Claims: A postcolonial geographical critique of 'partnership' in Britain's development discourse

This paper uses postcolonial theory to establish a critique of the concept of 'partnership' in the British Labour government's 1997 White Paper on International Development, which is routed through the colonial metaphor of the British Commonwealth 'family of nations' to reproduce racialized hierarchies and deny mutuality in the contemporary development of Britain and its former colonies. In the course of this critique, the paper urges British geography to acknowledge its own postcoloniality, which will lead to a mainstreaming of concerns about global justice and provide intellectual resources to reimagine the geographies of postcolonial Britain.     

Geography, law and the centralizing state: wages arrestment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland

This paper analyses reform of the law of wages arrestment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland to examine the spatial nature of the 'regulatory dilemmas' faced by the state in legal interventions in a spatially heterogeneous context. Though this reform was an example of how the nineteenth-century British state sought to regulate the spaces of everyday life, the analysis shows that law-making processes are the outcome of complex tensions between and within the state and legal systems. In these processes, local legal cultures, tensions between systems of common and statute law and the complex geographies of social life play important roles in shaping the conjunction of space, place and law.     

西方厨房研究及其对中国文化地理家庭空间研究之启示

文章通过文献分析法,在回顾西方家庭厨房研究的背景和内容的基础上,总结得出：西方文化地理学在全球化、现代化、城市化、后殖民化和后工业化的背景下,主要从物质文化、性别文化和跨地方文化3方面探讨了现代厨房作为社会文化空间的建构,它们认为厨房作为一个家庭空间,具有强烈的社会性,并强调厨房在构建人类日常生活和社会环境之间关系的过程中起主导性作用,而并非仅仅是家庭烹饪活动的承载空间。基于此,根据当代中国城市家庭的特点,文章对中国文化地理学的家庭研究现状进行了展望,指出今后中国文化地理的家庭研究需将家庭视为一个社会文化空间,分析家庭如何成为连结不同尺度空间的重要节点以及如何承载复杂的社会关系和社会分工,以期对中国文化地理学的家庭研究以及有关微观空间研究的进一步发展作出理论方面的贡献。     

“That is Real America!”: Imaginative Geography among the Chinese Immigrants in Flushing,New York City

Imaginative geography is lived. It is grounded in everyday life, embedded in local context, and influences place identity and place making. By using Chinese immigrants in Flushing, New York City, as an example, this article will explore the formation of multi‐scalar imaginative geographies of the receiving nation, city, and neighborhood among immigrants in their everyday work and travel. The study demonstrates that after migration, physical distance is replaced by the social and cultural distance across which imaginative geographies are formed, reconstructed, and contested. In the case of Flushing, the easy access to ethnic resources leads to a superficial exposure to the world outside the community, thus the geographic knowledge among the Chinese immigrants largely remains imaginative. The imaginative community nurtures a sense of insider‐ness that stands in large contrast with the sense of the outsider‐ness beyond the community, reflected in daily language, racial consciousness, perceived boundaries, and the sense of place among the Chinese immigrants in Flushing.     

基于理论旅行视角的人文地理学中想象地理研究反思

作为批判概念的“想象地理”对地缘政治和日常生活中的后殖民地理问题具有很强的分析能力。本文借用Edward Said“理论旅行”分析框架对想象地理概念引入人文地理学的最初过程及此后想象地理研究的发展演变进行了较为全面的分析,指出人文地理学对想象地理的真正关注始于20世纪90年代初,历经马克思主义地理学的语境压力,想象地理概念进入地理学并逐渐发展为南北关系问题和种族问题研究的核心概念之一。在这些研究中,这一概念充分展示了其解释力和批判激情,但同时也逐渐被体制化,进而产生了“体制化问题”——以批判“话语霸权”为目的的想象地理概念反而成为了一种话语霸权,研究者的批判意识逐渐减弱。基于以上梳理,本文指出,对概念和理论所处的历史和情境始终进行批判性审视是保持批判意识的根本。由此引发的进一步思考是：中国人文地理学的发展必然需要引介西方概念和理论,但在引介过程中应注意反思自身面临的学术后殖民问题,审视学术研究的历史和情境,始终对概念和理论的前提条件、适用范围与理论特性保持警觉,在西化与本土化之间,保持应有的批判意识。     

Quantitative Limits to Qualitative Engagements: GIS,Its Critics,and the Philosophical Divide∗

Heated exchanges between critical theorists and GIScientists over geographic information systems (GIS) in 1990s geography gave rise to calls for increased communication between critics and practitioners of the technology and most recently for “hybrid” qualitative–quantitative GIS practices. Although GIS scholars have successfully addressed mid-1990s critiques of the technology by developing a series of critical GIS practices that involve nuanced and reflexive deployments of GIS and assessments of its visual products, theoretical critiques of GIS remain fixated on the epistemological deficiencies of the technology. Despite references to loosening metaphysical tensions across the discipline, this difference in assessments reveals the discourses of critical-theoretic geography and GIScience to remain separated by a trenchant philosophical divide, across which ontological and epistemological commitments are inviolable. The inability to fully reconcile a critical–theoretic epistemology with the explicitly ontological metaphysics of GIS further complicates qualitative engagements with the technology by addressing a series of inconsistencies into GIS praxis arising from the quantitative limits to representation encountered in the formal universe of computing. The persistence of metaphysical tensions in critical engagements with the technology questions the degree to which qualitative methods can be seamlessly hybridized with the quantitative architectures of GIS.     

Comparing health status and access to health care in Canada’s largest metropolitan areas

Research has shown persistent inequalities in access to health care between and within sociodemographic groups and geographic areas. Yet much of what we know about geographical disparities in access comes from studies of regional and urban/rural contrasts, or from studies of intra-urban, neighborhood-level variations. We know relatively little about variations in access to primary health care across different urban areas, and whether such variations translate into differences among residents’ health. This study examines how health status and access to primary care vary across five of Canada’s largest cities, paying particular attention to populations that may be particularly vulnerable based on age and income. Across all outcomes, there was a consistently strong relationship with individual socioeconomic status. We show that city of residence is important for access to health care but not for health status. Results are discussed in terms of their relevance for urban health-care policy and delivery, and impacts on health and access to care.     

Place of life stories in labour geography: Why does it matter?

Labour geography foregrounds the role of workers in shaping geographies of work by paying attention to the larger actions of labour in response to the capital and state. It however pays less attention to the everyday geographies of labour and the complexities of the ‘social being’ in trying to understand workers motivations and responses. This review argues for labour geography to look beyond the factory gates to understand the nuanced politics of labour as relations get ‘reworked’ within a patriarchal-capitalist society. It argues for paying close attention to the life stories and experiences of workers, to create linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside, without losing sight of the larger struggles of labour and global processes, to develop a more grounded understanding of worker’s agency and actions.     

Slow dissent and the emotional geographies of resistance

Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad‐Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio‐political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence along the pipeline, particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be slow, impromptu or labour based. In this comparative ethnographic analysis, I consider the political environment that shapes socio‐political emotional ties in Nanga, particularly its socio‐political positioning as ‘the village of the First Lady’. In this case, people in proximate positions vis‐à‐vis the ruling family experience heightened oppression(s) and dispossession(s), at the same time that they report feeling little political recourse. In Kribi, on the other hand, responses to the pipeline can be described as defiant withdrawals, demonstrated through a series of unconnected refusals. Although resistance practices along the pipeline have not been visible or successful in an established sense, emotional geographies of resistance elucidate long‐term struggles to survive (i.e., slow dissent), including the accumulation of a collective emotional consciousness grounded in an awareness of historical patterns of injustice.