Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In spite of the recent proliferation of theoretically informed writings on all things ‘cyber,’- it remains the case that much of the literature on ‘electronic spaces’ is characterised by a strong current of technological determinism. That is to say, it assumes and reproduces a stable and matter-of-fact distinction between the material/technical and the social such that changes in the former are supposed somehow to ‘impact’ on the latter. In those accounts which eschew this position, authors tend to employ an approach towards technology that might broadly be termed social constructionist. After Latour, I argue that, in that they operate according to the same ‘logic’, both these positions—technological determinism and social constructionism—remain within a ‘modern’ worldview. I propose that if we are to (and I argue that we must) tell stories of a world in which what the moderns refer to as the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ are always already bound together, always already binding together, we require other vocabularies than those which divide and ‘black box’ the world into easy categories, vocabularies that are able to grant all sorts of things their rightful place in the (co)construction of the world. Drawing on a variety of writers, I suggest that one element of these other vocabularies might be what I term a ‘materialist semiotics’. Having elaborated certain strands of what this could mean, I offer some tentative accounts of what our ‘virtual geographies’ might look like from an a modern perspective.

This paper is about the means and ends of geographical inquiries into technology and technoscience. In working through a body of literature commonly grouped together under the collective phrase ‘science, technology, and society’, and in seeking to work upon empirical research on electricity networks, the author draws attention to the ontological and representational issues that are confronted when thinking through geographies of technology and geographies of techno-scientific knowledge. In the first part of the paper the ontological status of nonhumans and the politics of representation are discussed as a consequence of a rejection of technical and social determinisms. In the second part, the author turns to review some of the analytical metaphors that are conjured with in order to address the issues raised in the first part. In the third part of the paper the more overtly spatial metaphors of the literature of science, technology, and society are confronted and the move from a measured and ordered managerialist approach to the spatiality of technologies and technoscience is reviewed. In the fourth section, some lessons for the politics of a reconfigured geographical engagement with technology and technoscience are raised.

Recent efforts to protect biodiversity in the United States often reproduce the literal and figurative divisions of space that have originally endangered target species. Nature as redefined by these efforts is as much a social construction as it is some biophysical entity under siege by humans, We focus on the categorical and spatial distinctions between landscapes prioritized for protection and landscapes given less priority or ignored altogether. These distinctions, we wish to demonstrate, reflect pragmatic considerations of habitat quality and political expediency, but they also are enmeshed in dualist nature–culture ideologies that serve to legitimate and ultimately to reproduce the different practices that occur on these landscapes. We focus on protection of spotted owl habitat, one of the most important cases of biodiversity conservation in the United States since the passage of the Endangered Species Act. We consider recent spotted owl protection efforts in the Pacific Northwest and southern California. In the Pacific Northwest, spotted owl protection plans on public forests have been cited as justification for casing habitat protection on private lands, in spite of the major historical biodiversity role of these forestlands. In California, spotted owl policy deliberations for the urbanized forests of southern California have lagged far behind those in the Sierra Nevada, even though owl populations have declined faster in southern California than anywhere else in the state. These cases are indicative of a nature epistemologically understood and ontologically constructed as separate from culture, of what Latour would call an act of purification set up against the undeniably hybrid character of nature–cultures in late modernity. It is precisely this recognition of nature–culture intertwining, however, that will prove central to the creation of sustaining habitats for nonhuman life.

Recent years has seen increasing academic concern with constructions of authenticity, much of it focused upon the travel industry and the emergence of the ‘real holidays’ market in particular. Of appeal to independent travellers moving off the beaten track, such holidays have been located within a sociology of tourism that draws strict distinctions between the desires and activities of an independent traveller, drawn from the new cultural class, and working-class package tourists. Here it is suggested that accounts tracing the emergence of this market have tended to conflate two often related, but analytically distinct, discourses of authenticity which, when held apart, undermine the usual tourist typologies and considerably extend our understandings of the search for authenticity. Drawing upon qualitative interviews undertaken both with ‘travellers’ and with ‘tourists’ it is suggested that our understandings of this search be extended, to consider the ways in which a concern for authenticity is negotiated by a range of tourists enjoying a variety of holidays. Offering a critical intervention in debates around authenticity I champion a method capable of mapping the ambiguities of individual experience, rather than forcing that experience through the restrictive categories of various ideal types.

The recent call for the reorientation of analysis in medical geography to more critical approaches has been met with both enthusiasm and caution. Critical theories of health and health care services are emerging, which complement the well-developed focus on the spatial aspects of disease and service delivery. Yet in reconceptualising the links between place, space, and health, care must be taken in theorising in context experiences of health and illness. By context we mean the richly textured social formation wherein social relations are threads of a tapestry woven together. One topic which lends itself to such an inquiry is how material and discursive bodies combine to create identities for women with chronic illness around issues of gender and (dis)ability within the context of the wider social political economy. In this paper, we propose a feminist political economic analysis of environment and body as an addition to the critical frameworks emerging in medical geography. We first discuss what a radical body politics entails conceptually. Then we make suggestions with regard to undertaking such inquiry, using in illustration empirical work on women's reshaping of their environment in response to chronic illness. This type of investigation extends previous work on the formation of women's identities, experiences of chronic illness, and the materiality of everyday life. Last, we recast the concepts of environment, body, and identity formation while maintaining a commitment to the fluidity of conceptual and material boundaries.

Gay New York is an historical analysis of urban culture and the making of the Gay Male World between 1890 and 1940. As a study of urban social history this is an important work for urban geographers. Three geographers review the text from somewhat different geographical perspectives. Elder focuses on the scale of Chauncey's work. Knopp examines Chauncey's links between class, gender, and space. Brown employs the concepts of metaphor and metonym to argue that Gay New York is a ‘closet geography’.