Exploring "Associative Talk": When German Mothers Instruct Their Two Year Olds about Spatial Tasks

In this study, maternal input was analyzed during a task, in which German mothers instructed their two-year-old children to put two objects together in a particular way. In the setting, the spatial relation (ON and UNDER) and the canonicality of these relations (canonical such as ‘a pot on a table’ and noncanonical like ‘a train on a tunnel’) were varied. Two kinds of discourse strategies are proposed that characterize mothers’ input in this task: bring-in and follow-in. For the analysis, an automatic procedure was developed, in which the amount of words spent on a strategy was related to the overall word amount. The data suggest that the canonicality of the task can change the discourse: Bring-in strategies dominated the discourse in tasks with canonical spatial relations while in more difficult tasks with non-canonical relations, German-speaking mothers used follow-ins significantly more often than in the canonical tasks. Together, the results of this study shed light on the process of an on-line adaptation of the mother to her child and give us insight into how a situated understanding in a task-oriented discourse emerges

The graffiti of Mohamed Mahmoud and the politics of transition in Egypt: The transformation of space, sociality and identities

This study is concerned with the spatial transformations taking place in Mohamed Mahmoud that branches from Midan el-Tahrir; the official site of the Egyptian January 25 Revolution. Since the revolution, this street has witnessed a great deal of violence during several bloody clashes between protesters and security forces. It has also become famous for the dissenting graffiti murals wrapping the walls of it entrance. By conducting ethnography of this block of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, my study focuses on the residents and shop owners in the area, who I frame as the graffiti\u27s ‘unintended audience,’ to understand how these spatial and political transformations have affected this space, the residents’ experience, social relations and sense of belonging. I argue that these new spatial transformations brought by the revolution have introduced an alternative public space, inviting a peculiar array of incidents and distinctive social interactions in which people deploy the mode of speaking in their subversion of many ambivalences in the course of troubled political transition

Mechanistic Levels, Reduction, and Emergence

We sketch the mechanistic approach to levels, contrast it with other senses of “level,” and explore some of its metaphysical implications. This perspective allows us to articulate what it means for things to be at different levels, to distinguish mechanistic levels from realization relations, and to describe the structure of multilevel explanations, the evidence by which they are evaluated, and the scientific unity that results from them. This approach is not intended to solve all metaphysical problems surrounding physicalism. Yet it provides a framework for thinking about how the macroscopic phenomena of our world are or might be related to its most fundamental entities and activities

Subaltern imaginaries of localism: constructions of place, space and democracy in community-led housing organisations.

The localism strategies of the UK government provide a suite of ‘rights’ for community organisations that licence place-based political imaginaries with the intent to construct the community as a proxy for a smaller state. Conflating place with participation and promising to devolve power, localism authorises a performative enactment of democracy, citizenship and the ‘public’ through the lived experience of space. In constituting the local as a metaphor for democracy and empowerment, however, community localism foregrounds the pivotal role played by place and scale in cementing social differentiation and in naturalising hierarchical power relations. This paper explores the subaltern strategies of localism that may emerge when the rights of localism are exercised by residents’ organisations in marginalised communities of social housing. Drawing on research with community-led housing organisations it demonstrates how the spatial imaginations and spatial practices of localism can be implemented to assert new claims on democracy and citizenship. In particular it identifies four spatial practices – the extension of domestic space, the invocation of locality, the construction of domestic scale, and the scalar reimagining of democracy – that subvert the reordering of political space that is localism’s regulatory intent

Visual geographies : an editorial

The use of image-processing procedures and techniques and their products – photographs, aerial photographs, satellite images, maps – and the application of GIS and GPS, so-called "geomatics" (Thornes, 2004:787), are taken for granted in academic geographical practice today..

Convening Publics: The parasitical spaces of public action

About the book: Political Geography is a core subdiscipline of Human Geography, the Handbook of Political Geography will provide a highly contextualised and systematic overview of the latest thinking and research. Edited by key scholars, with international contributions from acknowledged authorities on the relevant research, the Handbook of Political Geography is divided into six sections: - Scope and Development of Political Geography - key debates; the geography of knowledge; conceptualisations of power; and conceptualisations of scale - Geographies of the State - state theory; territory and central local relations; legal and judicial geographies; borders; and states and nature - Participation and representation - citizenship; space; electoral geography; place; media public space; and social movements - Political Geographies of Difference - class; nationalism; gender, sexuality ; and culture - Geography Policy and Governance - regulation; welfare; urban space; planning, environment - Global Political Geographies - geographies of imperialism; post-colonialism; globalization; environmental politics; international relations; war; and migration The Handbook of Political Geography will be the standard work, widely used and highly-cited, by all scholars with an interest in politics and space

The Mobility and/or Fixity of Urban and Planning Policies – The Role of Divergent Urban Planning Cultures

Cities and regions are increasingly interconnected on a global scale. In the process of the making of cities and regions policy actors increasingly rely on globally flowing and very mobile urban policy models, which have been originally developed in different socio-spatial contexts. Simultaneously the search for these policies and their implementation is refracted by local/regional factors, which are relatively fixed as they are rooted in historically produced planning cultures. In this conceptual paper governance change is discussed through looking at the interplay between fixity and motion in urban development. For this purpose approaches to planning cultures and policy mobilities are related to each other theoretically