Towards the Revolution: Re-theorising the Ontology of Consumption under Capitalism

Jean-Paul Addie

Department of Geography, Miami University

The ‘Cultural Turn’ in geographies of consumption has lead to a critique of traditional Marxist commodity chain analysis. Peter Jackson highlights that, despite the availability of academic knowledge, such Marxist approaches have failed to stimulate social change and as such, research should focus upon the significance of meaning making in the consuming act. However, although the revolution does not appear to be imminently around the corner, the problem for the radical geographic project in geography lies not with the material subject of commodity chain analysis, but with our understanding of the subjectivity of the consuming subject under capitalism. I argue that to further the programme of radical geography in the field on consumption studies, a new ontology is requested which adopts, following Schopenhauer, the placement of the concept pain at the core of our understanding of what the world is. As such, the actions of the consuming subject should be understood as inherently selfish and focused towards ‘blanketing’ individuals’ experience of pain arising from a spatial awareness of their exploiting / exploited position under capitalism. Through engaging with Kundera’s construction of kitsch, I argue that radical geographers engaging with consumption must critically analyse the moments in the consuming act where the consuming subject may realise their own inherent agency by expanding Marx’s commodity fetishism. By outlining ‘the politics of kitsch’ I offer an introductory framework that seeks to illustrate how kitsch, as an extension of the commodity fetish, depoliticises and decontextualises the material, ethical and political moments of the consuming act. Only through existential realisation that negates notions of utilitarianism can a genuine and radical revolution of social relations occur whereby individual benefit is realised through acts of self-sacrifice. I conclude in noting that for radical geography to avoid redundancy, we must break out of the confines and niceties that currently constrain research and through critically engaging with a Schopenhauerian ontology, take an agenda outside of the academy with all the passion necessary.

'The Gaze is Alert Everywhere': The Production and Policing of Graffiti in Lexington, KY

Oliver Christian Belcher

University of Kentucky

In examining a contested park in Lexington, Kentucky, this paper brings attention to the fervid and tumultuous spatial strategies employed by municipal authorities and graffiti artists to undermine the efforts of their respective opposition, and to make claims on space. By departing from a geographic literature that has tended to treat graffiti as either a policy problem or as a mere act of “territorial marking,” this paper identifies the ways in which graffiti artists and municipal authorities alike have to strategically produce space in order to be effective in confronting their opposition. The activities of both groups bring about insightful conclusions. On the part of the graffiti artist, this paper concludes that graffiti has two primary functions: 1) as a subversive act against perceived powers in larger society, and 2) as an external act whereby individual value is constituted not only the perceptions of the graffiti community, but by the degree of ire drawn from municipal authorities and neighborhood residents. The municipal authorities (or the “municipal regime”, as I call them here), for their part, employ vast resources and strategies to combat local graffiti artists, with a seemingly unitary hope of restoring an appearance of social order. The most interesting angle the municipal regime programme is an effort to foster community gardening in the park as a reclamation strategy and as an exclusionary practice against graffiti artists.

Spatial Practices and the (Re)Production of Neighborhood Social Space

Deanna Benson

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The paper probes the political, economic, and social context of neighborhood revitalization during the 1960s and 1970s. Neighborhood organizations inspired and continue to inspire hope for inner city rebirth. I examine what neighborhood organizations achieved in their efforts to improve the quality of life for residents, what constraints they faced, and the underlying causes for success and failure. The Midtown Neighborhood Conservation Project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin grounds this inquiry. I engage Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of representations of space, spaces of representation, and spatial practice as an approach to deepening our understanding of social space. Lefebvre stresses the relationship between the two forms of social space and the spatial practices which underpin them. Spatial practices manifest power, (re)producing and securing dominant social space, and defining who and what is out of place. The issue is not so much who has power, but rather how power is practiced to control and maintain existing social spaces. Focusing on the spatial practices of people attempting to improve neighborhood social space, I offer one example of how everyday common experiences can inform our understanding of changes in urban space and time.

Upside down perception: misreading the risk on the Outer Banks' landscapes of leisure

Connie Bruins

Department of Geography, Miami University

Vacation days bring to mind escaping from one's everyday confines of work, home and environment. The Outer Banks of North Carolina provide just such a getaway for many vacationers; warm waves on sandy beaches and well-developed tourist amenities. The foundation of this blissful environment, however, is sand situated in the path of Atlantic hurricanes. Contrasted to the increasing frequency and ferocity of hurricane threats, and widespread media coverage of property damage, demand for access to these vulnerable areas is increasing. This study asserts that vacationers and would-be investors can easily misconstrue a series of landscape cues that serve to mask the vulnerability of thisenvironment: public infrastructure, dune and vegetation placement, zoning and insurance, and investor status. The recent growth in high-end residential development in the areas of Duck and Corolla are sited as examples of these misleading perceptions in the face of longterm risk.

“Drawing on Perception: Re-territorializing Space and Place from African-American Perspectives”

Marie Cieri

Department of Geography, The Ohio State University

I will present excerpts from recent research I have conducted with two cross-sections of African-American populations in Boston and Mississippi. My goal has been to reconfigure many of the boundaries and other spatial markings that geographers traditionally have applied to cartographic space by listening to the observations and stories of a variety of African-Americans who live, work, play and socialize in these places. “Drawing on Perception” forms a key component of my ongoing effort to develop alternative methods of generating, analyzing and communicating geographic information through a variety of accessible texts and tools of visualization drawn from geography, the arts and popular culture. The use of GIS technology figures in this work, but it is just one of a number of elements I employ to try to give voice to alternative perceptions of place, territory, community and home from a population that occupies a unique and generally under-recognized position within American society. Other methods include interview materials, hand drawings, photographs, historical materials and excerpts from African-American art and writing in addition to data re-analysis, strategic juxtapositions and graphic manipulations. Subjectivities that are not publicly acknowledged but enter into virtually all official representations of geographic space and the people within it are highlighted. I see the linking of GIS and qualitative research as a possible way to transfer some of the power inherent in the generation and communication of geographic information to those who generally lack it.

“The Plenary Power Doctrine and Urban Geopolitics After 9/11”

Mathew Coleman

Department of Geography, Ohio State University

The events of September 11 are frequently held as marking a distinct break in US immigration-related statecraft at its borders. Certainly US borders have been toughened as a result of the 9/11 attacks, but by far the most important – yet seldom noted – shift in US statecraft prompted by September 11 has been renewed emphasis on immigration policing tactics at the urban scale. Two key moves underwrite this shift toward urban geopolitics. First, the plenary power of Congress to make laws governing immigration in the interior – which, paradoxically, removes immigration procedures from legal scrutiny in the courts and from constitutional challenge – have been deepened and extended. The presumption here is that immigration is properly a national security matter, and as such warrants little if any consideration as to its legality or constitutionality. The upshot is the development of law and law enforcement practices which operate outside the law. Second, these exceptional immigration powers have been localized via municipal proxy forces who were once widely prohibited from carrying out federal immigration law enforcement tasks. So, for example, the Bush administration is now pressuring municipal governments to abandon long-standing bylaws which have to date barred city employees from communicating the immigration status of their clients to federal officers for immigration enforcement purposes. As a result of both changes, the urban scale has become an increasingly central component of US immigration policing in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Pilsen: Community engagement and experiential learning

Winifred Curran, Euan Hague and Harpreet Gill

Department of Geography, DePaul University

At DePaul University, students are required to undertake an experiential learning course. In the Geography Department, this condition is met by the introductory Urban Geography class. This paper will review the development of this course and its integration with neighborhood politics in Pilsen, a predominantly Hispanic residential area of approximately 3.5 square miles on Chicago’s south-west side where the median income is $27,763. In designing and operating this course, our intention is that students learn the practical applications and on-the-ground impacts of things often discussed rather abstractly or in a historical context in the classroom such as zoning laws, assessed property tax values, house sale prices and the physical infrastructure of buildings. Since Fall 2004 DePaul students have been involved in generating a building-by-building inventory that is being utilized by the Pilsen Alliance, a community organization, to plan for future ballot initiatives and referenda. Drawing on observations made by both faculty and students engaged in this project, in this paper we argue that although geographical research has long engaged its practitioners in fieldwork and field exercises, there is a need for politically engaged field pedagogy that brings together scholars and students with community organizations to tackle fundamental issues shaping contemporary urban life such as gentrification, displacement and changing economic structures in neighborhoods facing deindustrialization.

Racialization, representation and the politics of public space in Duisburg-Marxloh, Germany

Patricia Ehrkamp

Department of Geography, Miami University

In this paper, I examine the relationship between public space and what residents in a mixed German and Turkish neighborhood often refer to as ‘Turkish space’ by investigating the role that perceptions and constructions of space play in the construction of identities of and among German residents and Turkish immigrants. Turkish immigrants’ appropriations of public space for political demonstrations stirred hefty debates about the use and control of public space.  German residents saw their majority position and ownership of neighborhood space undermined. Rather than being inclusive and facilitating the being together of strangers, public space turned into exclusionary, Turkish space. It is important to note, however, that the notion of a ‘Turkish space’ is associated with the everyday practices of Turkish men rather than with Turkish women’s use of space. Hence, in order to fully understand the spatial politics of difference local residents engage in it is necessary to carefully unpack notions of ‘Turkish’ space that structure/shape social relations in the neighborhood.

Getting what you pay for: Scale, competitive liberalization, and the quest for hemispheric free trade

Jamey Essex

Department of Political Science, University of Windsor

Assistant US Trade Representative Christopher Padilla stated in a January 2004 speech that in pushing forward negotiations on the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the central concept of hemispheric free trade would be that “you get what you pay for.”  While Padilla was referring to the idea that the benefits of FTAA accession would be based on the concessions made, this statement can also be read as a brutally honest admission that within the production and extension of the neoliberal free trade project, the distribution of political and economic power will remain fundamentally unequal.  In this paper, I explore how the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) has tried to advance this project through its “competitive liberalization” strategy, which emphasizes the simultaneous pursuit of bilateral, regional, and multilateral free trade agreements.  USTR contends that bilateral agreements will push FTAA talks forward, which in turn will bolster the WTO, though many policymakers and economists consider this argument dubious.  Competitive liberalization is fraught with contradictions, not the least of which are those rooted in the tensions between differently scaled trade institutions, asymmetrically powerful trading partners, and competing and unsupportive capital factions.  I use the example of the 2003 US-Chile FTA to highlight these tensions and contradictions.  USTR hailed the agreement with Chile as a victory for economic freedom, political reform, and competitive liberalization, but a closer examination of both the negotiation process and the agreement’s potential to advance FTAA talks, strengthen the WTO, or make trade liberalization more socially equitable suggests otherwise.

Geographies of Governance and Resistance

Nancy Ettlinger, Chris Riley, and Nick Crane

Department of Geography, Ohio State University

Of the variety of types of geographies (for example, of location, place, space, spatiality) governance, that is the regulation of behavior, tends to entail a fundamentally locational discourse and set of practices oriented toward socio-spatial closure and containment. Effective resistance tends to entail a counter geography, one of diffuseness. From the vantage point of resistance, at issue are the conditions under which, and the degree to which, fluidity can be achieved and sense of place can be created across space. These conflicting geographies are exemplified by the governance and resistance of  ‘others’ in Columbus, Ohio. We compare the socio-spatial circumstances of two quite different ‘others’, Somali refugees and the homeless, with the intention of uncovering ironic similarities as well as apparent differences. We suggest that a geographic lens is crucial towards clarifying how practices of power occur among the apparently disempowered.

Scalar Politics and PPGIS

Rina Ghose

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Public Participation GIS has explored the issue of equitable access and use of GIS and spatial data, among traditionally marginalized citizens, in order to facilitate effective citizen participation in local decision making activities.  However, research indicates that PPGIS is a locally contingent process, with differential outcomes.  This paper contends that the politics of scale strongly shapes the PPGIS process, leading to significant variability in its effectiveness and sustainability among citizen-based organizations. Using the literature on “politics of scale”, the paper argues that spatial scale is constituted by struggles for power over spaces by actors and institutions situated at different scales.  This politics of scale may be both material and discursive, representing not only the struggles for control over tangible space and resources but also using “scale jumping” as a representational strategy to gain influence.  “Spaces of dependence” (containing localized social relations defining place-specific conditions) and “spaces of engagement” (containing the space in which the politics of securing the former unfolds) are created at multiple scales, affecting the PPGIS production of citizen groups.  Within these spaces, networks of association evolve and transcend political boundaries, to create both thematic networks and territorial networks that affect PPGIS sustainability.  Such networks can contain structural inequities, hierarchical dominance and fluctuating resources.  But these networks are also dynamic and flexible, enabling individuals to manipulate and modify them.  Through creative alliances and coalitions, citizen groups do skillfully navigate territorially-scaled networks of power in order to gain an effective voice in decision-making activities.

Planning nature and consumption in Portland’s Central City

Chris Hagerman

Department of Geography, Portland State University

Within post-industrial urbanism, the confluence of issues of governance, representation and consumption suggest a context in which to understand how new neighborhoods and citizens are constructed through material and discursive transformations centering on new formulations of the social meaning of urban-nature. This paper seeks to investigate the production of new urban spaces while seeking connections between the processes of planning and development and the embodied experiences of residents. As an icon of urban livability and progressive planning, the redevelopment of industrial districts in Portland, Oregon highlights how as public-private coalitions remake industrial landscapes into successful spaces for consumption they simultaneously transform the meanings of social-natures, offering the possibility of allaying anxieties about the legacies of capitalist modernism and its effects on the biophysical and social worlds. The multiple discussions and networks of knowledge brought to bear in the development process inform subsequent embodiment of the housing, retail and recreation spaces created in the new neighborhoods. Particular stagings of nature present possibilities for the construction of new urban places that appeal to environmental imaginaries while also prescribing practices and performativities for the co-construction of identities by new residents. These links, material and discursive, cannot be read alone, but must be accompanied with a dynamic investigation of how these spaces are embodied by particular subjects through consumption, not narrowly defined as use, but as an open process, constituting meaning and reinserting itself into cycles of production, development and re-adaptation of the ongoing production of the material landscape.

Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto: The Black Panther Party's re-scaling of Local Welfare Provision through the Political Ecology of Urban Hunger

Nik Heynen

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In July, 1969, from exile in Algeria, Black Panther Party (BPP) Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver wrote in an essay for Ramparts Magazine “On Meeting the Needs of the People,”, If we understand ourselves to be revolutionaries, and if we accept our historic task we can then move beyond the halting steps weve been taking and gain the revolutionary audacity to take the actions needed to unlock and focus the great revolutionary spirit of the people.Then there will be a new day in Babylon, there will be a housecleaning in Babylon, and we can halt the machinery of oppression. This discussion of Babylon occurred often within BPP rhetoric and writing and provides a powerful geographic metaphor through which to consider the BPPs political tactics, spatial practices and engagement with the political ecology of hunger.

Among the BPPs most recognizable political achievements was the success of their Free Breakfast for Children Program. At the breakfast peak, the BPP and other volunteers fed approximately 250,000 children a day before they went to school across the country. The historic importance of the BPPs breakfast program rests in the fact that it was both the model for, and impetus behind, all federally funded school breakfast programs currently in existence within the U.S. At the heart of understanding the BPP's Free Breakfast for Children Program and the spatial practices that led to its success are a set of interrelated scalar politics that played out as a result of: 1) the failures of the US national welfare state; 2) the BPP's vision of Black Nationalism, and; 3) the local technologies employed to serve the poor. All of these processes played out within multi-scalar attempts by the FBI to sabotage BPP efforts. This paper will investigate the Panthers politics of scale through the political ecology of hunger and the BPPs strategic spatial practices as they played out within the concrete jungles of Babylon.

Between Affect and Ethics: Informal Caregivers and the Implications for Health Care Reform

Stephen Healy

Department of Geography, Miami University

Informal caregivers produce an enormous amount of palliative and elder care in the United States each year. According to the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging (N4A) the formal recognition of unpaid caring labor with the passage of the caregiver support act has yet to translate into truly effective social support policy.

Caregivers themselves describe their caring labor in terms that correspond with contemporary social theoretical discussion of affect and ethics. Affect theorists such as Massumi insist upon a gap that separates receiving the affective intensity of any phenomenon and its emotional/subjective consequences. Likewise Badiou, Copjec and Žižek's recent conception of ethics is similarly contingent; fidelity to an ethical action either transforms or destroys the bearer of the act.

The care givers that I have interviewed described their labor as thankless and physically exhausting and yet also exhilarating. They spoke of fidelity to caring for a loved as both a duty that expanded their sense of themselves and/or as something that pushed them to their limits. People who were successful as informal care givers attributed their physical and psychological survival to the support they received from other family members and the broader community. The important implication of this observation is that looking at these structures of support for informal care givers — who cares for the care givers — might allow us to imagine an approach to the broader politics of heath care reform — including its market sector.

Revolutionary Neoliberalizations and the Illegitimate State: Milwaukee's Food System and the (Re)Production of Urban Hunger

Peter Hossler (presenter) and Nik Heynen

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In August of 1997, a policy statement issued by the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development aimed at highlighting the philosophy and goals of the State’s new welfare reform legislation called Wisconsin Works, or W2, suggested, “the new system should provide only as much service as an eligible individual asks for or needs. Many individuals will do much better with a light touch”. Despite the many victories claimed by the administration of then Gov. Tommy Thompson, time has shown that the State’s welfare reform legislation was based on deceitful practices and the repeated breaking of federal law. The severity of the Thompson administration’s unethical and illegal behavior will be investigated within the context of food stamp provision in this paper.

The case of food stamps is important in Wisconsin because shortly after W2 was enacted, the State saw the most substantial drop in food stamp participation in the country. For example, in Milwaukee, participation “dropped” from 130,785 cases in 1996 to 97, 614 by 1998. The decrease in food stamp participation led to Wisconsin assuming the reputation as the National model for welfare reform and propelled Thompson from Governor of Wisconsin to Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This paper will critically explore the ramifications of Wisconsin’s “light touch” philosophy and the local technologies the State used to deceive its poorest residents and the rest of the U.S.

Active Silence: Race, Space, and the Policing of Citizenship in Buffalo, NY

Jacqueline A. Housel

Department of Geography, University at Buffalo, New York

Charged with keeping order, the decisions police make to ‘order’ place in particular ways can have the effect of curtailing the rights of some, while expanding the rights of others. In other words, the police help shape the de facto rights of citizenship by deciding who belongs where. This paper explores informal aspects of policing that occur outside the formal justice system. Often undocumented, these everyday interactions help form the basis for dealings that citizens have with the state. Although people interact with police in many ways, the discussion is limited to ways that silence or ‘keeping still’ is used strategically by citizens either during informal police encounters or in an effort to avoid the gaze of police. This research examines populations known to have suffered indignities in their dealings with police. The two populations, elderly white women and young black men, are marked very differently but share the same living space in highly segregated Buffalo, NY. Using narratives gathered from interviews and discussion groups along with literature in the geographies of exclusion and citizenship, I argue that the public act of silence masks a hidden understanding of one’s multiple positions within sets of power relations in space and demonstrate how these silences actively create new spaces that reveal micro-level variations of citizenship.

Geographies of race in U.S. public education

Melissa Hyams

Affiliation

Two thousand and four marked the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, prior to which the United States government and the states were permitted to segregate students racially in primary and secondary public schools. While the Brown ruling ended de jure segregation, subsequent rulings and the activism of the civil rights movement achieved considerable success in uprooting de facto segregation in education and other domains. Today, however, the geographies of race in the United States reveal processes of resegregation. In this paper, I present some factors found contributing to this resegregation and the questions raised by the data about pursuing justice in educational policy.

Concrete Babylon: Life Between The Stars To Dwell And Consume In Hollywood, CA

Edward L. Jackiewicz (presenter), John Davenport, Giorgio Curti

California State University, Northridge, University of Kentucky, San Diego State University

An analytical treatment of dwelling and consumption offers an ability to better understand touristic experiences from the lived perspectives of both tourists and hosts. Heidegger’s notion of dwelling is juxtaposed with an examination of touristic consumption in order to elucidate the effects the consumption of place has on the lives of those directly involved. Hollywood, California serves as the empirical focus of this study. Here, it is shown that the popular imagination has come to dominate the consumptive purpose of this place. Moreover, recent gentrification projects have served to validate a symbolism of a past, real or imagined. As a result, Hollywood as a lived experiential place may be subverted. Illustrative of this is the entertainment complex termed “Concrete Babylon.”

Challenging the ‘Public’ of Public Space: Encountering the State in Central Vista

Priyanka Jain

Department of Geography, University of Kentucky

The literature on public space has constructed its ideal model as a political, democratic landscape, a sphere of critical discourse accessible to all, an arena in which power dynamics are minimal. I develop an integrative framework by connecting three major connotations of public space to study Central Vista, a monumental public space in New Delhi. These connotations are: public space as physical property of the state; public space as a semiotic democratic landscape; public space as a sphere of rational critical discourse where the citizens of the country experience national solidarity. Through my case study I highlight different ways in which the state governs public space and challenges the notion of publicness. The ethnographic field work helps me trace three kinds of encounters with the state in Central Vista: state as abstract monolithic entity, state as embodied and state as a regulating body. The three case studies that I discuss render new insights to the problematic of the ‘public’ in public space. First, space may appear public that is accessible to all but in reality can function as non-political and non-discursive. The second case study reflects the problematic of presence in public space that has been constructed in segregational and exclusionary terms. The third case study highlights the implications of using Foucault to think about public space by switching the object of inquiry from exclusion to regulation.

Immigration and Spaces of Whiteness in Small Town America

Helga Leitner

Department of Geography, University of Minnesota

During the past ten to fifteen years, predominantly white towns throughout the rural Upper Midwest have experienced historic changes in their population composition, brought about by an influx of "new" non-white immigrants. The large number of generally poor and culturally/racially different immigrants entering rural towns has been welcomed by employers, but has been met with anxiety and hostility from some white residents, creating tensions and conflicts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and content of white Euro-American reactions towards immigrants, in particular negative reactions. Starting with the concept of whiteness, which seeks to make visible the operations of racial privilege and advantage that influence attitudes and actions of white people, I offer a more nuanced perspective on whiteness that highlights the heterogeneity and contingency of all racialized discourses, practices and spaces. Based on focus groups with white residents, and observations in a small town in Minnesota in 2000-2001, the paper demonstrates that whites articulated a diverse range of attitudes towards new immigrants, including racism. It shows how whites' differently classed and gendered experiences of local transformations (of the social, economic and material spaces in town), together with their interactions with new immigrants in different places (at work, at home, in the neighborhood, in public spaces), help shape attitudes at the local level. As a consequence, transformations brought about by larger scale economic and political restructuring and national discourses on immigration and race are reworked through local geographies of white-immigrant relations.

Reproducing Ambiguity? The Spatial Politics of Irony and Sarcasm

Lauren Martin

Geography Department, University of Kentucky

This paper explores the politics of language and everyday geographies through ironic and sarcastic speech acts. Generally, irony and sarcasm are defined as modes of speech in which more than one meaning is present. As speech acts, they rely heavily on shared contexts and understandings between speaker and audience, producing a basis for both inclusion and exclusion.Thus, ironic and sarcastic speech acts are representational practices that are actively deployed to create insiders and outsiders, thereby consituting and reproducing social boundaries.On one hand, the politics of positionality make the presumptuous ambiguity of irony and sarcasm especially complex. On the other hand, humor is and has been one of the most powerful moments of resistence, and in this form, irony and sarcasm show potential.  Some postmodern literature has made much of irony as a representative attitude of the era, using it as a critical stance towards the self-eviden! ce of language and communication. This paper will explore the politics of irony and sarcasm as a spatial practices, as a potential form of critique, and as a form resistance for radical geographers.

The Spatiality and Strategic Use of Trade Policies Across Political Scales: The U.S. vs. the E.U.

Maureen McDorman

University of Kentucky

International trade is inherently spatial and political. This is reflected not just in the intuitively obvious example of trade flows and policy outcomes, but also in the geographies made by particular policies and their enforcement. Trade sanctions, such as tariffs, have been deployed as tools to change another country’s unfair or illegal trade practices. This paper examines two such cases: the “banana war” and the steel tariff fracas between the U.S. and the E.U. What makes these cases different from other retaliatory action is the clear, precise, and spatially targeted nature of the way in which, first the U.S., and later the E.U., strategically select the products and the goods for prohibitive tariffs. Their goal: to develop a list that uses the economic and political geographies of the targeted country to force the issue of the unfair or illegal trade practices into the domestic political arena. This spatial targeting of tariffs, it was hoped, would create enough economic injury in key political areas or regions so that individuals and companies in those areas would pressure their governments, at all levels, to take action to stop this economic harm; that is, to eliminate the illegal trade practice.

Global Localism: Recentering the Conservation Agenda for Mt. Kasigau, Kenya

Kimberly E. Medley

Department of Geography, Miami University

Context matters when interpreting patterns of diversity and human-resource relations at Mt. Kasigau, Kenya. This paper builds from ethnoecological research with the Kasigau Taita on the distribution and utilization of woody plants and translates their local perspectives on patterns of diversity across space and through time to global forces that are influencing these landscape changes. Mt. Kasigau rises from Commiphora-Acacia bushland between Tsavo East and West National Parks as the most northeastern and isolated mountain in the Eastern Arc, a globally recognized biodiversity hot spot. The mountain is particularly unique because of its steep ascent to evergreen tropical forest, unique floristic affinities, and near absence of human settlements on the mountain. Global conservation projects intersect local livelihoods, following a rationale that supports participatory development while simultaneously questioning the sustainability of local resource use. Local narratives, in contrast, document a more complex and dynamic relationship between the Kasigau Taita and their plant resources as they moved up and down the mountain in response to pre-colonial raids for cattle and slaves, a colonial First World War, public services, and environmental change. I hypothesize a “neotraditional resource management” system where plant naming and resource knowledge represent adaptive responses to other factors that influence their livelihoods. I argue that ‘local learning’ about these kinds of historical relationships between global forces and human relationships with plant resources are important to predicting and potentially guiding ‘global action’ for environmental protection.

Himalayan Environmental Crisis Narratives

John Metz

Department of History & Geography, Northern Kentucky University

The notion that subsistence farmers of the Himalaya were degrading their environments so severely that they were destabilizing the geological, biological and social systems in both the uplands and adjacent densely populated lowlands gained broad acceptance in the late 1970s and induced tens of millions of dollars of development project spending to halt and reverse the processes. However, by 1987 research to specify the processes of degradation challenged virtually all components of this "theory" and led scholars to judge this interpretation to be greatly exaggerated if not incorrect. In this paper I analyze the crisis explanation of human-environment relations as a discursive narrative. First, I identify the assumptions of the Himalayan Environmental Crisis narrative, note their similarity to analyses of crisis narratives from Africa, and briefly evaluate the empirical evidence for some of the claims of this explanation. Second, I consider the forces that sustained the crisis narrative and which continue to induce government agencies, and some scholars, to use the crisis narrative to explain contemporary problems. Finally, I explore how western scholars, development practitioners, and indigenous people can more effectively conceptualize human-environmental interactions in the Himalaya.

Nationalism and ethnic identity in urban space: Jewish community identity in a neighborhood of Istanbul

Amy Mills

Department of Geography, University of Kentucky (or after August 1) Department of Geography, University of South Carolina

This paper explores the relationship between urban space at the scale of the neighborhood, and the space of the nation as it is bound by grand narratives of nationalism and modernity in Turkey. I argue that while ethnicity is a category of difference produced by the conceptual framework of nation-making, ethnic communities produce cohesive identities for themselves through spatial practices of living in, moving through, and creating particular landscapes of belonging in the city. The urban landscape is thus the actual mediation of the ongoing negotiation of belonging in the nation. This paper explores the neighborhood as a space through which minority community identity is constructed through memory and in practice. I trace the movement of Istanbul Jews through the Bosphorus neighborhood of Kuzguncuk which had a thriving Jewish community from the early sixteenth century to mid-twentieth century. Jews from other neighborhoods moved to and from Kuzguncuk because of social ties formed through education, profession, or marriage. Between the 1940s and 1960s, however, thousands of Istanbul Jews migrated to Israel as minorities were targeted by anti-minority taxes and riots. Meanwhile, rural Muslim migrants settled in Kuzguncuk. Minority-dominated culture faded, eroding Kuzguncuk’s identity as a place of cosmopolitan social status. Most remaining Jews regrouped in new neighborhoods. While the intermarried and poor Jews who remain in Kuzguncuk are marginalized from the larger community, the larger Jewish community articulates its relationship to the neighborhood through the past. Today, Kuzguncuk is a place of memory for Istanbul Jews who remember Jewish history there with plans for a cultural festival and weekly visits to its synagogue. The mapping of local ethnic identity across the city is shaped by a larger context which creates boundaries of difference and of belonging in the nation.

Claiming Space: Discourse, Gender, and the Politics of Urban Identity

Gabriella Modan

Department of English, Ohio State University

Cultural geographers and other theorists of urban space have long noted widespread ideological constructions of cities as masculine, and rural or suburban areas as feminine. But how do such connections between geography and gender become manifest? Using a discourse analytic approach, this paper investigates how residents of a multi-ethnic Washington, DC neighborhood exploit local ideological connections between, on the one hand, Whites (particularly women), the suburbs, and fear, and, on the other, a multi-ethnic populace (particularly men), the city, and toughness, in order to create legitimacy for themselves as authoritative urban community members and deny such legitimacy for other neighborhood residents. Data, drawn from two years of ethnographic fieldwork, include email messages to a neighborhood email discussion list, a performance piece about life in the neighborhood, ethnographic interviews, and casual conversation. I explore the narratives that community members tell to delineate behavior that is consistent with neighborhood norms, and the preponderance of male protagonists (real or imagined) in these narratives, whose tough and often violent demeanors are presented as emblematic of urban identity. These characters contrast strongly with – often female, and often White – antagonists (likewise real or imagined) who are narrated as fearful of neighborhood spaces and residents, and therefore not psychologically ‘of the city’. The moral valences that these characters are imbued with crucially rely on a construction of the city as a dangerous place. Such 'narratives of the masculine city' circulate within a context of intense conflict over gentrification, and over the exclusivity or inclusivity of public space. While these narratives in many ways serve to contest the exclusionist “clean up the neighborhood” discourse of the wealthier residents, in the end they are counterproductive. In exploiting tropes of fear and danger as signifiers of neighborhood identity, and eliding women’s concerns of safety in public space with White pro-gentrification interests, community members obscure the very social and political inequalities which lead to the material conditions that they seek to combat. Furthermore, the gendered constructions of local spaces and the subsequent positioning of community members vis-a-vis these spaces pit the interests of the actual male and female members of the community against each other.

Western Aid to African Cities: Top-down Donor-driven Bottom-up Localized Development

Garth A. Myers

Department: African & African-American Studies/Geography, University of Kansas

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has recently drawn the world’s attention to the debt relief and development aid needs of Sub-Saharan Africa, most dramatically through his government’s sponsorship of the blue-ribbon Commission for Africa. Is anything really changing in the nature and character of this discussion about aid to Africa as a result? My cynical doubts are laid bare in this paper, based on my analysis of the Western aid to African cities through the United Nations Sustainable Cities Program (SCP) over the past decade and the continuities insinuated in the Commission for Africa report. Most bilateral donors are portrayed as speaking a common language with the International Financial Institutions during the last decade. Most funding for the SCP in Africa has come from the aid agencies of Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden, however, and these countries do not have a colonial legacy in Africa. Each has a history of democratic socialism or progressive politics. Northern European aid programs offer paeans to gender equity, human rights, social equality, popular participation, or environmental justice. The Sustainable Cities Program sells itself as being about bottom-up localized urban management led by working groups of stakeholders. However, using case studies from field research in Tanzania and Zambia, I argue that whatever progressive leanings remain in Irish, Swedish, or Danish aid programs to African cities, they deploy neoliberalism’s version of sustainable development and governance. SCP’s framework fits all demands of donors who support it. The donors’ agents shape the directions the local program offices take on a daily basis. The weird result: a bottom-up localized urban development initiative that is top-down and donor driven. I conclude by analyzing how the Commission for Africa report appears set to foster a similar result.

Tourist Development and Perceptions of Environmental Change in Cozumel, Mexico

Carl Nim

Department of Geography, Miami University

abstract coming

The Dialectics of Urban Environmental Metabolization and Social (Re)production: Race, Gender, Labor and the Production of Milwaukee's Urban Environment

Parama Roy (presenter), Nik Heynen, and Harold Perkins

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The unequal distribution of, and access to, urban environmental amenities, like urban trees, among different racial/ethnic groups within U.S. cities has been a central theme of investigation among geographers. Through the use of spatial data, much has been said about the unevenness inherent to urban environments. However, processes that remain much more intangible are those related to labor market inequality within governing institutions that manage urban environments.

Related to this, Milwaukee’s Department of Forestry has historically had very few African-American employees. Furthermore, the department has been dominated by men. Those minoriies and women that have been employed have primarily been seasonal and unskilled low paid laborers. The unequal representation of African-Americans and women, within a city that is 37% African-American and 51% women, has been suggested to result from institutionally embedded forms of racism and gender discrimination. This paper will investigate the processes that have produced Milwaukee’s Forestry Department’s unequal representation of African-Americans and women based on archival materials and in-depth interviews conducted with key forestry department personnel.

Exotic Invasive Nature: A Dynamic Contradiction within Capitalist Political Economy

Harold A. Perkins

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Because capitalist political economy is inextricably bound to material process, it is necessarily crisis prone. Operating within the parameters of material nature, forces of production can be antagonistic to renewed accumulation and consumption via their impact on, or their production of, nature. Much work centered on the politics of nature has therefore theorized the emergence of ‘hybrid’ natures from a first nature undeniably altered by human metabolic process, increasingly through capitalist modes of production. Indirectly suggested in this body of work, ecological damage results from nature being a reluctant player in its own commodification. However, less attention has been paid to the way in which forms of nature in relation to political economy can themselves capitalize on, and thrive within, the dynamics of altered ecosystems.

Dutch elm disease, Gypsy moth, and now Emerald ash borer, all considered exotic invasive species, represent a fundamental contradiction within the production process under capitalism. Brought to this country via ‘contaminated’ products transported from abroad, these species have thrived as emergent forms of nature capitalizing on humanly produced concentrations of elms, oak, and ash often found in urban settings. Urban forests are a component of capital’s consumption fund; damage incurred via these fungal pathogens and insects translates into urban environmental and economic crises as public and private monies must be directed to combat their spread and mitigate the damage they inflict. Because nature can also benefit from its relationship with human productive process, we need therefore to rethink formulations of ‘second’ or ‘hybrid’ natures.

Altering Conceptions of Spiritual and Family Space:  Missionary Practice and the Dawes Act

Christy Rogers

Department of Geography, Ohio State University

In a series of lectures on governmentality, Foucault discussed the emergence of modern governance through specific forms of rationality.  Particularly effective illustrations of overtly racialized, spatial strategies of governmentality include explications of the Dawes Act, an overt attempt to construct the liberal individual citizen through the rational technology of allotments.  The Dawes Act granted the President of the U.S. the authority to allot, or divide and assign title to, individual parcels of land on reservations to Native Americans, who were then granted citizenship.  While existing scholarship on the Dawes Act details practices related to the larger project of constructing the individual citizen, scholars only briefly discuss practices that I will argue are very important to situating the Dawes Act in the context of the late 19th-century project of standardizing conceptions of time and space:  the conversion to Christianity, and the alteration of gender relations, living arrangements, and family structure, including marriage practices, and other profoundly personal, “everyday” practices of life.  Altering these practices then has far-reaching consequences, especially with respect to establishing tribal identity and applying for federal tribal recognition today.

'Constructing' the nation: Women’s relief-work in Gujarat, India

Anu Sabhlok

Pennsylvania State University

This paper looks at the politics of relief-work and rehabilitation inpost-earthquake (2001) and post-ethnic riots (2002) Gujarat, India. Specifically I focus on two ideologically different women's organizations; SEWA(the worlds largest trade union of women informal workers) and the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti (women’s wing of a right-wing Hindu militant organization)that are involved in relief activities in an ethnically fragmented and volatile state in India. Both SEWA and Samiti have a vision for the ‘Indian nation’and their approach to relief-work visibly reflects it. Both SEWA and Samiti describe the relief-work as sewa (service). I see sewa as a ‘performance’that is both produced by and produces notions of gender, nationhood and community. By taking a critical look at how both SEWA and Samiti interpret, apply, negotiate and re(produce) definitions of sewa this study reveals the productive aspects of voluntary work in (re)creating categories of male/female; Hindu/Muslim, Victim/savior. At the same time this 'performance' creates a space where existing norms regarding men's work/women's work, public/private,Hindu vs. Muslim etc. can be challenged and often are.  While the broader questions address issues of agency, gender and nationalism I zoom in onto the actual geography of the relief-camps and rehabilitation sites in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. I critically analyze the dynamics of relief-work, what it entails and how the two organizations go about performing it. A large part of the paper focuses on ‘thick description’ of women working in the relief-camps; the intent being to reveal the fluid nature of 'given categories and fixed identities' in these spaces.

The Citizen in Space/ Dancing in Place

Katrinka Somdahl-Sands

Geography Department, Macalester College

We tend to recognize citizenship in places of formal civil activity, places like a voting booth, city hall, or a neighborhood council meeting. More often overlooked, are spaces of citizenship where citizenship activities take place in areas considered private, or in public arenas not controlled by the state. Over the last 15-20 years however a growing number of scholars are insisting that there are ‘new spaces’ of politics beyond the state identified locations. The key question is where are these new spaces and how do they come into being? In this paper I use Henri Lefebvre’s trialectics of space to demonstrate how Chantal Mouffe’s radical democracy produces new spaces of citizenship. This study uses Lefebvre’s production of space as a model of how spaces come into being, and thus how political spaces come into being.  It uses outdoor performance as its central empirical case because dance is generally nonverbal and thus can communicate lived space and passion more directly than other forms of ‘text’ that are mediated through language.  This work is about a micro-environment. It is the product of intensive fieldwork with a choreographer, her dancers and audience members.  In this paper I will discuss Flyaway Production’s performance of the Mission Wall Dance as a non-vocal and potentially non-rational mode of communication that integrates the history of the surrounding site and neighborhood to create lasting impressions of the work. I will discuss how the choreographer manipulated space (the trialectics) at the level of the city, the site, and finally at the symbolic level. Finally, I will discuss how memory and memorializing are used in the performance to create political images that last long after the particular performance is over.  I intend to show that if you look for the revolutionary potential in the production of space, you will find the new spaces of democratic citizenship desired by Chantal Mouffe.

Today’s Empires are Tomorrow’s Ashes: A Critical Analysis of Mark Hitchcock’s Premillennial Geopolitics

Tristan Sturm

Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University

Critical geopolitics has left religion in the margins and footnotes of its scholarship. This paper will help rectify this shortcoming. Evangelist Mark Hitchcock and his prophetic biblical interpretations have proliferated in the United States, influencing millions of Americans. Hitchcock’s exegesis is based on four ‘evil’ geopolitical containers: the ‘Muslim alliance’, the ‘Roman Empire’, Russia, and the ‘kings of the Far East’. This paper will critique Hitchcock’s geopolitics and how he claims to ‘know the future’ through unproblematized theatrical and visual analogies that remove him from the analysis, allow him to see the world as a whole, and give him the power to ‘know’ the Other. Belief and interpretation in the age of hyper-accessibility to information deserves critical attention when geopolitical licentiousness leads to justifications for the militarization of space and enmity toward the Other.

Facing off: high school riots, ethnic/racial segregation and girls’ perceptions of masculinity in Los Angeles, California

Mary E Thomas

Departments of Geography and Women’s Studies, Ohio State University

During the winter and spring of 2005, a spate of racially motivated riots broke out across Los Angeles public high schools. I will examine how high school girls at one of these schools explain the violence in terms of masculinity and racial-ethnic difference.  The girls criticize masculinity, especially the ways that boys are “competitive” and “stupid,” yet they rarely criticize the ways that boys use race and ethnicity to compete and fight with other boys.  I suggest that the girls have a harder time analyzing racial and ethnic conflict than they do gender conflict, and I ask what this difficulty presents for conceptions of the intersections of race, class, and gender.

The self-sufficiency paradigm and the construction of citizenship under the shadow state

Daniel Trudeau

Department of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder

daniel.trudeau@colorado.edu

In this paper, I examine the evolving topography of public-nonprofit sector relationships concerning refugee resettlement in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area during 1975-1985. This period of time is a defining moment in construction of the shadow state at the local scale. Using archived materials from state institutions and nonprofit organizations, I trace the development of nonprofit organizations into primary service providers for refugees. This process saw the emergence of a self-sufficiency paradigm that governed social service delivery. This paradigm is distinguished by a focus on economic independence and self-reliance. Under this model, nonprofits and state institutions together focused on work and work-oriented English language acquisition as the most important requirements for refugees to achieve self-sufficiency, which also effected a material valorization of refugees. Moreover, nonprofits in Minneapolis-St. Paul came to regard social services as the means by which refugees would be disciplined into self-sufficient and functioning members of society, ready to assume the mantle of American citizenship. At the same time, nonprofit organizations were disciplined—by their own devices as much as by the state--into standardized organizations capable of operating in a larger social service delivery system. This move towards standardization, and a concomitant move toward professionalization in nonprofit organizations, assisted with the material valorization of refugees. This evaluation of public-nonprofit relationships concerning refugee resettlement further illustrates the active role that nonprofits play in the local formation of the shadow state.

Redevelopment of Brownfield Sites Using Eco-Industrial Models

Keith D. West

Department of Geography/Geology, University of Wisconsin-Marinette

While reviewing the literature concerning eco-industrial development, it becomes clear that the concept has been broadly interpreted to cover a wide range of functions and situations. Many of these situations have been addressed in the form of Eco-Industrial Parks (EIPs). Even though the EIP model has experienced a general decline in the United States in the last few years, those that have been established – as well as those that progressed little past the conceptual stage – may still provide practical illustrations of what may be possible. Furthermore, the expanding field of industrial ecology has in recent years greatly enriched the technical, theoretical and methodological basis through which to study and evaluate eco-industrial development.

Several eco-industrial projects involve the added component – as well as the environmental and regulatory burden – of brownfield redevelopment. While this is a burden not to be taken lightly, some municipal redevelopment incentives may actually assist or complement an eco-industrial plan.

Through an application of the methods and evaluation tools provided by the study of industrial ecology, it is conceivable to develop a blueprint of critical factors that could more precisely define the concept of “eco-industrial”. These critical factors could then be incorporated into a model that would ensure environmentally sound restoration of urban brownfields while maintaining their industrial function.

Spotting the Subject: Conflicting performances between street kids and street outreach in New York City

Kristina Wilson

University of Colorado, Boulder

Street kids engage in a variety of survival activities while living on the streets. These activities can range from socially ‘unacceptable’ (sleeping or washing in public) to illegal (selling drugs or prostitution). As a result, part of the performance of street kids identities may involve being strategically invisible while in the public eye. In contrast, street outreach groups strive to be visible to street youth and further, to be able to easily spot the subjects of their outreach. Performances of visibility and invisibility by street kids and street outreach workers may be in conflict when enacted in particular public spaces. This paper will address some preliminary results of participant observation with a street outreach group in New York City. This research has brought to light critical questions of subjectivity, social justice, and activist research when working with homeless youth.

“That was then, this is now": Materializing Progress in Appalachia

Tommy Wilson

Geography Department, University Of Kentucky

This paper discusses the ideological links between the production of a 'reclaimed' mountaintop removal site in Prestonsburg, KY and the "onward America" meta-narrative employed by Appalachian industrialists one-hundred years earlier. The discourse of "progress", both then and now, has been pumped through the veins of local people by the arguments of newspapers, politicians, and business leaders. In both instances, however, the spectacle of landscape has allowed for these promises to materialize in an exaggerated fashion, and as such has been a key factor in their ability to create consensus and confound resistance. The production of fantastic built environments, the concretization of "preludes to progress", guarantees their rhetoric is not without substance. This paper will assemble a clearly cohesive link between the use of spectacle in Appalachia and its subtle legitimation of both the deployment of 'progress' and those who exploit it.

Grounding Postcolonial Theory and Development Practice: Urban Water Privatization in Ghana

Ian Yeboah

Department of Geography, Miami University

This paper grounds the nexus of postcolonial theory and development practice using Ghana's stalled attempt at urban water privatization. Postcolonial theory provides a framework for revealing that Ghana's development practice is characterized by a dependence on foreign sources of capital and expertise and it illustrates a psyche and mindset of Eurocentrism associated with the elite and decision makers of the country. The rationale for water privatization, the how of privatization, and the anti-development opposition to privatization illustrate, not only this dependency but also, the extent to which decision makers are willing to sacrifice sovereignty and culturally sensitive ways of doing things, to global capital, in exchange for development funds. Postcolonial theory reveals that in the state's zeal for Western or Oriental development, subalterns in Ghana have devised hybridities that are post-traditional and Oriental in nature to solve their water problems. These development solutions are couched within structures provided to human agency and suggest that development practice should therefore listen to subalterns in terms of how they construct and solve their problems.