Showing papers in "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 2020"
Abstract: This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region) – differences that are mobilised for accumulation. Labour migration scholarship has mainly explored sites of production. We extend recent social reproduction theory (SRT) and an older literature on labour migration and reproduction to argue that the intimate relationship between production and social reproduction is crucial to the exploitation of migrant labour and that this means we have to place centre-stage the analysis of invisible economies of care which take place across spatiotemporally divided households, both in the place of migration and in the home regions of migrants. Furthermore, we develop recent work on SRT and migration to argue that an analysis of kinship (gender over generations, not just gender) is crucial to these invisible economies of care. This analysis is important in showing the machinations of capitalist growth and for political alternatives.
83 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the US military's impact on climate by analysing the geopolitical ecology of its global logistical supply chains, focusing on the US Defense Logistics Agency Energy (DLA‐E), a large yet virtually unresearched sub-agency within the US Department of Defense.
Abstract: This paper examines the US military's impact on climate by analysing the geopolitical ecology of its global logistical supply chains. Our geopolitical ecology framework interrogates the material‐ecological metabolic flows (hydrocarbon‐based fuels, water, sand, concrete) that shape geopolitical and geoeconomic power relations. We argue that to account for the US military as a major climate actor, one must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon‐based fuels possible. Our paper focuses on the US Defense Logistics Agency – Energy (DLA‐E), a large yet virtually unresearched sub‐agency within the US Department of Defense. The DLA‐E is the primary purchase‐point for hydrocarbon‐based fuels for the US military, as well as a powerful actor in the global oil market. After outlining our geopolitical ecology approach, we detail the scope of the DLA‐E's operations, its supply chain, bureaucratic practices, and the physical infrastructure that facilitates the US military's consumption of hydro‐based carbons on a global scale. We show several “path dependencies” – warfighting paradigms, weapons systems, bureaucratic requirements, and waste – that are put in place by military supply chains and undergird a heavy reliance on carbon‐based fuels by the US military for years to come. The paper, based on comprehensive records of bulk fuel purchases we have gathered from DLA‐E through Freedom of Information Act requests, represents a partial yet robust picture of the geopolitical ecology of American imperialism.
69 citations
TL;DR: A special virtual issue aimed at providing online access to articles that can contribute to the work of coming to geographical terms with the COVID-19 pandemic is presented in this paper.
Abstract: This editorial introduces a special virtual issue aimed at providing online access to articles that can contribute to the work of coming to geographical terms with the COVID-19 pandemic. It outlines seven sub-themes of enquiry and analysis that are especially useful for contextualising coronavirus geographically. These are explored in turn as geographies of: (1) infection, (2) vulnerability, (3) resilience, (4) blame, (5) immunisation, (6) interdependence, and (7) care. In each case, connections are made between publications that are included in the special virtual issue and other more recent writings related specifically to COVID-19. In an effort to make these connections as useful as possible to geographers who have been drafted into online teaching in and about the pandemic, hyperlinks are used throughout to highlight additional online resources and reports.
68 citations
58 citations
50 citations
TL;DR: This dissertation aims to provide a history of web exceptionalism from 1989 to 2002, a period chosen in order to explore its roots as well as specific cases up to and including the year in which descriptions of “Web 2.0” began to circulate.
Abstract: Housing is central in the reproduction of social inequalities. Beyond divides across populations, trends point to increasingly unequal housing‐market dynamics across space. Nonetheless, little systematic evidence exists on the spatial inequality of housing values. In this paper we address this through a detailed investigation of house‐value developments in the Netherlands over time and space. We draw on national registers including longitudinal and geocoded data for the entire housing stock over the 2006‐2018 period. Spatial polarization is examined across different scales at the national, provincial, and urban level. We further investigate how housing‐market inequality trends vary over time, particularly between periods of economic boom and house‐price increases or, conversely, periods of downturn. Our analyses expose a substantial and widespread trend of spatial polarization. Rising spatial inequality between neighbourhoods is clearly apparent at the national level, within all but one province, as well as for 44 of the 50 largest municipalities. The polarizing trend appears structural and pervasive. While boom periods saw the strongest increases, inequality levels, remarkably, remained stable or even saw continued increases over the period of declining house prices. These patterns of spatial polarization in house values have fundamental societal implications towards uneven wealth accumulation and in amplifying socio‐economic cleavages across populations and space.
45 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the constructions of scarcity that underpin austerity and show how notions of scarcity (re)emergent in a period of austerity have shaped materially insufficient and stigmatising welfare systems.
Abstract: This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of scarcity that underpin it. Specifically, it shows how notions of scarcity (re)emergent in a period of austerity have shaped materially insufficient and stigmatising welfare systems. We do this through the example of UK food banks. We suggest that under austerity a particular moral economy of scarcity has become embedded at the level of common sense, including in the common sense of many of those distributing food aid. In UK food banks this moral economy is shaped by images of the “empty cupboard” and discourses of absolute hunger which normalise practices of (self)rationing and exacerbate food insecurity. Tracing attempts by some food bank managers and volunteers to challenge this moral economy, we conclude with a critical agenda for academics and practitioners to rethink relationships between welfare, austerity, and scarcity.
30 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe what kind of event Brexit is becoming in the impasse between the UK's EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit from the EU in 2019, based on 108 interviews with people in the North-East of England.
Abstract: Alongside the emergence of various populisms, Brexit and other contemporary geopolitical events have been presented as symptomatic of a generalizing and intensifying sense of uncertainty in the midst of a crisis of (neo)liberalism. In this paper we describe what kind of event Brexit is becoming in the impasse between the UK’s EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit from the EU in 2019. Based on 108 interviews with people in the North‐East of England, we trace how Brexit is variously enacted and felt as an end, advent, a harbinger of worse to come, non‐event, disaster, and betrayed promise. By following how these incommensurate versions of Brexit take form and co‐exist we supplement explanatory and predictive approaches to the geographies of Brexit and exemplify an approach that traces what such geopolitical events become. Specifically, we use the concept of ‘modes of uncertainty’ as a way of discerning patterns in how present uncertainties are lived. A ‘mode of uncertainty’ is a shared set of practices animated by a distinctive mood through which futures are made present and felt. Rather than treat uncertainty as a static, explanatory context, we thus follow how different versions of Brexit are constituted through specific ‘modes of (un)certainty’ – negative hope, national optimisms, apprehensive hopefulness and fantasies of action ‐ that differentiate within a seemingly singular, shared sense of uncertainty.
30 citations
26 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a cultural economy of everyday space-times which is attuned to the affective composition of forms of living, drawing on empirical work with forty users of digitally mediated payday loans, they employ this approach to trace how their loans become part of three intersecting forms of life: relief, as a pressing concern is deferred to the immediate future; separation, as private spaces are created within ordinary life and obligations are felt as individual responsibilities; and pressure, as demands to pay intensify the sense that debt is spiralling out of control and already ongoing precarity cannot
Abstract: Analysing the affective geographies of digitally mediated payday loans in the UK, this paper advocates and exemplifies an approach to cultural economy that focuses on how economic worlds are affectively animated and lived. Supplementing the two versions of ‘culture’ that cultural economy approaches have to date been organised around – culture as signifying system, or culture as assembled effect ‐ we propose a cultural economy of everyday space‐times which is attuned to the affective composition of forms of living. Drawing on empirical work with forty users of digitally mediated payday loans, we employ this approach to trace how their loans become part of three intersecting forms of living: relief, as a pressing concern is deferred to the immediate future; separation, as private spaces are created within ordinary life and obligations are felt as individual responsibilities; and pressure, as demands to pay intensify the sense that debt is spiralling out of control and already ongoing precarity cannot be sustained. In conclusion, we pose further questions for a cultural economy approach orientated to the analysis of forms of living.
23 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that prepping exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside the networked dependencies and restricted agency felt within late modernity, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection.
Abstract: Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet "preppers," a sub-culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state. By repositioning the prepper as an amplifier of conditions of the present, what emerges is an emblematic and anticipatory figure who troubles the cracks in the security state's governing logics, exposing its social differentiation and rehearsing the inevitability of its future failures. Drawing on qualitative research on UK prepping cultures, I define prepping across three constellations of imaginative-material practices, concerning "value," "temporalities," and "crisis." I argue that prepping exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside the networked dependencies and restricted agency felt within late modernity, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection. Living with profound crisis attunement, preppers nevertheless recuperate pleasure in material potentiality and skilful practice, in thoughtful engagement with temporalities, and in the vitality of community and meaning formed in the times and spaces in, and around, crisis.
TL;DR: This article identified three constructions of national belonging within white British narratives (belonging in Britain, belonging to Britain and being of Britain) and argued that these constructions are hierarchical in their differing temporalities and connections to whiteness.
Abstract: It is increasingly recognised both that belonging divides hierarchically and that people have different capacities to be seen as belonging. However, while the existence of hierarchies of belonging is well‐documented from the perspective of ethnically minoritised and migrant groups, what characterises, produces and underpins these hierarchies is largely unaddressed, as is a geographically‐informed analysis of their reproduction. This paper, based on interviews with white British people in the suburbs of London, takes a novel approach, examining the reproduction of national belonging among people for whom such belonging is relatively privileged. The paper identifies three constructions of national belonging within white British narratives – “belonging in Britain”, “belonging to Britain” and “being of Britain” – and argues that, although not always recognised as such, the three constructions are hierarchical in their differing temporalities and connections to whiteness. The elucidation of these different belongings and, crucially, the recognition of their hierarchisation and scalar‐reproduction, represent major contributions to research on belonging, and also help to explain the exclusion from a full sense of national belonging articulated by British people of colour.
TL;DR: In this paper, a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment, having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white-collar jobs.
Abstract: This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white-collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they have gained to create work in those same institutions. They do so by running errands and creating services for institutions, as well as undertaking administrative duties and teaching classes. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests. But we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. At the same time, however, their practises work to reproduce gender norms and class inequalities.
TL;DR: The authors explored women's and men's emotional geographies of an everyday exercise environment (the gym) in a Canadian city and found that the gym environment is generative of three place-based emotive processes of dislocation, evaluation, and sexualisation that collectively configure an unevenly gendered emotional architecture of place.
Abstract: In this article, we put forward a proposal for a critical geography of physical activity that attunes to experience while centring on the socio‐spatial processes and power structures enabling and constraining physical activity participation. Drawing on our research that explored women's and men's emotional geographies of an everyday exercise environment—the gym—in a Canadian city, we show how this approach can identify otherwise invisible environmental influences on physical activity participation. Our thematic analysis reveals that the gym environment is generative of three place‐based emotive processes of dislocation, evaluation, and sexualisation that collectively configure an unevenly gendered emotional architecture of place. Through this interstitial structure, the boundaries of localised hierarchies of masculinities and femininities become felt in ways that create tensions and anxieties, which in turn, reinforce gendered boundaries on physical activity participation. Two additional themes reveal how gendered motivation and individual factors mediate negative emotional experiences. Our findings indicate that emotional geographies are one way in which gender disparities in physical activity are naturalised at the scale of the everyday exercise environment. Interventions for gender equity in physical activity would benefit from being empathetically attuned to the subtleties of place‐based experiences. More widely, bringing emotions into geographies of physical activity sheds light on the larger question of the role of place in (re)producing gendered health inequities, with implications for geographical research on health and social justice. Future critical geographical inquiry is necessary to ensure that public health interventions are grounded in the experiential realities of practicing physical activity in particular places.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose that development justice be taken up as an analytical concept and praxis-driven framework for research on disasters, resilience, and climate change in the Caribbean and highlight how the logics, practices and debts of colonial underdevelopment, racial capitalism, and neoliberal extraction continue to erode resilience across the region.
Abstract: This paper proposes that “development justice” be taken up as an analytical concept and praxis‐driven framework for research on disasters, resilience, and climate change. The piece begins with a synopsis of the historical‐structural factors exacerbating risk in the Caribbean before reviewing the concepts of vulnerability, resilience, and development justice. Next, drawing from empirical data and via a development justice lens, we highlight how the logics, practices, and debts of colonial underdevelopment, racial capitalism, and neoliberal extraction continue to erode resilience across the region. We end by recommending that future adaptation and mitigation strategies related to disasters, catastrophes, and climate change be more attentive to structural and slow violence, as well as the historical trajectories of imperialism, racial capitalism, and hetero patriarchal norms. In sum, the piece constitutes an evidence‐based assertion that development justice perspectives alongside theories of non‐metaphorical decolonisation be used by scholars, activists, scientists, and states alike who are committed to mediating climate change and preventing/reducing the damage caused by disasters.
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of imperial accounts of "other" cultures at museums is explored through "Maori" and "Polynesian" curatorial practices and representations at the museum.
Abstract: There is much published research and strategic rhetoric on decolonising the discipline, the academy, and institutions of social and cultural importance. However, very little literature examines the stepping stones in the process of materially challenging, changing, and decolonising institutions themselves. This paper emerges as an outline of axes or episodes of dialogue in a collaborative journey between the artist Rosanna Raymond and myself, since 2005. We outline the issues encountered: some of these are intrinsically the legacies of imperial museology and the paradigms through which we evaluate and exhibit the cultures of racialised “others.” The episodes act as a means of understanding the politics and ways of decolonising that are possible. The collaboration enables the potential for interdisciplinary “ways of seeing” that counter colonial frameworks. The paper unravels the effect of imperial accounts of “other” cultures at museums, explored here through “Maori” and “Polynesian” curatorial practices and representations at the museum.
TL;DR: In this paper, a co-produced, interdisciplinary arts and humanities-centred research explores the re-weaving of local knowledges, experiences, perceptions and values of water and place through the concept, process and practice of "daylighting hidden rivers".
Abstract: Framed by questions about ‘hydrocitizenship’ in the 21st century, this co-produced, interdisciplinary arts and humanities-centred research explores the (re)weaving of local knowledges, experiences, perceptions and values of water and place through the concept, process and practice of ‘daylighting hidden rivers’. Located at the nexus of three theoretical frames – ‘participation’, ‘hydrocitizenship’, and ‘daylighting’, it engages reflexively with strong and weak ‘hydrocitizenship’ and with paradigms of ‘daylighting’. Working with diverse communities and organisations in South Bristol (UK), this eco-social research project discovered community concerns and needs, and positioned itself in relation to these in co-production. This involved older people, children and professional stakeholders in a place-specific, ‘catchment’ setting, using novel arts-led, creative, narrative mapping processes. We critically examined the value, opportunities and tensions of this multi-method approach to people’s past, present and future connections and relationships with their local (water) environment, their senses of self and community. Our iterative processes of seeking out ‘lesser heard’ voices were conceived and played out around a braided cascade of ‘openings’: emerging, connecting, enacting, imagining and reflecting. Thinking critically about our oblique, emergent processes, we identify fifteen ‘top tips’ concerning the creative participatory daylighting of lay knowledges and values, and ‘River Visioning’. These can inform co-working with communities to enable and empower citizen engagement with places and local water issues for resilient futures. Our findings contribute new understandings of ‘hydrocitizenship’ and creative participatory ‘daylighting’ in combination, when urban spaces are construed as ‘Water Cities’, cascading both water and narratives. Importantly, our co-production processes with lesser heard groups also exemplify ‘higher-order participation’ in co-visioning resilient futures, with all the messiness, complexity and conflicts exposed.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine cultural ideas about private property and the complexities of using land use planning law as an enabler of climate change adaptation, and explore how residents living in coastal Australia respond to the risks to their property and places they live that are posed by sea level rise and other coastal climate change-related risks.
Abstract: Societies are now squarely facing the risks of adverse environmental and climatic change, and developed coastlines are ground zero. Climate change will cause damage to, or loss of, coastal property — property that, in most Western societies, is considered a high net value asset. This paper examines cultural ideas about private property and the complexities of using land use planning law as an enabler of climate change adaptation. It reports the findings of qualitative research that explores how residents living in coastal Australia respond to the risks to their property and the places they live that are posed by sea level rise and other coastal climate change–related risks. By reporting how residents experience their material coastal environment, and how they relate with and to ideas of ‘property’ in a coastal environmental change context, this paper contributes to both coastal policy and to legal geography scholarship.
TL;DR: The idea and practice of going "into the field" to conduct research and gather data is a deeply rooted aspect of Geography as a discipline as discussed by the authors, which usually entails travelling to, and spending periods of time in, often far-flung parts of the global South.
Abstract: The idea and practice of going ‘into the field’ to conduct research and gather data is a deeply rooted aspect of Geography as a discipline. For global North Development Geographers, amongst others, this usually entails travelling to, and spending periods of time in, often far-flung parts of the global South. Forging a successful academic career as a Development Geographer in the UK, is therefore to some extent predicated on mobility. This paper aims to critically engage with the gendered aspects of this expected mobility, focusing on the challenges and time constraints that are apparent when conducting overseas fieldwork as a mother, unaccompanied by her children. The paper emphasises the emotion work that is entailed in balancing the competing demands of overseas fieldwork and mothering, and begins to think through the implications of these challenges in terms of the types of knowledge we produce, as well as in relation to gender equality within the academy.
TL;DR: In this article, a multi-sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings is used to illustrate the importance of absences for a fully-fledged materiality of legal events, and the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practised.
Abstract: There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully-fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non-attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law’s omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practised. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.