Search

This article examines two case studies that describe different ways of working with community partners to create civic engagement experiences in undergraduate education. Analysis of the case studies yields guidance about practical decisions involved in planning, designing, and executing pedagogy that uses engagement to generate what Fink calls "significant learning experiences." Emphasis is placed on several key considerations of goals, process, and outcomes for designing courses with community partnerships. The article also highlights a rationale for sponsoring community-engaged pedagogy and identifies the types of resources such work requires to be effective.

The term "translation" shows up in myriad sites within and outside of academia. It is frequently used to explain processes of movement and connection between languages, places, contexts, and ideas. Despite this ubiquity, translation as a concept is undertheorized within social science academic discourse. This paper responds to this gap by epistemologically rethinking translation and arguing that translation is emergent and geographic. The practices, processes, and politics of translation, therefore, can generate conditions for social transformation, which can lead to co-liberation. With this in mind, we draw on ideas of "improvisation," "accompaniment," and "emergent strategy" to conceptualize our rethinking of translation. We illustrate the possibilities of our rethinking by tracing translation within and through the Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) in Seattle, Washington, a municipal government-led endeavor to eliminate institutional racism and race-based disparities. Situating translation as emergent and geographic shifts attention to the ways and contexts through which possibilities for social change emerge in time and place. Thus, our theorizing of translation has broad utility for critical geographic inquiry and the specific study and praxis of local scale policy-making and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE HOUSING BOMB: Why Our Addiction to Houses Is Destroying the Environment and Threatening Our Society. By M. Nils Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Jianguo Liu. viii and 212 pp.; [...]

We propose that voluntary sector geographies are best understood using a systematic relational approach, drawing upon neo-Marxist and symbiotic perspectives. We focus on relations between the voluntary sector and the (shadow) state, internal spaces of client interaction, and external urban spaces. Our relational approach advances alternative understandings of the voluntary sector: ones that are partly but not fully in the orbit of the shadow state; more mediator than conduit for neoliberal policies; partly punitive, yet firmly in relation with other ambivalent measures for clients; and both spatially uneven and fixed, but always unbounded in its practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have long been at the forefront of participating in and exploring the intersection of geographic knowledge and community-engaged research. This Focus Section highlights key debates and challenges facing geographers who participate in community-engaged work, explorations of pedagogical and ethical practices, departmental and institutional challenges, and examples of thoughtful applications of geographic knowledge to community-based work. It also seeks to generate knowledge and discussion of how geographers can employ civic engagement to advance geographic learning and enhance the profile of the discipline within and beyond higher education institutions. By focusing on such issues, this collection of articles contributes in vital ways to meet the challenges that higher education institutions face in demonstrating the relevance of academic learning to societal issues. This introduction to the Focus Section reviews the historical context of civic engagement in geography, provides a broad-scale look at the state of civically engaged research in U.S. institutions of higher learning, and highlights the contributions of each of the individual articles included in this Focus Section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship of geography complex with civic engagement. Topics mention including crisis of civic engagement in the higher education according to the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, emphasizing of active learning projects and partnership of colleges and universities.

New Urbanism (NU) is an urban planning movement that aims to curtail suburban sprawl. Critics argue that NU actually contributes to sprawl. However, such claims overlook the diverse ways in which NU is implemented. This article contributes to the study of suburban development by examining two different types of NU projects in suburban Minneapolis–St. Paul and comparing these with a control case. Using surveys of the projects’ built environments and residents’ travel behavior and attitudes toward neighbors, the article finds that the NU projects break away from the physical and functional dimensions of sprawl, yet reproduce the social dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Lawn dissidents’ are people who violate norms of turfgrass yards often found in North American suburbs. This paper uses qualitative methods and engages a performance view of landscape to examine how these subjects’ sustainability-oriented lawn alternatives work unintentionally to create exclusionary landscapes. As capitalism adopts environmentalism as a ‘sustainability fix’, niche ‘green’ capitalist markets allow lawn dissidents to cultivate subject positions within sustainability that ignore social justice concerns. Alongside their environmentalist concerns, lawn dissidents continue to approach land through frames that treat it as a commodity and as a signifier of cultural distinction, particularly within an elite cosmopolitan subcategory of whiteness. Nonetheless, inasmuch as lawn dissidents enact social scripts and cultivate landscapes that perform white bourgeois sensibilities around urban sustainability, the exclusionary effect of this practice is neither inevitable nor necessary. By viewing the landscapes that lawn dissidents create through the theory of the interstice, we posit an alternative direction in which sharing economies offer a more inclusive vision of sustainability in urban residential landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two case studies that describe different ways of working with community partners to create civic engagement experiences in undergraduate education. Analysis of the case studies yields guidance about practical decisions involved in planning, designing, and executing pedagogy that uses engagement to generate what Fink calls "significant learning experiences." Emphasis is placed on several key considerations of goals, process, and outcomes for designing courses with community partnerships. The article also highlights a rationale for sponsoring community-engaged pedagogy and identifies the types of resources such work requires to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article frames the research ethics review process conducted by institutional review boards (IRBs) as an opportunity to enrich the education of geographers. Student participation in the IRB process enhances the education of geographers at the undergraduate and graduate levels in two key ways. Geographers can use participation in this process to demonstrate the relevance of a disciplinary code of ethics to professional practice. More important, such participation helps learners, particularly novices, conceptualize research as an ongoing process of intentional inquiry, in which the protection of research participants is vigilantly observed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we argue that nonprofit, nongovernmental organisations (NGO5) constitute crucial sites at which welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism are enacted and materialised in everyday life practices. This paper responds to recent calls from geographers to move to finer scales of analysis that enrich our understanding about the geographies of welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism. Our response is based on case-study research of NGOs that provide social services to migrants in Minneapolis-St Paul, USA, and Toronto, Canada. We draw on the concept of `translation' to show the agency of NGOs in articulating macroscale programmes of governance into concrete regulations that govern the conduct of everyday life. The case studies demonstrate the usefulness of seeing NGOs as translation mechanisms to current debates about the role of NGOs amidst welfare state restructuring and the rise of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]