Posts tagged geography

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Posted 1 year ago
Hi Andrew. Thank you for keeping this tumblr firstly, you make me want to get one too. But of course, laziness dictates otherwise. :) I consider myself leaning towards the left too, but as I read more into Marxism, I find it increasingly a theory that appeals to the underclass as an overly-simplistic explanation of their disposition, not a rigorous and systematic way of analysis. It comes across as a slightly deductive explanation to the state of society today. Especially when it comes to international relations, I find that Marxism seems to be unpopular with academics. What do you think, and are there anyone that I should read with regards to this? Thank you! - Nich
Anonymous asked

Hi, Nich. Thanks for your compliments, and sorry about the extreme delay in response.

I share a great deal of Marxist intuitions, but I, like you, sometimes have considerable doubt about the conclusions that many Marxist writers reach with them. I think the lack of rigor you point to in analysis refers to the tendency towards sloppy functional explanation, a point that John Roemer quite accurately describes. Though I’m not familiar with the field of international relations, I can imagine the critiques made of Marxist variants of it: that state actions are too readily described in terms of actions that benefit capitalists without making anything more than a cursory attempt to understand the reasons given by people in charge of the state. I think this is a good point, and I think many Marxists make the mistake of reading a functional/economic explanation into a given situation without adequately researching the causal factors that led to it. Perhaps there have been Marxist replies to these critiques- I cannot do much more than speculate about them, given my unfamiliarity with international relations.

As far as recommended writers, I would say probably pretty much any of the Marxist geographers: David Harvey, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, and J.K. Gibson-Graham are all very good at what they do. Harvey’s The Limits to Capital in particular is a very important work, and I think you’ll find that it certainly doesn’t lack for rigor. You might also want to look at the work of the analytical Marxists: G.A. Cohen, John Roemer, and  Robert Brenner are all good examples. Though watch out for any of the game-theoretic analyses that came out of that tradition- they rely on rational choice theory, which I find highly suspect. In particular, you might want to look at Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, which is a robust reconstruction of Marx’s analysis of productive forces and economic development. I hope this helps.

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Posted 1 year ago
More generally, qualitative methods such as interactive interviews and ethnography are necessary to abstract the causal mechanisms of which quantitative/statistical methods are oblivious. It should not be expected that these abstract causal mechanisms can explain events directly without any need for empirical research into the contingency of the concrete. To do so is to commit the error of ‘pseudo-concrete research’ that is common in radical structuralism such as Marxism (Sayer, 1992). Quantitative methods, on the other hand, are particularly useful to establish the empirical regularities between objects. Although these concrete regularities are not causal relations, they can inform the abstraction of causal mechanisms. Quantitative methods are also useful in drawing attention to the external and contingent relations between objects. Inferential statistical analysis can throw light on, for instance, the external relations between objects (e.g., employment and poverty) in society from a sample. One should bear in mind that these statistical generalizations are only ‘universal’ at a specific temporal-spatial intersection. A serious problem of reductionism is incurred if one attempts to treat these contingent generalizations as necessary causal mechanisms.
Henry Wai-chung Yeun, “Critical realism and realist research in human geography: a method or a philosophy in search of a method?” Progress in Human Geography 21,1 (1997) p. 57
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Posted 1 year ago

Finally, I also think we have to ask ourselves what kind of practices would follow if we accepted Barnes’ and Rorty’s arguments. One line of critique is that such views are critically disabling… Rorty’s favoured ironists cannot present descriptions of society as empowering or emancipating by claiming they reveal real structures of oppression or injustice. Yet emancipation in real social systems may clearly require more than redescription; it may require the transformation of real and enduring social structures whose mechanisms of oppression need to be accurately identified.

Even worse, it has been suggested, Rorty’s voluntarism encourages fleeting paradigm shifts and exotic redescriptions which are largely judged on aesthetic grounds. To Bhaskar (1985: 134–35), Rorty’s project smacks of ‘an ideology for a leisured elite … neither racked by pain nor immersed in toil – whose lives may be devoted to the practice of aesthetic enhancement’. Even more harshly, Haack (1994: 139) warns, ‘there would be no honest intellectual work in Rorty’s post-epistemological utopia’.

The underlying argument then is that critique and emancipation would seem to require some element of philosophical realism as a basis. The identification of real structures, powers and tendencies is necessary to enable us to uncover ideological distortions and forms of domination, and to carry out thought experiments to explore the possibility of different, and better, social organizations.

Keith Basset, “Is There Progress in Human Geography? The problem of progress in the light of recent work in the philosophy and sociology of science,” Progress in Human Geography 23,1 (1999) p. 37–38

The honors thesis proposal is coming up soon.

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Posted 1 year ago
Analytical Marxism? Causation? Area Studies? Collective Action? Generalization? All in one book? It’s like a dream come true. Zoom

Analytical Marxism? Causation? Area Studies? Collective Action? Generalization? All in one book?

It’s like a dream come true.

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Posted 1 year ago

Awesome "guerrilla urbanism" ideas for revitalizing "dying cities"

(Source: twilightfades)

via bthny
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Posted 1 year ago

The People's Geography Project

A World to Make

The major goal of the People’s Geography Project is to popularize and make even more relevant and useful to ordinary people the important, critical ways of understanding the complex geographies of everyday life that geographers have and continue to develop. Our contention is that such knowledge is an important tool not just in learning to cope with constantly developing and transforming relations of power that are deeply geographical, but in learning how to actively transform those relations in the name of social and economic justice.

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Posted 1 year ago

People, Power, and Public Spaces

The state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, where thousands of workers now protest the governor’s fierce attacks on collective bargaining rights, represents another case of a public commons becoming a staging ground for political resistance. The capitol, which sits right in the heart of downtown Madison, was named by Project for Public Spaces as one of the great public spaces of the world. “This is truly the town square that early Americans imagined as the crux of democracy,” the PPS website explains.

The people rallying behind public sector union workers at the Capitol are actually protected by the Wisconsin state constitution, which forbids the legislature from denying public access to the building when it is in session. (State law does permit capitol groundskeepers to clear the building in an emergency, presumably on orders of the governor—but those groundskeepers are also presumably members of the same union the governor wants to crush.)

This all shows that the exercise of democracy depends upon having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, Main Street, park, or other public space that is open to all. An alarming trend in American life is the privatization of our public realm. As corporate-run shopping malls replaced downtowns and main streets as the center of action, we lost some of our public voice. You can’t organize a rally, hand out flyers, or circulate a petition in a shopping mall without the permission of the management, which will almost certainly say no because they don’t want to distract shoppers’ attention from the merchandise. That’s why you see few benches or other gathering spots inside malls. The result is that our ability to even discuss the issues of the day (or any other subject) with our fellow citizens is limited.

Of course, public spaces enrich our lives in many ways beyond protests. Local commons become the sites of celebrations, festivals, art events, memorial services, and other expressions of community.

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Posted 1 year ago

Rutgers Professor Maps Toxic Ads, Then Buys Billboards to Publish The Results

mediafreakgodicon:

Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s innovative research analyzes the urban environment in terms of its impact on health. As Associate Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University, she carries out studies that focus on what she calls “toxic exposures” to things like fast-food outlets, advertising messages, and even subtler cues such as bulletproof glass, barbed wire, or shopfront security grilles.

For Edible Geography, I talked to Kwate about several of her recent studies, including one in which she mapped alcohol advertising in Central Harlem against residents’ drinking patterns. Not only did she discover that an astonishing 25 percent of the outdoor advertising space in the neighborhood was dedicated to selling alcohol, but also that exposure to these ads increased black women’s chances of being a problem drinker by up to 13 percent.

What’s particularly interesting about her current project, though, is that she is not only documenting the urban environment’s effect on health, but then turning around and using the same tools—outdoor advertising—to publish her results and stage a positive intervention. She’s still in the data-collection phase of this ambitious 5-year study, funded by a NIH Innovator Award, but eventually she plans to buy billboards, use them to disseminate her findings and their implications in terms of racism and inequality, and then measure her participants’ health pre- and post-exposure, in order to evaluate the impact of her own messaging.

The idea, Kwate explains, is to “play off the finding that, in some instances, African Americans—particularly those of lower income—who deny experiences of racism actually have worse health than those who report it.” Rather than a message of uplift, her ads will, she hopes, sensitize residents to the pervasive inequalities embedded in their streets and storefronts. Although this counter-marketing campaign is still a few years away, Kwate offers an example of the kind of message she might want to communicate in an bus shelter ad: “Normally, this space has a liquor ad in it.”

You can read more about Kwate’s shocking findings thus far and her bike-mounted fleet of urban researchers over at Edible Geography. I can’t wait (5 long years!) to see how her own blunt un-advertising campaign works out.

My school has some pretty cool professors sometimes.

via ghettomanifesto
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Posted 1 year ago

The Agnostic Cartographer

bthny:

One fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People’s Republic. The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute between the two nations for decades. Google’s sudden relabeling of the province gave the appearance of a special tip of the hat toward Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly bad: the press noticed that Google’s servers had started splaying Mandarin place-names all over the state only a few hours before Indian and Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.

Within China, Geens pointed out, the law commands that all maps represent “South Tibet” (aka Arunachal Pradesh) as fully Chinese. And Google Maps maintains servers in China that fall under Chinese law. In fact, Google runs an entirely separate maps site, ditu.google.cn, for Chinese users, which operates within the great Chinese firewall. This isn’t just a one-off concession to the party leaders in Beijing: Google maintains thirty-two different region-specific versions of its Maps tool for different countries around the world that each abide by the respective local laws. Thus on India’s version of Google Maps, for example, all of Kashmir appears as an integral and undisputed part of the country—because Indian law sees it that way. Similarly, “Arunachal Pradesh” is nowhere to be found on ditu.google.cn. What you find instead are all the same Chinese place-names that caused the uproar of Google Maps in August.

I’m really interested in modern cartography and the ways that technology has changed the ways in which people can represent the places in which they live through maps. This is a really cool article. 

(Source: abbyjean)

via bthny
Quote 16
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Posted 1 year ago
Idea: “Cities — not so-called failed states like Afghanistan and Somalia — are the true daily test of whether we can build a better future or are heading toward a dystopian nightmare.
Urban Growth for the New Millenium - Parag Khanna on Cities | The Ideas Economy (via smartercities)
via foreverybody