cultural geographies

What would it mean to understand nationalism as an atmosphere? This article makes a theoretical contribution to cultural geographical works on ‘affective atmospheres’ as well as to critical approaches to the study of nationalism by addressing this question. It examines how nationalism operates affectively and atmospherically through a discussion of the event of the London 2012 Olympic Games and the ‘happy atmospheres’ of being together that circulated in the course of those Games. The key claim of the article is that addressing the nation’s affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances is critical for understanding how nationalism endures and, furthermore, how it appears especially difficult to critique. As such, the article points to different ways in which thinking about nationalism as an ‘affective atmosphere’ builds upon the notion of ‘everyday nationalism’ but also takes it further by inviting an attentiveness to the different tonalities and intensities of nationality and shifting the focus from a subject identity or bounded community to the question of how affective forces congeal around particular objects and bodies and echo as part of an assemblage. Finally, this article makes a contribution to debates around the relationship between affect, atmosphere and politics by asking how national affective atmospheres might be resisted.

This article reviews and rethinks the study of cultural landscapes in the context of western Canadian settlement history. The historiography of scholarship on the colonial period, across a broad array of disciplines, follows themes central to the study of continuity and change in settler societies, including assimilation, cultural revivalism and transnationalism. Influenced by historical conditions particular to the region, namely, the creation of migrant block settlements and a legacy of multiculturalism, research has had a longstanding commitment to an ethnic history paradigm, which tends to orient our understanding of the cultural landscape in terms of what Brubaker and Cooper have called ‘identity history’. We argue that by focusing on relationships rather than boundaries, future research on the cultural dimension of settlement might move beyond ethnic history through investigating the possibilities of shared landscapes and communities of practice, built on the back of finding common material solutions to the problems of agrarian life.

This article develops the dancers’ choreographic notebook as a cross-disciplinary documentational device in the representation and analysis of multi-sensual qualitative sources. Drawing upon fieldwork collected during a London-based research placement with the dance company BalletBoyz, I endeavour to extend critical debates around the body and performance within human geography to examine the ‘more-than-representational’ methodological possibilities affiliated with performativity and its allied body of literature. In performing this methodological approach, I first hope to encourage experimental and creative documentational methods for conducting vibrant, engaging geographies of the body. Second, I affirm the centrality of sensuous, embodied accounts in the research process. Finally, this article seeks to equip others in their investigations into re-imagining what ‘physical’ thinking might look like. In documenting the body, I hope a space may be created to rethink the ontology of the body beyond the dualisms of absence or present.

More than 20 years after its devastating civil war (1975–1990), Lebanon has seen a burgeoning of environmental activism and discourse. Contemporary environmentalism is articulated largely by Western-educated activists, many of them working in the Western donor–financed non-governmental organization sector. Like romantic nationalists and urban reformers of the late 19th century, these activists view access to green space and nature as promoting patriotic attachments, civic virtue, and healthy social behaviors. They view green space and nature, as well, as an actual site for peaceful social interaction between ordinarily hostile groups and, hence, for the creation of national cohesion. This article explores the faith that activists place in the natural environment and open space as an instrument of citizenship and as a solution to Lebanon’s sectarian factionalism. Lebanese environmentalism, we suggest, provides an important alternative political vision for Lebanon and a form of dissent against the political status quo. Ultimately, however, it cannot disentangle itself completely from the very sectarian political structure it seeks to dislodge.

For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation.

Red kites are one of Britain’s rarest birds. Once extinct from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, a few remained in the upland valleys of Wales. In Wales, there are now over 1,000 breeding pairs, with a successful reintroduction programme throughout the United Kingdom. Part of this success story has been the provision of feeding stations. This article seeks to explore the unfolding and infolding topological relations that ensue at the Bwlch Nant yr Arian feeding grounds, near Aberystwyth as a site-based ontology. The gatherings at this site compose an alluring spectacular display which is a charged, affective experience. Following this practise the meanings of feeding red kites has evolved and metamorphosed into something less about kite survival, and more of an environmental pedagogy. Intriguingly, this is driven not by leaflets, documents, devices or schooling, but by an encounter with charismatic nonhumans, difference, affect and experience. The research navigates and explores the natures of the event-site and elucidates an affective zone of emergence that materialises where diverse Umwelten overlap.

This article explores the vagaries of locating value in California’s state park system in general and Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park in particular. The practice of listing and delisting for purposes of preservation relies on accepting the premise that some places are inherently superior and more worthy of public esteem than others, and that such distinctions are detectable, indeed, measurable in gradations. In this article, I aim to undermine our confidence in these kind of valuations and the designations they proliferate through scrutiny of two occasions where value is ranked geographically. I compare Frederick Law Olmsted Jr’s 1928 statewide survey of California that identified land for acquisition as parks, with a 2011 deficit-reduction measure earmarking 70 specific state parks for closure. These two lists demonstrate how value is immanent to social relations. The article contributes to examinations of value within Human Geography by developing a relational axiology that attends to the materials, forces and practices that hold together when value becomes subject to a project of fixing. I challenge the exclusively positive conception of value in on-going policy work and outline how valuation as a technology works to produce the public in whose name it is performed. What kinds of justifications emerge when fine-grained negotiations about revenue streams come up against long-held principals about the importance of nature and cultural history? Geographical value, in the same way as any other kind of value, is not found but is made by the very act of its enunciation. Accepting this requires us to think more carefully about how and why value’s identification leads invariably to its uneven distribution.

This article explores where and how silence ‘takes place’. After reviewing various cultural and political meanings and performances of silence, this article will provide an in-depth analysis of the Norwegian pavilion at the universal exhibition Expo 2000 in Hanover. While most pavilions at this exhibition displayed objects about nature, technology and humankind – the general theme of Expo 2000 – the main attraction of the Norwegian pavilion was an art installation named ‘The Silent Room’ produced by a contemporary artist. This article describes how the Silent Room was constructed, how the silence therein was technologically produced and how it was experienced by some of its visitors. Several technologies were used to create silence: a waterfall outside of the pavilion and a sound installation and isolating material inside. On one hand, technology was used indirectly, to produce the opposite of silence (sound) and to create the possibility of silence. On the other hand, a direct relationship between silence and technology was present as well: the idea to create silence by a deliberate break, by a significant non-use of technology. This article shows that silence is not only the absence of sound but also not spaceless nothingness. Silence is a spatial object that has multiple locations: it is portrayed as both a natural and a cultural characteristic of Nordic countries; its presence can be experienced in a room; and silence is physically, discursively and temporally located next to sound and noise.

Orson Welles’ experimental ‘essay film’, F for Fake (1973), captures in short form what the prodigious director’s life expressed in grander gestures: a speculative geography for an accident-prone cinema. Documenting the fakery techniques of famed 20th-century art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, the film has been widely read as a showcase of Welles’ own ‘charlatanism’. Indeed, even Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema claims that the ubiquitous Wellesian ‘character’ – the forger, the faker, the double-dealer – culminates in F for Fake. But, along with Welles’ other late-life essay films, it also offers a pragmatic strategy for theorizing the sites of cinematic production on the basis of their constituent contingencies. For Welles the independent filmmaker, these uncertainties unfailingly manifested in financial, technological, and geographical disasters – problems that, I argue, he harnessed to cultivate a unique cinematic ‘style’. The resulting ‘Wellesian continuum’ illuminates the conspiracy of perception, thoughts, and accident in the production of cinematic space. Offering ‘how to’ guide on forging series from the contingencies of production, Welles’ meditation on fakery models the creation of such sites and lays out the conceptual architecture for theorizing their cinematic production. Welles’ resulting ontology of cinematic seriality describes technical problematics – ‘anti-techniques’ – that give rise to speculative geographies.

This article describes research undertaken with a ‘drawing dance’ project, which suggests that thinking about cultural practices in terms of synaesthesia and developing research methods that involve inter-practice encounters to enliven these synaesthetic qualities might help to invigorate non-representational efforts to apprehend affect.