DISARMING NATURE: CONVERTING MILITARY LANDS TO WILDLIFE REFUGES*

Since 1988 the United States has closed nearly two dozen major military installations and reclassified them as national wildlife refuges. By presenting a case study of one site of military‐to‐wildlife conversion, this article examines the formation of these places and the implications of casting military practices and environmental conservation as compatible activities. As lands where military and environmental attributes can be perceived as inseparable, military‐to‐wildlife sites exemplify hybrid geographies that challenge dualistic notions of nature and society.     

Strategic globalizing centers and sub-network geometries: A social network analysis of multi-scalar energy networks

Over the past three decades, a multitude of studies have examined the relational properties of corporate networks as a proxy for analyzing interurban hierarchies and structures. While this has been important in illuminating the nature of global connectivity, a significant conceptual lacuna exists in understanding how a multi-scalar analysis of interurban networks informs a more complete understanding of the geographies of globalization, and how cities within these networks act as regional globalizing centers. Building upon the theoretical and methodological foundations of ‘world city network’ (WCN) research, this paper investigates the corporate networks of the energy industry as a historic driver of globalization using social network analysis from an Australia geographical perspective. Globally and nationally scaled energy networks derived from the Platts and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) corporate lists are used to explore the convergence of nationally and globally articulated networks, and identify cities instrumental in the globalization of the national industry sub-networks. These are strategic ‘globalizing centers’ which, in contradistinction to ‘global cities’ or ‘world cities’ as broad classifications, play nuanced roles in anointing industry-specific circuits of capital and information. The analysis of two complementary yet distinct networks provides theoretical insight into how scale plays an integral role in defining/articulating interurban relations.     

Nano-art,dynamic matter and the sight/sound of touch

This paper offers an auto-ethnographic account of Midas, an immersive bio-media installation created by artist Paul Thomas. The experiences of the installation provide a stepping-off point for a discussion of the corporeal geographies and the nano-imaginaries that the work develops. Understanding the senses as a principle means whereby the body mingles with the world and with itself, we begin from a focus on Midas’s presentation of the inter-relations of touch, vision and hearing, thereby extending geographical thinking on aurality, but also reworking the immersive geographies that are implicated within ontologies of touch. We draw out these geographies by way of the depths and passages of Irigaray’s (1993) fluid ontology of touch. From here we explore the ‘creative rethinking’ of matter that the installation develops, exploring the organismic topographies that it develops which stand against nano-imaginaries of matter that are focused either on the corporeal violence of nano-splatter, or the understanding of nanotechnologies through the mastery and control of matter.     

From new political organizations to changing moral geographies: Unpacking global civil society

The discourse of globalization suggests that territorial and cultural boundaries are increasingly insignificant or even disappearing in today's `world of flows'. More recently, this notion of borderlessness has also suffused broad reaches of the imagination of policy-makers and social scientists in the Western world. Thus, the term `global civil society' was coined to capture the experience and impact of transnational environmental and human rights activism. In this paper, however, it is argued that the concept remains both undertheorized and empirically dubious. In order to analytically `unpack' the concept, I provide a brief summary of an empirical research project on networks of new political organizations in South Asia and the West. The evidence assembled suggests the need to reconceptualize the geographies of transborder solidarity and concern beyond the rhetoric of global civil society.     

Urban Contestation in a Feminist Register

Abstract

Approaches to urban contestation that challenge the dichotomy between institutionalization and opposition, and understand contestation as including engagement, are explored. The emphasis is on how recent forms of feminist analysis and critical scholarship open up a conceptual terrain for such thinking, and the discussion is grounded using further details of City for All Women Initiative/Initiative: une ville pour toutes les femmes (CAWI-IVTF), which is seen to be a concrete, successful case. Its tactics and strategies are noteworthy because of the manner in which ideas drawn from feminist and progressive organizing in other (including non-urban and non-Western) contexts have been incorporated. CAWI-IVTF's successes are most striking in relation to women who previously felt alienated from local politics. The organization's rationale, strategies, and tactics provide insights into how women active in this network create new spatialities, and how their interactions in space are producing new political subjects.     

Mothering urban space,governing migrant women: the construction of intersectional positions in area-based interventions in Berlin

In this paper, we investigate new ways of governing migrant populations in Germany brought forth by social policies on the local level of inner-city neighborhoods. In recent years, numerous initiatives on the local level have constituted the ‘migrant neighborhood’ as a site of governmental attention. One initiative that policymakers consider particularly innovative is the neighborhood mothers program in Berlin, a program that instructs migrant women as agents of neighborhood improvement and encourages them to establish peer-to-peer relations to other migrant women in order to pass on social norms. In the paper, we combine governmentality and intersectionality theory to critically examine the modes of behavior change promoted by the neighborhood mothers program and the political rationalities that are used to justify the governing of (and through) migrant women. We draw particular attention to the spatial dimensions of the neighborhood mothers program, to the ways in which it targets domestic and intimate spaces as sites of inspection and intervention and appoints migrant women as ‘door openers’ for entry of the state into the regulation of families and communities.     

“Teaching Against Culture” in Geography of Islam

This article explores various ways of how to challenge the “otherness” of Islam and Muslims when teaching geography of Islam. It suggests a critical project of “teaching against culture,” which challenges essentializing notions of Islam as a monolith, and rather demonstrates the complexity of Muslim geographies and “lived” Islam. Furthermore, it implies examining the various identity categories and binaries such as secular–religious and West–East that come about in the classroom itself in the secular academic context of an urban state university. As such, the article engages in questions of significance to a wider set of courses on social and cultural geographies, geography of religion, and postcolonial geographies     

Entries and omissions: using solicited diaries in geographical research

This paper explores the use of personal solicited diaries as a qualitative research tool within social geography. Diaries were used with women from South Africa who recorded their experiences of violence over a period of one month. The paper analyses diaries in terms of their longitudinal benefits, their socially constituted nature, their use in conjunction with interviews and finally their potential for empowerment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the diary as a methodological tool.     

Generating vague neighbourhoods through data mining of passive web data

Neighbourhoods have been described as ‘the building blocks of public services society’. Their subjective nature, however, and the resulting difficulties in collecting data, means that in many countries there are no officially defined neighbourhoods either in terms of names or boundaries. This has implications not only for policy but also business and social decisions as a whole. With the absence of neighbourhood boundaries many studies resort to using standard administrative units as proxies. Such administrative geographies, however, often have a poor fit with those perceived by residents. Our approach detects these important social boundaries by automatically mining the Web en masse for passively declared neighbourhood data within postal addresses. Focusing on the United Kingdom (UK), this research demonstrates the feasibility of automated extraction of urban neighbourhood names and their subsequent mapping as vague entities. Importantly, and unlike previous work, our process does not require any neighbourhood names to be established a priori.     

“Doing Good Work”: Feminist Dilemmas of Volunteering in the Field

In this article, I argue that there is a need to examine the feminist ethics of volunteering in the field, specifically as it relates to issues of positionality, power and reciprocity, and participatory methods. Reflecting on dilemmas I experienced as a volunteer with the Girl Scouts of San Diego while conducting research on their annual Girl Scout cookie sale, I debate the relationship between volunteerism and fieldwork more broadly and question the effectiveness of volunteerism within a feminist geographic methodological framework. In light of the dilemmas that arose in the field as a volunteer and researcher, I question whether we can consider volunteering as “good work.”