Reviewed by Cheryl Cowdy Crawford, York University

“Whether joyful, heartbreaking or numbing, emotion has the power to transform the shape of our lives, expanding or contracting our horizons, creating new fissures or fixtures we never expected to find. But how do we articulate and negotiate such complex emotional landscapes?”

- Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith, “Introduction: Geography’s ‘Emotional Turn’,” Emotional Geographies, 1.

For this contract faculty member of York University, the question with which Davidson et. al. begin their introduction to the collection of essays in Emotional Geographies has had a particularly poignant relevance. The failure to negotiate a contract between my union and my employer has moved me from the front of the lecture hall to the “Northwest Gate,” the barren reaches of a northern parking lot on the edge of my suburban Toronto campus. For 85 days, I have been trying to write this review, thinking about the emotional relationality of people and places when I return home from the fraught space that has become my new emotional landscape: the picket line.

Never has the insecurity of my employment and status been so evident as it is on the physical fringes of the university campus with which I am affiliated, however casually or contractually. Never have I experienced so keenly and viscerally the complexities of the emotional landscapes I inhabit. In this space, I am suddenly an outsider, aware of the odd mixture of emotions I experience: illegitimacy, guilt, loneliness, alienation, disappointment, fear. But also solidarity with, and commitment to, the unusual mix of people who have become my new intellectual and emotional community, for the strike has brought together on the picket line at Northwest Gate three academic departments—English, Environmental Studies, and Kinesiology—who would rarely mix under usual circumstances.

It is interdisciplinarity at its finest, and the experience reminds me, as Davidson, Bondi and Smith do in their introduction to Emotional Geographies, that emotions have a place in the working lives of academics. Or, to put it more emphatically, “Clearly, our emotions matter” (1). Spatial affect is, in the essays included in the collection, recognised as materially important, not simply to the discipline of geography, but to other fields of academic study as well. Indeed, the editors express a desire to undermine rigid “disciplinary boundaries” (3). Contributors to the collection seek alternative perspectives in our understanding of the spatiality and temporality of emotions that will resonate with scholars as varied as our picket line, particularly those who are interested in the intersections of space, culture, and affect (3). While the editors define theirs as a “spatially-engaged approach to the study of emotions” in their introduction, it is quite evident that the text functions also as an emotionally-engaged approach to the study of space.

I must acknowledge that I am looking for something quite specific each evening when I return home – exhausted, numb, and chilled to the bone – and pick up this book, filled with an emotion that almost feels like hope. Ways to articulate and negotiate my relationship with the spaces and people of my intellectual community. An understanding of the “fissures,” in these relationships, ruptures which have been made effable by the change in the part of the landscape I can now inhabit. This is what I am seeking.

Admittedly, not all of the chapters in Emotional Geographies respond to the particularities of my emotional and research demands. As the editors explain, the volume is organised around three core themes: “the location of emotions in bodies and places, the emotional relationality of people and environments, and representations of emotional geographies” (3). In section one, “Locating Emotion,” each chapter explores the corporeality of emotions, including how dying, healing, and aging bodies intersect with place. Most intriguing are the chapters on travel, such as Jennie Germann Molz’s “Guilty Pleasures of the Golden Arches,” a study of emotional responses to McDonald’s restaurants in narratives of travel, and John Urry’s “The Place of Emotions within Place.” I appreciate Molz’s piece for its recognition of emotional ambivalence in our experiences of emotional landscapes, while Urry leaves me wondering if my desire to experience place meaningfully will always be hopelessly unrequited.

[Image: Gavan Watson, some rights reserved]

It is most obviously the second theme that speaks most to my emotional and spatial experiences of a labour dispute. Chapters in Section Two, “Relating Emotion,” each perform in different ways analyses of distinctive “emotional terrains,” to quote Hester Parr, Chris Philo and Nicola Burns, authors of chapter seven’s study of the emotional geographies of the Scottish Highlands. Something in their recognition of “the realities, processes and consequences of emotional repression as it happens in a distinctive geographical setting” rings true for me, especially now, as I return to this review in the aftermath of the strike at York (99). Their spatialisation of repression encourages readers to consider the ways emotional terrains—whether remote rural regions or the landscapes of educational institutions—may have trouble allowing emotions to matter, particularly when “emotional displays” are disruptive (87). (Repression is the most pragmatic of returns to the business of education, and so the evidence of the ways disruptive emotional displays marked the emotional terrain at York have long been removed, existing now only in photographs like the one above). Other chapters in this section, particularly David Conradson’s “Freedom, Space and Perspective: Moving Encounters with Other Ecologies” pose interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between self and landscape. “What might it mean” Conradson ponders, “to conceptualise the engagement between the self and landscape as a relational encounter”? (103) The essay lucidly draws on notions of affect from psychoanalysis and human geography to inform its analysis of people’s encounters with an English landscape, offering a unique perspective for those interested in eco-criticism.

As a scholar interested in representations of suburban space in literary texts, the latter section, “Representing Emotion,” is also of particular interest to me. Most compelling here are Deborah Thien’s chapter “Intimate Distances: Considering Questions of ‘Us’” and Owain Jones’ “An Ecology of Emotion, Memory, Self and Landscape.” Thien challenges in surprising ways some of my pre-conceived notions about the ethical relationship between intimacy and space, calling upon readers to reconsider the value of distance, difference and alterity when intimacy is examined as a “spatial affair.” I appreciate her work for its political commitment; likewise Jones, who reminds us that “emotions are intensely political, gendered, and spatially articulated” (207).

The collection ends appropriately and effectively with Liz Bondi’s “The Place of Emotions in Research,” which supplements the introduction’s defense of geography’s “emotional turn,” insisting on a more concerted appreciation of emotion in research practice. While she focuses on the necessity of acknowledging the emotional dimensions of scientific research in particular, scholars of all disciplines will certainly benefit from Bondi’s reminder that “our feeling states and our thinking are closely intertwined” (236). What strikes me most is Bondi’s assertion that it is quite possible to acknowledge our emotional and rational responses to research critically, and thus to sidestep participation in a more gratuitous “‘emotionalisation’ of culture” (237). Overall, Emotional Geographies elegantly succeeds in demonstrating just how critical participation in an emotionally- and rationally-engaged collaboration might look. It occurs to me that perhaps I have found something I didn’t know I was looking for during the process of preparing this review, which is a permission of sorts. Permission to recognize the place of my untidy emotions in all the colliding facets of my professional life. For this, I am most appreciative.

Datamasher maps US state-level statistics from the US census and other sources.  An example is their map of fast-food restaurants versus obesity rates (above).  Sometimes these are revealing, sometimes not, and sometimes their statistical reliability may not be good due to sample sizes.  Makes a nice map, however.

Rhizalabs’ FluTracker also does a global mapping of H1N1 influenza using Google:

I find myself increasingly asking similar questions, and given how many recent posts have been about new high-tech cities, I thought I could balance things out by pointing readers to Justin Partyka’s gorgeous photos of rural people and places in England.

For his collection The East Anglians, Partyka writes:

“For the last nine years I have been traveling the back roads of rural East Anglia, passing down drove and lane, track and way. On my journeys I discovered the remnants of the agrarian community that was once widespread throughout this region. For most people this is a world that no longer exists. It is a place where traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon, and the identity of the people is intimately shaped by the landscape on which they live and work. Small-time farmers, reed cutters and rabbit catchers, these are the East Anglians – the forgotten people of the flatlands who continue to work the land because the need to is in their blood.”

“Central to an agrarian culture is the idea of land: not just working the land, living on the land, and owning the land (all which are important) – but that much deeper concept of being part of the land; the process of it becoming both physically and psychologically engrained in the human experience. It is impossible to escape the presence of the landscape. It creeps from the fields into the home. It enters through an open window, or a crack under the door; engrained in the palm of a hand, or on the sole of a boot. Leeks sprout from the curtains and the table top is fenland peat. The agrarian farmers I have come to know are so deeply rooted to the land, it is as if they have grown up out of the soil like a tree. Such an intimate relationship comes from what the rural writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry, describes as “knowledge in place for a long time.”

“To enter into the agrarian world of the East Anglians’ is to experience a rural culture that has a direct lineage extending back to the region’s peasant farmers of the early Middle Ages. The agrarian farmer always has one foot firmly planted in the past. The old ways are proven to work and can therefore be relied upon. Everything is visibly engrained with history. Buildings are often cobbled together and are a ramshackle mix of wood, tin, and stone. And the agricultural machinery is a patchwork of rust, mud, and oil stains in which the past is embedded.”

“The agrarian farmer knows in fine detail the histories and biographies of his local landscape. After years of familiarity with the land he knows what is the best cycle of crop rotation on any particular field, where it lies wet in winter, and how best to plough, sow, hoe, and harvest that field to reap the best from it. Unaided by a map, he can negotiate the complex network of local droves and tracks by day and night, and walk the fields and woodlands, fen and marsh equally so. Inside the agrarian mind are the local wind patterns and river currents; along with the life stories of the local inhabitants, wildlife habitats, and tree and plant species past and present. I have been told of farmers who have come and gone, from what direction the fox will come to steal a chicken, and who planted a particular oak tree and when.”

“But during the last sixty years an agrarian way of life has become increasingly irrelevant in a modern society, and the East Anglians find themselves living on the margins. Most of the small family farms in East Anglia are now gone, while the fields of agribusiness have grown bigger, swallowing up the landscape as they go. The result is the depopulation of the rural landscape, and with it the loss of the knowledge of local place and the traditional skills of working the land that are so important to an agrarian culture. As one old-time farmer said to me, “It’s just one big tractor now and a thousand acres. There’s nobody on the land today.” “But” he continued, “there will always be those that straggle on – the awkward ones who remain.”

“I have spent many hours in the fields, patiently watching how man and the landscape intimately shape each other. If I am looking closely, occasionally I am offered a glimpse into the mystery of this ancient relationship. It is a fleeting moment; I click the shutter; and I wait…”

via Design Observer

[Bogotá City Blues by Coso Blues]

Wired UK reports on the digital city. Here are some utopian, critical and imaginary highlights:

Digital Cities: ‘Sense-able’ urban design
By Carlo Ratti

“By receiving real-time information, appropriately visualised and disseminated, citizens themselves can become distributed intelligent actuators, who pursue their individual interests in co-operation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors on the urban scene. Processing urban information captured in real time and making it publicly accessible can enable people to make better decisions about the use of urban resources, mobility and social interaction. This feedback loop of digital sensing and processing can begin to influence various complex and dynamic aspects of the city, improving the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the places we inhabit.”

Digital Cities: Words on the street
By Adam Greenfield

“[T]he technologies that the networked city relies upon remain opaque, even to those exposed to them daily. In fact, it’s hard to be critical and make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us … In the networked city, therefore, the pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening up these occult systems, explaining their implications to the people whose neighbourhoods, choices and lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists. If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?”

Digital Cities: London after the great 2047 flu outbreak
By Geoff Manaugh

“Public squares were rebuilt using data taken from air-circulation studies and the physics of the human cough. The distance a sneeze could travel took on architectural form. The congestion charge was applied to pedestrians, keeping transmissibility to a minimum; you could cross from borough to borough only with the written consent of a GP. Movement was controlled; public gatherings of people with incompatible immunities were made illegal; even the floorplans of flats and houses were carefully reshaped in accordance with medical regulations. Being at home felt like quarantine (and often, it was: if your daily skin tests didn’t look so good, you’d find your front door temporarily sealed). It was cold; some said dystopian. Until the prescription districts started to appear.”

[The City by lepiaf.geo]

Same day update: Also worth checking out are Ben Hammersley’s comments on this and related things.

Reviewed by Laura Murphy, University of Alberta

Connecting theory with lived experience can be challenging – especially when writing in resistance to hegemony. However, by drawing upon her own embodied and marginalized struggles, Maria Lugones negotiates this tension through relation to social spaces in her collection “Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes.” Lugones’ book is a compilation of her own essays, each of which are located on a continuum of theory and practical resistances. By example, her first few essays hinge on the theoretical with the latter reaching toward to discourse on concrete coalition building and purposeful transgression of spaces in the periphery. By employing a strategy of praxis throughout many of her writings, Lugones avoids “[thinking] what I won’t practice” while maintaining a “commitment against utopianism” (p. 5). Specifically, by embracing a poststructuralist-feminist lens, Lugones enables a decontexualization of hegemonic power by focusing on the following key themes: Trespassing, Traveling, Worlds and Playfulness (pgs. 8-30).

The political act of Trespassing provokes a visibility of dominant structures, which can then be mapped onto social spaces and spheres. This subversive transgression disrupts binaries of privilege and oppression, thus providing an alternative space where “we can sense each other as possible companions in resistance, where company goes against the grain of sameness as it goes against the grain of power” (p. 11). Further, this leaves room for collaborative resistance in the form of coalition building.

Traveling, as in ‘world’-traveling within Lugones’ context alludes to limited locations and mobilities as “all people who have been subordinated, exploited and enslaved have been forced to travel to “worlds” in which they animate subordinate beings” (p. 17). Borrowing from Marilyn Frye’s theory of “interlocking oppressions” Lugones’ encourages us as social theorists to attain “fluency in the mechanisms of oppression and insight in resisting those mechanisms” in traveling to spaces absent from the everyday experience (pgs. 18-19). Her concept of Traveling particularly resonates in Chapter 4.

Further, Lugones builds upon Danto’s theory of the relationship between symbolism and communication (p.21) and Guha’s “Prose of Counter-Insurgency” whereby revolutionary theories arise as a response to dominant hegemonies (p.23). She marries then challenges these two perspectives by developing an analysis of the complex and nuanced realities of different Worlds which “stand in relations of power to other worlds” (p. 21). Moreover, the creation of these worlds is born of “oppressions; unilinear, univocal, unilogical understandings of history; and abstract understandings of space” (p. 26). Lugones explicitly illustrates this by interrogating language – a particular feature of Chapter 1.

Finally, Lugones’ theme of Playfulness allows a consideration of crossings or boundaries as sites of play, which provide “openness to uncertainty” (p. 27). This poststructural tool opens up possibilities for resistance with a deconstruction of inequality within social spaces. Additionally, maintaining a sense of play is a powerful tool as it “keeps one focused on the crossing, on the process of metamorphosis” (p. 27).

Maria Lugones’ book is a thoughtful and productive reflection of the dominant discourses etched into our social spaces and movements. Her ability to ground theory through personal experiences, and contextually rich storylines, provides her arguments with an integral strength. She provides opportunistic spaces of resistance for marginalized and forgotten subjects to work through their erasures and counteract their own marginalized spaces. However, she focuses upon a resistance primarily from the oppressed. I think her call to action could be increasingly provocative if subjects from privileged positions outside of academia were also included in hegemonic resistances. Opening up such additional spaces would allow for a fuller, more complicated, yet multiplicitious resistance against structural and institutional inequalities within our communities.

The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”

Or as Geoff Manaugh so eloquently puts it, “[Y]ou go around the city, iPhone in hand – a kind of architectural dowsing rod held in front of you – discovering the traces of buildings that never were (perhaps even fragments of a city yet to come)… You walk past a certain corner on the Upper West Side and your iPhone starts to ring: you’re being called by a missing building… Absent structures detected in a wireless blur, leaving messages for you (complete with call-back number). Electromagnetic voice phenomena in architectural form.”

[Image by Geoff Manaugh]

And benjamin_aguirre adds: “This is a fascinating platform for exploring the latent imaginaries buried under/embedded in/folded into the built environment, capable of mining a precise history of a site through its virtualities rather than/in addition to its actualities. The surfacing of the virtual here washes the city-as the project’s title aptly suggests-in the phantasmagoric and uncanny. ‘Here lies architecture, unbuilt’.”

As with Dan Hill’s projections in The Street as Platform, I find this blurring between the actual and the virtual very interesting. But I’m also taken by the possibilities of how projects and applications like these can actually reshape the city. For example, Matt Jones recently wrote in The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future that “although Archigram didn’t build their visions, other architects brought aspects of them into the world.” Since we know that world-building is complex and imaginary architectures manifest in different and often concrete ways, I wonder how digitally augmented realities may become actual, material realities. Along these lines, Geoff Manaugh also asks us to imagine a scenario where “crowds of tourists mill about on 13th Street, looking around at the imaginary buttresses of a superstructure you’ve spent three years digitally assembling.”

But the content of these imaginings is also crucial. Kazys Varnelis reminds us that “Archigram were fundamentally modernist at heart, eager to see their visions realized in a capitalist utopia but the Italian radicals set out to critique the system, exacerbating its operations in works that were more dystopian than utopian… [And] my fear is that some theorists have argued against critique and self-reflection for so long that a new generation doesn’t even have an inkling of how to practice it.”

Now critics do raise issues about access to technology, and the more negative or nefarious purposes to which the same technology can, and will, be put. But what isn’t at all clear to me is how the imaginary can be used as critique. I wonder how exactly might technologists, designers and citizens proceed to reimagine the city in more critical ways.

Any ideas?

The University of Alberta Faculty of Extension’s City-Region Studies Centre, Edmonton Alberta Canada, in association with the Intermedia Research Studio and the Space and Culture Research Group welcomes applications from both Canadian and international applicants for a one to two year postdoctorate or research associate position.  Successful candidates will be expected to contribute approximately 50% of the time to engaged socio-economic research on urban and rural regions, governance, identity and planning and 50% of their time to their own theoretical research project which aligns with the focus of the Faculty on the scholarship and practice of engagement, the urban/rural/regional mandate of the Centre and contributes to the work of the Space and Culture Research Group.   Please submit a 1 page project proposal, indicating collaborators, partners and/or support in hand.  A background in political economy, public administration and/or small town and rural community development and policy research is an asset. Edmonton, the provincial capital, offers regional economic clusters in food processing, networks of organic food cultivation and farmers’ markets, nanotechnology, health research and videogame production.

Areas of current interest at the University of Alberta’s Intermedia Research Studio align with those of the Space and Culture Research Group but also include recent areas such as visual culture and ’second geographies’,  participatory, arts-based methods, and embodiment.  Areas being written up (including fieldwork on syncretism, race and communication in Salvador Bahia Brazil) and upcoming research is projected at many scales from the virtuality of sovereignty and the case of the Northwest Passage, to airport design, to cyborg identities, to the socio-economic aspects of nanotechnology and the material culture and regional impact of Canada’s National Institute for Nanotechnology.

This is a full time position based in Edmonton, competitively remunerated on a postdoctoral scale.  A fully complete Ph.D. is required at time of application.  A formal announcement will be available shortly on the University of Alberta website.  The University offers an accessible and diverse workplace.  This position will remain open until filled.

Fully funded Masters and Ph.D awards and visiting doctoral studentships in urban culture are also available in sociology, interdisciplinary studies, and in art and design at the University of Alberta: application deadline early Dec.  Contact the Department concerned.   The University is a global top 100 centre of research and features a vibrant cultural studies and social theory scene, as well as one of the best libraries, archives and data repositories (including GIS) in North America. The Space and Culture Research Group meets bi-weekly and provides a framework for research by faculty, students and postdoctoral researchers across the social sciences and humanities, concerned with any aspect of social space, place, urban culture or design.

Please contact: Space and Culture Research Group c/o Maryanne Wynne, Manager, City-Region Studies Centre, University of Alberta, Enterprise Square, 2-184 10230 Jasper Ave. Edmonton AB Canada T5J 4P6 Tel +1 780.492.9957

]]> http://www.spaceandculture.org/2009/09/24/space-and-culture-postdoc/feed/ 0 http://www.spaceandculture.org/2009/09/24/space-and-culture-postdoc/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/spaceandculture/wtQQ/~3/19s0PiHEDTQ/ http://www.spaceandculture.org/2009/09/17/anne-galloway-web-book-reviews-editor/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:31:31 +0000 Anne Galloway http://www.spaceandculture.org/?p=1032 Once a week for the next month or so, readers can expect to see updates and announcements from the journal editors and our bloggers—and as Web Editor, I thought I should get us started.

First, I’m very excited to announce that in November I take up a new permanent position as Senior Lecturer in Design Research at the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington. Besides being super excited about moving to New Zealand, I’m proud to be joining such impressive colleagues and students doing world-class work. I’m also really looking forward to learning, and blogging, more about the spaces and cultures of the southern hemisphere!

Although I’m feeling quite spoiled knowing that I’ll get two summers this year, I imagine teaching in the new Culture+Context degree programme will offer plenty of challenges, as well as  opportunities. I’ll be developing courses in design+culture and design anthropology, as well as co-teaching a design research class, which will no doubt help me make new connections between sociality, spatiality and materiality. I’m also working to establish the Design Culture Laboratory and starting my new research project, Counting Sheep: Using RFID to Explore NZ Wool Industries.

In other news, I’ve been collaborating with the Touch project, led by Timo Arnall and based in the Interaction Design department of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The project explores NFC and RFID technologies to enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. Earlier this year I completed re/touch, a website that “brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch to help designers and researchers create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios, define game play or otherwise get inspired to think, make and do things touch-related.” The Oslo super-team designed an interactive exhibition for re/touch that showed at Nordes 09 a couple of weeks ago, so keep an eye on the project blog for more on that. My current work involves a material culture analysis of the project’s RFID objects collection.

Long-time readers may also remember me from my research blog, purse lip square jaw. I’ve just started blogging again after a year or so hiatus, and I hope you’ll visit me there too.

Over the next week, I’ll be posting some new book reviews here—as well as a call for reviewers and online book review guidelines. I hope you’ll join the conversations!

As the journal’s Web & Book Reviews Editor, I’ll be posting some outstanding book reviews and asking people who would like to review books for us to get in touch with me.

I’m also looking forward to introducing new members of the Space and Culture team, and we’ll post updates from everyone else too so that you know what we’ve been up to.

Of course, we’re still tracking interesting things online to share with readers, and we have some observations and reflections of our own in the pipe.

In any case, we’re really looking forward to all of this and hope you are too. Stay tuned for more!

“Subtitled ‘Observation, organization, and transformation of urban settings’, the main element of this publication are 22 sheets of clear acetate, onto which are printed different conceptual layers and frameworks of a city … In ‘You are the City’, the 22 diagram drawings are split into four operational categories: Cosmological Ground; Leglisative Agencies; Currents, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and Connections. By combining different sheets, and adding layers, a huge range of different compositions can be created – a handmade decon version of SimCity. It invites the user to make new urban connections and realities, as different spatial arrangements and possibilities reveal themselves…”

Sounds and looks interesting!