Spaces of exposure: Re-thinking ‘publicness’ through public transport

Developing thoughts on exposure in cultural geography, literary studies, and mobilities research, this article aims to provide a more comprehensive account towards the publicness of public space. What would happen if we assessed publicness not by degrees of openness and inclusion, but through the nexus of vulnerability and complicity that is fundamental to the notion of exposure? To grasp such an intrinsic dualism, our perspective goes towards public transport, where experiences of exposure are intensified by its specific conditions of encapsulation and movement. We illustrate this perspective drawing from the autobiographical chronicles of the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, in order to then propose a ‘learning from’ the case of public transport for a rethinking of publicness. Specifically, we argue that exposure provides new insights on agency, power and vulnerability as part of a more processual notion of public space.

A Poetic Historiography of the Early English Settlements

Zooming in to consider how the ambitions of Jones’s project are realized in the individual poetic sequences that make up The Anathemata, Chapter 3 engages in a close reading of the third sequence of The Anathemata, ‘Angle-Land’. ‘Angle-Land’ focuses on the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes to Britain and the extent of the subsequent cultural change in the fifth century and beyond. This chapter argues that in ‘Angle-Land’ Jones uses aspects of the physical and cultural geography of Britain, in particular evidence from toponymy, to write a poetic historiography of the early English settlements that challenges the idea that the migration of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes rapidly transformed the landscape and culture of Britain. By exploring the language of landscape, Jones writes a poetic historiography that is in tune with contemporary, emerging historiographical narratives.

From Ricœurian Hermeneutics to Environmental Hermeneutics. Space, Landscape, and Interpretation

The analysis of fundamental texts such as “Architecture and Narrativity” and Memory, History, Forgetting aims to fill a gap in studies of Environmental Hermeneutics. Indeed, the analogy between space and narrative, through parallelism with the process of triple mimesis, is usually deduced by environmental hermeneuticists from the works Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another. However, Ricœur himself took it upon himself to make this transposition in a direct and elaborated way from a phenomenological and hermeneutic analysis of the built space (through architecture) and the inhabited space, opening the way for a broader and more grounded epistemology of environmental hermeneutics. The introduction of the critical concept of landscape, as seen today by constructivist and cultural geography, legitimizes the claims of an environmental hermeneutics as an interpretive process of formally non-textual objects. Indeed, landscape in its connection to territory has its own semiotic and semantic character, which is appealed to for reading and interpretation.

Conceptualizing In-Text “Kshetra”: Postcolonial Allahabad’s Cultural Geography in Neelum Saran Gour’s Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink

Literary renditions of cities have always gravitated towards the spatial imagination and its ethical counterpart outside the textual space. This paper explores the multicultural geography of the North Indian city Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) observed through Neelum Saran Gour’s postcolonial narratives Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink, projecting the narrative alignment of spatial aesthetics and cultural ethics. Interrogating the spatial dimensions of a “narrative world” within narrative theory (Ryan) and its interdisciplinary crossover with cultural geography (Sauer; Mitchell; Anderson et al.), the article seeks to examine Gour’s literary city not simply as an objective homogeneous representation, but as a “kshetra” of spatio-cultural cosmos of lived traditions, memories, experiences and collective attitudes of its people, in the context of E. V. Ramakrishnan’s theoretical reflections. The article proposes new possibilities of adapting the Indian concept “kshetra” to spatial literary studies; its aim is also to suggest a new source of knowledge about the city of Allahabad through a community introspection of “doing culture” in the texts, bringing into view people’s shared experiences, beliefs, religious practices and traditions as offshoots of the postcolonial ethos. The article aims to re-contextualize the city’s longstanding multicultural ethics in the contemporary times of crisis, which may affect a shift in the city’s relevance: from regional concern to large-scale significance within ethnically diverse South Asian countries and beyond.

Ok lá þar at óvilja hennar: A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in the Old Norse World

Despite the popularized image of the raping and pillaging Viking warrior, the culture of sexual violence in Old Norse society has remained surprisingly understudied. This article uses skaldic verses, a literary genre produced in Iceland and Norway, mainly from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, to suggest a reconsideration of sexual violence in the Old Norse world. It suggests that skaldic verses can help scholars discern a spatial and cultural geography of sexual violence against free men, women, and slaves, which suggests it was widespread and multidimensional and had ties to a pan-north Atlantic slave trade in the Viking Age.

Teaching and Learning foundation of the elective course "Cultural Geography"

At present, one of the urgent problems is the systematization of information on elective courses and the identification of methodological features of its implementation. The article presents the program of the elective course " Cultural geography" for classes of the natural-mathematical direction. In addition, the methodological structure of the course " Cultural geography " has been worked out. The article provides an analytical review of the latest sources on the cultural geagraphy in Russian and English. Keywords: elective course, geography of culture, program, annual plan, methodological structure.

IMAGES OF EARTH: CONCEPTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION IN DENIS COSGROVE’S CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

«Географическое воображение» – это странное терминологическое сочетание. Оно может вызвать подозрение у академически респектабельной географии вследствие тех эпистемологических опасностей, которые оно, предположительно, несет. В статье анализируется понятие географического воображения в работах выдающегося британского культурного географа и историка картографии Дениса Косгроува (1948–2008). У Косгроува нет развернутой и систематической теории географического воображения, но оно является основной темой его многочисленных исследований. Вопрос о географическом воображении для Косгроува фундаментальный, так как воображение становится у него едва ли не «трансцендентальным условием» любого возможного географического акта как акта представимости Земли или отдельных ее частей в географических образах (картах, живописных полотнах, ландшафтах, фотографиях, городских планировках и парках, цифровых репрезентациях). В статье рассмотрено несколько основных характеристик географического воображения и обширного поля географической образности у Косгроува. Географические образы – это не некие сущности, спонтанно производимые «продуктивной способностью воображения» во внутреннем интерьере «картезианского театра» и остающиеся замкнутыми в границах его сцены. Географическое воображение – имя какого-то сложного механизма, работу которого нам трудно (если вообще возможно) понять и описать, в котором оказываются задействованы глаза, руки, мышление, технологии, и этот механизм порождает экстерналии (образы Земли). Географические образы формируют новые (эмпирически нереализуемые) горизонты наглядности, видимости и интеллигибельности. Например, карта, по словам Кристиана Жакоба, «представляет схему, визуальную и одновременно интеллектуальную, которая занимает место невозможного сенсорного видения». Географические образы – это одно из «привилегированных мест» (но и выражений) графических экспериментов, экспериментов воображения, в ходе которых отрабатывались и продолжают отрабатываться все новые условия видимости, представимости и мыслимости Земли. Географическое воображение – работа по визуальному представлению не только эмпирического порядка, но и концептуальных структур. Географический образ не может быть сведен к чистому и нейтральному представлению пространственных (географических) фактов. По отношению к уровню «фактов» он всегда демонстрирует смысловую и визуальную избыточность. Для Косгроува история географического воображения – это еще и история «инвестиций», которые сделали и продолжают делать в географическую образность людские желания, страхи, надежды, метафизические спекуляции, религиозные искания и моральная чувствительность. Рассмотренная в целом исследовательская работа Косгроува, центрированная на теме географического воображения, является одним большим актом онтологической, эпистемологической, культурной и даже этической реабилитации образов. “Geographical imagination” is a very strange terminological combination. It might arouse suspicion in academically respectable geography as a consequence of epistemological dangers it presumably posed. The article examines the concept of geographical imagination in the research works of the distinguished British cultural geographer and historian of cartography Denis Cosgrove (1948–2008). Cosgrove has no advanced and systematic theory of geographical imagination, but it is the main focus of his studies. For Cosgrove, the question about geographical imagination is fundamental since, in his cultural geography, imagination becomes virtually a “transcendental condition” of every geographical act as an act of representing Earth and its parts in various geographical images (maps, paintings, landscapes, photographs, urban plans and city parks, digital representations). The article considers some basic characteristics of geographical imagination and the rich field of geographical image in Cosgrove’s cultural geography. 1. Geographical images are not some entities, spontaneously generated by the “productive capacity of imagination” in the interior of the “Cartesian Theater” and remaining closed within the borders of its scene. Geographical imagination is a name of a complex mechanism, whose work we find so hard to understand and describe (if this is even possible). In this work, hands, eyes, minds, and technologies are involved. The mechanism of imagination generates externalia (images of Earth). 2. Geographical images create new (empirically unimplementable) horizons of visibility, conspicuity, and intelligibility. For example, according to Christian Jacob, “the map presents a schema, visual as well as intellectual, that takes the place of an impossible sensorial vision”. 3. Geographical images are one of the “privileged places”, and also expressions, of graphic experiments, experiments of imagination, during which new ways of seeing and thinking Earth have been tested and are being investigated further. Geographical imagination is work on visual representations of not only the empirical order, but also conceptual structures. 4. Geographical images cannot be reduced to pure and neutral representations of geographic facts. In relation to the “factual” level, it demonstrates visual and semantic redundancy. For Cosgrove, the history of geographical imagination is also the history of “investment” in geographical images that human fears, hopes, desires, metaphysical speculations, religious pursuits, and moral sensitivity make. Considered as a whole, Cosgrove’s research in the field of cultural geography is one big act of an ontological, epistemological, cultural, and even moral rehabilitation of images.

Walking the Past, Acting the Past? Peace March to Srebrenica Commemoration

This article is based on an ethnographic study carried out during the Nezuk-Potočari Peace March in the framework of Srebrenica genocide commemoration. A more than 100-kilometer procession, attracting each year around 5,000 participants, represents the reverse route of the so-called Death March, the local population’s way of escape from the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Following theoretical insights from both memory studies and cultural geography, this article’s aim is to analyze mnemonic practices commemorating the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moreover, it explores the social processes through which such memory is produced, performed, and maintained. While applying participant observant methodology, I have engaged in conversation with residents and main actors taking part in the Peace March. Finally, the notion of collective memory is approached from the perspective of spatial mobility engagement of people visiting commemorative events and monuments dedicated to the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.