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This paper investigates the political implications of public art using frameworks of conflict and antagonism. We introduce 'restor(y)ing' as an analytical scaling device for examining public art's potential to destabilise official planning processes and reclaim cities through acts of re-telling (restorying) and re-making (restoring) urban spaces. We probe how commissioned/formal and unsolicited/informal public art practices can concurrently operate as artistic activism – or 'artivism' – to subvert the status quo in urban contexts that encounter rising socio-spatial inequalities. We deploy restor(y)ing both as an epistemic and real-world commitment to challenging hegemonic powers, and thus amplify activist agendas of marginalised communities. Our argument demonstrates how such politics of restor(y)ing works as a device to unpack conflictual interrelations between 'æffects': affects and effects that political public art can invoke simultaneously, yet potentially unevenly. The politics of æffects reveal contestations around public art in urban planning contexts and policies, public communication, and reception. They foreground intended inclusions vs. systemic exclusions (politics of effects) and the emanating impacts on urban belonging vs. alienation (politics of affects). While much public art scholarship accentuates its alleged positive benefits, we attend to the (oft-ambiguous) negative, conflict-attuned æffects of public art. Ultimately, we advocate for an intersectional approach to restor(y)ing urban justice through public artivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing debate about the role of monuments in diverse societies, there has been insufficient attention to contestations that have emerged involving 'gay' or 'queer' monuments. This article examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion that can stem from the social practices that evolve around these monuments, particularly as the imperatives and priorities of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) activism evolve while monuments, created in a particular historical and geographical context, are in some sense 'set in stone'. Drawing on an intensive, mixed-methods case study of the Homomonument in Amsterdam, the article develops a grounded critique of processes of inclusion and exclusion specifically in relation to Black, bisexual and transgender people. With a focus on dance parties organised at the Homomonument, the article calls for more research that analyses monuments as sites of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing everyday levels of LGBTQ+ phobia and other forms of identity‐based prejudice reveal the need for systematic attention across the versatile geographic discipline to the belonging and safety of LGBTQ+ field researchers. Through an expanded reflection on Bracken and Mawdsley's (2004) account '"Muddy glee": Rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork' (Area, 36, pp. 280–286), we consider the major issues – including forms of discrimination, exclusion and, sometimes, violence – that LGBTQ+ researchers (and more widely fieldworkers engaging LGBTQ+ communities) encounter at different stages of field research. We pursue a critical dialogue with opportunities and limitations provided by field, disciplinary as well as home institutional contexts and practices, including ethics and risk assessments, codes of conduct and support levels (or rather their deficiencies). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes original comparative perspectives of visibility, (counter)actions, and legacy regarding queer monuments: public artworks dedicated to, and questioning or queering normativities around, the lives of LGBT+ people. It pursues a dialogic, interdisciplinary, and multisite and intercultural argument, drawing from approaches and preliminary insights from a scholarly project (Queer Memorials) and artist's project (Strange Inheritance) with topical case studies covering North America and Europe. After abductive ethnography, the analysis oscillates between theory/literature and scholarly and creative practice. It attends to the critical roles queer monuments have played in engaging with how sexual "others" have fallen in and out of place through social struggles, radical politics, and collective memory. The peer exchange provides a cross-case taxonomy of queer monuments' roles, navigating between sorrowful, celebratory, provocative, and informative types and values. It advocates both arts-based enquiry and practice as grounded pathways for narrating queer monuments' activist potential to memorialize, and visibilize, sexual and gender minorities and their overlapping rights in/to space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first article to date that employs a knowledge map analysis to provide insights into the landscape of public art research, a multidisciplinary area that is concerned with issues around the geographies of art, space, and community. This study uses bibliometric analysis and knowledge visualization tools provided by CiteSpace mapping software to review scholarly journal output on "public art" since 1964-which is the first occurrence of this term in an article indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database covering English-language journal publications. The analysis reveals the value of bibliometric analysis for engaging data on the growth and popularity of public art as a research landscape-which is perceived as both a research field and research discourse. Accordingly, this study constructs knowledge maps, and thereby trends, of popular topics and networks of authors and institutions that have emerged in the public art research landscape. Such knowledge maps exhibit a "metageography" of cross-disciplinary connections within public art research (where these knowledge maps in themselves can be rendered as artworks, too). This study, as such, provides new reference points for scholars to position themselves in, and further deepen bibliometric investigation into, the landscape of public art research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial provides an introduction to the Journal of Geography in Higher Education Symposium on "Teaching geographies of sexualities: 20 years on". This edited collection revisits the Symposium "Teaching sexualities in geography" (Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Volume 23 [1999], Issue 1) and the earlier Arena Symposium essay series "Teaching sexual geographies" (Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Volume 21 [1997], Issue 3). The contributions to this updated anthology trace the evolvement and provide original critiques of the current state of sexualities (and, in extension, gender and intersectionality) education in geography curricula in transnational context. These interconnecting papers allow for a more in-depth understanding of the diverse possibilities and challenges facing the teaching of sexualities within geography in a contemporary international climate and identify opportunities for expanded provision. This editorial concludes with critical pointers to champion teaching-inflected sexualities scholarship that traverse disciplinary and geographical borders of pedagogical inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes a novel niche by providing an original critical synthesis of the potentials and challenges of using public art to teach about, and "que(e)ry", sexuality, gender and space. The argument vouches for a critical pedagogy that pursues a visual politics for experiential and potentially transformative learning about processes of social inclusion and exclusion, marginalization, and empowerment. It draws from vignettes of first-hand pedagogical methods in class (in the form of collaborative class debates coordinated through creative educative content including an infographic and educational film) and in the field (in the form of a guided walking tour abroad). The vignettes illustrate how a critical pedagogy aims to instigate "awakenings" and deconstructions of norms (e.g. heteronormativity) and privileged positionalities (e.g. cisgendered, white (gay) male). The analysis indicates multi-sited levels of praxes: critical reflections and critical actions that may stretch beyond the teaching space into "real-world" contexts. The paper demonstrates the value of putting personal experience central by interlocking research and teaching practices. It thereby shows the value of collaborative knowledge production for situated, nuanced understandings of self/culture. This study advocates further "first-person" investigation into the ensuing challenges of negotiating topic sensitivity and the disclosure of positionalities (of both educator and learner). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes an original critique at the nexus of public art, activism (i.e. public artivism) and migration alongside the promotion of inclusive change. It pushes at transdisciplinary boundaries by integrating geohumanities scholarship on socially engaged public art whilst adopting a queer theory approach to foreground and interrogate the socially marginalised. The focus is on Schellekens & Peleman's multi-site Inflatable Refugee installation, in response to the topical migration question, and the public performances and discourses that surround the migrant figure. An in-depth critical discourse analysis drawing from an interview with the collective and key documentation critically probes into the uses of public art(ivism) to raise issues particularly around the (mis)represention of this migrant figure. The case study evinces ambiguous modus operandi of public artivist practice. Although it may promote inclusive citizenship through 'queering' identity politics and migrant hyper-visibility, the material and socio-spatial affordances (along with limitations) of public artivism do not necessarily develop its full potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to geography's digital and political turns, this article presents an original critical synthesis of the under-examined niche of networked geographies of public-art practices in today's politicised digital culture. This article advances insights into digital public art as politics, and its role in politicising online public spaces with foci on: how digital technologies have instigated do-it-yourself modes for the co-creation of art content within peer-to-peer contexts; the way art is 'stretched' and experienced in/across the digital public sphere; and how user-(co-)created content has become subject to (mis)uses, simultaneously informed by digital 'artivism' and a new global politics infused with populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a case study on Miami Beach’s acclaimed iconic art deco architectural district, this article critically dovetails intersecting hegemonic spaces of preservation, memorial practices and social and sexual identities. It argues how commemorative narratives are selectively encrypted in the local urban environment and its artefacts deemed of historical significance. It especially reveals the tensions arising between art deco (i.e. architectural) preservation and gay (i.e. social) urban preservation, as well as its under-studied largely entrepreneurial nature and attraction for a mainstream, cosmopolitan class under neoliberalism. Drawing from extensive archival, policy, observational, participatory and interview data over 2013–2015, the article revisits in historical perspective how the art deco area, incarnated in the 1920s, developed across class-, ethnicity-, religion- and age-inflected social fragmentations and how this legacy, from the late-1970s onward, segued into the local gay-led preservation movement and select commemorations of the art deco scene. To this background, the study employs the tenet of ‘queerying’ to address the under-researched coalescing frictions in preservation between perceived authentic and engineered trajectories of (gay) place (re)makings alongside reminiscences selected over others. The findings uncover and challenge (un)intentional ‘(un)rememberings’ of the local early history and the recent past, where socially fragmented fault lines and the more recent gay-led preservation track remain overly homogeneously imprinted in dominant preservation communications and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal cities have increasingly welcomed initiatives for producing temporary urban art spaces to lure tourists and revitalize the local economy. This article examines the under-explored contested relationships between a major temporary art event and social (dis)engagement in the context of coastal urban regeneration. During the pop-up art event Dismaland (2015), led by the reputed graffiti artist Banksy and company, the coastal resort of Weston-super-Mare in England experienced an upsurge of international visitors. Banksy envisaged this “Bemusement Park”, situated in an abandoned lido, as an antagonist twist of Disneyland and the commercial modus operandus of theme parks. Drawing on discourse analysis of expert and public perspectives and auto-ethnographic experience, this article challenges the experienced extent of antagonistic art practice in juxtaposition to the formal discourse of creators and urban policymakers. The examination of the event's artistic, behavioral, spatial and temporal frameworks shows how it ambiguously navigated between authentic and engineered trajectories of involving its target audiences. The creators' anarchist plea for radical change was ambivalently met with appreciation of an urban art space for serious contemplation as well as a perceived lack of local community investment – the latter rendering Dismaland an urban ‘art colony’ that fostered an elitist global art market rather than urban-citizen-led participation. The in-depth case study concludes that greater attention, both in urban policy and scholarship, is needed to the implications of the production of temporary urban art spaces for immediate inclusive engagement with end users as well as sustained community development. The study particularly calls for caution in assuming inclusive community benefits of art-led regeneration as abundantly ascribed in creative city theories and urban policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship has largely been conducted on publics’ ‘offline’ public art encounters, while public art practice has become increasingly integrated with virtual dimensions. This article aims to fill this gap by focusing on digitally mediated public art engagement. A case study on the travelling Rubber Duck exhibition (2012–present) interrogates how this artwork is appropriated and narrated through digitally networked spaces (mainly social media, forums and news platforms) after its repeated on-site installations. This article argues for the need to expand on ‘virtual relationality’: the communication, (re-)negotiation and (re-)siting of public art’s roles and meanings through (mainly text- and image-based) social mediations within hybrid, online-offline contexts. Public art encounters are examined along fluid cybergeographical understandings of its social and spatial publicness, temporalities and uses, which deconstruct binaries including material/digital space, permanence/ephemerality and human/non-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions have remained under-addressed in scholarship on public memorial art, particularly with sexuality content. This case study on the Amsterdam-based Homomonument attends to this gap by differentiating emotions according to multi-scalar, multi-temporal and multi-semiotic dimensions of everyday lived experiences of sexual citizenship. Based on discourse analysis of secondary materials and social media coverage, supplemented with auto-ethnographic experience, the study explores how present-day feelings of respect, agitation and celebration around Homomonument are mediated at intersecting levels of the body, local community, broader society and especially emergent virtual community spaces. Such understanding requires critical interfaces with reminiscences, contemporary values and normativities, and future imaginaries. Specifically, this paper puts in perspective how Homomonument operates as queer micropublic: a space for intercultural encounter and 'queerying' sexual difference. This appears to be a multifaceted meaningful process, too: Homomonument ambiguously holds contesting, reconciling, indifferent and empathic sentiments alongside belongings and sexual identity expressions in quotidian life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on a workshop as a space of possibility to encounter actual publics, explore the relationship between publics and experts and imagine alternative realities for public-art practice. In a workshop that the author convened at the invitation of the local cultural organisation Lokaal42 in Helmond in the Netherlands, participants were challenged to transgress comfort zones by enacting and negotiating desired prospects for public art. This article critically attends to the notions of co-creation and (dis)comfort in the light of transformative positionalities as part of the workshop (and its role-play element in particular). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews gender mainstreaming in practices of urban governance in Europe by comparing Sweden and Italy, which have distinct welfare-state systems: that of the former is firmly embedded in institutional and social structures, whereas that of the latter is markedly more familistic. This review illustrates this relatively strong contrast case on the basis of a literature and policy analysis, and elaborates how the everyday policies of urban governance regarding the living environment are considerably more gender-sensitive in Sweden than is the case in Italy. The main explanation for this difference lies in Sweden's political social- ism and longer socio-democratic tradition of incremental and equity-planning approaches in urban governance, in contrast to Italy's social tradition of rather more conservative corporatism and patriarchal commune tactics. Socio-political and formal-institutional barriers, which are impeding both the top-down and the bottom-up implementation of gender-sensitive initiatives, could be overcome by creating more mental and formal legislative room for urban-based gender mainstreaming. Such room would challenge prevailing patriarchal societal structures and policy narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what is referred to as the concept of sexual citizenship, through referencing the work of the scholars Kath Browne, Phil Hubbard, Liz Dinnie and Marianne Blidon. Particular focus is given the the geographic aspects of sexuality, including in regard to the rights of gays to public spaces.

Urban regeneration in Dutch cities is increasingly accompanied by the cultural sector in general and by artists in particular. This paper presents comparative case studies on current artists-accompanied urban regeneration initiated by housing corporations in Utrecht and Rotterdam. On the basis of discourse analysis on the voices of decisive actors, it explores the rationale behind artists-accompanied urban regeneration and the sociospatial implications thereof. It empirically indicates that housing corporations are more inclined to deploy artists in urban regeneration when there are sufficient vacant buildings. It also illustrates that more decentralised housing corporations have a stronger and more long-term commitment to urban regeneration. The latter includes a greater commitment to interventions by artists within urban public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on particularities of indwellers' perceptions of public art and its locale by drawing on the epistemology of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women. New York: Routledge) and the notion of ‘geographies of engagement’ (Zebracki, Van Der Vaart and Van Aalst 2010, Geoforum 41(5): 786–795). We employ the case of Paul McCarthy's internationally acclaimed public artwork Santa Claus in Rotterdam to illustrate the sundry outlooks on its spatialities, aesthetics and moralities, and its functionalities in relation to place. Santa Claus's alleged sexual nature is highly disputed among local politicians and the local population. This dispute is narratively covered by media sources and inscribed by its popular renaming as the ‘Butt Plug Gnome’. We empirically situate documented media views within the way indwellers perceive Santa Claus and its experienced locale in interrelation with themselves. We try to open up differential vistas on public-art narration in relation to people, time and space, whereby we elaborate on the reflexive idea of ‘social relationality’ (Massey and Rose 2003, Personal Views: Public Art Research Project. Milton Keynes: The Open University) by revealing how socio-spatial differences in public-art narration are negotiated. As such, we examine how public art is geographically reconstituted through the publics, namely those for whom public art is essentially intended yet who have been neglected actors of analysis in public-art research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural policy has produced divergent intentions underlying the direction of public art since its advent in Western Europe in 1945. Literature has feebly demonstrated the extent to which differentialities in cultural policy have affected the production of public artworks over time and space. This paper fills this gap as regards Amsterdam and Ghent, cities that are situated in different national institutional contexts. It shows dissimilarity—in that one finds a relatively higher number of public artworks, more spatially dispersed and more diversified public artworks in Amsterdam than in Ghent, which is particularly a result of institutional differences—and similarity between these cities, in terms of initiatives by local communities and arts actors, irrespective of the local policy context. These results provide insight into policy concern with public-art production and the everyday practices and cultural traditions that underpin it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines two case studies from the UK and Israel to question/'que(e)ry' LGBTQ people's travel and mobility behaviours, to explore the issue of 'queer mobilities' and related exclusions from heteronormative public transport spaces. Our research demonstrates how the fear of anti-LGBTQ discrimination and violence have profound impacts on LGBTQ people's travel options and activity spaces. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, we examine how LGBTQ identity/'queerness', visibility, and safety perceptions affect mobility opportunities and choices. We pursue feminist and queer approaches to expose how LGBTQ people embody a complex, intersectional set of mobility considerations. The study reveals grounded experiences of different LGBTQ travellers and their coping strategies to feel able to travel safely. It identifies how LGBTQ participants are not necessarily physically excluded from mobility opportunities. Rather, they pay hidden costs to travel safely, which take the shape of identity and visibility compromises and heightened levels of fear while travelling. They also use more expensive travel alternatives, such as taxis, or take less direct routes to overcome their experiences of unsafe and inaccessible public transport alternatives. Thereby, we advocate a view of mobility as another important dimension of the discrimination and exclusion of sexual and gender minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]