Vital Statistics∗

This article questions the idea that quantitative methods, in particular the analysis of social statistics, is at odds with critical approaches to geography. It argues that numbers-based research is vital to highlight social injustice and oppression and that quantitative research can meet the requirements of critical geography to be reflexive, politically conscious, and activist. The article highlights two issues of pressing interest for research and activism by critically inspired quantitative researchers. First, there should be vigilance about the retrenchment of data collection and releases by the state, which will end up obscuring the ability to see social inequalities. Second, there should be a vigorous challenge to the political and judicial undermining of the results of statistical sampling and inference. These are vital tools for estimating hard-to-count populations and inferring inequalities between groups. The article gives examples of where these estimation issues are critical, which include civilian deaths in Iraq, counting minority populations in the United States, and the detection and remediation of structural racism.     

Encountering a multidimensional assemblage: The case of Norwegian corporate social responsibility activities in Indonesia

A vociferous debate on socio-spatial formations is ongoing between those advocating a geography of scales and those advocating flat ontologies and assemblages, yet a middle ground has not been properly addressed. The author argues for an empirically driven, multidimensional assemblage approach whereby the processes constituting an assemblage and the different socio-spatial organisation of heterogeneous entities form the analytical basis for geographical analyses of particular empirical events. He shows how Norwegian companies in Indonesia encounter different stakeholders constituting a multidimensional (situated, scaled, and networked) ‘assemblage of national interests’ with multitudinous motivations and drivers but quite specific converged influence. He examines the territorialising forces employed during such encounters, the de-territorialising forces challenging the assemblage, and how the evolution of the ‘assemblage of national interests’ resulted in 2012 in the world's first law on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has more or less forced Norwegian companies to make social investments in local communities within a CRS framing. The findings are that assemblages are scaled and networked, but also uncoordinated and ‘chaotic’. Norwegian companies in Indonesia are subject to a joint but dispersed, multidimensional assemblage of national interest, where stakeholders on different scales, with multiple motivations, mobilise to persuade them to run social investment programmes.     

A Post-Cold War Geography of Forced Migration in Kenya and Somalia

Drawing on recent research in the Horn of Africa, emerging patterns of managing forced migration in the post-Cold War landscape are identified and analyzed. While camps continue to house refugees, the meaning and value of ‘refugee’ have changed dramatically since the Cold War. Efforts to prevent people from crossing political borders to seek safety are increasing, giving rise to a new set of safe spaces. These new spaces are expressions of a distinct geopolitical discourse and take the names ‘UN protectedarea’, ‘preventive zone’, and ‘safe haven’. Their significance as a challenge to state-centric geopolitics both within conflict zones and as refugee camps is explored in the Kenya-Somalia context.     

A Post-Cold War Geography of Forced Migration in Kenya and Somalia

Drawing on recent research in the Horn of Africa, emerging patterns of managing forced migration in the post-Cold War landscape are identified and analyzed. While camps continue to house refugees, the meaning and value of ‘refugee’ have changed dramatically since the Cold War. Efforts to prevent people from crossing political borders to seek safety are increasing, giving rise to a new set of safe spaces. These new spaces are expressions of a distinct geopolitical discourse and take the names ‘UN protectedarea’, ‘preventive zone’, and ‘safe haven’. Their significance as a challenge to state-centric geopolitics both within conflict zones and as refugee camps is explored in the Kenya-Somalia context.     

Divergent responses to urban transformation projects in Turkey: common sense and state affinity in community mobilization

This article examines the role of state affinity in community struggles against authoritarian, neoliberal urban transformation projects (UTPs) in Turkey. It argues that as neoliberal hegemonic devices, UTPs produce contentious political spaces within which communities negotiate, resist, or comply with state-imposed, pro-market rationales (i.e. common sense). As an alternative to depictions of subaltern communities in mobilization as totally ‘co-opted‘ or ‘victimized‘ in neoliberal renewal or as ’unwilling’ or ’unable’ to produce a collective rights identity, the analysis offers a more complicated picture of community resistance, inactivity, and co-optation. To do this, it adopts a combination of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of production of space and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. The analysis is based on the findings from original ethnographic research on two ethnically distinct working-class neighborhoods under UTP threat in Gebze, a satellite city of Istanbul. It compares communities’ affinity with the state-sponsored ideologies (Sunni-Turkish nationalism, neoliberalism) by looking at their ethnic identities and social histories.     

Spatial (re)organization and places of the Brao in southern Laos and northeastern Cambodia

Initiatives designed to bring about social and spatial change, whether implemented by governments, international agencies, nongovernment organizations or private companies, invariably have an impact on how people perceive ‘places’– defined as spaces with particular meanings. In southern Laos and northeastern Cambodia the ethnic Brao peoples are facing rapid social and spatial changes as a result of a wide range of initiatives, many of which are associated with ‘development’. Case studies on internal resettlement from the uplands to the lowlands, the redesigning of living spaces, and the implications of protected national park establishment and management are discussed in relation to a four‐point typology of what is required to constitute place. The role of social and spatial (re)organization on place amongst the Brao is considered, including how peoples' conceptions of place are being altered and how the Brao are variously responding to efforts to (re)organize them and reconstitute their places.     

Freshwater geographies: Experimenting with knowing and doing geography differently

The fair and effective governance of freshwater is an increasingly prominent issue in New Zealand. Emerging from a complex of cultural, economic and biophysical narratives, freshwater geographies are multiple, varied and increasingly acknowledged as worthy of interdisciplinary scrutiny. In this commentary, we reflect on a series of generative spaces that we – as group of postgraduate geographers (plus supporting staff) – created to engage with the multiplicity of freshwater meanings both within and beyond the academy. Through this evolving epistemic‐political project, we significantly reframed our own understandings about what freshwater ‘is’ and how it ought to be governed. By pursuing a deeper understanding of how the world gets made, we expand our ability to know and make it differently.     

In-the-field politics: Multiple voices of outworkers and researcher

In this paper I reflect on some key methodological tensions that emerged during my PhD research. The research critically analyses the political struggles of outworking¹ women from Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian backgrounds in Sydney, Australia, for minimum wages and a monitoring of ethical networks in the clothing industry from 1997 to 2002. Rather than present 'key findings' in this paper I instead reveal how I began to think more critically and in less absolute ways about reading the multiple voices of outworkers, NGO workers and my own voice as researcher, activist and English teacher. I drew insights from Bakhtin's dialogism for thinking about research as shaped by sets of conversations. In this paper I reflect on several 'in-the-field' interactions: organising interviews, interviewing outworkers through an interpreter, storytelling in a rights-based English class setting, and how I and other participants represented outworking women in different forums. Dialogism required I take seriously the concept that knowledges are socially constructed in very particular contexts and this led to a rejection of my earlier notion of a singular authentic voice for outworking women or for me as researcher.     

Is being in work good for wellbeing? Work Integration Social Enterprises in regional Australia

ABSTRACT

Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISE) offer supported work environments for people experiencing disadvantage, including people with disability. This paper reflects on a research project that is mapping the ways in which social enterprises in regional Australian cities produce wellbeing for their employees. Through supported employment programs, these organisations are transforming individual lives, helping to build a sense of self-worth and purpose, and increase individuals’ social skills and capacities. Many of the perceived benefits are associated with a belief in the innate good of paid work. Based upon interviews with employees in the social enterprises, it is apparent that the hopes attached to providing ‘meaningful work’ are considerable. At the same time social enterprises are taking on social responsibilities that were once provided by the state, while also selling their services as employers of disabled and disadvantaged members of society and maintaining commercial viability of the enterprise. Using feminist political economy alongside discussion of the distributive economy, this paper explores how contemporary policy conditions, productivist biases and normative discourses about the value of wage work inflect the forms of wellbeing that can be experienced by WISE workers.     

西方乡村性研究进展

在梳理20世纪60年代以来乡村性研究的社会、学术背景的基础上,聚焦于乡村性的社会建构流派及其对中国乡村转型与乡村地理研究的启示。社会建构流派将乡村性看作是社会、文化建构的过程与产物而非先存的事实,重点关注乡村转型过程中的权力关系与差异性。由描述性流派、乡土流派向社会建构流派的过渡可以看作是从关注乡村性物质层面转向想象层面,由追求乡村性的本体、核心机制向探索乡村性的认识论问题,也就是从追求“乡村性是什么”到研究“不同社会群体如何认识乡村性”“不同社会群体多样化的乡村性话语和体验”。而目前的中国乡村性研究主要关注乡村性指标及其模型建构,相关研究对于各级政府全面地了解现存的乡村问题并合理地制定乡村发展、复兴政策规划具有重要的实践意义。在西方乡村研究中,乡村性指标由于暗含线性发展观、无法解读乡村变迁的机制和过程而饱受批判。在中国乡村急剧变迁的今天,现代化乡村发展话语占据着主导地位,而在这一过程中不公平的权力关系和霸权话语对部分农村、农民的边缘化基本没有提及。在这种社会与学术背景下,乡村性社会建构流派对于解构乡村性主导话语、揭示乡村变迁过程中的权力关系及不同社会群体间利益冲突与协商具有重要意义。     

Do social meanings matter? How and how much social meanings influence everyday transport practices?

We live among a throng of social meanings. In a transport context, cars are described as symbols of status, bicycles as the toys of Middle Aged Men in Lycra, and buses as ‘loser cruisers’. This study asks ‘Do these social meanings matter?’ Do they influence people's transport practices, and if so, how and how much? The participants in this research reported that social meanings had widespread influences, particularly on their transport mode choices, vehicle choices, and travel performances. This research has implications for the ways that social meanings are incorporated into transport policy and future transport research.     

Exploring space–time paths in physical and social closeness spaces: a space–time GIS approach

Exploring the evolution of people’s social interactions along with their changing physical locations can help to achieve a better understanding of the processes that generate the relationships between physical distance and social interactions, which can benefit broad fields of study related to social networks. However, few studies have examined the evolving relationships between physical movements and social closeness evolution. This is partially related to the shortage of longitudinal data in both physical locations and social interactions and the lack of an exploratory analysis environment capable of effectively investigating such a process over space and time. With the increasing availability of sociospatiotemporal data in recent years, it is now feasible to examine the relationships between physical separation and social interactions at the individual level in a space–time context. This research was intended to offer a spatiotemporal exploratory analysis approach to address this challenge. The first step was to propose the concept of a social closeness space–time path, which is an extension of the space–time path concept in time geography, to represent evolving human relationships in a social closeness space. A space–time geographical information system (GIS) prototype was then designed to support the representation and analysis of space–time paths in both physical and social closeness spaces. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed concept and design in gaining insight into the impact of physical migration on online social closeness was demonstrated through an empirical study. The contributions of this study include an extension of the time–geographic framework from physical space to social closeness space, the development of a multirepresentation approach in a GIS to integrate an individual’s space–time paths in both physical and social closeness spaces, and an exploratory analysis of the evolving relationships between physical separation and social closeness over time.     

“噪”起来：广州音乐现场的文化地理研究

将广州的音乐现场看作一个承载制造“噪音”的场所,以6个现场音乐酒吧为具体案例,通过定性分析的方法探讨音乐现场如何连结不同人和不同的地方,以及如何被建构成一个“动态”的空间和“越轨”的地方。研究结果表明：音乐现场作为一种动态的物质文化空间,由经营者、组织者、音乐人和乐迷通过社会实践共同建构而成,成为所有音乐演出参与者之间的关系及其与不同地理尺度之间关系的节点;音乐现场作为一个“越轨”的地方,将音乐现场的“局内人”和“局外人”区分。上述结论回应和丰富了现有音乐地理研究的内容和成果,并对中国超越“看的方式”进行文化地理研究提供了新的切入点。     

Integrating social network data into GISystems

Today, online social media outlets provide new and plentiful sources of data on social networks (SNs) and location-based social networks (LBSNs), i.e., geolocated evidence of connections between individuals. While SNs have been used to show how the magnitude of social connectivity decreases with distance, there are few examples of how to include SNs as layers in a GISystem. If SNs, and thus, interpersonal relationships, could be analyzed in a geographic information system (GIS) setting, we could better model how humans socialize, share information, and form social groups within the complex geographic landscape.

Our goal is to facilitate a guide for analyzing SNs (as derived from online social media, telecommunications, surveys, etc.) within geographic space by combining the mature fields of social network analysis (SNA) and GISystems. First, we describe why modeling socialization in geographic space is essential for understanding human behavior. We then outline best practices and techniques for embedding SN nodes and edges in GISystems by introducing terms like ‘social flow’ and ‘anthrospace’, and categorizations for data and spatial aggregation types. Finally, we explore case study vignettes of SNA within GISystems from diverse regions located in Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States, using concepts such as geolocated dyads, ego–alter relationships, node feature roles, modularity, and network transitivity.     

Gleaning from Gluttony: an Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste

As part of the global ‘rights to the city’ movement and mounting concern over food waste, results are presented here of an ethnographic study of young people in Australia who choose to glean food from supermarket ‘dumpster bins’ and open markets primarily for political reasons. These youth form part of an international ‘freegan’ subculture: the belief in ‘minimising impact on the environment by consuming food that has literally been thrown away’ (Macmillan English Dictionary Online 2002). The study explores the emergence of two related subcultures: ‘Dumpster Diving’ (the act of procuring food from a supermarket dumpster bin for individual consumption) and ‘Food Not Bombs’ (a global-spanning group who collect left-over food from markets to cook and serve to people on the street). The analysis focuses on the ethics embedded within their alternative consumption diets. These findings are analysed in terms of the creation of their alternative identities performed on temporal–spatial terrains, exemplifying the role of the contemporary activist's use of space, place and culture in relation to social issues.     

Dark side of the planet: hidden dimensions of urban agglomeration

ABSTRACT

This intervention probes the hidden, political dimensions of planetary urbanization. Drawing on political theory, it approaches its analysis through the analytic of ‘the political,’ the dimension in which antagonism performs a constitutive function in the social order. In doing so the intervention throws into relief the ways in which group-based differentiation, conflict, and exclusion establish the conditions of possibility for ongoing transformations of urban agglomeration. It then develops a case for further exploring intersections of the political and capitalist agglomeration to generate new knowledge about current mutations in urban economies of space.     

消费空间研究关注点的转变及其意义——兼论西方消费地理研究动态

针对现实中消费现象和消费研究日益显著现象，小文从传统消费地理研究思维定势和方法着手，疏理西方消费空间研究关注点的转变趋势：①包罗万象的消费研究对象和内容；②传统与现代新型多种消费空间类型的探讨；③对消费空间主体性与社会性的关注；④跨尺度空间与商品移动轨迹的新视角；⑤消费内涵的延伸。西方地理学家对消费的研究方法体现为传统地学区域和空间研究视角优势的发挥，以及批判性地继承大量的社会学理论和方法。西方地理学家对社会科学做出的贡献主要如下：①揭示消费空间不平衡关系和社会意义；②强调消费、消费者与消费空间的非均一、异质、流动特征，指出以消费者类型开展研究的弊端，质疑历史分析研究和消费阶段划分方法；③采用情景方法对主体与空间关系研究，揭示出多种消费空间存在的社会政治意义；④继承马克思政治经济学将生产和消费空间联系起来的研究方法，同时指出阶级视角对消费者多种差异性的忽视；⑤基于商品链、供给系统、商品循环和行动者网络等方法和学说的差异性视角及其政治立场，强调学说，尤其道德因素对社会实践的影响。     

Transnational Migration and the Gender Politics of Scale: Indonesian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia

Recent research has begun to explore the dynamics of transnational migration from a feminist perspective, and studies of migrant domestic workers have played a prominent role in pushing forward this work. Emerging simultaneously, but largely separately, are explicit debates within geography about the politics of scale, the social construction of scale, and the gender dimensions of scale. This article develops an analysis of the gender politics of the production of scale, specifically, the ‘transnationalisation’ of Indonesian activist approaches to overseas migrant domestic workers' issues. Based on fieldwork in an Indonesian community in West Java that has recently become a sending area for migrants to Saudi Arabia and interviews with activists representing Indonesian migrant women, the article examines the various gender‐specific ways in which migrant women's rights activists construct and deploy the scales of the body, the nation and the transnational. It argues that activist approaches to migrant domestic workers' rights and the ways in which activists mobilise migrant women's narratives represent sophisticated feminist theoretical approaches to scale. By identifying and exploring the scale theory embedded in activist strategies, the analysis highlights the imbrication of feminist theory with practice, and underscores activists' agency in producing the meanings of specific scales. In so doing, the article is aimed more broadly at elaborating the ambivalent relationship between feminist activism/theory and transnationalism.     

Constructing Risk: multi-scale change,livelihoods and vulnerability in the Mekong Delta,Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Change has been at the heart of the livelihoods concept since its inception, allowing for a clear focus on how people perceive, respond to and experience risk. The ardent focus on ‘the local’ within livelihoods work, both in research and programmatic terms, has to some extent overshadowed attention on the role of wider-scale political economic and environmental processes in generating change and determining responses to change. Livelihoods in the Mekong Delta have never been ‘local’, having long been historically embedded in international, regional and national economic, political and environmental transformations. Drivers of change at these wider scales have intensified, complicating local responses to change, whether through economic, social or political means. A more nuanced appreciation of how scaled relations can be supported is required to better anticipate and respond to the political ecology of risk.     

The Politics of AIDS Surveillance

This paper examines the social construction of official HIV/AIDS surveillance data in San Francisco and the implications of this research for understanding the past and future trajectories of the epidemic in the United States. I employ a methodology of social constructivism in an analysis of the historical evolution of the epidemic and a critique of its quantitative representation by public health officials. I argue that medical geographers have erroneously interpreted AIDS surveillance data as evidence for an exponential growth in AIDS cases during the past 17 years, neglecting to critically explore the multiple and extensive revisions in the definition of the disease (in 1982, 1985, 1987, 1993) by which patients have been reported over time. In contrast, social constructivism exemplifies a method for elucidating the sociopolitical interests of public health institutions and community activists which underlie the constant metamorphosis of the subjects (e.g., patients) and object (e.g., ‘AIDS’) comprising this epidemic.