cultural geographies

This article explores the possibilities of art as social practice in the context of the fight against HIV/AIDS. It is inspired by notions of art having the capacity to move beyond the spaces of galleries into an expanded field, and thus beyond the visual and into the social. The article examines the potential for sculpture to play a transformative role in HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention, and in transforming the gender relations that shape the dynamics of the spread of the disease. These ideas are developed through discussion of research conducted in Uganda and in the UK, which sought to develop forms of sculptural practice for HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention in Uganda. The article explores the ways in which a series of soap sculptures are an effective tool in the fight against the disease, particularly in communities with high rates of illiteracy and in which discussion of sex and sexuality remains largely taboo. The article contends that countering taboo and facilitating dialogue between women and men, thus encouraging attitudinal and behavioural change, are perhaps the most significant impacts that this form of sculpture can make. This is because while awareness of the disease in Uganda is often high, having the capacity to discuss and act upon this awareness is often problematic, largely because of fear, stigma and taboo, and the unequal gender relations that determine the nature of men and women’s sexual lives. The article concludes that the transformative effects of the soap sculptures are revealed in the ways in which they challenge taboos, tackle fear and stigma, and facilitate dialogue between men and women.

This paper examines how freshwater anglers in northern England ‘read’ rivers as landscapes and work with them relationally, through various sorts of embodied knowledge-practices, as part of their angling activity: processes that they call ‘watercraft’. We focus specifically on water as an environment that anglers encounter as a different world: unlike land and air, water is not an everyday medium in which humans (as terrestrial animals) live and breathe.We use this example of environmental engagement to go beyond visual engagement with landscapes, to show how people develop skills of environmental interpretation, mapping and nonvisual sense-making in ways that are particular to the water encounter. We conclude by arguing for a mutual and multisensory notion of environmental engagement that considers not merely human perception but also how environments, such as water, also shape that encounter.

Human sensory orders are recalibrated when faced with the reduced illumination levels of the night; it is harder to judge depth and distance, details are obscured, colours muted, and one is obliged to compensate for this loss of visual acuity by drawing on the other senses. Darkness also forces one to question how one’s body is in relation to that which surrounds, challenging one’s human sense of bodily presence and boundary. Focusing on The Storr: Unfolding Landscape, a temporary night-time installation by the environmental arts charity NVA (Nacionale Vite Activa) on the Isle of Skye in 2005, this article draws together contemporary art theory on installation art and recent post-phenomenological work in geography to explore the ways in which individuals experience the nocturnal landscape. In so doing, the article highlights the close connections between these two bodies of work and how they might be usefully employed to advance traditional geographical understandings of landscape in art. At the same time, however, it raises both an empirical concern and a methodological question. First, regarding the uncritical way in which visibility is incorporated into many post-phenomenological accounts of landscape. Second, regarding the validity of focusing on isolated narratives in instances such as this when so much of what the individuals experienced was caused by, or shared with, others.

By telling stories about the unevenness of the ideal of the Promised Land, Bruce Springsteen drenches landscapes with individualized renderings that speak to a collective sense of being American and living in America.Yet what is lost in this detail is the awareness that males dominate the American imaginary, that Americans are men, and that their America is masculine. A close, critical reading of Springsteen’s lyrics via Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of ontological positivity and becoming-woman reveals complexities embedded in his American imaginary, ones rife with iconic images that assist in figuring out how women come to be an intricate part of the story without being the subject of the tale. In reading Springsteen’s lyrical landscapes, ones crafted through the ideal of the Promised Land, I use the unexplored hook of man as subject as a positive mechanism of becoming to show how the lyrics work to place women vis-a-vis men’s journeys to the Promised Land.

After their defeat in the Chinese civil war, in 1949 the exiled Kuomintang (KMT) government fled to Taiwan and endeavoured to educate the baby-boomer generation on the island to become ‘true Chinese’. Geography education was one of the fundamental vehicles used by the KMT to construct a Chinese identity and to create a longing for a Chinese motherland. This paper explores the ways in which a KMT-versioned ‘sense of place’ was constructed in elementary education during the period between 1945 and 1968, and investigates how the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ were introduced and presented in school textbooks. By examining the geographic knowledge taught in Taiwan’s elementary schools (both through the content of textbooks and the design of the curriculum), this paper investigates how the foundations of a China-centric identity were laid, and also the ways in which a Chinese homeland was constructed through geography education. However, in the process of reinforcing a sense of Chinese-ness, the relationship between the island and its inhabitants was sacrificed. The island became distant, insignificant and absent in school education and was turned into a meaningless flatscape. This paper argues that the rise of Taiwanese awareness in the 1990s has proven that an arbitrary construction of an inauthentic Chinese identity is both problematic and unsustainable.