cultural geographies

The cosmopolitan city has been hailed a necessary response to the empirical reality of globalizing multicultural cities. We follow Shah in arguing that the ‘assumed equivalence between cosmopolitanism and global’ needs more careful attention, and suggest three ways in which the assumption may be unpicked. First, discourses on the cosmopolis tend to focus on a masculinized version of cosmopolitanism, usually equated with creativity and public civility as accompanying conditions for developing productive relations in business and enterprise. More needs to be said about whether cosmopolitan ideals and realities feature in feminized privatized spheres, including those of ‘carework’ and ‘domestic work’. Second, attention needs to be given to understanding how cosmopolitanism at work in the global city shapes political membership. This requires attention to be given not just to settled individuals but also to the mobile-but-not-free populations, such as transnational domestic workers, a category in between Bauman’s ‘tourist’ and ‘vagabond’. Third, the inner workings of cosmopolitanism deserve greater attention, and this requires focusing on the everyday and personal expressions and negotiations of cosmopolitan ideals among different groups of people. These observations prompt us to give attention to identifying provisional changes in the subjectivities of Filipino domestic workers as potential working-class cosmopolitans upon migration to Singapore. By exploring changes in consumption patterns, possibilities for cultural learning, the development of new sensibilities and the negotiation of cultural differences, we argue for the value of including migrant domestic workers in discourses on cosmopolitanism and the emancipatory hope of recovering an openness to, and respect for, humanity despite the retrogressive contours of transnational domestic work.

In this essay I examine the process of making meaningful places through a consideration of the life geographies of Norman Angell and Tom Driberg, two former residents of the Blackwater marshes, Essex. The essay begins by outlining how the cultural tradition of the west has tended to present marshes as marginal locations, and marshland landscapes as problematically ambiguous, and it shows how this characterization has influenced accounts of the Blackwater marshlands. I then introduce and examine the lives of Norman Angell and Tom Driberg: the former a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a solitary man for whom Northey Island provided a retreat from a threatening world; the latter a leftist politician and journalist, an extrovert who lived a colourful life in Bradwell on Sea. While both men came to the marshes as outsiders, they ended by making for themselves meaningful life geographies in the marshland, their struggles engaging with the symbolic, imaginary, and real components of the landscape. I conclude by proposing that Angell and Driberg’s life geographies indicate that, like the marshlands, landscape might best be understood as neither necessarily solid nor liquid in identity, but as a contingent process formed by local negotiation.

Arts-science collaboration is gaining increasing attention in geography and other disciplines, in part due to its ability to ‘do’ social, cultural and political work. This paper considers the work of SiteWorks, a series of projects initiated by Bundanon Trust – an Australian public company. SiteWorks involves arts practitioners, scientists, other scholars and local people creating works in response to the Bundanon site, on the Shoalhaven River, southeastern Australia. The paper draws on my experience as a SiteWorks participant, and poses two questions. What does this arts-science collaboration contribute to an understanding of the more-than-human world of this site? What are the methodological implications of the collaborative, embodied research methodology? The study finds that SiteWorks informs a politics of belonging. Understanding belonging has implications for thinking and action towards plant and animal life, and for the highly contested realms of human identity, indigeneity and migration. Unsettling fixed notions of belonging is essential for learning to live with the contingency presented by contemporary environmental change. Here I propose a ‘passing-through place’; a place not permanently dwelt in but vital nonetheless. Secondly, the study finds that collaborative, embodied research methodology reveals and challenges our practices, invites new modes of investigation, and presents new questions and insights into place and practice. Embodied methods heighten awareness of the more-than-human world, presenting opportunity for more ethical co-existence. The academy is presently witnessing increasing attention to impact and non-traditional output. Despite ongoing challenges, collaborative, embodied research practice presents one avenue for attending to these imperatives.

This article considers what we might learn about landscape from how certain gardeners respond to death, absence and afterlife. After situating the domestic garden amid recent work on landscapes of memory and absence in geography, the article presents a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. Each draws on encounters with experienced gardeners living in British suburbs. In particular, these movements focus on: commemorabilia, including plants, which offer the possibility to materialize and anchor something of what would otherwise be lost; how absences are teased into awkward presence through conversation and reminiscence; and the importance of the ‘people’ who continue to produce the garden landscape after their death. Collectively, the practices I describe are an attempt to domesticate – that is, to coconstitute more malleable and familiar relations with – absent presences, and in so doing to seek a comfortable, even if ultimately impossible, alignment between self, past, memory and landscape. I stress that this seeking requires work: practical projects of digging, planting, weeding, of making memory and losing it again. In so doing, the article suggests that the spectral does not always arrive from the outside but is something that can be fabricated. I conclude that we should look to the practicalities of living rather than ideas of life, and to acts of landscaping rather than concepts of landscape, in seeking to ascertain the ways in which absence comes to matter.

Throughout the Second World War camouflage was employed to conceal and counterfeit the military’s presence in diverse landscape habitats; a technology designed to wipe out revealing patterns and inscribe false forms, all in order to make of enemy reconnaissance a glass eye. It was on the plains of the North African desert that the technology proved its effectiveness for military strategy. The desert was an expansive, shifting environment, demanding a new relationship between modern militarism and knowledge of the earth’s surface. Where aerial reconnaissance could threaten to expose military desert designs, other forms of visual literacy were developed to engage with the vertical, as well as the horizontal, plane, all in order to camouflage military movements. This paper critically considers the triangulation of the technology of the aeroplane, and the camera, alongside the granular surface of sand. It explores the working practices of British desert camoufleurs, a diverse group of practitioners, including artists, scientists, filmmakers and, less expectedly, a magician, who were handpicked by the military due to their skills in visual literacy. Their innovations in camouflage form a narrative focusing on the development of desert-based design practices that subsequently arose from military engagements with this environment. The paper seeks to show both the aesthetic and the political implications of these military incursions into the desert, telling how the militarization of the desert exploited a land of mirages to deadly effect.

Drawing from ethnographic research on Canadian people living off-grid we describe and interpret how people without formal training in architecture or construction manage to build their own homes. Our findings show that they do so thanks to what we call regenerative life skills. Juxtaposing our argument in the context of DIY (do-it-yourself) research and discourse we argue that rather than in a solo endeavor off-grid builders engage in relational practices, becoming entangled with others, with historical traditions, with place-specific resources, and with the affordances of the materials they utilize. DIW (do-it-with) relies on the engagement of what we call regenerative life skills − drawing from relational theory and regenerative design.

Critically reflecting upon a performance piece enacted by the author, this paper explores the value of artistic practice as a means for undertaking research. The performance was a piece of GPS drawing, using the movement of a body in space to write the word ‘RIDE’ across the city, subsequently represented in the form of a map. Scholars working in mobilities have increasingly been opening up the spaces of transport to critical enquiry, revealing the practices and powers enmeshed in the everyday activity of moving from A-to-B. This paper argues that in using a bicycle ride to create an art work – even one of little aesthetic merit – the author was able to create a new understanding of cycling practices that would not be captured through conventional social science techniques.

Sarah Whatmore has argued that ‘[t]here is an urgent need to supplement the familiar repertoire of humanist methods that rely on generating talk and text with experimental practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers and extend the company and modality of what constitutes a research subject’. But how does one do this? What kinds of research practices are useful? And more specifically, what kinds of methods can help to conjure and enact a vitalist materialism in the field? This essay offers a brief and critical account of how the author attempted to perform a vitalist materialism through fieldwork practices undertaken in 2007. Research into Caribbean agronomic responses to the EU Sugar Reform involved ‘muddy boots’, diary writing, and video documentation methods. Participating in the thick of agronomic experiments facilitated a greater sensitivity to and awareness of the interactions and miscommunications involved between different vital agencies and video provided an evocative way of communicating more-than-human materialities. In sum, these methods were successful with regard to Whatmore’s call, but proved to be more useful as memory-prompting tools. This author found that practising vitalist fieldwork did not mean that one had to enrol fantastical new methods to reveal or get at ‘the vital’. Rather, the cultivation of a vitalist geographical imagination that was receptive and open to the liveliness of materialities and the significance of relational becomings was much more important.