Using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick to Explore Geographic Themes

Abstract

The classic American novel, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, can be used in geography and English classes at the high school and college levels to explore five themes that have a geographic component or are of interest to geography students: (1) the journey, (2) human/ environment interactions, (3) social relationships in space, (4) acquiring knowledge, and (5) ambiguities and their resolution. Included are detailed discussions of the themes with specific references to critical literature and passages in the novel, suggestions for background reading, and suggestions for classroom discussions and assignments.     

Cities and Urban Land Use in Advanced Placement Human Geography

Abstract

This article examines key topics and concepts in the cities and urban land use section of the Advanced Placement human geography course. Among the topics discussed are definitions of urbanism, the origin and evolution of cities, functional character of contemporary cities, the built environment and social space, and responses to urban growth.     

(Hetero)sexing Space: Gay Men and “Straight” Space in Adelaide,South Australia

This paper examines gay men's perceptions and experiences of everyday places in Adelaide, South Australia. It illustrates the nature of social space as a heterosexual artifact. The paper also outlines ways in which gay men may contribute to the heterosexualization of space. Many gay men monitor the public and private roles they play for fear of the consequences of “discovery,” and through self-policing and restricted behaviors they may contribute to the spatial supremacy of heterosexuality. Acts of nondisclosure and the adoption of straight sexual facades constrain gay men's social and spatial lives.     

George J. Miller award for Distinguished Service

Abstract

With this paper, I elaborate the use of the movies American History X and Mi Familia in classroom settings to highlight issues of ethnicity and the social construction of identity through families and communities. Taken together, these movies draw attention to racial geographies of Los Angeles but in very different ways. I contrast the ways they involve familial reactions to geographies of exclusion and betrayal, and how racial space is structured through larger community and institutional relations. I speak to how these issues are broached in a large introductory, interdisciplinary class.     

An Approach to Field Experience in Eighth Grade Geography

Abstract

Man, the social animal, has organized his cities for particular social objectives. His urban social communications take place within a spatially and socially restrictive network of interpersonal information contact. Viewed in this sense, cities exist to facilitate the social communications or interactions of their population. At the same time, however, diverse social goals and group frictions create barriers to smooth flows of information among urban dwellers. This paper introduces the theme of urban social interaction, outlines the structure of social ties in cities, and surveys two major urban problems relating explicitly to social interaction in the city. The approach here is to bring geographical concepts and knowledge to bear on problems of social interaction in urban space. It is hoped that greater insight by teachers and students into the social problems of cities is achieved by an improved understanding of the geography of social communications.     

Urban resilience for whom,what, when,where, and why?

ABSTRACT

In academic and policy discourse, the concept of urban resilience is proliferating. Social theorists, especially human geographers, have rightfully criticized that the underlying politics of resilience have been ignored and stress the importance of asking “resilience of what, to what, and for whom?” This paper calls for careful consideration of not just resilience for whom and what, but also where, when, and why. A three-phase process is introduced to enable these “five Ws” to be negotiated collectively and to engender critical reflection on the politics of urban resilience as plans, initiatives, and projects are conceived, discussed, and implemented. Deployed through the hypothetical case of green infrastructure in Los Angeles, the paper concludes by illustrating how resilience planning trade-offs and decisions affect outcomes over space and time, often with significant implications for equity.     

Globalization and the Balkanization of States: The Myth of American Exceptionalism

Abstract

This paper proposes different strategies for teaching social studies in an integrated manner using Main Street as a laboratory. The paper consists of two parts. Part one is devoted to a discussion of the empirical study; the second part focuses on strategies for integrating Main Street into the K through 12 setting. Although data are presented from fifteen smalltown parish Main Streets, Abbeville and Columbia are discussed in detail around Francaviglia's time, space, and image elements. The suggested strategies for integrating Main Street into the curriculum are rooted in K through 12 teacher experiences from three Louisiana Geography Education Alliance (LaGEA) Summer Institutes held in 2001, 2002, and 2003.     

Monuments and their functions in urban public space

ABSTRACT

The aim of the article is to present and discuss functions of public monuments in relation to different dimensions of geographical space. The authors discuss public spaces, monuments, public art, based on a mixed-method approach and an analysis of scientific literature as the main research method. The theoretical discussion is supplemented with the results of Internet searches and an analysis of media supplements, and specific examples are given, including some from Poland. An additional method was autoethnography, which involved an analysis of cultural phenomena based on the authors’ experience. The analysis revealed that monuments were part of public art and thus enriched public spaces in cities. They fulfilled different important functions: artistic, symbolic, commemorative, political, social, religious, marketing, and mixed. Additionally, the monuments reflected the contemporary transformation of ideas and social orders and therefore also reflected contemporary urban debates. They were products of social relations, powers, ideas, identities, and the collective memory reflected in the urban spatial structure of cities. The authors conclude that the examples presented in the demonstrate that monuments perform various functions in urban public spaces. From a spatial perspective, the role of monuments depends on their different impacts on people’s perceptions and interpretations of space.     

The New Star in Perseus

Abstract

Students often ask whether the examples we give as instructors have any relevance to their worlds, to their lives. Too often the answer is no. This paper describes a case that is obviously pertinent to both secondary and university students and their instructors. The legal battle over equality and racial discrimination in the New York City School system presents not simply a rich field for geographical consideration but also a pertinent one. It brings to students and their instructors a complex of economic, legal, and social issues played across a discrete spatial surface. As importantly, it offers a case study exploring the difficulties of both defining and then achieving distributive justice in post-modern environments in a context students and their instructors will recognize as relevant and timely. The discussion that results may be useful in economic, legal, locational, and social geographic instruction.     

Community resilience,natural hazards,and climate change: Is the present a prologue to the future?

ABSTRACT

The nexus of natural hazards, climate change, and community resilience poses both conceptual and methodological challenges. One key consideration is the underlying notion of dynamic change or transformation in the systems that affect community resilience—social systems, natural systems, technological systems—and the degree to which the interdependencies influence who is resilient, to what, where, and to whom. The article examines community resilience from the broad perspective of affluent societies and illustrates the considerable variability in both the temporal and spatial nature of community resilience to natural hazards in the short term, and climate changes in the longer term, especially in more affluent societies. The author finds that, given the rapidity of environmental, social, economic, political, technological, and cultural changes, present circumstances and remedies may not be adequate predictors or precursors of future conditions. She concludes that the challenges associated with community resilience, natural hazards, and climate change require transformational thinking and action if achievements are to be made in terms of significant disaster risk reduction and any semblance of a sustainable future when extreme weather events will be the norm, not the exception.     

Qualitative GIS to Relate Perceptions with Behaviors among Fishers on Risky,Rocky Coasts

This article presents an innovative mixed methodology that integrates qualitative geographic information systes (GIS) methods to expand the examination of space in the context of people’s lived experiences and risk. We emphasize the specific ways in which individuals perceive risk by treating risk as relational. Conceptualizing risk as relational challenges traditional assumptions of risk by rejecting that risk is the combination of physical and social elements. Instead, a relational understanding explores the socioenvironmental interactions that are perceived as hazardous, as they emerge in space. Such claims have long animated risk research, but only recently have methodological advances opened opportunities for relational analyses. Using hazardous coasts as the case, we analyze rock fishers’ risk perceptions and whether those perceptions influence their movement. Analytically, we relate rock fishers’ Global Positioning System movement with participant observations, video, semistructured interviews, and sketch maps anchored to questions focusing on spatial understandings of risk. In doing so, fishers’ perceptions of socioenvironmental stimuli are spatially represented, with sketch mapping as a window into the perception–environment interactions that produce risk. This methodology opens new possibilities for understanding human–environment systems that typically overlook how, where, and for how long risky human–environment interactions are perceived in space, if at all. Key Words: qualitative GIS, relational, risk, risk perception, space.     

Uncertainties in the geographic context of health behaviors: a study of substance users’ exposure to psychosocial stress using GPS data

ABSTRACT

This study examined how contextual areas defined and operationalized differently may lead to different exposure estimates. Substance users’ exposures to environmental stress (in terms of two variables: community social economic status and crime) were assessed from global positioning systems (GPS) data. Participants were 47 outpatients with substance use disorders admitted for methadone maintenance at a research clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. From 35.2 million GPS tracking points, we compared 7 different methods for defining activity space. The different methods yielded different exposure estimates, which would lead to different conclusions in studies using only one method. These results have important implications for future research on the effect of contextual influences on health behaviors and outcomes: whether a study observes any significant influence of an environmental factor on health may depend on what contextual units are used to assess individual exposure.     

Recreating Ocean Space: Recreational Consumption and Representation of the Caribbean Marine Environment

This paper investigates the historical relationship between the development of marine-based tourism and representations of marine space. Over the past 100 years, the Caribbean Sea has been transformed from a transportation surface connecting exotic ports of call into a commodity itself. Imagined by early travelers as a two-dimensional space to be crossed, the Caribbean has became part of a new tropical marine aesthetic, a three-dimensional spectacle to be actively consumed and conserved. These changing representations of the marine environment as a space of consumption have been paralleled by changes in the relationships between marine and terrestrial political economies. As marine-based tourism has intensified, the balance of power among coastal resource users has shifted. The increasingly conflictive consequences of this shift are illustrated by the case of Soufrière in St. Lucia where new uses of marine space have re-configured social and economic relationships. Soufrière's coastal economy has been transformed and its marine space increasingly politicized as competing representations of the sea have been used to assert conflicting claims to resource access. This paper attempts to elucidate the power of these representations by investigating their historical relationship to the changing role of the Caribbean Sea in the international tourism industry.     

The Urban Settlement Patterns of Disadvantaged Migrants

Abstract

Disadvantaged migrants to metropolitan areas are segregated by race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status within the residential areas of central city poverty neighborhoods. Whereas black migrants are generally restricted to ghetto space, regional cultural similarities and feedback in the social communication network are important to the residential location of lower class whites. The urban settlement patterns of a sample of recent disadvantaged white migrants to Indianapolis, Indiana, vary from the clusters of migrants from Appalachia and the South to the more dispersed pattern of migrants from Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, and other metropolitan areas. The residential location of migrants from Appalachia and the South is geographically restricted by cultural constraints, and heavy reliance upon a limited network of friends and relatives in the housing search. However, the sociocultural resources of the Midwest group and the previous urban experience of metropolitan migrants increase the range of housing opportunities in Indianapolis that are available and known to them.     

Discovery of local topics by using latent spatio-temporal relationships in geo-social media

ABSTRACT

Social networks have played a crucial role as information channels for people to understanding their daily lives beyond merely being communication tools. In particular, coupling social networks with geographic location has boosted the worth of social media to not only enable comprehension of the effects of natural phenomena such as global warming and disasters, but also the social patterns of human societies. However, the high rate of social data generation and the large amounts of noisy data makes it difficult to directly apply social media to decision-making processes. This article proposes a new system of analyzing the spatio-temporal patterns of social phenomena in real time and the discovery of local topics based on their latent spatio-temporal relationships. We will first describe a model that represents the local patterns of populations of geo-tagged social media. We will then define a local topic whose keywords share a region in space and time and present a system implementation based on existing open source technologies. We evaluated the model of local topics with several ways of visualization in experiments and demonstrated a certain social pattern from a dataset of daily Twitter streams. The results obtained from experiments revealed certain keywords had a strong spatio-temporal proximity even though they did not occur in the same message.     

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.     

Transformations of the Spatial Hegemony of the Courtyard in Post-Soviet St. Petersburg

Abstract

The courtyard is a space that existed before, during, and now after the Soviet period in Russian urban history. Noting the change in the courtyard's formerly hegemonic position on daily trajectories illustrates both Harvey's and Lefebvre's suggestions for uncovering the way that spaces articulate social values. A particularly revealing case study occurs in the struggle over including courtyards in a Chinese developer's project for a new multi-use district outside St. Petersburg. A brief history of the courtyard in Soviet planning allows subsequent analysis of the ways in which the city administration, the Chinese design team, and Russian planners deployed the courtyard as a spatial code for social meaning in design discussions. Examining the change in function and conceptualization of the courtyard shows how different groups in post-Soviet Russia seek to retain or redeploy concepts of the “collective” as they attempt to remake St. Petersburg as a successful “world” city.     

A Vulnerability Interpretation of the Geography of HIV/AIDS in Ghana, 1986–1995

Ten years after the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) was first reported in Ghana, it continues to spread throughout the country following patterns that are rare in other African countries. HIV is seen in twice as many females as males, more frequently in rural than urban regions, and regions with high rates of polygamy have significantly lower rates. The evidence presented in this paper shows that HIV diffusion patterns probably reflect the spatial distribution and social networks of vulnerable social groups. While information-based campaigns are still necessary in the fight against HIV/AIDS, they fail to enable or empower vulnerable people to protect themselves against infection.     

Un Proceso Muy Vagabundo: The Use of Visual Research Methods to Explore Intergenerational Political Behavior

This article explores the use of visual research methodologies for understanding the everyday political desires and behavior of individuals. Its goal is to extend conversations in geography about the use of visual methods for interpreting the relationships between society and space, specifically the ways in which photovoice techniques can help geographers better understand the ways in which intergenerational emplaced memories motivate and shape contemporary political action. Using an urban community in Costa Rica built through hybrid housing–antiviolence movements in the 1980s and 1990s as a case study, this article illustrates the material and metaphorical pathways that participants trace between historical social movements and contemporary social issues through their photo essays. Participant images are made in tandem with practices and movement in the present but recall and represent family histories and narratives of historical struggle in the past. Significantly, as savvy users embedded in visual worlds, participants use these moments of intersection between past and present to mobilize political arguments about value and justice in their community. In this way, visual methods reveal the political mundane: how individuals shape their political opinions through conversation between contemporary embodiment and experiences with social issues and family histories of social movement participation. Key Words: photovoice, urban social movements, visual research methods.