Search

Geographical features and cultural traits influence the character of big-mountain tourism in Alaska. This research considers the intersectionality of wilderness and frontier concepts on tourism culture, examines guides' and clients' motivations for participation, and relates these influences to the larger phenomena of tourism generally and nature tourism specifically. The findings show that Alaska's big-mountain tourism is globalized in its political and economic scope. Guides imagine themselves as pioneers on a last frontier of mountain pursuits, notions that relate well to images depicted of the region in literature and promoted by the tourism industry. Clients, on the other hand, come to Alaska because of its exceptional geography and unique mountain sporting culture, but are not as enamored with the mythos of the frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on geographic scholarship around disability and drawing on a programme of arts-based research, we bring attention to the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease. Seeking creative methodological opportunities, we invited families to send us postcards as a means of sharing experiences and reflections. We contextualize the emergence of the postcard as a modality of communication, situating our work within a wider epistolary and artistic tradition, before examining the opportunities postcarding might produce for geographic and broader qualitative research, noting the forms conduciveness to multimodality and recent calls for more engagement with the medium. We detail our own practices of participatory postcarding and the questions, challenges, and hopes such raised. Analysing the postcards received, we discuss how such helps understand the shifting social and cultural geographies of rare disease, reflecting on themes of (in)accessibility and exclusion, changing domestic geographies, and the importance of, and challenges associated with, family-based identities and communities in the context of rare disease. Such highlights opportunities for disability geography to engage in cross-cutting conversations and agenda-building with the nascent area of family geographies, along with further geographic inquiry into the spaces and worlds of rare disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the representation and theorisation of the city in Teju Cole’s novels – Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Open City (2011), and Tremor (2023). It argues that Cole’s writing articulates a new grammar of city-ness premised on historicised relationality and comparative thinking, thus challenging paradigms of urban representation that universalise the Western city. In particular, I propose that Cole’s novels offer a rewriting of Lagos and New York as specifically textual constructions, in which histories of modernity and colonisation get crystallised into their social geographies and cultural infrastructures. By close reading these texts and by drawing from the insights of postcolonial and literary urban studies, I analyse the formal devices – from variations in perspective to restricted focalisation – that Cole employs to textualise the city and its political histories. Through form, Cole’s novels raise crucial questions, both ethical and narrative, about representability, language, and historical violence in urban settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After briefly positioning cultural geography work on place names in New Zealand, this article examines the origins, composition and activities of the Honorary Geographic Board (1924–1946) as a place naming authority, with particular attention paid to some of the key individuals involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between light and mental health through a multifaceted inquiry into the complex and contested condition of 'Seasonal Affective Disorder' (SAD). It does so by first charting a disciplinary neglect of seasonal depression in 'geographies of mental health', followed by a consideration of broader philosophical ideas about human sensibilities and the place of light in life. These interpretative resources are brought into correspondence with both clinical debates about the legitimacy of SAD as a phenomenon and the role of culture in the experience of light-affected sadness. The paper culminates by outlining a future research agenda for a cultural geography of SAD in the context of climate-changed environmental light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to cultural geography's continued interest in exploring how images and photographic practices have shaped representations and engagements with architectural space. Using the Robin Hood Gardens Estate – a Brutalist social housing estate in East London as an example, it interrogates how visual strategies associated with the grid, the interruption and the ruin shape different narratives and representations of Brutalist architecture. At the same time, it extends discussions within cultural geography which surround Brutalism and the role that representations play in how the built landscape is mediated, politicised and encountered through different image making strategies, highlighting the importance of the 'image' to Brutalism as a style. It concludes by asserting the value of exploring how buildings are represented and how different photographic and image making practices continue to mediate our engagement with the built landscape and inform wider politics associated with specific architectural styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital mediation profoundly shapes how cultural geographers understand and encounter nature. Practice-based engagements with digitally mediated natures pose methodological, aesthetic and ethical questions for cultural geographers. Reflecting on a conference held in Bonn, Germany, in July 2022, which brought together a host of artists, practitioners, researchers and designers working at the human-technology-nature interface, this paper introduces the special issue, Digital Ecologies in Practice. The paper reflects on the key themes which cut across contributing articles and sketches a framework for methodologically – and practice – inclined geographers. Specifically, we draw out the ways in which practice-based engagements with digital technologies and processes of digitisation afford novel modes of sensing, speculating and remediating natures that have implications for the doing of both digital ecologies and cultural geographies as fields of research and domains of critical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents Nesting Ferality, a performative installation that examines how feral rose-ringed parakeets are represented online and governed in Dutch cities. Expanding existing research at the interconnection of artistic practice and cultural geography, the installation incorporates and performs quantitative and qualitative data in an exhibition space. The project deploys everyday digital technologies in novel ways to reshape people's perception and to explore how artists and geographers can collaborate to foster new environmental politics and mobilise new publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Composed between 2020 and 2022 by Guillaume Malaret, Érodé is a musical piece created from field recordings at Eagles Nest, a tidal island in Australia's Bunurong National Marine Park. Based on an interview with Guillaume Malaret, this article addresses several issues concerning digital representations, renderings, and ecologies of geological, hydrological, and sonic spaces, as well as the cultural geographies of landscape, embodiment, and affect. We explore the potentials of sonic composition and geophonic recordings for mediating bodily connections with difficult-to-imagine processes, such as environmental change over deep time. Our dialogue throughout this article contributes to emerging themes in digital ecological research by focusing on the materialities of digitization, digitally mediated creative practices in sonic geography, and the importance of different affective registers for comprehending environmental transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper moves beyond biomedical accounts of cycling health benefits to consider the situated, emergent, embodied, and relational notion of being well. In doing so, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari's account of affect to advance a conceptual framework of mobile therapeutic 'home' territories. We understand moments of being well as an emergent affective capacity generated by the coming together of socio-material relations in the process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Our rhizoanalysis is based on semi-structured interviews and sketches of cycling reactivation research in inner-city Sydney, Australia, in 2020 during the first pandemic lockdown. We demonstrate that for those working at home with access to coasts and parks, riding a bike became an important enabler of becoming and being well in moments of competitiveness and playfulness. Such moments emerged from the intensified affective force of social-material relations that comprise pedalling 'home' territories as 'lifestyle sport' or as 'active free-play'. In doing so, we contribute to debates in social and cultural geography on riding a bike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ch'oe Namsŏn was a key figure in the introduction of geography into the print media culture of early twentieth-century Chosŏn. Ch'oe used geography as a tool, creating a new territorial consciousness for national cohesion, and this article explores how this greatly shaped his poetic landscape. Locating itself between the boundaries of literary studies and cultural geography, this work looks at Ch'oe's underexplored T'aebaek poetry, in which his interests in geography, history, and national identity significantly converge. Drawing on "Mount Taebaek" of Korea's past, Ch'oe fashions the mountain into a pseudo-religious icon of nationhood. A symbolic landscape, evocative of a uniquely Korean past yet rising as a global icon going into a modern world, Ch'oe's poetry creates a godlike figure for the Korean people to look to in a changing time of imperialism, nationalism, and modern progress. Through various iterations of T'aebaek—benevolent deity, bringer of modernity, omnipotent ruler of the world—one sees the mountain play a vital role in the shaping of Ch'oe's nationalist project, which would have continued influence on his writings later in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an interview with Katherine McKittrick, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists program. McKittrick discusses Demonic Grounds, her pathbreaking study of Black women's geographies, on the advent of the twentieth anniversary of its publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2020, a group of Kanaka 'Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawai'i in the late nineteenth century. This essay explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically fourteen iwi po'o (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Ko'olau mountain range of O'ahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Through the Native Hawaiian concept of ho'opahulu, which, in 'ōlelo Hawai'i (Hawaiian language), encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from overfarming, this essay highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geographies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on a memorable encounter with the legendary choreographer Pina Bausch on the Greek island of Andros. Topics include the serendipitous meeting that left the author starstruck, the significance of Bausch's work in shaping their artistic journey, and the shifting cultural and historical landscape of the island over time.

This article offers a critical appraisal of institutionalised knowledge production and exchange on the history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom. We examine broad epistemic trends over 41 years (1981–2021) through an analysis of annual conference sessions and special events convened by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). We show how organisational, sociocultural, and epistemic changes were coproduced, as expressed by three significant findings. Organisationally, the group emerged through shared philosophical interests of two early career geographers at Queen's University of Belfast in 1981 and received new impetus through its strategic plan 1995–1997, which inspired long-term research collaborations. Socioculturally, the group's activities contributed to national traditions of geographical thought and praxis in masculinist academic environments, with instances of internationalisation, increasing feminisation, and organisational cooperation. Epistemically, the group's events in the 1980s shaped contextualist, constructivist, and critical approaches, and coproduced new cultural geography, but the emphasis shifted from historically sensitive biographical, institutional, and geopolitical studies of geographical knowledges, via critical, postcolonial, and feminist geographies of knowledge-making practices in the 1990s, to more-than-human and more-than-representational geographies in the early twenty-first century. • Analyses (the) history and philosophy of geography through the lens of a UK research group. • Examines 41 years of the group's RGS-IBG annual conference sessions and special events. • Reveals epistemic developments that shaped the wider discipline of geography. • Traces gradual diversification of contributors via internationalisation and feminisation. • Stresses close links between histories, methodologies, and philosophies of geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the history of geographic thought through a partial autobiography that covers the last 40 years – a period that corresponds with the existence of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). The paper is informed by both memory and a personal archive of material from the mid to late 1980s. The autobiographical material is linked to the places that the author passed through and the ways these places, and the assemblage of people in them, influenced the author's development of ideas around place, mobility and knowledge. In this sense, this is an account of how theory, scholarship and the scholars that produce them arise in networked ways through connections that are embedded in place but are often from elsewhere, traveling through. • An autobiographical approach to the history of geographic thought. • Explores the role of places as centers of calculation in an autobiography. • Surveys developments in geographic thought since the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often considered the 'birthplace of the blues', the Mississippi Delta hosts a vibrant cultural economy based on blues music and culture. As this economy relies on embodied social experiences in place, health and safety regulations issued to combat the SARS-CoV-2 virus had dramatic effects on musicians, business owners, and other cultural workers. In this paper, we examine the impacts of the pandemic on the cultural economy of the Delta, focusing on the city of Clarksdale, a primary destination for blues tourism. Situating the Delta's cultural economy and the blues music at its foundations within a broader historical arc of racialized struggle, we explore disparities in impacts of the pandemic on differently positioned individuals and groups. We argue that, while racial inequities continue to structure the Delta's cultural economy, local communities' responses to the challenges of the pandemic also demonstrate intergroup solidarities. Approaching these solidarities through Monica White's conception of collective agency and community resilience, we conclude that collective responses to the challenges of the pandemic in the Delta illuminate the potential for people from relatively privileged and marginalized groups in the region to come together to resist oppression and potentially drive social and political economic transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Humanitas: International Journal of Social Sciences / Uluslararasi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Humanitas: International Journal of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article is a tribute to Valene Smith, a prominent figure in the field of tourism research. The author reflects on their personal experiences with Valene and highlights her significant contributions to the field. Valene's work laid the foundation for various topics in tourism studies, such as cultural change, Indigenous tourism, and responsible tourism. She also played a crucial role in mentoring and supporting young scholars in the field. The article acknowledges Valene's lasting impact and expresses gratitude for her contributions. [Extracted from the article]

Dieser Beitrag skizziert Überlegungen zu einer bibliothekspolitischen Frage, die bisher noch schwer zu überblicken ist und die nur aus einer interdisziplinären Perspektive beleuchtet werden kann: Wie beeinflusst die Privatisierung Öffentlicher Bibliotheken die Auffassung des Bibliotheksortes? Inwieweit dürfen sich die Mitarbeitenden weiterhin auf die kommunale Koordination mit den neuartigen Vertragspartnern verlassen? Bleibt die pluralistische Arena zur Bildung einer kritischen Öffentlichkeit erhalten? Schwedische Öffentliche Bibliotheken gelten als eine der letzten Bastionen des ehemaligen sozialdemokratischen Wohlfahrtsstaates. Ihre deliberativen Arbeitsweisen, ihre Abstimmung auf den kommunalen und regionalen Rahmen in den Bibliotheksplänen und ihre Profilierung durch das demokratiefördernd intendierte nationale Bibliotheksgesetz sind inspirierend auch für die deutschsprachige Bibliothekslandschaft oder für verwandte Einrichtungen. In der Diskussion um alternative Trägerschaften steht aus der Perspektive des Personals offenbar viel auf dem Spiel. Die ausgewerteten Stellungnahmen von schwedischen Bibliothekar:innen aus dem letzten Jahrzehnt geben Einblicke in die Selbstvergewisserung einer anti-neoliberalen Wertegemeinschaft, die einerseits für den Erhalt humanistischer Kultur- und Bildungseinrichtungen kämpft, andererseits die Notwendigkeit erkennt – angesichts der Einsparungen und des zunehmenden Einflusses rechtspopulistischer und liberal-konservativer Kräfte –, neuartige Trägerschaften und Betreibermodelle zu erproben. This article outlines reflections on a library policy issue that is still difficult to grasp and can only be examined from an interdisciplinary perspective: How does the privatization of public libraries affect the view of the library's place? To what extent can staff continue to rely on municipal coordination with new types of contractual partners? Will the pluralistic arena for the formation of a critical public remain intact? Swedish public libraries are regarded as one of the last bastions of the former social democratic welfare state. Their deliberative working methods, their alignment with the municipal and regional framework in the library plans, and their profiling through the national library law intended to promote democracy are also inspiring for the German-speaking library landscape or for related institutions. From the staff's perspective, there is clearly a lot at stake in the discussion about alternative sponsorship. The evaluated statements by Swedish librarians from the last decade provide insights into the self-assurance of an anti-neoliberal community of values, which on the one hand fights for the preservation of humanistic cultural and educational institutions, and on the other hand recognizes the need – in view of cutbacks and the increasing influence of right-wing populist and liberal-conservative forces – to try out new operating models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three popular songs of enormous cultural significance are 'In My Life', 'Penny Lane' and 'Strawberry Fields Forever', all released by the Beatles in the 1960s and all set in the same part of Liverpool. In an original investigation, this article looks into the growth of that part of the city from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1950s, examining the changes to the landscape. This was as the initially rural environment gave way to a typical twentieth-century townscape of houses, roads, parks and schools. The memories of people who resided there are related and these along with old maps, photographs, newspaper articles and census details are examined to give a sense of the lived-in location that inspired the lyrics of Paul McCartney and John Lennon. The phenomenon of palimpsest – ancient features slightly visible underneath modern ones – is applied to this study of the location and a new concept of inverse palimpsest – the old consciously superimposed on the new – is put forward in a novel approach to landscape analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigaciones Turisticas is the property of Investigaciones Turisticas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of New Architecture is the property of New Architecture Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The literature documents that cultural factors affect housing or real estate markets and their interactions. Given this, we map global housing markets into different cultural blocs, and study the dynamics of price interaction among them. We investigate the extent and manner of price interaction within and between cultural blocs using a battery of econometric tests and network analyses. We confirm that housing markets within the same blocs are highly correlated, cointegrated and react to each other more quickly than those among different blocs. Our results provide a new perspective on the important role of culture in the transmission of linkages among housing markets globally and have vital implications for the global coordination of policies to stabilize housing markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the design and practice of a field course program that combines the urban walking tradition and digitally enabled mobile learning. This program adopts the concept of flâneur/flâneuse to develop a peripatetic pedagogy aiming to cultivate students' digitally assisted ethnographic skills; and to assist students in writing the digitally-mediated and post-modern city creatively. Based on a collaborative analysis, this article can offer a creative and critical way of thinking about our bodies, positionings, and the entanglements of technologies in a digitally assisted and multi-media educational environment and generate new knowledges in urban and cultural geography theories and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of International Social Sciences Academic Researches / Uluslararası Sosyal Bilimler Akademik Araştırmalar Dergisi is the property of Journal of International Social Sciences Academic Researches and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of South Architecture / Nanfang Jianzhu is the property of South Architecture Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article provides a historical overview of Quebec geography, discussing its development through textbooks, universities, and professional practice. It explores the unique perspectives and contributions of Quebec geography, including its focus on the North and engagement with indigenous issues. The article acknowledges criticisms of the discipline, such as its limited presence in schools and lack of participation in societal debates. The text also discusses the evolution of geography in Quebec over the past decade, highlighting changes in approaches, techniques, and education, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It emphasizes the need for geography to adapt to new conceptions of living together and ideological pluralism, particularly in areas such as climate, risks, extractivism, and surveillance technologies. The text concludes by presenting seven contributions that showcase the dynamism and ability of Quebec geography to engage in dialogue with a broader geographical community. [Extracted from the article]

This paper makes an argument for a geography of girlhood, located at the intersection of historical geographies of globalisation and empire on the one hand, and feminist interventions in the geography of childhood and youth on the other. A focus on girlhood, I argue, opens up a debate on the discipline's own implication in a debate on climate science, moral hierarchies of civilisation and reproductive health at which intersection the category of 'girl' was materialised in the 19th century. This focus extends and historicises the argument made by scholars like Nicola Ansel that geographies of childhood speak not only to intimate scales of experience ‐ such as the home and neighbourhood—but instead suggest the ways in which everyday life is implicated in the scale of the global and the geopolitical. Drawing on an inter‐disciplinary scholarship, the paper argues that debates on gender and maturity—converging on the figure of the 'girl'—shaped raced and classed imaginaries of progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through this, the paper demonstrates that 'girlhood' is at the heart of historical geographies of urban planning, social care, and health, as well as indexing the continuities in the transition from a colonial discourse of civilisation to a mid‐20th century concern with development. Finally, the paper asks how to write about girls through an archive that is almost obsessively fixated on them as subjects of education and reform, even whilst they rarely appear in it as speaking subjects. I argue that both an emergent focus on non‐textual objects as sources, as well as the use of ephemeral material—including notes, creative writing exercises from the classroom, school diaries etc.—alongside the official archive might open the scholarship up to a multi‐scalar analysis of girlhood as imbricated in larger global and national discursive and material practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Skelton's 2009 recording, Landings, is recognised as being intimately connected with landscape and the experience of place. This paper explores the use of therapeutic practice within the creation of the recording of Landings. Building on the work of cultural geographers who have emphasised the cultural and symbolic significance of landscape, as well as incorporating the work of geographers who have studied sound and music, the paper develops a non‐representational analysis, emphasising the interplay of human experiences and therapeutic practice. The paper explores how Skelton's music transcends a simple representation of the moorland landscape. It shows how the music, created through Skelton's therapeutic practice, channels the essence of the landscape. Skelton acknowledges the healing nature of this creative process. It offers catharsis and solace while, at the same time, connecting to living systems and exhibiting an ecological principle. By exploring the music created by Skelton's therapeutic practice and its profound alignment with nature, Landings offers valuable insights for geographers and beyond. Richard Skelton's 2009 recording, Landings, is renowned for its intimate connection with landscape and place. This paper delves into the incorporation of therapeutic practice in the creation of Landings, drawing on cultural geography and non‐representational analysis to highlight the interplay of human experiences and therapeutic methods. It demonstrates how Skelton's music, transcending a mere representation of moorland landscape, channels the essence of nature, providing catharsis, solace and ecological connection, offering valuable insights for geographers and therapeutic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have long been interested in popular culture, exploring everything from music and film, to fashion and sport. However, there remain some gaps in the field with some of the biggest and most widely consumed genres of popular culture suffering from neglect. Given the pace of technological change, geographers have been noticeably slow to come to grips with new digital popular media. This special issue presents work that interrogates popular culture ranging from the new to the old for its role as a vector for, or entry point into, encounters with places and people, and as a producer of spatiality and social relations. This editorial uses the concept of (em)placement to identify the complex overlaps, imbrications, and interlockings between social, cultural, and technological actors/actants. (Em)placement is also deployed to expand the space for popular culture as an object of study in geography in order to foster more diverse engagements, and the freedom to engage, with popular culture in the discipline. In doing so, we highlight contributions to cultural geography, bringing into focus the ways in which popular culture has been redefined in a time of heightened digital and deterritorialized engagement alongside restrictions on physical interaction enforced during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Finally, the editorial introduces the seven papers in this special issue, drawing attention to workaday and active engagements with popular culture, and how such engagement can facilitate encounters as [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is about many things including, but not limited to, Cyrille Regis, Delia Derbyshire, an Ewok badge, Mickey Mouse, Napalm Death, the Sylvanian Families, anonymous hate mail, bereavement, the luminous popular cultures of the often-deprecated English Midlands, the absence of so many amazing popular cultures from Social & Cultural Geography, and my own recurrent failure to write about these things. It is part of a Special Issue on (Em)placing the Popular in Cultural Geography. The essay opens out a set of questions and prompts for reflection about the relationship (or, more often, the weird non-relationship) between disciplines of Social and Cultural Geography and contemporary popular cultures. At its heart, you'll find six fragments of autoethnographic writing dealing with: popular cultural absences and silences in the written canon of Human Geography; joy and recognition, but also the burden of doing justice to popular cultures; and manifold antipathies towards academic work on popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for a recalibration of how cultural geography engages with music, lyrics, motion, and emotion. Within existing geographical work on music, research on the music itself remains scarce, with reflection on lyrics rarer still. This paper addresses this via a close reading of the work of the Glaswegian group, The Blue Nile. It examines how the trio – and especially their principal songwriter, Paul Buchanan – used lyrics as a means for articulating distinctive conceptions of movement and stillness. The significance of song-words themselves is considered, but so too is their mode of delivery, and their relationship to the enveloping musical settings they are embedded in. The importance of time, space and place in The Blue Nile's work is analysed and the methods by which they are evoked is investigated. The paper moves discussion on from well-covered terrain regarding music as a conduit for expressing youth focussed tropes, such as rebellion and speed, focusing instead on music's facility for voicing ideas of slowness and immobility, particularly in urban settings. In doing so, it demonstrates popular music's value for articulating sensations that are now being encountered with ever greater frequency, including those of stasis, drift, and disconnection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past century, the history of Romanian literature has been dominated by nationalist approaches, necessary for the consolidation of a stable cultural identity. However, the concept of cultural identity involves changing and migratory components as well, many related to its links with other cultural identities, each of them with its own literature. This book review provides insights into the scholarly significance of Dicționarul romanului central-european din secolul XX [The Dictionary of Central European Novel in the 20th Century] coordinated by Adriana Babeți and edited by Oana Fotache, understood as a project that maps a transnational literary phenomenon. The study is examined for its uniqueness, specific linguistic diversity and multicultural scope: 250 entries about works initially published in one of the fourteen languages spoken in the region, including French and English as international languages, either part of the canon or more marginal and less known. Other reasons include its adequate combination of analysis and synthesis; the extensive team research carried out over three decades; and its socio-political relevance nowadays. The review highlights the historical, cultural, and academic contexts in which the dictionary was published, the avatars of the concept of Central Europe, several characteristics of the Central-European novel, and details about its structure, sections and features. The presentation mentions a few limitations about the availability of the titles in the languages of the region and the admitted gender imbalance and indicates several research audiences possibly interested in alternative ways of approaching novels in the context of globalization.

The article presents the case study of Santa María del Tule from an ethnohistorical perspective. A chronology of Santa María del Tule is presented, based on the political regimes of the last five hundred years in Mexico. In the analysis, the Tule tree is identified as the ethnoterritorial axis that has articulated a praxis of symbolic, political and material resistance that has allowed the ethnic reconstitution of the community. In this logic, the article allows us to identify that the analysis of ethnoterritoriality allows us to deepen the understanding of the territorial resistance of the peoples of Abya Yala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The naming of places on university campuses plays an important role in shaping the cultural landscapes and geographies of higher education institutions. In recent years, there have been contentious debates over place renaming at colleges and universities in North America and around the world, which has drawn increasing attention to the politics of toponymic practices in higher education contexts. The decision-making process involved in place naming on a university's campus is generally informed by the institution's naming policy and implemented by a university naming committee, yet there is very little scholarship on university naming policy frameworks, procedures, and practices. In this article, we provide a systematic and comparative analysis of university naming policies in Canada and the United States. Drawing on data from more than 2,000 colleges and universities across North America, we assess the level of representation that faculty and students have on university naming committees, institutional commitments to public engagement in the naming process, the value of diversity, and restrictions on corporate naming rights agreements. We conclude that colleges and universities should develop more inclusive and equitable naming policy frameworks to ensure that campus namescapes live up to the ideals of higher education institutions in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reflection on the ways extractive industries manifest within and across place. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico over 8 months in 2019–2020, this paper focuses on the experiences of residents living in a town adjacent to an underground silver mine in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca, Mexico. I argue that a focus on lived, sensory and long-term engagement between people and mining opens new avenues for geographers to consider 'what mining does'. Looking beyond the language of 'impacts', I build upon work on cultural geographies of presence and absence to put forward the notion of 'mining presence': mining's present and absent affects and materialities that interweave with residents' everyday lives, homes, bodies, and landscapes. In other words, I explore the qualities of mining that bring the San José mine into a neighbouring town and mediate spaces of daily life. In doing so, this paper contributes to the geographies of the extractive industries by showing that attention to life with mining requires a re-thinking of the spatiotemporal relations of extraction itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "L'APPROCHE CULTURELLE" is a critical review of Paul Claval's book on Cultural Geography. The author explores the evolution of Cultural Geography in different national contexts, such as the United States, Portugal, and Brazil. The book addresses the importance of culture in society, highlighting its influence on communication, human relationships, and the formation of territories. Culture is also analyzed in relation to space, environment, and landscape, revealing how people attribute symbolic meanings to places. The text discusses the interaction between territory, power, and culture in the formation of spatial configurations. The cultural perspective in Geography emphasizes the influence of culture on the configuration of space and human interaction with the environment. Culture is seen as a dynamic force that permeates all aspects of geographical space. However, Claval's work is criticized for not sufficiently addressing the methodological implications of the cultural approach. The text discusses the cultural approaches proposed by Anderson, which include culture as "assembled effect," "mediated experience," and "ways of life." These approaches highlight the dynamism of culture and its relationship with power, social practices, and geographical and historical transformations. The author also mentions Claval's work, which contributes to the study of culture but emphasizes the importance of contemporary approaches to understanding culture and its impact on current societies. The cultural approach in contemporary geography plays a fundamental role in understanding the interactions between culture and space, highlighting the importance of information, communication, and knowledge in modern life. Culture permeates all spheres of society, and its critical analysis is essential for understanding social, economic, and political transformations. Claval's work is a philosophical and analytical journey that reveals the profound and multifaceted influence of culture on society. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of KULT online is the property of Justus Liebig University Giessen and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper traces a walking tour of Cork City that I recently undertook, using an autoethnographic perspective to tap into the linguistic and semiotic features of places and spaces associated with the blues musician Rory Gallagher and how they are tied to specific music memories. To do this, I draw on the theory of semiotic landscapes, yet put forward the term semiotic musicscapes to account for the imagined, embodied and emotional aspects of the visual linguistic environment that such music walks entail. I argue that these forms of secular pilgrimage turn the 'ordinary' into the 'extraordinary', relying on both specialised music knowledge and the imaginarium to make true meaning from visual and verbal signs. The paper, thus, offers a new way for ethnomusicologists to explore the cultural geography of music, as well as for (socio)linguists to approach the study of semiotic landscapes, particularly when tied up with musical heritage. It also extends current scholarship on Rory Gallagher whose life and work remain underresearched, despite his importance as a founding figure of Irish rock music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources from cultural geography, anthropology, feminist theory, posthuman theory, and science and technology studies that the project drew from. After this theoretical section, the paper then discusses the practical implications of the method and the two emergent strands of research ('weather matters' and 'construction matters') that were followed in Chennai, Dhaka, and Yangon. The final section of the paper reflects on the extension of the method into the formatting of a book and an online exhibition. The paper concludes by arguing that what the method offers to cultural, weather-based research in monsoonal and other climes, is a situated, non-formulaic method that recognizes the affordances of the Earth's agency, of matter and of other-than-human lives for generating knowledge of and ways of being in changing weather-worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the lure of redemption in contemporary academic and accounts of exhaustion, endurance, and biopolitical life. Drawing on, and contributing to recent work on negativity in cultural geography, the paper analyses how optimism and redemption find their way in to academic writing on the contemporary condition. It interrogates the optimism in these literatures, paying attention to the genealogical roots of the propensity to redeem accounts of slow and attritional violence and biopolitical subjectivity. In particular, the paper charts the implicit politics and ethics at play in the invocation of the Deleuzian 'otherwise' which haunts many accounts of the transformatory potential of exhaustion, and the remnants of dialectical historicism and Christian morality at the heart of redemption narratives in accounts of endurance. The paper ends by questioning the motives behind such hopeful readings, and asks what it might entail to refuse to redeem tales of violence with optimistic glimmers of an as-yet unspecified world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An architect and a cultural geographer meet to visit a vast industrial complex in southern Spain that was gradually abandoned between 1962 and 2012. Despite being formally designated as protected heritage, the practical absence of material intervention, historical interpretation or control of access turns the act of walking through these ruins into a highly immersive, sensorial and reflective experience. Drawing from fieldnotes and photo-documentation, this contribution broadens the generative potential of preserving-by-not-preserving, a novel heritage approach recently tackled in cultural geography literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of decline, disinvestment, and racism have left Detroit with an abundance of abandoned buildings, ruins, vacant lots, and illicit trash dumps. Though these structures and materials might have forfeited their previous purposes, they can act as catalysts, substances, and co-creators of artworks. The paper is thus interested in examining the intricate interplay between art, space, and materiality in Detroit further. Drawing from the practices of local artists Olayami Dabls and Scott Hocking, the paper adopts a new materialist framework to investigate the dynamic agency of matter in the artistic process. By considering materials as active participants in the production of art and space, the paper seeks to add to the emerging interest in the emancipation and meaning making of material in art as well as cultural geography's engagements with new materialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]