CULT GEO 3 Keywords/Concepts

Culture

• term redefined by Massey’s “The Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures”

• the totality of behavior patterns, ways of living and thinking, everyday practices, arts, beliefs, morals, institutions, and all other products of work and thought that shape and come out of human relationships

• Cultural forms are understood as:

  • products of histories of contact/interaction (“hybrid”)

  • contingent (constantly changing)

  • involving connections among multiple scales

  • shaped by relations of power

    • colonization and contemporary space

Landscape

• the arrangement or pattern of things on land; the look or style of the land; the shape and structure of a place

• allows individuals to create both opportunities and limitations for the people that live there (depending on where one resides in the power dynamics)

• example: Swentzell and the students attending the Santa Clara Pueblo and Day School

Rules of Place

• what people ultimately get out of a landscape; unique to different landscapes

• determined by those in power (leads to the politics of a location in which certain communities are at disproportionate advantages compared to others on account of a number of different factors)

• example: Massey - World City; consequences of this concept include Swentzell - Santa Clara Pueblo and Day School, Shabazz - Making of Robert Taylor homes in South Chicago, Rios - criminalization of Black and Brown youth, etc.

Inverted Quarantine

• an individualistic strategy for protecting oneself from perceived dangers by isolating oneself

• physically creating a barrier/enclosure and withdrawing behind it

• geographically refers to the concept of the US federal government supporting white ideals via the construction of suburbias as the new “American dream” to escape to

• example: Szasz - Shopping Our Way to Safety

Ethnography

• description of culture, the ways people live and make sense of their worlds

  • understanding how both structure and agency shapes the human experience (not just how humans think, but what conditions molded them to think that way)

• research method that involves participant observation and inductive analysis

• example: Victor Rios - “Punished” (the criminalization of Black and Brown youth)

Intersectionality

• overlapping forms of oppression

• example - Bailey - “Engendering space” (Black ballroom culture), Victor Rios - “Punished”, literally any of these articles could work (everything ultimately ties back to socioeconomic disparity and race)

Youth Control Complex

• combined effect of the web of institutions, schools, families businesses, residents, media, community centers, and the criminal justice system, that collectively punish, stigmatize, monitor, and criminalize young people in an attempt to control them

  • penetration of even the most intimate spaces (everyday life, especially in the form of expectation)

• example - Victor Rios “Punished” (specifically using Jose and his involvement in gang activities as an example)

Architecture

• physical construction of a landscape that shapes human behavior and life outcomes

• has the capability to change the environment to align with the rules of a place (e.g. rigidness, fluidity, what is kept out/in, etc.)

• example: Shabazz - Robert Taylor homes in South Chicago, Szasz - Growth of suburbias and gated communities, Swentzell - Santa Clara Pueblo and Day School

Space

• a social process that takes shape through relations of power (essentially giving a location meaning)

• shaped through social relations and perception (oneself and the community); really no confinement, it’s around everything that exists and is continuous

• example: literally every article (i think the best example is Law’s “Home cooking”)

place

• a specific location or destination concerning other things/people

• somewhat confinement in its description; described as fixed and in relation to one another

• example: literally every article (best examples come from massey’s world city)

Racial Segregation

• a consequence of when rules of place are defined by power dynamics

• comes from a “patchy” social geography, in which rules of place disproportionately provide more structure/less agenda to Black and Brown communities

• examples: Szasz - Shopping Our Way to Safety (establishment of “the urban world inhabited by more affluent folks, mostly white”)

Black Queer Space

• spacemaking practices that Black LGBT people undertake to affirm and support their nonnormative sexual identities, embodiments, and community values and practices

• SPACE → a place that they define for themselves that MOVES (place relies on the location, space doesn’t)

  • the culture itself creates that space and isn’t confined to a certain location

• demonstration of resilience and establishment of their own agenda against the intersectional structures built against them

• example - Bailey - “engendering space” (the establishment of a new world where they DO have autonomy and the ability to establish structures built FOR them)

Suburbanization

• the “sorting” of citizens not only by income but race and ethnicity

• process that produced an unequal organization of space made to favor white ideals

• example - Szasz - the establishment of surburbias, redefining the American dream, and providing certain communities disproportionate advantages in order to achieve that dream

proactive policing

• stems from the “broken windows” theory → visible minor forms of disorder generate more serious crime in neighborhoods

• incentive/motivation for police to arrest more people and cherry-pick violations (with the excuse aimed at “preventing” crime before it occurs)

  • leads to targeting of Black and Brown neighborhoods → higher crime rates → cycle continues (not only does the system perceive them as criminals, but they view themselves as criminals as well)

• example: Armenta - “protect-serve-and-deport” (the criminalization of immigrants via the immigration enforcement system)

neoliberalism

• economic and political restructuring the privileges free market capitalism

  • calls for less government regulation, privatization, reduction in government funded social welfare programs, education, etc.

  • considers it to be the best approach and that other countries should follow this westernized idea

• stems from Massey’s World City

  • geography of responsibility becomes the consequence

Geography of Responsibility

• tied into neoliberalism; more like a consequence of using neoliberalism and enforcing the concept onto other countries

• unequal connections to other places → responsibility that extends beyond World Cities (essentially that the influenced countries who implemented neoliberalism shouldn’t be the ones at fault for their own countries’ impoverishment)

• The “Global” is actually locally produced and should be treated as such

• example: Massey’s World City

Meritocracy

• the belief that people in a society pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; if you try hard enough, you can succeed on your own merit

  • ignores a LONG history in which certain kinds of communities have been privileged over others (equality is not the same as equity)

• example: Szasz - Shopping Our Way to Safety; surburbs became the symbol for the American Dream, but black and brown folks were quite literally restricted from putting down mortgage/investment payments despite inputting the same work into buying a home

politics of location/positioning

• how we/our bodies are situated/positioned/located in relation to others on account of several different factors, including gender, sexuality, race, class, citizenship, able bodiedness, history, and the location itself

  • e.g. the creation of laws and investment of spaces that disproportionately target certain communities/areas

• examples: Szasz (growth in suburbias), Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo and Day School), McKittrick (Black spaces designed for prison cycle)), Shabazz (spatializing Blackness; Robert Taylor homes)