A Review of “Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach”

Books Reviewed:

Browning, Frank A Queer Geography: Journeys Toward a Sexual Self

Fellows, Will Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest

Rubenstein, James M. The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography. 6th ed

Knox, Paul L. and Marston, Sallie A. Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context

Kuby, Michael; Harner, John, and Gover, Patricia Human Geography in Action     

Playing the Field: Questions of Fieldwork in Geography

Many questions-practical, strategic, political, ethical, personal-are raised by conducting field research. Some of these seem, or are constituted as, separate from the “research itself,” yet are integral to it. In this paper I attempt to cut through the breach that divides the doing of fieldwork and the fieldwork itself by addressing what constitutes the “field,” what constitutes a field researcher, and what constitutes data under contemporary conditions of globalization. Drawing on my work in New York City and Sudan, I argue that by interrogating the multiple positionings of intellectuals and the means by which knowledge is produced and exchanged, field researchers and those with whom they work can find common ground to construct a politics of engagement that does not compartmentalize social actors along solitary axes.     

Re‐enlivening the Indian Ocean through contemporary trade: East African traders searching for new markets in Jakarta

While much has been written about the history of mobility and trade in the Indian Ocean, recent trading connections between Eastern Africa and Asia have so far only gained very little attention. However, in Zanzibar alone, hundreds of traders regularly embark on journeys reviving old routes and further develop them, in order to take advantage of the way the global economy works today. By providing an ethnographic account of such a journey undertaken by four Zanzibari traders to Jakarta, this article gives an insight into the organization, calculations and imaginations involved in contemporary Indian Ocean trading networks. Although this trade journey clearly marks a new form of translocal mobility among Zanzibari traders, this mobile ethnography highlights how the journey is at the same time closely linked to, evokes and enlivens very old processes of mobility across the Indian Ocean, thus highlighting the dialectics between old and new mobilities, and between familiarity and strangeness.     

RELIGION IN SIN CITY*

Religion is an important, yet overlooked, aspect of local life in Las Vegas, Nevada. Many residents attend worship services and practice faith in an environment that often promotes the opposite of their religious beliefs. Using qualitative data from interviews with clergy across the spectrum of faith traditions, I analyze the adaptation of institutional religion to local circumstances in order to understand how religious belief reflects local sense of place. In a city bifurcated into tourist and local parts, such analysis provides a glimpse into the insider/outsider place dichotomy of long interest to geographers. It further illuminates how religion and place interact. Religious believers, in Las Vegas and elsewhere, often negotiate between their spiritual beliefs and their surrounding cultural environment.     

Life in de facto statelessness in enclaves in India and Bangladesh

Drawing on conceptualization of statelessness and ethnographic research on crucial insights of rightessness, this paper investigates how the politico‐geographic‐legality constructs statelessness in the enclaves in India and Bangladesh. Following the decolonization process in 1947, both India and Pakistan/Bangladesh inherited more than 200 enclaves, which comprise 80 per cent of the world's enclaves. With improved bilateral relations, India and Bangladesh officially exchanged the enclaves on 1 August 2015, and the enclave dwellers will gradually be granted citizenship rights over the next few years. In this period of transition from statelessness to statehood, this paper can be read as contemporary history. This paper will draw attention to three aspects of statelessness. First, conceptualization of statelessness not only applies to the refugeehood or de‐territorialization of people but also relates to the process of constructing transterritorial stateless people. Second, this paper will discuss the condition of statelessness constructed in a politico‐geographic‐legal trap. And finally, the paper calls for a wider empirical and critical focus on the hidden geographies of de facto statelessness.     

An Introduction to Scientific Research and Methods in Geography

Amidst ongoing and far-reaching shifts in the spatial organization of social relations, ethnographic researchers have struggled to develop adequately nuanced critical analyses of the subjectivities and agencies involved. In this context, many contemporary ethnographic studies have posited key social forms as “global,” external, or otherwise largely given. Important social and political issues can get lost in this articulation. Interweaving preliminary findings from an ongoing study in New York City with work by geographers who employ a process-based conceptualization of their objects, I outline a geo-ethnographic approach to understanding extralocal social relations that infuses a critically conscientious spatialization into these debates.     

'Private life' and 'work life': difficulties and dilemmas when making and maintaining friendships with ethnographic participants

This paper addresses the difficulties and dilemmas that may occur when friendships are formed with participants during an ethnographic research project. The ongoing, reciprocal relationships developed with participants are considered essential in the data collection of ethnography, as an avenue through which research can be carried out. However, while friendships in the field may open new doors to research, they can also create new (ethical) challenges. This paper revisits these issues, alongside research ethics guidelines, using three different scenarios: the negotiation of methods of contact, the maintenance of contact with participants and the sharing of research diaries with participants. From these discussions, two issues arise that may have implications for future ethnographic research: the obstacle of social networking websites and the negotiation of appropriate research ethics when participants become our friends.     

An orthodoxy of 'the local': post-colonialism, participation and professionalism in northern Thailand

Post-colonial critiques of development reveal the neo-colonial potential of the development project, embedded in the imbalances of power in relations between West and East, First World and Third World. One of the core responses to the challenge of such a critique has been to turn to new participatory approaches that privilege local knowledges, locally defined needs and priorities, above the vagaries of aid agencies or the 'expertise' of development professionals. In this paper I argue that such a shift in development discourse and method has had a significant impact on the discursive practices of professionalism and professional responsibility. Drawing on ethnographic research with development professionals in northern Thailand, I argue that participation has emerged as a new orthodoxy among development professionals who seek to identify themselves as ethical and moral agents of an emancipatory development project. The rise of such orthodoxy has had clear impacts in terms of fostering the emergence of local organization and advocacy groups. At the same time, however, this paper considers how a 'pro-local' orthodoxy may also be having dis-enabling effects for the very project of emancipation that professionals wish to carry out.