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Representations of older age are often reductive in western societies, portrayed as a distinct period of life characterised by social disengagement and physiological decline. Through rich ethnographic accounts developed with older people from Greater Manchester UK, this paper is concerned with how the category of older age is made through representations, and the different ways people encounter and relate to it. In doing so, it disrupts reductive representations by considering how older age is lived. I respond to calls for the incorporation of more-than-representational and affective approaches into the geographic study of older age to advance research on ageing and highlight affect as a useful concept for thinking through difference. The paper is concerned with how older people are represented, with how representations differentially affect and are affected by older individuals, and with how representations of older age are performed and folded into lived accounts. More-than-representational theories offer an understanding of older age that is not pre-given or free-standing, but as something which can emerge, gather and disperse in relation with materialities as well as diffuse atmospheres, affects and emotional resonances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the concept of light pollution and its connections to moral geographies of landscape in Britain. The paper aims to provide a greater understanding of light pollution in the present day, where the issue connects to policy debates about energy efficiency, crime, health, ecology and night time aesthetics, whilst also engaging with new areas of research in cultural geography. The main sources of investigation are the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the British Astronomical Association’s Campaign for Dark Skies (est. 1990). Using interviews, archival and textual analysis, the paper examines this anti-light-pollution lobby, looking at the lead-up to the formation of the Campaign as well as its ongoing influence. A moral geography of light pollution is identified, drawing on two interconnected discourses – a notion of the ‘astronomical sublime’ and the problem of urbanization. Whilst the former is often invoked, both through visual and linguistic means, by anti-light pollution campaigners, the latter is characterized as a threat to clear night skies, echoing earlier protests against urban sprawl. Complementing a growing area of research, the geographies of light and darkness, this paper considers the light pollution lobby as a way of investigating the fundamental relationship between humankind and the cosmos in the modern age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon a multi-species ethnography of companion dog training in the UK, this paper examines the training class as a site of inter-species communication through which dogs and their humans are mutually affected and transformed. We argue that dog training represents an important form of multi-species learning in which participants (human trainer, trainee and canine) shape one another, jointly if asymmetrically, through the performance of particular tasks and challenges. Successful training requires 'attunement' to the haptic and sensory experiences of another species and the creation of shared embodied languages through which relationships of trust and reciprocity are formed. Responding to calls for less human-centred methods we examine the possibilities of visual and ethnographic methods for capturing the 'animal's point of view' and explore how deep ethnographic involvement of the researcher's own body can draw attention to the everyday complexities of embodied inter-species communication. We consider the importance of our own embodied learning in decentring the human in the research process, engendering a corporeal understanding of the multi-sensory nature of inter-species interaction and transforming ourselves in the process. Through the use of ethnographic vignettes, photos and video stills we highlight the importance of body language, sound, touch, smell and training atmospheres in the creation of shared knowledges. In doing so we explore the possibilities of such methods for evoking the affective dimensions of human-canine interactions and attending to the complex and multiple actors and sensibilities which comprise multi-species training relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends our understanding of inland waterways by theorising the temporary absences of water in canals and rivers as possibilities for action, that is, affordances. The interplay of temporary absence and presence of water in the inland waterways provides a range of potentialities for various activities and practices. Affordance theory can help us to further theorise material absences and position them as important elements of performing, practicing and interpreting place. We show how temporary absence of water can create spatial, historical and communicative affordances, affording the movement of boats, revealing and recreating the past and raising environmental awareness. The paper is based on semi-ethnographic research on the rivers and canals in the United Kingdom and Italy, featuring document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with various waterway users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sketches some conceptual tools by which cultural geographers might advance geographies of architecture. It does so by thinking specifically about one architectural form: the modernist residential highrise, which is the 'big thing' of this paper. The paper draws on recent developments in material semiotics in order to interrogate features often uniquely associated with the highrise, such as its global reach, uniformity, and scale. The paper first rethinks how cultural geography has traditionally explained the movement of built forms, explicitly turning from diffusionist accounts to the notion of translation. It then offers a reconsideration of the way geographers might think about scale in relation to a 'big' and 'global' thing like the modernist highrise, arguing that scale is produced relationally and in specific contexts. Finally, it offers a template for cultural geographical scholarship which takes seriously the technical work entailed in things, like a highrise, materialising or de-materializing. It does so by way of two illustrative stories: one about the productive social science of highrise suicides in Singapore; the other about the destructive role of the inquiry into collapse of Ronan point in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critically reflecting upon a performance piece enacted by the author, this paper explores the value of artistic practice as a means for undertaking research. The performance was a piece of GPS drawing, using the movement of a body in space to write the word ‘RIDE’ across the city, subsequently represented in the form of a map. Scholars working in mobilities have increasingly been opening up the spaces of transport to critical enquiry, revealing the practices and powers enmeshed in the everyday activity of moving from A-to-B. This paper argues that in using a bicycle ride to create an art work – even one of little aesthetic merit – the author was able to create a new understanding of cycling practices that would not be captured through conventional social science techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper (originally presented as the Cultural Geographies 2009 annual lecture) reflects on the agenda set out in Maps of meaning 20 years ago which sought to chart a series of new directions in cultural geography. At the core of that project was an argument about the politics of culture and the idea of cultural politics. Today, that agenda might be re-cast as an attempt to map the intersection of culture and economy or, more precisely, of political and moral economies. This paper will apply these ideas to the geographies of food where, despite relative affluence and food security, consumers in the West (and particularly in Britain) are often described as living through an 'age of anxiety'. Consumer anxieties about food have been provoked by a range of food scares and farming crises. As a result, manufacturers and retailers have struggled to re-establish consumer trust in food and governments have urged a re-connection between food producers and consumers. The paper explores the concept of consumer anxiety and draws on a series of consumer interviews and life histories with people in the British food industry to illustrate the nature of contemporary anxieties about food. The paper concludes with some reflections on the intersection of public and private anxieties as illustrated by these personal and corporate food stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocates of naturist practice have long celebrated it as the authentic human-nature relationship, a way of rekindling our connections with the natural world, and a means of achieving and maintaining physical, mental and spiritual health. Using Hans Surén's book Man and sunlight (1927) as an example, this paper explores the importance of sensory perception to, and the embodied geographies of, naturism and the particular ways in which early 20th century naturists conceptualized, valued and attached meaning to the relationship between the body and nature. In so doing, the paper outlines the ways in which naturist practice reflected contemporary European-wide debates on urbanism, nationhood, health, and nature, and highlights some of the connections between early naturist philosophy and contemporary phenomenological theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade or so geographers have been arguing for more performative, practice-oriented and non-representational accounts of the ways in which people encounter, move through and inhabit landscapes, spaces and places. In this paper I argue that these theoretical concerns should also prompt geographers to explore the fairly long history of critical commentaries and aesthetic interventions by writers, artists, film-makers and landscape practitioners who have shown a sensibility to movement and embodied practices in the landscape. The paper then examines how landscape architects focused their attention on the movements, speed and visual perspective of vehicle drivers in their arguments for the landscaping and design of motorways in early postwar Britain. During the 1940s the Institute of Landscape Architects pushed for the involvement of their members in the landscaping and planting of all future roads, and prominent landscape architects criticized the tendency of local authorities and organizations such as the Roads Beautifying Association to plant ornamental trees and shrubs which would interrupt the flow of the landscape and distract drivers travelling at speed. Landscape architects such as Brenda Colvin, Sylvia Crowe and Geoffrey Jellicoe argued for a focus on simplicity, flow and the visual perspective of drivers, and the government's Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads applied similar criticisms to the work of Sir Owen Williams and Partners in designing and landscaping the earliest sections of Britain's first major motorway, the London to Yorkshire Motorway or M1. The paper examines how landscape architects pushed for a functional modernism to be constructed around the movements and speed of motorists, and it concludes by discussing how an admiration for foreign motorways was tempered by calls for a British motorway modernism reworked in regional and local settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the usefulness of 'nonrepresentational theory' for the study of dance. It is based on a set of personal reminiscences drawn from my own experience of learning French folk dance. I began to participate in the UK French folk music scene in 1996 out of personal interest, although I have subsequently become concerned with the practice from an academic perspective. I have a long-term interest in geography and music, particularly the relationships between music, landscape and national identity. The academic study has been founded on a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with musicians, promoters and organizers, dancers and others, field notes recording my own participation, in addition to musicological and historical analyses of repertoires and instruments. In this paper my personal reminiscences are in italics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memories are not confined to those who experience them firsthand. Rather, they can be transmitted and repeated by subsequent generations as prosthetic and moral memories, not linked solely to specific geographic locations but extending to affect and inform contemporary political debates. This paper investigates how and why the 1965 flooding of the village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley, north Wales is remembered through textual analysis of Welsh literature and popular music. It also highlights the profound impact that struggles over resources can have on social, cultural and political landscapes. The flooding, arguably the most dramatic hydropolitical event in the history of the United Kingdom, created tension between the need to protect cultural identity on the one hand and on the other, the need to provide essential natural resources for industry and urban development. The memory of this event has been sustained in Wales in a number of ways. Visually, graffiti calling on the public to ‘remember Tryweryn’ has become a tangible symbol of Welsh nationalism, and a potent part of the Welsh landscape. In Welsh literature (poems and songs) the memory of Tryweryn has been expressed in terms of loss and shame and the defilement of nature. Politically, Tryweryn provided the context for the rise of Welsh nationalism and devolution and has become a regularly used symbol of a culture under threat. Crucially, the memories now influence and inform contemporary debates around precipitation, drought and any forced removal justified in the name of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the premises of classical political economy, which urged limited intervention in the production and circulation of vital commodities, nineteenth-century British government became heavily involved in the urban food supply. This paper explores three areas where such governmental intervention was evident: the constitution of a network of public analysts devoted to the chemical sampling of foodstuffs, the increasing regulation of the dairy industry, and the construction of public abattoirs. Although these regulatory systems suggest an active, interventionary form of government, they can still be seen as broadly liberal in nature: they usually involved a substantial degree of delegation, pragmatism and negotiation, and their implementation was slow and geographically patchy. Nonetheless, substantial changes in urban nutritional practices can be discerned by 1900. By this time, little food was produced within British cities: much came from remote parts of Britain or overseas, and the supply was far more technologically-mediated than in earlier centuries. In the milk and meat trades, we can see the first moves towards industrialisation. Securing the vitality of the city, therefore, had entailed the development of distinct regulatory strategies and the emergence of new nutritional geographies, both of which would significantly shape the dietary history of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates concerning both transnational and diasporic populations have pointed to the complex and fluid senses of belonging experienced by many of those moving - or being moved - across borders and away from homelands. In particular it has been emphasized that as well as promoting a sense of plurilocality, such movements frequently evoke intense and privileged understandings of the homeland. In this paper, I highlight the multi-directionality that is often demonstrated by such populations, and reflect on the implications that physical (rather than just conceptual) movement between imagined and material geographies of home might have for senses of belonging. In order to do this I explore the experiences of middle-class British women and children who travelled repeatedly between India and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. I discuss their senses of belonging, self and home as they moved between the two countries, and begin to examine not only the implications for maintaining notions of Britain as home but also the ways in which this operates at a number of scales, including the domestic, national and imperial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how colonial migrants appropriated the performative identity strategies of passing and mimicry to gain inclusion into the diverse imperial and national spaces of Britain, Europe and the dominions. Mimicry and passing were both creative liberational migrant strategies as well as responses to powerful constraints operating against colonial newcomers in the West. The first section investigates the methodology and manifestations of race passing and the metropolitan environment that fostered it. The second section explores how and why class mimicry was deployed by colonial and non-colonial racial migrants and the balance of epistemological distance and proximity necessary for its operation. The last section focuses on spatialized colonial mimicry of imperial masculinity, citizenship, travel cultures and geographies of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]