Search

This paper focuses on women's agency through their responses to a rewilding initiative. To do this, we draw on ethnographic research conducted in a rewilding landscape in the Côa Valley in Portugal. Our initial encounters in the rewilding field were all with male workers. This led us to actively seek out women's experiences, who were mainly located on the margins of rewilding. We believe these experiences cast rewilding—and its effects on rural communities—in a new light. We discuss three women's differing relationships with a rewilding initiative: Beatriz who sold land to rewilding and purchased other productive land for her son; Diana and Matilda who are running businesses alongside raising young families and envisioning futures. Their experiences highlight not only how they have developed alternative means to ensure the reproduction of the family, but also how rewilding is more than nature. We conclude that listening to voices less heard enables a better understanding of how rewilding affects people's lives and their differential access to resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the book review titled "Book review: Tim Edensor, Landscape, Materiality and Heritage: An Object Biography," Nadia Bartolini discusses Tim Edensor's exploration of landscape, materiality, and heritage through the lens of the Barochan Cross. The cross, located in Scotland, holds personal significance for Edensor and serves as a catalyst for uncovering its life story. Edensor emphasizes that the cross has multiple stories and meanings, and he employs relational networks and assemblage theory to capture its complexity. The book delves into the cross's relationship with different landscapes and explores themes of heritage, authenticity, conservation, nationalism, and identity. Overall, Bartolini finds Edensor's account of the Barochan Cross to be captivating and inspiring, potentially motivating readers to explore the landscape and imagine alternative futures inspired by the cross. [Extracted from the article]

This review considers how rapid environmental change, generated through both inhuman natural forces and human-induced impacts, affects landscape futures and decision-making processes. To do this, we start by defining 'futures', and, more specifically, the different kinds of futures at stake in changing landscapes. We discuss how rapid environmental change not only puts immediate pressure on identifying alternative futures for landscapes, but also threatens to unsettle patterns of attachment to the landscape. We then explore different ways of managing tensions and consider strategies that have been used for breaking down binary divisions that may stymie informed and integrated decision-making. We conclude by adapting a five-point framework that incorporates uncertainty and environmental change when making decisions about landscape futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the use of film as a method to explore themes of change and loss which emerged during the recording of archaeological features at Orford Ness, UK. Owned by the National Trust, Orford Ness is an exposed shingle spit off the Suffolk coast recognised for its natural and cultural heritage. The research discussed in this paper engaged with a community archaeology project which has been recording features on the shingle spit as they are altered and erased by erosion and other coastal processes. The authors experimented with film as a method to investigate the work being undertaken by practitioners and volunteers in this dynamic landscape. We conclude that, within interdisciplinary heritage research, experimenting with film as a method facilitates the representation of embodied practices and exposes processes of meaning-making. We frame our discussion about the active production of meaning through an analysis of the way that film engaged with qualities articulated in the National Trust's Spirit of Place statement for the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about constructing memories of place, yet few speak of the difficulties in dealing with lost, partial and fragmented histories of place. We argue that behind the idea of 'memory of place' is an assumption that these memories are recoverable and can build a sense of place. Our research has led us to assume the opposite: not just that the fragments of history cannot build a complete memory of place, but that this understanding of memory and place is itself skewed by its reliance on materiality. This paper stems from a project that explores the place of spirituality in everyday life through insights from Spiritualist churches and their congregations. Whilst evidence of Spiritualist locations can be partially obtained through documentary records, a key challenge has been in understanding practices in the context of Spiritualism's disassociation with materiality and the centrality of Spirit. The paper concludes that retracing Spiritualism's past, and capturing its contemporary spiritual practices, uncovers a 'memory of place' that is not only in constant transience, but that can only be known through Spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on work about rewilding and human–animal relations by focusing inquiry on Portugal's Côa Valley, where a concentration of prehistoric rock art animal figures shares a landscape with a rewilding pilot which seeks to re‐establish a population of wild horses. In response to recent geographical debates, the paper offers a sustained, situated analysis of the temporalities of rewilding and related claims to non‐human autonomy. In the Côa Valley, ancient images of animal others are enrolled in efforts to return "wild" horses to the landscape, but conceptions of wildness and domesticity, and autonomy and temporality, remain fluid and unfixed – even as they are implicated in the production of bounded spaces and invoked in present‐day management imperatives. To conclude, we argue for an appreciation of degrees of animal autonomy in rewilding contexts, moving beyond the binaries that often seem to be the focus of rewilding debates. Understanding of these degrees of autonomy, we argue, must be grounded in histories of landscape co‐habitation and co‐production, and consider the intersection of past cultural tradition and conceptions of desired future natures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to map out the specific geographies through which spatialities of religion have been imagined. These involve such spatial metaphors as islands, networks and spheres. Less attention has been given to new forms of spirituality, and to the consequences of thinking through these for our understanding of modernity itself. We argue that modernity, religion and spirituality are entangled and spread through daily life. We conclude that adding new forms of spirituality to the mix of geographies of religion requires reconsidering more than the boundary between secularity and religion, but also rethinking the place of spirituality in modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural geography finds itself in a very different place from when Peter Jackson’sMaps of Meaningfirst appeared in 1989. Provocations for culturally attuned spatial thinking made at that time have either altered or at least been significantly reframed when issues of wider public engagement, collaborative arts practice and new ICT-based social and creative media are changing the terrain on which cultural geography is made and practiced. We introduce a collection of 11 short essays that set to provoke questions relating to cultural geography today. The essays stem from the Doreen Massey Annual Event ‘Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?’ that took place at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, in June 2014. We are not suggesting that there is a ‘malaise’ requiring revitalization, neither are we proposing a single best way forwards. Rather we suggest that a collective focus on how cultural geography can remain a lively place from which to engage with might provide a moment in which the diversity of cultural geography would be profitably mobilized for the future. In this introduction, we encourage geographers to think about where cultural geography is and where it is headed by considering three areas of interest: dis/locating provocations; re/defining culture; and changing geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the idea of how vibrancy can be produced. Specifically, the attempt is to investigate the multiplicities of vibrancy by considering one of Mussolini’s bunkers. The author examines the location of the bunker in the EUR (Esposizione Universale Romana) neighbourhood in Rome, the bunker’s materiality, and the context and social meaning of the bunker through a contemporary art exhibition called ‘Confronti’ (Confrontations) that took place in the bunker in 2009. The article argues that while emphasizing matter’s inherent vibrancy may be useful in some cases, there is also merit in further unpacking the ways in which vibrancy is produced. In this example, the concrete bunker expresses vibrancy through the processes involved in the emergent material form, and in the sustained politics and social considerations embedded in valuing tangible urban heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the commonly used metaphor of the palimpsest prevalent in urban studies, and suggests that there are realities in the field that are overshadowed by the dominant use of the metaphor. Whilst the palimpsest is a useful metaphor to illustrate chronological superimposition or traces of the past that remain hidden, it is inadequate in describing sites that feature material, spatial and temporal juxtapositions. To remedy this gap, the paper introduces the concept of brecciation, inspired by Sigmund Freud, to provide an alternative means to consider how the accumulation of materials affects planning in the city. Examples from two specific sites in Rome illustrate how brecciation enhances an understanding of the sites and enables to evaluate the practices of urban heritage in recent urban initiatives. By way of conclusion, the paper highlights the benefits of engaging with a concept that reveals concatenations at a site, and suggests that further work on brecciation could be expanded to include the exploration of intangible entanglements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I look at how the discovery of remnants contributes to creating new spaces in the city. I use the geological metaphor of brecciation drawing upon the work of Sigmund Freud to elaborate on how materials from the past and the present are jumbled in a nonlinear fashion to enable spatial multiplicity. I then illustrate these ideas through the case study of the Sala Trevi/Mondadori building in Rome which exemplifies the ongoing dynamics of the play of surfaces and depths when remnants are featured as part of the design. This is done by outlining ways in which the building unfolds spatial and material juxtapositions, and by elaborating on three elements that are indicative of the metaphor of brecciation. I conclude that when material and spatial entanglements occur, the metaphor of brecciation goes further than the metaphor of the palimpsest in facilitating spatial transformation in the city: spaces can be modified and create new possibilities with the past, enabling tensions to coexist in the present whilst not limiting reconfiguration in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of alternative and ‘New Age’ spiritualities and of the paranormal in popular culture hint at the existence of underlying economic relationships that are, though small in size by some measures, both significant and influential. This paper seeks to foreground the economic relationships underpinning the beliefs, practices and activities associated with alternative spiritualities. For, as we argue, these have either been marginalised in most studies of alternative spirituality or been understood in very limited terms, as a narrow reflection of contemporary capitalist consumer culture. This paper consequently asks how we might bring to view the economic relationships that necessarily accompany alternative spiritualities by exploring their size, shape and reach. Here, we draw on UK-based case studies of Manchester and London. Our exploration of alternative spiritualities and their economic relationships concludes that even while alternative spiritualities are woven into, and out of, ordinary economic relationships, there remains an intriguing sense that there is something distinctively esoteric about their economies. This, we believe, warrants further investigation (in the UK and beyond) into this too often marginalised aspect of contemporary culture and modern economic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]