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

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

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

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

Geographically touring the eastern bloc: British geography, travel cultures and the Cold War

This paper considers the role of travel in the generation of geographical knowledge of the eastern bloc by British geographers. Based on oral history and surveys of published work, the paper examines the roles of three kinds of travel experience: individual private travels, tours via state tourist agencies, and tours by academic delegations. Examples are drawn from across the eastern bloc, including the USSR, Poland, Romania, East Germany and Albania. The relationship between travel and publication is addressed, notably within textbooks, and in the Geographical Magazine. The study argues for the extension of accounts of cultures of geographical travel, and seeks to supplement the existing historiography of Cold War geography

A bear’s biography: hybrid warfare and the more-than-human battlespace

This paper makes an intervention highlighting the animal dimension of military geographies as an overlooked yet illuminating aspect of the hybrid nature of warfare. By bringing animal geographies into dialogue with critical military geographies and with a focus on relational ethics, the processes, performance and consequences of the more-than-human nature of the battlespace are examined through a vignette of Wojtek the bear. Wojtek was a mascot, pet and officially enlisted soldier of the Polish Army in the Second World War who travelled the desert plains, helped to fight at the Battle of Monte Cassino, before being demobbed with his fellow Polish comrades in the UK, eventually ending his civilian days in Edinburgh Zoo. Although a well-known figure Wojtek and his biography have predominately been used as a means to explore the Polish soldiers’ experience of the Second World War with the result that the bear as an animal is absent. This paper, therefore, puts the bear back into his biography in order to acknowledge the role and lived experience of animals in the military. Further, it suggests that exploring the place of animals in the military requires geographers to articulate the hybrid nature of warfare and also to explore the ethico-political relations this produces

Performing the Anglo-Scottish Border: Cultural Landscapes, Heritage and Borderland Identities

Recent times have seen much reflection on the nature of the Anglo-Scottish border region; its past, present and potential future. Political concerns have rightly absorbed much of the attention, but at the same time important light has been shed on the legacy of cultural engagements and forms of interaction that might be said to perform and produce this border over time and render it particularly distinctive. A soft, internal border, the territory considered in this article is one with an ancient feudal past and a heavily conserved, preserved and, in parts, still militarized present. It is predominantly rural and characterized by large swathes of forestry, agriculture, and moorland, all of which raise issues of aesthetic and environmental, as well as social and economic sustainability. The concern in the case studies presented in this article is how, through the relational and processual perspectives of border studies and cultural landscapes, we might comprehend the over layered and sedimented histories, the nature of identities, heritage and experience of place here. I consider too the ways in which recent forms of creative practice are contributing to a wider investigation of this region and re-conceptualizing the cultural significance of the border