Discipline games, disciplinary games and the need for a post-disciplinary practice: responses to Nigel Thrift’s ‘The future of geography’

In this response to Nigel Thrift’s ‘The future of geography’, I highlight the performative qualities of academic response. As a counter to Thrift’s optimism, I argue that such debate is inevitably parochial and imperialist. I question the validity of such ‘discipline games’ in a post-disciplinary world, emphasise the importance of a performative reading of academic futures and highlight that geographical journal space remains worryingly within-discipline, rather than post-disciplinary. More generally, I suggest that there are clear material risks to continuing to play discipline games in a post-disciplinary world.     

Emotional labour/body work: The caring labours of migrants in the UK’s National Health Service

The provision of care is an increasingly pressing issue in the Global North. With an ageing population and policies encouraging women into the labour market, there is a growing need for workers to undertake paid caring. This poses important and urgent questions about the social organisation of labour markets. Care work typically is low paid and undertaken in precarious, informal, or temporary situations. Many posts are filled by economic migrants, raising concerns about a care deficit in sending countries. In this paper we examine the ‘caring work’ undertaken by migrant workers in a West London Hospital. We employ a twofold characterisation of caring work. Like other bottom-end service sector work, this work is characterised by the face-to-face ‘emotional labour’. However, it also requires ‘body work’: close and often intimate physical contact between carers and those they care for. We argue that both of these aspects are important in understanding how caring work is constructed as poorly regarded and low paid. We show how these features play out in particular ways for migrant workers employed in such caring work.     

Globalising initiatives for gender equality and poverty reduction: Exploring ‘failure’ with reference to education and work among urban youth in The Gambia and Ghana

This paper focuses on what observers have perceived to be a failure of development leading to a ‘crisis of youth’ as increasing numbers of young people find it more difficult to gain education, access to health, a job and meet standard of living aspirations. For some, a possible escape is offered by migration to Europe, the United States or Australia, often illegally. For those remaining behind, however, international development agencies offer a ‘globalisation of solutions’ to employment, gender inequality and poverty through the millennium development goals and the programmes to attain them. In this paper we do not take the failures of development at face value but look at local contexts to present a more complex picture of the relation between education, work and social life. Based on fieldwork conducted in urban areas of The Gambia and Ghana, we argue that rather than education as a catch-all solution we need to give more attention to the costs incurred by and for young people in pursuing education and training, to the operation of and actual opportunities in labour markets, and to patterns of gender socialisation which give women limited scope to exercise agency. This paper explores key gender dimensions of work and education among low-income urban youth noting that despite on-going efforts to increase young women’s enrolment in schools and access to employment, gender inequalities have been far from eradicated. Our field interviews reveal how social expectations that women should perform the bulk of reproductive labour in their youth as well as in adulthood and constraints placed on young women’s personal freedom in respect of their social relationships reduce time dedicated to education and establish fewer contacts relevant to securing paid employment. The result is for men to end up with more educational qualifications, more skills, and higher-paying jobs, even if unemployment among young people in general remains a major problem.     

‘Through children’s eyes’: childhood, place and the fear of crime

This article seeks to bring young respondents more sharply into focus by considering fear of crime ‘through children’s eyes’. By incorporating children’s perspectives it is argued that more inclusive and integrative community safety initiatives may arise. Inspired by the recent flowering of research undertaken in childhood studies by social and cultural geographers, the study seeks to make a theoretical, empirical and spatial contribution to debates in the field. Based on the findings of a large-scale school survey, the responses indicate that children have an acute place-based sensitivity to a range of highly relevant community safety issues. This includes detailed reflections concerning the place of policing, boredom, youth gangs, motorcars and drugs in their neighbourhoods. It is suggested that the inclusion of children’s accounts into geographical debates not only enriches our knowledge of childhood studies, but also adds detail and texture to our understandings of fear of crime.     

Oil ‘futures’: Shell’s Scenarios and the social constitution of the global oil market

This article explores the relationship between the oil industry’s representation of operating conditions in key sites of extraction and the constitution of oil futures markets. An analysis of Shell Oil’s recent Scenarios publications, the ‘Trilemma Scenarios to 2025’ and subsequent ‘Scramble and Blueprints Scenarios to 2050’, provides insight into both the (global) social construction of oil prices and the oil industry’s reaction to social resistance in its operating environment - whether in the form of movements for resource sovereignty or climate change activism. Examining the implications of these two Scenario publications for key sites of Shell investment, the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Canadian Tar Sands, the article demonstrates that understanding the discursive implications of ‘peak oil’ for the petroleum industry requires contextualizing discussions of ‘scarcity’ within business agents role in shaping oil futures markets, and private industry’s interest in the ongoing development of unconventional fossil fuel sources. While the role of deregulated futures trading receives little attention in the Shell Scenarios, speculative trading - and thus perception concerning supply among business agents - is central to shaping global oil prices and thus the social conditions of the oil market.     

Architects and planners approaches to urban form and design in the Toronto region: A comparative analysis

This study compares architectural and planning approaches to urban form and design within a North American context. It presents a critical assessment of the results of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with a group of highly experienced architects, landscape architects, and planners from the Greater Toronto Region. Dialogues with practitioners revealed a growing intellectual divide in regard to understanding urban form and design issues. Planners portrayed the urban form as a product of social and economic forces or a backdrop for civic institutions, private development initiatives, and public action. Architects and landscape architects, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of built configurations and spatial relations in shaping economic, social, and cultural patterns. With such a polarized perspective of urban development processes, each group of practitioners proposed different and somewhat contradictory visions for the future of North American built forms. This study develops an understanding of theoretical and pragmatic concerns within design professions (architecture/landscape architecture) and social science professions (planning at large) that hamper the development of integrative urban design visions. It extends an interdisciplinary understanding of built environments and the forces that shape them and paves the way for more in-depth studies aimed at creating more integrative urban design theories and development strategies.     

Geographies of security and statehood in Norway’s ‘Battle of the North’

In this paper, we explore how ‘peak oil’ anxieties are woven into the spaces and practices of the state in Norway and the consequences of this for environmental justice and the public sphere more widely. We focus in particular on an ongoing struggle over access to hydrocarbon deposits in the Norwegian Arctic, the so-called ‘Battle of the North’. We use this dispute to highlight three wider theoretical points regarding (i) the continuing relevance of the state in the governing of nature-society relations, (ii) the increasingly fragmented and fluid nature of state space, and (iii) the significance of ‘security’ as a term around which social, economic and environmental tensions pivot. The paper concludes by reflecting on current efforts to prevent new oil activities in the north of Norway.     

‘All my hopes and dreams are shattered’: Urbanization and migrancy in an imploding African economy - the case of Zimbabwe

During the 1990s, urban livelihoods in Zimbabwe began to suffer a series of economic stresses, which accelerated in 1997 and then accelerated again, with the inception of fast-track land reform, from 2000. This has reduced urban living standards significantly and devastated real urban income levels. After a discussion of the economic and political parameters of this period, this paper links these to empirical changes in the urban livelihoods and perceptions of urban living standards of recent in-migrants to Harare. This draws on a longitudinal database of four surveys of recent migrants to the city conducted in 1985, 1988, 1994 and 2001. Among a range of qualitative issues explored in these surveys has been the question of migrants’ future plans in relation to their intended length of stay in town. It is shown that migrants have been feeling increasingly negative or unsure about their urban experience since structural adjustment began in the early 1990s, and that these perceptions had greatly strengthened by 2001. By the last survey only a small minority felt they would remain permanently in town and most of the migrants from rural areas felt that their living standards in Harare were either worse than rural living standards, or no better. While Zimbabwe’s current political and economic crisis is exceptional, serious urban poverty is a feature across sub-Saharan African countries and it is argued that this has had a depressing effect on net rural-urban migration rates.     

The social construction of the service sector: institutional structures and labour market outcomes

I argue that the characterisation of the lower end of the service sector as innately poorly paid, casualised and unorganised confuses cause and effect. It describes the effects of an institutional vacuum that allows this sector to suffer severe wage competition, which results in low wages and poor working conditions. There is nothing innate in the lower end of the service sector that makes these jobs poorly paid except the lack of institutions, such as unions and the state, structuring this segment of the labour market. Pay and working conditions vary within the sector and between specific locations, and depend on institutions, or the lack of institutions, to structure the local labour market. I use the case of hotel employees and restaurant employees in Las Vegas to show that not only can high union densities affect wages and other measurable benefits but a strategically unionised labour market also can transform the structure of the labour market itself.     

Making autonomous geographies: Argentina’s popular uprising and the ‘Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados’ (Unemployed Workers Movement)

This paper addresses the idea of autonomy—the desire for freedom, self-organisation and mutual aid. Through challenging economic neoliberalism, state repression, a powerful transnational elite, and the commodification of nature and resources, many communities, especially in the global south, are trying to manage their own affairs. Using the example of the Movement of Unemployed Workers (El Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados) in Argentina, I explore the idea of autonomous geographies and how they are made and remade at three overlapping levels: the territorial, through the emergence of networked autonomous neighbourhoods which are selectively open and closed to translocal links; the material, through the development of a solidarity economy where immediate needs are met and work is redefined, and; the social, where collective action and daily practice helps constitute more collective, autonomous forms of social interactions. In their desire to manage connections with the outside world while at the same time inspire autonomous place projects elsewhere, the MTDs represent both a ‘militant localism’ and ‘militant pluriversalism’. Moreover, while such experiments in making and embedding ‘autonomous geographies’ face limits and have few widespread examples on which to draw, it is through constant questioning and collective struggle at the everyday level that autonomy is made real.     

‘We do not want to leave our land’: Pacific ambassadors at the United Nations resist the category of ‘climate refugees’

The issue of the social geographical dimensions of climate change is timely and important. This paper sets out to explore one example of this: how people living in the Pacific who are most at risk of being made landless by climate change are portrayed in policy discourse, and how high-level international representatives of Pacific nations have responded to these portrayals. At the heart of this is contention over the portrayal of Pacific Island peoples as ‘climate refugees’. This paper analyses a number of documents since the 1980s, largely from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that deploy the identity construct of ‘climate refugees’. Fieldwork undertaken at the United Nations in New York in 2004 also enabled seven interviews with national ambassadors representing Pacific small island states. Interviews revealed how Pacific ambassadors have responded to the category of ‘climate refugees’, and positioned themselves in the discursive field surrounding the climate change debate. A poststructuralist framework, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of discourse and subject categories provided a means to critically scrutinise and better understand how people from Pacific countries are imagined in the wider, global geopolitical arena, but crucially, how leaders from these nations also construct themselves in relation to climate change and its associated impacts.     

Socio-spatial segregation and urban form: Belém at the end of the 1990s

In the second half of the 1990s, socio-spatial segregation increased in Brazilian cities, accentuating inequity among social groups. Using a combination of space syntax techniques and statistical analysis, this paper explores locational differences in central and peripheral portions of Belém. The analysis shows how socio-spatial segregation was made more pronounced by relationships between urban form, infrastructure provision and locational values. Social groups' opportunities in the city are suggested to be limited by features of its urban form, associated with infrastructure provision, especially for groups unable to take advantage of intra-urban accessibility. The paper also discusses the findings of the study in relation to the Brazilian urban context at the end of the 1990s.     

Publication practices in physical and human geography: a comment on Nigel Thrift’s ‘The future of geography’

This note expands on, and in some respects challenges, the distinction Thrift (Geoforum 33 (2002) 291) makes between the publication practices of young human and physical geographers. Evidence on highly-cited papers by eminent British geographers is used to suggest that human geographers have been publishing mainly in human-geography journals, but physical geographers in a wider range of outlets, for at least two decades; and that the most influential papers of all, human or physical, have generally been in multi- or inter-disciplinary journals. Publication in ‘non-geographical’ journals is desirable since it helps geographers have a wider impact. Conversely, the discipline is harmed if influential outsiders perceive geographers as only concerned with internal debates and seeking to impress each other.     

“It’s a gestalt experience”: Landscape values and development pressure in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand

Demand for both primary residences and second homes in high-amenity areas has led to escalating property values and widespread development pressure in coastal New Zealand. We focus on a major development proposal at Ocean Beach, a greenfield coastal site in the Hawke’s Bay region, and seek to explain the opposition it has provoked. In so doing, we address three questions: first, what landscape values are articulated within the planning process; second, what is the anticipated impact of 1000 new dwellings on those values; and third, how does place attachment figure in the ensuing debates. We address these questions though a thematic analysis of data derived from official reports and proposals, planning submissions, and key informant interviews. We find Ocean Beach to be a place that offers a quintessential coastal experience, often linked to youthful memories. Additionally, the site is valued for its accessibility and wilderness qualities - perceptions heightened by awareness that areas of undeveloped coastline relatively close to population centres are increasingly scarce. We contend that such sites are doubly valuable: in a formal sense, as natural landscapes whose processes and forms receive regulatory protection; and in an informal sense, as sites that generate human meaning, including emotions such as nostalgia, freedom and belonging.     

The geological history of the Isle of Wight: an overview of the ‘diamond in Britain's geological crown’

The geology of the Isle of Wight has attracted both the amateur and professional geologist alike for well over two centuries. It presents a cornucopia of things geological and offers a window into the fascinating story of the geological history and landscape development of southern England, as well as an important teaching resource for all levels of study from primary education through to academic research.This paper provides a geological framework and a summary of the history of research as context for the papers in this issue can be placed. Inevitably, it can only offer a précis of the huge amount of information available, but it is hoped will also give added impetus to further investigation of the literature or, indeed, new research.The island offers a field workshop for topics such as lithostratigraphy, sequence stratigraphy, tectonics and climate change; studies that are becoming ever more international in their influence. There are 15 Sites of Special Scientific Interest designated because of their geological importance and a number of these are internationally significant.After a brief discussion on the concealed geology, this paper concentrates on an outline of the near-surface geology on the coast and inland, and introduces a different view on the structure of the Cretaceous and Palaeogene strata. The enigmatic Quaternary deposits are discussed particularly with reference to the development of the Solent River, human occupation and climate change.     

Urban poverty neighbourhoods: Typology and spatial concentration under China’s market transition, a case study of Nanjing

Since the transition of the economic system in the early 1990s, urban poverty has become a prominent social problem and attracted attention among Chinese officials and academics. However, there have been few studies on the spatiality of urban poverty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the spatial pattern of urban poverty in China and the mechanism of spatial concentration. Urban poverty has begun to concentrate in specific locations, mainly in three types of poverty neighbourhoods: inner-city dilapidated residence, degraded workers’ villages and rural migrants’ enclaves. We argue that the emergence of concentrated poverty is rooted in the state-led urban development and the socialist housing provision system. Based on fieldwork in typical poverty neighbourhoods in the city of Nanjing, the concentration of poverty is examined, and its creation mechanism is analysed. Further discussion indicates that poverty concentration in particular neighbourhoods is different from slums or ghettoes in advanced western economies.     

Bushfire and everyday life: Examining the awareness-action ‘gap’ in changing rural landscapes

In this paper we use the notion of ‘everyday life’ to critically examine an apparent ‘gap’ between bushfire risk awareness and preparedness amongst diverse landholders in rural landscapes affected by amenity-led in-migration in southeast Australia. Landholders were found to bring their own agency to bushfire preparedness in the relationships between everyday procedures, dilemmas, and tradeoffs. Consequently, regardless of landholders’ awareness levels, attitudes towards bushfire and natural resource management influence if, how, and to what extent landowners prepare for bushfires. We argue that not only is the ‘gap’ complex but also paradoxical in that it is both evident in, and constituted by, landholder attitudes and action and simultaneously dissolved in their practices and decision-making in everyday life. Three dilemmas of everyday life in particular were found to underpin these attitudes: costs (in terms of monetary and time values), gender roles, and priorities. Using a mixed-methods research approach, this simultaneous cultural construction and material nature of bushfire in everyday life is mapped out through landholders’ narratives and actions that embody living with fire on the land. The place of bushfire in landholders’ everyday life has direct relevance to recent international discussions of the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in bushfire-prone rural-urban interface areas.     

Evidence for progressive Holocene aridification in southern Africa recorded in Namibian hyrax middens: Implications for African Monsoon dynamics and the ‘‘African Humid Period’’

Presented here are stable nitrogen isotope data from a rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) middens from northwestern Namibia that record a series of rapid aridification events beginning at ca. 3800 cal yr BP, and which mark a progressive decrease in regional humidity across the Holocene. Strong correlations exist between this record and other terrestrial and marine archives from southern Africa, indicating that the observed pattern of climate change is regionally coherent. Combined, these data indicate hemispheric synchrony in tropical African climate change during the Holocene, with similar trends characterising the termination of the ‘African Humid Period’ (AHP) in both the northern and southern tropics. These findings run counter to the widely accepted model of direct low-latitude insolation forcing, which requires an anti-phase relationship to exist between the hemispheres. The combined dataset highlights: 1) the importance of forcing mechanisms influencing the high northern latitudes in effecting low-latitude climate change in Africa, and 2) the potential importance of solar forcing and variations in the Earth's geomagnetic shield in determining both long-term and rapid centennial-scale climate changes, identifying a possible mechanism for the variations marking the AHP termination in both the southern and northern tropics.