Ethnography, space and politics: interrogating the process of protest in the Tibetan Freedom Movement

This paper examines the ability of ethnographic research methods to effectively study spatially extensive political activity. It argues that traditional ethnographic methods of sustained engagement with spatially bounded sites are not adequately suited to dealing with contemporary spatially extensive political movements. It argues that contemporary attempts to bridge this impasse have emphasised a dichotomy between global and local that ignores the connections, disconnections and process that occur between places. The paper argues for a critical ethnography that is based on a relational understanding of space emphasising Gillian Hart's conception of the interconnected nature of the 'site'. Taking a single demonstration against the Beijing 2008 Olympics conducted by UK-based Tibet supporters, it examines how the site of protest was closely linked to a variety of other places. Interrogating the processes of connection and disconnection brought about through the protest creates an ethnographic account that, while partial, develops an engagement with the heterogeneity of contemporary political action.     

Negotiating Expectations in the Field: Gatekeepers, Research Fatigue and Cultural Biases

This paper considers disjunctures between my expectations and experience of doing dissertation fieldwork, which I conducted in Benin between the autumns of 1997 and 1998. The research examined the nature of women's livelihood strategies and their associated outcomes in terms of material well‐being. I now believe that my feminist worldview, and my growing exhaustion as the project progressed, resulted in my minimising the importance of key aspects of fieldwork in an African context. Specifically, I downplayed the importance of negotiating with male “gatekeepers” in gaining access to the women with whom I wanted to work. While most of the time I was able to manage this well enough, one day, in particular, stands out as a time when I handled these negotiations very poorly. This paper compares the experiences of that day with another much more productive and fruitful one to examine how and why expectations and experience can diverge. A consideration of some of the issues that resulted in the “lost day” might prove instructive for other researchers.     

'Muddy glee': rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork

Fieldwork in geography has come under close scrutiny from feminist and postcolonial scholars in recent years. In relation to physical geography, commentators have pointed to a range of practices and images (notably the 'heroic', masculinist 'ideal') that have acted to deter and exclude women, from undergraduates to senior academics. For some, fieldwork is one of the key sites of gender discrimination for women in physical geography. This paper starts from a position of agreement with many of these critiques, but also seeks to 'reclaim' some more positive accounts and perspectives on the subject. In doing so, it aims to critique and disrupt the dominant image of physical geography fieldwork as essentially a masculinist endeavour, and encourage a wider view of the challenges and pleasures of fieldwork for women in physical geography.     

Gendering Climate Change: Geographical Insights

Although climate change is expected to increase vulnerabilities, marginalization, and sufferings of many in the Global South, impacts will be unevenly felt across social strata. Intersectionalities of social difference, especially along gender and class lines, differentiate the ways in which impacts of climate change are experienced and responded to. Feminist political ecology and feminist geography insights can explain how different groups of people understand, respond to, and cope with variability and uncertainties in nuanced and critical ways, thereby elucidating the gendered implications of climate change. With a regional focus on South Asia, the article underscores the key issues that can be applied geographically elsewhere. Gendered implications of climate change in South Asia are particularly poignant as patriarchal norms, inequities, and inequalities often place women and men in differentiated positions in their abilities to respond to and cope with dramatic changes in socioecological relations but also foreground the complex ways in which social power relations operate in communal responses to adaptation strategies. This is particularly evident in water-related productive and reproductive tasks in agrarian societies that constitute the majority of South Asia. As climate change is expected to exacerbate both ecological degradation (e.g., water shortages) and water-related natural hazards (e.g., floods, cyclones), thereby transforming gender–water geographies, it becomes imperative to undertake careful multiscalar and critical analyses to better inform policymaking. This article elucidates the complex ways that climate change will affect gender and social relations, thereby highlighting the ways that existing policy narratives and adaptation programs might be better informed by geographical insights. To this end, the article encourages feminist and critical geographers to more forcefully and fruitfully engage with global debates on climate change.     

Brainstorming, Modified Logframes and the Conversion of Research Hypotheses into Field Questions: Reflections from Team-based Fieldwork in Eastern India

This paper considers some practical problems associated with organising large‐scale comparative field research in eastern India. The focus of the paper is on the use of brainstorming and “modified logframes” as two means by which hypotheses about the working of the local state from the point of view of the rural poor could be turned into concrete field questions. The paper is less concerned with ethical and positional issues relating to team‐based research in “the tropics” (on this, see Williams et al., 2003a) than with the equally important if apparently more prosaic issues relating to the flawed but necessary search for objectivity and rigour in comparative field studies.     

A Tripartite Conceptualisation of Urban Public Space as a Site for Play: Evidence from South Bank,London

Public space is a feature of the urban built environment that has received increasing attention in recent years. Discussion has focused on the theoretical decline of public space, as private and institutional forces take on increasing influence. At the same time, many such “in-between spaces,” even privately owned ones, are used and experienced as public on a daily basis. Few studies, however, have explored how spaces understood as public are used and practised as such. To address this gap in the literature this paper draws upon ethnographic data collected on the “South Bank” in London (United Kingdom) to argue that “play” is a recurrent trait of sociospatial practices enacted in public space. Three interrelated typologies of playful practices in public space are discussed: child's play, plays on meaning, and play as simulation.     

Positionality and Praxis: Fieldwork Experiences in Rural India

This paper provides a reflexive account of conducting fieldwork as a graduate student in the Sunderban area of West Bengal state, India, in the mid‐1990s. Reflecting on my personal experiences of research in a setting that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, I use frames of positionality to understand the impact of explicit and implied power structures on the research process, the relationships between the researcher and those researched, and the transfer of knowledge. This paper argues that the multiple subject positions and identities of both scholar and subjects as presented in the field vary with setting, and that these positionalities affect access to informants, the tenor and outcomes of encounters, and knowledge production. While self‐reflexivity is endorsed as a strategy for critically informed research, active measures such as openness about the agenda and activities undertaken, self‐disclosure, making conscious accommodations for the research subject's work schedule and time constraints, mutual sharing of information, and explicit recognition of the research subjects' expertise through lived experiences are proposed as strategies for equalising the power balance between scholar and subject.     

Rural transformation: Cherry growing on the Guanzhong Plain,China and the Adelaide Hills,South Australia

Journal of Geographical Sciences - This paper echoes a tradition in agricultural geography by focusing on a single crop: cherries. It illustrates how developments associated with globalisation and...     

Letting failure be: COVID-19, PhD fieldwork and to not (want to) learn from failures

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted researchers to rethink their fieldwork. My doctoral fieldwork plans, which involved conducting ethnographic research amongst Afghan refugees and migrants in New Delhi and Kolkata, were upended because of the recurring waves of the pandemic and the lockdowns/curfews that were imposed in their wake (2020−2022). Locked out of my field, my inability to conduct my research as planned amounted to a failure that could not be redeemed, especially because of time constraints. Using autoethnographic vignettes of my encounters in the lead up to the eventual suspension of in-situ fieldwork, I critically reflect on how I approached and felt towards failures in/of field and how these encounters speak back to the discourse on failure in academia. In doing so, this article advocates for the need to revisit failures simply for what they are, without necessarily demanding and/or (self) expecting that we recast them as stepping stones towards success. By challenging the neo-liberal desire to re-present failures in a productive light, I argue we can make greater room for more supportive discussions around failures without committing ourselves to the task of having to find triumph in (every) adversity.     

Gender,Work, and Household Survival in South Indian Fishing Communities: A Preliminary Analysis

This article examines the interplay of gender, caste‐religion, and household survival strategy formation among Christian and Muslim fisher folk in the south Indian state of Kerala. The methodology consisted of surveys of forty‐one households in two villages in which data pertaining to male and female work patterns and other household level data were collected in the summer of 1999. My analysis demonstrates how particular ideologies of gender and work associated with different caste‐religion communities influence the strategies individual households adopt. I discuss intersections between gender and caste‐religion with other socioeconomic factors and illustrate the manner in which gender then gets reworked in particular ways in the course of economic transformation.     

Gender,Work, and Household Survival in South Indian Fishing Communities: A Preliminary Analysis

This article examines the interplay of gender, caste-religion, and household survival strategy formation among Christian and Muslim fisher folk in the south Indian state of Kerala. The methodology consisted of surveys of forty-one households in two villages in which data pertaining to male and female work patterns and other household level data were collected in the summer of 1999. My analysis demonstrates how particular ideologies of gender and work associated with different caste-religion communities influence the strategies individual households adopt. I discuss intersections between gender and caste-religion with other socioeconomic factors and illustrate the manner in which gender then gets reworked in particular ways in the course of economic transformation.     

Mapping Soils,Vegetation, and Landforms: An Integrative Physical Geography Field Experience*

Students in a graduate seminar at Michigan State University produced a series of detailed vegetation, soils, and landform maps of a 1.5‐square‐mile (3.9 km²) study area in southwest Lower Michigan. The learning outcomes (maps) and skill development objectives (sampling strategies and various GIS applications) of this field‐intensive mapping experience were driven by the assumption that students learn and understand relationships among physical landscape variables better by mapping them than they would in a classroom‐based experience. The group‐based, problem‐solving format was also intended to foster collaboration and camaraderie. The study area lies within a complex, interlobate moraine. Fieldwork involved mapping in groups of two or three, as well as soil and vegetation sampling. Spatial data products assembled and used in the project included topographic maps, a digital elevation model (DEM), aerial photographs, and NRCS (National Resource Conservation Service) soil maps. Most of the soils are dry and sandy, with the main differentiating characteristic being the amount of, and depth to, subsurface clay bands (lamellae) or gravelly zones. The presettlement (early 1830s) vegetation of the area was oak forest, oak savanna, and black oak “barrens.” Upland sites currently support closed forests of white, black, and red oak, with a red maple, dogwood, and sassafras understory. Ecological data suggest that these oak forests will, barring major disturbance, become increasingly dominated by red maple. This group‐based, problem‐solving approach to physical geography education has several advantages over traditional classroom‐based teaching and could also be successfully applied in other, field‐related disciplines.     

Beyond water, beyond boundaries: spaces of water management in the Krishna river basin, South India

As demand and competition for water resources increase, the river basin has become the primary unit for water management and planning. While appealing in principle, practical implementation of river basin management and allocation has often been problematic. This paper examines the case of the Krishna basin in South India. It highlights that conflicts over basin water are embedded in a broad reality of planning and development where multiple scales of decisionmaking and non-water issues are at play. While this defines the river basin as a disputed "space of dependence", the river basin has yet to acquire a social reality. It is not yet a "space of engagement" in and for which multiple actors take actions. This explains the endurance of an interstate dispute over the sharing of the Krishna waters and sets limits to what can be achieved through further basin water allocation and adjudication mechanisms – tribunals – that are too narrowly defined. There is a need to extend the domain of negotiation from that of a single river basin to multiple scales and to non-water sectors. Institutional arrangements for basin management need to internalise the political spaces of the Indian polity: the states and the panchayats. This re-scaling process is more likely to shape the river basin as a space of engagement in which partial agreements can be iteratively renegotiated, and constitute a promising alternative to the current interstate stalemate.     

Elderly co-residence and the household responsibilities hypothesis: evidence from Nanjing,China

In this paper, we analyze the effects of co-residence with elderly parents on gender differences in travel. The Household Responsibility Hypothesis (HRH) explains differences in the role of women regarding household responsibilities. However, research so far has studied “Western” household types while excluding households with co-residing elderly parents. Furthermore, research has paid exclusive attention to gender differences in commuting trips, and has neglected the effects of built environment characteristics. In view of these shortcomings, we pose the following research questions: what are the determinants of gendered differences in travel behavior, and specifically, what are the effects of elderly co-residence in households and land use on gender differences in trip frequency and travel distance? In addition to the HRH, we introduce the Elderly Co-residence Hypothesis, which suggests that co-residing elderly parents take over household responsibilities from adult women, resulting in diminishing gender differences in working-age travel patterns. We present the results of empirical research in Nanjing, China, that support this hypothesis.     

Far from Being "Home Alone": The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork

Despite persistent images to the contrary, most fieldworkers are accompanied. Yet, there has been limited discussion on the nature of accompanied fieldwork, particularly by geographers. Drawing on our experiences in three countries in the tropics, we discuss the dynamics of being accompanied in “the field” by our children and female co‐researchers. Specifically, we focus on issues of access and rapport; the impacts of their presence on our positionality; and the implications these have for power relations and research outcomes. We demonstrate how being accompanied entangles our personal and professional selves and can result in more egalitarian power relations as we become “observers observed”. We argue that by paying attention to the dynamics of accompanied fieldwork, there is the potential to enhance the conceptual focus of our methodological concerns and to provide a more theoretically sophisticated mode of exploring the ways in which our multiple identities intersect while in “the field”.     

(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.     

Griffith Taylor Lecture,Geographical Society of New South Wales, 2004: Australia and the ‘State of Nature/Native’

This account sets itself against the binarism of physical versus cultural determinism that drives population–environment debate over people's place on the Australian continent. In reading back into colonial times, it evokes ‘our’ unresolved sense of relation to nature on a continent that has pressed awkward buttons since the time the botanist on Cook's Endeavour, Joseph Banks, first mused over the apparent contradiction on the east coast of human presence and uncultivated land. Australia's ‘state of nature’, including its inhabitants, elicited tensions in Anglo-Celtic peoples’ ambiguous relation with nature that have never gone away or been resolved. Indeed, I argue, against the background of what was considered in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought to be a distinctly human separation from, and capacity to rise above, nature, that the Australian state of nature/native precipitated a crisis in prevailing ideas of ‘the human’. As consternation grew into the nineteenth century about the very capacity of Aboriginal people for improvement, and particularly for cultivation, I argue they challenged the basis upon which the unity of humankind had been assumed in Enlightenment thought. They could not be comprehended, according to the prevailing conception of racial difference, as a mere variety of the human. The radical idea of innate human difference may thus be understood as arising out of this incomprehension, as an attempt to account for the ontologically inexplicable difference of the Australian Aborigine. This lecture's excursion into the origins of ‘race’ is by way of highlighting the uncertainty of the divide between the human and non-human worlds. Imagining an entangled world of living things may help to craft fresh lines of debate about modes of environmental belonging and becoming on this continent that overcome the stale binaries and blind spots of Australia's population–environment debate.     

资源产业依赖、人力资本与“资源诅咒”假说——基于资源型城市的再检验

利用2003—2013年中国典型资源型城市的面板数据,在考虑潜在内生性的条件下,使用动态面板系统广义矩估计方法,开展"资源诅咒"假说的再检验,进一步讨论资源型城市的人力资本能否有效缓解"资源诅咒"。结果表明:中国资源型城市普遍存在"资源诅咒"现象;人力资本对经济增长的正向作用虽在一定程度上可以弥补资源产业依赖对增长的负向作用,但却不能明显抑制"资源诅咒";资源型城市普遍存在资源产业依赖对人力资本投资的"挤出"。     

Changing women's roles, changing environmental knowledges: evidence from Upper Egypt

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which changing gender roles in a Bedouin community in Upper Egypt, brought about by settlement over the last 20 years on the shores of Lake Nasser, have impacted on the accumulation and development of indigenous environmental knowledges by Bedouin women. The research was carried out among four groups of Ababda Bedouin in the Eastern Desert of Egypt and involved in-depth monthly conversations carried out over a period of 12 months. The main conclusions of the study are that the women of the study area have had to develop new knowledges which, in some cases, are now different from those held by men because of the different economic circumstances in which many find themselves; that these knowledges are fluid, dynamic and ever-changing with their own internal dynamism; and that socially constructed notions of gender are vital in the development process, notions that are sensitive to both men's and women's interests and their interrelationships.