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1.
Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Andrea J. Nightingale 《Geoforum》2011,42(2):153-162
Current theorising in human geography draws attention to the relational emergence of space and society, challenging ideas of difference that rely on fixed identities and emphasising the importance of the everyday in the production of social inequalities. Similarly, feminist political ecology has emphasised the role of ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ in the production of subjectivities such that ideas of gender and nature arise in relation to each other. In this paper I build from these insights to explore the ways in which the embodied performance of gender, caste and other aspects of social difference collapse the distinction between the material and the symbolic. Symbolic ideas of difference are produced and expressed through embodied interactions that are firmly material. Through this kind of conceptualisation, I hope to push forward debates in geography on nature and feminist political ecology on how to understand the intersectional emergence of subjectivities, difference and socio-natures. Importantly, it is the symbolic meanings of particular spaces, practices and bodies that are (re)produced through everyday activities including forest harvesting, agricultural work, food preparation and consumption, all of which have consequences for both ecological processes and social difference. Through the performance of everyday tasks, not only are ideas of gender, caste and social difference brought into view, but the embodied nature of difference that extends beyond the body and into the spaces of everyday life is evident. I use ethnographic evidence from rural Nepal to explore the ways in which boundaries between bodies, spaces, ecologies and symbolic meanings of difference are produced and maintained relationally through practices of work and ritual. 相似文献
2.
Epistemology and conceptions of people and nature in geography 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Andrew Sayer 《Geoforum》1979,10(1):19-44
The paper attempts to integrate two major issues of debate in geography which are conventionally discussed separately: epistemology and conceptions of the relationship between people and Nature. Whichever issue we start with, two concepts are essential: intersubjectivity and labour. Knowledge of natural objects is tied to labour, which both subjects ideas to a kind of test and changes our position within Nature. All knowledge depends upon intersubjective understanding between people, but this implies that in social science, and hence in human geography, the traditional subject-object relationship should be recast as a form of communication between ‘knowing-subjects’. These relationships are not limited to some separate sphere of epistemology but are constitutive of society in Nature itself. Labour, though traditionally overlooked in geography, is the most active and transformative process in changing Nature and society, and intersubjectivity is an essential element of the irreducibly social character of human life. In this attempt, the paper outlines and justifies a historical materialist perspective through critical engagement with positivist and humanist approaches. It is then argued that false conceptions of people and Nature in geography are grounded in the structure and selfunderstanding of our own society such that a critique of these ideas becomes a critique of our society. 相似文献
3.
In Britain, concepts of `social mix' and the `balanced community' provide an example of how policy discourses have adapted to changing conceptions of the role of the state in public provision, forms of social division and inequality, and housing market transformations. The recent development of a policy agenda by the Labour government in Britain devised to promote more socially balanced neighbourhoods is not new, and its lineage may be traced back to the origins of housing and urban policy. However, the manner in which this objective has been framed and the intervention it has provoked have varied considerably over time. One is struck more by the episodic and discontinuous nature of the application of mix and balance in British policy than any sense of a coherent set of strategies pursued through changing times. This paper contrasts the place of social mix and balance in the discourses of the immediate post-war period in Britain with the renewed emphasis on such ideas in the policies of the New Labour government elected in 1997. In the first period, the claims of social mix were infused with the language of national reconstruction and the post-war settlement and the development of universal state provision. More recently, interest in social balance has arisen partly as a response to increased management difficulties and the process of `residualisation' in social housing and partly in response to new concepts of the underclass, social exclusion and social capital. The promotion of social mix and balance in contemporary policy has been shaped by notions of the underclass, social exclusion and the development of social capital in poorer communities. Policy intervention is overtly premised on the assumption that more mixed communities will promote more positive social interaction for residents, despite the lack of evidence for this claim. In practice, much of the discourse has now taken on a stronger sense of discipline and control in order to manage social housing estates. The meaning of social balance remains confused, however, and the achievement of this objective through policy intervention is likely to remain fraught with problems. 相似文献
4.
Matthew Gandy 《Geoforum》2008,39(2):561-569
This paper suggests that the idea of “nature” remains a thematic leitmotif within interdisciplinary debates because it provides a potential bridge between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. Yet the development of new kinds of interdisciplinary insights into nature-society relations risks a renewed form of philosophical naturalism within which the epistemological tensions between bio-physical and social domains become blurred. In the fields of architecture, planning and urban studies, for example, we find instances where the idea of nature has mutated into a form of “neo-organicism” in which the ideological and historical context for contrasting ideas of nature remain obscured. If we re-examine our understanding of nature, however, drawing on recent insights in ecology, evolutionary biology and other scientific developments we uncover new possibilities for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas that may avoid the crude determinisms of the past. 相似文献
5.
Lise Saugeres 《Geoforum》2000,31(4)
This paper seeks to contribute to the theme of institutional geographies by exploring how the prevailing socio-spatial order is recreated and legitimated in the ways in which public rented housing is managed and delivered by housing associations and local authorities in the UK. The public rented sector has been increasingly catering for the most vulnerable sections of the population who are dependent on state benefits and cannot afford any other form of housing. As a result, housing staffs have found themselves having to take on a welfare role which entails controlling and policing social tenants who are seen to be causing disorder in society. This paper shows how a dominant housing management discourse reproduced by policies and staff at both front-line and management levels is that of an emerging ‘underclass’ promoted by right wing politicians and the media since the 1980s. According to dominant housing management discourse the members of this underclass are disrupting traditional patriarchal and capitalist institutions and values. Tenants’ houses and gardens not conforming to culturally and socially acceptable standards of cleanliness and tidiness symbolises tenants’ lack of conformity to the prevailing institutional order. Drawing on in-depth interviews with housing officers and managers, and observations of interviews between staff and tenants in six housing organisations, this paper analyses the ways in which housing organisations seek to control social tenants through the imposition of certain norms of cleanliness over their houses and gardens. 相似文献
6.
Juval Portugali 《Geoforum》1985,16(2):227-238
Einstein's relativity and the subsequent quantum theory have split physicists into two camps. One argues that the apparent inconsistencies between the mechanistic order of Newtonian physics and the holistic properties of matter revealed by relativity and quantum theory will eventually be resolved within an overall mechanistic order. The second argues that these holistic properties are genuine and require a drastic change in our overall world view. This tension between the mechanistic and holistic conceptions of the world has always existed in the life, human and social sciences. The force behind their emergence and development was the dialectical tension created by the inconsistencies between the mechanistic-Cartesian order, which dominated science, and the holistic properties which are apparent in the domains of life and human society. This recent split among physicists thus creates a new reality, in which the tension between the holistic and mechanistic conceptions of the world is no longer a tension between the scientific natural sciences and the non-scientific ‘humanities’, but rather the tension of science as a whole. The paper discusses the development of these parallel currents in the natural and social sciences and explores their implications. 相似文献
7.
Natural resource investment in the mining sector is often mediated through conflicts over rent distribution between corporate capital and landowner states. Recent rounds of neoliberal policy promoted by the World Bank have highlighted the need for landowner states to offer incentives in order to attract “high risk” capital investment. In Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, countries have been pushed to offer attractive fiscal terms to capital, thereby lowering the proportion traditionally called rent. This paper examines how the concept of “risk” has been mobilized to legitimate such skewed distributional arrangements. While certain conceptions of social and ecological “risk” have been prevalent in political and social theoretic discourse on mining, such focus elides the overwhelming contemporary power of our notion of “neoliberal risk” – or the financial/market risks – in actually setting the distributional terms of mineral investment. We illustrate our argument by examining the nexus of World Bank mining policy promotion and Tanzanian policy in the late 1990s meant to attract foreign direct investment in gold production. In closing, we suggest that just as “risk” is used to legitimate attractive fiscal terms for investment, recent events highlight how skewed distribution of benefits may set into motion risks that corporate capital had not bargained for. 相似文献
8.
Clarence J. Glacken 《GeoJournal》1992,26(2):103-111
This paper explores some of the fundamental ideas which have shaped Western attitudes toward the natural world. Four vital sets of ideas about nature and humanity, still current today, are examined: the relationship of the human race to other forms of life; the study of the interrelationships in the natural world; the transformation of nature by human agency; and subjective, emotional and aesthetic reactions to nature. Most of these ideas, though transformed throughout human history, have their roots in the classical world. Both classical and biblical conceptions were hospitable to an anthropocentric view of the role of human beings with regard to nature. The broader conception of the human race as a custodian of other forms of life has been a powerful ingredient in modern movements for conservation. Since about the middle of the 18th century, there has been increasing concern with the interrelationships in nature, and here two developments can be noted: the persistent idea of man as a geographic agent and the realization that human transformations of nature have provoked unforeseen and often unintended changes. 相似文献
9.
Ellen Hostetter 《GeoJournal》2010,75(3):283-298
This paper analyzes racialization—the social construction of ‘race’ as a normative dimension of everyday life—and shows that
emotion plays a central role in this process. My focus is the representation of post-World War II public housing, a key site
of white-black racialization in the United States. Representations of filth, decay, and danger separate African-Americans
from mainstream, white society as disturbingly different. I argue that this particular representation carries heavy emotional
value, specifically that of disgust and fear. It is disgust and fear that racializes this landscape, giving meaning and force
to an ideology that views African–Americans as inherently inferior to whites. Policy is framed by these emotions, impacting
decisions made about public housing. I explore these ideas through contemporary representations of public housing by federal
officials in Washington, DC and by newspapers in Charlotte, North Carolina as well as the federal program HOPE VI. 相似文献
10.
11.
《Geoforum》2016
Labour geography foregrounds the role of workers in shaping geographies of work by paying attention to the larger actions of labour in response to the capital and state. It however pays less attention to the everyday geographies of labour and the complexities of the ‘social being’ in trying to understand workers motivations and responses. This review argues for labour geography to look beyond the factory gates to understand the nuanced politics of labour as relations get ‘reworked’ within a patriarchal-capitalist society. It argues for paying close attention to the life stories and experiences of workers, to create linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside, without losing sight of the larger struggles of labour and global processes, to develop a more grounded understanding of worker’s agency and actions. 相似文献
12.
Joni Virkkunen 《GeoJournal》1999,48(2):83-89
Identity has become one of the core concepts of political geography. This reflects the wide recognition of a post-structural conception of society and space, as well as the acknowledgement of the political character of identity. The present article focuses on the politics of identity, and discusses the politicized forms of identity as related to the Soviet state building policies and the Estonian spaces of resistance. It will be argued that neither identity nor the political demand in Soviet Estonia can be viewed in isolation from their historical and social contexts. Both Soviet state politics and the Estonian spaces of resistance reflected the prevailing conceptions of past and the contemporary political realities. This article examines those preconceptions of the political and territorial development in Soviet Estonia, and also illustrates the interdependent character of state politics and non-state activism. The first part of the article concentrates on the Soviet state building practices – the use of power, symbols, education – and the second part examines the various forms of non-state activism of Estonians. 相似文献
13.
Domesticating neo-liberalism: Everyday lives and the geographies of post-socialist transformations 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
This paper examines the ways in which neo-liberalism is both constructed and made ‘more tolerable’ through everyday practices and livelihoods in post-socialist cities. It argues that existing conceptualisations of neo-liberalism centre too fully on the role of powerful global forces and institutions in constructing marketisation processes, and consequently neglect the ways in which everyday lives are embroiled in the formation of neo-liberal worlds. Through an exploration of the experience of neo-liberalism in the Slovak Republic and drawing upon research with households in one large housing estate in Bratislava, the paper examines the ways in which everyday lives construct neo-liberal possibilities in the attempt to make them ‘more tolerable’. In particular, the paper explores the postponement of the future by some members of the middle-aged generation failing to reap the benefits of economic reform, the role of economic practices ‘outside’ of market-based capitalist relations in constructing engagements with the formal market, and the role of domestic food production in sustaining household networks and social reproduction for some of the most marginal households in the context of low-wage employment and state benefit reductions. 相似文献
14.
Fadzilah Majid-Cooke 《Geoforum》1995,26(4):445-458
Despite its lack of success in countries across the globe, scientific or sustained yield forestry remains the dominant discourse in tropical forestry. The main concern of this paper is to provide a conceptualisation of the inherent technological difficulties in sustained yield technology. In doing so, the paper goes to the heart of the debate surrounding the construction of scientific knowledge and the nature of technological development. The examples used are from Peninsular Malaysia and the East Malaysian state of Sarawak. However, the issue of science and the politics of scientific knowledge production, as well as the contingent nature of technological development, have more general applicability. Moreover, the examples from Malaysia may be equally useful in countries that are similarly mired, in coping with the effects of forest resource ‘development’. Our contention in this paper is that sustained yield categories, such as the annual allowable cut, emerge from a whole network of assumptions and negotiations that are both social and technical. Since scientific categories are often under-determined, they are subject to contestation. The paper ends by outlining the way in which sustained yield knowledge claims are being contested by forces encapsulated under the umbrella of sustainable forest management. 相似文献
15.
Stefania Abakerli 《Geoforum》2001,32(4)
More than a strategy for environmental conservation, protected area paradigm has represented a specific conception of nature–society relationship. Originated in a context of capitalist consolidation, rapid urbanisation and frontier development in the US, this paradigm has given rise to a ‘politically viable rationale' in which utilitarian use of natural resources by tourism development would ensure nature preservation. This political rationality has deeply influenced environmental policies in developing countries, fostering a paradoxical model in the history of nature preservation. It also has brought into play diverse interests that have shifted patterns of local nature–society interaction, configuring a complex politicised environment. Established in ‘isolated' regions, protected areas have been implemented often by top–down approaches, disrupting resident peoples' livelihoods strategies through conflicts over the control of natural resources. Understanding the implications of development and conservation policies on resident peoples' livelihoods may represent a starting point for an integrated developmental conservation policy towards the promotion of sustainable livelihoods in environmentally sensitive regions in developing countries. These issues are analysed in the region of the Lençois Maranhenses National Park in Brazil. This paper argues that the context facing the region reveals a standardised conservationist paradigm marked by the absence of wider ecological criteria informing nature protection and a disregard for the strengthening of sustainability in existent socio-economic dynamics. The regional development and conservation policies have not only promoted tensions between resident peoples' livelihoods and the protected area paradigm, but also reinforced the legitimisation of social exclusion and environmental disruption under the prevalent rhetoric of nature protection and tourism development. 相似文献
16.
《Geoforum》2017
Over the past few decades there has been a turn toward ‘the everyday’ in the social sciences and humanities. For some authors, this turn is about making the everyday a new repository of authority of some sort, political, social, cultural or otherwise. For others, however, any turn toward the everyday interrupts any such evaluation. Focusing upon Stanley Cavell and the philosophical lineage that he continues from Emerson, Nietzsche, Thoreau and Wittgenstein, this paper examines Cavell’s interest in the menace and power of scepticism as key to understanding the everyday as a lived experience. As an introduction to this particular part of Cavell’s work for many Geographers, the paper puts Cavell in relation to more familiar approaches to the everyday, including de Certeau, critical Human Geography, non-representational theory, affect theory, psychoanalysis and pragmatism. 相似文献
17.
《Geoforum》2015
The difference between bank-based and market-based financial systems is a longstanding and influential conceptual staple of the interdisciplinary literature on finance. This dualistic model has been subjected to wide-ranging critiques over the past decade. Yet, while those critiques productively problematize the relationship between banks and markets presumed by the model, they fail to address the underlying distinction between banks and markets that is also presumed by the model. This article questions that distinction. It argues that financial markets are best understood not as places or platforms where banks and other financial actors come to interact – and thus as essentially separate from banks – but, instead, as, in large part, their interaction; as constituted by it. The article further argues for the political as well as scholarly importance of reconfiguring our ideas of what financial markets are. The idea of markets as separate, reified phenomena not only underpins the scholarly model of bank- and market-based financial systems – it does political work in the wider world, with the appeal to financial markets or, more nebulously, “the market” to rationalize and justify political decision-making having become a commonplace of contemporary public policy discourse. 相似文献
18.
On September 16th, 2005 the United States began restricting the entry of commodities shipped from abroad in wood packaging materials that do not conform to phytosanitation measures meant to prevent the spread of pests and pathogens. This action results from expensive lessons learned as global commerce facilitates pandemics like Dutch elm disease. Marxist political ecology is well suited to investigate such scenarios with its emphasis on the social production of nature within accumulation regimes. Some scholars contend, however, that Marxist accounts of the contradictions that result from nature’s commodification relegate nonhuman organisms to an apolitical role in environmental transformation while reinforcing the nature/society dichotomy. Often viewed as antithetical to Marxism, actor-network theory or ANT emphasizes the ability of actants (both human and nonhuman) to enroll other actants into heterogeneous assemblages or networks. Thus, it is claimed that nonhuman organisms can be attributed ontological status in processes of environmental change, much like their human counterparts. Despite this apparent theoretical discord, political ecologists are increasingly integrating aspects of both Marx and ANT into their analyses. But a more explicit articulation of the ontological basis and epistemic import of theoretical synthesis is warranted. This paper therefore prioritizes and links the ontological status of labor in both of these theories in order to expand the definition of urban environmental politics to include the role of nonhuman organisms. By demonstrating the laboring capacity of Dutch elm disease within the networks of urban political economy, the epistemology of environmental politics is thus expanded. 相似文献
19.
论述了自然变异及自然灾害与人类社会的互馈关系 ,探讨了社会条件控制下自然灾害的阶段性特点 ,提出了开展灾害社会学研究的使命。认为自然变异及自然灾害破坏人类社会的健康发展 ,但人类社会并不是完全被动的应付自然变异和自然灾害 ,而是对自然变异及自然灾害作出双向反响。一方面 ,采取科学的社会行为 ,积极抑制灾害活动 ,减轻自然灾害破坏损失 ;另一方面因政治腐败 ,纲纪松弛 ,经济衰退 ,社会混乱 ,或违背自然规律 ,盲目的社会经济活动 ,导致天灾与人祸并行 ,不仅加剧自然灾害 ,甚至导致许多全球性重大环境问题 ,对人类社会造成广泛而深远的影响。自然灾害不仅受自然条件控制 ,而且受人类社会的强烈影响 ,因此自然灾害除伴随自然条件发生复杂的周期性变化外 ,还伴随社会条件发生阶段性变化。自然灾害是一种自然社会现象 ,而且随着人类社会的持续发展 ,自然灾害的社会性越来越强烈。因此 ,在进一步加强灾害的自然科学研究的同时 ,开展社会学研究 ,对于发展灾害理论以及促进减灾事业的发展是十分必要的。 相似文献
20.
The issue of the social geographical dimensions of climate change is timely and important. This paper sets out to explore one example of this: how people living in the Pacific who are most at risk of being made landless by climate change are portrayed in policy discourse, and how high-level international representatives of Pacific nations have responded to these portrayals. At the heart of this is contention over the portrayal of Pacific Island peoples as ‘climate refugees’. This paper analyses a number of documents since the 1980s, largely from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that deploy the identity construct of ‘climate refugees’. Fieldwork undertaken at the United Nations in New York in 2004 also enabled seven interviews with national ambassadors representing Pacific small island states. Interviews revealed how Pacific ambassadors have responded to the category of ‘climate refugees’, and positioned themselves in the discursive field surrounding the climate change debate. A poststructuralist framework, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of discourse and subject categories provided a means to critically scrutinise and better understand how people from Pacific countries are imagined in the wider, global geopolitical arena, but crucially, how leaders from these nations also construct themselves in relation to climate change and its associated impacts. 相似文献