cultural geographies

Focusing on key mediators of knowledge-exchange in the Andes – known as kamayoq – we explore a recursive politics of translation (historicized, power-laden processes of hierarchically ordering language and meaning). Focusing on intercultural and bilingual education and development programs in the Peruvian Andes, and connecting cultural geographical, anthropological, and critical socio-linguistic scholarship, we uncover how equivocations of Indigenous concepts reproduce a coloniality of knowledge and being. We explore how kamayoq re-purpose equivocations by reworking translations through Andean concepts and praxis, such as iskay yachay – a reciprocal dialogue among knowledges, which stresses epistemic multiplicity and diversity. We explore kamayoq praxis and iskay yachay as a decolonial geolinguistic praxis of articulating worlds (or ontologies) otherwise, in pursuit of multi-epistemic co-existence. Our findings raise questions about geographies of decolonial knowledges and praxis, particularly where potential decolonial praxis intersects with the formalized institutions of adult bilingual education and intercultural development programing.

This paper delves into the concept of relationality and pairs academic literature with stories and lessons from Country. Bringing together majority Indigenous scholarship on relationality, the paper describes three main ideas: (1) How does a relational reality operate? (2) Relationality as a living practice and, (3) Relationality as responsibilities with kin. Many examples are provided to explain relationality in practical and concrete ways. As a trawlwulwuy woman, I weave the stories and lessons from Country throughout the paper, with a particular focus on research. I consider an inverse of relationality, extractivism, and identify how many dominant research practices are deeply extractive. The paper concludes with prompts for the reader on how research can be a more relational process. Overall, the paper demonstrates a relational ethos in (and out of) practice.

Post-representational cartography views maps as inherently unstable and unfinished, always in the making and thus singularly open for refolding and re-presentation. This perspective on maps calls for greater attention to the performances, negotiations, and contestations that occur during the ongoing production of maps, particularly in cases where maps are developed during collective, collaborative, and participatory processes in Indigenous landscapes riven by conflict and struggle. In the following, we examine the role of walking for the continual (re)making of participatory maps, specifically engaging with work in Indigenous methodologies to consider how an emphasis on performativity in map-makings may foster a post-representational perspective on Indigenous cartographies. We understand walking as map-making, a form of knowledge production generated by performative and situated storytelling along paths and in places filled with meaning. Drawing on a critical understanding of ‘invitation’ and ‘crossing’, we build on our experiences from participatory mapping projects in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil to explore the ways in which the material, performative crossings of bodies through Indigenous landscapes may inspire new forms of knowledge production and destabilize Cartesian cartographic colonialities.

This article explores events in and around a supermarket with a middle-aged man with learning impairments. While documenting their particularities, this article also deploys these events as prisms through which to reflect upon how place is implicated in disabling practice and how the disabling geographies that such practice shapes and is shaped by may be un/re/made. These events are made subject to two readings. In the first, although the supermarket seems merely a backdrop against which events take place, it combines with forms of governmentality in and with regard to place to form a product, or text, through which the normative order speaks. In the second, place is regarded as a dynamic process constituted by innumerable elements in constant motion. Because both these readings register the product and process of disabling geographies, this article attempts, albeit while being thwarted, to realise less disabling geographies through rehabilitating process and attending to the ‘thingness’ of place; actual and imaginative subversions, or reversals and deconstructions. These seek to disturb and trouble disabling geographies and the practice made possible therein.

In the field of Deaf Geographies, one neglected area is that of the individual deaf body and how individual deaf bodies can produce deaf space in isolation from one another. Much of the work published in the field talks about collectively or socially produced deaf spaces through interaction between two or more deaf people. However, with deaf children increasingly being educated in mainstream schools with individual provisions, and the old social networks and institutions of deaf communities coming under threat by the closure of deaf clubs and changing work practices, more research on the way in which individuals can produce their own deaf spaces and navigate those spaces is needed. In this paper, I outline two possible theoretical approaches, that of Lefebvre’s productive gestures to produce social space, and Bourdieu’s habitus, capital and hexis. I suggest that these theories can be productively utilised to better understand the individual basis of the production of deaf spaces.

Representations of older age are often reductive in western societies, portrayed as a distinct period of life characterised by social disengagement and physiological decline. Through rich ethnographic accounts developed with older people from Greater Manchester UK, this paper is concerned with how the category of older age is made through representations, and the different ways people encounter and relate to it. In doing so, it disrupts reductive representations by considering how older age is lived. I respond to calls for the incorporation of more-than-representational and affective approaches into the geographic study of older age to advance research on ageing and highlight affect as a useful concept for thinking through difference. The paper is concerned with how older people are represented, with how representations differentially affect and are affected by older individuals, and with how representations of older age are performed and folded into lived accounts. More-than-representational theories offer an understanding of older age that is not pre-given or free-standing, but as something which can emerge, gather and disperse in relation with materialities as well as diffuse atmospheres, affects and emotional resonances.

Balconies, windows and terraces have come to be identified as spaces with newfound meaning over the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns. There was not only a marked increase in the use of these spaces, but more importantly a difference in the very nature of this use since March 2020. It is keeping this latter point in mind, that I make an attempt to understand the spatial mobilities afforded by the balcony in the area of ethnographic research. The street overlooking my balcony, situated amidst an urban village in the city of Delhi – one of my field sites, is composed of middle and lower-middle class residents, dairy farms and farmers, bovines and other nonhumans. In this note, through ethnographic observations, I reflect upon the balcony as constituting that liminal space between ‘field’ and ‘home’, as well as, as a spatial framing device which conditions and affects our observations and interactions. This is explored by examining two elements – the gendered nature of the space, and the notion of ‘distance and proximity’, through personal narratives of engaging-with the field, and subjects-objects of study in the city.

Intimate Distances is an art project created in two parts – 6 months and 20,000 km apart. As a creative research project, it was conceived as a way to physically and conceptually explore distance through the intimate gesture of touch. It sought to visually communicate the spatial, temporal and embodied experiences of being on opposite sides of the world through the humble process of frottage. Grand ideas were intended to be galvanised by even grander distances. However, as this article recounts, the 12-month project took unexpected turns, which were generated by a series of failures and finally resulted in an embracing of uncertainty. Rather than following the proposed script, my tacit knowledge led the project in unforeseen ways that were ultimately more productive than expected. Through this article, which itself is a form of enacting an ephemeral experience, I outline how Intimate Distances unfolded and how non-representational theory and performative research entwine in this creative project.