The Unbearable Closeness of The East: Embodied Micro-Economies of Difference,Belonging, and Intersecting Marginalities in Post-Socialist Berlin

Abstract

This article examines the micro-politics of belonging in the post-socialist outskirts of Berlin, in Marzahn, one of many new urban immigrant settlement areas in Europe. More specifically, it focuses on what locals perceive as an acceptance-precluding conspicuous presence of nominally white immigrants of German ancestry from the former Soviet Union, the Aussiedler (resettlers). Long-term residents read and interpret these immigrants’ everyday embodiments by constructing what I call micro-economies of embodied difference in order to mark immigrants as non-belonging Eastern-European. In order to make sense of such practices and local antipathy towards the Aussiedler, I analyze the embeddedness of this suburban locality in the regional politics of belonging, showing how Marzahn and its long-time residents have themselves become post-wall Berlin's (and Germany's) internal Others, saturated with uncommodifiable traces of now-denigrated state-socialist Easternness. I suggest that in such a context these residents’ practice of ascribing the unwanted Easternness to recent immigrants works to deflect it in order to buttress their own claims to full membership citizenship in the unified Germany from which they have long been excluded. [Key words: belonging, immigrants, embodied difference, Othering, Easternness, Berlin.]     

G. Stanley Hall,Child Study,and the Teaching of Geography

Abstract

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), founding president of Clark University, was a leader in the child study movement and a significant figure in psychology and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hall had pronounced opinions on many educational subjects, including the teaching of geography. His criticisms and program for the reform of school geography were based on a mix of European ideas of heimatkunde or “home geography,” developmental or “genetic” psychology, and his work in the child study and nature study movements. This article traces Hall's involvement with geographic pedagogy from the 1880s through World War I, including his sponsorship of the first American Ph.D. dissertation in the teaching of geography, completed at Clark in 1906.     

The Value and Development of Irrigation in Louisiana Purchase Tract

Abstract

This issue brings to a close my 10 years as editor of the Journal ofGeography. It has been ajob that, with very few exceptions, I have enjoyed. Many of my colleagues have offered me sympathy for what they perceive must be the huge workload and responsibility associated with editing ajournal. Depending on one's preferences and abilities, however, many aspects of the editor's job are rewarding. Forgive me for beginning with a few personal observations about the last 10 years.     

From EDUPUNK to Open Policy: Critical Technology Praxis within Higher Education

Emerging less than a decade ago, the term EDUPUNK sought to encapsulate the nascent rebellion against the corporatism and neoliberal ideology permeating digital aspects of higher education. A loose association of academic technologists with interests in net neutrality, open source software, hacktivism, and so on, the EDUPUNK movement has also been informing the adoption of various open practices in higher education, including open educational resources (OER). Intriguingly, university administrators and policymakers—attracted by aspects such as increased access and lower costs for students—are taking notice. In this article, I focus on developments from across the state of Virginia to introduce a critical praxis landscape from within higher education. Thus, I showcase some of the opportunities for critical technology praxis within the neoliberal(izing) university.     

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.     

Courtroom Ethnography: Researching the Intersection of Law,Space, and Everyday Practices

This article argues for a more sustained use of courtroom ethnography by geographers as a means to research legal phenomena, especially in matters of court trials. To do this, I begin by referencing two main threads of courtroom ethnographies conducted in disciplines outside geography, specifically the spaces of the courthouse and courtrooms and the study of emotion and bodily performances by sociolegal and sociology scholars. To then underscore the ways in which a geographical perspective can enhance this existing research and point to topical and theoretical interventions that courtroom ethnography might offer geography, I draw on my experiences with courtroom ethnography on the criminal trial against former Enron chief executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. This experience produced a nuanced and lively understanding of how law, justice, and space comingle through the court’s physical spaces and performative embodiments. My conclusions emphasize courtroom ethnographies’ scholarly opportunities for researchers who study the intersection of law and space, while also reflecting on its challenges. Key Words: corporation, courtroom, Enron, ethnography, legal geography.     

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.

     

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.     

Teaching Controversial Topics: Iconography and the Confederate Battle Flag in the South

Abstract

This article examines various strategies for teaching controversial topics. As a case study, I present examples from my experience teaching about the cultural/political geographic concept of iconography in southern classrooms using as an example recent debates over whether governments in the region should sanction the flying of the Confederate battle flag. First, I discuss the recent literature on the teaching of controversial issues. Second, I examine the concept of iconography and the debates over flying the flag. Third, I present different strategies that can be used to approach this controversial icon in a classroom setting. I conclude by arguing that there is no perfect solution to the teaching of controversial topics that will succeed for every topic, irrespective of time and place.     

Awkward geographies: Spatializing academic responsibility, encountering Sri Lanka

This paper responds to recent postcolonial geographical scholarship that sets forth transformative agendas in order to create more cosmopolitan theoretical projects within the discipline. For many geographers the challenges they face are located within not only their own disciplinary parameters, but also those of other specific research communities within which their work situates them. By bringing geography and area studies into productive conversation, this paper explores the tensions between negotiating one's academic voice, position and responsibility within geography as well as within a specific area studies community. More specifically, as a UK-based geographer I reflect on some of my own fairly unremarkable, yet extremely awkward, encounters during the course of scholarly praxis in Sri Lanka in order to raise questions over the spatialities of responsibility and political engagement in such academic praxis. I seek to theorize the chasms that open in such awkward encounters between notionally situated 'local' and 'foreign' scholars respectively and, in particular, develop ways of engaging and reorienting those chasms in ways that might enable the production of theoretically rich, yet richly contextualized postcolonial knowledges committed to the site of one's scholarly praxis – not just to the advancement of a more cosmopolitan theoretical project within geography.     

Research in Geographic Learning: A Special Task Force Report to the National Council for Geographic Education

Abstract

The videotape and other technological innovations are powerful tools for enhancing classroom learning. Teachers can fall into the trap of simply turning on the VCR while students watch with unstimulated and unchallenged minds. This article offers a technique that engages students in active, reflective thought by utilizing the National Geographic Society videotape, Connections. Using the videotape narrative prior to viewing provides students with opportunities to become critical consumers of technology.     

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.     

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.     

Service-Learning: Critical Traditions and Geographic Pedagogy

Abstract

The rise of service-learning in higher education has been critiqued as little more than community service that encourages students to “do good,” but fails to generate original scholarship or social change. In this article, we argue that service-learning gives geographers the opportunity to challenge these critiques, by demonstrating the practical and political implications of collaborative research methodologies, while conveying powerful conceptual understandings of inequality. We begin by interrogating the philosophical overlap between experiential and service-based learning in the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Using this foundational approach, several theoretical and methodological debates in geography are examined, celebrating and drawing lessons from classic and current service-learning programs. We conclude with a discussion and reflection on experiences with implementing similar pedagogical projects.     

Finding Common Ground: A Critique of Subsumption Theory and Its Application to Small-Scale Forest Carbon Offsetting in Uganda

Carbon markets as a policy tool to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases continue to be controversial, especially in developing countries. It is thus refreshing that Carton and Andersson (2017 Carton, W., and E. Andersson. 2017. Where forest carbon meets its maker: Forestry-based offsetting as the subsumption of nature. Society &; Natural Resources 30 (7):829–43.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) undertook a field investigation of a transnational forest carbon offset project in Uganda. However, I am concerned that assumptions of structural Marxism that underwrite subsumption theory may have led the authors to see the project as inherently conflict ridden and exploitative and to neglect actual benefits. Their presentation of the project’s local impact jarred with my own empirical research into this project, undertaken in 2009, as well as more recent news accounts. While my field effort preceded the authors’ by 6 years, I attribute our different interpretations largely to theoretical and methodological differences. Evidence I present below suggests considerable alignment between the interests of transnational carbon markets and Ugandan smallholder farmers. Additional fieldwork might be able to resolve these differences in interpretation.     

Variable complexity of the US Continental Divide trace

Abstract

Map-view complexity of 65 contiguous segments of the conterminous US Continental Divide trace was evaluated by the divider method, with each segment’s geometry approximated by a fractal dimension (D) value, or two D values applying to fine and coarse scales of inspection. Results support a generalization that D values in the range 1.05–1.12 are typical for drainage divides viewed at regional to national scales. However about 20% of cases reviewed in this study are smoother (D = 1.01–1.04) or more complex (D = 1.13–1.18) traces. Complexities of these watershed boundary segments show no significant correlation with physiographic province or local relief. The primary influence of bedrock lithology and surface process is seen in zones of Quaternary volcanism, where uncommonly smooth and highly complex divide trace segments are more the rule than exception. Uncommonly smooth divide traces are also found descending mountain pediments in areas of parallel drainage, and some of the most tortuous traces are associated with drainage patterns disrupted by non-fluvial processes. Divide trace segments crossing terrain with uniform lithology show decreased complexity, but traces with the broadest range of complexity, including highest D values, occur in areas with moderate, not extreme, degrees of bedrock diversity.     

Litteraturanmeldelser

Abstract

Tschudi, Aadel B. 1968. Land Use Problems on the Urban Fringe: the Case of Sorkedalen, Oslo. Norsk geogr. Tidsskr. 22, 252–263. This article is concerned with land use planning in urban fringe areas, in particular problems related to claims on land for recreation. Sørkedalen has been selected for its interest in showing how, in spite of strict regulations to preserve the existing cultural landscape, land use has been changing in accordance with the trend characteristic of fringe areas elsewhere. The conclusion is that realistic goals in planning depend on careful interpretation of the present situation.     

Rural modernisation as national development: The Norwegian case 1900–1950

Nilsen, R. 2014. Rural modernisation as national development: The Norwegian case 1900–1950. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 68, 50–58. ISSN 0029-1951.

The aim of the article is to explain the maintenance of a pattern of scattered rural settlement in Norway during industrialisation and modernisation. The ‘master narrative’ of Norwegian transformation, based on the development of waterpower and the metallurgical and fertiliser industries, is only one of three narratives that can be told about the national transformation in the 20th century. A second narrative concerns the modernisation along the coast, and a third concerns the development of a varied, mostly rural, manufacturing and import-substituting industry. It is suggested that this attempt at rewriting the history of Norwegian modernisation can do what the master narrative does not do, namely explain the transformation from a poor to a rich society while more than half of the national population continued to live in rural areas.     

Geographers' Forum

Abstract

The Local Community: A Handbook for Teachers is an effective text and organizational framework for developing a course on the geography of a state which combines elements of introductory geography, regional geography, and geographic methods for a graduate class composed of practicing teachers generally inadequately trained in geography. Through a series of distinct, yet integrated steps teachers are exposed to the conceptual and methodological basics of the field, comprehensive analysis of regional patterns of the state, and specific strategies for teaching the geography of the state and the local community. Teachers leave the course knowing not only what to teach about the geography of a state, but how to teach it.