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doi: 10.1068/d2206pmid: N/A
As the birthplace of the Nazi Party, Munich assumed a prominent role in Hitler's plans to build a new Germany. The first major project of this Nazi building program aimed to redesign Munich's Königsplatz Square as a new ‘Forum of the Movement’. Contemporary writers and later scholars have generally seen the project as a successful and effective example of Hitler's ideas concerning urban design. Yet, informed by recent theoretical and methodological developments in geography, a critical analysis of contemporary sources and greater awareness of the square's new spatiality and functionality suggest that the project suffered from several deficiencies that limited its effectiveness both as a symbolic representation of Hitler's architectural aspirations and as a practical venue for party events. Indeed, the difficulties of co-opting this established public space likely played a pivotal role in shifting the focus of Hitler's monumental building program to new locations away from traditional urban centers and historical buildings.
Li, Feng; Papagiannidis, Savvas; Bourlakis, Michael
doi: 10.1068/d14708pmid: N/A
The rapid development of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) is creating new virtual worlds that significantly extend our socioeconomic environment. Increasingly, organisations and individuals have to live in multiple spaces incorporating physical, electronic, and virtual spaces, which are creating numerous new business and social opportunities and challenges. Today, MMORPGs—both virtual social worlds and online fantasy games—have evolved far beyond mere online computer games. From a business perspective, the new environment challenges existing management theories, creating new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs and calling for the development of new management theories and new research methods. From a social perspective, the virtual world represents the frontier of social computing, with profound implications for policy and our society at large. This paper will explore the concept of ‘multiple spaces’, examine the interplays and connections among the different spaces, and discuss their business and social implications. New themes for future research will also be highlighted.
doi: 10.1068/d9507pmid: N/A
By approaching the road as a contact zone, I develop novel insights into the turbulent multiculture of a northern mill town in England. Through a montage of encounters with taxis and ‘flash’ cars on the streets of Keighley, West Yorkshire, I illustrate how social differentiation is performed on the road as human difference is sorted and judged through assemblages of flesh, metal, and road. I develop recent debates on the social construction of race, arguing for a perspective that foregrounds what race does in social interaction. And so I offer a reconsideration of race as a technology of differentiation at work in interaction that is allied to what I call the ‘racism of assemblages’, which traces how loose racial summaries distributed across bodies, things, and spaces become the basis for perception, judgment, and action. In the process, I also assemble perspectives on multiculture from below, which disrupt talk of segregation and ‘parallel lives' in northern mill towns, and question arguments that more interaction and community cohesion are the answer to living with difference.
doi: 10.1068/d9408pmid: N/A
This paper examines the specific configurations that territorialization took in the colonial and post-colonial Malaysian state within the context of the crisis of authority that accompanies violent conflicts. I trace the post-colonial Malaysian state's attempt to legitimate itself when its elites supported the British in the counterinsurgency campaign, known as the Emergency, against the forest-based Malayan Communist Party who fought for independence after WWII. Territorializing Malaysia required both physical reconfiguration and imaginative recuperation of the landscape. The success of the counterinsurgency rested on two ambitious spatial policies: the New Villages and the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) agricultural scheme. I explore how the two policies constructed moral “citizenscapes” for the performance of national identity. The New Villages comprised a punitive landscape designed to contain 20% of the population through curfews and a geometric architecture rendering them visible to, and manageable by, the state. But an equally urgent task of the reterritorialization project for the Malaysian post-colonial government was the creation of a positive moral scopic politics and an essentialized national space inhabited by loyal subject-citizens in place of the anarchic rainforest and its insurgent population. The FELDA schemes were conceived as theatrical stages for performing national identity as embodied in the male bumiputera settler. My paper explores how state power is legitimized through a performance of its subjects and citizens within punitive and affirmative landscapes that construct a postcolonial nature.
Pykett, Jessica; Cloke, Paul; Barnett, Clive; Clarke, Nick; Malpass, Alice
doi: 10.1068/d14908pmid: N/A
The ethics of everyday consumption has become a key concern for social and environmental justice campaigning by NGOs in the United Kingdom. Schools are a prominent site for such campaigns, where, alongside other ‘controversial issues' and initiatives such as citizenship education, the problematisation of consumption practices has developed its own distinctive set of pedagogical devices. This paper questions the analytical framing of education as a space of neoliberal subjectification, in which ‘critical pedagogy’ is seen as the only legitimate form of resistance within theoretical models of domination – subordination and governmentality. The institutionalisation of fair-trade education in schools in Bristol, a city in the southwest of England, is presented as an empirical case through which to consider how best to theorise the rationalities of consumption-oriented campaigning by NGOs. We discuss the consequences of problematising global responsibility where learning is seen as a performative encounter between reflexive actors situated in particular sociocultural environments.
doi: 10.1068/d3309pmid: N/A
In this paper I describe rural gentrification—ie the in-migration of relatively young, ex-urban members of the postindustrial middle class (PIMC)—in the northern Rocky Mountains as a form of ‘permanent tourism’. The colonization of previously industrial landscapes—ie those created according to a regime that prioritizes the production/consumption of commodities—by the PIMC has led to the expansion of postindustrial class – cultural space and the creation of the ‘New’ American West. This shift in what constitutes the ‘highest and best’ use of these lands resonates with the character of late-Modern tourism in that this emerging regime emphasizes the production/consumption of ‘experiences' to a greater degree than does the extant regime. Thus, rural gentrifiers are enacting cultural projects that are akin to those of tourists but doing so with the intention of permanently writing them into the social and physical landscape. Drawing on ethnographic examples from my fieldwork in south – central Montana, I demonstrate how members of the PIMC mobilize their increasing local strength through citizens' environmental groups and political institutions and thereby forward their ideals of proper land-use policy and practice.
doi: 10.1068/d14808pmid: N/A
Theorising psychological activity as a spatial product appears a logical extension of moves in social theory to emphasise the role of space and place in the consideration of experience. Catalysed by turns in social and human geographies to highlight the role of space and location in constituting psychological activity, various forms of the ‘spatialisation of experience’ have emerged. In this paper I will follow this theoretical direction in relation to the underlying destabilisation of everyday life that emerges as a product of theoretical formations that emphasise the fluidity of space. More specifically, I will take the example of the home as a central space in the ongoing activity of people with enduring mental distress. Forging a theoretical line that takes in geographies of mental health, the home, and finally, Gilles Deleuze's work on ‘repetition’ and ‘habit’, I will analyse the role of home spaces in everyday life. Key here is a concern regarding the impact of theoretical emphases on continuity, mobility, and instability on understandings of the everyday lives of mental health service users. This includes addressing conceptualisations of the home space alongside the activities of the people who occupy, and hence co-make, such spaces. The article concludes by framing ‘spatial habituation’ of the everyday as central to creating a perceivable stability, analysis of which can aid understanding of the challenges facing people suffering with mental distress.
doi: 10.1068/d4509pmid: N/A
In this paper I offer an interpretation of Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France: Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. Through doing so, I suspend the mainstay of social scientific research that falls within the field of governmentality studies and turn instead to the historico-critical basis for Foucault's researches. Embracing notions of governmental ‘counter-conducts' and the ‘critical attitude’, I show how a positive desubjugating form of critique, which temporarily suspends the power of governmental norms, is wholly immanent to the formation and development of modern political governmentality. Furthermore, the ethos of this critique is key to understanding Foucault's genealogical method and his conception of the political. To advance these claims, throughout this paper I draw on the example of rights. I move away from the normative approach to rights in an era of (liberal) political governmentality towards a more performative understanding—what Foucault terms the ‘right to question’ governmental regimes of truth. I finish by describing Foucault's own questioning of governmental regimes and offer a rereading of his defence of the Vietnamese boat people in the early 1980s.
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