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Gendered Spaces in the City: Critical Topography in Geography Education
Street names in city maps may be interpreted as traces of memory practices and politics, and can clearly be identified as the products of hegemonic norms and values of a given time and place. In the following article we describe a project-oriented teaching unit for secondary school students. In the course of the project, students are instructed to research either their school or residential neighborhoods, looking at the persons and events commemorated and written into the city. These toponymic inscriptions can be analyzed by studying the naming practice of streets and squares. Which people and events are remembered and which are forgotten? Do these events and people indicate processes of social inclusion, exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination? Investigating naming practices will be the starting point for the students to develop their own naming suggestions, as well as encouraging their active engagement in further negotiation processes regarding naming practices in their towns and villages. The teaching proposal is based on the idea of a geography teaching that educates politically, and meets the requirements of a critical topography approach (VIELHABER 2012). Students will also gain experience in aspects of a critical map reading competence and the work can also be situated within the context of critical place-name studies (ROSE-REDWOOD 2009).
Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings
Critical Geographies introduces students, scholars and activists to wide-ranging approaches, topics and theories associated with critical geographical scholarship. A selection of thirty-six chapters of previously published work, spanning over 150 years, is organized into four thematic sections with editorial introductions, addressing the themes of critical reflection within academic geography, theorizing the relationship between space and society, outlining geographical approaches towards human-environment relations, and a critical view on representing Earth. The collection offers a series of snapshots of the multi-directional and meandering paths of critical thought in the geographic discipline.
Placing Critical Geographies: Historical Geographies of Critical Geography
2022
This book explores the multiple histories of critical geography as it developed in 14 different locations around the globe, whilst bringing together a range of approaches in critical geography. It is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive account of a wide variety of historical geographies of critical geography from around the world. Accordingly, the chapters provide accounts of the development of critical approaches in geography from beyond the hegemonic Anglo-American metropoles. Bringing together geographers from a wide range of regional and intellectual milieus, this volume provides a critical overview that is international and illustrates the interactions (or lack thereof) between different critical geographers, working across a range of spaces. The chapters provide a more nuanced history of critical geography, suggesting that while there were sometimes strong connections with Anglo-American critical geography, there were also deeply independent developments that were part of the construction of very different kinds of critical geography in different parts of the world. Placing Critical Geographies provides an excellent companion to existing histories of critical geography and will be important reading for researchers as well as undergraduate and graduate students of the history and philosophy of geography.
Feminism and Social Theory in Geography: An Introduction
Professional Geographer, 2007
This essay introduces a collection of articles based on papers developed for a Fall 2004 speaker series at the University of Minnesota. The articles address the continued relevance of feminist geography and the unique contributions of feminist perspectives in various areas of geographic research. They also point out directions for needed future research. This introduction briefly reviews the successes of and remaining challenges to feminist geography, including material inequities yet unresolved in two other (nonresearch) ''places'' of academic life: teaching and the workplace. We discuss the ongoing underrepresentation of women and people of color on our faculties and in the front of classrooms. Key Words: antiracist geography, critical theory, feminist geography, marginalization, social theory. *We would like to thank several members of our department for their support of the 2004 Feminist Speaker Series, particularly our chair at that time, John S. Adams, without whose support the series would not have been possible. Eric Sheppard and Gwen McCrea were key members of the planning process. The series was given logistical, moral, and curricular support by Glen Powell, Helga Leitner, and Arun Saldanha. We would also like to thank the members of Supporting Women in Geography and various faculty members who helped host and welcome our speakers, and the students and faculty from across campus who attended the series and participated in its conversations. Finally, we are grateful to Tiffany Muller, Eric Sheppard, and Arun Saldanha for their helpful comments on this article.
Gender, Place & Culture
In this intervention, we consider how relational thinking about our positions and experiences can contribute to a feminist, anti-oppressive praxis in geography. Hosting a critical dialogue amongst ourselves, we collectively reflect on our experiences on coming of age in a discipline marked by ongoing forms of coloniality, racism, sexism, and trans/homophobia in an attempt to find commonalities across our different identities and experiences. Drawing from feminist thought and situating these evolving and polyvocal concepts within our experiences as feminist geographers, we consider what relationality and its associated practices can accomplish within our institutions. We also critique how feminist approaches, such as these are taken up and deployed in 'critical' spaces, yet often fail to transform power dynamics long characterizing the discipline and its institutional spaces. In doing so, we aim to develop a feminist * All three authors played an equal role in conceptualizing and writing this paper; and hence they appear in alphabetical order. 2 geographic praxis that recognizes our fluid subjectivities and the different positions we inhabit in the academy while also contributing to a sense of solidarity and commonality-indifference. We revisit and build upon feminist concepts of positionality and relationality to both name the identity politics of the field and to fashion a way toward more inclusive spaces shaped by mutuality, recognition, and an antioppressive praxis.
Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography*
The Professional Geographer, 2007
This article focuses on the concept of intersectionality, which is being used within the wider social sciences by feminists to theorize the relationship between different social categories: gender, race, sexuality, and so forth. Although research within the field of feminist geography has explored particular interconnections such as those between gender and race, the theoretical concept of intersectionality as debated in the wider social sciences has not been addressed. This article attempts to respond to that omission. It begins by tracing the emergence of debates about the interconnections between gender and other identities. It goes on to reflect on attempts to map geometries of oppressions. The emphasis then moves from theorizing intersectionality to questioning how it can be researched in practice by presenting a case study to illustrate intersectionality as lived experience. The conclusion demonstrates the contribution that feminist geography can make to advance the theorization of intersectionality through its appreciation of the significance of space in processes of subject formation. It calls for feminist geography to pay more attention to questions of power and social inequalities.
Qualitative Methods, Critical Geography, and Education
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, 2019
The work known as critical geography, a distinct yet varied subfield of spatial analysis, seeks to understand how the social construction of both space and place interact with, resist, and reinforce structures of power and the work of individual and collective identity. A critical geography approach to qualitative educational research privileges inquiry that includes how the lived experiences of schools (i.e., students, teachers, schools, communities) are defined, constrained, and potentially liberated by spatial relationships in both discursive and material ways. That is, a critical geography approach includes how such understandings may be used, for example, to critically examine how spaces are used, by whom, when, and how in the process of learning and not learning; what spaces mean and mean differently) for different people inhabiting the spaces of education; how spaces are used to construct identities, allegiances, and bodies; how they act pedagogically to position bodies to know and be known; and the kind of pedagogies they help make possible and intelligible for both teachers and students in classrooms.
Geography and Feminism: Worlds in Collision?
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1992
Geography and feminism are two powerful intellectual forces at large today. Are they forces that can communicate effectively with each other to build a richer understanding of life on earth or are they two alien worlds in collision? I explore three core analytic traditions that I see as common to geography and feminism: finding significance in everyday life, appreciating the importance of context, and thinking about difference. With examples from local labor market studies, I then illustrate how the collision between geography and feminism has not ignited a destructive explosion but instead has illuminated how we think about gender, how we think about place, and how we think about work. I argue that because geography and feminism share certain intellectual traditions, the two areas of inquiry should, once they begin to open up to and learn from each other, not only transform each other but also contribute powerful new insights about the world.