cultural geographies

This paper examines work in cultural and human geography that theorises temporality in terms of events. Moving from humanist phenomenology, to non-representational and assemblage theories and current geographies of encounter, it suggests these accounts of events tend to analyse the past and future through the lens of the present. Building upon these literatures and the work of Tristan Garcia, the paper argues for an expanded notion of the event, where past and future events can be considered as both distinct from, and linked to, the present moment. Here, time comes to be defined as the ordering and stacking of events, where events are understood as sites of comprehension, in which entities are differentiated. The paper suggests this position is useful in order to trace temporal causality across and between entities and events. Tracing the causality of entities and their ordering and stacking across events enables a closer analysis of what the paper terms the temporal power of non-human things. To illustrate this argument, examples from an ESRC project on digital gaming and in-game purchasing are analysed.

Geographical analyses of posthuman thought have called for the need to develop a critical form of posthumanism that neither rehashes the pitfalls of humanism, nor promulgates a universalized and ungrounded subject position. This article demonstrates how recent advances in critical posthumanism work to address the limitations of posthuman thought by offering a unified philosophical framework that situates knowledge claims and reimagines human subjectivity and human-nonhuman relations. Critical posthumanism not only synthesizes several of the political, methodological, and philosophical strands of posthuman thought that geographers and philosophers have drawn out, but it also foregrounds an affirmative ethico-political ethos toward a historical moment characterized by socioecological injustices, intersectional inequalities, and advanced capitalist economic systems. By separating itself from transhumanist and epochal forms of posthumanism, critical posthumanism offers cultural geographers concentrating on human-nature relations a more philosophically rigorous, socially accountable, and critical way of approaching the stakes involved in posthumanist discussions.

This paper develops a more-than-representational approach to consumer agency in food biopolitics that is sensitive to people’s everyday eating experiences. In recent years, studies of food biopolitics have engaged with questions of agency by examining how socially constructed ideas of ‘good’ eating and citizenship are engaged on the ground. Yet, there remain opportunities to depart from the evaluative mind as a dominant site of ethical self-formation, and engage with the body as a site of political action and agency. In this paper, I argue that people’s sense of citizen selves has long been, and continue to be, organised across the interplay of material, discursive, and visceral spaces of eating. I develop this argument by drawing on a critical analysis of historical and contemporary news forums related to public eating in Singapore. For many consumers, their disdain for certain food—ranging from the erstwhile state-vaunted meal plans to leftover food on public dining tables—express an embodied agency in negotiating the technocratic designs of citizenship. In developing a visceral biopolitics of eating, this paper aims to expand understandings of consumers’ capacity in negotiating the ethical tensions between hegemonic imaginings of ‘good’ citizens and the everyday pleasures of eating. Approaching consumer agency this way orientates critical yet oft-overlooked attention to the body’s capacity to act, and possibly effect change, within the broader workings of dietary bio-power.

Infrastructure has proven a polyvalent concept in human geography and anthropology for exploring the intersection of the social and technical. However, the ‘below’ of infrastructure, the infra, has remained underexamined in its relationship to the state, territory and the earth. This article proposes that infrastructure is better understood as a geophilosophical relation that renders a set of relations a subsurface for the propagation of another: it designates a socio-natural ground for political-economic figuration. It outlines the geophilosophical relations of infrastructure through thinking with the project SEA STATE by Singaporean artist Charles Lim, a series of artworks which document Singapore’s infrastructural underside, which Lim terms the sea-state, and provides a conceptual elaboration of SEA STATE’s aesthetic figures. In positing the continuity of figures across the sea-state’s varied infrastructures, SEA STATE exposes the colonial trajectory of its infrastructural systems, the contingencies it churns up as it endeavours to maintain its place in the world market, and the fundamental inversion of figure and ground the sea-state has effectuated. This inversion is all the more evident when we consider the expansive land reclamation projects of modern Singapore, wherein its territory has become infrastructure for bespoke logistical and petrochemical concerns, and will continue until the end of the century under the auspices of mitigating sea level rise. As the geological imaginary of the Anthropocene begins to seep into infrastructural anxieties of maintenance, breakdown and inundation, with governments and policymakers demanding that nature itself become infrastructure, it is critical to trace the longue durée of these infrastructural formations, how their continuities are remade and reiterated by the demands of subsequent historical-geographical junctures, and how the designation of figure and ground can ultimately result in the figure becoming the condition of possibility for its ground, requiring its continual reproduction.

Obscenity and pornographic culture did not disappear with Times Square’s gentrification in the 1990s. Rather, gentrification inaugurated new obscene cultural forms, displaying the opulence of celebrity and the enclosed spaces of media production. Using observations and interviews with production staff at Total Request Live (1998–2008), the flagship music countdown show on the MTV cable network, the essay examines techniques of incorporating audiences and audience-generated content into late-1990s/early-2000s TV production, just before social media’s rise. It examines media production within a material urban process, not simply producing ideology or images, but inciting and laboring on forms of self-exposure and a quasi-erotic excitement of watching others transgress deepening class hierarchies. The essay describes the urban material foundations of this cultural form as infrastructures of obscenity. For this, it theorizes obscenity beyond sex and explicitly erotic content. It likewise proposes obscenity as an alternative to standard analytical approaches to media, like ‘ritual’, ‘transgression’ and carnivalesque ‘inversion’ or resistance, which are insufficient to understand the production techniques at TRL. It connects those insights to Times Square’s millennial transformations, focusing on the strategies used by MTV’s Midtown Studio in the production of TRL. The analysis demonstrates how the social production of new architectural and infrastructural strategies in Times Square’s post-Disney Store period used highly staged audience engagement to build a recursive, shared experience of obscenity through transgression, prurience, intensity, and authenticity. The infrastructures of obscenity approach complements theories of active viewership but also problematizes viewers’ activity as fully-formed resistance or ‘subversion,’ implicitly or explicitly. This essay’s evidence illustrates how an opposing organizational project by media capital happens, imperfectly, pragmatically, and perhaps even contrary to many theoretical assumptions about how audiences and industry encounter each other, provoking further an engagement with contradiction, ambivalence, and labor to materially organize the heterogeneity of social feeling.

This article extends our understanding of inland waterways by theorising the temporary absences of water in canals and rivers as possibilities for action, that is, affordances. The interplay of temporary absence and presence of water in the inland waterways provides a range of potentialities for various activities and practices. Affordance theory can help us to further theorise material absences and position them as important elements of performing, practicing and interpreting place. We show how temporary absence of water can create spatial, historical and communicative affordances, affording the movement of boats, revealing and recreating the past and raising environmental awareness. The paper is based on semi-ethnographic research on the rivers and canals in the United Kingdom and Italy, featuring document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with various waterway users.

This paper develops the new concept of the geography of placemories as a critical approach for deciphering spatialised memories in cultural geography. In referring to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and cultural materialism in line with Raymond Williams, the paper reflects on processual conceptions of feeling, society, memory and place. First, reviewing existing research on memory and place elucidates that cultural geography takes spatialised memories as fixed objects. Its analysis leads to statements about society. Second, to avoid this fallacy, the paper shifts the analytical basis for the cultural geographical conception of memorial sites from place to feelings and experiences by developing a new view on spatialised memory. The resulting processual problematisation of the ontology of memories, as well as its relevance for the present and spatialisations, is called the placemoric approach. The analysis of contested remembering processes with regard to the prerogative of interpretation of half-timbered houses in descriptions of Nuremberg’s old town in North Bavaria, Germany demonstrates the capabilities of the placemoric approach. In doing so, the paper shows how spatialised memories are the socially constructed result of permanently changing feelings.

Feminist scholars, activists, and artists have long addressed the topic of virginity and have dismantled it as a powerful, globally circulating, and gendered myth. It affects how many woman-identifying people experience how their bodies become (a)sexual. Centrally, the myth of virginity has been shown to be mobilized in support of colonial, ethnonationalist identity projects. In Kyrgyzstan, disciplining women through policing their sexual behavior co-constituted nation-building projects after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on data collected since 2017 (qualitative interviews in Bishkek and Osh and qualitative research on Instagram), I examine intimate geographies of the virginity myth in Kyrgyzstan. Building on geographic scholarship on intimacy and body parts, I discuss the ways in which virginal blood works both to submit to and to reclaim one’s intimate body spaces and sexual practices. I argue that people affected by the virginity myth create the foundations for intimate justice in Kyrgyzstan. On the one hand, people are reclaiming authority over their intimate bodies through subverting sexist systems of sexual control and through expanding discursive horizons of virginity performances. On the other hand, activists on Instagram are supporting digital public spaces that allow to author virginal blood narratives and provide resources on intimate body knowledge. Analyzing the scalar doings of virginal blood, the paper contributes a case study on intimate justice and the geographies of the body in Kyrgyzstan. My analysis encourages further examination of the capacities of the body to better understand how certain body parts turn into key sites of (geo)political struggles and can transform them.

This article discusses social spaces within Bunurong Country, Australia, and the production and recording of Aboriginal cultural values. Among the broader Australian community, there is a considerable appetite for the incorporation of ‘authentic’ Aboriginal cultural values into various Western processes, such as the planning, heritage and environmental sectors. This article argues that by establishing Aboriginal control of how these values are produced, significant cultural meanings and connections can be made in relation to Country. Utilizing a ‘two toolbox’ approach as a way to integrate Aboriginal and Western structures, it outlines and explains a framework for discussing Aboriginal cultural values, as defined by Bunurong knowledge holders, as a tool to record and link the context of these values to community-generated outcomes. This framework is designed to be applied as a method for recording Aboriginal cultural values within cultural landscapes, to produce social spaces with meaning and dignity for Bunurong people.

Cultural geography has a long tradition of embracing video as both an observational method and a form of public engagement with research findings. In this article, we describe the making of Posthuman Landscapes, a silent film composed of moving panoramic images depicting the landscapes of three regional Australian towns (Griffith, Port Hedland, and Port Lincoln), along with creative writing that responded to the material qualities of those places in the form of ‘tweets’. Created as part of Boyd’s 3-year project called ‘Engaging Youth in Regional Australia’, the film formed part of a touring exhibition designed to disseminate research findings to communities within these towns. As artist-geographers, we approached the making of the video from a posthuman perspective in which the human and non-human are entangled. Our conceptual guide for working creatively with the landscapes was the posthuman concept of enchantment, which considers how the extraordinary can appear within the everyday to shake and disrupt ordinary affects. The concept of enchantment inspired us to juxtapose the inevitable familiarity and unfamiliarity that the audiences in these three towns would encounter through the film as it traveled from place to place. Here, we discuss how this juxtaposition of the familiar and unfamiliar was layered through both our film-making and writing practices, how this juxtaposition attempted to promote a posthuman orientation to landscape, and how such creative engagements contribute to knowledge translation in cultural geographical research.