Jennefer Laidley (w/ Ute Lehrer), Environmental Studies, York University

‘We’re not building condos, we’re building communities’: Disenfranchisement and Manipulation on Toronto’s Central Waterfront

Toronto’s waterfront is currently the site of a massive new development scheme based on creating the kinds of places and spaces that will secure Toronto’s position in the global economy. Politicians, developers, architects, media pundits, and neighbourhood activists alike are promoting this development scheme as the new urban panacea for a variety of social and environmental problems.

This paper critically investigates Toronto’s waterfront development policies and practices, demonstrating how the political discourse about this development, as well as the development model itself, not only manipulates but disenfranchises both the general as well as the specific local public. It raises the issue of the ways in which a wide variety of purportedly universal environmental and socio-economic benefits are being used to justify large-scale capital investments in inner cities, while simultaneously obfuscating their primary beneficiaries and underlying ideologies.

The paper will also address the ways in which the ‘common good’, in the form of public space and waterfront access, is being used to create the image of a ‘world-class’ competitive city, while at the same time this ‘common good’ is being increasingly privatized. The spatial and social conditions which will result, at least in the case of Toronto, will have long lasting negative consequences for social justice in the city.

Wen Lin, Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Social Construction of GIS in a Non-Western World: The Case of Shenzhen, China

GIS technologies have been rapidly developed in urban China, particularly in local governments over the past decade. However, in-depth investigations of GIS practice in China and other non-Western worlds are absent. Drawing upon a range of literature on GIS and society, GIS diffusion in organizations, and political economy, this study examines the complex process of GIS development in local governments of China.  GIS are viewed as social constructions because they are socially embedded technologies that influence social practice. I argue that it is necessary to examine the social construction of GIS by examining GIS practice both within the organizational context as well as within the broader social conditions. In particular, I propose to use the concept of “scaled network” to explore the dynamic social relations of actors in networks of GIS development. Scaled networks conceptualize social connections and power relations in terms of networks of actors embedded in different spatial extents. Thus, this concept helps to understand how GIS practice dynamically interacts with its embedded social contexts at various scales.

Through an in-depth case study of Shenzhen, China, I aim to reveal that how particular social, economic and political conditions, as well as the organizational context, have contributed to GIS practice in urban China over time; conversely, how such GIS practice has influenced the process of urban development and urban governance.

Maggie Walker, Geography, University of Kentucky

The Work of Culture in Tijuana

This paper is part of a larger project which argues that the city of Tijuana, Mexico has been transformed from a site of compromise to one generative of change through the material and representational activities undertaken in the ‘cultural’ sector.  My presentation takes as a point of departure portions of the Tijuana Municipal Plan 2005-2007.  In looking at the particularities of cultural practices in Tijuana, I interrogate the text through three interrelated questions: 1) what is the work of culture in Tijuana?;  2) whose interests do certain representations of culture in Tijuana serve and what are the potential effects of these representations?; and, 3) how are visions of city culture exemplar of exclusionary practices in a region where heterogeneity and shifting notions of boundaries characterize the socio-spatial landscape?  I conclude by suggesting that the way ‘culture’ has been mobilized in Tijuana is useful for a more general discussion of culture in Geography. 

Nick Crane, Geography, Ohio State

Improvement District Publics, and Places of Accountability: Reflecting on the Establishment of BIDs in Downtown Columbus OH

An increasingly prevalent model of urban governance, the Business Improvement District (BID) engages public and private sector interests towards the construction of a managed public realm.  This paper considers the degree to which the BID model has proven accountable to the appropriate publics.

Research in Columbus, Ohio suggests that funding procedures and administrative boundaries condition BIDs to unevenly represent certain publics of an improvement district. Interviews reveal that the effects of BID practices are not thought to significantly exceed districts’ territorial boundaries or the social boundaries of financial stakeholders, while textual analysis indicates that such stakeholders are representationally privileged by BID practices, frequently to the relational disadvantage of other affected publics.

Most existing literatures seek to clarify BID managers’ public obligations through attention to the territorial and social boundaries of improvement districts.  Understanding this emphasis on boundaries as reductive, I challenge this reading of accountability through literary theory, political theory, and critical geography.  Emphasizing the fluidity of BIDs’ effects, and recognizing the relationship between privileged stakeholders and overlooked publics, I rethink the boundaries of improvement district place, arguing that BID managers must be accountable not only to investors, but to the improvement district publics that their practices call into being.

Mathias J. Detamore, Geography, University of Kentucky

Urban Spaces, Public Fantasies: Thinking Through the Paradox of Public Space

 Public space is formless, urban space is not. To the extent that public spaces are contained within the changing geographies of urban spaces, the problematical processes of neoliberal policies, an automobile-centric hegemony, urban fantasies, and the surveilled spaces of a maniacal security have left the concept of public space as the vanishing specter of a democratic ideal. This paper revisits some of the theoretical findings and methodological approaches to my Masters in Architecture thesis, titled: Paradox and the City: a margin for the heterogeneous connection of urban networks (University of Cincinnati: 2005) that sought to bridge the discontinuities between the edges and boundaries of the urban environment in an attempt to stitch the fabric together into a more democratic space through urban design. A brief introduction and overview of the main theoretical points concentrating on Edward Soja's Thirdspace, Gillian Rose's paradoxical space, and hell hooks' political margins is outlined. The aim of the hypothesis was to diagram and abstract social relationships as the exist in negotiated and contingent ways and then apply this hypothesis to a physical design project in downtown Cincinnati that further abstracted these relationships in a theory of heterogeneous connectivity. The paper concentrates on the problems discovered in the theoretical strand that problematizes the relationship between public space and urban space. An introduction to the architecture/urban design project that accompanied this research is then provided; the complication arrived at in the paradox discovered between urban space and public space; concluding with where this research is taking me into the future.

David L. Prytherch, Geography, Miami University of Ohio

Regionalism has Always Been New: a Century of Catalanist Euroregionalism in Valencia

This paper traces historical debates in Valencia about the integration of the Catalan-speaking regions of the northwestern Mediterranean to explore how economic restructuring and cultural regionalism can be synthesized within the politics of Euroregionalism. Emerging European regions are at the center of debates about state re-scaling and New Regionalism, as well as economic geography’s broader cultural and institutional turn. The most innovative of such work advocates a move toward empirically rich, cultural economic analyses. I offer here such a case study of the Catalanist political project of integrating Valencia with Catalunya as the core of wider territorial framework (now called the Euroregion) of the Mediterranean Arch. Analyzing the writings of Valencia’s prominent Catalanists reveals how the economic and cultural have long been discursively synthesized in the social construction of a territorial idea designed to be economically and culturally integrated, competitive, oriented to the Mediterranean and Europe, and Catalan speaking.  By exploring the evolution of this idea over nearly a century, I suggest the basic outlines of New Regionalist discourse can predate the structural contexts of globalization, neoliberalism, or the European Union integration often used to explain it, suggesting that new regionalism is perhaps not always so new.

Chris Blackden, Geography, University of Kentucky

Metasovereign: Modes of Power in the WTO

Theorizing the World Trade Organization in terms of sovereignty opens up a number of interesting problems.  The WTO, like a traditional nation-state, works through a complex mixture of persuasion and coercion (two modes of power that tend to fade into one another rather than being strictly separable).  As the nation state is bolstered by the material threat of armed force and the normalizing discourse of patriotism, the WTO is bolstered by the material threat of trade sanctions and the normalizing discourse of the market.  Borrowing from Foucault, Agamben, and Mitchell, we can look at sovereignty from the bottom up, as a kind of projection (think of a hologram) created by the intersection of the ideas and practices of many individuals.  This creates a central reference point that can be appealed to in order to mobilize actors in power struggles.  The WTO constitutes one such reference point.  Since it is possible to appeal to multiple sovereign reference points (and even for the division of authority between these points to be codified), it is possible for sovereignties to overlap in terms of population and territory.  With the rise of multistate bodies like the WTO, such arrangements may be becoming the norm.

Joel Wainwright, Geography, Ohio State

After Doha

After the Director General of the World Trade Organization unexpectedly announced the “indefinite suspension” of the Doha Round of trade negotiations on July 24, 2006, many observers interpreted the collapse of the Doha round as a setback for globalization.  This presentation will argue that the collapse of Doha is to be celebrated, but not because it portends the end of globalization (however defined).  I will outline the conflicting forces that caused the collapse of the Doha round and draw lessons for future political-economic struggles.

Simona Niculae, Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Hungary

“Pristine Places and Unaltered Customs”: Cultural Tourism in Rural Romania

The paper investigates the emergence of cultural tourism in the rural communities of post-socialist Romania. The country had to face remarkable economic and social changes in the last two decades. Some of these transformations originate in the neoliberal policies adopted largely by the former socialist states. In this context tourism is also promoted as a development project against poverty. Moreover, under the pressure of the forthcoming accession to European Union, Romania seeks to find her own voice in the "European family". Using ethnographic data gathered from two rural communities from Transylvania, the paper explores how the alignment to cultural tourism in the framework of neoliberalism and Europeanization is a process of reshaping identities, of restructuring spaces, social differences and of reconstructing the meanings of cultural heritage.

Rohit Negi, Geography, Ohio State

Life and Politics after Privatization in Zambia

Privatization of almost all production in the last decade or so in Zambia has led to retrenchment of thousands of workers. Copper mining has been hit especially hard. From a peak employment of 60,000 generally well paid and unionized jobs in 1990, the labor force in copper mining had been reduced to fewer than 30,000 by 2005, of which a third comprised poorly paid and non-unionized contractual labor. Often, those who lost their jobs during the real and constructed economic crisis in the 1990s, when the prevailing philosophy of ‘there is no alternative’ to privatization was at its height, also lost their lifelong savings and pensions due to the massive devaluation of the Zambian Kwacha. Laid-off miners in Kitwe, however, have a strange term for their predicament—many told me they were ‘pruned’ from the mine at such and such date. In this paper I will use the workers’ astonishingly dry way to describe their superfluous, redundant position in the micro-economy as a window to understand the vicissitudes of the political economy of the Copperbelt after privatization.

Ebru Ustundag, Geography, Brock University

‘Safe City’ as a Democratic City: The Paradox of Europeanness in Instanbul

Historically, Istanbul has always been a contested space for the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, to define themselves as European. In the process of complying with the regulations of the Union, there has been an increased emphasis on security in the city; and new forms of governing practices have been introduced in order to provide safety. While there has been significant research on the relationship between the city, democracy and citizenship, there has been less attention to the new forms of governance that have arisen in the city as a result of internationalization of security measures. Despite the increased security measures and new practices of governance and discipline, the city also appears as the space where various social groups not only articulate the expansion of their rights but also claim new ones. Critical research on cities and citizenship can take new directions by exploring the linkages between democracy, city and citizenship within the context of internationalization focusing on security concerns embedded in local, national and supranational discourses and practices. The key questions to be explored in this paper 1) What is the role of the city in ensuring internationalization of security? 2) What are new practices of governance to establish the secure city? 3) How are the new citizenship practices constituted and how are new rights claimed as a response to these new forms governance and discipline in the city?

Gabriella Modan, English, Ohio State and Susanna Schaller, City and Regional Planning, Cornell University

“Safe and Clean”: Community Reactions to Environmental Innovations in a Multi-Ethnic Business Improvement District

“Safe and Clean.” This slogan captures the mission of Business Improvement Districts springing up throughout the US to help “revitalize” urban neighborhoods. Cities are refashioning urban spaces to compete for visitors and potential residents who want to experience urban spectacle but are wary about walking actual US city streets. Consequently, the work of Business Improvement Districts is to banish disorder and to offer safety and predictability. In making urban neighborhoods feel safe, however, BIDs may sanitize the urban environment, suppressing heterogeneity (cf. Mitchell 2003, Zukin 1995, Sorkin 1992): Safety is psychological as well as material, and an environment that feels safe to one  may feel hostile to another.

We examine a cognitive mapping project conducted in a multi-ethnic Washington, DC BID neighborhood. In these maps and ensuing conversations, participants evaluated standard environmental innovations used by BIDs as alternately welcoming or exclusionary, depending on their ethnicity, age, residential status, use of neighborhood space, and business owner status.  This study highlights the importance of including community members from multiple backgrounds in critical assessment processes to evaluate the impact of standard BID structure on heterogeneous communities.

John Paul Cervas Catungal, Geography, University of Toronto and Eugene McCann, Geography, Simon Fraser University

Displaced and Violated: Moral Geographies of Iconic Urban Space

Oliver Christian Belcher, Geography, University of Kentucky

Does a Sovereign Speak Before He Devours? Questioning the Role of Sovereignty in Hardt and Negri

In their two seminal works Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri identify two powerful, interwoven forces that presently constitute the global social order.  The first is a new world order characterized by a sovereign Empire that presents itself as “enveloping the entire space of what it considers civilization, a boundless, universal space,” and “encompassing all [historical and present] time within its ethical foundation.”  Although this seemingly “permanent, eternal, and necessary” order is merely a representation of itself on the part of Empire, the challenges to its rule (the consistent challenge by the “multitude”) allows for sovereign intervention against such “exceptions” to be exercised in order to maintain the “legitimate” imperial ordering.  The second identified force is a decentralized order of productive assemblages that is distinguished by its unitary biopolitical programme of “producing producers”; i.e., “life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life.”  Following Foucault, who argued that the insistence on a theory of sovereignty is "the greatest theoretical trap we are in danger of falling into when we try to analyze power," this paper questions the necessity of a concept of “sovereignty,” as understood by Hardt and Negri, in the present biopolitical order.

Kevin Grove, Geography, Ohio State

Biopolitical Territoriality: Empire and the Spatiality of Immaterial Labor

Since their publication of Empire in 2001, Hardt and Negri have come under consistent criticism from political geographers for their seemingly aspatial conception of postmodern imperialism.  Such critiques read Empire through relational concepts of space that stress territory and territoriality as essential geopolitical practices.  In this light, the seemingly ‘smooth’ space of Empire is contradicted by these ongoing practices that reproduce contemporary imperialism.  While these critiques draw attention to territorial mechanisms through which imperial power operates within today’s neoliberal context, their dismissal of the (non)geography of Empire may be premature.  Rather than rejecting spatiality, I suggest Hardt and Negri advance a biopolitical conception of space through their category of immaterial labor.  Developed through Negri’s work in Italian social struggles of the 1970s, this represents a radical reworking of Marxist understandings of labor that have structured contemporary geographic knowledge.  I argue that reading the development of immaterial labor in Negri’s earlier works draws out a historically nuanced definition of territorial practices - specifically a biopolitical understanding of territory that is the basis for the geography of Empire.  Using a brief case study of global warming, I suggest that such an understanding can productively inform critical geographic contributions to contemporary geopolitical issues.

Anna Secor, Geography, University of Kentucky

Territory and the New Geopolitics

George W. Bush began his second term as President of the United States with an inaugural speech that mapped global space in terms of those regions where an unholy concoction of “resentment and tyranny” is brewing, and those lands of “liberty” whose defended borders are unable to repel the “destructive powers” of the other.  Yet this Manichean mapping (see also T.M. Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map)  is inscribed upon a more complex topography of enmity and alliance.  A diffuse “micro-geopolitics” (see Gregory, The Colonial Present) is evident when Bush addresses himself to the denizens of the lands of tyranny, promising, “When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”  This paper asks how the geopolitical world view of the Bush administration and its foreign policy work to territorialize American imperialism. Through a discussion of Schmitt and Agamben, I argue that the relationship between power and territory is always already ruptured as the condition of its own inscription. Finally, there is no “American Empire” that does not at once both territorialize spheres of order and chaos and disseminate the possibility that we will be unable to tell them apart.

Jason Davis, Geography, Ohio State

Empire in Antarctica

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s books draw primarily on current events in both the United States and Europe as examples of the changing political order, but their ideas of Multitude and Empire should have corollary examples in other parts of the world if they are to be taken seriously. In this analysis, I will address both correlations and contradictions within Empire and Multitude to the political situation in Antarctica. Antarctica has been a valuable example in posing critical challenges to previous universalized geopolitical conceptions, and can be a useful tool in refining these latest global political generalizations. While Hardt and Negri do not ever cite Antarctica as an example of anything, they do indicate that their ideas are broadly applicable to the entire world and therefore such a study is justified. Concepts within Empire that apply to Antarctica with particular strength are the ideas of the decentralization of power, biopower as opposed to border power, the valorization of immaterial labor, and resistance to Empire being concerned with issues of representation. Problems with applying Empire to Antarctica include the use of violence, the periodization of the authors, and the existence of a single world order.

Lauren Martin and Stephanie Simon, Geography, University of Kentucky

Code Green or the New Normal? Governmentalizing the State of Exception in the Department of Homeland Security

The U.S.’s post-9/11 mandate to ‘secure the homeland’ has brought about significant reorganizations in domestic security and defense institutions and has pushed the apparent exceptionalism of the so-called ‘post 9/11 world’ to the foreground of geographic research.  The appearance of such excesses of executive power as secret prison camps and illegal domestic wiretapping has caused much speculation about the ‘return’ of sovereignty.  In this context, many theorizations of state power have gravitated toward Giorgio Agamben’s revision of Foucault, which foregrounds the sovereign decision, the “state of exception,” and the separation of biological and political life.  This emphasis on sovereignty has eclipsed Foucault’s insights into the governmentalization of sovereignty. Using research on the Department of Homeland Security, we argue that discourses of ‘preparedness’ and ‘vulnerability,’ neoliberal imaginings of the individual terrorist, and the economization of funding allocation work together to institutionalize the exception, producing a ideal, but paradoxical “new normal” and explicitly uneven geographies of security in the U.S. The emergency is made everyday, woven into a “hidden matrix of politics” through the U.S. ‘war on terror’ (Agamben 1998).  Mobilized through security practices and logics, this mundane governmentalization is the topological structure that allows concrete spaces of exception to appear.

If “cartography” is contemporary accepted cartographic theory and practice, then “paracartography” (a term recently coined by John Krygier) is any cartographic theory or practice beyond those confines. Paracartographic experiments are diverse and common, may borrow from or hybridize with conventional cartography, or even influence it, but are not obligated to conform to its strictures.  Artists working with maps, activists engaged in indigenous mapping and counter-mapping, diagrammatic social mapping, and maps guiding or emerging from psychogeographic activities are but a few examples of paracartography. The outcomes of paracartographic practice and experiments may expand the possibilities of mapping, may be amusing, may undermine mainstream cartographic theory and practice (particularly as embedded in geographic information systems [GIS] software), may be a waste of time, may help to understand the conventions and limitations of maps, or may leak out into the world, inspiring new engagements with space and place. Participants in this session will show and discuss examples of their paracartographic work with session attendees.

John Krygier, Geography, Ohio Wesleyan

Unmaking Maps

Denis Wood, Independent Scholar

This Is Not the World

Robert Ladislas Derr, Art, Ohio State

Documenting Psychogeographical Walk Performances

Marie Cieri, Geography, Ohio State

Maps Created in Collaboration with Activists and Artists in New Orleans and Mississippi in Response to the Hurricane Katrina Disaster

Ann M. Oberhauser and Kim Cordingly, Geography, West Virginia University

Work, Identity and Neoliberalism

The intersections of work, identity, and neoliberalism are explored in this panel discussion to better understand the socially constructed and locally constituted spaces of neoliberalism.  The conversation will address various aspects of resistance to the seemingly relentless expansion of neoliberalism in contemporary society with a focus on the construction and negotiation of social identities in the context of work.  The pluralities of work will be examined in regards to both formal and informal activities as they relate to cutbacks in public spending, privatization, and market-led reforms that affect the spaces of work.  Examples will be drawn from those who exist on the margins and in alternative spaces of work such as self-employment or microenterprise initiatives. The discussants will draw their analyses from both the Global South and Global North to illustrate the geographical extension and highly uneven imposition of neoliberalism.  With economic restructuring and related neoliberal policies in place for nearly three decades, critical geographers continue to make important contributions to debates concerning the socio-spatial dimensions of and contradictions surrounding this process.  

Virginia Parks, Social Work/ Social Welfare, University of Chicago (co-author Dorian Warren, Political Science, Columbia University)

Contesting Neoliberalism in the City: Anti-Wal-Mart Campaigns in L.A. and Chicago

While recent scholarship has begun to explore the dynamics of urban-based political responses to neoliberalism, few studies engage in comparative empirical analysis that illustrate locally contingent modes of contestation while taking care to avoid a "fetishization of the local."  In order to both understand and devise strategic responses to neoliberalism, we argue for analyses that take seriously both the constraining and enabling effects of local political institutions and geographies while also explicating general modes of contestation. Through a comparative case study of anti-Wal-Mart campaigns in Los Angeles and Chicago, we examine how diverse political institutional contexts shape the strategies of movement actors, and theorize the conditions under which local strategies against global actors and processes are successful. Specifically, drawing on Katznelson's and Sites' emphases on the "horizontal barriers" that impede labor and community coalitions, we argue that contemporary urban labor-community movements must negotiate, though not necessarily overcome, intra-horizontal barriers (e.g., within labor itself) in order to engage in effective strategic action.

Anu Sabhlok, Geography and Women’s Studies, Penn State University

Gandhian Economics in Liberalizing India

In this paper I explore the geography of economic liberalization in India by placing it historically and theoretically in Gandhian terms. Is economic liberalization for India a move towards globalization, or is it one that enhances ‘Indian’ nationalism?  What are the overlaps between Gandhi’s call for local economies and today’s push towards global economies? This paper questions the theorization of scale as discrete entities while also providing a Gandhian (as opposed to Marxist) critique of capitalism. Although largely theoretical, the insights for this paper draw from over a year of ethnographic research in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, India. Ahmedabad once known as the Manchester of India, was home to Gandhi during the anti-colonial struggle and is today a site of visible economic liberalization and violent Hindu nationalism.

Margareta Lelea, Gender and Global Issues, University of California at Davis

Feminist Organizing Across Border Lines: the First Ladyfest in Timisoara, Romania

The do-it-yourself feminist festival, Ladyfest, was first organized in  Olympia, Washington and there have since been over 60 festivals organized  mostly in Western Europe and North America.  However, the concept of the  festival has hopped the Global North/ Global South divide and young  feminists in Brazil, South Africa and Romania have created their own.  The  first festival in Romania was organized in 2005 and has inspired a  community of women both inside and outside of Romania to continue collaboration.  How does this challenge notions of local/global organizing  and the creation of emancipatory spaces? What is the significance of this  in a post-socialist context?

This panel will address the geography of inequality, specifically at the regional scale.  Participants will discuss geographers' contributions to social justice activism and policy through work in housing policy, education, and economic development initiatives for clients in Columbus, Cleveland, and across the nation. 

Tom Rudd, Kirwan Institute, Ohio State

Introduction and Opening Remarks

Jason Reece, Kirwan Institute, Ohio State

Addressing ‘Spatial Racism’ through Communities of Opportunity

Christy Rogers, Kirwan Institute, Geography, Ohio State

Housing Mobility and Regional Policy in Thompson v. HUD

Rebecca Reno, Kirwan Institute, Ohio State

Economic Segregation: Challenging Ohio’s Public Schools

Denis Rhoden, Kirwan Institute, Ohio State

Equitable Economic Development: Regional Dynamics

Risa C. Whitson, Geography, Ohio University

Who Does the Trash Belong to? Connecting Social and Environmental Activism through the Organization of Trash Pickers in Buenos Aires

While scavenging has long been an integral part of Argentina’s urban economy, since the economic crisis that began at the end of the 1990s, the face of trash picking has changed in many ways, as it has become both more visible to the public and increasingly important to the livelihood strategies of marginalized communities.  Within this context, a handful of cooperatives and other organizations have begun to develop with the intention of providing decent work for trash pickers and/or promoting community recycling through the official incorporation of scavenging into the urban waste disposal process.  In this paper I draw on interview-based fieldwork conducted in 2006 to briefly examine the activities of four cooperatives of trash pickers, as well as the activity of the municipal government of Buenos Aires related to recycling efforts.  I argue that while activism surrounding this occupation necessarily and essentially addresses a variety of social and environmental injustices, in spite of its integrative nature, tension continues to exist among the distinct constituents of this struggle.  These tensions, like the production and consumption of the trash itself, continue to mirror social inequalities in Argentine society.

Katrinka Somdahl-Sands, Geography, Macalester College

A Home in Motion?

This paper is intended to ask the question if it is possible to be at ‘home’ while in motion. I analyze the work of Bird Brain Dance, who performed a “navigational” dance project in the fall of 2002. Over the course of this dance project, choreographer Jennifer Monson and her company followed the migration pattern of tagged ospreys as they flew south from Maine to Venezuela. Each performance event began with a sensory workshop, followed by the performance itself, and concluded with a discussion amongst the performers and audience members. I detail this structure to show how Ms. Monson uses her work as a medium to renegotiate the relationships between art, the environment, and place. This section flows into an analysis of non-places, specifically spaces of migration and travel. I argue that like the migrating birds, humans are also inherently the repositories of their previous points of interaction, up to and including the present moment. In this way identity and home are never ‘displaced’ even while in motion. Within this section I pull from interviews and the performers on line journals to illustrate their embodied understanding of transition.

Andrew Baldwin, Geography, Queen’s University Kingston

Multiculturalism and Nature in Canadian National Identity

Multiculturalism and nature are often considered core elements of Canadian national identity. But rarely are these two foundational categories recognized as genealogically proximate. Instead both are made to occupy discrete cognitive spaces and are celebrated as two distinct facets of Canadian life, emerging at two very distinct moments in the Canadian national narrative. In this paper, I offer a counter-reading of nature and multiculturalism in Canadian political culture, one that disrupts their presupposed autonomy. Drawing from insights taken from postcolonial geography, I argue that the ontologies of nature and multiculturalism in Canadian national discourse are of a piece and have worked in tandem from at least the early twentieth century. Both, I contend, reflect historical geographies of whiteness that govern Canadian identity around the conventions of white normativity. I examine these ideas through two empirical sites: Lawren Harris’s landscape painting; and the practice of amateur ornithology.

 Jocelyn Thorpe, Environmental Studies, York University

“In the Virgin Wilds of Canada”: Gender, Race, Nature and Nation-Building in Temagami, Ontario

In 1901, a large area of forested land in Northern Ontario was designated by the provincial government as the Temagami Forest Reserve. It was one of a series of forest reserves set aside in early twentieth-century Ontario as part of a government initiative to manage public lands for the continuous supply of timber. Though ensuring timber supply was the explicit objective of the forest reserve system, railway and other promoters began to advertise the Temagami Forest Reserve as a “pristine” site of Canadian nature, a place for white city-dwellers to go to escape the degenerative effects of modern urban life. But for the Teme-Augama Anishnabai (TAA), the Aboriginal inhabitants of the area, Temagami was neither a timber reserve nor a vacation getaway; it was their homeland. Yet despite the TAA’s continued assertions of sovereignty and title to land, policy-makers ignored the claims of the TAA, and tourist literature discussed members of the TAA only in terms of how they facilitated or hindered tourists’ experiences of the area. In this paper, I analyze the role of the Temagami Forest Reserve in transforming the land, imaginatively and legislatively, from an Aboriginal space to a site of national nature. I argue that this is part of a larger process through which Canada has come to be imagined, “naturally,” as a white space, and its colonial legacy rendered invisible.

Theresa Wong, Geography, Ohio State

The Politics of Forest Classification in Thailand

Based on a case study in a Thai forest reserve, this article compares two modes of ‘reading’ the forest ­ official and local classification systems ­ and discusses how they imply different ideas about the forest, and how these competing knowledges interact with the politics of forest governance. Forest classification conventions are shown to slip, as ‘facts’ about the forest, from their origins in extraction-oriented forestry to the realm of conservation. Through a comparison of conventional vegetation classifications used in the state’s governance of the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in Thailand, with the classificatory systems of resident Pwo Karen communities, this paper examines the slippage of conventional classifications through various uses and the emphases placed by competing representations of the forest within the context of conservation politics in Thailand. It was found that conventional classifications continued to prioritize the silvicultural potential of trees within a conservation context, downplaying other notions of forests ­ such as their importance to livelihoods and a consideration of governance - which are present in Karen classifications. 

Jitesh Malik

Landscape Architecture and Studio Art, Penn State University/ University of Louisville

Art as Inquiry, Building Bridges Across Time and Space: Landscapes of Contentious Memory in Punjab, India

In August of 1947 India and Pakistan became independent nation-states. In celebrating the success of powerful anti-colonial movements we often forget the forced migrations of over 10 million people that accompanied the carving up of these new states. In this art installation I explore the intersections and interjections of partition memory with the landscapes of Punjab. I focus my inquiry on the relationship of memory, body and place as it relates to ‘landscapes of dispossession.’ The proposed exhibition is both an expression of some of the theoretical/metaphorical findings of my research in Indian Punjab (and online forums with both sides of Punjabis) and is also conceived as a forum where further ideas can be explored. I have been ideating some sketches/proposals for interventions at various sites along or across India-Pakistan border. The purpose of these interventions is to encourage dialog about the thorny past, in telling the difficult stories that have been selectively forgotten and in discussing long-term strategies for healing of the landscapes that continue to be affected by the events of 1947. In the installation that I am proposing, I intend to mimic the pre and post partition condition, communicate the traumatic reminiscent of that memory and gather responses for the proposals/sketches for the border places. I am aiming for an interactive format that invites responses from an engaged audience.

Format: An interactive mixed media installation involving maps, yarn, fabric, and (maybe) a performative aspect towards the beginning and end. 

Jason Box, Geography, Ohio State

Project Thin Ice: Global Warming in the Perspective of Greenpeace, Mainstream America, and a Climate Scientist

This talk recounts the experience of a 3 week cruise with Greenpeace around the southern half of Greenland documenting impacts of climate warming.  Emphasis is made on observations of the perception of Global Warming and its impacts from an outsider's perspective.  The present day mainstream perception of Global Warming is compared with my own and that of climate campaigners from Greenpeace.

Harold A. Perkins, Geography, Ohio University

Laboring through Neoliberalization? From Municipal to Nonprofit Green Space Stewardship

Remnants of a bygone era of collective investment in urban green infrastructure, the Milwaukee County Parks System is now in crisis. By eliminating over 60% of its annual funding since 1980, a series of fiscally conservative Milwaukee County Executives have used one of the largest public park systems in the country as a means to offset county-wide budget shortfalls. The impacts have been slow to develop but are cumulative; decreased programming, physical neglect, increasing crime rates, and increased user fees have all diminished patronage. Touted as a benefit to tax payers and park users, both the County and City of Milwaukee are relinquishing responsibility for these spaces by leasing some of them to nonprofit/private entities, in effect, ‘balkanizing’ the parks system. The results of this shift in stewardship appear in the form of reinvigorated urban green spaces, but further investigation reveals potential problems in increasingly private control over formerly public spaces. This paper investigates the possibility of a connection between these actions and neoliberalization, while exploring the potential ramifications of the privatization of urban public parks in general.

Julie Guthman, Community Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz

Re-placing Obesity: Thoughts on Interrogating a Contemporary American Discourse

In the last few years, the so-called epidemic of obesity has obtained enormous discursive valence, named as both cause and effect of American profligacy, hubris, and, even, senescence. Moreover, it has become justification for all manner of projects that are