GPHY 229 lecture content

Added to the end of week 11

Socio-spatial positionality

is a term used by many geographers to denote how a person's social and spatial location (their identity, their relative location in the global system and

social relations

are he connections between people. Our focus on social relations can range in scale from relations between two people, to relations between nations and socially constructed races.

social relations of power

1. Patriarchy = most buildings are named after men

2. Capitalism = the university experience, renting, partying, drinking (expensive)

3. Colonialism = institution is modeled after European culture, on indigenous land

4. Ableism = the campus isn’t necessarily accessible for someone with a physical disability 

5. Heteronormativity = gender of washrooms, change rooms, and the features of them

Ableism and the university

1. Ableism = privilege particular physical, mental, and emotional capacities often through space in ways that produce disability

2. Disability = links people of common overlapping related experiences of oppression based in navigating a world designed and defined by able-bodies people. This term has been reclaimed by people whose body minds have been medicalized and pathologized, working from an empowerment perspective

space and social relations

1. Geographers study space - the simultaneity of social relations

2. As social geographers, we consider the various and simultaneous social relations that make space, including capitalist accumulation, colonial practices, patriarchal and sexualized logics, militarized, that shape (outer) space

3. Eg. Extractive capitalism takes place in and through space

   1. Corporate headquarters of private companies vs site of mining and minerals/labourers

   2. Americans desirous of fossil fuels future and Western hemisphere dominance/control

focus: outer space

1. How social relations shape human relationships wth outer space

2. How socio- spatial positionaliy shapes our engagements with/understand of outer space

colonialism and settler colonialism (social relations and space)

1. Social relations of power shape humans engagements with all spaces

   1. Our ability to see, explore, and know ‘out there’ is deeply rooted in land and material practices here

   2. Practices/ engagements with outer space are shaped by social elations of power

      1. Colonialism = the process of exerting political ,legal, and economic conflict over another territory

      2. Settler colonialism = the process of taking political/ economic control over a territory and people through the act of settlement, especially wth the view to access and control

   3. Colonialism and settler colonialism shape outer space and our relationships with it

Maura Kea (30 meter telescope)

Why are Kānaka Maoli opposed to the telescope? 

1. The history of being stripped of resources and cultural practices

2. Sacred land and what they choose to do with it

3. About intergenerational trauma

4. Sacred waters 

How is the telescope related to colonial practices?

1. “No should be enough”

2. Anti a building that goes up on sacred land (build because of science)

3. They were told that the 3 telescopes were the last they have 13 now

How are Kānaka Maoli resisting and fighting back?

1. Protesting

2. Speaking out

3. Resistance from the begging

4. Seeing each other as equals and respected 

5. Being an example for the younger generation because they will have todo the same thing

   1. Pillars, guardians, mountains (unshakeable)

socio-spatial positionality

1. Our socio- spatial positionality is related, in part, to how we are positioned in global social relations. Our socio spatial positionality is:

   1. Relation = the condition of possibility for an agent depends on her or his positions with respect to others. We do not just occupy positions ‘out there’. But our positions are always in relation to others

   2. Power- laden = some positions tend to be more influential than others. As the relation between our positions are often unequal. It also follows that all knowledge us situated, which ‘challenges the power of those who claim objectively

   3. Enacted = the social relations that produce different positions are continuously repeated over time, both reproducing dominant power relations but also creating space for new kinds of relations to emerge

   4. Spatial = the construction of new spaces and shifting connections between places produce various forms of inequality and different knowledges/experiences for the people in those places

2. Socio- spatial positionality is a function of our identities ; our training, experiences, family and collective life, our spirituality/cosmology

3. Mann article = how socio-spatial positionality affects relations with and understandings of space exploration

outer space, speculative fictions, and liberators future

1. Social relations of resistance, empowerment, speculation, and liberatory future life worlds

2. Does space exploration and its power relations have to be inherently negative

3. How can we think of relations of power with respect to not being oppressed but being empowered

4. What would be necessary to ensure one’s empowerment isn’t related to another’s exploitation

Octavia Butler

1. how her socio-spatial positionality as a Black American woman shaped her science fiction

   1. Ongoing trauma against black women

   2. Inspired by the past, present, and future

   3. Grew up in California - farming (exploitation)

2. how her science fiction can be seen as liberatory

   1. Exploring the past, present, and future

   2. Being aware of prejudices

3.  how Afrofuturism envisions and constructs new spaces and geographic imaginaries

   1. Having an overview of everything

   2. Aliens living among humans

   3. Thinking abut the stars because colonization's of the cosmos

   4. “The destiny of earth is to take root among the stars”

cultural artifacts

1.  are elements of material culture that reveal important aspects of the societies, places, and communities that produce them

   1. Historical material

   2. Today music as a cultural artifact produced in and through specific spaced/places

the south Bronx

1. NYT article the Bronx

2. Those who grew up in the Bronx have been defined by fires

3. Set up to fail by disinvestment, redlining, and eminent domain

4. Robert Moses was a master builder

   1. Expropriating people’s property for him to build

   2. Building parks in white neighbourhoods

   3. Built massive highways right through the highways

   4. Built overpasses that city buses couldn’t go under

   5. Involved in creating segregation

the place of Canadian music

1. Traditional Newfoundland music

   1. Social relations to place

   2. Irish diaspora

   3. Geographical/cultural separation from Canada

   4. Connections with fiddle traditions across country, such as Métis and French-Canadian

   5. Spatial arrangement and location of place: kitchen parties

   6. Aural tradition, collective tradition

2. Tom power and the Dardanelles

   1. Grew up in the suburbs of St. John’s

   2. Globalize and Americanized music culture

   3. Long resisted traditional Irish music

   4. Became exposed as he travelled, sang, radio

Regulations to protect cultural forms

1. Tom powers experience resonated

2. Cassettes, radios

3. Exposure to Canadian content

   1. Canadian radio-television and telecommunication commission

   2. Quotas for Canadian content for radio

   3. Current quota for pop music of Canadian radio stations 35% of music must be CanCon

      1. CanCon = Canadian content

4. Protecting Canadian artistic industry from American hegemony

Shifting cultural artifacts of music circulation

1. Contestation over cultural protection tense

2. Regulations not kept up with shifting media from of cultural artifacts

3. Records, cassettes, CDs

4. Radio

5. Digital files (MP3)

6. Streaming digital files (Spotify)

7. Music industry

   1. More users = more revenue

   2. Customer experience and algorithms

   3. Subscription based

Regulation of digital streaming services

1. Online streaming act (2023)

   1. Update of broadcasting laws to capture online platforms

   2. Currently being implemented/contested

   3. Bill states: online undertakings shall clearly promote and recommend Canada programming, in both official languages as well as in Indigenous languages

   4. Spends 5% of annual Canadian revenues into funds that support the production of Canadian content

2. Foreign-Canadian streamers (Spotify, Apple, Amazon) are fighting the decision to spend 5%

Music and the power geometry of place

1. Places sit in a relations of power with other places

   1. Segregated music spaces in Minneapolis separation an connection between Newfoundland and other Canadian fiddle cultures

   2. Canadian vs American content

2. Medium matters (digital vs analog)

   1. Regulations

      1. Not kept up with shifting musical forms

      2. Companies and music flows increase

Prospera, Hunduras as a place

1. Trend in ‘making new places’ private city, semi-autonomous charter

2. Liberation exit strategy ideology

3. Founded through social economic zone

4. As a place

   1. Dynamic

   2. Specific

   3. Multiple positinalisties

   4. Relational and connected

Massey’s global sense of place

1. What is the socio-spatial positionality of the writer

   1. Spatial = Manchurian, British, London

   2. Temporal = globalization, thatcher, and NIDL

   3. Disciplinary = Marxist geography

2. The global sense of place

   1. The world is increasingly dominated by movement - of people, images, and information

   2. Doreen Massey examines the nature of mobility in the era of globalization and what this means for our sense of place

space to Doreen Massey

1. Global relations

   1. Simultaneous, uneven

2. Relations between cities (Kingston and Ottawa)

   1. Movement of people, money, imaginaries

3. Relations between a city and its surrounding area

   1. Labour, agriculture; tourism

4. Relations between humans and non-humans

   1. Wanted and unwanted animals

5. Key concept

   1. Space to Massey, is the dimension of things happening at the same time. It is simultaneity and multiplicity of social- relations that connect humans to one another and that connect humans to our non and more than human worlds

Time-space compression

1. Spatial relations ‘change’ as places brought into new/different relation with one another

2. Space here is relative and not absolute

3. Example - globalize worlds and NIDL

   1. Time space compression

   2. Marxist idea of the annihilation of space by time

   3. How has the world sped up

4. Massey qualifies simplistic notions of time space-compression by looking at its social differentiation

The power of geometry of globalization flow

1. Spatial relations shaped by power - as tha power is entered or changes, so too does space/relations between space power geometry

   1. of time space compression

   2. For different social groups, and different individual’s, are places in very distinct ways in relation to these flows an interconnections

   3. This points concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it, it is also about power in relation to the flow of movement

   4. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility, some people are more in charge of it than others, some initiate flows and movement, others don’t, some are more on the receiving-end of it than others, some are effectively imprisoned by it

      1. Examples= refugees, migrants and jets over the Pacific

Qualifying time-space compression

1. When attuned to social differentiation, power geometries, and different socio-spatial positionalities, it is clear that time-space compression is relative and complex

   1. A product of our socio-spatial positionality

   2. Slowing down

   3. Relational and powerful

   4. Becoming globally meaningful

      1. Place has not disappeared or been swallowed up

Place to Massey

1. Place still matters

2. Place - how spatialized social relations come together to produce specific ways of relating in particular locations

3. Multiple scales of place

   1. Roads, prison, university, neighbourhoods, city

4. Key concepts = place is the particular set of relations tat occur simultaneously in a given locale

Key elements of socio-spatial positionality

1. Our socio-spatial positionality is related, in part, to how we are positioned in global social relations. Our socio-spatial positionality is:

   1. Relational

   2. Power-laden

   3. Enacted

   4. Spatial

2. Socio-spatial positionality in partly a function of our identities they have been constructed through social systems of power

3. My situatedness within social relations  

   1. Racial capitalism (race and class)

   2. Patriarchy (gender)

   3. Nationality

4. But also

   1. Occupation

   2. Family status

   3. Disciplinary training

   4. Cultural artifacts

   5. Spirituality

5. Key concept:

   1. Socio-spatial positionality = is a term by many geographers to denote how a persons social and spatial location influenced their experiences and how they understand the world

geographical imaginaries

1. Colonial foundations of history: mapping territory

2. 1950 and 1960 quantitative revolution

3. 1970 and 1989 humanistic and cultural geography

4. 1980 critical turn

Discourses

1. Discourse according to Stuart Hall, are the rules and practices and produce meaningful statements - they are systems of representation that have real effects in the world

2. A group of statements which provide a language for talking about - a way of representing the knowledge about a particular topic at a particular historical moment

3. Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. But since all social practices entail meaning, and meanings shape and influence what we do- our conducts- all practices have a discursive aspect

Discourses formation

1. Statements:

2. The statements that give a particular knowledge about the object

3. Often in relation/ opposition to an other

4. Rules:

5. The rules that make some things syable/ knowable and others not

6. Subjects:

7. The subjects that are constituted through or personify the discourse and their attributes

8. Authority and expertise:

9. How particular knowledges on the topic acquire authority and hegemony or dominance

10. Practices:

11. Practices that are legitimately within institutions to deal with these subjects

12. Contextual specificity:

13. Recognize that a different discursive formation will arise at a different moment or in a different place

Orientalist as discursive formation

1. to Edward Said (1979, p. 12),  Orientalism “is distribution of geopolitical awareness" about the East "into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, and historical texts” 

2. invention of Western Europe 

3. a way to manage that which became known as the ‘Orient’ by making statements about it, ruling it, and authorizing knowledge about this place

4. homogenizes, simplifies, and stereotypes

5. based on statements of ‘backwardness’; religiosity vs liberalism; 

6. figures of Muslim women as victims in need of saving from culture, religion, Muslim men

WW84 and orientation

1. How cultural artifacts like Hollywood films reflect and produce geographic imaginaries (specifically discourses) of place, with real material effects

2. Note: tricky because we don’t want to reify stereotypes; rather, we want to focus on critically analyzing and dismantling them

Battles over Hijabs on the sport field

1. Shireen Ahmed’s work

2. Islamophobic and Orientalist assumptions and tropes shape people’s abilities to participate in certain spaces 

3. Eg. FIFA not allowing women to wear the hijab on the sports field 

4. 2007: Asmahan Mansour of Ottawa was ejected from a soccer match in Quebec for wearing hijab; escalated to football’s world governing body (FIFA) who ruled hijabs not allowed because ‘dangerous’

5. 2011: Iranian women’s football/soccer team forfeited qualifier for 2012 Olympics

6. 2014: FIFA struck down rule due to significant organizing by Muslim women footballers

7. 2022: France voted 160-143 in favour of banning hijab from every conceivable sports competition: recreation to high-level participation

8. Roots in Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse that position Muslim women as ‘victims’ of a generalized ‘patriarchy’ and in need of ‘liberation’ by the ’West’

Battles over Hijabs through war

1. Tropes of Muslim women as ‘oppressed’ through the symbol of the ‘hijab’ or ‘veil’ have underpinned Western legitimations of violence

2. Hijab and veils in general have gained meaning in Islamophobic discourses as a symbol of patriarchal oppression 

3. But of course many people wear hijab and veils for many, many reasons! 

4. Eg. Algerian War (1954-1962): war for Algerian independence from France

5. Frantz Fanon summed up French colonial doctrine as: 

6. "If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight.”

7. 1958: ‘unveiling’ ceremonies staged wherein French women would take veil off Muslim women to show acculturation to French and European values

8. But: many women began wearing veils and hijabs as response to this  French tactic to symbolize independence on their own terms

9. And the French discourse of saving Muslim women was contradicted by the violence of the colonizer

10. reached women through “rape, torture, and destruction of villages” (MacMaster – Burning the Veil)

11. Has parallels to Western countries’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

Islamophobia

1. hate against Islam and Muslims

2. roots in Orientalist discourse

3. quashing the romanticized versions of the Orient into a flattened set of negative conceptions and prejudices associated with this region, often orbiting around the idea of terror

4. gained traction in North America and Europe in the 1990s, after the Cold War era

5. increasingly violent following the Sept 2001 attacks against the World Trade Centre

Real material effects Quebec mosque shooting

1. Real material effects: January 29th, 2017 -the Quebec Mosque Shooting (the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City)

2. 6 worshippers killed

3. Gunman got life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years

4. Controversy that he wasn’t charged w/ terrorism under the Criminal Code

5. January 29 is now recognized as the national day of remembrance of the Quebec City mosque

Spatial discourse

1. Orientalism 

2. Geographic and historical specificity

3. Discourse about Africa

4. Invention (Mudimbe)

   1. 15-18 centuries, exotic + Italian

5. Primitivism (Walcott)

   1. Primitive vs Enlightened

   2. Can use tools of discourse analysis to think about discursive production of Africa as exotic, primitive

6. Today; Dominant geographical imaginations o areas of informality and poverty as slums and favelas

Discourse of the slums

1. Discourse of slums = defined in terms of lack

   1. United nations definition

      1. Durable housing

      2. Sufficient living area

      3. Access to improved water

      4. Access to improved sanitation facilities

      5. Secure tenure

what are favelas

1. Not slums

   1. Precarious

   2. Auto-constructed

   3. Un/regulated

   4. Infrastructure

   5. Ambivalently tolerated

   6. Middle to low income

   7. As “comunidades” to some

2. Overall vastly heterogeneous but distinct geographical imaginary of ‘morro’

favela tours

1. Favelas produced as discursive object for tourist consumption; tours reproduce this imaginary

   1. First jeep tours began in 1990s

   2. 2006 passage of a law made Rocinha an official tourist destinations in Rio de Janerio

   3. As ‘competitive grounds for tourism’ for both symbolic and physical reasons

      1. Largest favela in Brazil

      2. Two exits

      3. Breathtaking views

      4. Contrast between haves and have-nots

      5. Rocinah = has bot h formal agencies and informed circuit

Discourses analysis of favela tours

1. How are discourse of the favela produced through slum tours?

2. What kinds of tropes are mobilized about favelas by tourists, tour operators, and narrator?

   1. Statements

      1. The statements that give a particular knowledge about an object

      2. What is sayable/knowledgeable and what is not sayable/knowable

   2. Subjects

      1. The subjects that are constituted through or personify the discourse and their attributes

   3. Authority and expertise

      1. How particular knowledges and people acquire authority and hegemony/dominance

Afrofuturism definition

is a cultural and artistic movement that focuses on liberation from oppressive structures and involves often mystical imaginings of the past, present and future of Africans and African Americans

Afrofuturism

1. 1 Redefining gender roles and featuring powerful women and trans people

2. 2 Combining both ‘traditional’ and ‘futuristic’ technological imaginings of Africa and African culture

3. 3 Featuring Black people and made by Black people

4. 4 Offering a critique of ‘real world’ structures of power by imagining worlds where they are subverted or don’t exist

5. “A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture” (Jamie Broadnax)

Black panther

1. What elements of ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’ does Wakanda (and the movie) combine? How do these break a Eurocentric dichotomy of tradition vs. progress?

2. What gender roles can you identify in the movie? How might these subvert patriarchal structures?

3. How does the movie frame ‘Africa’? Why does Wakanda exist, and why has it remained isolated from the rest of the world?

4. What is the relationship between Wakanda and Oakland, California? How does this matter for the storyline? And, an addition: how does this relation disrupt the typical superhero binary between good vs evil/hero vs villain?

Indigenous futurism

1. Dr. Grace Dillon on unreserved

   1. Anishinaabe

   2. Portland state university

   3. Helped coin term indigenous futurism

mobility

 the movement from one place to another’s temporarily or permanently

Migration

a long distance move that changes your place of residence this can be from one neighbourhoods to another or form one country to another

Borders

1.  social constructions that separate people and territories from one another

   1. Nation-state borders

   2. Semi- permeability

Our focus

1. The social and cultural dimension of migration

   1. How people make new homes and places where they move

   2. The histories of ties/relations across different places

   3. How people remain connected to other counties and cities through everyday practices

   4. Complex sense of belonging and Homes

Diaspora

1. Groups/communities of people who have had to leave their home/homeland and make life elsewhere but remain a connection with that ‘home’

2. Diaspora = the involuntary dispersal/displacement of a people from a homeland to which they are still attached

3. Diaspora space = inhibited by the dispersed population and their offspring, the receiving society, and those who remain in the sending countries

criteria for diaspora

1. Homeland orientation (another home where they are rooted)

2. Involuntary dispersal

3. Boundary making practice (maintaining identity)

examples of diaspora

1. African diaspora = the salve trade moved people all over (black Atlantic)

2. British government afraid of the common wealth coming back (creating overpopulation)

3. Wind-jack boat (brought people to England)

Why is it important (diaspora)

1. Where people reside and where people are rooted are not always the same

2. Diaspora challenge the way we think about a space

3. How diaspora is presented

4. Economic opportunity

5. To stoke fear in populations

6. Diasporas are not always the same (general concept)

7. Variety in the way diaspora is formed (language, land, geographies, politics)

Bad Bunny halftime show

1. How did Bad Bunny critique borders, border enforcement, and broader social relations of neocolonialism in his Super Bowl Halftime show performance?

   1. The sugar cane grass

   2. All in Spanish

   3. The house he sang on

   4. The people brought in

   5. The ending of him saying we are all American or in this together

Borders

1. Spatial production

   1. Borders cette and reinforce practices of nation-state sovereignty, enforced legally, imaginatively

2. Structure

   1. Borders are a power structure, and an integral component of the transnational neoliberal capitalist system

3. Surveillance

   1. Borders track and make particular populations visible to the state

4. Fear based

   1. Boarders operate through fear at the border, and internalized fear in Brodeur-related spaces and territories

the borders as spatial production

1. Mounts Article: how states make borders malleable and diffuse in order to control populations

2. Externalizations of nation-state borders

   1. Canada, UK, Australia, EU, US

   2. Island archipelagos/ archipelagos of detention

   3. Esquimalt, Vancouver island, Canada

      1. Port of entry- no asylum rights, no lawyers

   4. Micronesia, Pacific Islands;

   5. Christmas Island

   6. Lombok, Indonesia

      1. Not party to 1951 Convention relating to the status of refugees

      2. Australia takes advantage of this

   7. Lampedusa, Italy

the border as structure

1. Borders are a power structure, and an integral component of the transnational neoliberal capitalist system

2. Borders help make this system work

   1. They keep wages low in some places so corporations can exploit labour

   2. They regulate the flow of goods, capital, and people across space

3. Different countries may work together to uphold the transnational neoliberal capitalist system through aligning their immigration practices

Borders as surveillance smart tech and biometrics

1. Borders simultaneously being made smart

2. Borders become reconstituted as biometric regulating mobility by amassing digital biological data in shared databases

Biometrics

1. A biometric or biometric identifier is an objective measurement of a physical characteristic of an individual which, when captured in a database, can be used to verify the identity or check against other entries in the database.

2. What are some examples of biometrics?

Biometric borders in action

1. US, customs and border protection

   1. For most visas; fingerprint scans of all 10 digits; digital photo for facial recognition

2. ESTA proposed changes

   1. Electronic system or travel authorization (ESTA) for countries of Visa Waiver program (VWP)

   2. CBC new report - provide five years of their social media history, email addresses used in the past 10 years; telephone numbers used in the past 5 years, and information about family members, including their addresses and telephone numbers

   3. Won’t affect Canadians yet

3. Government of Canada

   1. Collecting biometric information for all temporary resident visa, work permit, study permit, and temporary resident permit applicants, and all permanent residents applications

   2. Testing out facial recognition

borders as fear-based surveillance (affect and emotion)

1. ring Super Bowl

   1. What is going on here

   2. How might this ad create particular concerns for migrants? What is it asking citizens to do

   3. Amazons ring + ICE

   4. How might it use fear to regular and police migrants?

   5. Examples: Big Tech’s role in spreading hate against an ‘Othered’ population to drive them across border

   6. Rohingya: Muslim ethnic minority in Rakhine State, Myanmar; attacked by Myanmar security forces in 2017 during targeted campaign of murder, rape, burning after years of systemic discrimination

   7. Facebook assisted in this

   8. Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General: “In 2017, the Rohingya were killed, tortured, raped, and displaced in the thousands as part of the Myanmar security forces’ campaign of ethnic cleansing. In the months and years leading up to the atrocities, Facebook’s algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the Rohingya which contributed to real-world violence… While the Myanmar military was committing crimes against humanity against the Rohingya, Meta was profiting from the echo chamber of hatred created by its hate-spiralling algorithms.

Borders as socio-spatial constructions

1. Inter-scalar

2. Internalized

3. Externalizer

4. Constantly shifting

Carceral geography

1. Kingston as carceral city

2. Carcerality = related to lager systems/structures of power. A logic of punishment, banishment and containment in response to harm

3. Policing = an institution and apparatus that enforces these logics of punishment and banishment

policing and racial capitalism

1. Policing in US and Canada is high

2. In Canada: emerged through colonial and settler colonial formations

3. Intention: create property in people and in land

   1. Protect property of individuals and the state

   2. Policing and carceral technologies permeate into and saturate non-prison space

      1. Policing and policing technologies at Queens university

Carcrality on Campus

1. What are the police at Homecoming

   1. What are they protecting?

   2. What are they not protecting?

   3. What are challenges of homecoming are they not equipped to deal with?

systems of care to mitigate harm

1. What other systems of care exist at queens university that operate beyond, or instead of, carcerality and policing?

2. What difference initiatives and practices are undertaken to take care of one another?

University spotlight grading

1. Grading

   1. Why do institutions have grades? What are grades for?

   2. How do grades affect your work? Your learning?

   3. What could we use instead of grades?

   4. How might grades-operate in a punitive fashion?

Ungrading

1. Grades aren’t good incentive

2. Grades are not good feedback

3. Grades encourage competitiveness over collaboration

4. Grades are not good markers of learning

5. Grades aren’t fair

6. Grades are often inequitable

7. Grades create a policing relationship between instructor/TA and students

Kingston’s geographical imaginaries

1. Queens university

2. Public service worker

3. Kingston Pen and Collins bay, P for W (prison for women)

Carceral geographies

1. Defines as geographical engagement with spaces practices, and experiences of confinement and coercive control

2. Carceral geographies explores regimes of imprisonment, detentions, temporary holding, and captivity 

Prison capital of Canada

1. Trading centre

2. Military base

3. Growing exponential rate

4. British elite saw the new comers as a threat to hierarchy

   1. Criminalized because of class and race

   2. Upper class was worried about class revolution

   3. Solution was to build KP

5. Kingston is the prison town

   1. Close proximity to all prisons

   2. 7 institutions used to be 10

   3. Home to correctional training facilities

   4. 8.2 million in sales in 2017 at KP tours

Prison to community reintegratoin

1. Is the process of leaving prison and re-entering the community

2. Reintegration requires formerly incarcerated person to: find housing, get a job, look for doctor, attend parole, open a bank account….

houselessness

An individual or family who doesn’t have a permanent address or residence. The living situation of an individual or family who doesn’t not have a stable, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect, means and ability of acquiring it. It is often the result of what are know as systemic or societal barriers, including lack of affordable and appropriate housing

Research with communities who are pushed to margins

1. People wit experiences of incarceration and or being unhoused have been using their voices to talk about their experiences of oppression. And injustice for long time, and only they can fully describe their experiences

2. We still need in depth ongoing consultations with criminalized people about what they need and want if we are to create more equitable society

Carcerality to abolition

1. Abolition seeks to undo the way of seeing and doing things that position prison and punishment as the solution to political, economic, socio-cultural, interpersonal problems

2. Is not only a decarceration

3. Is about reorganizing how we live our lives together in the world

Abolition geographies

1. What are the conditions where people use harm to solve problems

2. What can we do so there is less harm

3. Preventing violence and who’s committing it

4. Alternate forms of justice

5. Learned that life is precious

Harms of drug use

1. What are the conditions under which it is more likely that people will resort to using violence and harm

2. What are the harms associated with drugs use and overuse

3. What can we do about the conditions causing drug use and harm so that there is less harm

Carceral geographies: Criminalizing drugs

1. Drug use not inherently criminal

2. Criminalizing drug possession, selling, and consumption are central to mass incarceration systems

3. High proportion of people incarcerated due to criminalization of drugs

4. War on drug legislation mass killings of people in places like Brazil, US and Philippines

Criminalization of drugs in Canada

1. First drug control in Canada (1908)

   1. Opium act = regulated drugs

   2. Into 1923 the control included more drugs (Cocaine, cannabis, morphine)

2. Food and drug act

   1. 1920 = 1920 control acceptable drugs used in healthcare

3. Opium and narcotics act (1929-1960)

4. Narcotics control act (1960-1990)

   1. Lack of differentiation between drugs

5. Controlled drugs and substance act (1997)

   1. War on drugs

   2. Focus on prohibition

6. Legalizing since

   1. Cannabis approved for terminally = 1999

   2. Legalized for recreational use 2018

Practices of abolition drug decriminalization

1. Drug decriminalization

2. Abolition is the main reason for which people are imprisoned

3. Attempt to address root problems of addiction through medication

4. Portugal drug crisis

   1. Liberal Portugal (1% using heroine)

   2. All families connected to drugs

   3. People are treated as patients now and not as criminals

   4. Change in law will change how drugs are used

   5. People are more likely to find help if they aren’t criminalized

   6. Drug related drugs decreased significantly

Harm reduction

1. Harm reduction international

2. Policies and programs and practices that aim to minimize the negative health, social and legal impacts associated with drug use, drug policies and drug laws

3. Focuses on positive change and on working with people without judgement, coercion, discrimination or requiring that people stop using drugs as precondition of support

4. Community needs assessment for people dealing wry interlocking crisis in Kingston

   1. Covid-19 pandemic

   2. Costs and vacancy rate housing

   3. Drug poisoning

Kingston integrated care hub:

1. Organized during early dats of covid-19 pandemic at artillery park

2. Harm reduction, care, community safety

3. Section 56 exemptions

towards drug decriminalization in Canada

1. Exemption from the controlled drugs and substances

2. Reduce stigma, barriers to service, and ultimately mortality

3. Toronto public health

4. British Columbia

5. Ontario’s community care and recovery act

6. Denied by government of Canada

Wicket problem

1. Something that can be temporarily solved but not completely

2. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation creativity and change

Carceral and spatial tactics regulate the movement of animals

1. How animals are implicated in our geography, cultures

2. Geographical scale (communication)

3. Animal geographies touch on - experiential, conceptual, methodological, historical, spatial, political, ethical, epistemological

4. Why is the carceral important when thinking about animals

   1. Ethical questions

   2. Social and cultural questions

   3. Economic questions

   4. Historical questions

   5. The barbed wire around prisons were to keep animals inside then used to keep prisoners in

5. Space do that is carceral (prison and animals)

   1. Control movement

   2. Control option

   3. Surveilled movement (monitored)

   4. Bars and barbed wire (keep something in)

   5. Controlled spaces (keeping people in and people out)

      1. What should the public be able to see

   6. Displayed

6. Examples of carceral spaces for animals

   1. Zoos

   2. Animals in tourism (on display)

   3. Animals in agriculture (invisible)

   4. Home (breeding), dog parks

   5. Queens (bees, monkeys, mice) testing

7. Thinking about Kingston

   1. Circus and zoos

   2. Relationship with goats (day of the goats)

   3. Queens using a black bear as a mascot

   4. Chinese company using goat milk for infant formula

Prison farms in Kingston

1. Prison farms in Kingston

2. Prison farm - farm operated in the prison

   1. Produced food for the prison

   2. Hard work and therapeutic benefits

3. Land seen as useless if unused

4. Commercial prison farm proposal for goat farms for the infant formula

   1. Sell has feel good narrative

5. 30% of people in prison are incarcerated indigenous peoples

   1. Indigenous worker wrote about working on the farms

   2. Slave labour

   3. At least I’m putting food on the table

6. Dog, horse programs

   1. More horse in penning then wild

      1. Used for policing (people in prison break the wild from them)

      2. Dogs used in policing (high rates of death and injury)

   2. Horse training program (portrayed as therapeutic)

7. Soft and hard skill for prisoners

   1. Working on farms

   2. Working with animals

   3. Soft skills = belittling (teamwork)

   4. Taught prisoners how to burry a body with dead stock

8. Government

   1. The building of the goat and dairy farms

   2. The barn took 4 years to build and costs 21 million dollars

   3. Don’t want people to see or know what the government is planning

   4. Manure (dead stock)

Cyborgian sporting bodies

1. Cyborg = cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction

2. What different technologies shape sporting bodies and culture

3. Think of people with supporting mechanics

sporting bodies circulating through tech

From viral meme to the influencer athlete

1. Ionah Marh = promoting sports positive body

2. Turkish shooter

Olympian on social media: from viral meme to the influencer athlete

1. Brady Katchuk = AI generated content (false)

2. Figure skater = who asked for an extension on her assignment

3. Eileen Gu = most decorated snow boarder

The influencer athlete

1. Social media has transformed as they get sponsors if they attach their brand to the athlete

2. Global superstar brands are buying audience engagement

3. Athlete creates content and brands then partner with them

4. Hyper global attention (every 4 years)

social media and the athlete

1. Athletes as

   1. Cyborgs

   2. Circulated images vis social media

   3. Social media influencers

2. Shifts reflect broader changes in digital economies and geographical economies

Digital geography

1. How bodies, lives, and infrastructures and spaces are increasingly mediated through digital code

2. This includes considering how we affect digital infrastructures, applications, and programs and how they affect us

3. Intertwining of digital geographies, bodies, and emotions.

4. Sport and emotions

mediated sport and affect

1. Domestic violence/ intimate partner violence rates increase by about 10% after upset losses

2. Affect theories say before one can even name an emotion, an external event causes physiological, neurological, and charged responses in our bodies

3. In case of a loss in football, bodily capacities becomes oriented to violence

Definition of affect

“affect refers principally to a body's or bodies' “capacity to affect and be affected.” A body's “charge of affect” is two-sided: that is, what a body can do and does do are a matter of intensive “capacities to affect” and“capacities to be affected.” Normally this use involves invoking an analytic distinction between affect and emotion, where “emotion” is used to refer to the ways in which affects are named, interpreted, and reflected and, by contrast, “affect” refers to the intensity of experience, a quality that provides something close to the background sense of an event or practice or space.” (Anderson, 2017, International Encyclopedia of Geography)

Affect, emotion, and the digital

1. Sports betting

2. Bad calls (agree or disagree)

3. Algorithms

Influencer culture: digitally mediated affect

1. A new forms of capitalism: the influencer culture

2. First half

   1. Trends and styles

   2. More attention cycle (treadmill)

   3. Follower, engagement, reach

   4. Vulnerability = sponsor opportunity

   5. Online creator capitalism

   6. Curated self = shape self esteem

   7. More digestible niche = more brands

   8. Response to collapsed job market

   9. Shift to freelance and control over years

   10. Work for an employer you can’t see

   11. Context collapse = blurring of public and private self (real vs fake)

3. Second half

   1. Looking the same

   2. Body image, politics, and toxic

   3. Gets clicks and algorithm likes it

   4. Creators feel pressured to post what’s on trend

   5. Reverse engineering

The algorithm

It’s fundamental from, an algorithm is a process designed to solve a specific problem, it’s a set on instructions that end up n a desired conclusion.

1. Recipe to bake a cake

2. Traffic light signals changes

3. Non-playable charters in video games

4. In computing

   1. Written program language

   2. Social media often multiple complex

   3. Driven by what you watch

Landscape

1. A comprehensive product of human action such that every landscape is a complex repository of society. It is a collection of evidence about our character and experience, our struggles and triumphs as humans” (Valentine, 2001, p. 26)

2. “as a sort of communicational resource, a system of signs and symbols, capable of extending the temporal and spatial range of communication” (Foote, 1997, p. 33)

ordinary landscape

1. Through living regular everyday life

2. InClaude’s socio-economic activity

3. Implicit

4. Bi-directional: people shape landscapes, landscape shape people

symbolic landscape

1. Specific values or aspirations of builders, financiers build into landscapes

2. Explicit

3. Representations of landscape that come to symbolize identity

   1. Non-gothic parliament hill in Ottawa

   2. Group seven Canadian wilderness paintings

overlap

1. Landscapes are multiple layers of embodies meanings

2. Reflect dreams, ideas as well as material lives

3. Messages in landscapes can be read as signs of values, beliefs, practices, but not everybody will read it in the same way

memorialization

1. Inscribing representation of specific people or events into the landscape to create a memory scape that ties history, identity, and memory together

   1. Often as attempt to legitimize a given social and political order