Gendered spaces and practice,relationality, emotion and affect at the Marian shrine of Ta Pinu, Gozo, Malta

In this chapter the case study of Ta’ Pinu, Gozo, a site of pilgrimage for Marian devotion and the national shrine of Malta, is analysed as a gendered assemblage and an example of the intersection of gender and religion, with attention to the spatial and power relations associated with these flows and processes. Islands have functioned as places of spiritual retreat and subsequent pilgrimage throughout the history of the Christian faith, the liminal character of their coastal landscapes and environments creating particular intertwinings of experience and spiritual practice; yet, whilst this experiential nexus may be extraordinary for visitors, it is the everyday context of daily life for inhabitants (see Maddrell 2011, 2013, Maddrell and della Dora 2013, Maddrell et al 2015, Maddrell and Scriven (forthcoming)). Here my attention is turned to the island of Gozo in Malta, analysing the Roman Catholic shrine of Ta’ Pinu, in order to offer a spatial perspective on gender and religion within this specific context and arena. Whilst the journeys to this island shrine can have significance, drawing on feminist theories of embodiment, my focus here is less on the journey per se and more on the spaces and practices of religious performance and related geographies of spiritual encounter, emotion and affect, with particular attention to the gendered dimensions of these practices at Ta’ Pinu. This will be set within the wider context of an overarching analysis of faith practices as embodied in everyday spaces and practices, reflecting a need for more scholarly attention to examining those pilgrimages which are embedded in everyday practice rather than a stand-alone extraordinary event (Maddrell 2013). It is hoped that this meshing of perspectives and themes will yield fresh understanding of the specific place-time dynamics of gender and religion at Ta’ Pinu, and in turn contribute to a spiritually-inflected understanding of gendered discourses and practices. Before turning to the core discussion, Marian veneration as a form of pilgrimage practice and the history of the Ta’ Pinu shrine are briefly outlined, and fieldwork methodologies explained

‘Praying the Keeills'. Rhythm, meaning and experience on pilgrimage journeys in the Isle of Man.

This paper explores the concept of ‘the travelling being’ through the lens of pilgrimage walks inthe Isle of Man in the British Isles. Focusing on pilgrimage offers a particular spiritually-inflectedperspective on the experience of travel and associated meaning-making. The pilgrimage walksstudied centre on the sites of small sixth to twelfth century chapels, known as keeills, which arescattered across the Manx landscape, and provide a focus for ecumenical reflection and celebrationof Celtic Christian heritage. Participants’ experience of two different forms of pilgrimage walks areanalysed using qualitative techniques, with reference to embodied and affective experience, mobilities,rhythm, meaning-making and belief. While all participants appreciated the experiences of walkingin the landscape, companionship, heritage expertise, and time-space for reflection, individual senseof ‘journey’ and experience, including a sense of the onward journey or what was ‘taken home’,was deeply inflected by the presence or absence of belief. Pilgrimage narratives offer insight to themeanings ascribed to and derived from the experience of spiritually inflected mobilities and rhythms,as well as the arrhythmia pilgrimage can represent relative to secular worldviews, and the arrhythmianon-believers may experience and negotiate when participating in pilgrimage walks

To read or not to read? The politics of overlooking gender in the geographical canon

Wherever there is an established ‘canon’ within an established scholarly arena, this is near universally dominated by texts written by men. Whilst historical contextual reasons may account for the gendering of such knowledge production in relation to publications dating from the nineteenth and preceding centuries, one has to ask why this has persisted in an era of equal access to education and academia in the twentieth century. Why is women’s work, highly influential in its day, overlooked in subsequent histories of the discipline and therefore marginalised in discussions of key works? These questions are particularly pertinent to any notion of a geographical canon, given the subject’s relatively late arrival as a degree award in the UK from 1917 onwards. This paper draws on an analysis of the significance of lineage, reviewing, reputation and genre in the contextualised production and reception of selected work to explore the merits and demerits of a geographical canon e and the implications for gendered geographical knowledge. It goes on to suggest i) a more inclusive and dialogic relational approach to understanding past and present geographical work based on Kilcup’s notion of the ‘soft canon’; ii) a broadening of the cast and range of outputs considered ‘influential’; and iii) encourages greater critical reflection on contemporary practices of canonization within sub-disciplines

Mapping grief: a conceptual framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement, mourning and remembrance

This paper highlights the significance of the spatial dimensions of the universal human phenomena of bereavement. Grief, mourning and remembrance are experienced in and mapped upon (i) physical spaces, including the public and private arenas of everyday life; (ii) the embodied-psychological spaces of the interdependent and co-producing body-mind and (iii) the virtual spaces of digital technology, religious-spiritual beliefs and non-place-based community. Culturally inflected, dynamic emotional-affective maps of grief can be identified, as a form of deep-mapping,which reflect the ways in which relationality to particular spaces and places is inflected by bereavement, mourning and remembrance. Individual’s emotional-affective cartographies can intersect, overlap, or conflict with, others’ maps, with social and political consequences. The conceptual framework outlined here is illustrated by a schematic representation of grief maps. This framework provides geographical scholars with a lens on the dynamic assemblage of self-body-place-society that constitutes culturally inflected individual and shared everyday grief maps, providing insight to relational spaces, emotional-affective geographies and therapeutic environments. The reflexive identification of such maps represents a potential resource for the bereaved and their therapeutic counsellors, facilitating the identification of places which evoke anguish or comfort etc. and which might be deemed emotionally ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ at particular junctures

Book review: By northern lights: on the making of geography in Sweden. By Anne Buttimer and Tom Mels. Basingstoke: Ashgate 2006. ISBN 0-7546-4814-1

283 Book reviewBy northern lights: on the making of geography in Sweden. By Anne Buttimer and Tom Mels. Basingstoke: Ashgate. 2006. 214pp. £xx cloth. ISBN: 0—7546—4814—1 cloth SAGE Publications, Inc.2008DOI: 10.1177/14744740080150020804 AvrilMaddrell Oxford Brookes University This book follows on conceptually and in subject matter from Buttimer's Geography and the human spirit (1993) and Geographers of Norden (1988) co-edited with Torsten Hagerstrand. The volume explores the making of Swedish geography, emphasizing geography as socially constructed knowledges. Although principally an analysis of the historical development of Geography in Sweden, By northern Lights draws on the interviews of the International Dialogue Project 1978–88, notably in the interview with Hagerstrand constituting Chapter Six. This interview, in the spirit of the Dialogue Project brings the (albeit still mediated) personal– professional voice of the geographer rather than their authorial or pedagogic voice to the history of geography. Buttimer brought oral history to the history of geography, long before it was fashionable, and this tradition is continued here. Many will find insight to Hagerstrand's work through this interview and it provides a useful resource in teaching the development of geographical thought – as does the whole book. The exploration of personal life-careers through biography (such as those of Edgar Kant, W. William-Olsson and Gerd Enquist) is a rich vein running throughout the text, linked in turn to wider intellectual, social and polit- ical milieu within and beyond geography. Conceptually, changes in the history of Swedish geography are explained using Buttimer's threefold conceptual frameworks of meaning, metaphor and milieu and phoenix, faust and narcissus. Although explained here, a reader unfamiliar with these ideas may find it helpful to read Buttimer's earlier work first. However, once grasped, these analytical frameworks are applied to effect in this volume in the nuanced exploration of institutional and individual accounts of geography (although the poor text quality on some of the tables mapping these different elements is unfortunate). Buttimer and Mels provide the historian of geographical ideas and practices with a rich source of contextual studies at an institutional and national 284 level, all of which combines to shed light on particular matrices of influence that produced a specifically Swedish expression of geography and Empire, home and regional studies, geog- raphy and social concern, applied geography and the separation of physical and human geog- raphy. This then provides the international reader with an opportunity to place famous Swedish developments such as the quantitative group at Lund within the broader context of Swedish geography, as well as an opportunity to learn about other geographical events and trends less well known to the Anglo-American reader at least. One novel and fascinating ele- ment is the inclusion of all Swedish doctoral dissertations 1884–2000 in Appendix A, pro- viding an accessible data set that can be analysed in many ways, not least in showing the trends in themes and methodologies in Swedish geography as well as the strong applied route for geographical knowledge. Overall, By northern Lights provides a detailed account of the history of Swedish geography, which has been long-overdue and should long stand as a reference not only on geography in Sweden but the practice of the historiography of geography

‘Praying the Keeills’: rhythm, meaning and experience on pilgrimage journeys in the Isle of Man

This paper explores the concept of ‘the travelling being’ through the lens of pilgrimage walks in the Isle of Man in the British Isles. Focusing on pilgrimage offers a particular spiritually-inflected perspective on the experience of travel and associated meaning-making. The pilgrimage walks studied centre on the sites of small sixth to twelfth century chapels, known as keeills, which are scattered across the Manx landscape, and provide a focus for ecumenical reflection and celebration of Celtic Christian heritage. Participants’ experience of two different forms of pilgrimage walks are analysed using qualitative techniques, with reference to embodied and affective experience, mobilities, rhythm, meaning-making and belief. While all participants appreciated the experiences of walking in the landscape, companionship, heritage expertise, and time-space for reflection, individual sense of ‘journey’ and experience, including a sense of the onward journey or what was ‘taken home’, was deeply inflected by the presence or absence of belief. Pilgrimage narratives offer insight to the meanings ascribed to and derived from the experience of spiritually inflected mobilities and rhythms, as well as the arrhythmia pilgrimage can represent relative to secular worldviews, and the arrhythmia non-believers may experience and negotiate when participating in pilgrimage walks

Educating

This chapter considers the nature of what it is to ‘educate geographically’, how this has developed historically, its impact on students’ world views and experiences, and what key challenges and opportunities face contemporary geographical education. These questions will be discussed in relation to signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005) and an exploration of the following key themes: the relationship between viewing the world and world view; fieldwork and geographical knowledge, skills and praxis; implications of Information and Communications Technology for the production and consumption of geographic knowledge; and whether an ‘authentic’ geographical education can prepare graduates for living responsibly in a (super)complex world (Barnett, 2000). We contextualise these themes in the discipline’s intellectual heritage, but we also relate them to constraints imposed by evolving government policies. We are aware that we offer an inevitably selective agenda, and we are equally conscious that the discussion is driven by Anglo-American literature, practices and policies, which marginalises geographical work in other languages (Garcia-Ramon, 2003). We have endeavoured, nevertheless, to draw on a range of international examples and studies. In addressing the issues, we include a range of undergraduate and postgraduate student views from our own department, in order to gain some insight into what it is to study geography today and how contemporary students imagine, think and act geographically. Universities have recently been defined as ‘a home for attempts to extend and deepen human understanding in ways which are, simultaneously, disciplined and illimitable’ (Collini, 2012). The university setting is an important focus of discussion here, but it would be a mistake to confine consideration of educational experience to universities, or even periods or spaces of formal study. Education is recognised increasingly as a lifelong endeavour which takes place in many contexts, such as the home, commune, street, social club, workplace and time-space of travel

‘It was magical’: intersections of pilgrimage, nature, gender and enchantment as a potential bridge to environmental action in the Anthropocene

Centring on embodiment, gendered eco-spiritual responses to nature, enchantment and environmental crises in the Anthropocene, this paper explores engagement with nature as a spiritual experience and resource through ‘Celtic’ Christian prayer walks in the Isle of Man. Web-based and printed materials for the walks are analysed for references to nature and environmental responsibility, and the complexities of personal, gendered and theological relation to nature and the environment are explored through participants’ accounts. The analysis is attentive to participants professing Christian faith and institutional affiliation as well as those without affiliation or faith and to their gendered experience. Themes identified include nature-inspired ‘Celtic’ spirituality; personal relation to the non-human (the divine, nature and nature-as-divine); the landscape as a liminal ‘thin place’; and social and environmental responsibility. The paper concludes by signalling the potential for bridging between pilgrimage-centred enchantment and eco-spirituality in order to mobilise engagement with and for the environment in the Anthropocene, including environmental conservation activities, lobbying or protest. Whilst eschewing gendered stereotypes, empirical findings evidence gendered patterns of engagement and responses to different expressions of spirituality. Attention to these differences could facilitate the engaging and mobilising of different cohorts of pilgrims with environmental agendas, inspiring personal and collective environmental action

Smart gendered mobilities and lessons for gendered smart mobilities: economic migrants in Bristol, UK

This chapter explores contemporary 'smart' practices of economic migrants and smart cities into dialogue, drawing on insights from historical and contemporary gendered strategies for smart mobilities