People, place, and space: Theoretical and empirical reflections in studying urban open space

People, place, and space are the main domain of spatial research which is widely discussed in the geographic discipline. Geographers always focus on the meanings related to space and human interactions to explain people, place, and space. The concept was explained by Richard Harsthrone (1959), Fred E Lukermann (1964), David Harvey (1969), Henri Lefebvre (1974), Yi-fu Tuan (1974), Edward Relph (1976) and Doreen Massey (2005), etc. As a human geographer, Yi.fu Tuan has a great contribution to explain people-place relations and further explained by Relph, Massey, and other scholars. Grounding on the geographic research traditions, this paper presents the concept of people, place, and space reviewing the historiographical literatures and some empirical research studies on people-space relations. Theorists have argued that people and space are deep-rooted in studying place attachment creating people’s sense of place. People’s actions and behaviors create meaning through their individual and communal behaviors in that space where they live and interact. Moreover, theoretical perspectives argue that placemaking is always associated with the social and cultural dimensions of a society. Empirically, as an indigenous society, people from the core area of Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) have been perceiving urban open space as a commonplace for social and cultural life activities whereas migrants’ people living in the newly growing settlements have been perceiving the open space as a place for recreation and social capital enhancement.

Marx’s law of value: a critique of David Harvey

In 2018, Professor David Harvey, the human geographer and the eminent scholar of Marx’s works and their modern relevance, wrote a short paper entitled ‘Marx’s refusal of the labour theory of value’. In this paper, Harvey presents a series of theoretical confusions. The dual nature of value in a commodity is ignored by him. So Marx’s theory of crisis (based on insufficient surplus value) is replaced with insufficient use values for workers as consumers. The class struggle becomes not workers versus capitalists, but consumers versus capitalists or taxpayers versus governments. This is confusing to a class analysis and strategy for the working-class struggle.

Figures of Chance and Contingency in Albert Kahn's Planetary Project

The Archives de la Planète is a collection of visual material – about 100 hours of film, 72000 autochromes and 4000 stereoscopic images – established between 1908 androughly 1932. While the project was of Kahn’s inspiration (and also financed by him),the human geographer Jean Brunhes served as its scientific director. Its purpose was to document the diversity, but even more so, the underlying unity of human life and activity all over the globe. It seems thus fitting that Brunhes used a cartographic logicin mapping the “positive facts” of his science, relying on visual documentation. Thisarticle examines some of the temporal complexities and contingencies of representation inherent in the autochrome part of the collections. As archives within the archive, they upset the cartographic logic of the project.

When dialogue means refusal

In my response to Rose-Redwood et al.’s (2018) ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’ ( Dialogues in Human Geography 8(2): 109–123), I attend to the question of what it means to refuse dialogue. Dialogue as it is often deployed is supported by a host of colonial logics that position many marginalized humans, and nonhumans, as unable to communicate ‘rationally’ (that is to dialogue). Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, Glen Coulthard ((2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.), Audra Simpson ((2007) Ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67–80; (2014) Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.), and others, I suggest that refusal can mean more than merely stepping outside dialogue, allowing the problematic to pass unchallenged. Rather, refusal may be a way of resisting, reframing, and redirecting colonial and capitalist logics, constituting both an important political strategy and an assertion of diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Refusal, in these contexts, is neither a negation of the need for dialogue nor a withdrawal from the need to counter colonialism, but a refusal to be drawn into politics that enable colonialism, and so can be a strong assertion of sovereignty. I then position myself in relation to this work, thinking through what refusal as dialogue might mean as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable, task of supporting decolonization.

A social marketer, a geographer, and an engineer walk into a bar

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to contemporary debates about interdisciplinarity and social marketing by presenting the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working across disciplines in an Australian community energy efficiency intervention – Energy + Illawarra. The paper also aims to identify challenges, practicalities and learning that emerge from collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. It also aims to provide some suggestions and guidelines for researchers in the interdisciplinary space. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a case study approach and presents the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working together on the Energy + Illawarra project – a community energy efficiency social marketing intervention. Findings Challenges in interdisciplinary projects that are presented by differences in ontology, methodology, language and discourse are identified. The importance of being critically reflexive and openness to alternative perspectives are examined. Concerns over publishing interdisciplinary research are considered. The value of experimenting and developing partnerships through pilot projects is discussed. The potential of leveraging existing synergies and the opportunity to learn from clashes in ontology are also highlighted. Originality/value This paper contributes to the discussion about being interdisciplinary in social marketing by identifying subjectivities, practicalities and opportunities from collaborating on cross-disciplinary projects. Guidance for researchers on working on interdisciplinary projects offers value for social marketers working in this area.

‘We were there too’: There is much to learn from embedding auto/biography in the knowing and doing of prison research

Within the social sciences, there is a wealth of literature that examines the challenges and ethical dilemmas encountered by researchers in conceptualising, conducting and understanding their research. In this article, we share our reflections on experiences we encountered carrying out a qualitative evaluation of a prison gardening intervention with male substance misusing prisoners. Our aim is to suggest that there is much we can gain when researchers engage in a process of reflexivity, which includes consideration to the intersection of identity of the researcher, the researched and the forces of various kinds, operating upon and within such situations. As such, here we share our fieldwork experiences and shed light on how, for us, the evaluation was a subjective, power-laden, emotional, embodied experience. We highlight how a human geographer and a sociologist working as part of a multidisciplinary evaluation team encountered issues associated with choices in terms of how we conduct our work, the emotional labour expended and how we had to assume both chosen and imposed identities. We have been challenged to consider and reflect upon aspects of gender, class, age and professional status throughout our research experience, with the ‘researched’ and between the ‘researchers’. Finally, we suggest that embarking on qualitative research in a prison setting is an outcome of complex negotiations, but in theorising our subjectivities is a means of illuminating issues that often remain invisible within prison research.

History, Geography, and Historical Geography

In 1986, 585 out of 5,686 members of the Association of American Geographers declared their allegiance to the Historical Geography Specialty Group; among 50 AAG specialty groups, the historical geographers ranked 7th. Yet one prominent human geographer regards historical geography as “overdetermined,” an “empty concept” conveying “few (if any) significant analytical distinctions” (Dear 1988: 270). Dear’s argument is that, by definition, all geography should be historical, since “the central object in human geography is to understand the simultaneity of time and space in structuring social process.” So the only subdisciplines of human geography which have any intellectual coherence are those focused on distinct processes—political, economic, social. To me, even this distinction is unrealistic and impracticable for research purposes. But Dear does not go so far as to argue that historical geography or other “overdetermined,” “multidimensional,” or “peripheral” subdisciplines are wrong, merely that they are incidental to geography’s “intellectual identity.”

Some Methodological Perspectives on the Analysis of Team Games

The cross-disciplinary perspectives of the physical educator and human geographer are used to illustrate methodological approaches to the analysis of team games. Spatial transformations of player configurations raise questions of two-dimensional, or Euclidean, regression, from which residuals create inter-pretable vector fields. Asymmetries in team play raise questions of the “winds of influence” blowing through appropriate spaces as graphic summaries of team dynamics. The meteorological analogy is explored further as teams create pressure surfaces, or forcing functions, which control the “flow of the game.” Finally, an algebraic topological language of structure is suggested to describe the dynamics of player-polyhedra by defining a relation upon a set of players engaged in a game.