchanged between Australia and the rest of the world. First, we investigate the agents, circuits, and frequencies of acacia movements, including transoceanic transfers, regional diffusion, and ecological dispersal. Second, we trace bundles of knowledge or technology that accompany the acacias, highlighting how they help shape regional biogeographies. Finally, we analyze how different societies, with distinct economies, politics, and environmental sensibilities, receive introduced plants. This approach allows us to see transferred plants as active agents in region-forming processes, and to avoid normative tropes like ‘miracle plants’ or ‘alien invasives’. The highlighted species include Acacia colei, Acacia melanoxylon, Acacia mearnsii, Acacia farnesiana, Acacia nilotica, Acacia mangium, and their close relatives.     

Antinomies of generosity: Moral geographies and post-tsunami aid in Southeast Asia

The Indian Ocean Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 generated a wave of private donations from Western countries - a paradigmatic case of generosity. However, more than a year after, a number of evaluation studies conclude that post-tsunami aid has achieved ambivalent results and that recipients of aid felt excluded from the reconstruction process, reduced to passive observers. This paper argues that there is a link between the abundance of generosity and the practices of aid: the practices of gift giving after the tsunami have developed a humiliating force for those who were at the recipient end of the gift chain, because the marketing of Western generosity by media and aid agencies reinforced those affected by the tsunami as “pure” victims, as “bare life” - passive recipients devoid of their status as fellow citizens on this planet. In a second step, the paper discusses the meta-ethics of these practices of generosity, thinking about the ambivalences inherent in bridging distance in encountering the “distant” other in our aid practices. Various forms of virtue ethics reflect this emphasis on the generous person, while neglecting the perspective of the person in need, and therefore implicitly reproduce those asymmetries of gift giving. In contrast to these conceptions, I want to argue that we need to ground our duty to help distant sufferers in their moral entitlement to be aided. This requires a meta-ethical approach that seeks a combination of a theory of justice with virtue ethics.     

“An oasis for us”: ‘in-between’ spaces of training for people with mental health problems in the Scottish Highlands

Training and Guidance (TAG) units in the Scottish Highlands are sites that people with mental health problems can access for training and learning activities designed to prepare them for (re-)entry into the labour market. These units also perform other, perhaps more intangible, roles in assisting trainees to cope with their mental health problems, thereby offering a supportive setting with therapeutic dimensions (albeit one not explicitly configured as delivering therapy). In this paper we explore the ‘in-between’ quality of the TAG units as spaces that might be said to possess dual economic and social roles. Using primarily qualitative evidence, we investigate both sets of roles, debating the extent to which the economic and social imperatives complement or contradict one another. The paper contributes to critical commentary on how ‘workfare’ initiatives articulate with the experiences and concerns of disabled trainees, the novelty arising in part from centralising the material spaces at the heart of such initiatives.     

Bringing it all back home: The extensification and ‘overflowing’ of work: The case of San Francisco’s new media households

This paper explores the extensification of work—that is the distribution or exporting of work across different spaces/scales and times—and its impact on individual workers and households. We argue that contracting out and the work life balance debates might be developed more usefully within the holistic framework of extensification. The key process that we follow can be described as overflowing. We contrast the universally positive representations of spillovers and embedding that we are familiar with in economic geographies with the more negatively characterised overflowing of work into and out of the household. The paper is built around a case study of those involved in the new media industry in San Francisco: households, workers and companies.     

Socio-cultural dimensions of climate change: charting the terrain

We have reached a crucial turning point in debates around climate change. A well established scientific consensus regarding the physical causes, dynamics, and at least many likely implications of anthropogenic climate change has thus far failed to result in any substantial movement towards mitigation. For many, then, the most urgent questions regarding climate change are now socio-cultural ones, such as: how do people come to hold and act on certain beliefs regarding environmental conditions and processes; how do institutional forms and histories shape and constrain the views and options of various sorts of actors; and what are relationships among fossil fuels, climate change, and the historical geographies and future trajectories of capitalism? Far from being simpler than physical and life science questions, these social science questions introduce entirely new sorts of actors, dynamics, and methodological challenges into this already complex and dynamic domain. This special issue takes up these topics. In this essay, we chart some of the major contours of contemporary social science thinking regarding climate change and introduce the articles in the special issue. We begin by examining work, from political science and scholarship on the commons, that foregrounds questions of sovereignty, territoriality, and cooperation with respect to environmental governance. Then we examine work from neoclassical economics and radical political economy, which frame climate change in terms of externalities, or contradiction and crisis, respectively. Finally, we examine the rapidly proliferating work exploring how individuals think and feel about these issues, emphasizing concepts of risk, communication, and governmentality.