Cultural Geography

Improvement in the Inland: Culture and Nature in the Australian Rangelands

by Nicholas Gill

with Kay Anderson, 2005, Australian Humanities Review, 34, www.australianhumanitiesreview.org

Improvement in the Inland: Culture and Nature in the Australian Rangelands

by Nicholas Gill

with Kay Anderson, 2005, Australian Humanities Review, 34, www.australianhumanitiesreview.org

What is the Problem: Usefulness, the Cultural Turn, and Social Research for Natural Resource Management

by Nicholas Gill

2006, Australian Geographer, 37(1), 5-17.

One strand of criticism of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography and other disciplines is that it produces research that is... more One strand of criticism of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography and other disciplines is that it produces research that is of limited ‘usefulness’ and has disarmed academics. This paper argues that elements of the critique of the cultural turn are overstated. It then argues that criticism of the ‘usefulness’ of cultural research rests on simplistic assumptions concerning the relationship of the social research to users such as policy makers. The problem is depicted as largely related to the nature of the information flowing to ‘users’. Such assumptions are critiqued through discussing the concept of ‘use’, influences on the use of research, and models of relationships between ‘users’ and researchers. Finally, the paper argues that a key issue in the relationship between policy making and social sciences is the users’ expectations. A recent example from research in natural resource management (NRM) policy making shows that ‘users’ of social science research can have a questionable foundation from which to assess social research. This example also points to clear roles for cultural research in NRM. The problem of connecting with policy makers is multidimensional. It is one for social researchers as a whole and it includes the norms and practices regarding nature and natural resources of potential‘users’.

Trial by Fire: Natural Hazards, Mixed-Methods and Cultural Research

by Nicholas Gill

With Christine Eriksen and Ross Bradstock, 2011, Australian Geographer, 42(1), 17-38.

This paper considers the issues of research ‘relevance’ and ‘use’ to reflect
upon a cultural geography research... more This paper considers the issues of research ‘relevance’ and ‘use’ to reflect
upon a cultural geography research project on bushfire that did not begin with any specific aim of being useful to policy makers but which has garnered considerable and ongoing interest from a broad audience. It provides an example of how the integration of quantitative and qualitative research methods and data can enhance research into cultural
aspects of natural hazards whilst simultaneously playing a key role in ensuring that the research results are of interest to a wide range of groups. Using a mixed-methods research approach was found to provide insight into complex factors that influence attitudes and actions towards bushfire amongst diverse landholders in rural-rban interface areas in
south-east Australia. We argue that mixed-methods research is a powerful tool in building and enhancing a cultural geography that has policy relevance, retains analytical depth, and is acceptable to risk managers. The ability of cultural geography through mixed methods research to illuminate how socio-cultural processes are central to environmental attitudes and preparedness behaviour has direct relevance to recent international discussions of how to manage the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in
bushfire-prone rural-urban interface areas.

The Construction of an Alpine Landscape: Building, Representing and Affecting the Eastern Alps, c. 1885-1914

by Ben Anderson

Forthcoming in Cultural Geography.

Between 1885 and the First World War, German and Austrian alpinists talked of ‘opening up’ the Alps in Germany and the... more Between 1885 and the First World War, German and Austrian alpinists talked of ‘opening up’ the Alps in Germany and the Austrian Empire with a vast network of huts and paths. This article argues that this effort to develop the Alps arose from a series of relationships between people, objects, representations and affects which linked urban spaces of middle-class conduct to the alpine environment. Alpinists utilised media such as landscape reliefs and panoramas not merely to represent the Alps, but to inculcate a particular affective response amongst Germany’s urban middle-class, or Bürgertum. Instead of a Romantic ideal of mountains as unknowable symbols of nature’s power, these alpinists promoted a modern gaze which would see all, from the safety of a controlled, governable landscape. In doing so, alpinists legitimised their intervention in the Eastern Alps, developing these once unknown landscapes as a bürgerlich [bourgeois, or middle-class] cultural resource.

A GIS Comparative Analysis of Bronze Age Settlement Patterns and the Contemporary Physical Landscape in the Jazira Region of Syria

by Tony Mathys

Most of the datasets presented in this thesis are available for free in ArcGIS shapefile format on the ShareGeo Open data repository at http://www.sharegeo.ac.uk/.

These datasets are available for everyone to use as it is important to encourage data sharing in support of research activities.

There are also some CORONA satellite images available on ShareGeo for the Syrian Jazira region. The plan is to eventually provide complete CORONA coverage for this region, though geo-referencing will not be precise as it's intended to be more for user orientation.

Acknowledgement should go to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which makes CORONA imagery available via its EarthExplorer online data service at http://edcsns17.cr.usgs.gov/NewEarthExplorer/
Many CORONA images are available to download for free from this service, though require processing and geo-referencing for use in a GIS or a software package for processing remotely sensed imagery.

Relevant to this, and the thesis, is the following paper presented which first introduced how CORONA satellite imagery could be applied to archaeological work in the Near East. Martin Fowler also wrote about the potential of CORONA in the Aerial Archaeology Research Group (AARG) news.

Mathys, Tony. “The Use of Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs in a GIS (IDRISI) to Map Archaeological Sites and the Surrounding Landscape in the Northeastern Region of the Syrian Jazirah. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute, NASA and St. Cloud State University Remote Sensing Applications in Archaeology Conference. St. Cloud, Minnesota, May 29-31, 1997.

Unfortunately, papers presented at this conference were not published.

My gratitude and thanks to Dr Sarah Parcak for citing this unpublished conference paper in her book (Satellite Remote Sensing in Archaeology), and to Dr Aled Rowlands and Dr Apostolos Sarris for citing it in their Journal of Archaeological Science article 34 (2007).

Life off the Grid: An ethnographer and videographer meet the people whose homes produce all the energy they need

by Phillip Vannini

Co-authored with Jonathan Taggart, published in Canadian Geographic, June 2012

Off-grid Mobilities: Incorporating a Way of Life

by Phillip Vannini

Published in Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies

Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital... more Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital video—documents and interprets the mobilities of off-grid living on Lasqueti Island, British Columbia, Canada. The data presentation focuses in particular on the embodied experience of off-grid inhabitation, highlighting the sensory and kinetic experiences and practices of everyday life in a community disconnected from the North American electrical grid and highway network. The mobilities of fuel and energy are presented in unison with ethnographic attention to the taskscape of everyday activities and movements in which off-grid islanders routinely engage. The analysis, based on Tim Ingold's non-representational theory on place, movement, and inhabitation, focuses on how the material and corporeal mobilities of off-grid life body forth a unique sense of place.

Mapping indigenous Siberia: Spatial changes and ethnic realities, 1900–2010

by Ivan Sablin

co-authored with Maria Savelyeva, published in Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 77–110.

This article discusses spatial changes in the ethnic territories of Native Siberians from the late nineteenth century... more This article discusses spatial changes in the ethnic territories of Native Siberians from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. A Geographic Information System (GIS) was developed to model and observe these changes. The GIS also features resource-oriented economic activities, major waterways and railroads. Analysis of the model, textual sources and statistical data made it possible to determine what factors constituted Siberia’s ethnographical pattern of the early twentieth century and led to its changes in the ensuing decades and what impact on the indigenous peoples these changes had. Four special maps showing Siberia in the 1900s–10s, 1930s–40s, 1970s–80s and 2000s–10s were produced from the GIS and are included in the article. The current legal status of the indigenous peoples’ territories was also examined. This article presents an interdisciplinary macroscale case study.

Place, Naming, and the Interpretation of Cultural Landscapes

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H. 2008. “Place, Naming, and the Interpretation of Cultural Landscapes.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, Ashgate Press (edited by Brian Graham and Peter Howard), pp. 195-213.

Toward a Newsworthy Cultural Geography

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H. 2004. “Toward a Newsworthy Cultural Geography.” Journal of Cultural Geography 22(1): 139-142. Invited contribution to “Dialogues” section of journal.

Collective memory and the politics of urban space: an introduction

by Derek Alderman

Rose-Redwood, Reuben, Derek H. Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu. 2008. “Collective Memory and the Politics of Urban Space.” GeoJournal 73(3): 161-164. Introduction to special issue (guest edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu).

Growing up in Sanhattan: Cartographies of the Barrio Alto in Alberto Fuguet and Hernán Rodríguez Matte

by Vinodh Venkatesh

Hispanic Review 80.2 (2012): 313-28.

Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2011. Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies. Political Geography. 30 (2), 90-98.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that... more Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

What symbols

by Dmitry Misyurov

This article contains 12 questions about the symbols. What are your thoughts in response? This article contains 12 questions about the symbols. What are your thoughts in response?

Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, by Tim Ingold (book review)

by Phillip Vannini

Forthcoming, yet-to-be-copy-edited review of Ingold's recent work, to be published in the journal Transfers

My book review of Tim Ingold's Being Alive, Ways of Walking, and Redrawing Anthropology My book review of Tim Ingold's Being Alive, Ways of Walking, and Redrawing Anthropology

Familial relations: spaces, subjects, and politics

by Lauren Martin

co-authored with Chris Harker

Introduction to our themed issue on the family in geographical research.

Other articles include:
more Introduction to our themed issue on the family in geographical research.

Other articles include:

Do as I say, not as I do: the affective space of family life and the generational transmission of drinking cultures 776 – 792
Gill Valentine, Mark Jayne, Myles Gould

Transnational families and the family nexus: perspectives of Indonesian and Filipino children left behind by migrant parent(s) 793 – 815
Elspeth Graham, Lucy P Jordan, Brenda S A Yeoh, Theodora Lam, Maruja Asis, Su-kamdi

‘The church is ... my family’: exploring the interrelationship between familial and religious practices and spaces 816 – 831
Sonya Sharma

Women in waiting? Singlehood, marriage, and family in Singapore 832 – 848
Kamalini Ramdas

Precariousness, precarity, and family: notes from Palestine 849 – 865
Christopher Harker

Governing through the family: struggles over US noncitizen family detention policy 866 – 888
Lauren L Martin

The spectacular and the mundane: racialised state violence, Filipino migrant workers, and their families 889 – 904
Elizabeth Lee, Geraldine Pratt

Soviet cartography set in stone: the ‘Map of Industrialization’

by Dominique Moran

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I take the example of the `Map of Industrialization', a huge stone mosaic map of 1930s USSR as a point... more In this paper I take the example of the `Map of Industrialization', a huge stone mosaic map of 1930s USSR as a point of convergence for discourses connecting Soviet propaganda and the depiction of Soviet space through cartography, the nature of maps as social constructs, the relationship between cartography and art in Soviet Russia, and the role of cartography in shaping the image of the Soviet nation-state. I trace the history of the Map and consider the Map as a work of art and as an instrument of the state, exploring these notions in the context of its history of exhibition in the USSR and overseas and of its periodic alteration. I conclude with a consideration of the changing discourses surrounding the Map in the post-Soviet era and link this discussion to broader themes of cultural memory, monuments,and the negotiation of national identity.

Hewn from Stone: (Re)Presenting Soviet Material Cultures and Identities

by Dominique Moran

Journal of Social History

This paper is concerned with the 'production' of items of material
culture, including monuments, made from... more This paper is concerned with the 'production' of items of material
culture, including monuments, made from precious and semi-precious stone, in the early Soviet Union (1920s and 1930s). Selecting examples such as the stars which top the Kremlin towers, it engages with the issues of production of these items, in particular the significance of the materials from which they were made, and the (re)constructed identities of the craftsmen who made them. Drawing on contemporary press sources in order to access a particularly opaque public discourse surrounding these issues, the paper considers these items as embodiments of the labour of their makers, and interrogates the significance of that labour for the regime for which the objects were made. It concludes that through the act of production, Soviet workers re-produced and re-presented themselves in line with the imperatives of the commissioning state

En los bordes de la nación: cultura regional y nuevas formas de ciudadanía en el Caribe Mexicano norte [Prolegómenos]

by Luis Alberto Velasco Ruiz