Search

This article reflects on the key findings and insights offered by recent work on public understandings of air pollution, which has begun to adopt some of the concepts and methodologies associated with social constructionism. We begin with a brief discussion of debates in the social sciences generally, and human geography specifically, regarding the precepts of 'social constructionism', before setting out the 'heterogeneous' mode that we adopt in this paper. In this light, we trace briefly the fairly narrow empirical, methodological and conceptual preoccupations of early air pollution perception work. These accounts usefully situate the remainder of the paper, which focuses on the recent body of research that explores public understandings of air pollution, with quite different approaches to theory and data collection to that which has gone before. The argument we develop asserts that a constructionist interpretation, in revealing 'complexity' and the entangled interaction of society-environment-technology, raises serious questions about the dominant political discourse of air pollution and the policy responses which it legitimates. The issues raised by this review, we believe, offer a fresh perspective and the potential to progress not only our understanding and management of air pollution risks but also the contribution of geographers to a challenging research terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Science studies are an increasingly prominent interdisciplinary body of work. Now a diverse literature, one of its most consistent and common themes is a reluctance to accept the standard model of scientific explanation (‘internalism’) that conceives scientific knowledge, and the disciplines with which it is associated, as the product of a rationality that is progressively realized over time. Instead, science studies emphasize the importance of local circumstances in shaping knowledge, which, in turn, makes such knowledge messy and context-dependent. The purposes of this paper are twofold. The first is to provide a selective review of science studies. In particular, the paper recognizes three subtraditions within the larger genre: Mertonian institutionalism, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and cultural studies of science. The second purpose is to begin developing a case study in order to apply such literature, that of the institutional origins of economic geography during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and linked to a series of wider social processes around commercial trade and imperialism. To make the case study manageable, I concentrate on only two authors and their respective key books: the Scottish geographer George Chisholm, who wrote the first English-language economic geography textbook, A handbook of commercial geography (1889); and the American geographer J. Russell Smith, author of the first US college text in economic geography, Industrial and commercial geography (1913). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the golden age of philanthropy. Over the 55-year period 1998–2052, bequests to charity in the USA alone are estimated to be between $109 and $454 billion per year. This paper exhorts geographers to give critical attention to less-than-charitable consequences of the so-called ‘new philanthropy’ among the super-rich. It sets out a number of areas that appear to warrant critical geographical inquiry, including: bonds between philanthropic engagement and place; diaspora philanthropy; jurisdictional taxation arrangements favouring the wealthy and super-rich; characteristics of culturally variegated philanthropy; and philanthropy’s geographical links with spaces of exploitation and territories of guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most towns and cities in the UK and USA possess a number of venues offering sexually orientated entertainment in the form of exotic dance, striptease or lap dancing. Traditionally subject to moral and legal censure, the majority of these sex-related businesses have tended to be situated in marginal urban spaces. As such, their increasing visibility in more mainstream spaces of urban nightlife raises important questions about the sexual and gender geographies that characterize the contemporary city. In this paper we accordingly locate the phenomena of adult entertainment at the convergence of geographic debates concerning the evening economy, urban gentrification and the gendered consumption of urban space. We conclude that these sites are worthy of investigation not only in and of themselves, but also because their shifting location reveals much about the forms of heterosexuality and homosociality normalized in the contemporary city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of juridification are a defining feature of late modern war. But geographic accounts of war have generally not considered the role that law plays in shaping its conduct. This paper explores the juridification of war using the concept of lawfare. Lawfare may signal an intensification and shift in the relationship between war and law, but I argue that understanding the nature and extent of these changes requires a careful examination of the historical geographies of war, law and lawfare. Drawing from critical legal approaches I offer a preliminary geographical and historical theorization of lawfare so that we may better understand the relationship between war and law today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the efforts of American geographer Gilbert White in dealing with natural hazards management. It mentions about the paper published by White regarding his concerns for safety and security which focused on water supply, peace and conflict resolution, and management of river basins. However, White gave little time to the articulation of philosophy or theory and avoided theoretical debates and referred philosophical questions. After all the efforts, the author concluded that White mattered was the inner man both his own self and those whose lives he touched.

This paper undertakes three tasks: (1) to consider monetary policy’s role in contemporary capitalism and state governance; (2) to introduce the fundamentals of contemporary monetary policy; and (3) to outline some of the material and ideological stakes in the social, political, and economic geographies of monetary policy and central banking as practised in advanced capitalist nation states. I focus on subnational and class effects, arguing that the precarious relation between central banks and national democratic processes has become increasingly tenuous. Empirical examples are drawn from Canada and the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic 'playing field' in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America's future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890-1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States' expansion in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in lactation technology in recent years have changed the ontological status of breast milk, giving it new-found mobility. This paper considers the contested meanings over breast milk's 'proper place' in US and UK society. By synthesizing scholarship from geography, gender studies and science and technology studies, I use the case of mobile breast milk to propose a new framework for how geographers might conceptualize mobile biosubstances. Drawing on the work of Waldby and Mitchell (2006), I suggest that the ways in which breast milk now travels reflect how mobile biosubstances increasingly function as a hybrid form, drawing together elements of both gift-exchanges and commodity-exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neil Brenner’s response (this issue) to ‘The social construction of scale’ (Marston, 2000) raises a host of excellent points that might, as he intends, help focus and refine the blossoming discussion of geographical scale. His larger argument, that the popularity of scale theories has led to a certain ‘analytical blunting’ of this sharply defined concept and that scale is increasingly conflated with broader discussions of space, is surely correct. Yet two aspects of Brenner’s response are troubling: first, the idiosyncratic genealogy of scale theories he wishes to assert; and second, the refusal of feminist arguments about the scale of the household. Both moves compound and exemplify rather than resolve the problem he identifies. In the hope of sharpening the analytical debate, therefore, we would like to offer a brief sympathetic critique of these two foundations of Brenner’s approach to scale theory. Our argument is that the analytical blunting of scale can best be countered through the constant reinvention of scale theory ahead of the fetishist juggernaut. For exactly this reason the original article insisted on the constitutive but largely unheralded role of social reproduction and consumption, in conjunction with social production, in the production of geographical scale. It seems to us that Brenner’s commitment to a politics of scale is, following Lefebvre, only ‘space-deep’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mixed-race partnering in the United States is on the rise, scholars have paid scant attention to where people of 'differently racialized parentage' (Ifekwunigwe, 2001: 46) actually meet. In an effort to help fill this gap, this paper (1) offers an overview of current scholarship on places of encounter and (2) aims to provide a blueprint for future research that will explicitly interrogate where mixed-race partners meet. We organize our survey around four contexts – residential neighborhoods, workplaces, educational settings, and cyberspace – to point out productive avenues for further inquiry. In contrast to much of the literature cited in this essay and in an effort to emphasize the intersections of race and space, we advocate for new scholarship that addresses the times and places where routine, prosaic, interactions between adults can erode long-standing stereotypes and lead to meaningful relationships. In studying everyday social and spatial processes, we highlight the potential insights gained from detailing the 'micro-geographies of habitual practice' (Nash, 2000: 656). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although 'resources' and 'nationalism' are core analytical categories in geography, the concept of 'resource nationalism' has received little attention in the discipline. We address this lacuna by reviewing relevant literature across the social sciences, and tracing key concepts and scalar frames to advance a critical approach to resource nationalism. In contrast to realist approaches, we understand it as a political discourse mobilized by a wide range of actors. Highlighting its multiple, co-existing, and often contradictory narratives about places, subjects, identities, and materialities, we illustrate the relevance of this critical framework with brief examples from Kazakhstan, Bolivia, and the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars have noted a broadening of environmental justice research, both geographically and conceptually, to include global issues that expand beyond the spatial distributions of environmental ‘goods' and ‘bads' to include other dimensions including recognition, participation, and capabilities. The purpose of this report is to consider how this broadening has influenced research topics and themes, the geographic locations of researchers, and the future course of environmental justice research. We searched for articles identifying environmental justice as a keyword from 2000 to 2009 in Scopus, Web of Science, and GeoBase. While the number of articles published looking at environmental justice has increased over the past decade, our search contradicts the previous claims that environmental justice research has greatly expanded conceptually or geographically beyond its traditional origins. Our findings show that environmental justice research remains firmly rooted in the United States, focusing on the distributional aspects of environmental harms. We introduce alternative research methodologies that can be used to inform a more holistic and just approach to research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the possibility that US rural amenity destinations are affected by ‘linked migration’ streams similar to ones connecting the fate of high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants in global cities. To date, the possibility of such a linkage has not been considered in the vast literature on migration and social transformation in rural America, a literature that has treated the arrival of these two groups (high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants) in rural spaces as separate processes. We explore the possibility that these two groups, in a particular set of US rural amenity communities, are structurally linked. We focus on the theoretical implications of documenting such linkages, arguing that the presence of linked migration dynamics in rural areas would transform scholarly debates on: (1) Latino immigrants in the rural USA; (2) amenity migration and rural gentrification, not only in the USA but in a range of postindustrial economies; and (3) theories of globalization and mobility, as well as the place of the rural in globalization dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of work on homelessness by geographers. Much of this has been framed by the desire to connect discussions of homelessness to wider debates around gentrification, urban restructuring and the politics of public space. Though such work has been helpful in shifting discussions of homelessness into the mainstream geographical literature, too much of it remains narrowly framed within a US metric of knowledge and too closely focused upon the recent punitive turn in urban social policy. Here we advance instead a framework that recognizes the growing multiplicy of homeless geographies in recent years under policies that are better understood as multifaceted and ambivalent rather than only punitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the intellectual construct of the work of American geographer Gilbert White regarding the range of alternatives. According to the author, White believed in the capabilities of all humans to improve the world and the welfare of other through collaborative efforts that are grounded in reasoned inquiry. The author partitioned the thinking components of White into range of alternatives but many scholars have sought to conceive of choice in terms of rational behavior. Meanwhile, semanticists disagree about whether the word alternative refers to situations involving choosing between two items or a wider spectrum of possibilities.

The article focuses on the implications of reconstituting poverty as a social exclusion practiced by states which aim to pursue social order and welfare. It highlights Great Britain's Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) and the bubble laws in the U.S. It is stated that the British ASBO allows police forces, housing associations and community organizations to undertake sub-criminal behavior by delinquent families, gangs and noisy neighbors to instill a culture of respect and responsibility while the U.S. bubble laws tend to curb the increase of anti-abortion protesters. The author believes that the legal efforts to improve public life involve changes of public space, public morality and public access.

The article focuses on the relationship between globalization and governance in the U.S. The author specifically explores the political geographies of control and neoliberalism that form the relationship. Neoliberalism has become an increasingly umbrella term for the diverse ideologies, policies and practices associated with liberalizing global markets. In geography, there has been widespread attention paid to the spaces of neoliberalism, the scales of neoliberalism, the urban regimes of neoliberalism, the natures of neoliberalism and the governmentalities of neoliberalism. The work that has mapped the political geography of neoliberalization at and across a whole variety of scales is highlighted.

Discusses the contents of the book "The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities," by H. Hoyt. Insights on how residential structures of American cities were formed; Functions of American urban real-estate markets; Scale of the city and the region in relation to economics.

Focuses on the historical geography of natural resources and regional capitalism in California. Useful metaphor for the all-powerful urban world on the impact of environment beyond as a source of staple resources; Inclusion of historical geographers; Primary focus on nature and environmental transformation.

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq conjure up eerily familiar specters, the continuities and specificities of contemporary imperialism in relation to its late 19th-century forebear, both framed in terms of liberal civilizing missions, discourses of regime change and nation-building, and projects of reconstruction and development spearheaded by the Bechtel Corporation. This is a time not of "Jihad" vs. "McWorld" but a complex interplay of forces termed "McJihad." A forensic delving into the Faustian bargains entered into by oil companies in the Middle East, backed up by the United States military, not only sheds new light on the present conjuncture, it also serves as an antidote to the jockstrap-snapping excesses of Empire.

Focuses on the role played by population geography in fertility research in Great Britain and the United States. Historical patterns of population change presented by geographers; Persuasive argument against the dominant role of social class and occupation in explaining fertility change; Geographical perspectives of understanding fertility and family decision-making.

This review highlights geographical perspectives on mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States, explicitly calling for increased analysis at the scale of the mixed-race household. We begin with a discussion of mixed-race rhetoric and then sketch contemporary trends in mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the US. We also weave in considerations of the public and the private and the genealogical and social constructions of race. Our challenges to current thought add to the landscape of scholarship concerned with race and space. By presenting mixed race in fresh ways, we offer new sites for intervention in this evolving literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political ecology has recently seen a long-overdue movement toward studies of environmental conflicts in advanced capitalist societies, far from the rural African, Latin American, and Asian societies that constitute the great majority of studies in the field. This shift has raised questions about the commonalities and differences between 'first-world' and 'third-world' political ecologies - questions that present broader challenges and opportunities for the field. The question of commonalities and difference in 'first-world' and 'third-world' political ecologies is hemispheric; recent research in political ecology consists primarily of local-scale studies, leaving the field poorly positioned to address such broad-scale comparative questions. Appropriately, local political ecology studies challenge the stability of the 'first world' and 'third world' as meaningful geographic frames posed in these questions; but in dismantling these frames without suggesting alternatives for broader-scale analysis there is danger of moving political ecology toward even greater emphasis on specificity and difference and pushing consideration of broader-scale processes farther into the background. This is a serious challenge in a field already criticized for sprawling incoherence. This article argues that one response to these challenges is to reconsider the concept of 'regional' political ecologies. Regional approaches can retain the greatest strengths of recent political ecology in revealing the importance of local-scale social dynamics while situating these dynamics within broader scales of regional (and global) processes - providing greater coherence while avoiding such problematic frames as the 'first' and 'third' world. To illustrate, a brief case study and discussion are presented that consider a regional political ecology of the rural American West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1930, a time when human geography was not considered to be among the emerging analytic social sciences and when urban geography barely existed as an identifiable subfield, C. Warren Thornthwaite, later a gargantuan figure in American climatology, was awarded a doctorate under Carl O. Sauer at the University of California, Berkeley. In his dissertation, 'Louisville, Kentucky: a study in urban geography', Thornthwaite analysed land-use zonation, commercial strip development, daytime-night-time populations, community formation, elevation and land values, functional regions and cultural areas, spatial competition and optimal location, buying power and residential distribution. Thornthwaite's urban geography was centered unmistakably in the spatial tradition, and his innovative research - based on aerial photographs, intensive field observations, city directories and detailed mapping - treated concepts that were to become central to urban geography as it developed in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Urban geography, however, evolved independently of Thornthwaite's contributions. Thornthwaite directed no graduate students, and his unpublished dissertation was not cited until a perfunctory reference in 1954. A second citation, not appearing until almost 30 years later, described it as 'a major synthesis'. Thornthwaite's dissertation was not only an anomaly in the career of its author but also an anachronism in the history of urban geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty in America has grown persistently throughout the twentieth century. Once a condition confined to immigrants, women and children, by the 1930s poverty became tied to the geographic development of the nation. Historically, poverty policy has emphasized individual moral responsibility while ignoring its geographic and structural origins. A weak attempt to address the deeper origins of poverty in the 1960s imploded with the economic crisis of the 1980s and the slide into conservative politics. By 1997 more than 700 counties in the USA were in economic distress. Few new initiatives have been offered to resolve this decades-old problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Introduction The final decade of the last millennium opened with the demise not only of soviet-style socialism and of apartheid. In addition, shock troops of the neoliberal right and the cultural left confidently declared the Death of Development. This was no mere impasse, as some had suggested in the 1980s. Development was definitively dead, and sending out noxious fumes that could only be dissipated either by market rationality or by New Social Movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the study of sexuality geography in the U.S. Means of understanding the treatment of society towards lesbians and gays; Upsurge of interest on lesbian and gay communities; Analysis on sexual citizenship.

Comments on G.F. White's evaluation of national flood policies in the U.S. Structural approaches to floods; Ways to encourage wise use of floodplains; Implications for geography.

The article provides information on the life and works of American geographer Gilbert F. White. He was born and raised Chicago, Illinois and spent his boyhood at his father's ranch in Wyoming where he developed an interest in the natural world. White earned a doctor of philosophy degree in geography in 1942 and his dissertation argued against the focus on large-scale engineering works in the face of flood hazards. Furthermore, he launched a research program that focused on human perception and adjustment to natural hazards when he became the chairperson of Department of Geography in the University of Chicago.

The article focuses on the life and works of Allan R. Pred, a geographer and social scientist in the U.S. Pred was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1936. Pred's father was a high school French language teacher and his mother is a housewife and musician. He started his career as a theorist of the American city and has fourteen books and monographs on geography and social science translated into seven languages. The author added that Pred was one of the most-cited scholars in the geography and conducted research on modernity.

Many graduate departments offer introductory courses in the history and theory of geography. As these courses draw upon review articles in Progress in Human Geography and Progress in Physical Geography, it may be useful to assess the challenges they face, survey some alternatives and ask how well academic journals speak to those challenges and alternatives. My examples are drawn from the universities of Chicago and Colorado where I have taught graduate history and theory courses over the past 15 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]