Pub Date : 2022-11-09DOI: 10.1177/14744740221134119
M. Sholeh, S. Lotfi
Since one of cultural geography’s aims is to understand how human cultures influence the landscape, the geobiography of a modest artifact can be a readable clue concerning a larger cultural context. This article discusses how diasporic cultural mobility finds its way from the place of origin to the place of settlement. The story begins in Soviet Russia in the twilight of the 1930s when the Red Revolution has driven many people to flee their homeland and continues in Iran before and during World War II. A family of White emigrants from Ukraine came to Iran in the 1930s. They tried to relive sweet memories of distant years in the village of Damavand outside Tehran by finding a Russian-style summer residence, ‘dacha’, in the context of Iranian culture and geographical territory. In late Summer 1941, a taxi driver entrusted an old engraved copper pot to them as a guarantee to return and take them to Tehran, which Allied forces had occupied. Four generations have continuously cared for this unbreakable relic, whose story, valued much more than the object itself, illustrates the cultural dynamics of migration in the form of portable property. A geobiographical approach helps us better understand diasporic cultural practices in a new socio-cultural context: 1930s–40s Iran.
{"title":"The ‘geobiography’ of an extraordinary artifact, or a conserved relic from the Iranianized ‘Dacha’ culture","authors":"M. Sholeh, S. Lotfi","doi":"10.1177/14744740221134119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221134119","url":null,"abstract":"Since one of cultural geography’s aims is to understand how human cultures influence the landscape, the geobiography of a modest artifact can be a readable clue concerning a larger cultural context. This article discusses how diasporic cultural mobility finds its way from the place of origin to the place of settlement. The story begins in Soviet Russia in the twilight of the 1930s when the Red Revolution has driven many people to flee their homeland and continues in Iran before and during World War II. A family of White emigrants from Ukraine came to Iran in the 1930s. They tried to relive sweet memories of distant years in the village of Damavand outside Tehran by finding a Russian-style summer residence, ‘dacha’, in the context of Iranian culture and geographical territory. In late Summer 1941, a taxi driver entrusted an old engraved copper pot to them as a guarantee to return and take them to Tehran, which Allied forces had occupied. Four generations have continuously cared for this unbreakable relic, whose story, valued much more than the object itself, illustrates the cultural dynamics of migration in the form of portable property. A geobiographical approach helps us better understand diasporic cultural practices in a new socio-cultural context: 1930s–40s Iran.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"471 - 483"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43562210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-09DOI: 10.1177/14744740221134121
Zita Joyce, Susan Ballard
In September 2010 the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand was rocked by the first of a sequence of 16,000 earthquakes. This essay considers art and creative practices that have responded to the experience of living in the earthquake-damaged city. In an environment transformed by seismicity, we argue that artists became co-creators with the planet, using its instability as a medium of art making, an active agent and long-term collaborator in creative practice. Those practices mediate the experience of seismicity, communicating the overwhelming energy of a faultline rupture in artworks that employ sound, touch, image, memory and emotion. We use the term seismic media to describe an expansive field encompassing the unstable earth as medium, the practice of mediating seismicity, and the media texts and objects that attempt to express it. In this essay we employ the concept of seismic media to discuss artworks created within the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch as it undergoes an extended period of rebuilding. We identify artists’ relationships with the material geology of a city with a focus on new geographical and aesthetic understandings. Seismic media enables people to work through the experiences of earthquakes and their long aftermath, while remembering the city as it was and imagining the city that could be.
{"title":"Seismic media: art and geological co-creation in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand","authors":"Zita Joyce, Susan Ballard","doi":"10.1177/14744740221134121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221134121","url":null,"abstract":"In September 2010 the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand was rocked by the first of a sequence of 16,000 earthquakes. This essay considers art and creative practices that have responded to the experience of living in the earthquake-damaged city. In an environment transformed by seismicity, we argue that artists became co-creators with the planet, using its instability as a medium of art making, an active agent and long-term collaborator in creative practice. Those practices mediate the experience of seismicity, communicating the overwhelming energy of a faultline rupture in artworks that employ sound, touch, image, memory and emotion. We use the term seismic media to describe an expansive field encompassing the unstable earth as medium, the practice of mediating seismicity, and the media texts and objects that attempt to express it. In this essay we employ the concept of seismic media to discuss artworks created within the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch as it undergoes an extended period of rebuilding. We identify artists’ relationships with the material geology of a city with a focus on new geographical and aesthetic understandings. Seismic media enables people to work through the experiences of earthquakes and their long aftermath, while remembering the city as it was and imagining the city that could be.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"165 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45727669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-05DOI: 10.1177/14744740221133820
Maria Eidenskog, W. Glad, Madelene Gramfält
This article explores how sustainability is made present and visible in the life of residents in a new neighbourhood. Glass is enacted by design professionals and a Swedish municipality to create spaces for residents that fulfil sustainability objectives and put daily life on display. However, some practises developed by residents resist the intended uses of these spaces. Through a detailed case study of the proclaimed new role model neighbourhood of Vallastaden in Linköping, Sweden, we critically investigate the ontological politics of the residents’ everyday life, including their social life with neighbours, low-energy living, interactions with local small businesses, recycling habits and mobility habits. By attending to glass, we show how humans, non-humans, materials and technologies become part of everyday practises and help uncover the ontological politics of mundane life.
{"title":"Enacting sustainability through glass: a study of ontological politics in the proclaimed role model neighbourhood of Vallastaden","authors":"Maria Eidenskog, W. Glad, Madelene Gramfält","doi":"10.1177/14744740221133820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221133820","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how sustainability is made present and visible in the life of residents in a new neighbourhood. Glass is enacted by design professionals and a Swedish municipality to create spaces for residents that fulfil sustainability objectives and put daily life on display. However, some practises developed by residents resist the intended uses of these spaces. Through a detailed case study of the proclaimed new role model neighbourhood of Vallastaden in Linköping, Sweden, we critically investigate the ontological politics of the residents’ everyday life, including their social life with neighbours, low-energy living, interactions with local small businesses, recycling habits and mobility habits. By attending to glass, we show how humans, non-humans, materials and technologies become part of everyday practises and help uncover the ontological politics of mundane life.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"391 - 411"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46569085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-05DOI: 10.1177/14744740221135013
Franklin Ginn, Katy Connor
In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with hydroponic systems, we describe a means to interact with plants beyond instrumentalism and beyond appreciation at a distance. We present several opening glimpses into a distinctly plant subjectivity that are afforded by technological mediation. This method informs ongoing research into growing liveable worlds with plants and is offered as a novel practice for critical plant studies, vegetal geographies and multispecies studies.
{"title":"Vegetal HydroPoetics: an arts-based practice for plant studies","authors":"Franklin Ginn, Katy Connor","doi":"10.1177/14744740221135013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221135013","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with hydroponic systems, we describe a means to interact with plants beyond instrumentalism and beyond appreciation at a distance. We present several opening glimpses into a distinctly plant subjectivity that are afforded by technological mediation. This method informs ongoing research into growing liveable worlds with plants and is offered as a novel practice for critical plant studies, vegetal geographies and multispecies studies.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"493 - 497"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42840937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-03DOI: 10.1177/14744740221134120
Duojie Zhaxi
This paper explores the ways new houses in Tibetan villages of Qinghai have become a marker of family status. After the advent of state-led housing subsidy projects in China’s Qinghai province in 2009, Tibetan villagers have actively and increasingly engaged in building new houses to maintain their family status and prestige. According to local standards, owning a new, high-quality house is now an important measure of the household’s living standard and signals the family’s social and economic status. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, and engaging with cultural geographies of home and house, this study examines the shifting markers of family status and explores how state-led development projects inscribe social, cultural, and political meanings in housing. In doing so, it argues that Tibetan villagers’ desire to construct new housing in Qinghai province is to create markers of family status, not actual shelters.
{"title":"Shelter or status? Housing and the shifting markers of family status in Tibetan communities in China","authors":"Duojie Zhaxi","doi":"10.1177/14744740221134120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221134120","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the ways new houses in Tibetan villages of Qinghai have become a marker of family status. After the advent of state-led housing subsidy projects in China’s Qinghai province in 2009, Tibetan villagers have actively and increasingly engaged in building new houses to maintain their family status and prestige. According to local standards, owning a new, high-quality house is now an important measure of the household’s living standard and signals the family’s social and economic status. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, and engaging with cultural geographies of home and house, this study examines the shifting markers of family status and explores how state-led development projects inscribe social, cultural, and political meanings in housing. In doing so, it argues that Tibetan villagers’ desire to construct new housing in Qinghai province is to create markers of family status, not actual shelters.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"607 - 620"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49494694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-29DOI: 10.1177/14744740221134123
Sergei Basik
{"title":"Book review: Ronan Hervouet, A Taste for Oppression: A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus","authors":"Sergei Basik","doi":"10.1177/14744740221134123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221134123","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"662 - 663"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48325340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.1177/14744740221126988
J. Lovell
This article enquires how ‘spatial hinges’ between author Philip Pullman’s series The Book of Dust and different sites are unexpected and elusive, but may opened by mindfulness. Natalie Goldberg’s mindful writing practice techniques are used as an interpretative instrument to measure this hinging together of parallel worlds. The research data amalgamates interviews with Oxford fantasy tour guides conducted before COVID 19 restrictions with writing sprints about Lockdown walks in both a local park and on a guided tour of ‘Philip Pullman’s Oxford’. The data reveals how a secret commonwealth of elves and fairies infuse the parks with otherworldly, unexpected and exaggerated bucolic awakenings and intersubjectivity, exposing ancient mythical places, including a holloway. On a tour of Oxford, the imaginative storytelling techniques of the guide include impromptu flights of fancy and tilted perspectives that contribute to an atmosphere of unlikeliness, suggestive of Pullman’s texts. In addition, an experience of getting lost or ‘de-touring’, leads to unexpected encounters with the affective mystical presence of Pullman’s novels. The findings conclude that mindfulness may create a state of attunement to the reverberations of the opening of spatial hinges, allowing stories to reveal themselves spontaneously.
{"title":"Opening spatial hinges with mindful writing practice: negotiating Philip Pullman’s secret commonwealth","authors":"J. Lovell","doi":"10.1177/14744740221126988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221126988","url":null,"abstract":"This article enquires how ‘spatial hinges’ between author Philip Pullman’s series The Book of Dust and different sites are unexpected and elusive, but may opened by mindfulness. Natalie Goldberg’s mindful writing practice techniques are used as an interpretative instrument to measure this hinging together of parallel worlds. The research data amalgamates interviews with Oxford fantasy tour guides conducted before COVID 19 restrictions with writing sprints about Lockdown walks in both a local park and on a guided tour of ‘Philip Pullman’s Oxford’. The data reveals how a secret commonwealth of elves and fairies infuse the parks with otherworldly, unexpected and exaggerated bucolic awakenings and intersubjectivity, exposing ancient mythical places, including a holloway. On a tour of Oxford, the imaginative storytelling techniques of the guide include impromptu flights of fancy and tilted perspectives that contribute to an atmosphere of unlikeliness, suggestive of Pullman’s texts. In addition, an experience of getting lost or ‘de-touring’, leads to unexpected encounters with the affective mystical presence of Pullman’s novels. The findings conclude that mindfulness may create a state of attunement to the reverberations of the opening of spatial hinges, allowing stories to reveal themselves spontaneously.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"279 - 298"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47377465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-14DOI: 10.1177/14744740221126986
Amy Butt
“Poisonless:a bare city, bright, the colours light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet.” The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) This is how Ursula K. Le Guin describes the city of Abbenay in The Dispossessed. It is modest and unassuming. It is quiet. This architectural restraint is jarringly at odds with predominant portrayals of the science fiction city. As noted by Graham (2016) and Hurley (2008) the future city has become synonymous with rapid vertical urbanisation, closing off alternative urban visions and the possible futures they contain. While there is a growing call for the study of sf by scholars in the spatial disciplines such as Abbott (2016), Collie (2011), Hewitt and Graham (2015) and Kitchin and Kneale (2002), the unassuming, everyday spaces of feminist sf are often lost in the shadows cast by the dystopian high rise. As Le Guin argues, these passive and participatory utopias become visible only when we ‘adjust to a dimmer light’ (1989). In response, this paper lingers in shared spaces of sf which are possible examples of what Washida Imarisha terms ‘visionary fiction’ which is sf that ‘has a relevance towards building new, freer worlds’ (2015: 4) including; N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). By imaginatively inhabiting the utopian enclaves within these feminist texts it is possible to explore geographies of alterity – to adjust to the dim light and learn to cherish the quiet.
{"title":"‘It was quiet’: the radical architectures of understatement in feminist science fiction","authors":"Amy Butt","doi":"10.1177/14744740221126986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221126986","url":null,"abstract":"“Poisonless:a bare city, bright, the colours light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet.” The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) This is how Ursula K. Le Guin describes the city of Abbenay in The Dispossessed. It is modest and unassuming. It is quiet. This architectural restraint is jarringly at odds with predominant portrayals of the science fiction city. As noted by Graham (2016) and Hurley (2008) the future city has become synonymous with rapid vertical urbanisation, closing off alternative urban visions and the possible futures they contain. While there is a growing call for the study of sf by scholars in the spatial disciplines such as Abbott (2016), Collie (2011), Hewitt and Graham (2015) and Kitchin and Kneale (2002), the unassuming, everyday spaces of feminist sf are often lost in the shadows cast by the dystopian high rise. As Le Guin argues, these passive and participatory utopias become visible only when we ‘adjust to a dimmer light’ (1989). In response, this paper lingers in shared spaces of sf which are possible examples of what Washida Imarisha terms ‘visionary fiction’ which is sf that ‘has a relevance towards building new, freer worlds’ (2015: 4) including; N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). By imaginatively inhabiting the utopian enclaves within these feminist texts it is possible to explore geographies of alterity – to adjust to the dim light and learn to cherish the quiet.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43909365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-04DOI: 10.1177/14744740221126984
B. Garlick, Liesl King
The science fiction of Ursula Le Guin deftly uses prose to conjure alternative worlds, societies and cultures of nature amidst times of profound upheaval. Equally, her writing is suffused with quiet hope: the sense that we already possess the tools required to craft better futures, if only we paid better attention to the here and now. Across her work, Le Guin poses political and ethical questions about the value of, and our relationship to, the wider environment; and the consequences that (may) lie in wait along our contemporary lines of flight. In Always Coming Home (1985), she excavates a possible future: a speculative cultural geography of life on earth that is both careful in its placing and caring of place. In this paper, we consider the space-times of this experimental ‘archaeology of the future’ and its imagined post-Anthropocene landscape. We explore how Le Guin’s non-linear, digressive, fragmentary writing mobilises the love of place (topophilia) to manifest an awareness of there being multiple, potential, situated articulations of life after the Anthropocene in tension with profound uncertainty over the earthly legacies of our current modes of existence.
Ursula Le Guin的科幻小说巧妙地用散文描绘了在深刻动荡时期的另类世界、社会和自然文化。同样，她的作品充满了平静的希望：我们已经拥有了创造更好未来所需的工具，只要我们更好地关注此时此地就好了。在她的作品中，勒金提出了关于更广泛环境的价值以及我们与更广泛环境关系的政治和伦理问题；以及（可能）在我们当代的飞行路线上等待的后果。在《永远回家》（1985）中，她挖掘了一个可能的未来：一个对地球上生命的推测性文化地理，它在放置和照顾地方方面都很谨慎。在本文中，我们考虑了这个实验性的“未来考古学”的时空及其想象中的后人类世景观。我们探讨了勒金的非线性、离题、零碎的写作如何调动对地方的热爱（拓扑学），以表明人类世之后的生活存在着多重、潜在、情境化的表达，而人类世对我们当前生存模式的地球遗产存在着深刻的不确定性。
{"title":"A geography beyond the Anthropocene: Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as topophilia for survival","authors":"B. Garlick, Liesl King","doi":"10.1177/14744740221126984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221126984","url":null,"abstract":"The science fiction of Ursula Le Guin deftly uses prose to conjure alternative worlds, societies and cultures of nature amidst times of profound upheaval. Equally, her writing is suffused with quiet hope: the sense that we already possess the tools required to craft better futures, if only we paid better attention to the here and now. Across her work, Le Guin poses political and ethical questions about the value of, and our relationship to, the wider environment; and the consequences that (may) lie in wait along our contemporary lines of flight. In Always Coming Home (1985), she excavates a possible future: a speculative cultural geography of life on earth that is both careful in its placing and caring of place. In this paper, we consider the space-times of this experimental ‘archaeology of the future’ and its imagined post-Anthropocene landscape. We explore how Le Guin’s non-linear, digressive, fragmentary writing mobilises the love of place (topophilia) to manifest an awareness of there being multiple, potential, situated articulations of life after the Anthropocene in tension with profound uncertainty over the earthly legacies of our current modes of existence.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48544549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-04DOI: 10.1177/14744740221123572
William Jamieson
Infrastructure has proven a polyvalent concept in human geography and anthropology for exploring the intersection of the social and technical. However, the ‘below’ of infrastructure, the infra, has remained underexamined in its relationship to the state, territory and the earth. This article proposes that infrastructure is better understood as a geophilosophical relation that renders a set of relations a subsurface for the propagation of another: it designates a socio-natural ground for political-economic figuration. It outlines the geophilosophical relations of infrastructure through thinking with the project SEA STATE by Singaporean artist Charles Lim, a series of artworks which document Singapore’s infrastructural underside, which Lim terms the sea-state, and provides a conceptual elaboration of SEA STATE’s aesthetic figures. In positing the continuity of figures across the sea-state’s varied infrastructures, SEA STATE exposes the colonial trajectory of its infrastructural systems, the contingencies it churns up as it endeavours to maintain its place in the world market, and the fundamental inversion of figure and ground the sea-state has effectuated. This inversion is all the more evident when we consider the expansive land reclamation projects of modern Singapore, wherein its territory has become infrastructure for bespoke logistical and petrochemical concerns, and will continue until the end of the century under the auspices of mitigating sea level rise. As the geological imaginary of the Anthropocene begins to seep into infrastructural anxieties of maintenance, breakdown and inundation, with governments and policymakers demanding that nature itself become infrastructure, it is critical to trace the longue durée of these infrastructural formations, how their continuities are remade and reiterated by the demands of subsequent historical-geographical junctures, and how the designation of figure and ground can ultimately result in the figure becoming the condition of possibility for its ground, requiring its continual reproduction.
{"title":"All Lines Flow In: excavating the geophilosophical relations of Singapore’s infrastructure through SEA STATE","authors":"William Jamieson","doi":"10.1177/14744740221123572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221123572","url":null,"abstract":"Infrastructure has proven a polyvalent concept in human geography and anthropology for exploring the intersection of the social and technical. However, the ‘below’ of infrastructure, the infra, has remained underexamined in its relationship to the state, territory and the earth. This article proposes that infrastructure is better understood as a geophilosophical relation that renders a set of relations a subsurface for the propagation of another: it designates a socio-natural ground for political-economic figuration. It outlines the geophilosophical relations of infrastructure through thinking with the project SEA STATE by Singaporean artist Charles Lim, a series of artworks which document Singapore’s infrastructural underside, which Lim terms the sea-state, and provides a conceptual elaboration of SEA STATE’s aesthetic figures. In positing the continuity of figures across the sea-state’s varied infrastructures, SEA STATE exposes the colonial trajectory of its infrastructural systems, the contingencies it churns up as it endeavours to maintain its place in the world market, and the fundamental inversion of figure and ground the sea-state has effectuated. This inversion is all the more evident when we consider the expansive land reclamation projects of modern Singapore, wherein its territory has become infrastructure for bespoke logistical and petrochemical concerns, and will continue until the end of the century under the auspices of mitigating sea level rise. As the geological imaginary of the Anthropocene begins to seep into infrastructural anxieties of maintenance, breakdown and inundation, with governments and policymakers demanding that nature itself become infrastructure, it is critical to trace the longue durée of these infrastructural formations, how their continuities are remade and reiterated by the demands of subsequent historical-geographical junctures, and how the designation of figure and ground can ultimately result in the figure becoming the condition of possibility for its ground, requiring its continual reproduction.","PeriodicalId":47718,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Geographies","volume":"30 1","pages":"51 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47368626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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