cultural geographies

In this brief editorial, we chart the past and future of the journal cultural geographies as we launch our 25th volume. On a daring course, we seek to publish the most creative cultural work, and here suggest what that may include.

The rising interest in the digital within geography has created an opportunity to reassert the role and responsibility of academic inquiry – to study and to do, to understand and to intervene, to put thought into action, to be technopositional. Indeed, a groundswell of interest in what is termed ‘digital geographies’ across Anglophone human geography has been marked by the recent organization of working and specialty groups of the Royal Geographical Society and the American Association of Geographers. Whether political ecologies, economic and urban geographies, critical mapping, or cultural geographies, the subfields of our discipline are increasingly digital – both in how inquiry proceeds and in the object of inquiry itself. Therefore, it is timely to take stock of the role of the digital in the wider discipline, to better articulate a distinctly technopositional stance. In this cultural geographies Annual Lecture, I reflect on the launch of the journal in 1994 (under the name Ecumene) and its relaunch in 2002. I contemplate the simultaneous technophilic currents within the discipline and the ‘GIS wars’ which were being waged at that time. In doing so, I outline current opportunities (and urgencies) for technocultural geographies which are responsible and responsive, situated by the shifting registers of the digital in geographical scholarship, public imaginaries and attention economies, and radical engagements.

In this Special Issue we explore and extend conceptions, characterisations, and applications of skill within and beyond geography. Framed by the question: “where is skill located?”, the papers assembled do not just explore where skilled practice ‘takes place’, its sites and situations, but also prompt a deeper ontological and epistemological rethinking of skill. And it is this rethinking of skill that is at stake in our editorial. In what follows, we map out this rethinking and introduce the five advantages of skill that the papers develop. Firstly, skill is practical in that it is concerned with the actual doing or use of something with accomplishment. Secondly, skill is processual in that the skilled practitioner works emergently and responsively rather than rubrically and successionally. Thirdly, skill is technical in that it involves not just techniques of the body but encompasses what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘originary technicity’ of the body. Fourthly, skill is ecological in that it is not of the individual body, but of the entire field of relations that make practice possible. And finally, skill is political in that there is a continuous flow between the micro – (that which is emergent) and macro – (that which exists more concretely and can be represented) politics of practice.

Beekeeping is a highly skilled form of animal husbandry that dates back to centuries. It has become a popular hobby in the United Kingdom, but as an activity has rarely featured in geographical research. In this article, I present beekeeping as an interesting site of study for cultural geographers interested in enskilment processes, education and expertise. This article draws on in-depth ethnographic research with a community of hobby beekeepers in Lancashire, United Kingdom, to give a detailed analysis of the enskilment process of novice beekeepers, how this process is being shaped and influenced by a trend towards increasingly formal education tools within the community, and what this means for those interested in the power of skilled practice and expertise. In doing so, it explores issues around formal and informal learning environments, the role of social context in shaping learning, the power of government advice, and it illustrates the complexity introduced by close engagement with an insect.

This article inspects a set of paradoxes that appeared in an investigation of contemporary industrial craft in the last remaining factory making machine lace in the United Kingdom. Its focus on a single site, set against a now global industry, means it can build on work in cultural and economic geography to understand this setting as a heterogeneous space, with links to a range of material and immaterial lineages, practices and networks. Ethnographic fieldwork on the factory floor at Cluny Lace threw up three paradoxes inherent in the firm’s continued survival in a context of industrial decline. The first of these paradoxes is the re-concentration of material and immaterial resources in the factory both despite and as a result of the global restructuring of the textile industry. The second is the embodiment of knowledge, and therefore craft skill, both within persons and distributed through the worker’s material environments. Third, is the recognition that the skilled practice the workers carry is not uniform but is multiple, resulting from an unequal distribution of opportunities within the lace industry and different versions of practice that result from the re-concentration of human capital in the factory. This article demonstrates that skill is not uncontested, but is power-ridden and value-laden, and transcends scale. It shows that knowledge and skill are not bound within an individual but are distributed among social actors, material objects and locales, where an attention to each is necessary for understanding the spaces of skilled practices and the ongoing survival of contemporary industrial craft production.

This article considers the ideal of living simply, critically exploring the practical realisation that achieving simplicity in life is a complex and skill-laden business. Particular, localised versions of living simply are subject to consideration, centring on the lived experience of dwelling as exhibited in huts and bothies, a historic feature of contemporary rural landscapes in Scotland. The article considers the kinds of skilled practices associated with these built forms, and the embodied expertise understood by users and owners as emerging from time spent in simplified structures where modern conveniences do not come as standard. As such, it seeks to place skill within the 21st century but also question where skill is located physically, morally and imaginatively. In doing so, this discussion queries why a situated version of skill needs to be cast as personalised and place-based and subsequently introduces the adapted concept of a ‘skillscape’ after Ingold (2000).

Conjuring up images of fine openwork shawls, Shetland lace knitting might seem to be the very essence of ‘tradition’. Although contemporary scholarship is increasingly noting the diversity of knitting practices and practitioners – from stitch ‘n bitch to yarn bombing – accounts of Shetland lace knitting often convey a sense of a skilled practice which has remained unchanged since time immemorial. In this article, I illustrate and unravel how the skill of Shetland lace knitting has become seemingly sedimented by telling its story through a series of innovative archival explorations and engagements. Using ‘making’ as method, I employ the skilled practice of knitting as a means by which to investigate the question of skill itself. By putting the anthropologic work of Tim Ingold into conversation with contemporary geographical theory, I advocate an ecological consideration of skill which is able to account for the economic, cultural, geographical and material threads of practice, while undermining any notion of skill being static or given within a situation.

This article examines the nature of skilled practice within two settings of musical performance, the rehearsal and the compositional workshop. Drawing primarily on the work of Richard Sennett and Tim Ingold, I suggest that a characterisation of musical performance as a craft practice attends to the development of skill and expertise through the performer’s physical and everyday encounters with the world and provokes a reconsideration of the dimensions of performance that might otherwise be taken for granted. The first case study addresses rhythmic coordination during a rehearsal of Four Duets for clarinet and piano (2012), composed by Edmund Finnis for Mark Simpson and Víkingur Ólafsson, and the second traces the development of instrumental techniques by composer Evan Johnson and performer Carl Rosman as they collaborate on a new work for historical basset clarinet, ‘indolentiae ars’, a medium to be kept (2015). The article makes the case for skilled practice as an improvisatory interplay between performers and the meshwork of people, objects, histories and processes which they inhabit.

Founded in 1875, Maison Lemarié is one of the last remaining plumassiers (feather-makers) anywhere in the world. In highly concentrated and minutely detailed work, the artisans at Lemarié painstakingly treat, dye and apply fragile feathers to haute couture garments. Mindful of preserving these rarefied skills, Chanel (a global fashion empire) purchased the workshop in 1997 as part of ‘Paraffection’. Paraffection, which roughly translates to ‘for the love of it’, is a Chanel subsidiary company established to preserve and promote the heritage, craft and manufacturing skills of highly specialized fashion ateliers. By enacting a visit to Maison Lemarié, this article demonstrates how its heritage and skills are embodied not only in the artisans working there but also in the feathered remains used and housed in the workshop. Unravelling the stories held in human and avian bodies, we suggest, enables a series of broader geographical reflections on skill, gender and Paraffection.

Digital interfaces, in the form of websites, mobile apps and other platforms, now mediate user experiences with a variety of economic, cultural and political services and products. To study these digital mediations, researchers have to date followed a range of methodological strategies including the modification of pre-existing qualitative research methods, such as content analysis, discourse analysis and semiotics, among many others, and an experimentation with new methods designed to make visible the operation of data aggregation, analytics and algorithms that are hidden from users. Building upon, while distinct from these strategies, the article sets out a post-phenomenological approach to studying interfaces, websites and apps that explicitly interrogates how they appear as objects. In doing so, the article provides a response to a problem that animates contemporary cultural geography: that new cultural objects are emerging which place in question the habits and practices of analysis that composed the ‘new’ cultural geography. To do this, the paper develops the concepts of unit, vibration and tone to unpack interfaces as sets of entities that work together to shape the experiences and responses of users. As such, the article provides a methodological vocabulary for the analysis of how interfaces operate to modulate user response and action on a series of habitual and un-reflected upon levels and thereby to create outcomes that suit their owners and operators.

This article examines monumental mosques and particularly those that are built to be and function more as monuments than as places for worship. We consider the role of monumentality in religious landscapes by way of six exemplary mosques in three different world regions – Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Tracing their unique histories and the identity narratives inscribed in their built form, we stress three broader commonalities among these mosques-as-monuments: (1) each is the result of top-down, state-funded planning infused with strong nationalist or ideological symbolism, (2) each was designed to be an iconic architectural showpiece in the country’s capital city, and (3) each represents a stark contrast to other places of worship within that national or regional context. In this unique comparative study, we use an interpretive approach designed to push the research on monuments and monumentality into new directions and new empirical contexts, and specifically to ask why and with what effect some religious sites are primarily monuments and only secondarily places of worship.

At a major research institution in the American South, cleanliness norms are intensifying for students, housekeepers, and institutional administrators. Whether individual practice, waged labor, or institutional policy concern, daily hygiene routines often refer to invisible or otherwise absent threats to health. Broadly construed as ‘germs’, these include flu, norovirus, and Escherichia coli, as well as dirt, dust mites, allergens, and mold. Their mobilization influences students’ and housekeepers’ interpersonal relations in a range of common university spaces, revealing connections among disease, embodiment, risk, and care. At the same time, concern with germs aligns with institutional efforts to control a historically powerful cadre of workers. Connections between students’ experiences of health and disease risk and housekeeper and institutional orientation to those risks are obscure, although fundamentally constitutive of each other. Analysis of their different, but intersecting ideas about microbial hygienic risk draws together critical geographies of social reproductive labor, cultural geographies of more-than-human agency, and a recent call to elaborate a political ecology of health. Ethnographic and archival data reveal how germs retrench institutional disparities, placing the (re)production of student cleanliness practices and the working lives of housekeepers in tension. For students, germs help shore up valorized subject positions, informing regimes of self-care. For department administrators, a new employee management regime made the potential of microbial threats to student health a scientific instrument of labor control. For housekeepers, germs are particularly evocative of the demand to care for student health by managing exposure to microbial disease risk. Exploring different mobilizations of germs reveals the importance of more-than-human life to systems of and divisions between social reproductive labor regimes on campus.

Seseña is the main residential project in Spain that was interrupted due to the 2008 financial crisis, though some parts of it were actually accomplished and people are now starting to move there. By using the symbolic figure of an ‘archaeological park’, the author recounts a trip he made in May 2016 to reflect on whether such a place ceases to be a ruin only for the fact of being inhabited. The material and sociological aspects of this type of urban development are tackled from an ironic and critical perspective to finally conclude that Seseña is a set of ruins ‘come what may’.

This article describes an Arts Council England project, undertaken by the author and a photographer, to examine spatial and temporal relations between an art project, its subject and its audience. The project explored and documented the architecture of a modernist 1970s housing estate, Netherfield, designed by a group of four architects for the new city of Milton Keynes. The estate has not aged well and the visual remnants of what had been an ambitious and idiosyncratic housing scheme were to be photographed and juxtaposed with the original architectural drawings. The photographic process contributed to a more complex series of perspectives which included the archival history of the estate and its surrounding new city, the people who live there and my own reflections on a council estate childhood. In turn, these perspectives are set out in this article in terms of the spatial and temporal realms in which they are, and continue to be, produced. Loosely conceived in terms of Lefebvre’s production of space triad, these realms are traced through the estate’s historical narrative from plans to buildings which then converge in the eventual art work. The gallery is seen as an assemblage of multiple connections drawn between various productions of archival, architectural and artistic spaces.

In this short editorial, we outline some of the reasons why we think books and book reviews remain important for the field of cultural geography.

Creighton Connolly (2017) Landscape political ecologies of urban ‘swiftlet farming’ in George Town, Malaysia. cultural geographies 24(3): 421–439. DOI: 10.1177/1474474016684128.

The journal would like to make the following correction:

Endnotes 45-69 should be revised as follows:

45. Geografia, George Town Land Use and Population Survey.