cultural geographies

This article introduces inland waterway guidebooks as cultural objects that deserve further attention from cultural geographers who have begun to shed light on inland waterway cultures in recent years. It contributes to the wider disciplines long-standing interests in representations and representational objects, and more recently the interest in studying representations and their relations to everyday forms of practice. Focusing on a popular series of waterway guide, the Collins/Nicholson Waterways guides, I employ textual and visual analysis alongside an autoethnographic account of using these guides to examine what waterway guidebooks are, how they represent waterway spaces and how they are used in the practices of wayfinding on a narrowboat. By doing so I argue that waterway guides are powerful objects of representation that can tell us much about how waterway spaces are represented and how they are experienced with a guide in hand from the perspective of boat users. In laying out these arguments, I build on the notion of the travelling landscape-object to develop a theory of cruising landscape-objects, which I define as waterway guides that both represent, (re)produce and circulate waterway spaces at the same time as they are representational and material objects that can co-constitute wayfinding practices on the water.

In this article we explore how the English post-industrial canal has gone from enclosed and abandoned urban ruin to thriving but contested urban landscape. We contend that canals deserve closer social scientific attention in and of themselves but also as a creative entry point for understanding the instabilities and ambivalences of contemporary urban life. We probe at three dynamics in the English context: uneven cycles of attention from state, capital and civil society that ‘revealed’ the canal over the course of the 20th century; how the contemporary canalscape is made ‘from below’ and how its unique materiality as a stretched, socio-natural waterway has been mobilised, latterly, in biopolitical ways. We note how the cultivated meaning of these previously enclosed industrial relics is now deeply entwined with the mood and mobility of urban dwellers. Methodologically, we excavate these three dimensions through a synthesis of phenomenological attunement and analysis of historical, literary and social scientific accounts.

In this essay, we propose to study three recent Australian landscape memoirs – Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015), Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau (2009) and Germaine Greer’s White Beech (2013) – all of which demonstrate the capacity of landscapes to act as perceptual conduits for the fundamental tension between world and self. Our main contention is that landscape memoir acts as a pre-eminent vehicle for this tension, which is captured across different times and spaces and among multiple, intricately co-constituted life-worlds. Landscape memoir, in this and other ways, functions as both a multi-sensory phenomenological instrument for the recording of physical and emotional engagement with landscape and a distinct, episodically organised mode of life writing that seeks to understand the fractured nature of individual selfhood in the context of a more-than-human world. The essay also looks at the capacity of memoirs of this kind to operate as vehicles for conservationist thinking and action. In each of our three main cases, landscape mediates between an insecure self and a world or worlds that are portrayed as being threatened, although this is not enough in itself to establish a basis for the three works as ‘conservationist’ texts. However, all three can be seen as individual enquiries into different kinds of conservation that use the techniques and characteristics of landscape memoir to reflect on the material possibilities of personal and collective recovery (Winton) and ecological restoration (Greer); or, over and against these, to mark the elegiac registration of irretrievable loss (Tredinnick).

This article examines the gendered service economy of bars and restaurants catering to ageing US military retirees in Olongapo City, Philippines. During the Cold War, Olongapo housed Subic Bay Naval Base, one of the largest overseas US military installations, and today thousands of former American service members have retired here. A focus on retiree bars reveals how Filipina bartenders and waitresses facilitate an ageing masculinity for these expatriates wherein men’s internalized senses of social, economic, and sexual marginality in the US are seemingly suspended or deferred in the Philippines. Geopolitical histories of US militarism in Asia-Pacific, unequal military basing agreements, and Subic’s so-called hospitality industry endure decades later to naturalize the hierarchies of accommodation between local hostesses and foreign customers. Drawing on – and further developing – geographic scholarship on ageing and masculinities and focusing on the so-called hospitality industry’s shift over time reveals the expectations placed on service workers to accommodate men’s changing needs and desires. Years after Subic’s closure, interviews with bartenders and customers illuminate how decades of entanglement with US militarism have outsourced some of the reproductive labor that sustains this population of ageing retirees in Subic. More than mere bodies sustaining and serving the outsourced needs of ageing service members, however, through bar work Filipina hostesses experience changes to their own geographies of belonging and leverage opportunities to realize their own dreams and desires. The relations in Subic’s retiree bars attest to US militarism’s intimate afterlives and its enduring dependence on the gendered and racialized labor of local populations.

This paper examines the curation of a month-long public exhibition titled #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] in one of New Delhi’s busiest metro stations, as a form of self-authorship by young women from its digital and urban margins. #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] is a metaphor for journeys, communications, connections, associations, interceptions, social networks and individual/collective behaviours, that is curated as women ‘see’ and ‘speak’ with/through their mobile phones. Using Marie Louise Pratt’s notion of ‘contact zone’, we examine #AanaJaana as a space of encounters that emerges by visually ‘composing-with’ as well as ‘learning-with’ the realities and constraints of space, technology and power. Based on self-authorship over a period of 6 months within a ‘safe space’ of a WhatsApp group of young women living in the urban margins, we draw attention to #AanaJaana as a set of crosscutting networks of power dynamics over women’s bodies across the home, mobile phone and the city. #AanaJaana refers to how young women in the margins negotiate the ‘freedoms’ of moving (aana) in online space with the ‘dangers’ of going out (jaana) into the city, or the restrictions of entering (aana) online space with the freedom of leaving (jaana) home. We argue first, that #AanaJaana is a space of confinement because of the infrastructural paralysis in the peripheries. Second that it is also at the same time translocally produced by referencing several textual, digital and material spaces of self-realisation. Finally, we argue that #AanaJaana is a space of intertextuality through encounters between emojis, shorthand, voice notes on the mobile phone, with parody and dark humour of their gendered experiences that can transform shame, humiliation and fear into reflection, resistance and agency. The paper concludes that as a polycentric practice, #AanaJaana offers an appropriate metaphor to expand the ‘contact zone’ in order to decolonise gendered knowledge and power across digital-analogue margins.

This article looks at how Palestinian-Israeli middle-class mothers, who enjoy the advantages of the middle class yet belong to a geographically and socially marginalized minority, educate their children in and about socio-spatial reality. The study brings the field of geographies of parenting into dialogue with relevant insights from literacy studies. Building on the concept of spatial literacy developed through previous ethnographic research with Palestinian-Israeli women university-students, we analyze recent interviews on mothering and education carried out with the same population more than a decade later. Borrowing Vygotsky’s concept of scaffolding, findings reveal three major ‘scaffolding strategies’ used by the women to teach their children to read social relations in Israeli society: shaping the learning environment, directing spatial proficiency and supporting spatial proficiency. Throughout, we juxtapose the women’s elaboration of spatial literacy as students and of scaffolding strategies as mothers. The study contributes to geographies of parenting by elucidating how parent-child interactions may serve as a context for learning about space and social relations.

This article examines how everyday practices materialize abstract discourses of social “quality” within the spaces of the Chinese rail system. Rail travel remains a primary mode of transportation in China, competitive on cost and comfort—though not at the same time. This article brings together geographies of skill and mobility to examine how the skilled practice of rail travel produces high and low “quality” bodies and spaces within the rail network. Drawing on Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” to shed light on how movement creates cultural landscape at the national scale, I argue that the growing socio-economic gap within China has led to the emergence of distinct and incompatible traveling practices within the rail ridership. The conflict between a “lacking” ridership relying on mutual tolerance and a “quality” ridership prioritizing self-containment been resolved by the construction of high-speed rail as a separate network, segregating “high” and “low” quality riderships while still serving both.

Developing thoughts on exposure in cultural geography, literary studies, and mobilities research, this article aims to provide a more comprehensive account towards the publicness of public space. What would happen if we assessed publicness not by degrees of openness and inclusion, but through the nexus of vulnerability and complicity that is fundamental to the notion of exposure? To grasp such an intrinsic dualism, our perspective goes towards public transport, where experiences of exposure are intensified by its specific conditions of encapsulation and movement. We illustrate this perspective drawing from the autobiographical chronicles of the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, in order to then propose a ‘learning from’ the case of public transport for a rethinking of publicness. Specifically, we argue that exposure provides new insights on agency, power and vulnerability as part of a more processual notion of public space.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about massive changes in religious landscapes across the world. Recent research has focused on whether religions create problems or are sources of solution or support in these extraordinary times. Although some studies document religious leaders’ and institutions’ innovative responses to preserve ritual practices and foster members’ sense of belonging, they fail to highlight lay practitioners’ bottom-up religious transformations. Noting this, this article draws on the case of Lufeng city in south China to examine how local residents inventively reconfigured the temporal-spatiality of their ritual practices during temple lock-downs. Through an ethnographic-style exploration, we reveal multi-faceted spatial changes in the ritual performance, including the reconfiguration of home spaces, the performance of worship practices outside temple doors and the mobilization of digital spaces of communication to accumulate good fortune. Apart from these spatial strategies, local ritual transformation also produces temporal adaptations. Through these temporal-spatial reconfigurations, local residents innovatively cope with new social circumstances and articulate religion’s continual significance. This study foregrounds an agentive and flexible understanding of religion in times of crisis.

Process of rapid urbanisation in China during recent years have created the need for names to be given to new urban roads. However, due to the inattention of institutions charged with responsibilities for place-naming, some roads remain unnamed. Although these unnamed roads have been overlooked by China’s municipal authorities and by toponymic scholars, they have attracted the attention of Yulu Ge. In 2013, Ge named an unnamed road in Beijing after himself as a work of public art, aiming to urge the government to improve urban governance and to raise public awareness about the necessity of civic engagement. While there are many studies on the critical toponymy and geographies of public art, little attention has been paid to place-naming as a work of public art and the popular responses to it. This article considers how Ge conducted his public art and the attitudes of city residents who had knowledge of it. It is argued that Ge’s artistic practice has brought convenience to residents’ everyday lives and has led city authorities and urban communities to pay greater attention to unnamed roads. However, questions remain over the role of the artist as a disruptive presence in the city’s orderly structure. Therefore, this article argues that the disputes over the Geyu Road remind artists and scholars to consider how place-naming as an artistic practice can intervene in urban lives in a more appropriate way, and the extent to which authorities and urban society can accommodate creative and effective interventions such as Ge’s place-naming practices.

This paper stems from cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration between community music and human geography which sought to interrogate and understand claims of social sustainability and social change often cited in evaluation reports of community music projects. The lead authors (Parks and Cassidy) took this dialogue forward by organising a geography conference session which incorporated an instant choir workshop to test how we might ‘do’ social sustainability through practice. Drawing upon ideas from both disciplines, the paper synthesises the reflections of nine participants in the session to explore the capacity of creative, embodied, geographical practice to transform hegemonic experiences of academic conferences, and to create a sustainable and inclusive community of practice.