“It’s either the most exciting technology product of recent years, or the 21st Century equivalent of the Sinclair C5″ (Cellan-Jones, 2013, n.p.).  Google Glass (styled as “Google GLΛSS”) is a wearable computer with a head-mounted display (HMD) that is being developed by Google with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer.  Google Glass displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format, that can interact with the Internet via voice commands.  While the frames do not currently have lenses fitted to them, Google is considering partnering with sunglass retailers such as Ray-Ban, and may also open retail stores to allow customers to try on the device.

When BBC News Technology journalist Rory Cellan-Jones took Glass for a stroll on the beach overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, the elderly dog walkers there were more amused about a strange Brit talking to himself than anxious about their privacy, although the majority felt the whole idea was rather more creepy than cool.

According to the report, where Google’s big idea impresses most is as a camera.  The video footage is reportedly also much steadier than what you would gain from a shaky camera phone.  Its strength lies in its ability to capture exactly what you see.  The results are the kind of pictures you often miss with a camera you have to ready for action. And it is this head-mounted technology, combined with the voice commands that raise interesting points for geographers studying the inter-relationship between humans and technology.

It is widely accepted that new technology “increasingly affects/infects the minutiae of everyday life and corporeal existence” (Grosz 1994, 48), and that operating as assemblages, or with co-agents, bodily abilities are altered (Michael 2009).  In his 2012 Area paper, Paul Barrett comments on the use of technology in a very different scenario: climbing.  This paper adds to debates on bodies and materiality concerning how we experience places not only as bodies but as complex assemblages. It engages with the relations between climbers, their kit and the places in which they climb to explore how during the situated practice of climbing, climbers and material artefacts co-evolve resulting in a diverse array of synergies that co-enable the climb. In particular, Barrett focuses upon the use of ‘Cams’.  Cams are spring loaded devices that are placed into parallel cracks in rock faces used to secure the climber’s ascent.  Differing roles and functions emerge and are negotiated between climber, crag and kit. These roles and functions go beyond those detailed by manufacturer-ascribed use-values that define their ‘proposed’ or ‘proper’ role/s and limits within the climber’s safety assemblage. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews with climbers, Barrett uses Actor Network Theory to explore the enabling, situated, contingent and co-emergent relations between climbers and their kit and show how more-than-representational dimensions of their environmental engagements are dependent upon entering into symbolic and synergistic relationships with material others.

In a similar way, Google Glass uses technology to extend both the corporal being of the body and its capabilities of purpose.  It promises to reshape our relationship with the online world – or turn us all into Donna Haraway’s infamous cyborgs.  What is more, the ability to record others discretely in any given space leads us to questions surrounding how these human/technology relationships further invading each other’s privacy with careless abandon.  But that’s another blog post….

Paul Barrett (2012) ‘My magic cam’: a more-than-representational account of the climbing assemblage, Area 44(1) pp. 46-53.

Rory Cellan-Jones, Google Glass – cool or creepy? BBC News Technology, 15 May 2013.

Elizabeth Grosz (1994) Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism, Allen and Unwin, London.

Mike Michael (2009) The cellphone-in-the-countryside: on some of the ironic spatialities of technonatures. In White, D. and Wilbert, C. eds. Technonatures: environments, technologies, spaces, and places in the twenty-first century, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, pp. 85–104.

by Fiona Ferbrache

A billboard outside Beacon College, Hong Kong: the type that promotes celebrity tutors

Fulfilling roles as facilitators of learning, impassioned ambassadors and professionals of their subject areas, those who teach, tutor or lecturer will hopefully gain the respect and attention of their students, but few will rise to celebrity status through this calling.  Unless, that is, they are part of the ‘celebrity tutors’ (Straits Times) that are hailed as Hong Kong’s ‘tutor kings and queens’ (BBC News).  A Channel 4 documentary on this phenomenon revealed how exam pressure in Hong Kong has led to parents seeking additional tutoring for their children and how one ‘super tutor’ has transformed this demand into a successful commercial enterprise.  He is one example of a celebrity tutor that you may catch smiling glamorously from giant posters in Hong Kong shopping malls or on the sides of buses – the typical advertising ground for commercialised faces such as film stars and sports stars.

 These ‘Tiger Tutors’ are interesting in terms of their insight to the commercialisation and staging of education, but I also want to draw attention to another part of the professional academic’s life: the staging of research.  Tim Hall explores, in an early view paper for The Geographical Journal, human geographers’ contemporary research activities with a focus on the changeability and diversity of individuals’ research practices (in British universities).  The paper draws upon survey results to discuss why change happens and highlights the porosity of geographical research boundaries, applied research and contention between autonomous research and the staging of Geography within departments, funding bodies and the structures of the RAE.  Hall’s paper complements earlier sociologies of geography such as those by Sidaway (1997) and Castree (2011).

The two academic activities, presented here, demonstrate general processes of academic knowledge production and, particularly, “the corporatisation of higher education” (Hall 2013:11).  As an early career academic, both offer optimism for the future, in their different ways.

  Hall, T. 2013 Making their own futures? Research change and diversity amongst contemporary British human geographers. The Geographical Journal. DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12002

  Castree, N. 2011 The future of geography in English universities. The Geographical Journal 177,4. 294-9

  Sidaway, J. 1997 The production of British geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers  22,4. 488–504

  HK celebrity tutors. The Straits Times: Asia Report

  Meet the ‘tutor kings and queens’. BBC News online.

  The making of… Hong Kong’s Tiger Tutors. Channel 4

Similar to the one exemplified, the unusual structure “with its higgledy-piggledy walls and turf roof”, of the home of Sculptor Charlie Hague and his wife Megan Williams has been likened to that of a ‘hobbit’.  Yet, this eco-dwelling in rural Pembrokeshire could become a test of the Welsh Government’s grand designs on sustainable living.

The couple spent nearly a year creating their wooden roundhouse on private family land in Glandwr. The single level dwelling was constructed using lime plastered straw bale walls, cost £15,000 to build and was completed just in time for the couple’s first child allowing them to move out of the damp caravan where they had lived for the previous four years.  Tensions surrounding the state of the current British economy and its high house prices are reflected in the couple’s claim that it was the only way they could afford to own their own home. The roundhouse seemed a suitable, and sustainable solution, and even earned plaudits from environment architects across the world.

Last week I attended an informal seminar event about multiculturalism and youth, and it got me thinking about the issues and debates that surround these topics. For example, a quick internet search about multiculturalism and education will provide you with a whole range of results: positive and negative; old and new; expected and unexpected. The search results include articles written for teachers about how to benefit from teaching in multicultural classrooms and how learning experiences can be enhanced in an environment where pupils have a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. However, searches will also yield websites reporting the opposing argument about the detrimental effects on a child’s learning when they are in a class with others from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
The relationship between learning and multiculturalism also translates into policy debates which are evident in the search results, notably in relation to the funding implications of migrant children who are entering the state education system. This issue has recently been highlighted in a report in the Guardian surrounding the notion of Education Tourists and the right of illegal immigrants to have access to education.

Following this search I went on to look at where academics and specifically geographers have contributed to these debates and I came across a new article by Helen Wilson on parental encounters in relation to multiculturalism in primary schools. This work provides an alternative approach to considering the impacts of multiculturalism beyond the classroom. Wilson highlights the importance of intercultural dialogues that extend from the school environment and into the wider community, notably amongst the parents of the school pupils. This work recognises the significance of parental interaction at primary schools where more involvement by parents is demanded than in secondary schools, where previous research has been conducted in this field. Responsibilities for young children increase the opportunity for and the necessity of parental encounters with multiculturalism and these often occur in a repeated and routine manner. These encounters represent a new form of social learning and help challenge what are deemed to acceptable forms of intolerance towards difference. This demonstrates how geographical research is providing a fresh look at contemporary issues including encounters with multiculturalism and the impacts it can have in schools and wider society.

Wilson, H.F. 2013 Multicultural learning: parental encounters with difference in a Birmingham primary school Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers DOI: 10.1111/tran.12015

Immigration: The cost for schools BBC News

Teaching in multicultural classrooms: tips, challenges and opportunities The Guardian

Ministers planning immigration crackdown on ‘education tourists’ The Guardian

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013). © Wikimedia Commons.

Irrespective of one’s opinion of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, few would disagree that her policies and legacies deeply impacted the British Isles, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and much of the developed and developing world. Her domestic and overseas endeavours altered our geographical focus, highlighting new lands, peoples, and conceptions of the world even while others faded from view. But this presents us with new, underlying questions: how, where, and why?

To begin our investigation, one must go back in time, before Thatcher’s famed 1979 election, to 1973, a year that would symbolise heightened, competing tensions. That year, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark officially joined the European Community (later European Union, or EU). Britain’s ascession marked the end of a turbulent decade in colonial relations. Since the early 1960s, the country had pulled out of Kuwait, Aden, much of Africa, and the Caribbean. Increasingly, Britain’s economists, industries, and politicians looked to Europe and the United States for a solution. Watching Britain’s imperial retreat from his office in New Zealand, that year historian J G A Pocock called for a new approach to British history and international affairs, which he termed ‘New British History’. He sought to remind the British of their international responsibilities and legacies, their historically intimate and fluid relationships with the so-called ‘settler colonies’ – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the British West Indies, and South Africa (India is often included as well) (p. 431), and pondered on where Britain’s path lay next. For early observers, the answer was unpredictable at best.

What is most evident from this period was the Thatcher movement’s profound influence in determining where geographers would focus their attention and resources, as well as what areas slipped into relative negligence. It is therefore possible to construct a geopolitical ‘roadmap’ of 1980s British geographical scholarship, demonstrating that, in an effort to maintain their relevance and avail themselves to the broadest possible audience, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and political experts largely published in lockstep with upcoming trends and changing situations at home and abroad. In the aftermath of the government’s struggle with mining unions, scholars took advantage of national attention on the North to publish a series of related studies. These articles, importantly, were not narrowly limited to union organisation, nor to mining, but rather sought to engage with broader geographical and ethnographic themes. In 1980, for instance, Alec H Paul and Paul Simpson-Housley published ‘The Novelist’s Image of the North’, reminding audiences of the region’s immense natural beauty and cultural clout. I M Evans stuck to a closer, geopolitical analysis in his examination of how the then-international steel crisis had affected other EEC states, rather than simply Britain. Two years later, John North and Derek Spooner returned to Northern England, to re-examine the wider implications of the Coal Board’s investment programme in the heavily-affected (and marginalised) Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire regions.

The Falklands War directly catalysed a flurry of investigative discussions and scholarly explorations of the contested British territory. As a previous Geography Directions article discussed in detail, the war presented the RGS-IBG with a unique opportunity: to educate itself, the government, and the public about a series of islands that had already been in Britain’s continuous (but largely ignored) possession for over 150 years in 1982. Similarly, the United States’ invasion of Grenada – a Commonwealth Realm – in 1983 spurred a similar rush to, as Brian J Hudson suggested, ‘Put Grenada on the map’. In response to his September 1985 Area article, however, Rex Walford conducted a series of impromptu surveys with British and American audiences to determine whether recent popular and academic coverage of the invasion (and of the island more generally) had actually resulted in greater awareness of Grenada’s location, society, and affairs. The answer, Walford discovered, was certainly not encouraging. ‘At only one venue (a joint RGS/GA lecture at Hull) has a majority of the audience identified the island [of Grenada] correctly[!]‘ (p. 57). John S Brierley, then an associate professor of geography at the University of Manitoba, preferred a less humorous, more serious approach, arguing that the social and economic development programmes created by the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada, led by Maurice Bishop, should be closely examined to determine what lessons could be learned. He uncovered that some social welfare initiatives could prove quite useful in other Caribbean states. Writing nearly a decade later, Robert Potter recalled Brierley’s assessment, and reminded contemporary development anthropologists, geographers, and planners of how ideas gained from Grenada, brought by the RGS-IBG in the war’s aftermath to public attention, could be incorporated into current grassroots/NGO/small government schemes.

Armitage, David, 1999, Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?, The American Historical Review 104.2, 427-45.

Paul, Alec H and Paul Simpson-Housley, 1980, The Novelist’s Image of the North: Discussion, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 5.3, 174-84.

Evans, I M, 1980, Aspects of the Steel Crisis in Europe, with Particular Reference to Belgium and Luxembourg, The Geographical Journal 146.3, 396-407.

North, John and Derek Spooner, 1982, The Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Coalfield: The Focus of the Coal Board’s Investment Strategy, The Geographical Journal 148.1, 22-37.

Hudson, Brian J, 1985, Putting Grenada on the Map, Area 17.3, 233-35.

Walford, Rex, 1986, Finding Grenada on the Map, Area 18.1, 56-57.

Brierley, John S, A Review of Development Strategies and Programmes of the People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada, 1979-83, The Geographical Journal 151.1, 40-52.

Potter, Robert, 1995, Urbanisation and Development in the Caribbean, Geography 80.4, 334-41.

Sacks, Benjamin, 2012, (Re)Introducing the Falklands: The March 1983 ‘Geographical Journal’, Geography Directions, 18 February.

This week, parts of the UK have been basking in temperatures around 20 degrees Celsius  ‘At long last!’ many have exclaimed after a springtime marked so far by frigid easterly winds bearing cold air and snow from the still frozen interior of the Eurasian landmass. Trees have been late to blossom, crop growth has been stunted, and newborn lambs have perished under snowdrifts. Many were starting to wonder whether we would ever seen spring at all.

With climate change expected to alter weather patterns in many parts of the globe, a growing band of researchers across geography and the social sciences have started to explore how individuals experience and relate to the weather in their everyday lives. These researchers are interested in how people deal with extremes of heat and cold, or wet and dry, and in how even the most banal changes in the weather impact on our everyday lives. For example, Russell Hitchings has investigated the ways in which office workers deal with the seasonality of the weather, with interesting conclusions for thinking about how we interact with the elements when many of us spend most of out time indoors, in climates regulated by air conditioning and central heating.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Studying these practices is challenging. While many of us remember extreme weather events like heat waves and blizzards for some time, we might struggle to remember how we dealt with the intricacies of the weather on a typical British Spring day, where sunshine and showers alternate in step with the opening of umbrellas and the packing away of raincoats. Some of these methodological challenges are dealt with by Eliza de Vet in a new paper in Area, where she compares the use of interviews, diaries and participants’ photographs in research on weather experiences and practices.

Drawing on a research project looking at weather practices in Darwin and Melbourne, Australia, de Vet argues that interviews may be the most effective way for researchers to reconstruct the everyday practices of, for example, keeping cool and comfortable in the tropical heat. Interview techniques can be usefully supplemented by asking respondents to keep diaries and to take photographs which capture their own ways of dealing with the weather. However, de Vet points towards the importance of considering “participant fatigue” in such projects, as asking too much of respondents – especially about usually banal things like the weather – can lead to disengagement. Projects investigating people’s experiences and practices of weather therefore need careful management, but they can yield fascinating insights into behaviours which many of us take for granted, but which might become hugely significant under a changing climate.

 Spring: where has it gone? The Guardian, March 30

Russell Hitchings, 2010, Seasonal climate change and the indoor city worker. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 2, 282-298

 Eliza de Vet, 2013, Exploring weather-related experiences and practices: examining methodological approaches. Area, DOI: 10.1111/area.12019

Google Street View is a tool that many people will likely have used at some point in their lives.  I myself have ‘dragged and dropped’ the little orange man onto a map of the street where I live to find my house.  I’ve also spent a lot of time reminiscing over the facades of old childhood homes and that of my neighbours, hoping to spot someone I think I know, or a car I should recognise.

However, a recent BBC report questions how, in addition to using 3D maps to look at the places they already know, has it also changed the way they relate to the wider world?

Google’s Street View cars have now driven over 39 countries.  In addition they have pictured 65% of the UK’s roads and interestingly the interiors of some museums, cathedrals and shops can also be explored. More recently, I also used Street View to investigate further afield.  Firstly, I spent some time trying to gauge the quality of a cheap hotel I’d booked for a last minute holiday in the Algarve in Portugal. Secondly, I planned a route to show my second-year students around Ground Zero on their field trip to New York next week.  It seems that many people are using Street View for similar reasons.  Duncan Walker describes some of these in the BBC article.

Previously, Haas would have turned to guidebooks to provide the information for a successful trip. But he feels that being able to see the outside of a hotel, the surrounding city and its inhabitants is an entirely different experience. ”It’s definitely changed the way I would approach travel… I look at Street View first to see where I’m going, what’s around me.” And it is not the first time he has used it to eliminate uncertainty. ”If I’m going to a friend’s house for a dinner party I check whether there’s parking on the street, so I know if I’m driving, or if I can take a cab.”

Walker continues by emphasising how the transformation from traditional street plan to Street View has facilitated a change in certain practices.  For instance, tradesmen such as glaziers and satellite dish installers can look at a property online and talk to potential customers about their services without actually visiting. Drivers can find landmarks to make unfamiliar car journeys easier; and architects can study buildings without being there. Furthermore, the neighbourhood and its homes can be explored virtually by house hunters – and can have some significant influence.  Although between 40 and 50 houses looked good in the estate agents’ details, Curt Parks, who is looking for a four-bed detached home in Berkshire with his partner, Denise, have only bothered to visit four or five after walking past the others on Street View. ”We were looking at one that looked lovely,” he says. “You go into Street View and you realise that it’s on a main road and at the end of a grotty row of houses.”

It is the uses of these technologies that have been the subject of recent geographical enquiry.  In an Early View article in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski explore the relationship between new spatial media (in this case – the informational artefacts and mediating technologies of the geoweb) and social change.  The paper argues that these types of media represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups to leverage web-based geographic information technologies in their efforts to effect social change.  Using five new spatial media initiatives, they explore how knowledge is constructed and represented in ways often different to geographic information technologies, such as GIS. One aspect of this considers the individual ways in which people interact and explore spaces, particularly compared to conventional cartographical practices.

Certainly, cartography is changing; and with it, our everyday interactions, constructions and memories of the spaces around us.

Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski, New spatial media, new knowledge politics, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Article first published online: 28 August 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00543.x.

Duncan Walker, Has Street View changed the way we behave?, BBC News, 25 March 2013.

World Map from 1664

If the biologist’s iconic tool of the trade is a microscope, then the geographer’s might well be a map.  Both tools offer an alternative perspective of the world, but unlike the microscope, which enlarges for the biologist, the map serves the geographer through reduction.  Maps and processes of mapping are the topics of enquiry in a TIBG paper by Kitchin, Gleeson and Dodge (2012) – one of the latest pieces of work on cartography by these authors.

For those unfamiliar with the scholarly literature, it is perhaps assumed that “a map is unquestionably a map” (Kitchin et al. 2012:2) – something that exists to measure and represent the world, even through its different forms.  For example, the London Tube map, celebrated this year as part of the 150-year anniversary of London Underground, is a topographical map showing connections between stations, rail lines and fare zones.  This is different to geographically scaled maps such as the Michelin Road Atlas or Ordnance Survey maps.

Different again is the set of maps (cartograms) comprising the Worldmapper collection, available online (see below).  These are based on a flat map of the world and territories are re-sized according to particular variables e.g. total population, fruit exports, disease, internet uses and migration.

Kitchin et al. challenge the idea of a map as something complete, fixed and stable – that which they refer to as being “ontologically secure”.  Instead, they rethink mappings as processual (thus the importance of using the verb ‘mapping’ rather than the noun ‘map’): practices that are never complete but unfold out of and into specific relational contexts.  Their paper is written from a more-than-representational standpoint to challenge the assumed ontology of maps and then consider what this means epistemologically for cartography.

The theory behind this article can be applied to other visual materials – photography, for example.  However, Kitchin et al. will hopefully inspire you to look again and rethink how you understand those maps blue-tacked to the wall in your teacher’s room.

  Mind the map: London Underground turns 150. BBC News

 Kitchin, R., Gleeson, J. and Dodge, M. 2012. Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. doi/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00540

 Worldmapper collection

Conceptions of class remain inseparable from contemporary society, according to a BBC-commissioned study. The Great British Class Survey, undertaken by the BBC’s Lab UK and faculty at LSE, University of Manchester, University of York, City University London, Universitetet i Bergen, and Université Paris Descartes, surveyed 161,000 people across the British Isles. The study’s authors argued that ‘class’, as twentieth century writers tended to define it, was ‘too simplistic’.  Rather than an equation of ‘occupation, wealth and education’, class was actually formulated around ‘economic, social and cultural’ dimensions, of which the traditional structure only formed a part. Along with the traditional classes – elite/upper class, middle class (itself a category distinct from US conceptions), and working class – new divisions had arisen: technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers, or ‘precariat’, the authors’ term for ‘precarious proletariat’. Predictably, the study’s publication catalysed a diverse range of media responses. The Financial Times reminded its readers of how deeply entrenched class was in British history. Tristram Hunt recalled William Harrison’s 1577 Description of England: there were ‘four degrees of people’, led by ‘those whome their race or blood or at least their virtues doo make noble and knowne’. A letter to The Guardian compared it to the hierarchy used by the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification scheme (NS-SEC). The Guardian itself wondered whether the new hierarchy was more reflective of the television programme ‘The Wire‘ rather than of British society.

Critics aside, the BBC survey indicated the continuing influence of class, whether desired or not, in shaping how different people think, act, speak, travel, and shop. Geographers have long been aware of the role and perception class played in British and international cultures. Indeed, in 1995, Gary Bridge (Rodney Lodge) called for a standardised, ‘consistent application of class analysis’ when examining urban and rural gentrification. In a 2004 Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers study, Anthony J Fielding (University of Sussex) documented the spatial organization of Japanese cities by class. Critiquing previous, recent accounts that suggested that Japan’s rapid, postwar capitalist transformation had erased, or at least minimised cities’ ‘social geography’ (defined by Fielding as the distinction of classes or groups in space), Fielding used GIS programming to visually and textually demonstrate how major cities have, in fact, been organised by class and social standing, as is the case in most European and North American cities. Interestingly (and importantly) however, through the collection of mapping of this aggregate data, he suggested that the degree of spatial ‘segregation’ was generally lower than in the West. Comparing Kyoto and Edinburgh, Fielding proposed that the former’s spatial organisation was different, and it experienced a lower, but still quite identifiable level of segregation (p. 83). Indeed, Fielding’s study of Japan implicitly mirrored Jon May’s study, also from the University of Sussex, seven years previously. In the 1996 study, May, evidently fatigued from ‘theoretical literature’ on London’s complex social dynamic, created visual and textual maps of Stoke Newington (p. 195).

Class, it almost goes without saying, infected the storied halls of Lowther Lodge. For some two decades at the turn of the twentieth century, the Royal Geographical Society had debated whether to elect women to the fellowship (women had applied for admission as early as 1847, but the issue was not seriously considered until the 1890s). If women were to be admitted, as Morag Bell (Loughborough University) and Cheryl McEwan (Durham University) recalled, then, as the debaters proceeded to argue, they must be of the right social and economic standing. Returning to more recent issues, JoAnn McGregor posited the rapid growth of Britain’s Zimbabwean community within class ‘differences and identities’, in a fascinating shift from more mainstream studies of Robert Mugabe-era emigration. Regardless of whether the BBC survey has lasting impact, geographers will continue to observe, critique, and play with class.

 ’Huge survey reveals seven social classes in UK‘, BBC News, 3 April 2013, accessed 7 April 2013.

 Tristram Hunt, ‘The rise of the precariat and the loss of collective sensibility‘, Financial Times, 7 April 2013, accessed 7 April 2013.

 David Rose and Eric Harrison, ‘Little solidarity over the question of social class‘, The Guardian, 5 April 2013, accessed 7 April 2013.

 Paul Owen, ‘BBC’s seven social classes: The Wire version‘, The Guardian, 4 April 2013, accessed 7 April 2013. 

 Mike Savage et al., 2013, A New Model of Social Class: Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment, Sociology 1-32.

 Gary Bridge, 1995, The Space for Class? On Class Analysis in the Study of Gentrification, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 20.2, 236-47.

 Anthony J Fielding, 2004, Class and Space: Social Segregation in Japanese Cities, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 29.1, 64-84.

 Jon May, 1996, ‘Globalization and the Politics of Place: Place and Identity in an Inner London Neighbourhood‘, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 21.1, 194-215.

 Morag Bell and Cheryl McEwan, 1996, The Admission of Women Fellows to the Royal Geographical Society, 1892-1914; the Controversy and the Outcome‘, The Geographical Journal 162.3, 295-312.

 JoAnn McGregor, 2008, ‘Abject Spaces, Transnational Calculations: Zimbabweans in Britain Navigating Work, Class and the Law‘, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 33.4, 466-82.

The Gangotri glacier in India, source of the Ganges river. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Towards the end of last year I visited an exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Museum entitled ‘Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya’. The exhibition presented the work of mountaineer, photographer and filmmaker David Breashears, who had recently trekked through the Himalaya to produce updated photographs of glaciers which had been caught on film by earlier explorers. The exhibition blended the scientific iconography of climate change with that of the intrepid explorer, with the ice picks and ropes of the geographic expedition juxtaposed against the graphs and satellite imagery of climate science (see here).

My interest in glaciers grew from some empirical work I’ve been conducting on the contestation between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Indian government over the possible rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers. In the IPCC’s 2007 report, it was asserted that the glaciers could entirely disappear by 2035. This claim was refuted by a government-sponsored review conducted by an Indian glaciologist, which reported a mixed pattern of advancing and receding glaciers and challenged “the conventional wisdom” of climate change causing rapid melting, as the Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh put it. The 2035 claim was later revealed to be ill-founded, having been picked-up from a magazine interview with a glaciologist in the 1990s and eventually finding its way into the IPCC report.

Melting ice has become a visual icon of climate change. Images of polar bears stranded on diminished ice floes and juxtaposed ‘then-and-now’ photographs of shrinking glaciers often dominate media coverage of the issue. There is something very tangible about disappearing ice, perhaps because its relationship to warming temperatures is much more direct and imaginable than the more complex causal links between global warming and the occurrence of extreme weather events. The vulnerability of ice to human-generated heat neatly captures the sense that human activities are impinging on and endangering a fragile natural world.

Scientific knowledge of melting ice is, however, deeply complex. As shown by the IPCC incident, it also sometimes the topic of heated scientific and political debate. In a recent paper in The Geographical Journal, Ulrich Kamp and colleagues provide a window onto the complex methods of detecting change in mountains glaciers, while also offering a fascinating account of how different sorts of data can be combined to produce new scientific understandings. The authors visited the RGS archives in London to access data and photographs from a 1910 RGS expedition to the Turgen Mountains in Mongolia led by Douglas Alexander Caruthers (1882-1962). After reviewing field notes and photographs from the expedition, the authors made their own way to the Turgen Mountains to reproduce the images made by Caruthers and his team.

By carefully positioning and calibrating their cameras, Kamp’s team was able to produce images suitable for detailed comparison. The anthropologist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour has often noted how much scientific knowledge production depends on achieving “optical consistency”, in order to find regular avenues through geographic space. The optical consistency achieved by the 21st century explorers enabled them to compare the pixels of their new images with scanned versions of the 1910 pictures, in order to ascertain precise measurements of ice loss. The authors are then able to conclude that glaciers on the lower slopes of the mountains have shown a marked retreated over the course of the last 100 years, and that continuing climate change will likely see that trend continue.

The image of the geographer-as-explorer has long since receded from imagination (at least those of academic geographers). However, Kamp et al.’s study demonstrates that where a key variable of scientific research is the passage time, there is great value in revisiting the archived work of geographers of old.

India ‘arrogant’ to deny global warming link to melting glaciers. The Guardian

 IPCC officials admit mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers. The Guardian

Ulrich Kamp et al., 2013, Documenting glacial changes between 1910, 1970, 1992 and 2010 in the Turgen Mountains, Mongolian Altai, using repeat photographs, topographic maps, and satellite imagery. The Geographical Journal, DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2012.00486.x

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Martin Mahony

When prominent environmentalist Mark Lynas recently announced that he no longer opposes the genetic modification of agricultural crops, a decades-long debate about the risks, benefits, uncertainties and politics of biotechnology returned to our news stands. Lynas’ speech at the Oxford Farming Conference in January made the news worldwide, as the former guerilla activist of the anti-GM movement announced his regret at the harm done to technological progress by the protests of his one-time colleagues.

Researchers in geography and science and technology studies (STS) are united by, amongst other things, their interest in boundaries. In a recently-published commentary in Area, Helen Pallett and I seek to explore this disciplinary confluence to try and make sense of the recent evolution of the GM debate. We were inspired to the task by last year’s protests around a field of experimental wheat at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire. We drew attention to what we see as four interesting (and overlapping) boundary issues in the GM debate:

• The distinctions made between reason or rationality and unreason or irrationality;
  
• the inclusion or exclusion of certain voices from a debate often cast as being solely about science;
• the boundaries between different spaces of public engagement which may have different norms and styles of debate; and
• the material territories of the laboratories and fields of experimental crops, which were threatened with transgression last year by the Rothamsted protests.

We thought it was important to shift academic analysis of such controversies away from discussion of an abstract public debate at the national level to consider more deeply the material elements and multiple spaces of debate and contestation. What was also interesting to us is how these very different sorts of boundaries and spaces interact with and map onto each other; so the territory of Rothamsted’s wheat field came to symbolise, for a short time, the protected space some actors saw as necessary for science to function, out of reach of society’s interference.

We could equally have written a piece like this in response to the Lynas story – reflecting for example on the ways rhetorical boundaries were drawn between cool-headed scientific rationality and emotive, irrational protest. Lynas’ interview in the Guardian could itself be read as an insight into the constellation of powers which constitute contemporary modes of environmental governance.  Science, the state, private corporations, social movements, high-profile media figures – all of these actors make an appearance in Lynas’ story, as we hear how one individual has navigated the contested boundaries which separate them from one another. All four elements of our sketchy typology of boundary issues likewise make an appearance in the media coverage of Lynas’ conversion. Real-world events like these provide occasions for geographers to engage with other disciplines and academic traditions like STS and environmental sociology, which have their own analytic tools for making sense of boundaries, whether material, rhetorical, or both. In research on complex issues like GM, disciplinary boundaries too can be subject to some rethinking.

 Martin Mahony and Helen Pallett, 2013, Boundaries, Territory and Public Controversy: The GM debate Re-materialised, Area, DOI: 10.1111/area.12014

 Martin Lynas: Truth, treachery and GM food, The Guardian

 Anti-GM activists urged not to trash wheat field, The Guardian

On the 14^th March, the United Nations Development Programme published the 2013 Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, which describes how the “rise of the South is radically reshaping the world of the 21^st century, with developing nations driving economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and propelling billions more into a new global middle class”.  Crediting sustained investment in education, health care and social programmes as well as increasing international engagement, the report states that the “world is witnessing an epochal global rebalancing”.  Whilst the UN’s press release focuses on the “massive poverty reduction” and that more than 40 developing countries have demonstrated growth beyond expectations, Claire Provost highlights some of the more negative findings from the report in her article for The Guardian.  Her article focuses on the warning from the UN that unless action is taken to tackle environmental threats such as climate change, deforestation and air and water pollution, the number of people living in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050.  The report highlights that climate change is already exacerbating “chronic” environmental threats, and stresses that although everyone is affected, “they hurt poor countries and poor communities the most”.

In an article for The Geographical Journal, Nigel Clark, Vasudha Chhotray and Roger Few discuss the relationship between natural hazards and disasters and how best to address the “uneven exposure and resilience of different social groups”.  They argue that human-induced climate change and its associated impacts have further added to the already complex nature of natural disasters.  Questioning the concept of global environmental justice, they discuss issues such as the tendency of powerful political and economic actors to take advantage of disasters and how traditional coping mechanisms have been eroded by ‘global modernising forces’; however, they state that whilst aid responses can be distributional and/or rights-based, the idea of justice is likely to stem from “ordinary human virtues of care and compassion”.  Following this argument, Clark et al., offer the notion that current generations of humans may be more likely care about the environment and the challenges it, and our future generations, face if we consider ourselves as owing an incalculable debt to past generations who survived a magnitude of natural disasters and therefore made our existence possible.

As growth in developing nations continues, the challenges facing them will change.  The UN highlights that sustainable economies and societies will rely on new policies and structural changes, and that these are needed if human development and climate change goals are to be aligned.  However, it is clear that policies alone will not be enough.  If we can show the same resilience and respect for our environment as our ancestors did, and view our actions as something we ‘owe’ our future generations, perhaps attitudes will change.

 Nigel Clark, Vasudha Chhotray, Roger Few, 2013, Global justice and disasters, The Geographical Journal, DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12005

 Environmental threats could push billions into extreme poverty, warns UN, The Guardian, 14^th March 2013

 Press release: “Rise of South” transforming global power balance, says 2013 Human Development Report, accessed 18^th March 2013

 Human Development Report 2013, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, accessed 18^th March 2013

Covering much of central New York State is a mosaic of forest, pasture, and cornfields punctuated by lakes, small towns, rural residences, and sometimes wind turbines (© Peter Klepeis)

by Peter Klepeis

Most news coverage of forests tends to focus on deforestation. And for good reason. The Food and Agricultural Organization concludes that from 2000-2010 upwards of 13 million ha of forest per year were converted to other uses or lost to natural causes. Most of the clearing occurs in the tropics, and the resultant biodiversity loss, carbon dioxide emissions, and threats to local inhabitants are among the reasons to be concerned.

Global trends in forest cover hide regional differences, however. Many temperate and rich-country contexts have been experiencing forest recovery for decades. In the eastern United States, for example, cleared areas reached their peak in the mid-to-late 19^th century, but this was followed by widespread natural forest regeneration. This forest expansion is celebrated for increasing carbon sequestration and improving water quality, reducing flood risk, decreasing soil erosion, expanding wildlife habitat, and providing opportunities for recreation and extractive industries. But it is not entirely positive. As described in Jim Sterba’s new book Nature Wars, extensive forest cover, a decline in hunters, and a lack of natural predators has led to a boom in wildlife – and deer in particular – with tick-bearing disease, auto accidents, and munched veggie gardens among the negative consequences.

Regardless of its positive or negative impacts on nature and society, what explains the shift from net forest loss to net gain? In the early 1990s the geographer Alexander Mather started to develop forest transition theory: economic development, the abandonment of lands marginal to agriculture, and the movement of rural inhabitants to urban areas tend to stimulate forest recovery. The theory captures fairly well the recovery trends seen in the U.S. and Europe over the past few hundred years. But the theory is not without its critics. Forest change is dynamic, non-linear, and the factors involved are linked to specific places and time periods. Not surprisingly, therefore, recent scholarship documents how – after decades of net gain – forest cover in the eastern U.S. started to decline in the 1970s.

In a new article in the journal Area, my co-authors and I use aerial photographs to evaluate changing forest cover between 1936 and 2008 for a town in central New York State. As expected, a decline in the farming sector and changing life and livelihood goals within farming families led to 25.8 % of the town reforesting. Two new trends emerge, however. First, there is a pronounced increase in the percentage of forest recovering on prime agricultural soils, which holds the potential to diversify habitat and increase biodiversity. Prior to 1994, reforestation on high quality soils was rare. Second, alternative land uses and invasive species, such as the Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis), represent possible new forms of forest disturbance. Landowners are starting to develop wind power and natural gas, and practice silviculture. Also, there is steady growth in amenity-oriented land use and rural residential development. These new dynamics challenge theories of forest change, and raise questions about the prospects of sustainable land and forest use in the region.

The author: Peter Klepeis is Associate Professor of Geography at Colgate University, N.Y., U.S.

Klepeis P, Scull P, LaLonde T, Svajlenka N and Gill N 2013 Changing forest recovery dynamics in the northeastern United States Area DOI: 10.1111/area.12016

Mather A S and Needle C L 1998 The forest transition: a theoretical basis Area 30 117-24

Grainger A 1995 The forest transition: an alternative approach Area 27 242-51

Mather A S 1992 The forest transition Area 24 367-79

Sterba J 2012 America gone wild Wall Street Journal 2 November

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2012 State of the world’s forests FAO, Rome

Excavations for London’s Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death. The £14.8bn Crossrail project aims to establish a 118km-long (73-mile) high-speed rail link with 37 stations across London, and is due to open in 2018.Thirteen bodies have been found so far in the 5.5m-wide shaft at the edge of Charterhouse Square, alongside pottery dated to the mid-14th Century. A BBC report suggests that analysis of DNA taken from the skeletons may also help to shed light on the lives of Londoners of that day. In addition, the bodies may contain DNA from the bacteria responsible for the plague that became known as the Black Death – from an early stage in the pandemic – helping modern epidemiologists track the development and spread of differing strains of a pathogen that still exists today.

Charterhouse Square lies in an area that was once outside the walls of London, referred to at the time as “No-man’s Land”. By 1658, the area had escaped this status.  The skeletons’ arrangement in two neat rows suggests they date from the earliest era of the Black Death, before it fully developed into the pandemic that in later years saw bodies dumped haphazardly into mass graves. Archaeologists working for Crossrail and the Museum of London will continue to dig in a bid to discover further remains, or any finds from earlier eras.

Jay Carver, project archaeologist for Crossrail told the BBC that the site is “probably the most important medieval site we’ve got” because of the type of data represented in the shaft.  The find is providing more than just a precise location for the long-lost burial ground; ”We’ve got a snapshot of the population from the 14th Century – we’ll look for signs that they’d done a lot of heavy, hard work, which will show on the bones, and general things about their health and their physique,” said Nick Elsden, project manager from the Museum of London Archaeology, which is working with Crossrail on its sites.

The importance of this discovery for today’s population raises key issues surrounding the agency of dead bodies in contributing to the formation of contemporary geographies.  This calls to mind a paper recently published by Craig Young and Duncan Light in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.  This paper follows the mobilities between 1958 and 1990 of the dead body of Dr Petru Groza (1884–1958), a significant political figure in post-World War II socialist Romania, to explore the implications for human geography of engaging with the dead. Young and Light argue that, although there has been a considerable interest in ‘geographies of the body’ and ‘deathscapes’, human geography has had relatively little to say about dead bodies. The paper draws on literatures from death studies and dead body politics, as well as research in memory studies, history, anthropology and law, to develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of the corpse in society, and argues that human geography should do more to consider how dead bodies contribute to the formation of contemporary geographies. To illustrate these points the analysis first explores how the treatment of Groza’s corpse and the ‘deathwork’ associated with it is an example of ‘dead body politics’. Second, the analysis draws out the agency of the corpse and its role in a variety of ‘deathscapes’. The conclusion considers the implications for human geography of engaging with ‘corpse geographies’ more generally.

In a field dominated by archaeologists and historians, it seems that Young and Light clearly find a more significant role for the dead in contemporary human geography.

Craig Young and Duncan Light (2013) Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (1), 135-148.

Jason Palmer,

‘Black Death pit’ unearthed by Crossrail project, BBC News, 15 March 2013.

As I walk by my former primary school on a Tuesday early morning, the current pupils must be gathered in assembly for I can hear the School hymn.  Schooled in Guernsey, I studied the Bailiwick of Guernsey’s Curriculum and my education was embedded, to a large extent, in local Island (one might say national) context.

‘National’ or ‘state’ level schools tend to be considered as mainstream organisations for learning (Kraftl 2012).  They teach about the world beyond their state borders, but rarely embed themselves internationally.  This point is made by the team behind Avenues: an alternative educational establishment based in New York.

Avenues, subtitled ‘The World School’, opened its first campus in September 2012.  It is envisaged that this international school will expand to include more than 20 campuses around the globe, in places such as Singapore, London, Paris, Mumbai and São Paulo.  When this integrated global learning community is established, students will be able to take advantage of a singular leaning system to spend short periods at different campuses around the world.  This physical mobility is part of the essential criteria through which Avenues aims to “prepare students for global life”.

With its global philosophy, perhaps Avenues could be conceived as a form of education beyond the mainstream (this is not an unusual perspective in current media articles on the school).  If so, then it contributes to what Kraftl (2012:1) calls “geographies of ‘alternative’ education”.  While Kraftl’s focus remains on UK-based homeschooling, and draws upon themes of emotion and affect, and family and home, his article clearly demonstrates some of the political, social and academic values associated with alternative sites for learning.

Could we see Avenues and its potential global networks analysed in geographies of education at some point in the future?

  Avenues: The World School

  Education: Move Over Dalton. The Economist (online). 01 September 2012

  Collins D and Coleman T (2008) Social geographies of education: looking within, and beyond, school boundaries Geography Compass 2 281–99

  Kraftl, P. (2012) Towards geographies of ‘alternative’ education: a case study of UK home schooling families. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00536.x

  World class: a superschool for the global age. The Telegraph (online). 04 February 2013

Libya’s struggles continue to haunt the international community. Well over a year after Muammar Muhammad al-Qaddafi’s death at the hands of rebels forces in Sirte, midway between Tripoli and Benghazi, militant and sectarian groups compete with each other for control of key provinces and national resources. Last Thursday, an estimated one hundred militiamen disrupted proceedings of the Libyan National Congress, protesting the government’s proposal to “purge Qaddafi-era officials from public office”. Militia leaders noted that they agreed with the proposal, but feared that the National Congress would seek to dilute the bill’s efficacy in order to protect their own interests. The British Embassy waded into the protests, reminding Libyan political groups that the National Congress must be allowed to conduct its business safely, democratically  and without harassment: “These people were chosen to represent Libya and it is important to give them space and security so that they may make their decisions”. The Embassy’s commentary was unsurprising, given both the United Kingdom’s recent involvement in the outcome of the Libyan Civil War, as well as Europe’s longstanding interest in Libya, its land, and peoples.

In the December 2012 issue of The Geographical Journal, James D Sidaway (University of Singapore) recounted Europe’s twentieth century predilection with Libya. His account artfully and succinctly contextualized Britain and France’s most recent intervention within the backdrop of often-complicated European-Libyan interests. Sidaway described Libya’s twentieth and twenty-first century geopolitics as “Subaltern”, deliberately borrowing from Joanne Sharp’s 2011 Geoforum article, where state regimes implement policies largely designed to sustain the regime’s survival, not dramatically enhance the populace’s welfare. Some of the blame for this, certainly, rested with Qaddafi’s egoistic desires to control Libya for the rest of his life (and beyond, through his sons). But the initial enthusiasm for his regime, and indeed the impetus behind his removal forty-odd years on, was to alter the nation’s relationship with Europe.

In the 1960s, Qaddafi took advantage of decades of nationalist anger against Europe and the United States to gain power. From the 1920s to the end of the Second World War, Libya was a proxy state under the control of Fascist Italy. Benito Mussolini envisioned Libya as the cornerstone in a “new Roman empire, by means of Italian settlement and planning and resting on the repression of all revolts and organised resistance” (297). Italian colonisation sought to impose European, not indigenous conceptions of order and society, a policy many Libyans continued to resent long after Mussolini’s capture and execution in 1945. But the end of international war did not mark the end of Libya’s entanglement with the West. After the Italian withdrawal, the British and American installed Idris, the Allied-backed leader of wartime Cyrenaica (eastern Libya), as the first monarch of the new Kingdom of Libya. “For the best part of [the next] two decades”, Sidaway argued, “Libya’s post-colonial trajectory was exemplary in the eyes of Western powers” (298). Idris’s foreign and domestic policies alike sought to maintain the elite’s status quo. Although Qaddafi radically shifted Libya’s path towards nationalism and secular Islamic authority after the 1969 coup, he too demonstrated a tendency to prioritise measures intended, first and foremost, to protect his regime’s stability vis-à-vis the West and its allies within Libya. Qaddafi’s Libya thus continued to be governed (and defined) as a response to European and American behaviour. Even as the Qaddafi regime slid towards collapse, its leader looked not to internal negotiations, but rather to Europe for a solution amenable, of course, to his interests (299). Support was not forthcoming, in part because the Libyan opposition revolted against Qaddafi, in part, because of his anti-Europe, anti-democratic stances. For better or worse, then, Libya has long been, and remains, in Europe’s strong gravitational pull.

The difficulty, as Sidaway reminded us, is that Libya’s complicated history, both with Europe and its African neighbours, has done much to erase memories of the region’s violent past (and present). In the 2008 festivities marking a formal rapprochement between Libya and Italy, for instance, few officials wished to discuss Qaddafi’s extensive human rights violations, or then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s leaked comments on the accord’s economic benefits.

 Chris Stephen, Libyan national congress attacked by rogue militias, The Guardian, 7 March 2013.

 James D Sidaway, 2012, Subaltern Geopolitics: Libya in the Mirror of Europe, The Geographical Journal 178.4, 296-301.

 N Barbour, 1950, The Arabs of Cyrenaica: Review, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica by E E Evans-Pritchard, The Geographical Journal 115.1/3, 96-98.

In one way or another geographers have long been concerned and intrigued by ‘work’. Geographical research has looked at, for example, the spatial division of labour, labour migration and the relationship between labour and gender. However, it has recently been noted that “geographers have been avoiding work. At least as an explicit research topic, work has been largely absent from the geography agenda” (McMorran 2012).

This apparent lack of geographical consideration is perhaps a little surprising given the contemporary changes to working practices that have been identified in the media. This week it has been announced that Yahoo! is to introduce measures to prevent employees working from home as the company believes that the interaction between staff in the office allows a more productive working environment. This move has surprised many given that Yahoo! are a IT firm and it is improvements to telecommunications and computing that have increased the ease with which people are able to work from home. Remote working is perceived to be increasing in popularity but its impacts are not well understood. Academic research has shown that those who work from home often receive smaller pay rises and fewer promotions. Questions have also been asked about the efficiency and work-output of those who work from home. Struggles to focus and concentrate on tasks are deemed to be an issue amongst remote workers and a University of Texas study has recently found that tele-commuters work an average of five to seven hours of week more than those who work in a normal office setting.

These contrasting findings indicate that there is a need to undertake geographical research into these issues and this is highlighted in McMorran’s recent publication in Area on “Practising workplace geographies”. Geography as a discipline is well placed to study working practices by employing ethnographic methodologies and other participatory methods. These techniques will enable a true picture of working practices to be observed rather than using interview or survey methods that are reliant on employees’ views and information about their own work. This issue has also been subject to media scrutiny this week in the wake of research indicating that surveys regarding alcohol consumption under report the true level of consumption in the UK. This raises questions about the general reliability of data collected in the course of research.

Therefore, these two contrasting media articles both demonstrate how geographical research has a role in investigating significant contemporary issues. In these cases it also shows that it is not only the subjects which geographers are researching that are important but also the methods and the techniques which are being used to do so.

McMorran, C. 2012 Practising workplace geographies: embodied labour as a method in human geography Area 44:4 489-495

Teleworking: The myth of working from home BBC News

Drinking, sex, eating: Why don’t we tell the truth in surveys? BBC News

The idea of human control over the weather is certainly not new; neither are many of the accompanying anxieties. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Geoengineering – or ”deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming” (as defined by the Royal Society) – is a topic which always divides opinion in debates about how to tackle climate change. As levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continue to rise at break-neck speed, many insist that efforts to de-carbonise our economies will not be sufficient to avoid dangerous levels of climate change. The only solution, the argument goes, is to counteract humankind’s alteration of the atmosphere’s chemistry with similarly large-scale – but planned – interventions in the operation of the earth system.

The technologies conventionally captured under the label “geoengineering” can perhaps be more usefully thought of in terms of solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). SRM technologies range from the mundane to the fanciful: from painting roofs white to reflect more sunlight, to the deployment of giant mirrors between the earth and the sun to intercept solar energy before it even reaches earth’s atmosphere. Other suggestions include the artificial fertilisation of the ocean to encourage it to absorb more carbon dioxide, and the injection of reflective sulphate aerosols into the high atmosphere. The CDR category contains slightly less vaulting technological ambition; technologies here would seek to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (with things like synthetic trees and carbon ‘scrubbers’ in power stations) and squirrel it away in underground stores.

For advocates of geoengineering research and deployment, it is essential that we prepare the way for technologies which could deliver us from a full-blown climatic catastrophe. For opponents, geoengineering is another example of the kind of hubris which got us into the environmental crisis in the first place, and the technologies will simply lead us into a vicious circle of unintended consequences and even more risky and uncertain remedial actions. The geoengineering debate thus takes us to the core of deeply ideological debates about the relationship between humans and nature, about technological progress, and about the democratic governance of risk and the environment.

New research from the Science, Society and Sustainability (3S) Group at the University of East Anglia has shone some light on how these diverse normative, ideological and technological assumptions have played out in media coverage of geoengineering debates. In a paper in The Geographical Journal, Kate Porter and Mike Hulme explore the dominant framings of UK newspaper coverage of the issue. Questions of innovation, risk, governance, economics, morality, security and justice are all identified as framings which direct – implicitly and explicitly – the ways stories about geoengineering are assembled and presented to the reading public. Risk framings, for example, tend to emphasise the trade-offs between the avoidance of serious climate change and the uncertain outcomes of large scale geoengineering interventions. Morality framings, by contrast, tend to translate these calculations into a Biblical language of guilt, blame, judgement and punishment.

What will perhaps be of most interest to geographers is Porter & Hulme’s account of the different conceptions of ‘nature’ which can be traced through these diverse framings. Nature emerges, variously, as a powerful self-regulating system in need of palliative care; as something much bigger than and outside of human agency against which dreams of total knowledge and control are futile; and as something more ephemeral which is inherently threatened by geoengineering. This latter conception stands close to Francis Bacon’s notion of natura vexata - a nature once free and unconstrained, which is now oppressed and frustrated by human action. These different understandings of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman have deep roots. Any attempt at a deliberate, global modification of the planet’s energy flows will have to negotiate these competing visions. How to do this in a way which is robustly and justly democratic is a question which we are yet to come to terms with.

Any discussion of geoengineering is freighted with normative assumptions and political preferences (you’ll probably have noticed some of mine). Porter & Hulme’s work offers a preliminary guide to the rhetorical resources and ideological frames which populate the geoengineering debate, and raises further interesting questions. How do these debates play out differently in different places and cultures? Who is trusted as a source of information on geoengineering? How do different conceptions of ‘nature’, ‘risk’ and even ‘democracy’ shape the debate? These are important discussions which geographers are well-placed to contribute to.

 Kate Elizabeth Porter and Mike Hulme, 2013, The Emergence of the Geoengineering Debate in the UK Print Media: A Frame Analysis, The Geographical Journal, DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12003

 Rogue geoengineering could ‘hijack’ world’s climate, The Guardian

 Carbon dioxide levels show biggest spike in 15 years, Times of India

Backers of a universal alphabet say it will make pronunciation easy and foster international understanding by using phonetic methods of spelling. But what might phonetic spelling systems really be able to do for geographers?

Admittedly, the hazards of attempting to pronounce foreign languages on global travels might be lessened.  A BBC article on the topic gives the example of being in Vietnam and wanting to order a a bowl of soup. You ask a local where you can get “pho”. After momentary confusion you are handed a book. It’s the curse of phonetics. Pho was correct. But you failed to emphasise the vowel and so articulated in Vietnamese “copy” (of a book). I myself have had many an awkward conversation with telephone communications operatives trying to pronounce the lines of address from my mid-Wales hometown.  Welsh is notoriously difficult to pronounce using the untrained tongue, but English has more pitfalls than most other languages.  ”Don’t desert me here in the desert” is a classic example of the heteronym, words spelt the same but pronounced differently.

The argument over regulating spelling has been raging for more than a century, with the likes of Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw becoming advocates of a new phonetic alphabet.  Apparently, Shaw bequeathed a large sum in his will to setting one up.  Today, this has been attempted by Jaber George Jabbour, a Syrian banker living in the UK. He has set up SaypU, an alphabet with none of the indecipherable squiggles of traditional phonetic alphabets.

It contains 23 letters from the Roman alphabet as well as a back to front e. There is no place for “c”, “q”, or “x”, which merely repeat sounds achievable by using other letters. The “ɘ” represents the sound “schwa”. Jabbour was a frustrated traveller. He would see words on billboards, menus and street signs. But he didn’t have a clue how to pronounce them. When he first got to London he said Leicester Square as it is written – Le-ses-ter Square – receiving funny looks. Only later did he realise that it is pronounced “Lester”. His new alphabet transforms words such as ‘like’, ‘quote’ and ‘new’ into ‘layk’, ‘kwowt’ and ‘nyuu’.

Reading this article brought to mind an Area paper by Gesa Helms, Julia Lossau and Ulrich Oslender that discusses the dominance of English within the human geography discipline.  The article reflects on the workings of language, not only in the field of academic publishing, but also more widely in the research contexts and everyday work. The work draws upon the authors’ experiences as German-language speakers at different stages of their academic career and highlights personal observations.  They argue for a wider recognition of language in the practical terms of academic work is called for in the light of an increasing ‘internationalization’ of academia.

It seems, that rather than attempting to homogenize it, Helms et al consider the need to appreciate and utilize the variety of different language available to add to the breadth and depth of geographic enquiry.  It may be that Jabbour’s rational for the SaypU alphabet attempts to secure ease for the traveler and improve communications connections; but, if the case in academia is an example, what impacts will this cultural globalisation have upon the place of language in our everyday lives?

Gesa Helms, Julia Lossau and Ulrich Oslender, 2005, Einfach sprachlos but not simply speechless: language(s), thought and practice in the social sciences, Area, 37(3), pp 242-250. 

 Tom de Castella, Could a new phonetic alphabet promote world peace?, BBC News Magazine, 20 Feb 2013.

The identity, experiences and and behaviour of animals – in short, their subjectivity – has been a topic of great media interest of late. The scandal over the discovery of horse meat throughout the European food chain has raised serious questions not only about the seeming opacity of the meat industry, but also about our cultural relations to particular species. The illicit substitution of meat from one herbivorous quadruped for that of another has produced outrage of both a political and ethical kind, pointing towards particular culturally-embedded understandings of animal subjectivities. Likewise, the debate about the culling of badgers to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis in the UK has often proceeded through contrasting framings of badgers as vicious pests and as lovable woodland critters. These framings, in turn, can be traced back to literary presentations of badgers of works such as The Wind in the Willows – as the BBC’s Roger Harrabin reports in his interview with Angela Cassidy of Imperial College, London.

These themes of human-animal relationships have long been of interest to geographers. Agriculture and the food industry are interesting spaces where human-nature relationships are played out in a variety of material, economic, scientific and ethical ways. The field of ‘animal geographies’ has interrogated the networks which tie humans and animals together in ways which transcend conventional dualisms of ‘human’ and ‘nature’ and which pose challenging questions to the distinction between animals as economic or scientific objects, and animals as conscious, feeling subjects.

As reported by Connie Johnston in a new paper in Geography Compass, the recent evolution of the question of animal subjectivity has been an important feature of the farm animal welfare debate. Animal welfare has become an object of state regulation in the EU and US, with new branches of regulatory science interacting with forms of animal rights activism to construct new categories of animal subjectivity and emotion. Drawing on the geography of science literature, Johnston suggests that we need to trace the knowledges and norms of animal welfare through various spaces of knowledge production – from geopolitical units such as the EU, through the immediate living environments of farm animals, to the very ‘location’ of animal subjectivity, such as neuronal architectures. Johnston hints at sources of difference in how animal welfare is governed in the EU and US, such as different legal landscapes and economic priorities, and argues for further research to clarify and explain the different ways in which animal subjectivity is constructed in different places.

As the recent cases of badgers and horses show, animal subjectivities – or rather, human constructions of them – are deeply cultural affairs. Attempts to determine an absolute ‘essence’ of animal subjectivity often founder, and thus geographical scholarship has the potential to contribute to our understandings of how such categories are constructed, and the political and ethical work they do for us in highly charged debates about our food and about our relationship with the nonhuman.

 Horsemeat scandal: the essential guide, The Guardian, 15th February 2013

 Badgers: Splitting opinion for more than 200 years, BBC News, 11th October 2012

 Connie L. Johnston, 2013, Geography, Science, and Subjectivity: Farm Animal Welfare in the United States and Europe, Geography Compass 7 139-148

On the 15^th January the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) published a report stating that horse and pig DNA had been detected in beefburger products available from retail outlets in Ireland.  The FSAI reported that whilst the presence of pig DNA had a plausible, although clearly still unacceptable, explanation –cross contamination in meat processing plants, there was no reasonable explanation for the presence of horsemeat.

Since then, the ‘horsemeat scandal’ has dominated our headlines with a steady stream of shocking revelations about the meat industry and its regulations, supply chains and possible links to the criminal underworld.  The timeline of findings and events published by the UK Food Standards Agency demonstrates not only the extent and seriousness of the investigation, but the unfolding complexity and (to some) the surprising lack of transparency of the meat industry.  What is clear, however, is that as the number of products testing positive for horse DNA rise, consumer confidence is plummeting and accusations of blame are flying. 

Whilst Felicity Lawrence provides an ‘essential guide to the horsemeat scandal’ in The Guardian, explaining the involvement of Europe in our meat supply chains in particular, Reuters report on the “accusations, denials and threats to sue (that) reverberated round Europe on Friday as meat traders, food processors, retailers and governments all rejected blame”.  However, as the pressure on Governments to act grows and claims of mis-labelling, negligence and fraud ricochet across Europe, Reuters describe how the accused believe they are being used as scapegoats for the politicians who are struggling to explain these breaches in food safety controls.     

As the saga continues, and questions are raised about how this substantial quality control failure has been allowed to happen, the meat industry will find itself under increasing scrutiny.  In a timely article for The Geographical Journal, Laura Devaney provides interesting insight to the operating logics, performance and impact of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (the institution that first reported the presence of horsemeat in beef products) since its formation 10 years ago.  Using interviews with food industry stakeholders, Devaney highlights the “dynamic coexistence of both neoliberal and biosecurity agendas” in the work of the FSAI, which reflect the “new ways of securitising food… (that attempt to) protect society and allow it to prosper, but enable the deregulated free trade of safe food”.  However, Devaney also discusses the conflict between the neoliberal agendas that promote self-regulation in the food industry and the biosecurity measures related to ensuring public health and food safety.  It is this conflict that appears to be the key component in the current horsemeat scandal.  

In these times of economic austerity the demand for cheap, mass-produced processed food has grown, it is therefore not a surprise that the complex nature of supply chains and the de-regulation of the food industry have been taken advantage of.  As always, ‘lessons will be learned’ from this latest food scare but in the meantime, instead of pointing the finger of blame, regulations need to be tightened and consumer confidence regained.

 Laura Devaney, 2013, Spaces of security, surveillance and food safety: interrogating perceptions of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland’s governing technologies, power and performance, The Geographical Journal, DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12001

 Horsemeat scandal: the essential guide, The Guardian, 15th February 2013

 Horsemeat blame game ricochets across Europe, Reuters, 15th February 2013

 Timeline on horse meat issue, The Food Standards Agency, accessed on 19th February 2013

 FSAI Survey Finds Horse DNA in Some Beef Burger Products, Food Safety Authority of Ireland, accessed on 19th February 2013

In the August 1924 edition of The Geographical Journal, the Royal Geographical Society republished a notice from Monsieur Raoul Montandon, then-president of the Geographical Society of Geneva. The Geneva group was finalising a new series, entitled Materiaux pour l’Étude des Calamités, in honour of the International Red Cross Committee. Both the Geneva and London societies, as well as G Ciraolo, president of the Italian Red Cross, hoped to galvanise as much support as possible amongst geographers to assist in editing Materiaux. In so doing, the societies sought to fashion a truly international journal, bridging the divide between medicine, international affairs, and geography.

The joint call came at a propitious moment in the Red Cross and the RGS’s history. The non-sectarian, non-governmental movement, which celebrated its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this week, had recently recovered from its massive undertakings on both sides in the First World War, and was well-poised to take advantage of international sympathies, as expressed by the League of Nations, in particular, towards preventing another world war. Indeed, geographical societies, the Red Cross, and the League of Nations were deeply linked.

The Red Cross (and Red Crescent after 1919) stands as one of the few success stories in twentieth century international cooperation. Geographers and explorers became involved early in the organisation’s modern development. Fridtjof Nansen, a geographical polymath who sailed schooners, reached towards the north pole on drifting ice flows, sketched arctic landscapes, tested scientific theories in Greenland, and served as Norway’s (then newly-independent from Sweden) first ambassador to the United Kingdom, helped lead the Red Cross’s humanitarian efforts in Russia and Armenia immediately following the vicious Civil War. For these efforts, he was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize. He worked with both the Red Cross and the League of Nations until his death in 1930, hoping to prevent another catastrophe on the scale of the 1914-1918 war.

Nansen was by no means alone in aiding the Red Cross’s mission. An examination of The Geographical Journal‘s obituaries revealed a number of geographers and explorers who worked with the Red Cross and to spread geographical knowledge. May French Sheldon, one of the first women elected to the RGS fellowship (1892), was an itinerant explorer in the mould of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg who travelled three times around the world and was the first female to lead an expedition into Central Africa. In the First World War she embarked on an international lecture tour to raise money for the beleaguered Belgian Red Cross.

Just as Sheldon fashioned her own geographical career, Prince Iyesato, head of Japan’s Tokugawa family (who had lost power in 1867, but were eventually restored to leading the House of Peers) was elected a Life Fellow of the RGS for his lifelong interest in and support of geographical endeavours. As an unofficial patron, he travelled to London to attend the Society’s 1930 centenary celebration. In the 1920s, he directed the Japanese Red Cross, sending volunteers to aid in the Great War’s aftermath, as well as undertaking responsibilities on behalf of Japan at the League of Nations.

1924, Scientific Study of Natural Catastrophes, The Geographical Journal, 64, 2, 191-92.

Brown, R. N. Rudmose, Obituary: Fridtjof Nansen, The Geographical Journal, 76, 1, 92-95.

1936, Obituary: May French Sheldon, The Geographical Journal, 87, 3, 288.

1940, Obituary: Prince Iyesato Tokugawa, The Geographical Journal, 96, 6, 451.

Austen, Nancy Virginia, 1921, “Prince Tokugawa, Heir of Japan’s Last Shogun“, New Outlook, 129, 514-15.

“Red Cross celebrates 150th anniversary“, BBC News, 17 February 2013.

Research carried out with people living in Colorado, US, has found that Americans who lived well above sea level were less likely to be obese than those in low-lying areas.  Reported in the Mail (online), Lead researcher Dr Jameson Voss, from Uniformed Services University in Maryland, said: “I was surprised by the magnitude of the effect… I wasn’t expecting such a consistent pattern as what was emerging.” The study based on data from 400,000 people living in Colorado illustrated that a person’s obesity risk dropped with every 660ft increase in elevation.

To examine obesity rates at different altitudes, the researchers combined information from several databases, including a telephone health survey of 422,603 Americans from 2011. The researchers had information on 236 people who lived at the highest altitude of at least 9,800 feet above sea level. Those people tended to smoke less, eat healthier and exercise more.

The researchers also had information on 322,681 people who lived in the lowest altitude range – less than 1,600ft above sea level. After taking into account other factors that could influence the results such as retirement age, the researchers found adults living in the lowest altitude range had a Body Mass Index (BMI) – a measurement of weight in relation to height – of 26.6. That compared to people who lived in the highest altitude range, who had a BMI of 24.2. A healthy BMI falls between 18.5 and 24.9.

Dr Voss considered that the associations persist over the long term, with changes in elevation perhaps affecting appetite hormones, growth and how many calories the body burned. These findings could help explain the difference in obesity rates between states.  However, the results are unable to conclude whether moving to an area of high altitude would mean you would automatically loss your excess weight.  It would be interesting to study whether obesity prevalence would change if the research participants moved to a lower altitude.

Dianna M. Smith, and Steven Cummins, 2008, Obese Cities: How Our Environment Shapes Overweight, Geography Compass, 3(1), 518-535.

J D Voss, P Masuoka, B J Webber, A I Scher and R L Atkinson, 2013, Association of elevation, urbanization and ambient temperature with obesity prevalence in the United States, International Journal of Obesity, DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2013.5.

Want to slim down? Living at a higher altitude can help (and it’s nothing to do with climbing), Mail (online), 13 February 2013.

by Fiona Ferbrache

As a geography lecturer, I often hear students enthuse about the diverse opportunities the discipline presents to them in terms of future careers.  Geography embraces so much between the polarised categories of the natural and the social; the human and non-human; local and global; and life and death, as illustrated on this website.  Recognising the centrality of geography in the world around us makes it somewhat surprising that our disciplinary issues are rarely acknowledged as explicitly geographical when they appear in the public realm.  This point is made by Smith (2013):

academic geography generally has little or no disciplinary presence in episodic media enthusiasms for geographic topics ranging from glacier behaviour, food labelling, or flows of people, goods or waste

He continues by stressing that geographers with popular public profiles, Mark Maslin and Iain Stewart, have been labelled exclusively as ‘earth scientist’ and ‘geologist’ respectively, despite their crossovers with geography (which, in the latter case, is reflected upon by Donovan, Sidaway and Stewart, 2011).

So what can be done to bridge the gap between scholarly knowledge of geography and public knowledge of geography?  Among other things, Smith suggests the development of interactive exchanges between academics and publics (see, for example Lane et al. 2011), and adaptation of research outputs for presentation to different audiences (Smith cites Murphy (2011) as a good example). These activities might well be enriched through the use of internet technologies and digital media.

The lack of geography, explicit in the public arena, makes websites such as Geography Directions and Geography in the News, key resources for students and teachers.  Arguably though, these sites remain focused on a more disciplinary community, thus raising the question who (or which groups of people) comprise the ‘publics’ that we are seeking to make geographies with and for?  Also, in seeking to include, who are we excluding?

  Donovan, K., Sidaway, J.D. & Steward, I. 2011 Bridging the geo-divide: reflections on an interdisciplinary (ESRC/NERC) studentship. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 36 9-14

Lane, S.N., Odoni, N.. Landström, C., Whatmore, S.J., Ward, N. & Bradley, S. 2011 Doing flood risk science differently: an experiment in radical scientific method. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 36 15-36.

  Murphy, J. 2011 Walking a public geography through Ireland and Scotland. The Geographical Journal. 177 367-379

Smith, J. 2013 Geography in public and public geography: past, present and future. The Geographical Journal. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2012.00491.x

  Geography in the News. RGS-IBG.

The laying of water pipes in Israel c. 1946. Hydrological politics are now a key site where climate change meets questions of sovereignty. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Martin Mahony

Global geopolitics have conventionally been conceived of in terms of the horizontal actions and interactions of territorially-bounded nation states. However, critical geographers have recently started giving consideration to ‘vertical geopolitics’, drawing greater attention to the spatial exercise of power in a dimension which cannot conventionally be discerned from a flat political map of the world.

Vertical geopolitics have figured prominently in the news recently, particularly as new technologies of surveillance and violence have challenged conventional orderings of vertical territory (such as the notion of sovereign ‘airspace’). In particular, the military use of drones – or unmanned aircraft – for the purposes of intelligence-gathering  and assassination has quite radically altered the political geographies of modern warfare. Meanwhile, the WWF’s recent announcement that drones will be used to help protect wildlife from poachers marks an interesting development in the sky-bound surveillance of the global environment.

Climate change offers an fascinating window through which to observe the changing dimensions of political geography. In the first instance, the science and politics of the atmosphere may seem to challenge conventional territorial forms of governance. However, research is starting to emerge which demonstrates how certain political responses to climate change represent reterritorialising moves in the ongoing negotiations over sovereignty, environment and natural resources.

A paper I wrote recently with Mike Hulme seeks to explore the knowledge-base underlying many such moves. Regional climate prediction has become a key means of localising or even territorialising climate change, thus producing new forms of political space in which the implications of climate change can be debated. A recent paper by Michael Mason in The Geographical Journal takes this proposition further. In analysing the ‘securitisation’ of climate change in the context of the Israel/Palestine conflict, he offers a fascinating picture of the interaction of climate politics with the (vertical) geopolitics of contested sovereign spaces.

Mason argues that the specific way in which climate change has been rendered as a security problem by the Israeli government tends to reinforce vertical relations of domination over Palestinian skies and groundwater resources. By contrast, in the case of the Palestinian Authority, the threats posed by climate change have both been woven into liberation narratives and used as an opportunity to demonstrate policy competence and fitness for statehood.

Mason’s paper makes an important contribution to a growing body of literature which emphasises the multitude of ways in which climate change is securitised, normalised and politicised in different contexts and settings. The vertical geopolitics of climate change represent an important facet of this line of inquiry, and one which is only just beginning to be explored.

 Michael Mason, 2013, Climate Change, Securitisation and the Israel-Palestine Conflict, The Geographical Journal, DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12007

Martin Mahony & Mike Hulme, 2012, Model Migrations: Mobility and Boundary Crossings in Regional Climate Prediction. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 2, 197-211

 WWF plans to use drones to protect wildlife. The Guardian

John Brennan’s killer drones are new symbol of American in the world. Los Angeles Times