Parents,permission, and possibility: Young women,college, and imagined futures in Gujarat,India

This article advances critical geographies of youth through examining the spatiality implicit in the imagined futures of young women in rural India. Geographers and other scholars of youth have begun to pay more attention to the interplay between young people’s past, present, and imagined futures. Within this emerging body of scholarship the role of the family and peer group in influencing young people’s orientations toward the future remain underexamined. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, my research focuses on a first generation of college-going young women from socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds in India’s westernmost state of Gujarat. I draw on the “possible selves” theoretical construct in order to deploy a flexible conceptual framework that links imagined post-educational trajectories with motivation to act in the present. In tracing the physical movement of these young women as they navigate and complete college, my analysis highlights the ways in which particular kinds of spaces and spatial arrangements facilitate and limit intra- and inter-generational contact, and the extent to which this affects young women’s conceptions of the future. I conclude by considering the wider implications of my research for ongoing debates surrounding youth transitions, relational geographies of age, and education in the Global South.     

Sibling caringscapes: Time–space practices of caring within youth-headed households in Tanzania and Uganda

This paper investigates the time–space practices of young people caring for their siblings in youth-headed households affected by AIDS in Tanzania and Uganda. Based on qualitative exploratory research with young people heading households, their siblings, NGO workers and community members, the article develops the notion of sibling ‘caringscapes’ to analyse young people’s everyday practices and caring pathways through time and space. Participatory time-use data reveals that older siblings of both genders regularly undertake substantial caring tasks at the very high end of the caregiving continuum. Drawing on rhythmanalysis, the paper explores how young people negotiate emotional geographies and temporalities of caring. The competing rhythms of bodies, schooling, work and seasonal agricultural production can result in ‘arrhythmia’ and time scarcity, which has detrimental effects on young people’s health, education, future employment prospects and mobility. Young people’s lifecourse transitions are shaped to a large extent by their caring responsibilities, resulting in some young people remaining in a liminal position for considerable periods, unable to make ‘successful’ transitions to adulthood. Despite structural constraints, however, young people are able to exercise some autonomy over their caring pathways and lifecourse transitions. The research sheds light on the ways that individuals embody the practices, routines and rhythms of everyday life and exercise agency within highly restricted broader landscapes of care.     

2000 ans de colmatage du port antique de Fréjus (Forum Julii), France : une double métamorphose littorale

The ancient harbour of Fréjus, located in a Holocene ria, has been the subject of a research program in archaeology and, notably with regards to the sedimentary environment at its foundation. A core was extracted in the middle of the basin of Fréjus harbour. The objective is to understand the paleogeographical evolution of the pre-harbour and Roman harbour environments. The sedimentological and biostratigraphical proxies enabled us to: (1) confirm Texier's (1849) hypothesis in which the pre-harbour environment comprised a marine bay blocked by an artificial quay (Gébara and Morhange, 2010). Excoffon et al., 2006 and Devillers et al., 2007, demonstrate the presence of a rocky coast (butte Saint-Antoine), at the time of the harbour's foundation, which it has been progressively transformed into a sandy coast due to the sedimentary input of Argens delta. This study permitted: (2) to confirm the date of foundation of Fréjus’ harbor; and (3) to show different phases of protection. Indeed, the harbour facies attests to a euryhaline lagoon (B1 and B3) which was gradually transformed into a freshwater lake (B4) due to the progradation of the Argens. Low sedimentation rates (ca. 0.5 mm/year), between the end of the last century BC until seventh century AD is consistent with the dredging of the harbour basin.     

‘That’s where my perception of it all was shattered’: Oral histories and moral geographies of food sector workers in an English city region

Geographers and oral historians continue to have much to learn from each other. The subfield of labour geography in particular can enrich its understanding of workers’ lived experiences, both in employment and beyond the workplace, through greater use of interpretative, collaborative oral history methodologies. Attentive to the temporal specificity and inter-subjectivity of people’s narratives, oral history reveals how workers’ moral geographies emerge and change. This article documents the spatio-temporalities and institutions of food sector employment in Peterborough, England, a city-region from which urban-based workers are bussed out daily to rural jobs. The analysis draws on four extended case studies of people who migrated to the UK and worked in the sector in the 2000s, building on recent research that has highlighted harsh employment conditions in the food production, packing and processing sector. It complements this work by viewing narrative itself as an agentic act and listening to how research participants crafted their life stories. These stories revealed diverse, complex and context-specific moral geographies, with participants variously placing value on small acts of rebellion or refusal, dignity and the time to speak with others at work. The article advocates greater engagement by labour geographers with the subjective experiences of workers, and with individual as well as collective agency.     

Following things of rubbish value: End-of-life ships, ‘chock-chocky’ furniture and the Bangladeshi middle class consumer

There has been an upsurge of geographical work tracing globalised flows of commodities in the wake of Appadurai’s (1986) call to ‘follow the things’. This paper engages with calls to follow the thing but argues that work thus far has been concentrated, first, on global flows from developing world producers to developed world consumers, and, second, on things that remain stable as they circulate. This paper instead argues that ‘follow the thing’ research needs to also attend to flows ‘down’ the value chain, from developed to less developed worlds, and to things that are either coming apart or being disassembled. The case presented here is end-of-life ships, sent to be broken in less developed countries, as most are, in this case in Bangladesh. It looks at how the arts of transience re-work materials from rubbish value ships into new forms and objects in the household furnishing sector, which are then appropriated by Bangladeshi middle class consumers. Far from being a minor feature this is shown to be empirically a significant component of the Bangladeshi economy. Theoretically the paper challenges many habitual assumptions about global flows of commodities and urges ‘follow the thing’ research to rethink the thing. Paying attention to the back-end of the value chain shows that things are but temporary configurations of material. At best partially stable, things are argued to be endlessly being assembled, always becoming something else somewhere else.     

Critical moments? Life transitions and energy biographies

Family and youth research has highlighted the importance of lifecourse transitions, illustrating how they can have a substantial impact on people’s everyday lives and anticipated futures. Given their apparent significance, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to life transitions – particularly unexpected ones – to explore how they can impact upon everyday energy use. This is a central concern of Energy Biographies project. The project’s qualitative longitudinal design makes an original contribution, affording a detailed view of how transitions unfold and their significance for energy demand and environmental action. Central to elucidating these issues is the concept of ‘linked lives’, recognising that people live interdependently. In this paper, we explore the accounts of three participants who experienced one or more life transitions during the course of the project, in order to consider the impacts of these events (both planned and unanticipated) on their everyday energy use and environmental actions as part of their linked lives with others.     

Institutional geographies of the New Age movement

This paper is concerned with the production and reproduction of different institutional geographies of the New Age movement. Instead of taking institutional geographies to be given and fixed co-ordinates in the social field, the paper seeks to understand how they are relational outcomes and effects that require constant upkeep. After characterising the New Age movement, in terms of its central cosmology and visions of transformation, the paper takes an actor-network theory (ANT) approach to the understanding of institutional geographies. Through analysing how New Age knowledges and practices travel through time and space, and utilising ANT’s concept of ‘centres of translation’, institutional geographies are taken to be active space-times that are both enrolled into New Age teachers and practitioners programs of action, and space-times that actively enrol teachers and practitioners. It is argued that the intertwining of different engineered actor-networks in and through these space-times maintains the New Age movement itself and thus examining institutional geographies can tell of the movement’s shape or topology. A controversy over the work of David Icke is explored to reveal how institutional geographies are sites for regulation of what counts as New Age knowledge. Finally, this paper seeks, partially at least, to assess in terms of the ANT approach taken, the visions of transformation propounded by the New Age movement.     

Migrant times beyond the life course: The temporalities of foreign English teachers in South Korea

The study of life course has become a central feature of geographical and other social science approaches to youth and migration. It has offered scholars possibilities to explore the timing of events, experiences of time and in the context of migration, the opportunity to analyse mobility patterns in relation to life stages and transitions. Yet, despite this emphasis, much life-course research rests on a limited understanding of time characterised as a linear or even static entity that regulates life in a way that occludes the complex directionality and rhythms of time. In this paper we seek to push beyond these limitations of life course research by developing broader theoretical understandings of time in migration. In particular, we develop a Heideggerian analysis of the migration stories of western English teachers in South Korea, an example of migration as part of a youth–adult transition. Our analysis reveals that the mobilities of English teachers need to be understood in much more complex and relational ways and we draw attention to their more-than-subjective temporalities, questions of attunement to being (affect) and temporal openness in migration. Through this discussion the paper highlights three key areas for further development of scholarly understandings of time in migration: the situatedness of migrants, the holistic character of migration as a happening in the world, and the eventfulness of migration, always characterised by an openness of possibility for emergent spatio-temporal differentiation.     

Evaluating geological heritage: correspondence on Ruban, D.A. ‘Quantification of geodiversity and its loss’ (PGA, 2010, 121(3): 326-333)

This article comments on the recent paper in this journal by Ruban (2010) which presented a simple quantitative scheme for the calculation of landscape geodiversity and its application to evaluating geodiversity between different locations. This comment article highlights some conceptual and methodological issues in the set-up and application of Ruban's scheme, and suggests that geodiversity as a measure can only be meaningful if it is set within a wider context of landscape and geological conservation and management. Some examples of conservation strategies in Great Britain are described in order to illustrate this wider context.     

Detailing spaces and processes of resistance: Working women in Dundee’s jute industry

Recent and ongoing calls within labour geography and social and cultural geography have highlighted the importance of resistance, its spatial productions and manifestations. However, within this work, the geographical history of the factory system has been largely overlooked. Drawing upon Foucauldian theorisings in the fields of management and organisation, together with recent writings on the geographies of resistance, this paper takes Dundee’s jute industry at the turn of the twentieth century as its focus and explores how the workplace itself, and the very workplace discipline used to ensure a productive, efficient and hardworking workforce, engendered workplace protest among the industry’s working women. Writing through a number of modes and scales of protest within the workplace, within and between work groups, departments, mills and factories, and across the city, this paper adheres to an approach that carefully details the spaces and processes of resistance, paying careful attention to how union and non-union resistances operated and the geographies they worked through and created.     

Domesticating home anchored work: Negotiating flexibility when bringing ICT based work home in rural communities

Based on a study of people conducting ICT based work from home in Scotland and Norway, the article analyses how work is negotiated and integrated with non-paid activities in the household and local community. The article fills a gap in that it focuses on rural contexts rather than the urban work life often depicted in literature on flexibility and work. When work is brought home, a domestication process takes place whereby practices of work are negotiated and integrated into everyday life, sometimes changing common perceptions of where and when work is “in” or “out of place”. While working from home is common in rural areas, the study shows that ICT based knowledge related work is still seen as relatively “out of place”. Drawing on the domestication concept, the study shows how community norms about accessibility, interaction and where to be at certain times, had to be renegotiated when this type of work was conducted from home. Imbued in these negotiations were subtly often tacitly communicated moral conceptions on what constitutes good parenthood (in particular motherhood) as well as “real” work. Both men and women reported benefits in terms of combining family and work obligations when working from home, but the tendency was still for traditional gender patterns to be reproduced. Women tended to fit work around the needs of the children, whereas men saw themselves first and foremost workers. Following the concept “doing gender” some challenged these patterns, but did so carefully in relation to the work organisation as well as the community. The impact of communities in regulating home anchored work suggests there may be a need for communities to take on a more active domestication process as more people conduct ICT based work with the home as the base, opening up the moral and normative geographies for when work is “in” or “out of place”.     

Setting Shari’a standards: On the role, power and spatialities of interlocking Shari’a boards in Islamic financial services

This paper aims to refine earlier research on the geographies of Islamic financial services (IFS) through a study of how cities are being connected through interlocking directorates in Shari’a advisory boards of IFS firms. The relevance of this analysis is discussed against the backdrop of recent critiques of mainstream ‘world cities’ research because of structuralist and universalizing tendencies. By applying a network concept to the relationalities of world cities within financial circuits, we explore the nested city/firm/actor structure behind Shari’a board membership, and reassess the connectivity of cities in the IFS network in terms of the role and spatialities of interlocking Shari’a boards. The results show that Gulf cities, most notably Manama, Dubai and Kuwait City are particularly well-connected, while also mainstay financial centres outside the Middle East, such as London and New York are networked by interlocking board memberships of a global Shari’a elite. The dominant position of Manama is traced back to its role as a standard-setting city for Shari’a-compliant investments, which materializes through the enacted presence of an array of highly interlocked regulatory bodies and mediating elites.     

Spatial relations and the materialities of political conflict: the construction of entangled political identities in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768

This paper engages with the material geographies of political conflict. It applies the concerns of actor-network theory around the entangled character of material/social relations to the geographies of subaltern politics. It explores how interconnected strikes of riverside labourers and sailors in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768 contested the terms on which materials were enrolled into mercantile capitalist networks. The dynamic geographies of these strikes are used to unsettle constructions of subaltern spaces of politics as bounded and localised. The paper then demonstrates how labourers crafted multiple antagonisms through negotiating their location in materially heterogeneous networks. It uses this concern with contested material geographies to engage with the entangled construction of political identities. The paper concludes that interrogating the materialities of political conflict does not just add a neglected technical dimension to the study of political activity; it provides considerable resources for engaging with the inventiveness of subaltern political activity and agency [Barry, A., Political Machines: Governing A Technological Society, Continuum Publications, London, 2001].     

Bringing it all back home: The extensification and ‘overflowing’ of work: The case of San Francisco’s new media households

This paper explores the extensification of work—that is the distribution or exporting of work across different spaces/scales and times—and its impact on individual workers and households. We argue that contracting out and the work life balance debates might be developed more usefully within the holistic framework of extensification. The key process that we follow can be described as overflowing. We contrast the universally positive representations of spillovers and embedding that we are familiar with in economic geographies with the more negatively characterised overflowing of work into and out of the household. The paper is built around a case study of those involved in the new media industry in San Francisco: households, workers and companies.     

Eutrephoceras subplicatum (Steinmann, 1895) is a junior synonym of Eutrephoceras dorbignyanum (Forbes in Darwin, 1846) (Cephalopoda, Nautiloidea) from the Maastrichtian Quiriquina Formation of Chile

Nautilus subplicatusSteinmann, 1895 is a latest Cretaceous species of nautiloid which is common in southern South America (Chile, Argentina) and the Antarctic Peninsula and which is best assigned to the genus EutrephocerasHyatt, 1894. Nautilus dorbignyanusForbes in Darwin, 1846 and Nautilus valenciennii Hupé in Gay, 1854 are here considered to be senior synonyms which later authors have apparently overlooked. The type material of these two taxa is reillustrated. On the basis of this and additional material it is demonstrated that only a single nautiloid species occurs in the Quiriquina Formation of late Maastrichtian age. For this we propose to use N. dorbignyanus as the oldest available name.     

Proximity,subjectivity, and space: Rethinking distance in human geography

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorising, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis.     

‘The magical operations of separation’: English elite schools’ on-line geographies,internationalisation and functional isolation

This paper examines the enduring separation and isolation of elite schools in England, in the face of increasing and substantial internationalisation. It presents the findings of a research project examining the geographical narratives produced by 30 elite schools on their websites and through their prospectuses, newsletters, blogs and twitter feeds. A critical visual and textual analysis was undertaken. Drawing on these data, the paper argues that elite schools remain highly focused on promoting and defending their separateness and isolation, despite extensive, documented international involvements. Work on institutional and carceral geographies and geographies of education have provided some theoretical justification for why this might be the case, and we explore these reasons here. The paper concludes with a plea for more work on the elite schooling sector in England, as their spatial practices (isolation and internationalisation) continue to have a weighty bearing upon society.     

Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.     

Moments in everyday/distant geopolitics: Young people’s fears and hopes

The everyday implications of a volatile geopolitical climate are increasingly recognised, but far less is known about how people’s emotional geographies are affected by geopolitical change. This paper offers a critical examination of how some young people in different parts of the world navigate fears and hopes that might be considered ‘global’ in nature, and those that might be considered ‘everyday’. We report from participatory research conducted with young people from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds living in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We examine how personal fears and hopes intersect with wider anxieties about youth, urban crime and terrorism. The research suggests that global-everyday emotions are not separated out in young people’s analyses. They are critically reflexive about wider discourses of fear, while undertaking the day to day business of navigating what are sometimes challenging emotional topographies.     

Escape to victory: Development,youth entrepreneurship and the migration of Ghanaian footballers

This article contributes to contemporary debates over the resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism of young people in the Global South by exploring the relationship between development and the migration of male youth within the football industry. Drawing on fieldwork in Accra, the paper reveals how young Ghanaians attempt to enact development as freedom through spatial mobility. Significantly, this is coupled with an awareness that their desired spatial mobility is difficult to attain, thereby inducing a sense of involuntary immobility. For some male youth, the solution to this predicament is to invest in their sporting bodily capital and become Foucauldian ‘entrepreneurs of self’ in the form of a professional footballer. Meanwhile for others, the solution to prevailing economic pressures is to embrace financial risk by becoming entrepreneurs in the form of football club owners, and attempting to profit from the movement of players. The interests of these two sets of entrepreneurs coalesce around the fact that the mobility of footballers is crucial to generating a return on their respective investments. It is argued that the construction of young Ghanaians as responsible for their future life chances, and the growing dissonance between aspirations and the ability to migrate, is a key reason why youth are trying to migrate through football. Problematically, this can foster conditions favourable for irregular migration.