Search

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the basic premises of the economic system as we know it. If this pandemic successfully disrupted our ordinary days under capitalism, it should also upend [...]

ABSTRACTWhile urban geography has made significant contributions to mainstreaming disruptive thinking through its invocation of justice, less discussed is what good must our descriptions do especially when they pertain to others’ suffering. This essay addresses the ethics of practicing social inquiry by drawing two thematic lessons: painful clarity and the appropriation of space. Centering the importance of painful clarity reflects on the relational politics of plural claims-making, the ongoingness of which helps us focus not only on our everyday complicity in others’ struggles but also on what can be done here and now. The appropriation of space highlights the role of spatial milieu as a medium through which structural constraints and political agency can be situated in a specific time and place, enabling forms of social inquiries that are instrumental and operative. I conclude by suggesting three considerations that could help bridge the separation between knowledge and action.

ABSTRACTBob Lake’s writing traces a route from positivism to pragmatism, from market dominance to political possibility, from coercion to persuasion, and from consolatory escapism to engaged practice. His work inspires us to embark on an engaged practice that not only questions the worth of “spectator knowledge” but also reinstitutes the purpose of our everyday participation as members of the academic community. Lake is an anti-essentialist who finds the meaning of knowledge production in interhuman communication and collective engendering of communal values. This has led his work to constantly question the predetermined a prioriworldviews, epistemologies, and ideological umbrellas that often occlude the actual realities that real social actors continue to reshape and reinvent. His incessant questioning is not born out of contrarian vanity. Rather, it encourages us to develop and practice habits of creative democracy in our everyday actions of love, care, and solidarity.

AbstractWith increasing exposure to environmental catastrophes and natural hazards, the terminology of ‘resilience’ is becoming ubiquitous in the planning field. As a part of this continuing discussion, this paper examines how the concept of resilience has been used in disaster planning, especially with a focus on the creation and use of knowledge to ‘build resilience’ in response to potential future natural hazard events. In discussing the practice of creating and using knowledge in disaster planning, I draw insights from the interdisciplinary critical studies of science and technology literature, which has been developing rich discussions on the challenges we face in producing geographical knowledge. I demonstrate in this paper how resilience theory can be linked with the concept of ‘technicity’ used in the virtual geography literature, and how that association can have meaningful implications for the production and application of knowledge in disaster planning.