Area最新文献

Research has recently focused on various under-the-radar sustainability-oriented community initiatives to understand and support bottom-up dynamics of social-ecological change. While community initiatives vary widely, research on them tends towards an instrumental perspective: a will-to-upscale. While exploring possibilities for expanding (some of) the practices and impacts of sustainability-oriented projects and organizations, we argue for a more cautious approach to instrumentalising community initiatives. We develop our argument around four recurring issues we identify in the literature: (1) conceptual imprecisions; (2) privileging of novelties; (3) politics of urgency; and (4) outwards orientation. In response to these critiques, and leaning on geographical theories of scale, we outline our caution. At its core, this approach is a ‘literacy of scaling’ where scaling functions as a tactic subordinate to the community.

Building on my ongoing ethnographic research with people living with HIV in different European countries, the paper focuses on RD, a Catalan man I have interviewed three times since 2014. In RD's life narrative, ‘crisis’ is a recurring theme including both the most blatant forms, like the severe housing crisis in Spain that followed the global financial crisis, and the most ordinary ones like domestic violence. Analysing the impact of crises in RD's perception and experience of the present, interwoven with the past(s) and the future(s), the paper discusses two main benefits of longitudinal ethnographic research. First, it allows to capture how crisis is not just a moment or a phase in RD's life, but acts as context generating a recurring experience of an ‘uncanny present’ shaped by logics of return and repetition of the past, and anticipation of the future. Second, it supports RD's self-awareness around his ability to navigate the unknown when experiencing the ‘uncanny present’; this highlights the ethical care dimension entailed by such methodology.

This paper is based on the ReFashion study which used mixed-method longitudinal research to track and amplify the experiences and coping mechanisms of 200 women garment workers in Cambodia as they navigated the financial repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. It develops the idea and practice of ‘feminist longitudinal research’ (FLR) through re-centring the too often marginalised knowledges and ways of knowing of Cambodian researchers and research participants. Hearing and learning from their experiences reveal the labours and care-work involved in the ‘doing’ of longitudinal research during a time of extraordinary crisis, and the potential for feminist consciousness raising and solidarity that can arise both within and beyond the confines of an academic study. The paper advocates for geographers and other social scientists to go beyond technically-framed issues of participant ‘attrition’ and ‘retention’ in longitudinal studies to think more creatively and critically about the process of longitudinal research and what it means for those taking part in it. FLR not only evidences the temporally contingent gendered impacts of a phenomenon, but can be distinguished by its intentionality and/or potential to challenge the patriarchal status quo, both in the lives of researchers and participants.

Drawing from early twentieth century documents from the Home for Destitute Children in Burlington, Vermont, USA, I explore the notion of the archive as a site of knowledge, politics, and ethics. Despite the absence of children's own perspectives in this archive, I propose taking a geographical relational poverty approach to gain insights by examining power relations between middle-class adult women and ‘destitute’ children. Specifically, I use records generated by women in charge of the Home (the matrons and the Board of Directors) to identify three dimensions of relational relevance. First, the women exerted power in constructing the Home as a place through ordering temporal rhythms, influencing sensory experiences, and imposing social boundaries and material conditions. Second, I review discourses such as the ‘desirable child’, ‘innocence’, and eugenicist notions of ‘feeblemindedness’ employed by the women to ‘fix’ children, both to repair them and to keep them in place. Third, I provide a reflection on the possibilities of combining manuscript archives with digitized sources such as the census to uncover adults' production and containment of ‘destitute children’.

Recent debates within Geography have discussed the benefits of collaborating with non-academic partners in research (e.g. Campbell & Vanderhoven, 2016, Knowledge that matters: Realising the potential of Co-production. Manchester, UK: N8 Research Partnership; Holt et al., 2019, Area, 51, 390). We discuss these debates in relation to two key concepts in Geography: Impact and Participation. In this article, we critically reflect on our own experiences as PhD researchers conducting collaborative research projects, discussing the outcomes, challenges and ‘expectations gaps’ of collaboration with non-academic partners (Flinders et al., 2016, Evidence & Policy, 12, 261, p. 269). Our contribution lies in our reflections on collaboratively producing knowledge through being embedded in non-academic expert organisations. Much of the debate in Geography has focused on collaboration with marginalised groups or vulnerable communities (e.g. Holt et al., 2019, 2019, Area, 51, 390), and we add to these debates with the experiences of collaborating with two expert organisations: a specialist climate journalism organisation (Carbon Brief); and a government organisation (Met Office). First, we discuss the varying forms of impact that were produced through conducting our research collaboratively, not only through improving the quality of our academic outputs through ‘ontological transformation’ (Barry et al., 2008, Economy and Society, 37, 20, p. 20), but also ‘real-world’, actionable impacts for the collaborative partners. We relate both these experiences to ideas of impact which go beyond the REF Impact Agenda, specifically finding important the concept of ‘impact-in-process’ (Marzi, 2022, Area). Second, we discuss the ethical complexities and power dynamics involved with embedding a researcher in an expert organisation. We highlight the need for broader conceptions of ethnical research, drawing particularly from Campbell and Vanderhoven's ‘ethical state of mind’ (2016, p. 30). In sum, we argue that although PhD research which is produced collaboratively with expert organisations can produce practical benefits to both researcher and partner, there are important discussions around power dynamics and ethics which can prevent PhD research done in this way from fully realising the transformational potential of collaboration.

In cities around the world, skateboarders repair surfaces and objects for the purposes of play using techniques to fill, smooth, and fabricate. Research in social and cultural geography focuses on the ways citizens repair and care for material objects using do-it-yourself (DIY) practices. Despite continuities, repair work by skateboarders does not strive to improve neglected, absent, or dysfunctional infrastructure for the common good, as in cases from literature on DIY urbanism, nor to subvert objects, texts, and surfaces to make political statements, as in cases from literature on tactical urbanism. Skateboarders do repair and care work to prepare surfaces for playful damage benefitting other skaters and onlookers enjoying the spectacle. By exploring these widespread but under-researched acts of repair and care and the circuits of knowledge that reproduce them, this paper makes four arguments. First, skateboarders do repair and care work to generate ‘spots’ for skateboarding from assemblages of objects and surfaces intended for other purposes. Transforming spots brings otherwise mundane patches of the city to life through thousands of tiny acts of repair and care. Second, repair and care work by skateboarders is most effective when barely visible to people outside the culture. However, repaired surfaces make their way to large audiences, often millions of viewers, through skateboard photography and video, giving some of them an outsized life across time and space. Third, knowledge about techniques of repair and care are considered an important part of skate culture to be learned and shared. Protocols of care shape acceptable degrees of modification to surfaces and objects, and as skateboarding globalises so too do these protocols. Fourth, acts of repair and care have no guarantees of longevity. Hours of labour can be destroyed by direct acts to stop skateboarding and by indirect acts emanating from dynamics of urban change.

Qualitative researchers can usually discern the difference between obedient speech and fearless, critical, or oppositional speech. Yet the context in which speech acts are performed is necessarily uneven, such that the same people who might speak freely in one place are often quick to engage in obedient speech in another. Speech acts also depend on the speaker's positionality, meaning that some speakers may have the privilege to act as ‘truth-tellers’ and speak freely, whereas the positionality of others does not enable this. This paper considers how these contextual factors can be overlooked when liberal speech norms are taken for granted. Engaging with Michel Foucault's writing on parrhesia, I highlight the issues of positionality and context in defining how socio-political borders are drawn around free (‘fearless’) speech as opposed to obedient (‘performative’) speech. I show how parrhesia opens up key questions for qualitative research about the politicisation of free versus obedient speech through space and time.

In this paper, I use auto-netnography data to explore my experiences of self-tracking with my Apple watch to uncover some of the ways in which the materiality of self-tracking led me to experience an intensified form of surveillance around my body. The paper contributes to literature within digital geographies which considers the blurring of online and offline boundaries. I consider this in relation to auto-netnography and auto-ethnography to question the distinction between the two. I contribute to debates in fat studies around the blurring of the personal and researcher identity when supporting the Health at Every Size Approach, furthering these debates by exemplifying how the materiality of self-tracking can intensify feelings of guilt and shame when researching the body. The paper concludes with some ethical recommendations for self-care in the research process, arguing that future research should consider how the researcher should hold space to deal with the unintended emotional consequences that may come from research.

In April 2022 UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) announced that all books must be open access from January 2024 onwards. If the UKRI proposals are formalised as part of the next REF (Research Excellence Framework) exercise, this will have damaging consequences for geography and other disciplines. In this commentary I argue that this is an ill-considered proposal that is already disrupting academic book publishing. There is an urgent need to evaluate alternative open access models that will not entrench existing forms of academic inequality, marginalise the significance of books as a distinctive facet of intellectual life, or threaten the production of rigorous peer-reviewed monographs.

Wetlands have historically been considered hindrances to development, with ‘reclamation’ considered the appropriate management practice. This is no different in India, where most cities are built on wetlands. This study examines the case of fast urbanising Kozhikode City on the south-west coast of India by overlaying political and developmental interventions of the city with its ecological realities. While pre-colonial settlements in the region were predominantly along the coast leaving the marshy inland areas, the need for resource mobilisation by colonial forces led to the development of Conolly Canal through the wetlands. The spoil bank of the canal spawned the development of roads cutting across the wetlands, a process continuing to this day, with consequent ribbon development. Wetland loss due to reduction in depth, core area loss, fragmentation and salinity intrusion have gone hand in hand with the city's rapid urbanisation. While the looming threat of climate change is forcing Kozhikode's planners to revive the canal, wetlands that sustain the canal (and the city) are buried too far beneath the piecemeal undertakings that have shaped the city. This paper reconstructs the environmental history of the city, the canal and the wetlands from the establishment of the city to the present, spanning a period of 500 years. Determinants of urban growth including canal construction, transport network development in line with the spoil banks and rapid urbanisation processes are chronicled to understand the interconnectedness between ecology, urban sprawl and the rationality of disaster preparedness. In this context, the future development proposals for the region are examined especially with the wetlands as the backdrop. We employ mixed methodologies to track this history including satellite imagery, geographic information systems (GIS), archives and interviews with senior citizens. This framework can be applied to other cities to understand the metabolic relationship of urban growth with ecology and its changing history.