Sallie Marston | University of Arizona (original) (raw)

Journal Articles and Papers by Sallie Marston

Neil Brenner's response (this issue) to 'The social construction of scale' raises a host of excel... more Neil Brenner's response (this issue) to 'The social construction of scale' raises a host of excellent points that might, as he intends, help focus and refine the blossoming discussion of geographical scale. His larger argument, that the popularity of scale theories has led to a certain 'analytical blunting' of this sharply defined concept and that scale is increasingly conflated with broader discussions of space, is surely correct. Yet two aspects of Brenner's response are troubling: first, the idiosyncratic genealogy of scale theories he wishes to assert; and second, the refusal of feminist arguments about the scale of the household. Both moves compound and exemplify rather than resolve the problem he identifies. In the hope of sharpening the analytical debate, therefore, we would like to offer a brief sympathetic critique of these two foundations of Brenner's approach to scale theory. Our argument is that the analytical blunting of scale can best be countered through the constant reinvention of scale theory ahead of the fetishist juggernaut. For exactly this reason the original article insisted on the constitutive but largely unheralded role of social reproduction and consumption, in conjunction with social production, in the production of geographical scale. It seems to us that Brenner's commitment to a politics of scale is, following Lefebvre, only 'spacedeep'.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The development of a political strategy to address the uneven distribution of power and resources... more The development of a political strategy to address the uneven distribution of power and resources in a 19thcentury American city is the focus of this paper. It is argued that public celebrations of St. Patrick's Day in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts must be seen as something more than simple expressions of Irish tradition and culture. Instead, as the literature in social history is making increasingly clear, parades and other forms of mass public ritual are better characterized as demonstrations of community power and solidarity and serve as complex commentaries on the political economy of urban-industrial social relations. In Lowell, the parades were at first used to impress both the Yankee and the Irish communities with the spectacle of Irish respectability. Ultimately they were used to press for Irish participation in republican America on specifically Irish terms.

Increasingly, the iiterature on restructuring has begun to reveal that the popular response in Am... more Increasingly, the iiterature on restructuring has begun to reveal that the popular response in American cities to the profound spatiaf transformations accompanying the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy is on the rise. In this paper we focus on the role that women are playing in the new urban politics that has begun to emerge to negotiate these changes. Our objectives are to identify some of women's motivations for activism as well as to suggest the impacts they are having through their neighborhood organizations on local policy and planning. In order to explore these objectives, in-depth, open-ended interviews were conducted with a group of wamen activists prominent in neighborhood organizations in the rapidly growing Southwestern U.S. city of Tucson, Arizona, This study proposes that women's motivations for activism are directly derived from their sense that personal and political life are intricately linked. Furthermore, while uneven, the impact of nejghborhood organizations is significant, not only in terms of political campaigns, candidates, and issues, but also with respect to local planning and pol~~mak~ng.

In the last 15 years a range of new and revitalised forms of retailing have emerged in cities and... more In the last 15 years a range of new and revitalised forms of retailing have emerged in cities and suburbs across the USA. Power centres, hybrid centres, speciality retail centres, and street-based retailing have complicated the existing mix of shopping centres, malls, factory outlet/off-price centres, and festive/restoration centres. After examining the literature on retail change and establishing our theoretical framework, we analyse the history of mall construction and contrast it with a representative retail firm, Gap Inc., in order to gain some insights into the diversity of contemporary American retailing. Through this empirical examination we argue that retailing in the USA is currently operating through a range of spatial forms. This diversity in retail forms has been assisted and promoted by the emergence and increasing predominance of large corporate retailers -from clothiers to home furnishing vendors to booksellers -who are able to operate profitably in a range of spatial settings. As mall construction nationally has declined new shopping centre formats and the recent revival of street-based retailing appear as innovative spatial forms that extend the opportunities and broaden the experiential aspects of shopping for a wide range of consumers. We conclude that contemporary retailing, like manufacturing, has become increasingly flexible in its locational practices.

Special issue, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie

This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people produce value in all domains of... more This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested in the relationship between the production of value "at work" and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions that enable its deployment. Consider these three vignettes of contemporary life:

Urban geography in the 1980s experienced significant transformations in theory, method, and pract... more Urban geography in the 1980s experienced significant transformations in theory, method, and practice largely from new currents in social theory. In this paper we describe and analyze the ways in which social theoretical influences shaped our own work as we entered the discipline first as graduate students and later as junior faculty. Drawn into the social theoretical currents that were swirling both within and outside (urban) geography, our own earliest work was an attempt to engage with and struggle against some of these currents. In our paper we address the theoretical, methodological and practical issues that most challenged us as representatives of a generation of urban geographers who "came of age" in the 1980s. We specifically address our common interest in making a space for a sophisticated conceptualization of agency in a paradigm of the urban political economy that was over-determined by structural theory. We use Caroline Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman as an epistemological framework for thinking through our evolving feminist work on culture and social reproduction as well as an entry point into the dramatic changes that were occurring in geographers' theorizations of capitalist urbanization in the 1980s. [

The controversy surrounding the New York City St. Patrick's Day parade suggests that Irish ethnic... more The controversy surrounding the New York City St. Patrick's Day parade suggests that Irish ethnicity in the United States is still an important site of identity formation and fragmentation. In this paper I examine the New York City parades between 1990 and 2001 where a conflict has developed between the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, who want a place in the parade but have been denied entrance. The identity politics that surround the St. Patrick's Day parade controversy suggest that for diasporic communities, ethnic and national identities are highly contested and that boundaries-some hard and fast, others more permeable-are constructed along any number of axes. For the construction of Irish identity in New York City within-group identity is disputed across a number of these axes with the most important difference being sexual identity, particularly when it is being performed in a public space. 

Special issue, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie

Political Geography Quarterly, 1989

Journal of International Women S Studies, Sep 1, 2012

This paper explores the often-undervalued role of gender in transitional justice mechanisms and t... more This paper explores the often-undervalued role of gender in transitional justice mechanisms and the importance of women's struggles and agency in that regard. We focus on the efforts of the women's movement in Guatemala to address questions of justice and healing for survivors of gendered violence during Guatemala's 36-year internal armed conflict. We discuss how the initial transitional justice measures of documenting gendered war crimes in the context of a genocide were subsequently taken up by the women's movement and how their endeavors to further expose sexual violence have resulted in notable interventions. Interviews with key organizational activists as well as testimonies given by victims of sexual violence during the conflict suggest that transitional justice mechanisms, extended by women's movements' efforts, are creating conditions for the emergence of new practices and spaces that support the fragile cultivation of new subjectivities. Sujetas de cambio (subjects of change) are premised not on victimhood but survivorhood. The emergence of these new subjectivities and new claims, including greater personal security and freedom from everyday violence, must be approached with caution, however, as they are not born automatically out of the deeply emotional struggles that play out around historical memory. Still, their emergence suggests new ways for women to cope not only with the sexual violence of the past but also to work against the normative violence that is part of their present.

Political Geography, 2001

Cities, 1985

Book reviews more significant than conventional divisions b&ed on the manual/non manual distinction.

Geographical Review, 2013

creativity and geography v The Emergence of "Creative Geographies"