cultural geographies

This article explores the multiple and multifarious encounters of and with Globe, a 1-metre-diameter copper spherical sculpture hosting four cameras that has been rolled by the artist Janetka Platun and others in London, Shrewsbury and Delhi. Situating Globe in relation to Janetka’s art practice and the wider ‘art of rolling’, and extending broader debates about globality, encounter and relational aesthetics, the article argues that Globe’s journeys generated ‘meaningful content’ beyond an aesthetic moment of interaction by inspiring people to share stories, ideas and reflections on home, migration and belonging through their encounters with her. Globe’s encounters were inspired by curiosity, often sparked by her materiality, mobility and ‘globe-ness’. Rather than merely act as a prompt for people to reflect on home, migration and belonging, Globe has also been marked by her own journeys and encounters, reflecting their unpredictable and often transformative nature.

This article develops cultural geographical understandings of exhaustion through an exploration of the bodily pressures induced by mobile working practices. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with resource sector workers in Australia who work away from home for periods of time as well as ‘left behind’ partners, we argue that exhaustion is a collective ‘structure of feeling’, but one that is differently experienced by mobile workers and partners. Tracing the diverse rhythms of compression and decompression that are experienced by workers and partners both at home and away, our focus on temporality connects the exhaustions experienced at resource extraction sites with exhaustions experienced in the home. By providing an important temporal focus to debates on intimacy-geopolitics, we explain how rhythms instigated by resource work are complicit in generating structures of feeling that compromise wellbeing within the home. We conclude that the exhausted bodies of mobile worker households are an obscured casualty of our current resource-intensive lives.

This article recounts a day-trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the ruined town of Pripyat through a series of ethnographic vignettes from the point of view of a tour guide. This article offers an approach that begins with questions of embodiment, materiality and agency in order to research worldly forces, such as radiation, without reducing them to only matters of language and thought. In responding to these challenges of the radioactive landscape of the Chernobyl Zone and Pripyat, the article offers ‘exposure’ as a model of subjectification, applicable beyond radioactive landscapes, which is based upon passivity, vulnerability and a foundational relation-with worldly others which exceed our perceptual, representational and bodily capacities. I introduce the work of Merleau-Ponty as a key theorist behind landscape geographies. In particular, the rejection of dualism and distance is shown to be a vital starting point when understanding tourism and guiding in the radioactive landscape of the Zone. Through the crackling and chirruping of the Geiger counter, the halting, careful movements of visitors and my own uncertainties, I illustrate how radiation is first encountered as a bodily exposure; which is only ever apprehended after-the-fact and experienced as vulnerability. I argue that a more passive, vulnerable sense of embodiment is needed than phenomenology provides, for which I bring the work of Irigaray into conversation with recent post-phenomenological work in geography.

The March of Peace (Marš mira) is a 63-mile, 3-day walk through eastern Bosnia organised in memory of the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and traces in reverse a death march. Marchers take a trail from Nezuk, stopping at mass graves found along the way, arriving at the memorial cemetery in Potočari a day prior to the annual mass funeral for victims who have been recently exhumed. This article charts the journey from the death march to the peace march and asks the reader to assess the efficacy of embodied memory-work and the ethical responsibility to undertake – and responsibilities when undertaking – alternative memory-work in post-genocide landscapes and sites of mass murder, through a series of rhetorical shifts. A number of frames are enacted to challenge other more linear and conventional approaches, allowing the sociological and political productivity of engaging with post-genocide landscapes in a post-conflict state to emerge, referencing dissident forms of remembrance through the method of walking-with others while traversing this post-genocide landscape on foot. Travelling-with around 8,000 mourners, some of whom were survivors of the death march, the aim here is not to simply describe what is taking place; rather, the journey is undertaken in order to activate a space – a space within which I might engage with issues of landscape, conflict and memory in the context of their current discussion within cultural and political geography, genocide studies and memory studies, and more importantly to speak of genocide and a post-genocide landscape.

This article foregrounds the pilgrim, as a relational identity, to explore the co-emergence of self and world through embodied spatial practices. The pilgrim, as a liminal and mobile figure, is aligned with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of the ‘flesh’, which presents subject and object as co-incipient. An auto-ethnographic study of the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage in the west of Ireland combines interview accounts from research participants and my own fieldwork experiences. This journey into the performative and liminal aspects of pilgrimages examines of how pilgrim and path emerge in an intermeshing of body and landscape, the spiritual and material and culture and praxis. In mobilising the figure of the pilgrim, this article contributes to disciplinary discussions concerning phenomenology/post-phenomenology, while highlighting the significance of pilgrimage as a purposeful performance.

Trash is rarely just trash. As cultural geography regularly insists, it is also often relational and resourceful, poetic even. It is, in short, a material of rich aesthetic and political value. But what of this relational geography is left when a space is cleaned up? What is lost? In Johannesburg, a city that has long prospered, spatially at least, through habitual cycles of rubbish and renewal, the impulse towards the sanitary has historically betrayed its tendency towards racial exclusion and erasure. As the city labours once again to clean up its self-image, I explore the everyday absence this pattern produces as well as the aesthetic interventions that this geography otherwise enables. In Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s part-visual, part-textual exhibition Ponte City (2014), I locate a mode of melancholy representation that gives creative, specifically archival form to the ordinary loss imposed upon Johannesburg’s tallest residential tower as part of its aborted redevelopment in 2007. In this, I attempt to reorient cultural geography’s attention away from the materiality of trash, reflecting, instead, on the allied abundance of its absence.

This article contributes to ongoing debates around the cultural production of waste by arguing for a clearer distinction between concepts of ‘waste’ and ‘excess’ and by suggesting the benefits of this distinction for tackling the perceived consumer cultural waste ‘problem’. Drawing on recent qualitative research with UK adolescents, I consider how a range of (youth/consumer) cultural drivers, social norms and moral imperatives shape young people’s everyday material consumption practices in ways that reflect (and produce) varied ways of (de/re-)valuing no-longer-wanted possessions. By exploring the cultural projects within which the young participants and their material possessions were engaged, and by identifying their aims in employing specific keeping and ridding practices, noteworthy differences between ‘waste’ and ‘excess’ materialise. I suggest that the drivers of the ‘excesses’ identified – characterised here in terms of ‘outgrowings’ and ‘hedging’ – highlight a set of distinctly cultural challenges to be met if the slippage of materials from ‘excess’ into ‘waste’ is to be averted. I contend that acknowledging these challenges, and these conceptual distinctions, may prove beneficial in attempts to address some of the societal challenges (e.g. material novelty as a driver of social status) related to the production of waste.

There is a long history of collaboration between artists and geographers, with creative forms of research and dissemination of findings taking shape as artworks. In addition, there has been significant push from academia for researchers to maximise their research in ways that cater to, and engage with, broader public audiences. Art and creative practices tap into this through formats such as exhibitions, performances and participatory workshops which draw upon arts-based research methodologies with which geographers are becoming increasingly engaged. However, with this enthusiasm to adopt art practices for research dissemination purposes, tensions can arise in determining the levels of collaboration and authorship between artists and geographers, especially when the artist is employed as a research assistant on the project. In this ‘In Practice’ article, we explore the tensions and challenges that creative collaborations produce with respect to copyright and authorship, specialist skills and the delicate balance of doing creative research as part of a research team. We argue that geographers and artists need to address these issues from the outset and revisit them throughout the research process, and we offer some suggestions for how art–geography research collaborations might best be negotiated.

Climate change science is unequivocal on the link between fossil fuels and climate change. Yet, some governments – including those in Australia – fail to meet agreed targets and continue to invest in the coal industry. Scientists and other scholars have expressed concern that the science is not prompting shifts in policy adequate to address current and future effects of climate change. Many have called for other tools – specifically, the arts and social sciences – to investigate and communicate about the environmental and social changes underway. In this context, this article explores the potential of interdisciplinary collaborative song-writing as research practice. Beginning on a boat on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the research team adopted singing and song-writing as a method for coming together to reflect upon our research aims and motivations, to explore and express the delight and grief we were experiencing in this climate-changing land and seascape and potentially to reach new audiences and create different affects. Our multidisciplinary expertise offered impetus to pursue a hybrid form: an original song written, professionally recorded and vinyl pressed; scholarly notes to expand on our song lyrics; visual presentation of our music as annotated score; and written reflections on the process and its contribution to knowledge. Here, we present and explore the possibilities of song-writing as creative geographical practice.

The present contribution intends to propose an epistemological reflection on the links and relationships that interweave the map, cultural heritage, landscape and places. I have identified an interpretative horizon that intersects the scientific geographic debate with the literary subject and proposed a specific reading of the site of Old Gibellina in Sicily, Italy, where reality and representation seem to converge. In 1968, Gibellina was razed to the ground by an earthquake. Then the site of Old Gibellina was covered by the ‘Grande Cretto’: the work of Land Art made by the artist Alberto Burri. In my perspective, the Cretto represents a unique place: it is a full-size map, it is landscape and it is world at the same time. What happens, then, when reality and representation coincide in a place?