Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call ‘distributed preparedness’. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US.

Ghosts, spectres, and spirits and the stories told about them have long been a source of intellectual inquiry; they appear to be everywhere in scholarly discourse yet are largely absent from many recent debates about enchantment and modernity. This paper speculates on what happens to cultural politics when enchanted modernities are seen to encompass ghosts and ghost stories, and considers the political possibilities of specifically modern enchantments that have the power to enchant and disenchant simultaneously. The paper first examines the ways in which understandings of both enchantment and modernity have changed over time and, in particular, the impact of postcolonial theory on reconceptualising the relationship between the two. It then uses a ghost story encountered in fieldwork in South Africa to illustrate how the figures of ghosts and spirits can cast light on the lived experiences of postcolonial modernities. The paper contends that while ghost stories do not necessarily fit with more optimistic politics of enchantment, in the South African context they can represent active political engagement and produce positive political effect, rather than simply disenchanting those modernities that produce them. The paper concludes that an alternative approach is required to navigate between an overly cynical politics that works to disenchant the world and more optimistic accounts that focus on the ethical possibilities of enchantment. This necessitates a close reading of how modernities are enchanted in particular places and to what political effect.

The connections between home and the self have been the subject of debate in recent years. As a metaphor for a bounded and stable identity, the ideal of home is regarded as dangerous by theorists who oppose a politics based on nostalgic appeals to unity and privilege. Home is criticised as an exclusionary and depoliticising space. Scholars such as Iris Marion Young and Geraldine Pratt argue, however, that we should be wary of rejecting home, since the material space of home provides valuable support for individual and collective narratives of identity. In this paper I reflect on these debates in the light of my father's experience of dementia and the move from his own home into residential care. I examine alternatives to the account of identity on which critiques of home as exclusionary space are based, such as narrative identities and Jessica Benjamin's intersubjective approach to the self and the concrete other.

Drawing on Jasanoff's concept of coproduction [2004 States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order (Routledge, London) and Ong's notion of ‘graduated’ sovereignty [2000 Theory, Culture and Society 17(4) 55–75], we analyse Singapore's promotion of the biomedical industry. To secure its place in the knowledge-based economy, Singapore's developmental state is determined to change the mind-set of its population and inculcate the individual creativity and entrepreneurialism needed for scientific innovation. It is also rolling out an internationally accepted framework of bioethics regulation. We explore the liberal values implicit in these two projects for promoting biomedicine and their implications both for the civic norms of Singapore's developmental state and for the wider relationships between science and liberal democracy.

In this paper I demonstrate how an ontological perspective variously informed by Spinozan and Deleuzian philosophy and the (Shinto-influenced) work of Japanese artists Masamune Shirow and Mamoru Oshii offers an approach to landscape which decenters human position(s) and allows an exploration of landscape on its own terms. Through an empirical exploration of this approach, I analyze the animated Japanese science fiction film Ghost in the Shell (1998 [1995]), and discuss how its imagery, ideas, and philosophies can elucidate and aid in an understanding of landscape, not as a separate or passive entity but as a relational living and endeavoring thing.

The interconnections between trees and memorialisation are explored at three particular sites in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Memorial trees have been used as a seemingly blank canvas, to be coloured by the paintbox of memory. The ability of such trees to carry significant memories of past events into the present involves myriad slippages and all kinds of untidiness: the settings in which memorial trees are asked to perform are subject to significant and often transformative cultural change; the trees themselves are active organic components in the changing coconstitution of place and place meanings; and tree places can afford emotional responses and serve as spaces of much more immediate and prereflexive practice and performance. These dynamics suggest rather different connections between trees and memorialisation, which we term treescape memories.

This paper deals with second-generation Barbadians or ‘Bajan-Brits’, who have decided to ‘return’ to the birthplace of their parents, focusing on their reactions to matters relating to race relations and racialised identities. The importance of race and the operation of the ‘colour-class’ system in the Caribbean are established at the outset. Based on fifty-two qualitative in-depth interviews, the paper initially considers the positive things that the second-generation migrants report about living in a majority black country and the salience of such racial affirmation as part of their migration process. The paper then presents an analysis of the narratives provided by the Bajan-Brits concerning their reactions to issues relating to race relations in Barbadian society. The impressions of the young returnees provide clear commentaries on what are regarded as (i) the ‘acceptance of white hegemony’ within Barbadian society, (ii) the occurrence of de facto ‘racial segregation’, (iii) perceptions of the ‘existence of apartheid’, and (iv) ‘the continuation of slavery’. The account then turns to the contemporary operation of the colour-class system. It is concluded that, despite academic arguments that the colour-class dimension has to be put to one side as the principal dimension of social stratification in the contemporary Caribbean, the second-generation migrants are acutely aware of the continued existence and salience of such gradations within society. Thus, the analysis not only serves to emphasise the continued importance of racial-based stratification in the contemporary Caribbean, but also speaks of the ‘hybrid’ and ‘in-between’ racialised identities of the second-generation migrants.

This paper attempts to mobilise the metaphors of pregnancy and lactation to address the imperatives arising from British academic geography's postcolonial position. We embed our argument in our readings of extracts from two consciously postcolonial fictional texts. In the first part of the paper we consider geography as a discipline that is pregnant but ‘in trouble’ to illustrate the paradoxical struggle of the discipline to be a global discipline whilst at the same time marginalising the voices and perspectives that make it global. In the second part of the paper we consider geography as a discipline whose ‘milk is flowing’ to suggest ways that the discipline can acknowledge its global interconnectedness to produce a mutually responsible academic agency.