Paul Adams | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Adams

In my previous research, I have developed a taxonomic system for situating work in the nascent fi... more In my previous research, I have developed a taxonomic system for situating work in the nascent field of geomedia. This taxonomy organizes the field into four quadrants separated by the classic geographical distinction between space and place, and an orthogonal division between media as containers and media as contents. There is growing attention to communicational processes that fragment or modularize identity while extending agency in various ways. Second, the formation of social collectivities evolves in response to the new processes forming personal identity. New kinds of publics emerge through digital data flows, and these redefine the nature of mobility. When one moves with a digital device that links to distant locations while constantly updating the location of the user, and the device both shapes and tracks the user's movement, distinctions of space, place, content and context break down. This chapter builds off the quadrant diagram to provide a sense of where we are headed with these developments.

Maps showing immigration into Europe are a potential source of journalistic bias. Limited time an... more Maps showing immigration into Europe are a potential source of journalistic bias. Limited time and funding to create maps of migration can lead to dependence on data from institutions dedicated to controlling migration, in effect promoting a logic of surveillance directed at immigrants rather than a logic of hospitality based on respect for human rights. There are organizational and logistical barriers to overcome if migration is to be portrayed in ways that support thoughtful, democratic, rights-based deliberation but efforts need to be made to map migration in ways that reveal the geographical experiences of individual immigrants including their movement paths and the risks
they face. This article examines unusual maps of migration, drawing on examples from news media as well as from non-governmental organizations, research teams, book authors, private companies, and entertainment media based in several European countries. The examples provide a foundation for concrete recommendations regarding the responsible use of cartographic visualization as a component of immigration news.

The Internet functions as a political forum--a space in which conflicting ideas about policy, gov... more The Internet functions as a political forum--a space in which conflicting ideas about policy, governance, ideology and personal identity are discussed and debated. This paper considers the way the virtual space defined by the Internet was appropriated by French citizens to discuss and debate the US presidential election of 2004, and how French users of cyberspace engaged with each other's ideas in several online virtual spaces. I demonstrate the ability of the Internet to promote the diffusion of certain constructions of the United States, American society and American leadership in particular. I also demonstrate contested perspectives on French society, culture, policies and leadership.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1992

An examination of television as a center of meaning and as a social context supports the concept ... more An examination of television as a center of meaning and as a social context supports the concept of a place without a location. Similar ideas have appeared in media theory since the 1960s, but have not been the subject of geographic research. Comparison of television with other media, including books, radio, and film, reveals that it is uniquely place-like. Television functions as a social context, providing sensory communion and social congregation; it also functions as a center of meaning, helping a society define "us" and "them," conferring value on persons and objects, and, possibly, supporting hegemonic social control. A comparison of television and certain architectural structures identifies similarities and differences that may be related to long-term historical changes in society.

Political Geography, 1996

Yi-Fu Tuan is skeptical of methods, including those of hermeneutics, but his approach closely par... more Yi-Fu Tuan is skeptical of methods, including those of hermeneutics, but his approach closely parallels the prescriptions of several hermeneutic philosophers. He seeks to empathize with all kinds of human experience by reading across various works from literature and the arts, as well as history, biography, social science, philosophy and theology. In Tuanian hermeneutic circles, geographically contingent understandings of the world propel people between a pole of experience characterized by rootedness, security and certainty, and an opposing pole characterized by outreach, expansiveness and imagination. One pole signifies stasis, the other, transformation, but elements of each pole infiltrate and animate the other. These Tuanian contrasts reveal many ways of being-in-the-world, and how they mix and blend is always subtle and full of nuance. For example there is always a certain distance in what is nearby and a kind of nearness in what is far away. Tuan thereby provides a lens on the ambiguities and ambivalences that attend the human experience of dwelling in the world.

Some of the most perceptive contributions to the geographic study of media and communication have... more Some of the most perceptive contributions to the geographic study of media and communication have been in areas of landscapes studies and geohumanities. To bring landscape and geohumanities insights together more explicitly with communication and media, this progress report draws on George Revill's concept of an 'arc of sound', expanding the concept's scope to an arc of communication – a dynamic trajectory connecting one vantage point to another through various translations and shifts. It is a mix of integration and translation that forms its own space, place and time, integrating elements of embodied performance, multiple sensory modalities, temporality, absence and excess. Arcs of communication often depend on collaboration and can produce transformations of identity. The concept of the arc of communication enables discovery of numerous threads connecting landscape studies to geohumanities while deepening geographical understandings of media and communication.

This chapter explores a few of the ways in which place participates in distributed agency. Accord... more This chapter explores a few of the ways in which place participates in distributed agency. According to a long tradition, we think of place as a simple vessel or site for agency while neglecting the ways in which place profoundly affects what we are able to do. Drawing on geographic theories, literature and philosophy, emplaced action is presented in this chapter as action that transcends the taken-for-granted boundaries of mind and body through its embeddedness in place. The role of place in extending human agency is demonstrated through examples ranging in scale from the home to the nation-state.

Media and communication are attracting increasing amounts of attention from geographers but the w... more Media and communication are attracting increasing amounts of attention from geographers but the work remains disorganized and lacks a unifying paradigm. This progress report suggests a new paradigm for geographical studies of media and communication and indicates how recent research fits under this umbrella. The report presents recent studies of literature, film and television, digital media, photography, comics, stamps and banknotes. The range of theoretical concerns in this body of work includes performance, agency, materiality, immateriality, networks, politics, emotions and affect. Collectively, these concerns point to communications not merely as transmissions through infrastructure, space and time, but rather as encounters between various human and nonhuman agents. The metaphysical question is exactly what such encounters do to participants – how agents are transformed by other agents' communications. This leads to synthesis in a new paradigm for media/communication geography: the metaphysics of encounter.

A turning point in human–environment relations has been signalled by the term Anthropocene. Acade... more A turning point in human–environment relations has been signalled by the term Anthropocene. Academic responses to the Anthropocene must acknowledge the unprecedented role of humankind on the planet while avoiding models that dismiss or minimise the agency of non-human actors. They must pay attention to hybridity, materiality, actor-networks and nonrepresentational geographies, and at the same time, they must appreciate posthumanist blurring of ontological divides between the social and the natural, and an ethics of mutual inclusion. One way to meet these varied objectives is by understanding place as an organic whole orchestrated by human and non-human communications, an entity I call an 'enviro-organism'. An account of the enviro-organism proceeds through three phases of the day on a generic, though far from universal, beach. It integrates four goals: to renew understanding of communication as a geographical process, to emphasise scalar ambiguity, to reveal various ways in which communications are embodied and to promote holistic ways of acting and thinking with the world rather than against it. Theoretical foundations in Peircean semiotics, biosemiotics and Jacob von Uexkull's idea of Umwelt permit this sustained focus on communication as a generalised phenomenon linking humans and non-humans in a place.

This paper examines the Santo Daime religion, the Amazonian town of Céu do Mapiá which is one of ... more This paper examines the Santo Daime religion, the Amazonian town of Céu do Mapiá which is one of its primary spiritual centres, and Ayahuasca, a key sacrament of the Santo Daime religion. The small village in the Amazon demonstrates the active outreach by a place which functions as a nexus of international and intercontinental flows of substances, bodies and meanings. The power of place is entwined with the story of religious belief and practice, which in turn depends on a tropical vine, Banisteriopsis caapi. In this networking process, we find a confluence of human agency with more-than-human agency, as well as the modalities of religious experience, crossing and dwelling. It is demonstrated that religious networking can be understood in terms of three forms of crossing (terrestrial, corporeal and cosmic) held together by the power of place (Mapiá and other subsidiary spiritual centres). In addition, three aspects of the 'ayahuasca network' are treated in depth: religious diffusion and adaptation, interaction with environmental movements and ideologies and contestation with legal structures and processes surrounding international drug traffic and the use of psychoactive substances.

Written long before I knew what an abstract was...

What is the virtual? I would offer three complementary definitions. First, the term indicates an ... more What is the virtual? I would offer three complementary definitions. First, the term indicates an immaterial context of interaction, a kind of intangible architecture that supports and organizes interactions. Second, the virtual evokes an organized field of relations that people navigate using one or two senses while suspending or separating the other senses, bracketing them in a different stream of awareness. Third, the virtual can be understood as a system that permits spatially dispersed participants to interact in a way that would otherwise require proximity and face-to-face interaction. Defined in this way, the virtual has a long history, reaching back to the origins of writing and speech itself.

Scarcely an issue of any leading geography journal published in the past year can be found that d... more Scarcely an issue of any leading geography journal published in the past year can be found that does not contain at least one article referring to communications or media. Most references are oblique, as when an article is an attempt to destabilize environmental views promoted by “the media,” but some are direct, as in studies of particular uses of certain media. This interest in mediated communication was not the case in the late 1990s, when Ken Hillis wrote about the “invisibility of communications in geography” (1998). Since that time, an online “journal of media geography,” Aether, has published several issues and a specialty group dedicated to “Communication Geography” has emerged in the Association of American Geographers paralleling some of the interests of the older “Geography of the Global Information Society” commission in the International Geographical Union. In Britain, despite the absence of an RGS-IBG study group dedicated to the topic, a phenomenal amount of interest has been directed towards new media and communication topics in the past five years. Interest in media is tangential to the main orientation of many studies, but it lies behind a wide range of concerns such as “identity formation,” “narrative,” “scale,” “discourses,” “publics,” and “networks.” The sub-disciplines most engaged in studies of media are urban, economic, political and social geography, as well as studies of gender, mobilities, embodiment, and nonrepresentational theory. The specific roles of media in these studies are varied and as such they merit efforts to clarify and elucidate.

The broadening and deepening of Europe as a macro-region impels processes of expansion, contracti... more The broadening and deepening of Europe as a macro-region impels processes of expansion, contraction and transformation in sub-regions positioned within the EU and across the EU’s border. Recent arguments stress the idea of regionalization as a multi-layered character. Using Northern Europe as a study site, three such layers are explored: territorially bounded regionalization in the voting patterns of the Eurovision Song Contest, networked regionalization in the membership of intergovernmental organizations, and fluid regionalization in the geography of language. The associated regionalization processes are explained and visualized using mixed methodologies. Across these three layers of regionalization we can see the persistence of a Scandinavian core, but various territorial, networked and fluid forms of regionalization are stretching and pulling at the edges of Nordic regionalizations.

Online environmental messages are examined through the use of focus groups. These messages are de... more Online environmental messages are examined through the use of focus groups. These messages are derived from short online videos and an interactive Internet tool called the ‘‘ecological footprint calculator.’’ Subject responses are compared and contrasted across two axes of differentiation: Americans versus Norwegians, and journalism students versus petroleum engineering students. Responses of focus groups drawn from these four 10 stakeholder types show the importance of place in online environmental communication. Place takes four general forms: (1) a dimension of the audience, (2) a dimension of the text, (3) an aspect of interactive online communication, and (4) a figurative understanding of social networks. In general, it is argued that effective online communication regarding environmental risks and problems requires sensitivity to these 15 four different aspects of place. In particular, it is argued that place images in online videos should be carefully tailored to their social and geographical place of reception, including local environments but also geographical variations in environmental attitudes. In addition, interactive online simulations should be tailored to the user’s sense of ‘‘home,’’ particularly attachment to one’s nation-state. Similarly, efforts to 20 promote pro-environment attitudes should make use of online social networks by treating them like places in their own right, with local norms and customs, ideals and ideologies. Based on this argument, a key finding of the study is that while responses to an interactive online ‘‘footprint calculator’’ are generally positive, and show benefits relative to online videos, the limited ability of users to select their (self-identified) ‘‘home’’ undermines the tool’s effectiveness.

Trajectories are defined as constructs used in geopolitical discourses at all levels – formal, pr... more Trajectories are defined as constructs used in geopolitical discourses at all levels – formal, practical and popular. Each trajectory consists of a particular scaling of here, a particular scaling of there, and a particular causal hypothesis about how the two are linked. Norwegian discourses about the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize provide examples of trajectories. These discourses reveal certain assumptions about the motives and outcomes framed in terms of trajectories, as well as closely associated types of emotion and affect. By employing the concept of the trajectory, geographers can better understand geopolitical discourses, their construction of scale and causality, as well as their dependency on the in-between spaces of emotion and affect.

The study of information and communication technologies (ICT) by geographers has evolved over the... more The study of information and communication technologies (ICT) by geographers has evolved over the past third of a century from a concentration on friction of distance and spatial organization toward a set of four interrelated social approaches: ICT as a set of contested terrains, ICT as a means of perception, ICT as a form of embodiment, and ICT as virtual places or spaces (distanciated social contexts). These approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. What is absent thus far from the ICT debate is attention to ethnicity, except as a surrogate of economic class or in vague allusions to a digital divide. Since people use ICT to build a sense of community and personal identity, both of which relate strongly to ethnicity, the topic deserves attention. The four approaches are integrated here to understand the appropriation of the internet by temporary and permanent immigrants to the USA from India (typically called Non-Resident Indians or NRIs). The concept of virtual space can be used to organize discussion of the use of the internet by NRIs. To better encapsulate the virtual space we employ a map of what we call 'bridgespace', a virtual space that supports flows of people, goods, capital and ideas between South Asia and North America. We consider the full range of sites involved in the bridgespace, then direct our attention in particular to 'matrimonial' sites, those sites designed to support the identification of marriage partners.

Public opinion polls from before and after 2001 in Quebec (Canada) reveal a marked shift during t... more Public opinion polls from before and after 2001 in Quebec (Canada) reveal a marked shift during that year in attitudes about the US. Québécois opinions of the US fell to the least favorable rating they had had in 15 years. A ''fair weather friend'' phenomenon based on fear of association with a target state does not fully explain Quebec's reaction. Consideration of Quebec's historical geographical situation as a small nation without a sovereign state suggests deeper reasons for the shift in perspective, which are confirmed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of letters to the editor of daily newspapers. Québécois letters about the attacks of September 11 were inclined to frame these attacks in terms of a battle between a large and powerful state and various small and weak nations, and subsequently to find common cause with the small nations. This particular framing of the 9-11 events according to a ''small-nation'' code reflected fundamental elements of the historical-geographical situation of Quebec as constructed in Québécois discourses. The activation of a set of key associations from the national past to understand international relations in the present is an example of what Gertjan Dijkink calls the ''national reflex''. The activation of the reflex by an attack on the US points out how a hegemonic state can be vulnerable, paradoxically, as a result of its own supremacy. #

In my previous research, I have developed a taxonomic system for situating work in the nascent fi... more In my previous research, I have developed a taxonomic system for situating work in the nascent field of geomedia. This taxonomy organizes the field into four quadrants separated by the classic geographical distinction between space and place, and an orthogonal division between media as containers and media as contents. There is growing attention to communicational processes that fragment or modularize identity while extending agency in various ways. Second, the formation of social collectivities evolves in response to the new processes forming personal identity. New kinds of publics emerge through digital data flows, and these redefine the nature of mobility. When one moves with a digital device that links to distant locations while constantly updating the location of the user, and the device both shapes and tracks the user's movement, distinctions of space, place, content and context break down. This chapter builds off the quadrant diagram to provide a sense of where we are headed with these developments.

Maps showing immigration into Europe are a potential source of journalistic bias. Limited time an... more Maps showing immigration into Europe are a potential source of journalistic bias. Limited time and funding to create maps of migration can lead to dependence on data from institutions dedicated to controlling migration, in effect promoting a logic of surveillance directed at immigrants rather than a logic of hospitality based on respect for human rights. There are organizational and logistical barriers to overcome if migration is to be portrayed in ways that support thoughtful, democratic, rights-based deliberation but efforts need to be made to map migration in ways that reveal the geographical experiences of individual immigrants including their movement paths and the risks
they face. This article examines unusual maps of migration, drawing on examples from news media as well as from non-governmental organizations, research teams, book authors, private companies, and entertainment media based in several European countries. The examples provide a foundation for concrete recommendations regarding the responsible use of cartographic visualization as a component of immigration news.

The Internet functions as a political forum--a space in which conflicting ideas about policy, gov... more The Internet functions as a political forum--a space in which conflicting ideas about policy, governance, ideology and personal identity are discussed and debated. This paper considers the way the virtual space defined by the Internet was appropriated by French citizens to discuss and debate the US presidential election of 2004, and how French users of cyberspace engaged with each other's ideas in several online virtual spaces. I demonstrate the ability of the Internet to promote the diffusion of certain constructions of the United States, American society and American leadership in particular. I also demonstrate contested perspectives on French society, culture, policies and leadership.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1992

An examination of television as a center of meaning and as a social context supports the concept ... more An examination of television as a center of meaning and as a social context supports the concept of a place without a location. Similar ideas have appeared in media theory since the 1960s, but have not been the subject of geographic research. Comparison of television with other media, including books, radio, and film, reveals that it is uniquely place-like. Television functions as a social context, providing sensory communion and social congregation; it also functions as a center of meaning, helping a society define "us" and "them," conferring value on persons and objects, and, possibly, supporting hegemonic social control. A comparison of television and certain architectural structures identifies similarities and differences that may be related to long-term historical changes in society.

Political Geography, 1996

Yi-Fu Tuan is skeptical of methods, including those of hermeneutics, but his approach closely par... more Yi-Fu Tuan is skeptical of methods, including those of hermeneutics, but his approach closely parallels the prescriptions of several hermeneutic philosophers. He seeks to empathize with all kinds of human experience by reading across various works from literature and the arts, as well as history, biography, social science, philosophy and theology. In Tuanian hermeneutic circles, geographically contingent understandings of the world propel people between a pole of experience characterized by rootedness, security and certainty, and an opposing pole characterized by outreach, expansiveness and imagination. One pole signifies stasis, the other, transformation, but elements of each pole infiltrate and animate the other. These Tuanian contrasts reveal many ways of being-in-the-world, and how they mix and blend is always subtle and full of nuance. For example there is always a certain distance in what is nearby and a kind of nearness in what is far away. Tuan thereby provides a lens on the ambiguities and ambivalences that attend the human experience of dwelling in the world.

Some of the most perceptive contributions to the geographic study of media and communication have... more Some of the most perceptive contributions to the geographic study of media and communication have been in areas of landscapes studies and geohumanities. To bring landscape and geohumanities insights together more explicitly with communication and media, this progress report draws on George Revill's concept of an 'arc of sound', expanding the concept's scope to an arc of communication – a dynamic trajectory connecting one vantage point to another through various translations and shifts. It is a mix of integration and translation that forms its own space, place and time, integrating elements of embodied performance, multiple sensory modalities, temporality, absence and excess. Arcs of communication often depend on collaboration and can produce transformations of identity. The concept of the arc of communication enables discovery of numerous threads connecting landscape studies to geohumanities while deepening geographical understandings of media and communication.

This chapter explores a few of the ways in which place participates in distributed agency. Accord... more This chapter explores a few of the ways in which place participates in distributed agency. According to a long tradition, we think of place as a simple vessel or site for agency while neglecting the ways in which place profoundly affects what we are able to do. Drawing on geographic theories, literature and philosophy, emplaced action is presented in this chapter as action that transcends the taken-for-granted boundaries of mind and body through its embeddedness in place. The role of place in extending human agency is demonstrated through examples ranging in scale from the home to the nation-state.

Media and communication are attracting increasing amounts of attention from geographers but the w... more Media and communication are attracting increasing amounts of attention from geographers but the work remains disorganized and lacks a unifying paradigm. This progress report suggests a new paradigm for geographical studies of media and communication and indicates how recent research fits under this umbrella. The report presents recent studies of literature, film and television, digital media, photography, comics, stamps and banknotes. The range of theoretical concerns in this body of work includes performance, agency, materiality, immateriality, networks, politics, emotions and affect. Collectively, these concerns point to communications not merely as transmissions through infrastructure, space and time, but rather as encounters between various human and nonhuman agents. The metaphysical question is exactly what such encounters do to participants – how agents are transformed by other agents' communications. This leads to synthesis in a new paradigm for media/communication geography: the metaphysics of encounter.

A turning point in human–environment relations has been signalled by the term Anthropocene. Acade... more A turning point in human–environment relations has been signalled by the term Anthropocene. Academic responses to the Anthropocene must acknowledge the unprecedented role of humankind on the planet while avoiding models that dismiss or minimise the agency of non-human actors. They must pay attention to hybridity, materiality, actor-networks and nonrepresentational geographies, and at the same time, they must appreciate posthumanist blurring of ontological divides between the social and the natural, and an ethics of mutual inclusion. One way to meet these varied objectives is by understanding place as an organic whole orchestrated by human and non-human communications, an entity I call an 'enviro-organism'. An account of the enviro-organism proceeds through three phases of the day on a generic, though far from universal, beach. It integrates four goals: to renew understanding of communication as a geographical process, to emphasise scalar ambiguity, to reveal various ways in which communications are embodied and to promote holistic ways of acting and thinking with the world rather than against it. Theoretical foundations in Peircean semiotics, biosemiotics and Jacob von Uexkull's idea of Umwelt permit this sustained focus on communication as a generalised phenomenon linking humans and non-humans in a place.

This paper examines the Santo Daime religion, the Amazonian town of Céu do Mapiá which is one of ... more This paper examines the Santo Daime religion, the Amazonian town of Céu do Mapiá which is one of its primary spiritual centres, and Ayahuasca, a key sacrament of the Santo Daime religion. The small village in the Amazon demonstrates the active outreach by a place which functions as a nexus of international and intercontinental flows of substances, bodies and meanings. The power of place is entwined with the story of religious belief and practice, which in turn depends on a tropical vine, Banisteriopsis caapi. In this networking process, we find a confluence of human agency with more-than-human agency, as well as the modalities of religious experience, crossing and dwelling. It is demonstrated that religious networking can be understood in terms of three forms of crossing (terrestrial, corporeal and cosmic) held together by the power of place (Mapiá and other subsidiary spiritual centres). In addition, three aspects of the 'ayahuasca network' are treated in depth: religious diffusion and adaptation, interaction with environmental movements and ideologies and contestation with legal structures and processes surrounding international drug traffic and the use of psychoactive substances.

Written long before I knew what an abstract was...

What is the virtual? I would offer three complementary definitions. First, the term indicates an ... more What is the virtual? I would offer three complementary definitions. First, the term indicates an immaterial context of interaction, a kind of intangible architecture that supports and organizes interactions. Second, the virtual evokes an organized field of relations that people navigate using one or two senses while suspending or separating the other senses, bracketing them in a different stream of awareness. Third, the virtual can be understood as a system that permits spatially dispersed participants to interact in a way that would otherwise require proximity and face-to-face interaction. Defined in this way, the virtual has a long history, reaching back to the origins of writing and speech itself.

Scarcely an issue of any leading geography journal published in the past year can be found that d... more Scarcely an issue of any leading geography journal published in the past year can be found that does not contain at least one article referring to communications or media. Most references are oblique, as when an article is an attempt to destabilize environmental views promoted by “the media,” but some are direct, as in studies of particular uses of certain media. This interest in mediated communication was not the case in the late 1990s, when Ken Hillis wrote about the “invisibility of communications in geography” (1998). Since that time, an online “journal of media geography,” Aether, has published several issues and a specialty group dedicated to “Communication Geography” has emerged in the Association of American Geographers paralleling some of the interests of the older “Geography of the Global Information Society” commission in the International Geographical Union. In Britain, despite the absence of an RGS-IBG study group dedicated to the topic, a phenomenal amount of interest has been directed towards new media and communication topics in the past five years. Interest in media is tangential to the main orientation of many studies, but it lies behind a wide range of concerns such as “identity formation,” “narrative,” “scale,” “discourses,” “publics,” and “networks.” The sub-disciplines most engaged in studies of media are urban, economic, political and social geography, as well as studies of gender, mobilities, embodiment, and nonrepresentational theory. The specific roles of media in these studies are varied and as such they merit efforts to clarify and elucidate.

The broadening and deepening of Europe as a macro-region impels processes of expansion, contracti... more The broadening and deepening of Europe as a macro-region impels processes of expansion, contraction and transformation in sub-regions positioned within the EU and across the EU’s border. Recent arguments stress the idea of regionalization as a multi-layered character. Using Northern Europe as a study site, three such layers are explored: territorially bounded regionalization in the voting patterns of the Eurovision Song Contest, networked regionalization in the membership of intergovernmental organizations, and fluid regionalization in the geography of language. The associated regionalization processes are explained and visualized using mixed methodologies. Across these three layers of regionalization we can see the persistence of a Scandinavian core, but various territorial, networked and fluid forms of regionalization are stretching and pulling at the edges of Nordic regionalizations.

Online environmental messages are examined through the use of focus groups. These messages are de... more Online environmental messages are examined through the use of focus groups. These messages are derived from short online videos and an interactive Internet tool called the ‘‘ecological footprint calculator.’’ Subject responses are compared and contrasted across two axes of differentiation: Americans versus Norwegians, and journalism students versus petroleum engineering students. Responses of focus groups drawn from these four 10 stakeholder types show the importance of place in online environmental communication. Place takes four general forms: (1) a dimension of the audience, (2) a dimension of the text, (3) an aspect of interactive online communication, and (4) a figurative understanding of social networks. In general, it is argued that effective online communication regarding environmental risks and problems requires sensitivity to these 15 four different aspects of place. In particular, it is argued that place images in online videos should be carefully tailored to their social and geographical place of reception, including local environments but also geographical variations in environmental attitudes. In addition, interactive online simulations should be tailored to the user’s sense of ‘‘home,’’ particularly attachment to one’s nation-state. Similarly, efforts to 20 promote pro-environment attitudes should make use of online social networks by treating them like places in their own right, with local norms and customs, ideals and ideologies. Based on this argument, a key finding of the study is that while responses to an interactive online ‘‘footprint calculator’’ are generally positive, and show benefits relative to online videos, the limited ability of users to select their (self-identified) ‘‘home’’ undermines the tool’s effectiveness.

Trajectories are defined as constructs used in geopolitical discourses at all levels – formal, pr... more Trajectories are defined as constructs used in geopolitical discourses at all levels – formal, practical and popular. Each trajectory consists of a particular scaling of here, a particular scaling of there, and a particular causal hypothesis about how the two are linked. Norwegian discourses about the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize provide examples of trajectories. These discourses reveal certain assumptions about the motives and outcomes framed in terms of trajectories, as well as closely associated types of emotion and affect. By employing the concept of the trajectory, geographers can better understand geopolitical discourses, their construction of scale and causality, as well as their dependency on the in-between spaces of emotion and affect.

The study of information and communication technologies (ICT) by geographers has evolved over the... more The study of information and communication technologies (ICT) by geographers has evolved over the past third of a century from a concentration on friction of distance and spatial organization toward a set of four interrelated social approaches: ICT as a set of contested terrains, ICT as a means of perception, ICT as a form of embodiment, and ICT as virtual places or spaces (distanciated social contexts). These approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. What is absent thus far from the ICT debate is attention to ethnicity, except as a surrogate of economic class or in vague allusions to a digital divide. Since people use ICT to build a sense of community and personal identity, both of which relate strongly to ethnicity, the topic deserves attention. The four approaches are integrated here to understand the appropriation of the internet by temporary and permanent immigrants to the USA from India (typically called Non-Resident Indians or NRIs). The concept of virtual space can be used to organize discussion of the use of the internet by NRIs. To better encapsulate the virtual space we employ a map of what we call 'bridgespace', a virtual space that supports flows of people, goods, capital and ideas between South Asia and North America. We consider the full range of sites involved in the bridgespace, then direct our attention in particular to 'matrimonial' sites, those sites designed to support the identification of marriage partners.

Public opinion polls from before and after 2001 in Quebec (Canada) reveal a marked shift during t... more Public opinion polls from before and after 2001 in Quebec (Canada) reveal a marked shift during that year in attitudes about the US. Québécois opinions of the US fell to the least favorable rating they had had in 15 years. A ''fair weather friend'' phenomenon based on fear of association with a target state does not fully explain Quebec's reaction. Consideration of Quebec's historical geographical situation as a small nation without a sovereign state suggests deeper reasons for the shift in perspective, which are confirmed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of letters to the editor of daily newspapers. Québécois letters about the attacks of September 11 were inclined to frame these attacks in terms of a battle between a large and powerful state and various small and weak nations, and subsequently to find common cause with the small nations. This particular framing of the 9-11 events according to a ''small-nation'' code reflected fundamental elements of the historical-geographical situation of Quebec as constructed in Québécois discourses. The activation of a set of key associations from the national past to understand international relations in the present is an example of what Gertjan Dijkink calls the ''national reflex''. The activation of the reflex by an attack on the US points out how a hegemonic state can be vulnerable, paradoxically, as a result of its own supremacy. #