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.     

Mining History: Mobilizing The Past In Struggles Over Mineral Extraction In Peru

This paper examines how the past is constructed and mobilized within contemporary Peruvian mining politics. Beginning with an exploration of tensions existing within the mining industry's relationship to its history, I analyze how mining proponents have sought to both naturalize today's mining expansion by locating it within a national history of extraction, while also working to break free from certain negative aspects of the industry's past. The paper then examines how the past is remembered and invoked within the context of on‐the‐ground struggles at a large‐scale gold mine in the region of Ancash. I address the contradictory ways in which local history is constructed in these struggles and document how memories of past experiences with mining inform how area residents understand and critique the “new” mining economy. This paper underscores the need to understand the complicated, selective, and often‐contradictory ways in which the past is made present in extractive industry conflicts.     

Property speculation,global capital,urban planning and financialisation: Sydney Boom,Sydney Bust redux

In this ‘Thinking Space’ essay we revisit Maurie Daly’s 1982 book Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust, fuelled by concern for how Australian cities are being transformed by financialised real estate. Daly's insights remain highly relevant to Sydney and other cities around Australia and the world today. Poorly planned densification, inflated property markets, land speculation, and housing poverty are all outcomes of the (global) capitalist intersection of finance and land in Australia. The overwriting of Aboriginal country with colonial-capitalist systems of land ownership set in train a process of land and housing booms, bubbles and busts that are better understood by their circular continuity rather than as a set of ephemeral ruptures. It is the property and finance system itself, rather than any ruptures to it, that reproduces unequal and alienating social relations. Researchers investigating property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation, we argue, ought to revisit this key text to inform their contemporary analyses. Moreover, those wielding power over Australian urban affairs would do well to read it too, lest its lessons be ignored for another generation.     

Qualitative Health Research: Negotiating Life with HIV/AIDS

In this paper, I look at the use of qualitative methods in health geography. I focus on two projects using in-depth interviews with people with HIV/AIDS. Drawing from feminist work on qualitative methodologies and the production of knowledge, two questions are posed. First, what insights do interviews offer about people's daily experiences with HIV/AIDS? Second, given that interviews involve direct contact between interviewer and respondent, what are the implications of using this methodology? Projects reveal that living with HIV/AIDS involves a complex series of negotiations. These include negotiating one's own identity within medical discourse, dealing with health care professionals, and choosing how to use medication. The projects also indicate that qualitative research itself involves a process of negotiation. Researchers' preconceptions, interview settings and formats, and relationships established during research can effect research outcomes andresearch participants. I argue that a willingness to reflect critically on the use of qualitative methods is needed to safeguard against these unintended consequences.     

PARTNERSHIPS AND PHOTOGRAPHS: COMMUNITY CONCEPTIONS OF KEWEENAW NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK*

Geographers have a long tradition of using photographs to investigate landscape meaning. I conducted photo‐elicitation research with community members residing in and around one of the National Park Service (nps ) “partnership parks” in order to obtain their conceptions of the park. The nps partners with myriad groups in order to manage the park, resulting in mostly privatized amenities at Michigan's Keweenaw National Historical Park. Participants in my study took photographs of landscapes and used them to discuss their conceptions of the park. Building upon recent scholarship on the perceptions of parks and place attachment in parks, the photo‐elicitation revealed a strikingly complex array of understandings. Social class, not whether one lived within or outside the park's boundaries, was the most important variable in categorizing perceptions of the park. These data help us understand how community members conceive of partnership parks and thus may help inform nps decision making.     

Qualitative Health Research: Negotiating Life with HIV/AIDS

In this paper, I look at the use of qualitative methods in health geography. I focus on two projects using in-depth interviews with people with HIV/AIDS. Drawing from feminist work on qualitative methodologies and the production of knowledge, two questions are posed. First, what insights do interviews offer about people's daily experiences with HIV/AIDS? Second, given that interviews involve direct contact between interviewer and respondent, what are the implications of using this methodology? Projects reveal that living with HIV/AIDS involves a complex series of negotiations. These include negotiating one's own identity within medical discourse, dealing with health care professionals, and choosing how to use medication. The projects also indicate that qualitative research itself involves a process of negotiation. Researchers' preconceptions, interview settings and formats, and relationships established during research can effect research outcomes andresearch participants. I argue that a willingness to reflect critically on the use of qualitative methods is needed to safeguard against these unintended consequences.     

Korean Americans in Los Angeles: Decentralized Concentration and Socio‐spatial Disparity

This study analyses the socioeconomic and demographic make‐up of Koreans in Los Angeles metropolis, the largest hub of Koreans in the United States, to better understand the decentralized concentration of Koreans by addressing their within‐ and among‐group variations. By employing the rarely used measures of correspondence and typology analyses, we delineate the boundaries for Korean clusters using Getis and Ord G* local statistic, wherein each cluster's neighborhood and demographic characteristics are compared to gain nuanced insights of within‐group variations, and its evolution during 1970–2010. Cluster level analysis of Koreatown suggests that even though it was classified as a Korean cluster, Korean Americans were unevenly distributed across these clusters, with underrepresentation in white‐dominant neighborhoods, whereas much of their intraurban spaces were shared with Hispanics. All clusters except extended Koreatown exhibited Li's ethnoburb‐style spatial patterns. The Koreatown and suburban clusters were also distinct in terms of their demographic/ethnic, socioeconomic, educational, age/life cycle, and housing characteristics, suggesting socio‐spatial polarization. Our analysis, challenges the commonly perceived notion of Koreans being a homogenous group and Asians being model minorities. We illustrate significant within‐group differences among the Koreangelos. We, thus, propose innovative measures to analyze population groups to flesh out rich narratives of America's fast changing social geographies.     

Health Seeking Behavior: Q‐Structures of Rural and Urban Women in India with Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Reproductive Tract Infections

I use a gender framework to examine why women need to utilize social networks to discover and resolve problems related to reproductive tract infections (RTI) and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). In India, women's health is linked with social status and perception of their health needs. This paper provides insight on how social networks are gender‐, location‐, and context‐specific and how they are linked to STD issues. This paper examines why social networks are integral to women. The health‐seeking behavior of rural and urban casual sex workers is examined via Q‐analysis, a language of mapping relationships. Results from Q‐analysis reveal women's use of four systems—kinship, belief, traditional medical, and western medical services. Finally, I conclude with important implications for research on gender relations and social networks.     

Cross‐border rubber cultivation between China and Laos: Regionalization by Akha and Tai rubber farmers

This paper is a multi‐sited ethnography of cross‐border rubber cultivation between China and Laos. Smallholder minority rubber farmers from Xishuangbanna (China) have forged successful informal share‐cropping arrangements to grow rubber trees on the land of relatives and friends in neighbouring Laos. By becoming rich and entrepreneurial rural citizens, Akha and Tai farmers have also, in their own eyes, raised their own ‘quality’ (suzhi) and see themselves as ‘modern’. By examining various meanings of ‘modern’ in China, and contrasting the rubber farmers' experience with Jacob Eyferth's notion of rural ‘deskilling’, this paper shows how through learning to plant, cultivate and tap rubber, these farmers have taken on the discipline and technical knowledge of ‘modern’ workers and become ‘skilled’. By rising in ‘quality’, minority farmers on China's periphery challenge the entrenched binaries of urban/rural, modern/backward, prosperous/poor and Han/minority nationality. Xishuangbanna minority farmers acknowledge that they are also ‘backward’ in the Chinese social hierarchy, but their extension of rubber cultivation to kin and others in Laos has confirmed their modernity as dispensers of development, technical know‐how and ‘superior’ Chinese culture to Lao farmers who are ‘backward and poor’. In contrast to large state rubber farms that have failed to establish rubber plantations in northern Laos, minority farmers have created regionalization.     

Assembling/Worlding Cities

This article explores the assembling and worlding of cities as both aspirational and evaluative processes in which cities are assembled, compared, and “positioned.” These practices involve the global circulation of expertise, best practices, models, and technologies related to how best to develop and govern cities. From specific examples from the authors' research, it is argued that the two distinct but overlapping notions of assembling and worlding help us conceptualize the contemporary urban–global condition. Building on the article's insights, we end this Urban Pulse with some questions for future global urban studies.     

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.     

Life in de facto statelessness in enclaves in India and Bangladesh

Drawing on conceptualization of statelessness and ethnographic research on crucial insights of rightessness, this paper investigates how the politico‐geographic‐legality constructs statelessness in the enclaves in India and Bangladesh. Following the decolonization process in 1947, both India and Pakistan/Bangladesh inherited more than 200 enclaves, which comprise 80 per cent of the world's enclaves. With improved bilateral relations, India and Bangladesh officially exchanged the enclaves on 1 August 2015, and the enclave dwellers will gradually be granted citizenship rights over the next few years. In this period of transition from statelessness to statehood, this paper can be read as contemporary history. This paper will draw attention to three aspects of statelessness. First, conceptualization of statelessness not only applies to the refugeehood or de‐territorialization of people but also relates to the process of constructing transterritorial stateless people. Second, this paper will discuss the condition of statelessness constructed in a politico‐geographic‐legal trap. And finally, the paper calls for a wider empirical and critical focus on the hidden geographies of de facto statelessness.     

Consumption,ageing and identity: New Zealander's narratives of gifting,ridding and passing on

Consumption practices involving disposal can provide important insights into how ‘being’ is accumulated. Analysis of 36 semi‐structured interviews with 13 individuals aged 59–70 in the Manawatu, Kapiti, Rangitikei and Horowhenua regions of the North Island in New Zealand illustrates how practices of gifting, ridding and passing on goods as legacy contribute to the production of familial and individual subjectivities. The research revealed that practices of disposal are performative, with both the absent presence of the objects placed away and the practices by which this occurs having agentic effects. The places that objects were assumed to occupy in the real and imagined lives of others and the moving of things away contributed to older adults' identities as caring parents, productive citizens and individuals of significance. Disposal practices consequently enabled participants to stabilise and order parent and child relations and one's relative position in the life course.     

Doing groups: Situating knowledge and creating stories

This paper presents group research as a potentially powerful research tool for cultural geographers interested in the ways knowledge is produced at the interpersonal level. I argue that groups can create unique research spaces that incorporate 'sociality', the everyday social norms, logics and languages that guide ordinary conversations, into the research agenda. By concentrating on these discursive norms, insights can be obtained into the ways that knowledge is negotiated, produced and constrained in different places. To demonstrate the value of group research, a case study involving Australian environmentalists is analysed, to show how forests are constructed, contested and naturalised within this particular subculture. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of group research to critical geographers interested in social empowerment and change.     

Gender and local soil knowledge: Linking farmers' perceptions with soil fertility in two villages in the Philippines

Scientists often turn to farmers to understand soil management. This process reveals differences and overlaps between local and scientific soil knowledge but rarely considers women and gender issues. This paper examines men's and women's local knowledge of soils in upland, smallholder farms in two villages in Mindanao, the Philippines, using focus group discussions, semi‐structured household interviews, field visits, GIS and soil testing. Farmers' field areas were calculated and delineated based on their perceptions of the different types of soils on their land. Men and women chose the same plots for what they considered their best soil but differed on what they felt were their worst. The fertility of the soils that women considered to be the best and worst was not significantly different from that of the men's respective choices. There was a difference in fertility, however, between the best and worst soils regardless of gender. Although soil fertility analyses showed that the women's chosen soils were similar to men's, analyses of qualitative data showed that their knowledge of soils was different and was based in part on a gendered division of labour. A multidisciplinary approach helped bridge the gap between sociocultural and physical research.     

Dammed and diversionary: The multi‐dimensional framing of Brazil's Belo Monte dam

Belo Monte is one of the most divisive dams in Brazilian history, becoming entangled in a thirty‐year struggle between pro‐ and anti‐dam interests over the role of the facility within a complex web of Brazilian development and the future of the Brazilian Amazon. This research explores how the proponents of Belo Monte have adopted a number of policy frames as a means of deflection, to divide the opposition and legitimize the project. It investigates this claim by analyzing speeches given within the Brazilian Câmara dos Deputados and the public speeches of high‐level politicians. These sources, organized around a framework previously identified by Ahlers et al. ( 2014 ), show that the government and individual politicians have used a variety of framing devices to legitimize the hydroelectric facility. Principal methods of framing used also demonstrate how contemporary narratives (e.g. sustainability) have been employed to deflect opposition criticism and widen the scheme's perceived beneficiaries. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how the transformation represented by Belo Monte encompassed not only a process of engineering but also a re‐articulation of the complex and its role in modern Brazil.     

Could sand mining be a major threat for the declining endemic Labeobarbus species of Lake Tana,Ethiopia?

Sand and gravel materials are often used in Ethiopia's construction sector. However, the impacts of sand mining on the water body's habitat and biodiversity are not yet considered in the country. In this paper, we study how sand mining activities at Lake Tana and its inflowing rivers affect the environment and spawning grounds of the endemic Labeobarbus species. We measured physico‐chemical parameters in‐situ and developed structured questionnaires to collect primary data on the fishery and sand mining. We found significant differences in conductivity, total dissolved solids and temperature among sampling sites (P < 0.05). Majority (>90 per cent) of the respondents confirmed the drastic physical changes in the rivers and a severe decline in fish production. The study revealed that the ecology of the mined rivers was seriously affected by sand mining, which interfered with migratory routes of fishes and resulted in loss of their spawning grounds. The unregulated sand mining also conflicted with the interests of the fisheries management and environment. Thus, urgent policy intervention is needed to protect the ever‐declining Labeobarbus species of Lake Tana and the environment.     

State‐led talent return migration programme and the doubly neglected ‘Malaysian diaspora’: Whose diaspora,what citizenship,whose development?

This paper questions the assumptions of ‘diaspora’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘development’ underlying diaspora strategies targeting a specific pool of overseas Malaysian ‘talent’ migrants. I examine the Malaysian state's discursive attempts to construct a carefully contained economic ‘diaspora'—the ‘Malaysian diaspora'—through its talent return migration programme. In this process, there is a portion of the ‘Malaysian diaspora’, especially non‐bumiputeras (sons of soil), who are doubly neglected and excluded: first, from access to full and equal citizenship (which arguably contributed to their emigration in the first place); and second, from eligibility and recognition to participate in Malaysia's talent return migration programme. However, recent political activism calling for electoral reform and overseas voting rights challenges state‐constructed visions of the ‘diaspora’ and their expected roles in advancing ‘development’. This paper concludes by highlighting questions raised by the Malaysian case, linking these explicitly to how diaspora strategies—as they have been conceived, practised and contested—challenge the broader Migration and Development paradigm.     

Support for,and Impacts of Publishing in the Annals of the AAG: The Authors and and Editor Speak

A survey of 176 authors who published in the Annals between 1988 and 1993 provides insights into why authors submitted their research to the journal, what support they received, and the impacts of the publication on their careers. Most decided themselves to submit their work, and one-third received support from research grants; cartographic assistance and graduate assistants were less important. The major benefits of publishing in the Annals were visibility in one's department, contact with other geographers, and requests for reprints. Most authors presented their ideas at professional meetings prior to submission. Promotion and salary Inc.reases were benefits for women, assistant professors, associate professors, and physical geographers. Authors considered their articles as original examinations that yielded new results, contributed to theory, stimulated debate, and helped bridge gaps inside and outside of geography. These results are useful in helping individual authors and for administrators in identifying the kinds of research support needed by authors publishing in the Annals.     

(Trans)national Bodies, (Trans)national Languages and the Transformation of Local Urban Space

This paper discusses some of the ways that international students, particularly those from East Asia, are involved in the transformation of urban space in Auckland City. Using existing economic reports, local media accounts and the author's initial observations, the paper identifies how the embodied and linguistic practices of international students are involved in the changing landscapes of Auckland's inner city. This cursory reading serves to identify a research agenda and to reflect upon some key theoretical textxs. The insights of Arjun Appadurai, Michael Peter Smith and Ulrich Beck are used to suggest that the changes in Auckland, whilst certainly local, are also influenced fry factors that emerge from beyond the borders of international students' origin communities, cities and nations.