Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Preparing the books to read every day is enjoyable for many people. However, there are still many people who also don't like reading. This is a problem. But, when you can support others to start reading, it will be better. One of the books that can be recommended for new readers is experience and education. This book is not kind of difficult book to read. It can be read and understand by the new readers.

Experience and Education.

Justice and the Politics of Difference

The dilemma of domestic work in postapartheid South Africa should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon of marginal interest to sociologists. The globalization of paid domestic work means that hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries in the global South are living in a form of servitude, as they work for low wages, under abusive conditions in wealthier countries as part of a ‘‘global care chain.’’ In this brilliant study, Shireen Ally demonstrates how these relations of servitude have resisted change in ‘‘the national care chain’’ in contemporary South Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa is a contradictory place. On the one hand there is deepening inequality, poverty and widespread collective violence in the form of xenophobic attacks against foreigners and violent protests about the failure of the local state to deliver substantive social citizenship in the shape of access to housing, jobs, water, electricity and sanitation. On the other hand the new constitution embodies a powerful vision of participatory democracy, new institutions to protect human rights, and the redrafting of apartheid labor legislation included one of the most extensive and expansive efforts anywhere in the world to recognize paid domestic work as a form of employment. These state efforts to modernize and professionalize domestic work as a form of employment were remarkable. Existing labor legislation was extended inter alia to include a landmark national minimum wage, mandatory formal contracts of employment, extensive leave, formal registration, as well as access to unemployment insurance benefits, which Ally points out was a ‘‘world first.’’ However, a central thesis of the book is that the outcome has been disempowering for domestic workers. With analytical depth and sensitivity, Ally demonstrates the persistence of servitude. Paradoxically, the book suggests that domestic workers’ lives have not changed much under democracy and many feel that ‘‘things are worse than before.’’ While they are the beneficiaries of ‘‘an extensive democratic statecraft’’ attempting to turn ‘‘servants’’ into workers with the same rights as other workers, their social position as migrant ‘‘mother-workers,’’ often caring for their employers’ children at the expense of their own, has not been affected. Ally explains this paradox in the tension between the forms of formal power deployed by the post-apartheid state in its efforts to protect these ‘‘vulnerable’’ workers and the forms of informal power generated by the intimate nature of their work. This involves a ‘‘contradictory collision of depersonalizing rights and personalizing intimacy’’ (p. 187). In the absence of state protection under apartheid, South African domestic workers had elaborate ‘‘practices of power’’ rooted in their highly personalized relationships with employers, as a way to control their work. ‘‘In the absence of labor rights defining leave provisions, sitting down every morning with tea and talking to one’s employer about her problems became a way to ensure an extended Christmas vacation’’ (p. 13). These informal mechanisms for negotiating working conditions have continued and demonstrate these women’s creativity and assertiveness. Another paradox Ally identifies in this highly original exploration is that the political inclusion of domestic workers has ironically depoliticized them. Making domestic workers the subjects of rights through their construction as ‘‘vulnerable’’ defined their political status as incapacitated and inert. With the state positioning itself as the representative and protector of domestic workers’ interests, they were demobilized, their unions displaced and weakened and their voices muted. Thus Ally argues that ‘‘the attempt to turn ‘servants’ into workers through liberal democratic rights, rather

Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America

ore, but there are others well worth mining. For example, women do not feature much in his narrative. It might have been better if he left them out completely as his analysis of the feminine side of landscape is worn out and riddled with arcane clichfis of mother earth’s dark vaginal caves and fecund fields. That landscapes have gender is a perspective worth pursuing; however, Schama’s emphasis is towards masculine conceptions and interactions with landscape. The book might have been more compelling had he offered careful discussion of women and the femininity of place. As it stands women play silent partners to men in building culture and remembering it in the land. In Water, he offers the worn out metaphor of a dark wet crevice in the earth as vagina. My response is one of ennui, tiring of yet another scholarly glance up a woman’s skirt as a token nod to understanding the mysteries of female sexuality and its relation to landscape. More often than not it is a thinly veiled need to flash a woman’s genitalia in a dark room full of scholars (keeping in mind this book originates from a series of lectures) in an effort to seem progressive or risqufi. Another annoying interpretation of women is in attributing their assertiveness to androgyny or some desire on their part to be like men. Can’t a woman climb a mountain without, as Schama puts it, \"acting out her quasimasculinity\" (p. 495)? Does Schama need to point out what Henriette d’Angeville wore when she climbed Mont Blanc in 1838? Reference to her attire seems to be presented as evidence of her validity as a woman. As though to say she did a manly thing, but because she dressed so prettily her femininity remained intact. What a relief. If Schama wants to offer a new way of looking that derails the fast track to the future bereft of \"myth, metaphor, and allegory, where measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter of value\" (p. 14), then he might have shown where these interpretive lenses of culture exist in the machine age. The deeply embedded bonds of nature and culture through myth and symbol emerge even in modern societies. He brings his readers to the gates of modernity after a long, sometimes fascinating, always well-documented, but painfully laborious journey. I’m glad to have read the book, but am not convinced Schama has offered a new way of looking at landscape. What he illuminates well and often are the rich and diverse reasons for looking at landscape--seeing landscape as auger for cultural meaning that nourishes humanity’s raison d’etre. However, that he succeeds in his claim to stick to Thoreau’s aversion to the esoteric is debatable. Perhaps one person’s concrete is another’s quicksand, but his references seem only accessible to readers familiar with European and American history of the arts and letters and may be esoteric to many. Near the book’s close, he emphasizes that the local, the nearby, holds the key to landscape memory, as though it was to these places he took his now well-traveled reader:

Privatopia: homeowner associations and the rise of residential private government

Section 1 - Diverse Conceptions of People, Place, and Space Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Constructing Differences in Public Spaces: Race, Class and Gender as Interlocking Systems" [1996] Susan Ruddick "Spacetime and the World" [2005] David Harvey "Psychological Ecology" [1943] Kurt Lewin "Junkspace" [2002] Rem Koolhaas "One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity" [1997] Miwon Kwon "Spatializing Culture" [2013] Setha Low Section 2 - Human Perception and Environmental Experience Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Psychological Maps of Paris" [1970] Stanley Milgram and Denise Jodelet "The City Image and Its Elements" [1960] Kevin Lynch "The Theory of Affordances" [1979] James J. Gibson "Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis for Design" [1969] Robert Sommer "Theory of the Derive" and "Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation" [1958] Guy Debord Section 3 - Place and Identity Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self" [1983] Harold Proshansky, Abbe Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff "Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space" [1995] Dolores Hayden "The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category" [1987] Kay Anderson "The Brandon Archive" [2005] Judith Jack Halberstam "The Poor Little Rich Man" [1900] Adolf Loos "Migration, Material Culture and Tragedy: Four Moments in Caribbean Migration" [2008] Daniel Miller Section 4 - Power, Subjectivity, and Space Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Tall Storeys" [2008] Kim Dovey "Desire and the Prosthetics of Supervision: A Case of Maquiladora Flexibility" [2001] Melissa Wright "Mothers Reclaiming Their Children" [2007] Ruth Wilson Gilmore "The Social Becomes the Spatial, the Spatial Becomes the Social: Enclosures, Social Change and the Becoming of Places in the Swedish Province of Skane" [1985] Allan Pred "Software-sorted Geographies" [2005] Stephen D.N. Graham "The Habitus and the Space of Life-style" [1984] Pierre Bourdieu Section 5 - Meanings of Home Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Domesticity" [1986] Witold Rybczynski "Disability, Embodiment and the Meaning of the Home" [2004] Rob Imrie "You Got to Remember You Live in Public Housing" [2008] Talja Blokland "The House as Symbol of the Self" [1974] Claire Cooper "Home Rules" [1994] Denis Wood and Robert J. Beck "Home: Territory and Identity" [2000] J. MacGregor Wise Section 6 - "Public" and "Private" Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Putting the Public Back into Public Space" [1998] Kurt Iveson "To Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice" [2003] Don Mitchell "Contesting Crime, Order and Migrant Spaces in Beijing" [2001] Li Zhang "Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public: Gay Uses of the Streets" [1995] George Chauncey "People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Phillip Johnson" [1998] Alice T. Friedman "The Prison of 'Public Space'" [2008] Mark Kingwell Section 7 - The Urban Experience Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "The Metropolis and Mental Life" [1903] Georg Simmel "Paris-Capital of the Nineteenth Century" [1939] Walter Benjamin "Walking in the City" [1984] Michel de Certeau "The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact" [1961] Jane Jacobs "People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg" [2004] AbdouMaliq Simone "City Life and Difference" [1990] Iris Marion Young Section 8 - Landscape: Nature and Culture Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "A Pair of Ideal Landscapes" [1984] John Brinkerhoff (J.B.) Jackson "The African Origins of Carolina Rice Culture" [2000] Judith Carney "This Land Is Ours Now: Spatial Imaginaries and the Struggle for Land in Brazil" [2004] Wendy Wolford "Beyond Wilderness and Lawn" [1998] Michael Pollan "Ecstatic Places" [1990] Louise Chawla Section 9 - The Social Production of Space (and Time) Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "The Production of Space" [1991] Henri Lefebvre "Railroad Space and Railroad Time" [1978] Wolfgang Schivelbusch "A Time for Space and a Space for Time: The Social Production of the Vacation House" [1980] Anthony King "A Room of One's Own" [1929] Virginia Woolf "The Last Place They Thought Of: Black Women's Geographies" [2006] Katherine McKittrick "Class Struggle on Avenue B: The Lower East Side as Wild Wild West" [1996] Neil Smith Section 10 - Shifting Perspectives: Optics for Revealing Change and Reworking Space Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Panopticism" [1975] Michel Foucault "Toward an Architecture of Humility: On the Value of Experience" [1999] Juhani Pallasmaa "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California" [2000] Laura Pulido "Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings" [2006] Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry "The Global and the Intimate" [2012] Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner "On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement" [2001] Cindi Katz Section 11 - The Spatial Imagination Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Invention, Memory, and Place" [2000] Edward Said "Negotiating the Muslim American Hyphen: Integrated, Parallel, and Conflictual Paths" [2008] Selcuk R. Sirin and Michelle Fine "Maps and the Formation of the Geo-Body of Siam" [1996] Thongchai Winichakul "'Drawing the Coral Heads': Mental Mapping and its Physical Representation in a Polynesian Community" [2003] Richard Feinberg, Ute J. Dymon, Pu Paiaki, Pu Rangituteki, Pu Nukuriaki, and Matthew Rollins "How Do We Get Out of This Capitalist Place?" [1996] J.K. Gibson-Graham "De-, Dis-, Ex-" [1987] Bernard Tschumi Section 12 - Democratic Prospects and Possibilities Editors' Introduction and Suggestions for Further Readings "Restoring Meaningful Subjects and 'Democratic Hope' to Psychology" [2013] Susan Saegert "Rhizome" [1987] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari "Living the 'Revolution' in an Egyptian Village: Moral Action in a National Space" [2012] Lila Abu-Lughod "Traffic in Democracy" [1999] Michael Sorkin "Containing Children: Some Lessons on Planning for Play from New York City" [2002] Roger Hart

The People, Place, and Space Reader

Nearly a decade ago, The New York Times ran the article ‘Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being Passe’ (2007) and debates about the demise, rise, and sprawl of LGBTQ neighborhoods have been ongoing wi...

There goes the gayborhood

This article develops the concept of shoestring democracy as a way to characterize the resulting social relations of private governance structures embedded in two types of collective housing schemes found in New York City and the adjoining suburbs: gated condominium communities (gated condominiums) and market-rate cooperative apartment complexes (co-ops). Drawing from ethnographies of gated condominiums and co-ops in New York City and neighboring Nassau County, New York, we compare these two forms of collective home ownership regarding the impact of private governance structures on residents and their sense of representation and participation in ongoing community life. “Shoestring democracy” encompasses a broad range of behaviors utilized to insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreements, and limits rather than promotes political participation. The greatest differences between the co-ops and gated condominiums were found in discussions of safety and security, in that condominium residents have developed an elaborate discourse of the fear of crime and others, especially racialized others, to explain why they moved to their secured communities. Co-op interviewees, on the other hand, generally felt a sense of safety in their buildings, often due to the gatekeeper effect of the co-op board and doormen. In gated communities, covenants, contracts, and deed restrictions (CC&Rs) guarantee that most problems are resolved before they start. While the same can be said for co-ops, interviewees find that these rules and regulations seem to mystify everyday governing practices for the average co-op resident. Moral minimalism and a lack of structural and procedural knowledge may insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreement, but also may discourage civic participation. Exploring the apathy residents expressed about participation and a lack of representation suggests that although the Rochdale principles of cooperation that are the legal and social basis for co-ops may have been important at one time, current practices of private governing boards do more to restrict participatory democratic practices than encourage them. The policy implications are outlined with suggestions of how to make homeowners associations and co-op boards more accountable and encourage greater adherence to the original co-op mandate.

Shoestring democracy: gated condominiums and market‐rate cooperatives in new york

The lesbian or lesbian-queer neighbourhood is a slippery idea, and for many women throughout the world it is an elusive ideal, even in LGBTQ meccas such as San Francisco, London, Berlin, and New York City. Renowned enclaves such as the Castro district, Soho, Schoneberg, West Village, Lower East Side, and Chelsea developed as cities within cities, where LGBTQ people could safely find one another and build communities together. But practices of territory-making and place-claiming are antithetical to women’s economic and social abilities in the urban sphere, and the urban is a historically unwelcoming environment for women. I suggest, then, that lesbianqueer neighbourhoods, then, do not work in ways identical to gay and queer men’s neighbourhoods, but, as Tamar Rothenberg’s quote reveals, they are still spatialised ‘communities’. As Sarah, a participant from my research, describes in the quote above, the Park Slope neighbourhood in Brooklyn is produced as lesbian-queer in the way it affords these women safety and refuge. So what then is a lesbian-queer neighbourhood to lesbians and queer women? What does it afford them in their everyday lives? Dynamics of gender, race, and class have not been fully accounted for in studies of LGBTQ neighbourhoods; however, recent work has begun to confront assumptions that all LGBTQ people will be granted equal access and can politically and economically maintain such properties over time (Manalansan, 2005; Taylor, 2008; Moore, 2011).

Queering the Meaning of ‘Neighbourhood’: Reinterpreting the Lesbian-Queer Experience of Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1983–2008

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS with special attention to the under-examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labor and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users good enough software. Instead, I argue that “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted.

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Jen Jack Gieseking

Papers

The People, Place, and Space Reader

There goes the gayborhood

Shoestring democracy: gated condominiums and market‐rate cooperatives in new york

Queering the Meaning of ‘Neighbourhood’: Reinterpreting the Lesbian-Queer Experience of Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1983–2008

Operating anew: Queering GIS with good enough software