Women drinking alcohol: assembling a perspective from a Victorian country town, Australia

Gender is a key lens for interpreting meanings and practices of drinking. In response to the overwhelming amount of social and medical alcohol studies that focus on what extent people conform to norms of healthy drinking, this article extends critical feminist geographical engagement with assemblage thinking to explore how the technologies of biopower covertly materialised as bodily habits may be preserved and challenged. We suggest an embodied engagement with alcohol to help think through the gendered practices and spatial imaginaries of rural drinking life. Our account draws on interviews with women of different cohort generations with Anglo-Celtic ancestry living in a country town in Victoria, Australia. Three vignettes based around emergent themes of maternal, domicile and socialising bodies help shed light on the contradictory ways gender is lived through the dynamics of alcohol consumption which help constitute everyday life in a country town

Sharing the spirit? Sociospatial polarization and expressed enthusiasm for the Olympic Games

This article seeks to contribute to the literature that assesses the local outcomes of hosting hallmark events by examining the expressed levels of enthusiasm for the year 2000 Olympic Games within Sydney. We report on the results of a telephone survey of 658 Sydney residents conducted in February 1998 designed to measure enthusiasm for the 2000 Olympic Games. As of February 1998, it appeared that enthusiasm for the 2000 Olympics remained strong in Sydney, thereby providing support to the views of those who regard hallmark events as a psychological mechanism to assist residents to feel a sense of pride in their city and nation. However, higher levels of enthusiasm were recorded in the lower socioeconomic status suburbs of Western Sydney than in the higher status suburbs of the North Shore. These differences were not statistically differentiated by economic indicators (income, occupation, and education levels) but were significant by association with social variables such as country of birth, age, and marital and family status. Several implications of these results are considered within the literature debating the outcome of hosting hallmark events

The moral terrains of ecotourism and the ethics of consumption

In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of Western philosophical ethics as they may peliain to tourism. Our discussion then turns to one of the most popular attempts to address sustainability across the globe: ecotourism. Ecotourism as distinct from tourism writ large is earmarked by appeals to concepts and ethical practices peliaining to sustainability (in all its varied meanings), consumption, preservation, and the politics of colonialism and the dynamics of global development strategies. In order to bring the ethics of consumption into the context of ecotourism, we provide a case account of ecotourism that represents one of the more popular versions, national park tourism, and the exchanges that occur over what we call the \u27moral terrains\u27 of ecotourism. At Uluru-Kata Tju!a National Park ecotourism pertains to market dynamics, colonialism, adjacent and conflicting heritage, challenges to environmental identity, micro-management strategies aimed at cultural reconciliation and political agency, as well as the cthics of entertainment that plagues tourism as a human form of consumption. We conclude with sections addressing the elevation of the ethics of ecotourism to a quandary of global environmental justice and utilize the controversy of the Uluru-climb to exemplify nOlmative demands on today\u27s quest for sustainable tourism

Mapping same-sex couple family households in Australia

The map (1:1,218,987) accompanying this report is the first to depict the distribution of same-sex couple family households across Australia. The map and the report contribute to emerging scholarship combining critical geographies of sexualities with quantitative techniques and GIS in order to advance the political claims of sexual minorities. The data were collected through the 2006 Census and obtained via consultation with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. These data included the number of same-sex couple family households for all Statistical Divisions across Australia and for Statistical Sub-Divisions within metropolitan capital cities. Geographical concentrations of same-sex couple family households were determined by calculating the proportion of couple family households that were same-sex in each Statistical Division and Statistical Sub-Division, since the Census defines same-sex couples as a subset of couple family households. To visualise where the proportions fell above and below the national average, and thus where concentrations were found, these ratios were converted to location quotients using the Australian average as the denominator. The map combines different scales – Statistical Divisions and Statistical Sub-Divisions – to illustrate distributional patterns between inner-city and suburban areas, as well as between urban and regional localities, across Australia. While high concentrations are found in inner-cities, there are also significant suburban and regional concentrations, thus contesting assumptions about same-sex couples’ inner-city residential choices. Moreover, since same-sex couples were found in most Statistical Divisions, those areas below the national average cannot be considered devoid of these families, with implications for the effective operationalisation of equal rights legislation

Mapping same-sex couple family households in Australia

The map (1:1,218,987) accompanying this report is the first to depict the distribution of same-sex couple family households across Australia. The map and the report contribute to emerging scholarship combining critical geographies of sexualities with quantitative techniques and GIS in order to advance the political claims of sexual minorities. The data were collected through the 2006 Census and obtained via consultation with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. These data included the number of same-sex couple family households for all Statistical Divisions across Australia and for Statistical Sub-Divisions within metropolitan capital cities. Geographical concentrations of same-sex couple family households were determined by calculating the proportion of couple family households that were same-sex in each Statistical Division and Statistical Sub-Division, since the Census defines same-sex couples as a subset of couple family households. To visualise where the proportions fell above and below the national average, and thus where concentrations were found, these ratios were converted to location quotients using the Australian average as the denominator. The map combines different scales – Statistical Divisions and Statistical Sub-Divisions – to illustrate distributional patterns between inner-city and suburban areas, as well as between urban and regional localities, across Australia. While high concentrations are found in inner-cities, there are also significant suburban and regional concentrations, thus contesting assumptions about same-sex couples’ inner-city residential choices. Moreover, since same-sex couples were found in most Statistical Divisions, those areas below the national average cannot be considered devoid of these families, with implications for the effective operationalisation of equal rights legislation

Doing Discourse Analysis

My hope in writing this chapter is to generate enthusiasm for geographical research employing discourse analysis. My intention is to provide some advice on doing discourse analysis to facilitale the design of research. I first outline why some geographers have been inspired by this approach. I suggest how Foucauldian discourse analysis is a break from other critical methods applied to textual analysis, including content analysis, semiology, and iconography. The theoretical underpinnings of the method provided by Michel Foucault, a French poststructuralist philosopher, is a key source of difference. I therefore condense Michel Foucault\u27s contribution to discourse analysis by sketching out his key theoretical concepts and their methodological implications. To discuss the methodological implications 0f doing discourse analysis I draw upon the advice of feminist geographer Gillian Rose and linguist Norman Fairclough. I provide a list of questions to help implement a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis and illustrate their implications lor \u27doing\u27 geography by drawing upon examples. This chapter should therefore be read only as an appetiser as there are many forms of discourse analysis. The suggested readings provide a much larger selection of the theoretical and methodological possibilities

A passion for Geography flourishes at the University of Wollongong

University of Wollongong acknowledges that never has there been a more exciting or important time to do Geography. There are new global challenges, problems and anomalies emerging that need creative solutions. University of Wollongong recognised that a Geography degree provides graduates with an eclectic and interdisciplinary skill-set necessary to address these challenges. Graduates will be trained in both the skill sets of a scientist and a social scientist, alongside communication, writing, and analytical skills. UOW Geography graduates will be analytical and critical thinkers toward social, cultural and physical problems and issues. The UOW Bachelor of Geography provides graduates with a broad range of transferrable skills setting up a lifetime of career opportunities

Ethnic diversity, scarcity and drinking water: a provocation to rethink provisioning metropolitan mains water

Urban water scarcity in south-east Australia forces us to engage with how our present centralised public utilities are embedded in our everyday lives, amidst uncertain futures. In the last decades, socio-technical approaches have illustrated how the myth of endless main water supply is made possible by cultures of engineering and plumbing. To extend debates about the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to understand the processes by which Burmese refugees and migrants who lived with water scarcity pre-migration make water potable post-migration to Australia. With a focus on mapping the material, discursive, spatial and emotional relations that enable the provisioning of potable water, the paper brings into conversation Elizabeth Shove\u27s social practice theory with Elspeth Probyn\u27s emplaced formulation of subjectivity. The adaptive provisioning capacities of people whose lives are immersed in cultures of water scarcity point towards a politics and relational ethics of care underpinned by provisioning and first-person contact. To conclude, these grounded Burmese examples provide an opportunity to employ scenario thinking to imagine alternative drinking water futures for south-east Australian cities

Water, skin and touch: migrant bathing assemblages

This paper offers a contribution to cultures of urban water research through household ethnographies conducted with 16 participants who migrated from Burma to Sydney, Australia. We draw on a strand of corporeal feminism and offer the concept of bathing assemblages to interpret how watery skin encounters provide clues to how participants washed themselves in their \u27home\u27 country may persist, transform or stop. Our analysis maps how dimensions of the self (ethical, gender, class, ethnic, national faith and others) are constituted by, and generative of, the felt intensities of watery encounters through different bathing assemblages. This paper illustrates how bathing practices are shaped as much by emotional and affective intensities as by reasoned activity. We show the utility of corporeal feminism not only for theorising subjectivity, but also for household sustainability politics