Becoming skilled: The cultural and corporeal geographies of teaching and learning Thai Yoga massage

This paper explores the process of learning an embodied knowledge using the work of Dreyfus and Deleuze. Although geographers have begun to acknowledge the role of embodied knowledges in social life, there have been few in-depth case studies of how these skills are learned. This paper offers a case study of Thai Yoga massage (TYM), a ‘complementary and alternative therapy’ which is growing in popularity in the United Kingdom. Having outlined the case study, the paper explores the cultural geographies of the formalisation, documentation and contestation of the set of techniques that have come to cohere in the UK as TYM. The paper then interrogates the messy corporeal geographies of learning a skill, and briefly considers how more advanced practitioners experience their skilled practice.     

It's a long way to the other geographers and geographic knowledges

Geographic knowledge is usually understood as the knowledge produced by geographers. Yet, it is also produced by people outside of the academia. But as Western science claimed for its exclusive self the status of ‘knowledge’, others have long been denied the production and possession of a true knowledge, and recognised merely the mastering of practical skills. The binary opposition between scientific and other forms of knowledge has been central to the construction of academic geography until the late 1980s, when postmodern thought cast some doubt on the universality of scientific knowledge. This led to critical analyses of academic geography, revealing its situatedness, as well as to a new interest for the geographies of the ‘Others’. Examining how geographers have dealt with other knowledge sets so far, and how they have labelled them, this paper argues that other geographies should be given more attention. This means focusing on the knowledges themselves, and considering implementing a true dialogue between these and academic geography. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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.     

Scaling knowledge: towards a critical geography of critical geographies

This paper provides an analysis of the scale politics involved in the production of social-scientific geographic knowledge. I argue that critical Geographers need to acknowledge that ideas do not circulate unfettered or limited solely by their intellectual value. Instead, we must understand that some ideas are `attached' intimately to the places in which they originate while others circulate freely without attachment to specific places. Through such simple (dis)locations, geographic ideas get inserted into spaces of academic knowledge production that are shot through with scale politics. Ironically, such scalar processes produce a simple, transparent, abstract and hierarchical space of knowledge production that elides the complex spatial relations that we as geographers are supposed to be so interested in understanding.     

Labor geographies in a time of early globalization: Strikes against Singer in Scotland and Russia in the early 20th century

This essay provides analyses of labor strikes at two early sites (first quarter of the 20th century) of the global production line – Singer Manufacturing Company’s factories at Clydebank, Scotland and Podolsk, Russia – and the labor management strategies that led to and resulted from these particular enactments of power. I focus on the degree to which Singer and its employees were embedded in local, regional and national contexts, and how and why workers’ agency mattered to the course of early globalization. I also suggest that such analyses provide significant understanding of how and why early global production was both different from and similar to contemporary globalization. By so doing, this analysis contributes to theoretical discussions concerning degrees of territorial embeddedness of transnational corporations, particularly in regard to changes over time as well as geographic scale, and adds historical nuance to theoretical questions concerning labor geographies under conditions of globalization.     

The racialized geographies of news consumption and production: contaminated memories and racialized silences

With its longstanding history and interest in issues of landscape and representation, geographers are ideally positioned to analyze the relationship between media, identity and place in media. What is missing, however, is a grounded understanding of the dynamics of the locally produced politics of representation and, in particular, how these representations are perceived by different members of the audience. This paper briefly explores the nexus of race, news production and news consumption through an analysis of interviews with racialized journalists (journalists who identified as members of minority racial groups) and a focus group conducted with self-identified Iranian Canadians. The paper looks specifically at two themes that emerged in the empirical material: the contamination of memory and the creation of colonized memory media-spaces for some participants in the focus group, and the nature of racialized silences in the newsroom. I suggest that geographies of news might well be understood as a complex, interactive process of the production of meaning between both producer and consumer, where news content, ethics, roles and values are negotiated through multiple social contexts.     

Popular geographies and geographical imaginations: contemporary English-language geographical magazines

English-language geographical magazines present very different geographical imaginations to their readers than those portrayed by academic geographers, with whom the editors and publishers of those magazines have very little contact. There is a mutual lack of appreciation—which could have substantial consequences for the academic discipline. To increase academic geographers’ appreciation of the popular geographies being portrayed, the contents of recent volumes of three magazines—National Geographic, Geographical, and New Zealand Geographic—are distilled, with their major themes identified. One clear conclusion is that there is virtually no contact between the two imaginations: popular geographical magazines almost entirely ignore the work of academic geographers.     

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.     

The non spaces of critical geography in Mexico

The paper examines the limited presence of critical geography in Mexico and analyses why the lack of theoretical discussion means there is a need for theory from abroad. Different stages in the development of our critical practice, our links with planning programmes, and a lack of relations with other Latin American countries are all salient features.     

Geography and postgenomics: how space and place are the new DNA

For many geographers, postgenomics is a relatively new perspective on biological causality. It is a non-dualistic way to conceptualize DNA, genes and environment. It also presents an opportunity for a broad critical engagement with biology through geography’s insights into socionature and the fallacies of spatial inference. In postgenomics, mapping of the spatial and temporal contexts and circumstances surrounding DNA, rather than DNA sequence alone, has become prioritized. Consequently, scientific and economic value in postgenomics accrues through the enclosure and mapping of the ‘omes’. These include the more familiar epigenome and microbiome, but also the interactome, the phenome, and the exposome among many others. The omes represent the cartographic translation of biological spatialities that modify the outcomes of DNA sequence from within as well as from outside of human bodies. In this article, we show how postgenomics leverages this omic ontologicalization of space and puts it to productive use. Drawing upon recent studies of the human microbiome, we illustrate how problematic geographies of difference arise through the way this omic mapping unfolds.     

The local geographies of poverty: a rural case-study

Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in the spaces of poverty in Britain. An increasing number of geographers have placed poverty back `on the map' by pointing to its complex spatial manifestations. In addition, the increased importance attached to the concept of social exclusion within UK social welfare discourse has led to social policy researchers thinking more critically about the broader social and spatial contexts of poverty and, consequently, new connections between poverty and space have been identified. However, within these new spatialised accounts of poverty in Britain, scant attention has been given to the local geographies of poverty. In fact, relatively little is known about the complex connections between poverty and place, and, more specifically, the ways that poverty is associated with different material forms, representations and experiences in particular local contexts. This paper develops these kinds of connection between poverty and place through an exploration of the local geographies of rural poverty in South-west England. Based on an analysis of local poverty data, in-depth interviews with a broad range of key agencies and a case-study of poverty in a particular village, the research highlights the complex socio-spatial nature of poverty, the different spatial scales and visibilities of poverty, and important connections between poverty and the shifting social composition of local space.     

Situating the geographies of injustice in democratic theory

Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of democracy in critical human geography and related fields. This paper considers the conceptual placement of contestation in a strand of democratic theory often denigrated by these approaches, namely theories of deliberative democracy informed by post-Habermasian Critical Theory. It is argued that this concern with contestation derives from a focus on the relationships between different rationalities of action. It is proposed that this tradition of thought informs a distinctively phenomenological approach to understanding the situations out of which democratic energies emerge. In elaborating on this phenomenological understanding of the emergence of political space, the paper proceeds in three stages. First, it is argued that the strong affinities between ontological conceptualisations of ‘the political’ and the ontological register of canonical spatial theory squeezes out any serious consideration of the plural rationalities of ordinary political action. Second, debates between deliberative and agonistic theorists of democracy are relocated away from questions of ontology. These are centred instead on disputed understandings of ‘normativity’. This move opens up conceptual space for the analysis of phenomenologies of injustice. Third, using the example of debates about transnational democracy in which critical theorists of deliberative democracy explicitly address the reconfigurations of the space of ‘the political’, it is argued that this Critical Theory tradition can contribute to a distinctively ‘topological’ sense of political space which follows from thinking of political action as emerging from worldly situations of injustice. In bringing into focus this phenomenological approach to political action, the paper has lessons for both geographers and political theorists. Rather than continuing to resort to a priori models of what is properly political or authentically democratic, geographers would do well to acknowledge the ordinary dynamics and disappointments which shape political action. On the other hand, political theorists might do well to acknowledge the limits of the ‘methodological globalism’ that characterises so much recent work on the re-scaling of democracy.     

The public trust doctrine and critical legal geographies of water in California

Legal processes shape how water resources are allocated, regulated, distributed, and governed. This paper examines the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that addresses the state’s role in governing natural resources by requiring states to manage certain bodies of water and their shorelines for the good of the public. The paper focuses on how the public trust doctrine has been used—with varying degrees of success—to protect water bodies by contesting the diversion and transfer of water in California. The paper compares how the doctrine was applied in two cases: Mono Lake and the Salton Sea, two California lakes that have been threatened by water diversions and transfers. Advocates at Mono Lake successfully used the public trust doctrine for environmental protection, while public trust was an unsuccessful strategy at the Salton Sea. The paper examines issues of nonequilibrium ecosystems, natural versus artificial ecosystems, and wasteful versus reasonable uses of water.By investigating why one case was deemed eligible for public trust protections while the other was not, this paper examines how discursive constructions of nature are embedded in and enacted by legal institutions and how these constructions of nature impact the implementation of legal protections of natural resources. In examining the use of the public trust doctrine in California, the paper examines both the potential and the limitations of the public trust in practice, showing how legal processes and institutions can be used to protect public interests in natural resources but also how particular environmental narratives are reinforced through these institutions.     

(Re)Connecting spatial literacy with children’s geographies: GPS,Google Earth and children’s everyday lives

This article sets out an agenda for research that (re)connects research on children’s geographies and childhood studies with studies of spatial literacy. Research on children’s environmental cognition and, latterly, spatial literacy, has been artificially and problematically separated from the majority of research in childhood studies. Our fundamental aim in this article is to argue for – and to evidence – greater attention to how spatial literacy and children’s everyday lives are embedded in one another. To support our broader call for a synthetic research agenda, we draw on some more focussed, qualitative empirical material taken from a large-scale project about children’s mobilities and everyday lives in newly-built urban communities. Our analysis focuses upon children’s interpretations of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) tracks of their mobilities, set against a background of Google Earth imagery. In doing so, we showcase one suite of ways in which research on environmental cognition and children’s geographies might proceed together. We demonstrate that children not only displayed analytical skills (for instance, in relation to scaling effects and pattern recognition) but that many also exercised higher-level, critical analysis, especially in relation to errors on Google Earth outputs. Simultaneously, we interrogate the recursive articulation of a range of qualitative indicators of spatial literacy, with children’s everyday mobilities, routines, emotions and memories. The paper analyses how new conceptual languages and technologies being propounded by spatial literacy scholars could afford a more enriched understanding of key contemporary concerns for children’s geographers, and, recursively, what spatial literacy scholars might gain from engaging with (especially qualitative) research prompted by those concerns.     

Producing/contesting whiteness: rebellion, anti-slavery and enslavement in Barbados, 1816

The increasing attention paid by geographers to white identities represents a welcome corrective to research on race and ethnicity that focused on non-white subjectivities and promises to deconstruct the purportedly `normal' or `unremarkable' status often afforded to whiteness. Such work is a vital part of a critical geographical agenda. This paper seeks to contribute to such an agenda by responding to Bonnett [Area 29 (1997) 193, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives, Prentice Hall, 2000] call for a historical geographical engagement with `white studies'. To do so, it begins by considering how such a critical geography might be spatially and theoretically framed. It then introduces a specific context for such an engagement--the revolt of 1816 by enslaved people of African origin in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados. Reading this not as a single event but as a locus of multiple and conflicting narrations, each linked to particular assertions and contestations of whiteness, the paper argues that geographies of white identities must emphasise struggles between `white' subjects, as well as the role of subaltern acts and representations in white racialisation. This is important if postcolonial, and therefore critical, geographies of white identities are to be produced.     

Constructing economic geographies from corporate interviews: insights from a cross-country comparison of retailer–supplier relationships

In the light of the significant role played by corporate interviews in the construction of contemporary economic geographies, this paper suggests that the practices of corporate interviewing in the research process demand critical reflection. These practices are reflected upon in the context of a comparative study of retailer–manufacturer power relations in the UK and USA. In particular, attention is paid to the ways in which corporate interviews actively construct knowledge of contrasting own-brand supply relationships in these national economies. To do this, the paper addresses the following issues: (i) the embeddedness of corporate interviews in a transforming economic geography; (ii) the processes of identifying, and gaining access to, own-brand supply networks in the UK and USA; (iii) the use of materials resulting from corporate interviews to produce nuanced understandings of own-brand supply relationships; (iv) the adoption of an appropriate textual strategy for writing such interview-based material into economic geography.     

Geopolitics and family in Palestine

This paper questions geographers’ ability to think about power and violence through different epistemological registers, specifically by examining the discursive production of Palestine as place in geopolitical studies. Although the banner of geopolitics groups together a variety of approaches, these studies more or less cohere around a very particular type of imaginative geography of place - as violent and political. Recent arguments for cosmopolitan approaches to place - particularly when encountering non-Euro/American sites - are used to argue for more diverse approaches to places such as Palestine within Anglophone geographical scholarship. Using research on Palestinian family spaces and spacings, an alternative approach is outlined that exposes some geographies of dealing with and getting by the Israeli Occupation that are largely ignored by geopolitical approaches. These tropes prompt a return, in the conclusion, to the question of how geographers analytically apprehend power and violence, and the possibilities for doing this at the limits of, and beyond, the framework of geopolitical analysis.     

Relational networks of knowledge production in transnational law firms

For geographers, debates surrounding the knowledge economy have reinvigorated interest in the geographies of learning and knowledge production. Particularly topical are discussions of the possibility of spatially stretched (global) learning, something especially relevant to professional service firms where the production and management of knowledge across transnational organizational networks is essential. Taking this as its starting point, the paper explores the way knowledge is produced and circulated in transnational legal professional service firms. Drawing on the ideas of relational economic geography to analyse original empirical material, it highlights the way relational networks are socially constructed to allow learning to be stretched across space. The paper then goes on to identify the ‘politics’ of inclusion in these networks and the exclusivity of membership. It also highlights the geographies of power that influence the nature and effect of the knowledge produced and circulated. It does this by examining the role of relational knowledge networks in the ‘Americanization’ of legal practice in Europe and the impacts of such changes on national institutional and regulatory contexts. It is, therefore, argued that transnational corporate networks need to be viewed as heterogeneous and ‘embedded spaces of social practice’. It is shown that studying the actors and their interactions across relational networks is vital to fully understand how global relational forms are constructed and to understand their structuring effects on the global economy.