Deborah P. Dixon

My dinner with Derrida, or spatial analysis and poststructuralism do lunch

Menu. This paper extends our previous efforts to (de)lineate contemporary divisions between poststructuralist and spatial analytic, or scientific, approaches in geography. We adopt the format of a dialogue between a hypothetical spatial analyst (SA) and a poststructuralist (PS). Their exchange covers, among other items, the differing stances of these approaches to epistemology, ontology, research questions and methods, and the concept of ‘context’. We also further develop the concept of the ‘epistemology of the grid’, which we define as the spatialization of categorical thought. We link this epistemology to two others, Cartesian perspectivalism and ocularcentrism, arguing that their realization in social practice is generative of social order.

Introduction: feminist engagements with geopolitics

Here, we introduce a themed set of articles that, using diverse feminist knowledges and practices, aims to expose the force relations that operate through and upon bodies, such that particular ‘geopolitical’ subjectivities are enhanced, constrained and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited and often abandoned. The substantive scope of these articles highlights the relevance of such feminist analysis, not as a universalising framework, but as a project of universal reach. The empirical depth of this work, founded upon (variously) a committed period of fieldwork, the careful gathering of lengthy, in situ interviews, participant observation, focus groups, visual methodology and months spent in the archives highlights a complex, feminist ethics of care. Taken as a collection, what we hope these articles make clear are the manifold struggles within feminist analysis in regard to ‘researching with’ embodiment, agency, passivity, vulnerability, emotion, praxis and care.

Cultivating Discourse: The Social Construction of Agricultural Legislation

Abstract In this article we initiate a critical analysis of the discursive geographies from which U.S. agricultural legislation has been constructed. First, we refer to the geography of discourse, which consists of the production, dissemination, and consumption of ideas, concepts, theories, and understandings. Specifically, we trace the emergence and development of an American agrarian discourse, constituted from a wealth of ideas and theories concerning the place of farming in American society and the embodiment of these lines of thought in the agricultural legislation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We highlight particular discursive sites and the establishment of expert groups and associated institutions, as well as time and place specific understandings of farmers and farming. The second dimension we draw out focuses on the semantic geography of discourse itself: It is through discourse that objects of debate—such as people and place—are demarcated and placed in relation to each other. In this case, farming and farmers have been understood in relation to a series of binaries (free/fettered, family/corporate, rural/urban, welfare/investment, safety/risk, individual/social, us/them), one side of which becomes valorized as “ideal” or the “norm.” We explore the semantic geography of agricultural legislation by focusing on one discursive site, namely the U.S. Senate, and the debates leading to the passage of the 1996 Freedom to Farm Bill.

The blade and the claw: science, art and the creation of the lab-borne monster

Here I outline some of the fears, as well as some of the desires, associated with the lab-borne monster as manifest in the emergent genre of critical BioArt. Using a recent installation on Disembodied Cuisine to ground my discussion, I look first to the chimeric character of biotechnology per se, as well as the hybridised practices and products of this close collaboration between Science and Art. I then take the opportunity to explore how the partial life-forms of a critical BioArt—conceived of as the material products of a ‘wetware’ that exists on the borders of the laboratory and the exhibition, life and death, organism and machine, subject and object—speak to the notion of monstrosity on a number of levels. As designer life forms they are inspired by, but also reflect upon, their ‘naturally’ conceived siblings: they illustrate the increasing capacity of various technologies to re-order materials into new combinations and assemblages, while their aesthetics trouble and excite. As ersatz sybillines they are a product of the time and place within which they are created, but are also portents of what is to come. And, as replicant subjects, they are destined to be experimented upon, observed and assessed, providing us a ‘living laboratory’ through which we learn ever more about our own frailties and capabilities. I conclude with an explicit consideration of the political import of these perilous beasts which, though they fail to escape the strictures of a property-based society, yet enact a visceral aesthetic that refuses more of the same.

Technological trajectories: old and new dialogues in geography and technology studies

Dixon, D. P., Whitehead, M. (2008). Technological trajectories: old and new dialogues in geography and technology studies. Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (6), 601-611.

Wonder-full geomorphology Sublime aesthetics and the place of art

Though not yet readily apparent in articles and book chapters, there is a burgeoning series of ‘in the field’ collaborations between geomorphologists and artists focused around the mutual exploration of ‘inspirational landscapes’, and the harnessing of the emotive dimensions of such body/world encounters in the production and communication of geomorphological knowledge. Seemingly at odds with the discipline’s emphasis upon the production of fieldwork data (as opposed to sensed phenomena), as well as its disavowal of the subjective, this work nevertheless resonates with a complex and fascinating aesthetic tradition within geomorphology. Here, we ‘place’ these contemporary collaborations via: reference to Humboldtian science, and the crucial link between sensibility and precision; a reading of the Kantian sublime in the work of G.K. Gilbert; a sketching out of the evisceration of both the aesthetic and art in the second half of the 20th century; and, finally, a review of the current scope of art/geomorphology collaborations, and possible futures.

A Woman's Place in the Crab Processing Industry of Eastern Carolina

Traditionally, most of the pickers used in the crab processing industry of rural Eastern Carolina have been women from the local area, both black and white, while the managerial staff has comprised white women related through kinship to the white, male crab house owners. In recent years, however, this recruitment strategy has changed. Following the lead of the regional poultry industry, the crab houses are now bringing in Mexican workers under the H2-B visa program. Unlike many of the Mexican migrant workers coming into the USA, the crab labor force is made up of women, about half of whom are married with children. This article provides a case study of the ensuing dual labor structure within the crab processing industry. Utilizing in-depth interviews with the employers and employees of the Luther Lewis and Son crab house, the authors ask: What are the contours of inclusiveness and exclusiveness within and without the crab house?

Confronting the geopolitical aesthetic: Fredric Jameson, The Perfumed Nightmare and the Perilous Place of Third Cinema

This essay explores the conceptual limitations within Fredric Jamesons notion of the geopolitical aesthetic through an analysis of Jamesons now classic reading of The Perfumed Nightmare; this film is central to his concept of the utopic character of film more generally and, moreover, to his argument on the embeddedness of Third World representations within a global, capitalist system. We suggest that, although Jameson acknowledges the underlying constructed and relational character of ontological categories such as film (despite their reification under capitalism), his theory of historical materialism demands that they also be understood as formed with regard to a socio-economic totality. And, because the recognition of a totality requires a master narrative within which all can be understood and framed within a logic of equivalence, Jameson must by default conceive of epistemology as fundamentally divided between a true and a false consciousness. Taking our own cue from recent developments in anti-essentialist thought, we conceive of such cultural forms as the temporarily fixed embodiment of broader-scale discourses that continually construct and deconstruct the world as we know it, including our understandings of the ‘real’ as well as the ‘economic’, the ‘political’ and the ‘cultural’. In our own re-imagining of The Perfumed Nightmare, we provide a partial response to this, noting how these realms are constituted from the temporary ‘fixing’ of a series of people- and place-based identities, such as those constituted under the rubric of ‘gender’. Accordingly, we re-work the term ‘cognitive mapping’ as the attempt to outline the web of significations within which objects are embedded as well as the concomitant lines of fracture and contradiction that allow for such objects to become meaningful in a host of other contexts.

One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization

This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The project, which brought together AVLs programmers, visualization experts, and artists with NCARs scientists, required the integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives. In the language of such collaborations, the term renaissance team was coined to capture the collective expertise necessary to produce modern, high-end visualizations of large data sets. In this article, we deploy Simondons concepts of technical objects and collective individuation to analyze the development of AVLs Katrina simulation. One extended sequence of team member collaboration suggests that technical objects also be treated as “collaborators,” for they have the capacity to transform such collectives through the unique problems they present.

Between Difference and Alternity: Engagements with Edward Soja’sThirdspace

Forum on: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, by Edward W. Soja