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

Territory, affective intensities, and how alcohol comes to matter

In response to Jayne and Valentine's (2023) article, we build on their arguments that, like alcohol studies, many more-than-representational geographical accounts of alcohol consumption rely on a priori assumptions, ‘expressions’, and ‘facts’. To do so, we embrace their critique that our previous work fails to fully interrogate how alcohol consumption ‘transforms’, ‘shapes’, and ‘mediates’ emotions and effects. In revisiting our interpretation, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of territory to employ the interpretative strategies outlined by Jayne and Valentine of de-determination and how unfolding moments of socio-material relationships shape the affective capacity of bodies to act and sense. We illustrate how the concept of territory presents a productive analytical framework for alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness

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

Critical moments? Life transitions and energy biographies

Family and youth research has highlighted the importance of lifecourse transitions, illustrating how they can have a substantial impact on people’s everyday lives and anticipated futures. Given their apparent significance, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to life transitions – particularly unexpected ones – to explore how they can impact upon everyday energy use. This is a central concern of Energy Biographies project. The project’s qualitative longitudinal design makes an original contribution, affording a detailed view of how transitions unfold and their significance for energy demand and environmental action. Central to elucidating these issues is the concept of ‘linked lives’, recognising that people live interdependently. In this paper, we explore the accounts of three participants who experienced one or more life transitions during the course of the project, in order to consider the impacts of these events (both planned and unanticipated) on their everyday energy use and environmental actions as part of their linked lives with others

Emotional and affective geographies of sustainable community leadership: A visceral approach

In this paper, we aim to better understand what mobilises people into being and becoming named as leaders in sustainability in the places where they live. Our premise is that action for sustainability originates with passionate individuals who lead action at the local level. We present our analysis of a walking sensory ethnography conducted in 2012 undertaken as part of exploratory research on adaptation to climate change in the coastal town of Dunbar, Scotland. We sought to understand the complex, embodied and sensorial ways in which places, and our experiences of connection to places, are constituted. The starting point for our discussion is the recognition of the intricate, deeply entangled relations between the human and nonhuman world that have historically been obscured by western understandings of a pristine nature set apart from the world of human culture. Building on literature under the umbrella of “Anthropocene feminisms”, we suggest that a visceral approach as conceptualised in the work of Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2008) and Hayes-Conroy and Martin (2010) offers embodied knowledge as a radically relational view of the world that allows an entry into the ways in which the micro-scale of the body intersects with the global scale of political praxis. Our detailed discussion of one of our research participants provides an example as to how this individual came to feel connected through a shared sense of consciousness with the human and non-human. In this exploration, we found possibilities in thinking beyond the otherwise paralysing narratives of anthropogenic climate change. Our argument is that this focus brings to the fore the transformative capacity of viscera, emotional and affective responses to anthropogenic climate change, and that these are integral to hope, albeit this is a hope that needs to consider capacity and vulnerability in new ways

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