Search

Building on recent work in postcolonial urban studies that has developed more genuinely plural approaches to urban theorising, this article poses the problem of ‘worlding’ in relation to urban LGBTQI+ activism in Sydney, Australia. Specifically, the article examines how Sydney is variously worlded as or against ‘Asia’ in public debate around LGBTQI+ politics and in the imaginaries of activists living in Sydney. These worldings are shown to be an important aspect of queer activisms and urbanisms in Sydney, and I argue that attention to this worlding can productively complement a renewed focus on place and specificity in queer urban literatures. While imagining Sydney or Australia as part of Asia is itself no guarantee of productive politics or of decentring epistemologies, the article argues that some of these worldings do provide an occasion and a provocation to think elsewhere and otherwise in ways that are responsive to the specific character of White Australia’s colonial pasts and presents, while also generatively (dis)locating Sydney beyond the ‘West’. publishedVersion

Scholars across the social sciences and humanities have increasingly questioned the meaning and purpose of critique. Contributing to those conversations, some geographers have advocated for affirmative or reparative practices such as reading for difference or experimentation that seek to provoke more joyful, hopeful, or enchanting affects, as alternatives to what they perceive as a prevailing forms of ‘negative’ critique. In response, others have re-emphasized the centrality of negativity and revalued negative affects in the context of regimes of racialization, heteronormativity, and coloniality. Rather than taking sides in a debate thus framed, this article develops an ambivalent position that foregrounds multiple senses of difference that exist within affirmative and reparative projects. Drawing on feminist and queer geographic work, the explicitly political and difference-oriented writing of Sedgwick and Deleuze, and queer and postcolonial affect scholars, we argue for critique characterized by an ambivalent and pluralistic attitude toward feeling. Joining those arguing for a pluralization of the moods and modes of critical work, our readings suggest the necessity of a pluralism that refuses any escape from the ‘negativity’ of the social field in favor of an affectively ambivalent engagement with the inherent politics of critique in a plural and uneven world. publishedVersion

Reflecting biographical entanglements at varying points in both their and Ronan’s lives and careers, the contributors bear witness to Ronan’s expansive intellect and the thematic, conceptual, disciplinary, methodological and geographical breadth of his research concerns. We can learn much from studying an academic life, and especially one as rich and prodigious as Ronan’s. And yet, as academics, we do so little of this kind of labour, depriving ourselves of repositories of vital wisdom and knowledge and wastefully neglecting hard won intellectual resources. In Ronan’s scholarly corpus, there is much to excavate, reappraise, and appreciate. But this Editorial Introduction to ‘Paddison Geographies’ will not revisit Ronan’s research, teaching, and service – this task is performed with authority, empathy, wisdom and verve in the formal introduction to the Special Issue written by Chris Philo and thereafter in the articles which follow.

This article investigates efforts by a small regional university without a geography department to incorporate geography into its general education curriculum as part of a “quality enhancement” pro...