Encountering soviet geography: oral histories of British geographical studies of the USSR and Eastern Europe 1945-1991

This paper considers the history of British geographical studies of the USSR and Eastern Europe 1945-1991, presenting material from a research project which has included thirty-two oral history interviews. Oral history is an especially fruitful research methodology in this context due to the distinct issues of formality and informality involved in researching the Soviet bloc. After discussing the nature of the subdiscipline and the Cold War context, including the role of the British state in shaping the field, the paper considers the role of formal academic meetings and exchanges, and the place of unofficial spaces of encounter in the formation of an intellectual culture. The paper concludes by reflecting on the merits of oral history in studies of the production of geographical knowledge

Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition:virtuosity, discipline and the agency of insight in UK naturalists’ arts of seeing

Approaches to visual skilling from anthropology and STS have tended to highlight the forces of discipline and control in understanding how shared visual accounts of the world are created in the face of potential differences brought about by multi-sensorial perception. Drawing upon a range of observational and interview material from an immersion in naturalist training and biological recording activities between 2003 and 2009, I focus upon jizz, a distinct form of gestalt perception much coveted by naturalist communities in the UK. Jizz is described as a tacit and embodied way of seeing that instantaneously reveals the identity of a species, relying upon but simultaneously suspending the arduous and meticulous study of an organism’s diagnostic characteristics. I explore the potential and limitations of jizz to allow for both visual precision and an enchanted and varied form of encounter with nature. In so doing, I explore how the specific characteristics of wild, intangible and irreverent virtuoso performance work closely together with disciplining taxonomic standards. As such, discipline and irreverence work together, are mutually enabling, and allow for an accommodation rather than a segregation of potential difference brought about by perceptual variety

Pampering, Well-Being And Women’s Bodies In The Therapeutic Spaces Of The Spa

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Social and Cultural Geography, 2013, Vol. 14 Issue 1 pp. 41-58 © 2012 copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/ DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2012.734846This paper develops and extends recent work in geography on therapeutic landscapes and the body in an examination of pampering practices in the contemporary spa. Drawing on feminist research on health, gender identity and the body, the paper explores the importance of escape, relaxation and other strategies to combat stress on the well-being practices and routines of women. Using original data collected from interviews in two spas in the South West of England, the paper argues that a visit to the spa is increasingly being seen as an important part of women’s wider health and bodily maintenance providing a space for relaxation and withdrawal from responsibilities of the home and workplace. The pampering treatments reinforce the therapeutic benefits of the spa creating a sense of luxury and a focus on the self. The paper locates these arguments within the twin theoretical concerns of the ‘care of the self’ and disciplining the body, suggesting that any attempts to understand the practices and therapies for maintaining bodily well-being must incorporate a recognition of their simultaneous role in regulating the size and shape of women’s bodies

Georges Perec’s experimental fieldwork; Perecquian fieldwork

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis paper traces key themes in contemporary experimental fieldwork – explorations of ordinary places by artists, writers, activists, enthusiasts, students and researchers – to the works of Georges Perec. Preoccupations of this work – including playfulness, attention to the ordinary, and writing as a fieldwork practice – are all anticipated and elaborated in Perec’s oeuvre, where they converge around an ‘essayistic’ approach. Exhibiting these traits, some contemporary fieldwork is more convincingly Perecquian than psychogeographical or Situationist, despite the tendency to identify it with the latter. Through Perec, it is therefore possible to bring contemporary experimental fieldwork into focus, identifying a coherence and sense of project within it, while speaking to the question of what it means and could mean to conduct fieldwork experimentally. Particular attention is paid in this paper to Perec’s most accomplished and sustained field texts, both of which have been translated into English: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010, from 1975 original in French) and Species of Spaces (1999/1974)

Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning

Green criminology has sought to blur the nature-culture binary and this article seeks to extend recent work by geographers writing on landscape to further our understanding of the shifting contours of the divide. The article begins by setting out these different approaches, before addressing how dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded in landscape photography. It then describes how the ways we visualize the Earth were reconfigured with the emergence of photography in the 19th century and how the world itself has been transformed into a target in our global media culture

Ambivalent improvements: biography, biopolitics, and colonial Delhi

This paper explores the ambivalent feelings towards the Government of India produced in one of the government’s own employees. In establishing the Delhi Improvement Trust in the 1930s, Arthur Parke Hume had to battle against governmental cost cutting in an attempt to secure the rehousing of slum evictees. The refusal of the government to accept this welfarist commitment to investment led to the stalling of the improvement projects and great emotional disquiet for Hume. This is traced through his personal correspondence with his parents. In interweaving these insights with the imperial archive, three biographical approaches are adopted. A traditional chronology is used to order the events, an analytical approach is used to outline the discursive regularities of Hume’s observations, and a genealogical approach is used to suggest the influences on Hume’s writings and the broader governmental rationalities that he had to negotiate

Incompleteness: landscapes, cartographies, citizenships

Landscapes as dynamic relations between people and worlds are always incomplete. They are partial understandings, evolving knowledges, edited images and unfinished stories of our designed and undesigned environments. Gaps within and between landscapes can reveal histories omitted and individuals silenced, but this open-endedness of landscapes can also provide opportunities to contribute and participate. In this paper I explore how landscapes are always under construction and I argue that their incompleteness offers potential for new practices. I question, how traditions of mapping can reflect dynamic realities of landscapes; how design and representational practices that attempt to fix time and complete space can work with incompleteness; and how designers and researchers can embrace such landscapes as open-ended, collective endeavours. In this paper, I discuss a mapping project called ‘Incomplete Cartographies’—an experiment with in-progress cartographies, incrementally informed by situated narratives, and producing new forms of belonging

Finding the coast: environmental governance and the characterisation of land and sea

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.In environmental governance for land and sea, the cultural is increasingly imbricated with the natural in the language of ecosystem services and the promise of integrated management. We are witnessing accelerated efforts to bring cultural and natural landscape character assessments into dialogue with other sorts of planning and governance mechanisms for coastal and marine environments. As land, sea, nature and culture are brought into closer correspondence, the coast assumes ever greater significance as a site and object of decision‐making in planning and environmental governance. In this paper, I draw on the critical analytical techniques of cultural geography to argue that coasts suffer from definitional ambiguity and conceptual insufficiency, both of which are exemplified by landscape and seascape characterisation, with specific consequences for environmental governance. I argue that we need to (1) both recognise and destabilise the unhelpful dichotomy between land and sea embodied in landscape and seascape character assessments, which have their provenance in landscape architecture; and (2) engage new language and conceptual tools that help us to rethink coasts critically. To this end, later on this paper, I briefly discuss alternative ways of conceptualising the coast, for example as a liminal space

Educational landscapes and the environmental entanglement of humans and non-humans through the starling murmuration

Recent years have seen a continued critical reflection on the “post” or “more‐than” representational landscape as well as a related critique of nature which centres on this concept as a deployment of meanings and their effects. In this paper, I want to explore the possibilities and challenges of widening access to these more entangled and performative understandings of nature and landscape through the example of winter roosting starlings and the spectacle of the starling mumuration. In doing so, the paper also explores the dominant educational constructions of nature as utilised in conservation work and informal educational television, the consideration of the latter taken up through my own work on a forthcoming BBC television series. The focus of this exploration is the RSPB Ham Wall nature reserve on the Somerset Levels, widely regarded as one of the prime locations in Britain for observing murmurations, and where the number of visitors coming specifically to view roosting starlings on a winter's evening can reach 1,000 people. While in many ways the reserve maintains conventional roles of warden‐led stewardship and observational education of nature “in its place,” I also want to suggest that the spectacle of the starling murmuration affords an opportunity to convey humans and non‐humans as embedded in a more performative understanding of conservation which challenges the predominant conventions of conservation practice. In this more reflexive educational context, the possibility exists to frame an accessible and illustrative understanding of the geographies of a more entangled human–non‐human nature