Cultural References

• Cambridge is essentially a market town with grand historic buildings set in narrow streets, the historic core is its defining character

• Trade and commerce dominate the centre with the market square at the heart with colourful stalls selling a variety of goods

• Town buildings reflect the original market town economy

Cambridge City Council, 2003

• The media age in Cambridge is around 31 years, lower than England average 

• 2.7% of people were born in India and 2.4% in China

• 14.8% identify as Asian with one of the largest increases overtime seen in this ethnic group

ONS, 2023

• Culture began as a noun of process before beginning to develop into a new social and intellectual movement

• It now describes intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of ways of life as well as artistic or intellectual works as cultural artefacts

• Hostility has been connected to claims of superior knowledge and creating distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture

Williams, 1985

• Geographers do not simply take photos but they make them by taking an active role in creating framings for analysis 

• The photo form is ambiguous as it preserves singular moments, in sites of constant activity and change such as cities this is problematic

Arnold, 2021

• Cambridge is a world-renowned centre of science and innovation that blends historical wonder, natural beauty and academic prestige

• It is one of the UK’s top innovation centres but faces problems with housing affordability, water supplies, congestion and lack of laboratory space

• The university makes a total net economic impact of nearly £30 billion to support wider Cambridge ecosystems and economic health

• Population growth in Cambridge has been historically higher than other UK cities which causes challenges for house prices and congestion levels

GOV.UK, 2024

• Landscapes are organic and constantly developing, every landscape is unorganised and singular

• Geography is based on the union between physical and cultural elements of landscape by blending physical ecology and cultural expression

• ‘Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result’

• The natural landscape is important for supplying materials for the formation of the cultural landscape but the shaping force is culture

Sauer, 1925

• Reconceptualising culture is important for turning attention to processes and relationships with other spheres of life, the reification of culture is a fallacy and we should instead focus on the development of the idea of culture

• Super-organicism is denied to see culture as socially constructed and actively constrained by social actors

• It is a powerful idea and within it there are systems of race and gender struggles created by language, discourse, class and ideology

• By understanding culture as an idea we can better understand how it functions as well as understanding systems of power that impose meaning on the everyday

Mitchell, 1995

• Culture is a lens of knowing in a meaningful way of life through spatialities of care, ethics and justice

• The idea of the encounter is key to cultural landscapes of care as well as the built environment shaping such social encounters

• Changing cultural landscapes impact spatialities of care, who we care for and what we care about; togetherness and solidarity are conditioned through cultural expectations

• Landscapes serve as a framework to make sense of how power is culturally manifested through everyday encounters

Lin et al., 2022

• Places are where cultures, communities and people root and define themselves; they are produced from an ongoing composition of traces over the local and global that combine to allow past traces to define a current place

• The cultural world is produced through the acts in which individuals engage with everyday which demonstrate power, power has the ability to make places and cultural systems

• Power can be used by dominating groups to create cultural control, these can also be disobeyed in transgressions to transform embedded cultural orthodoxies

Anderson, 2021

• Postcolonial theory is a tool for critical undoing of knowledge and reveals colonial origins of space, it recognises the continued and troubling presence of colonialism after the colonial period

• It has roots in Said’s ‘Orientalism’ as it considers how we think about distant places in a geographical and postcolonial enquiry

• This Is seen in the example of India’s colonisation and how this was aided by mapping as well as the legacy that continues in the containing idea of exoticism

Jazeel, 2012

• The superorganic status reified culture by giving it a causative power and ontological status, this has been passed through cultural geographers but now has much criticism 

• The superorganic lacks empirical evidence, there is no such thing as an individual apart from culture and it is a German romantic idea that does not exist; culture as legitimate should be rejected

• The world described by the superorganic theory is one in which the individual is absent and there is a lack of inquiry into social interactions

• In the 1940s there was a new conception of man as conscious, self-interested and has a role in the content 

• Culture is not a determinant but rather a context for choice operating on a variety of scales and in different ways, it is a set of traditions that guide action rather than a powerful force

Duncan et al., 1980

• Links performativity and bodily practices in nonrepresentational theory

• This theory is about the practices of the mundane and everyday, it focuses on the ‘body subject’ to emphasize practices that cannot be spoken, that words cannot capture and texts cannot convey but instead experiences and movement that are only cognitive

• Non-representational theory moves away from a concern with representation and text as this values what is spoken or written over multi-sensual practices and experiences

• Dance is a particularly important expression, but this can be used to develop a wider set of ideas around bodily-practices, performativity and dance theory

Thrift, 1996

• Dance has become geography along with a new language of performativity to challenge the conceptual basis of cultural geography by paying attention to performance and practice 

• Theory on dance and performativity stems from feminist work on the performance of gender as Butler saw that gender did not exist outside of doing but was a reiteration of previous performances that had become naturalised as gender norms

• Thrift furthered this in non representational theory moving away from a concern with representation and text to multi sensual practices and experiences, he saw dance as an expression of free, uncontrolled movement 

• Dance is not apart from language but instead is a complex intersection of speech, writing, text and the body; it is always mediated and regulated in specific contexts which reveals more of the colonial, racist and classist histories under the display

• Dance can create identity on gender, sex and ethnic levels; dancing differently can be an act of resistance

Nash, 2000

• Power is not found in the exchanges between subjects, but it is in the very production of the binary frame of ‘male’ and ‘female’ that thinks about gender

• Being female is not a natural fact, but a cultural performance due to the repetition of constrained acts that produce the body in a gendered norm

• The female is no longer a stable notion as the political stakes of designating the origins of gender are revealed in a genealogical critique

• ‘Drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself’ shows how drag exposes the social construction of gender identities

Butler, 1990

• The actor-network theory has three main points of origin in sociology attempting to treat nature and science synaptically, in a rebellion to French epistemology and inspired by Michel Serres’ attitude to time and space

• It is an ‘infra-physical’ language mapping out the traces of networks through figures that set them going and keep them at work 

• The framework helps us see things that were previously concealed by categorised ways of thinking, this moves away from hierarchies of size and shows that categories always mediate between each other

• Actors in networks need not be human but simply make shifts in space and time, this moves away from a world of categories to a world of hybrids

• This also moves away from ‘tyrannical’ to ‘philosophical’ geography where the world is no longer understood in terms of proximity and Nature/Society divides, they seek to restore the multiplicity of the world

Bingham & Thrift, 2000

• Natureculture is a synthesis of nature and culture recognising their inseparability in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed

• This emerges from scholarly interrogations of dualisms deeply embedded in intellectual history (human/animal, nature/culture) as these dualisms tend to dissociate humans and nature but anthropology not mediates between these to identify connectivity and synthetic properties of entities previously opposed

• Natureculture is linked to the emergence of ethnoprimatology mixing cultural, economic and political elements of traditional primatology to conceptualise humans as an interactive zone for primates

• This is shown in Bali as populations and tourists live alongside long-tailed macaques in a mutual ecology where their lives intertwine

Malone & Ovenden, 2016

• Cultural geography in the UK has been concerned with the politics of representation and identity seeing the matter of nature somewhat marginalised; but now geographers find their way back to the connections between the Earth and life

• There is a return to the rich conjunction between the bio (life) and the geo (earth) shifting the register that the materiality of the world is articulated through the environment and land influencing human beings; the impact of technologies and non-human life marks a shift to a ‘more-than-human’ approach to the world

• There is a shift away from humanistic approaches to landscapes seeing that the landscape is co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and the alive Earth

• The characteristics of things are always in the making and humans are composed due to connection with non-humanity in a web of connection

Whatmore, 2006

• Attention to animals stretches back to Aristotle, livestock in agriculture, symbols and themes, hierarchies, pets, circus representations etc., it is now new

• Animals have reemerged in the last several decades as a more frequent focus of scholarship suggesting new relationships between scholars and their subjects and the roles of animals in the past and present 

• There are issues and contentions with the definition of humans and animals as the same but also different, how this association is used to break down boundaries but also reinforces them

• The study of animals has become respectable and population but remains marginal, this marginal location supplies it power and appeal and it can challenge settled assumptions and relationships

Ritvo, 2007

• The zoo is an institution inscribing various human strategies for domesticating, mythologising and aestheticising the animal universe; the Adelaide Zoo uses many discursive frames and practices through which animals are fashioned and delivered to the South Australian public

• Visual technologies move from menagerie-style caging, Fairgrounds and naturalistic enclosures that craft the human experience of nature

• This is not a ‘natural’ setting but one deliberately set aside for human recreation; the suburban backyard is a natural setting in which human routine interventions with nature see the suburbs become ecosystems for wildlife and humans to coexist

• The zoo is socially constructed, it is a social function inscribing human strategies for domesticating; they tell stories of boundary making activities

• Animals are the medium on which humans inscribe a cultural sense of distance from the realm of nature

Anderson, 1995

• Decolonial scholarship seeks to build on and go beyond postcolonialism, it is a long-term processes involving many strands of divesting colonial power

• Although the formal colonial rule has ended, many forms of knowledge through which the world is explained are rooted in Euro-American claims pronouncing universal truths

• Decolonial scholars continue to examine enduring Western influences, frameworks and political inspiration whilst encouraging a rethinking of the world from the perspectives of marginalised academic in the global South 

• Modernity co-emerged with coloniality meaning that colonial power is not situated elsewhere but continue to evolve within everything

• There should be a reorienting of work allowing analytics insight into power pointing to how racialised knowledge production have influenced the experiences of Black, Indigenous and marginalised people

• Diverse knowledges should be bought in and contrasted with one another to form a more diverse background; decolonising requires caution, guidance and humility

Radcliffe, 2017

• There is no clearly defined structure that neatly traces and binds decolonial geographies, they are diverse and interconnected; a constellation in formation of co-resistance existing within embodied theories of liberation

• Constellations are formed as the embodied knowledge of Indigenous peoples comes into dialogue with Black and dispossessed peoples to understand how colonial dispossession and the plantation economy can join in multiple stars

• The decolonial is an affirmative refusal of white supremacy, anti-blackness, the colonial state and racialized political economy of displacement and violence that requires the dismantling of systems of oppression

• It recognises the interconnectedness of gendered, homophobic an ageist strands but sees diverse bodies as posing a threat to the settler colonial order in their bodily sovereignty

• Differently situated people renew and create cultures that have always been present, these stars form constellations to guide us towards decolonial futures

Daigle & Ramirez, 2019

• Race is both an experienced way of life and an analytical concept that conditions us into interpreting the world around us; it was developed as a theoretical system to expand European power and form a sense of European cultural superiority 

• Race can be seen as socially constructed rather than biologically determined, social constructs also determine sexist and homophobic attributions of strength, knowledge or civilisation to form a socially constructed world filled with socially constructed bodies

• Racialisation has historically produced power, territory and inequality to justify the actions of the white North against the Black south and east as well as the production of racial inequality in modern multicultural societies

• Through the system of race inequalities, poverty, degradation, denial of human rights and erasure of culture has been formed as a result

Kobayashi, 2016

• The #RMF movement erupted at the University of Cape Town in March 2015 and led to the formation of #RMF at the University of Oxford and similar movements across universities in the US

• The radical student movement centred around decolonising at the University of Cape Town by confronting questions of institutional racism, increasing access to education and reforming the Eurocentric curriculum

• In Oxford, the #RMF movement was established two months after the original protest, the students called for the removal of the Rhodes’ statue at Oriel College Oxford in an attempt to delink from Eurocentric theory and opt to frame their movement through a decolonial lens

• The #RMF campaign has provoked more public discussion and debate on the rights and wrongs of the British Empire than any number of books and articles

Ahmed, 2020

• The ‘decolonial kaleidoscope’ disrupts a western-centred world view and instead creates ‘a multi-coloured, compound and ever-changing kaleidoscopic understanding of the world’

• It recognises that there are multiple types of cultural geographies that should disrupt the western-centred world by bringing in diverse and varied cultural geographies, more than human elements and understanding that humans are not the only agents of cultural production

Radcliffe, 2022

• The Philippine rice terraces, established thousands of years ago, have enabled the conservation of more than 500 varieties of rice and have done so with very little soil erosion and optimal use of water resources

• The local people and their rice culture and traditions are the living ‘genebanks’ for the rice varieties and farming technologies in high altitudes 

• Some of the rice terraces have been inscribed as World Heritage Sites in recognition of their outstanding beauty and organically evolving cultural landscape

Nozawa et al., 2008