'Sexercise': Working out heterosexuality in Jane Fonda’s fitness books

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Leisure Studies, 30(2), 237 - 255, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02614367.2010.523837.This paper explores the connection between the promotion of heterosexual norms in women’s fitness books written by or in the name of Jane Fonda during the 1980s and the commodification of women’s fitness space in both the public and private spheres. The paper is set in the absence of overt discussions of normative heterosexuality in leisure studies and draws on critical heterosexual scholarship as well as the growing body of work theorising geographies of corporeality and heterosexuality. Using the principles of media discourse analysis, the paper identifies three overlapping characteristics of heterosexuality represented in Jane Fonda’s fitness books, and embodied through the exercise regimes: respectable heterosexual desire, monogamous procreation and domesticity. The paper concludes that the promotion and prescription of exercise for women in the Jane Fonda workout books centred on the reproduction and embodiment of heterosexual corporeality. Set within an emerging commercial landscape of women’s fitness in the 1980s, such exercise practices were significant in the legitimation and institutionalisation of heteronormativity

Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.Cally Guerin, Vicki Xafis, Diana V. Doda, Marianne H. Gillam, Allison J. Larg, Helene Luckner, Nasreen Jahan, Aris Widayati and Chuangzhou X

Mining Big Data for Tourist Hot Spots: Geographical Patterns of Online Footprints

Understanding the complex, and often unequal, spatiality of tourist demand in urban contexts requires other methodologies, among which the information base available online and in social networks has gained prominence. Innovation supported by Information and Communication Technologies in terms of data access and data exchange has emerged as a complementary supporting tool for the more traditional data collection techniques currently in use, particularly, in urban destinations where there is the need to more (near)real-time monitoring. The capacity to collect and analise massive amounts of data on individual and group behaviour is leading to new data-rich research approaches. This chapter addresses the potential for discovering geographical insights regarding tourists’ spatial patterns within a destination, based on the analysis of geotagged data available from two social networks. ·info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Young ghosts: ethical and methodological issues of historical research in children's geographies

This paper was published in the journal, Children's Geographies [© Taylor & Francis] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2012.693838Geographers researching children and young people have often been at the forefront of disciplinary debates in geography surrounding methodological practice and ethical considerations (Matthews et al. 1998, Valentine 1999, Pain 2004, Hemming 2008, Hopkins and Bell 2008, van Blerk and Barker 2008). In this short paper, I want to focus on a less-popular research method used by children’s geographers – archival methods (cf. Gagen 2000, 2001) – and reflect specifically on some of its methodological and ethical challenges. I argue that thinking about historical research can challenge children’s geographers to consider other types of encounter from that of the (embodied) encounter between a researcher and a child (Horton 2008). These different and multiple encounters include those between the (adult) creator of ‘material’ and a young person, a young person (as creator) and their intended audience, and the further encounter between a young person from the past and a present-day researcher during fieldwork. The spatial and temporal deferral in some of these encounters suggests a re-thinking of how we approach and conceptualise research ‘with’ young people. Furthermore, these (dis)embodied encounters can challenge ethical norms in children’s geographies such as consent, confidentiality and positionality in different but overlapping ways. I contend that children’s geographers are well versed in these ethical issues, some of which transfer well into the practice of historical research. For example, issues surrounding children’s ‘voice’ and responsibility are quite similar (as I later discuss), but there is a difference between contemporary and historical research in terms of the media involved (your own tape recordings or someone else’s recorded tapes; fresh participatory artwork or dust-covered diaries) and a different retrieval process (direct embodied research with young people or deferred connections in another building, time and place)

Effects of land use and forest management on soil carbon in the ecoregions of Maryland and adjacent eastern United States

The impacts of forest-related land use and management on soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks have been investigated through years of primary research and review articles. This attention is justified given the importance of land use and management to greenhouse gas mitigation, soil and forest productivity, and other ecosystem services. However, there is a gap of scale and scope between site-level studies that control for sources of variation, producing high-confidence results for limited locations, and the broad reviews that offer more general conclusions. The present analysis is intended to fill that gap. Here, we focus on six ecoregions of the eastern United States, and integrate meta-analysis of published literature with synthesis of geo-referenced soil observations to: (1) test whether common land use and management practices quantitatively impact SOC; (2) identify key sources of variation in these effects; (3) assess how sources of variation translate to decisions about land use and management at ecoregional to landscape levels. Results corroborate general trends, such as O horizon SOC losses with harvesting and fire and SOC gains during reforestation, but provide greater detail about the influence of specific practices and site-level controls on SOC stocks and change in the study region. Results also show that: (1) harvest impacts depend upon landform and soil taxonomy; (2) harvesting forests that are recovering on previously cultivated lands decreases SOC; (3) tree biomass and SOC recovery increase concurrently during reforestation; (4) specific harvest, site preparation, and fire management practices affect the magnitude and variability of changes in SOC. Perhaps more importantly, ecoregional classification and soil taxonomy provide spatial frameworks for placing quantitative estimates of SOC stocks and changes in the geographic context of the study region, providing greater detail and specificity for individuals and institutions concerned with SOC management at more localized levels

Land use and management effects on soil carbon in U.S. Lake States, with emphasis on forestry, fire, and reforestation

There is growing need to quantify and communicate how land use and management activities influence soil organic carbon (SOC) at scales relevant to, and in the tangible control of landowners and forest managers. The continued proliferation of publications and growth of data sets, data synthesis and meta-analysis approaches allows the application of powerful tools to such questions at ever finer scales. In this analysis, we combined a literature review and effect-size meta-analysis with two large, independent, observational databases to assess how land use and management impact SOC stocks, primarily with regards to forest land uses. We performed this work for the (Great Lakes) U.S. Lake States, which comprise 6% of the land area, but 7% of the forest and 9% of the forest SOC in the United States, as the second in a series of ecoregional SOC assessments. Most importantly, our analysis indicates that natural factors, such as soil texture and parent material, exert more control over SOC stocks than land use or management. With that for context, our analysis also indicates which natural factors most influence management impacts on SOC storage. We report an overall trend of significantly diminished topsoil SOC stocks with harvesting, consistent across all three data sets, while also demonstrating how certain sites and soils diverge from this pattern, including some that show opposite trends. Impacts of fire grossly mirror those of harvesting, with declines near the top of the profile, but potential gains at depth and no net change when considering the whole profile. Land use changes showing significant SOC impacts are limited to reforestation on barren mining substrates (large and variable gains) and conversion of native forest to cultivation (losses). We describe patterns within the observational data that reveal the physical basis for preferential land use, e.g., cultivation of soils with the most favorable physical properties, and forest plantation establishment on the most marginal soils, and use these patterns to identify management opportunities and considerations. We also qualify our results with ratings of confidence, based on their degree of support across approaches, and offer concise, defensible tactics for adapting management operations to site-specific criteria and SOC vulnerability