Russia's Far East: A Region at Risk

Abstract

In this article I ask to what extent geographers can draw on psychoanalytic theory when examining interview data. I consider Freud's theory of the mind and its unconscious processes to ask how bringing the unconscious to bear on identity studies potentially impacts qualitative research on subjectivity and identification. Existing geographic debate on psychoanalytic theory and methods provides an organizing framework for my argument. Although the article advocates an ontology of the psychoanalytic subject, I suggest that researchers must avoid psychoanalyzing research subjects. This distinction limits the ways in which scholars can “read” personal narratives for unconscious processes.

     

Interviewing Enjoyment,or the Limits of Discourse

This article addresses how psychoanalytic methodologies can be used to conduct and analyze semistructured interviews. Drawing on my work as a research assistant during the summer of 2006, I discuss the process of interviewing soccer fans who attended televised broadcasts of the FIFA World Cup soccer matches in cafés in Vancouver, British Columbia. The research examined the emotional geographies of nationalism and consumption using the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment. Reflecting on the intersubjective and embodied dimensions of the interview process, this article discusses the difficulties of capturing and conveying interviewees' enjoyment. Specifically, I explore how enjoyment, which is partially extradiscursive, disappears when articulated and represented through speech. I assert that psychoanalytic attempts to methodologically grasp enjoyment must be attentive to not only how subjects represent their enjoyment through discourse but also to their tears, ecstatic chanting, and celebration; that is, to the enactment of enjoyment itself.     

Traversing Fantasies,Activating Desires: Economic Geography,Activist Research,and Psychoanalytic Methodology

In this article I recount the ways that key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—the relationship between language and desire, fantasy and subject formation, ethics and the traversal of fantasy—have enabled a novel methodological approach to activist research. Psychoanalysis allows us to recast research as a process of encountering and traversing fantasies, which is simultaneously a process of engendering new representations, desires, subjectivities, and societies.     

Conceptualizing Scale in the Science of Broadening Participation of Underrepresented Groups in Higher Education

The Association of American Geographers Catalyzing Research on the Geographies of Broadening Participation Creative Scholarly Retreat explored ways in which geographers can advance approaches to broadening participation of underrepresented groups in higher education and the scientific workforce. Conversations during the retreat revealed the need for theoretical models to guide research and policy development. In this article, I ask how the geographic concept of scale can inform the problem of broadening participation of underrepresented groups in higher education. First, I explain how the concept of scale can drive future research using the literature within geography. Next, I propose the situational matrix as an analytical schema using the concept of scale. I then analyze various scales first as ordering devices and then as politically produced entities in conversations about underrepresentation in higher education. I conclude by arguing that identifying the scales that are in operation and then figuring out ways in which they function simultaneously and even in mutually contradictory ways will push the project of broadening participation forward.     

Locating the Melody of the Drives

Psychoanalysis has profoundly influenced those social theories that inform qualitative methodology in human geography. Yet many geographers are skeptical about the value and viability of psychoanalytic methodology because of its alleged reductionist causal explanations and relativistic interpretations of data. Drawing on the work of Slavoj ?i?ek, which affirms Jacques Lacan's undermining of the dualism of causality versus sense, this article illustrates the potential value of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a qualitative methodology in geography. Using a methodological case study from my research on Jamaican tourism, I illustrate how we can locate a Lacanian understanding of the drives in the interactions between tourists and hotel workers. In so doing, the article provides new insights into the enduring allures of tourism's commodity-form by focusing on how the object petit a—a chimerical object that incites desire and an unattainable object that the drives encircle—takes place in customer service and entertainment activities.     

Intimate Distance: The Unconscious Dimensions of the Rapport Between Researcher and Researched

To explore how psychoanalysis might contribute to the methodology of human geography, this article returns to Freud's experiences of psycho-logical analysis before he develops psychoanalysis as a distinct understanding of the mind, identity formation, and subjectivity. Going back over the early history of psychoanalysis, Freud's psychoanalysis can be seen as an attempt to solve a set of problems inherent in late nineteenth-century psycho-logical analysis. Thus, it is possible to cast his methodological solutions in a new light. In particular, this article explores the problems associated with the unconscious rapport that developed in the therapeutic use of hypnotism in the cure of hysterical symptoms, for both doctor and patient. Freud's techniques can be seen as a way to produce an appropriate detachment—or intimate distance—between himself and his clients. This intimate distance is instructive. As a corrective to certain trajectories within human geography, this article identifies five methodological propositions that might inform future research.     

Back to Revolutionary Theory Through Racialized Poverty: The McGee Family's Utopian Struggle for Milwaukee∗

In this article, I consider possible political action that can reverse deepening racialized poverty in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At its core, this article uses the efforts of the McGee family, an important activist family spanning three generations within Milwaukee, to offer insights into conceptualizing alternative strategies for confronting racialized poverty in Milwaukee. I also use the McGees's story to reconsider the ways geographers might generate revolutionary theory. The article is based on more than thirty interviews and several focus groups with a mixed array of people related to a broad temporal, spatial, and political research project on poverty, race, and inequality within Milwaukee.     

The Cognitive Load of Geographic Information

Multimedia presentations that combine verbal and visual information are increasingly becoming important methods for communicating geographic information. This article discusses literature related to cognitive load theory (CLT) and offers ideas on how this theory might be used for geography education and research. By considering the limitations of the human mind, CLT offers geographers a way to assess critical components of the spatial learning processes. Methods for measuring cognitive load and reducing overloads are discussed within a map context. It is argued that managing the cognitive load experienced by learners is the key to representing geographic information.     

湿地水文过程与植被响应研究进展与案例分析

生态水文学是20世纪90年代兴起的一门研究生态过程和生态格局水文机制的新学科。湖泊湿地作为中国5大类天然湿地类型之一,湖泊湿地生态水文学的研究业已成为生态水文学的研究的一个重要对象和分支,其核心在于研究湖泊湿地生态系统中多时空尺度的水文与生物格局、过程的耦合特征及其相互作用。论文首先概述了湖泊湿地生态水文学的研究进展,包括其基本理论,内涵、外延及其主要研究内容;凝练了湖泊湿地生态水文学研究的方法体系、思路及框架;针对目前湖泊湿地生态水文学研究中存在的问题及薄弱环节,提出了湖泊湿地生态水文学未来研究的发展趋势和亟需加强研究的重点方向。在此基础上,以长江中游的典型通江湖泊湿地——鄱阳湖湿地为例,通过开展的湖泊湿地生态水文过程与模拟研究的典型案例,阐述了鄱阳湖湖泊湿地生态水文过程的变化及其植被响应研究的最新进展和研究成果。论文对于构建涵盖湖泊湿地水资源、湖泊湿地生态景观格局与流域管理、湖泊湿地生物多样性保育以及湿地资源可持续利用与生态管理等方向在内的战略研究体系,完善湿地生态水文研究与流域生态与管理的技术支撑体系具有重要的指导意义和实践价值。     

A critique of the socio-spatial debate and the publicness of urban space

Research on urban processes under capitalism and the resulting transformations of urban space is caught in a socio-spatial dualistic debate, which neglects the continuum and relativities of space. The author aims to extend this debate through an in-depth review and critique of the main perspectives on socio-spatial relations. He argues that in capitalist urban processes urban space plays a dual role as both the public sphere and arena of capital accumulation. However, importantly, this dual role has led to the multidimensional nature of the publicness of space which, in turn, collaboratively results in increasingly blurred boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in cities. To grapple with the new features of urban space for theory and empirical research, the article offers an alternative property rights approach. Rather than treating space as monolithic, the proposed property rights approach puts the case for analysing space as a continuum. On this basis, the author discusses how that approach can be used for empirical research.     

Narratives of Safety on Social Media: The Case of #mysafetyselfie

This article draws on the case of #mysafetyselfie as an example of how social media can be used to highlight the social and spatial factors affecting women's experience with safety. In particular, I consider the ways in which media technology mediates embodied practice through an examination of the selfie as a form of relational place making. In the first section, I situate #mysafetyselfie as a node along a continuum of sociospatial work by Jay Pitter—the project's initiator—stemming from her personal and professional engagement with safety. I then draw from mobile interface theory to argue for the selfie as a practice of embodied implacement, which situates experience as contextually informed. In the next section, I conduct a close reading of three safety selfies from the project, in which safety is framed by the subject in intelligent and creative ways. I conclude by reflecting on the outcomes of #mysafetyselfie and the ethical responsibility of curating stories both offline and online.     

On feminism and feminist allies in knowledge production in urban geography

In this response to Ananya Roy’s paper, I ask: who are the allies of feminist knowledge production about the urban? To explore this question, I specifically ask what feminist scholars may find of use in two books, namely Arrival Cities by Doug Saunders and Implosions/Explosions edited by Neil Brenner, that are representative of two major discourses on the urban, respectively, the “Urban Age” and planetary urbanization, currently favored by policy bodies and (some) academics. Their limited engagement with politics leads me to conclude with a call for a feminist mode of situated knowledge production to engage with (the limits of) urban theory and the urban as a site of praxis.     

区域地理系统单元等级圆锥建模

本文基于S.Beer空间分辨率圆锥,应用等级体系理论,结合地理学有关研究成果,探讨建立一种具有尺度单元结构性质的区域地理系统模型———区域地理系统单元等级圆锥。研究认为,区域地理系统单元等级圆锥由地理最小结构单元、地理基本功能单元、地理景观单元、地理景观类型单元与地理景观类型组合单元组成,它们分别实现地理学“最小空间粒度划分”、“基本空间过程分析”、“空间过程共轭分析”、“类型划分”与“类型间相互作用”的研究方法,分别体现地理学“还原分析”、“过程分析”“整体分析”、“类型分析”与“综合分析”的研究思想。     

Urban policy mobilities,argumentation and the case of the model city

In recent years urban geographers have devoted considerable attention to the dynamics of policy mobility. After reviewing the progress achieved in this literature, in this article I offer two distinctive contributions. First, I draw on the “argumentative turn” in policy studies and related fields in order to develop an alternative conceptualization of urban policy mobility that pays greater attention to its discursive and argumentative aspects. I thus reassert the significance of democratic processes in the negotiation of urban policy. Second, I outline an alternative methodology for the study of urban policy mobility, focusing on the analysis of argumentation. I apply this methodology to historical instances of urban policy mobilities arising from a recent research project that aimed to historicize the phenomenon of the “model city,” defined as the local deployment of another city’s experience as an argumentative resource supporting particular policy claims.     

The Biogeography of Geographers: A Content Visualization of Journal Publications

Biogeographers choose to align their scholarship within different domains, from ecological or historical biogeography, to landscape ecology, macroecology, or the analytical perspective initiated with the theory of island biogeography. Biogeography is also practiced under the umbrella of geography, as geographical biogeography. Using the ISI Web of Science journal article database, I performed content visualizations of research authored by those biogeographers with an identity or interest aligned with geography. Content affinities with ecological biogeography were strong. However, physical geography materialized as the core of biogeographical inquiry for geographers based upon the central location of physical geography within these visualizations, and upon the ranking of journals where these geographers publish. I argue that the systems legacy of physical geography provides geographical biogeographers with an identity and an invitation to connect with the field of scholars advancing the study of complex systems.     

Mapping Communities: Geographic and Interdisciplinary Community-Based Learning and Research

This article discusses the ways in which the impacts of “geographic” community-based learning and research (CBLR) transcend the boundaries of the discipline of geography and also contribute to the practice and theory of civic engagement. I consider mapping and spatial thinking as a unique method for encouraging faculty, students, and community to engage in community partnerships. Drawing from several years of experience of teaching a CBLR course in an interdisciplinary setting, I highlight the role of geography in promoting community engagement. Geographic perspectives and methods can transform outreach or service models of community engagement into meaningful community partnerships that build and sustain a reciprocal relationship between university and community. I articulate three levels of geographic intervention that geographers need to attend to: theoretical, pedagogical, and institutional interventions on civic engagement.     

创新型城市研究的理论演进与反思

通过对创新型城市研究的理论性追溯及其主要研究内容回顾,梳理出创新型城市研究的发展演进脉络。着重反思了当前创新型城市研究方面存在的薄弱环节,认为其突出表现为创新型城市研究的指标化困境以及对于城市创新外生力量源泉关注的不足,并明确指出,个性化的城市创新路径选择以及有效利用国际创新资源是未来创新型城市研究与实践的主要突破方向。     

地理学视角的干旱传播概念、特征与影响因素研究进展

从地理学视角理解干旱传播时空维概念内涵,沿着“概念界定—特征量化—过程描述”这条主线全面揭示干旱传播特征、模式与机制及其研究现状,对于深刻理解干旱发展始终全过程中干旱演变过程与驱动因素具有重要的理论意义。论文首先从地理学时空完备性进行干旱传播概念界定;分析干旱传播的时空两维特征并归纳其研究思路与方法;探究干旱传播的主要影响因素;并归纳出基于“特征—过程—机制”的干旱传播研究框架与展望。通过梳理国内外文献并综述表明,干旱传播具有时空维概念与特征,其主要受下垫面因素(水系特征)、气候变化与人类活动(土地利用行为)控制。目前,干旱传播主要集中于干旱传播时间维度上的滞后性特征及传播概率研究,在探索其空间维度特征、演绎干旱传播过程并揭示其驱动机制方面尚有不足。揭示气象干旱、水文干旱、农业干旱至社会经济干旱形成与演变的过程机制和规律是干旱研究的重要内容,是制定高效的御旱抗旱措施的首要前提,从地理学视角揭示干旱传播概念内涵并探究其特征与过程机制应是干旱研究的题中要义。     

广州城市流浪乞讨者的空间管治与日常生活实践

以广州流浪乞讨者为研究对象,通过深度访谈等质性研究方法,解读针对流浪乞讨者的空间管治政策与手段,分析流浪乞讨者的日常生活实践与生境协商。研究发现：在地方城市政策对流动性与公共秩序限制的双重压力下,在流浪乞讨者的日常生活实践中,不仅有针对管治行动者而刻意为之的特殊营建,亦有基于程式化生活流程对自我身份认同的重塑与真情实感的展演。地方政府基于空间目标的救助与真实存在的日常生活实践存在着一种张力。研究关注了城市边缘群体日常生活对地理意义的主动塑造过程,对全面理解并规范管理中国城市流浪乞讨现象具有借鉴意义。     

Nonprofit Foundations and Grassroots Organizing: Reshaping Urban Governance

Collaborative urban governance has increased the role of community organizations in local decision-making processes. These organizations need financial resources in order to participate in urban governance. In this article, I examine the impact of foundation grants on the relationships and agendas of four community organizations in one neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Drawing on interviews, observations of organizations, and archival research, I demonstrate that in the 1990s, nonprofit foundations had a significant impact on the formation of new organizations and on their agendas in the neighborhood. Foundations are, therefore, an important player in urban governance, shaping a “neighborhood policy regime.”