Geraldine Pratt

Gender, Work and Space

Gender, Work and Space explores how social boundaries are constructed between women and men, and among women living in different places. Focusing on work, the segregation of men and women into different occupations, and variations in womens work experiences in different parts of the city, the authors argue that these differences are grounded, constituted in and through, space, place, and situated social networks. The sheer range and depth of this extraordinary study throws new light on the construction of social, geographic, economic, and symbolic boundaries in ordinary lives.

A Description of the Affective Quality Attributed to Environments

The meaning that persons attribute to environments is divided into perceptualcognitive meaning and affective meaning. Affective meaning is then conceptualized as a two-dimensional bipolar space that can be denned by eight variables falling in the following circular order around the perimeter: pleasant (arbitrarily set at 0°), exciting (45°), arousing (90°), distressing (135°), unpleasant (180°), gloomy (225°), sleepy (270°), and relaxing (315°, which is thus 45° from pleasant). Alternatively, the same space can be denned by two orthogonal bipolar dimensions of pleasant-unpl easant and arousing-sleepy—or equally well by exciting-gloomy and distressing-relaxing. Reliable verbal scales for these eight variables are developed and shown to approximate the proposed theoretical structure. Most of us would acknowledge the pervasive if subtle influence of affective responses on person-environment interactions. The English language provides hundreds of words, such as lively, boring, disgusting, and relaxing, that persons use to describe the affective quality of places. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this large array of affective descriptors, environmental psychologists have focused their attention on only a few and then only one at a time (such as degree of comfort, annoyance, pleasantness, or psychological stress), implicitly expressing pessimism about the possibility of including in their research or theorizing anything approaching a complete description and assessment of the affective quality attributed to places. Our thesis is that a very simple conceptualization can encompass the diverse affective concepts applied to molar physical environments. Theorists from widely differing vantage

RECONCEPTUALIZING THE LINKS BETWEEN HOME AND WORK IN URBAN GEOGRAPHY

The link between home and work is one of the cornerstones of urban geography. We argue that this link has been conceptualized in a limited and limiting way, and yet this overly simplified view of t...

Geography and the construction of difference

Abstract There is growing evidence of ‘horizontal hostilities’ among women: many women are affirming their identities along axes of class, race, sexuality, age and/or relationship to colonialism. Within recent feminist writing, geography—space, place and location—has been used as a vehicle for rethinking a feminist affinity that does not erase or undermine ‘difference’. We review contemporary uses of geographical metaphors and caution against an excessive emphasis on displacement as a metaphor for a critical feminist stance. We argue that geographies of placement must be held in tension with an ideal of displacement. We develop this point through a case study of women and work in contemporary Worcester, Massachusetts. Women in Worcester are very much rooted in place and this is a vehicle for the construction of differences across women. We argue that studies of the construction of feminine identities in particular places counteract the current tendency within feminism to rigidify differences among women a...

SPATIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE GENDER DIVISION OF LABOR IN A LOCAL LABOR MARKET

It is widely known that women work in different occupations and industries from men. With data from the Worcester, Massachusetts metropolitan area, we examine the extent to which employment opportunities are also spatially segmented along gender lines. After reviewing the reasons for previous scholarly neglect of the question of the location of employment opportunities by gender at a fine spatial scale, we present several reasons for expecting such patterns to exist. Our analysis of special runs from the 1980 Census Journey-to-Work File for Worcester reveals striking differences in the locations of womensvs. mens employment at the censustract level. Moreover, within each industrial sector, e.g., manufacturing or consumer industries, women work in different parts of the metropolitan area from men. We begin to explore the processes that might generate such patterns by examining the distances traveled by women vs. men to work in census tracts where the employment is held predominantly by workers of one sex...

Stereotypes and Ambivalence: The construction of domestic workers in Vancouver, British Columbia

A fixture for holding a whip antenna element in position outside a cabinet housing a television set or the like is assembled with the cabinet by snapping it into place within an aperture in a wall of the cabinet. The fixture allows replacement of the antenna element from outside the cabinet.

Care of the Subject: Feminism and Critiques of GIS

Critique is a fundamental part of academic discourse. It is a means for researchers to critically examine assumptions, ideas, statements and theories. While there may be general agreement about the integral value of critique to scienti!c and intellectual enterprises, less attention has been paid to the form and delivery of critique. This article argues that ‘how’ critique is expressed, as well as what its objectives are, is critical to achieving changes in any research area. We start from the position that many of the critiques of geographic information systems (GIS) have aimed to demonstrate what is ‘wrong’ with this subdiscipline of geography rather than engaging critically with the technology. Critics have judged the processes and outcomes of GIS as problematic without grounding their criticism in the practices of the technology. This follows a pattern of external critique in which the investigator has little at stake in the outcome. External critiques from human geographers tend to be concerned with epistemological assumptions and social repercussions, while internal critiques have focused on the technical. But there is a further difference. Internal critiques have a stake in the future of the technology while external ones tend not to (Pratt, 1996). While dividing critiques of GIS into ‘external’ and ‘internal’ oversimpli!es the !eld, we use it as a heuristic to delineate broad differences in approach. By drawing on feminist analyses of critique, we argue for a form of critique that transcends this binary by tackling enframing assumptions while remaining invested in the subject. To be constructive, critique must care for the subject. A feminist critique of GIS engages more directly with GIS practices, and need not reproduce the antagonistic dualisms that have characterised debates about GIS and technology to date. Over the past decade, there have been a number of critiques of GIS in geographic journals. Many of these were written by critics concerned with the effects of widely disseminated GIS technology, but expressed in a manner consistent with external critique. Critics expressed concerned about the promulgation of positivism, repercussions of enshrining quantitative techniques in software, as well as social effects of GIS (Smith, 1992; Lake, 1993; Sheppard, 1993, 1995; Pickles, 1993, 1995, 1997). Accounts of GIS from the early 1990s were polemical and often negative, while those published later in the decade, when GIS was better ensconced, tended to be more conciliatory (Schuur-

Gender, Class, and Space

The social area analyses and factorial ecologies of the 1950s and 1960s have constrained the way in which scholars conceptualize urban space; in particular, one can trace contemporary arguments regarding the social reproduction of class to the notion of homogeneous neighborhoods that emerges from social area analyses and factorial ecology. It is argued that the growth in female labor-force participation, the fact of occupational sex segregation, and other recent demographic trends have important implications for the social geography of the North American city. With 1980 Census data from the Worcester, MA Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, the impact of the gender division of labor on urban social space is described; in particular it is shown that occupational segregation is an important source of intraneighborhood class heterogeneity. The final section of the paper is an exploration of the implications of the findings for theories of social reproduction and for class-based urban politics.

Mobile Modernities: A South Asian family negotiates immigration, gender and class in Canada

For the modern Indian immigrant family ‘modernity’ is not necessarily found in the west. Using qualitative data drawn from in-depth interviews with one immigrant Sikh family, conducted in both Vancouver and the Punjab, we draw attention to the mobile and contradictory modernities family members have faced in their migration, settlement and subsequent transnational activities. We explore how class, gender and sexuality have framed the experiences of the members of this family in differential, partial and sometimes ironic ways. In so doing we construct a theoretical argument about the nature and geography of modernity, and how it relates to immigrant settlement in Canada.

Time, space, and the occupational segregation of women: a critique of human capital theory

Abstract Human capital theory is one frequently invoked explanation for womens position in the paid labor force. This explanation sees the occupational segregation of women largely as the outcome of womens long-range rational decisions to choose jobs that will accommodate their absences from the labor force for child bearing and rearing. We agree with the human capital theorys emphasis on womens domestic labor as a major source of occupational segregation. We believe, however, that the human capital argument highlights the wrong set of variables (those related to womens labor force discontinuity) and overlooks those more immediate geographic factors that contribute forcefully to occupational segregation. Using detailed interview data from a representative sample of households living in the Worcester, Massachusetts urban area, we show that occupational segregation is related to the day-to-day space-time constraints women face rather than to time out of the labor force.