Denis Linehan

Public geographies through social media

In this paper, we argue that new social media produces new forms of public geography and digital praxis in which the relationship between reader and writer is radically altered and which enables geographers to engage in timely conversation and debate with the public on unfolding issues, and provides new avenues to connect with older forms of broadcast media. Social media can strengthen geographers engagement with the existing fourth estate and forge new relationships with an emerging fifth estate – dynamic, responsive and empowered publics. We illustrate such potentials by drawing on our own experiences of contributing to IrelandAfterNAMA, a collective blog that provides critical analysis of the present crisis in Ireland which has established a regular readership and has led to significant media work (over 500 newspaper articles and radio and television interviews). Such public geography projects are not without their challenges and pitfalls, not least because they alter and challenge the ways in which academics work, communicate and are assessed. Nevertheless, we believe that at the very least their quotidian practices enact what Macgilchrist and Bőhmig (2012: 97) term ‘minimal politics’, creating ‘tiny fissures in the mediascape’ that inform and engage with wider publics in ways that academic articles rarely do and work to challenge hegemonic formations.

Regional survey and the economic geographies of Britain 1930–1939

This paper re-considers the history of economic geography in the interwar period in Britain. The activities of the discipline are considered in the context of the commercial geographies of this time, and the intensive round of industrial and social surveys undertaken at a regional level in Britain in the period. Taken together, these economic geographies constructed a range of representational and material spaces and helped construct industrial regions characterized by particular types of places, peoples and performances. These surveys, and the production of the economic geographies that they facilitated, became a key intellectual arena where conflicting ideas about the political and economic management of the industrial region and the national economic were acted out. Following the intention of recent work into the histories of geographical knowledge, the essay will seek out the lateral associations of economic geography, paying particular attention to politically situated nature of the economic geographies produced by academics, regional organizations and the Labour Party.

Where the boys are‐ teenagers, masculinity and a sense of place

Abstract Recent research on the social and gendered geographies of children and young people is filled with new insights into the social and cultural conditions under which their presence in urban space is moderated and their identity constructed. This study seeks to contribute to this research area, by exploring the ways in which teenage boys acquire and maintain a particularly gendered sense of place. The paper demonstrates that this sense of place is regulated by the support structures of all male schooling, by patriarchal family structures, and through the marshalling of the boundaries of heterosexuality amongst the boys peer group. The paper concludes that due consideration of these issues needs to be evaluated if the experience of teenagers in urban space is to be effectively understood by social geographers.

The creation and circulation of public geographies

In response to the commentaries, we discuss further how social media disrupts and remakes the creation and circulation of geographical knowledges and potentially reconfigures the moral economy of the social sciences. In particular, we examine questions of what is meant by public geography, the publics which such geographies serve, alternative and complementary approaches to social media, the politics of authorship within collective blogs, the politics and mechanisms of knowledge circulation, and the extent to which social media has an impact beyond the academy, enacting ‘minimal politics’.

Spacing forgetting : the birth of the museum at Fort Jesus, Mombasa, and the legacies of the colonization of memory in Kenya

This chapter discusses public memory in Kenya through an analysis of the restoration of Fort Jesus, Mombasa, Kenya, and the contemporary role of the fort as a site of memory. Drawing on the political uses of erasure, fiction, and omission, the authors reveal continuities in the production of memory at Fort Jesus that have been politicized in colonial and postcolonial contexts. An analysis of the British and Portuguese motives in converting the fort into a museum shows how the transformation supported their imperial projects in Africa in face of growing calls for decolonization. The chapter also analyzes the resistance to the restoration led by two figures in the Kenyan anticolonial movement, Tom Mboya and Pio Gama Pinto. Although reaffirming how their resistance to the museum provides a critical alternative to the nostalgic narratives currently in vogue at the site, the authors conclude that the memory work around Fort Jesus actively neglects the colonial experience.

Overlapping territories: social and cultural geography in Ireland

In the early 1990s, Fintan O Toole’s book Black Hole, Green Card set out to chart the ‘disappearance of Ireland’ (O Toole 1994). Broadly concerned with the consequences of globalization, Ireland he concluded was a ‘sort of flying island, hovering between a number of different contexts, often flying blind with no one sure how the controls work anymore . . . a place always taking off again and again into its own outer spaces’ (O Toole 1994). O Toole’s anxieties represented well the zeitgeist of that period, when Ireland was undermined by emigration and devastated by unemployment, and years of political violence in Northern Ireland had taken their toll. But in the decade since 1994, the conditions which led O Toole to chart a failing economy and an increasingly borderless Ireland have transformed in ways he and very few others anticipated. In Northern Ireland an uneasy but welcome peace has transformed the quality of life for many. In the South, economic prosperity has precipitated rapid social, environmental and cultural changes. Reflecting on the literature that has attempted to track the outcome of these transformations, this paper will present a short review of the key trends in the geographical work on the island of Ireland. Whilst we are sensitive to the institutional and political differences in both jurisdictions, we hope that, in light of recent political events, a paper that attempts an integrated analysis of the geographical work on both parts of the island will be welcomed. As will become apparent, our intention is to illustrate how the production of geographical knowledge on Ireland reflects the overlapping territories in which the island’s economy, culture and spaces are experienced.

Geography in Ireland in transition‐some comments : Introduction

The publication of Rob Kitchins commentary on the state of Geography in Ireland in the sixtieth anniversary issue of Irish Geography has opened the possibility for a broader, public dialogue about our discipline. This forum represents a continuation of this conversation, with its focus on a variety of theoretical, institutional and personal concerns about Irish Geography.

Author meets critics: a set of reviews and a response

Kathleen Stewart Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 144 pp.,

Irish Empire: assembling the geographical imagination of Irish missionaries in Africa

18.95/£11.99 paperback, (ISBN 978-0822341079)

The Colonial Hotel: spacing violence at the Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique

64.95/£47.00 hardback (ISBN 978-0822340881). Words fail. And so we need to experim...