geographical imaginations

What is a boundary?

A geographical marker and maker of authority that separates territories categories and people.

Are boundaries only physical?

No boundaries are not necessarily physical they are also social symbolic discursive and experiential.

How do boundaries operate beyond territory?

They shape belonging acceptable behaviour identity and categories of the mind.

How are boundaries linked to power?

Boundaries express territorial authority and are used to control inclusion exclusion and access.

How do boundaries emerge?

Through conflict separation partition discourse and everyday practices.

Do boundaries disappear with globalisation?

No globalisation reconfigures boundaries making them more permeable but not absent.

What is meant by boundaries as processes?

Boundaries are unstable changing and continuously remade through practice and meaning.

How are boundaries constructed in discourse?

Through language symbols narratives maps and representations.

What role did empires play in boundary making?

Empires dictated territorial boundaries which later shaped postcolonial states.

What are boundaries between categories?

Conceptual divisions created through language classification and categorisation.

How does language create boundaries?

Naming and categorising bring things under control and make boundaries appear fixed.

What does Foucault say about categorisation?

Boundaries appear fixed through continuous classification and registration.

What is the Self and Other boundary?

A boundary that separates identity from difference shaping subjectivity and belonging.

What is the mirror stage?

A process where the self is formed through recognition and separation from others.

Are subjects stable or fixed?

No subjects are incomplete multiple and constantly changing.

What are subjects in transit?

Mobile shifting identities not fixed to place or category.

What are more-than-human boundaries?

Boundaries shaped by non-human actors objects and material forces.

What does Latour argue about action?

Action is produced by networks of human and non-human actants.

Are ethical boundaries stable?

No ethical boundaries are unstable contradictory and frequently crossed.

What is transgression in relation to boundaries?

Transgression is part of how boundaries are produced and maintained.

How are boundaries of the body defended?

Through ideas of cleanliness impurity and separation of us and them.

How are immigrants represented in boundary discourses?

As dirty threatening or out of place reinforcing symbolic boundaries.

What does in place out of place mean?

People crossing moral spatial or social norms provoke fear and exclusion.

What is a moral panic in boundary terms?

Anxiety caused by perceived boundary crossing of social norms.

What are boundaries of care?

Limits defining who we feel responsible for and how far care extends.

How far should we care?

Care is shaped by imaginative geographies not just physical distance.

Is care spatially limited?

No care is based on perceived closeness nearness and responsibility not geometry.

What is intimate care?

Care based on close personal relationships.

What is humanitarian care?

Abstract distant care for unknown others.

Does care have clear boundaries or scale?

No care responds to being called upon and has no fixed boundary or scale.

What are boundaries of language?

Limits created by representation naming and categorisation.

Why is representation problematic?

It creates false divisions between true and false us and them.

What is deconstruction?

An approach that shows meanings are unstable and boundaries are blurred.

How does deconstruction challenge boundaries?

By showing the excluded other is embedded within the primary identity.

What is meant by questioning boundaries?

Rejecting fixed categories and recognising hybridity and complexity.

What are wounded geographies?

Places marked by trauma violence insecurity and fear.

What is geographical scale?

A way of organising difference between kinds of places rather than just size.

Is scale natural?

No scale is socially produced and politically shaped.

How is scale linked to power?

Scale reflects and reproduces unequal power relations.

Are scales fixed and bounded?

No scales are fluid formed through practice and interaction.

What is scale as structure?

Scale as a platform where social and natural processes operate.

What is scale as agency?

Scale produced through political economic and social processes.

What is scale bending?

Challenging dominant scale arrangements by linking actions across scales.

What is the politics of scale?

Using scale to exert control define boundaries and link identities to places.

Can scale jump?

Yes actors can jump scales to gain power or influence.

How do poststructuralists view scale?

As socially constructed discursive fluid and contested.

What are flat ontologies?

Approaches that reject hierarchy and emphasise networks flows and relations.

How are scales produced?

Through relationships networks linkages and context.

Are scales fixed platforms?

No scales are relational flexible and moment-specific.

What does relational spatiality mean?

Spaces and scales are produced through connections and flows.

What is the scale of the body?

A scale highlighting embodiment social reproduction and lived experience.

What is the key conclusion about boundaries?

Boundaries are processes unstable experiential and open to challenge.

What is the key conclusion about scale?

Scale is fluid socially constructed and politically significant.

What is social inequality?

Differences in income, resources, power and status within and between societies, maintained by institutions and social processes.

What is spatial inequality?

Unequal distribution of attributes among spatially defined populations.

Why is inequality a moral issue?

Inequalities raise questions of right and wrong, not just difference.

How has global inequality changed since 1945?

Intercountry inequality increased while population-weighted global inequality declined.

Why is the Global North vs Global South divide oversimplified?

Inequality increasingly exists within countries, dividing elites, the bourgeoisie, the marginalised and the impoverished.

How is global inequality measured?

Using income measures (Gini Index), HDI, and GNI per capita (PPP).

How does globalisation affect inequality?

It creates jobs in the Global South, reduces some poverty but creates new forms, reduces manufacturing jobs in the Global North, and expands low-paid service work.

How does migration reproduce inequality?

Skilled migrants are welcomed while unskilled migrants are restricted, creating low-paid labour pockets and increasing inequality through remittances.

What are remittances?

Money sent home by migrants, often increasing inequality in communities without migration traditions.

What is neoliberalism?

An ideology prioritising liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation over social equality.

How does neoliberalism reproduce inequality?

By privileging business, ignoring social contracts, and enabling profit through cheap labour.

What is urban poverty?

A structure of opportunities where access to education, health, housing and work is constrained.

What characterises urban poverty in the Global South?

Rapid unplanned urbanisation, informal settlements, informal economies, female-headed households, and unequal power relations.

What are informal economies?

Economic activities relying on household and community networks outside formal regulation.

How does gender shape urban poverty?

Women face limited access to housing and services and experience time poverty.

What explains urban poverty in the Global North?

State intervention, structural economic change, and discursive isolation.

What is symbolic marginality?

The demonisation and stigmatisation of the urban poor.

Why is rural poverty often hidden?

Rural areas are idealised, masking deprivation and excluding the poor.

What is cultural stigmatisation in rural poverty?

Poverty is denied or normalised as part of rural life.

How is rural poverty diverse?

It includes cultural exclusion, powerlessness, and hidden everyday hardship beyond material poverty.

What is a moral panic?

A media-driven exaggeration portraying a group as a threat to societal values.

How are young people morally stigmatised?

They are portrayed as dangerous, disorderly, and disruptive to adult social order.

Why are hoodies significant?

They symbolise disaffected working-class youth and moral panic.

How does race shape inequality?

Through racialised policing, surveillance, and assumptions of danger.

What does Butler argue about race?

That Black bodies are perceived as dangerous prior to any action.

How is racism reproduced in migration discourse?

Through “good vs bad migrant” narratives and us vs them separation.

What is the overall conclusion about inequality?

Inequalities are complex, geographically varied, and reproduced through globalisation, migration, neoliberalism, and moral judgements around age, ethnicity, and race.

What is a body?

• Bodies are conceptually messy and promiscuous in geography

• No agreement on what the body is, how bodies are made, or where they begin and end but some common ideas…

• They are sites of the self- where identity is formed and negotiated, where social differences emerge and power plays out

• They mark the boundary between self and other

• We can ‘read’ bodies for their representations

Bodies as material

• Bodies are also material- they feel emotions and pain. They are physiological

• Complicating the mind/body dualism and assumptions about what counts as knowledge.

• Geographers look at how space and place are not backdrops to the body but how bodies and spaces emerge in relation to one another.

• Where a body is affects how it might be racialized, gendered, sexualized

• Multiple ways of being, identity, and difference emerges across place

Geographical histories of the body

• Structuralist accounts of geography (as developed in the 1950s as a quantitative form of geography) seen as not representing bodies with feelings, memories, knowledge, information or identity

• The rise of the ‘new cultural geography’ and a focus on representations of bodies, on reading bodies as texts for how they depicted identities

• Phenomenological accounts- a more human centred approach. Subjectivity in the lived body. Bodily awareness is key to our perception

• Without the body there is no space- but this may also be pre-conscious. Bodies build habits and routines and function involuntarily

Geographical histories of the body 2

• The idea of Seamon’s ‘place ballet’ where routine and repeated bodily movements choreographed to build place

• Bodily practices ‘dominate our everyday lives’ (Valentine 1999)

Non representational theory

re explore movement, practice and the senses. What bodies do, not simply how they look

Geographical histories of the body- Performance

• Performing arts became key to geographical thinking, a way of accessing thoughts before cognition, drawing attention to the unexpected, unanticipated, experiential qualities of space, place and being

• Everyday practice matters. Skills and practical/ tacit knowledge

• Performing bodies illuminate everyday spaces

• Street performers and buskers make cities lively but also reveal where you can be/when you can perform

• Bodies are in/out of place but also shape social and environmental interaction

Geographical histories of the body 3

• Not enough attention to corporeality of bodies, to materiality and flesh. Too much focus on text, language and discourse

• Has discussion of embodiment disrupted white, western, masculinist and heterosexual ways of knowing? (Longhurst and Johnson 2014)

• Messy, fleshiness is missing

Geographical histories of the body- EXAMPLE

clubbing (Malbon 1999) and raves (Saldanha 2005)

Corporeal messiness

• Questioning the corporeal boundaries of the body

• Sweat (like other bodily fluids) as ‘out of place’, ‘dirty’, or ‘sexy’, also a marker of some bodies as more privileged

• Waitt and Staines (2015) how sweat emerges across places in summer

• Misgav and Johnston (2014) sweat and sexual desire- movements and spaces where gendered bodies become stabilized, rather than fluid

Beauty- bodies

• When fatness and its presence in certain places becomes constructed as ‘disgusting’ or ‘pleasurable’ (Colls and Evans 2013)

• Hair as a lens for rethinking the borders of the body (Holton 2020)