Hilda E. Kurtz

COMMUNITY GARDENS AND POLITICS OF SCALE IN NEW YORK CITY

New York City community gardens have been the subject of political contestation over the course of their thirty‐year existence. In 1999, 114 gardens were slated for public auction and redevelopment. This article examines the controversy over the garden auction as a politics of scale in which garden advocates successively raised the scope of the controversy beyond the scale of individual gardens, and ultimately beyond that of the city. Analysis of this land‐use conflict highlights the significance of politics of scale for grassroots organizations within a market‐centric, neoliberal economic framework.

DIFFERENTIATING MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF GARDEN AND COMMUNITY

Community gardens are widely recognized as an effective grassroots response to urban disinvestment and decay. There has been remarkably little attention paid, however, to the differences among community gardens as physical and social spaces. This paper suggests that variations among gardens reflect and reproduce differing interpretations of the meaning of both community and garden in the city. A comparative discussion of three community gardens in Minneapolis, Minnesota, highlights the concept that at the intersection of notions of community and garden are the issues of enclosure, inclusion and exclusion. Decisions about whether and how to enclose community gardens shape the role that community gardens play in urban neighborhoods. [Key words: community gardens, neighborhood revitalization, urban activism.]

Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the boundaries of public and private spheres

Many scholars have examined the implications and effects of a putative dichotomy between public-as-masculine and private-as-feminine spheres on community activism, and suggest that womens community activism blurs this ideological divide in numerous ways. This article draws on a case study of a siting conflict in St. James Parish, Louisiana, to examine how, in the process of blurring boundaries between gendered spheres of interest and activity, predominantly women environmental justice activists contended with differently gendered contexts. Concepts of performance and performativity shed light on how gendered hierarchies of public and private sphere activism both constrained and enabled the protest groups political practice.

Guest Editorial: Geographies of Citizenship

Citizenship is a political concept and category of social analysis that is subject to a wide range of theoretical and practical interpretations. Inflected with various traditions of thought that have been in dialogue for centuries, the fundamentally geographical concept of citizenship mediates, in different guises, between self and society, inclusion and exclusion, private and public. Periodic renewal of academic interest in citizenship in response to global political and economic change highlights tensions between enduring ideals of citizenship and the contingent conditions under which citizenship is understood and practised. Geographers have distinguished between formal and socio-cultural dimensions of citizenship to contrast the formal uniformity of citizen rights and obligations with socio-spatial differentiation in the experience of citizenship (Painter and Philo, 1995; Pincetl, 1994; Kofman, 1995). Doing so highlights the unevenness of citizens’ access to political, civil and social rights (Painter and Philo, 1995; after Marshall and Bottomore, 1950/1992) and the ways in which discourses of citizenship are leveraged in everyday life to effect inclusion and exclusion in various political communities (Kofman, 1995; Clark, 1994; Secor, 2003). Geographers have investigated the interplay of formal, socio-cultural and discursive dimensions of citizenship with both implicit and explicit attention to place, space and scale. Expanding on earlier geographical engagement with citizenship, the papers in this Special Issue of Space & Polity consider how different political subjectivities are fostered across spaces and scales of citizenship, and investigate how these subjectivities are negotiated in tension with formal provisions for citizenship. The papers included in this Special Issue examine how the interaction of formal and socio-cultural dimensions of citizenship shapes social space in a range of settings. These papers offer insight into the spatial constitution of citizenship as political borders are both formally redrawn and reimagined in popular discourse. They provide empirical examinations of the interaction between state-centred definitions of the rights, obligations and membership requirements of citizenship and the discursive and active practices of citizenship as they unfold in different times and spaces—from contemporary Nigeria to post-9-11 US. They share a complex treatment of the conditions under which citizenship has become reimagined and practised in different settings. In order to locate the contribution

Food Deserts in Leon County, FL: Disparate Distribution of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Accepting Stores by Neighborhood Characteristics

OBJECTIVE Examine whether neighborhood characteristics of racial composition, income, and rurality were related to distribution of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)-accepting stores in Leon County, Florida. DESIGN Cross-sectional; neighborhood and food store data collected in 2008. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Forty-eight census tracts as proxy of neighborhoods in Leon County, Florida. All stores and SNAP-accepting stores were identified from a commercial business directory and a United States Department of Agriculture SNAP-accepting store list, respectively (n = 288). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Proportion of SNAP-accepting stores across neighborhoods. ANALYSIS Descriptive statistics to describe distribution of SNAP-accepting stores by neighborhood characteristics. Proportions of SNAP-accepting stores were compared by neighborhood characteristics with Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests. RESULTS Of 288 available stores, 45.1% accepted SNAP benefits. Of the 48 neighborhoods, 16.7% had no SNAP-accepting stores. Proportions of SNAP-accepting grocery stores were significantly different by neighborhood racial composition and income. Primarily black neighborhoods did not have any supermarkets. Results were mixed with regard to distribution of food stores and SNAP-accepting stores by neighborhood racial composition, income, and rurality. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS This study suggests disparities in distribution of SNAP-accepting stores across neighborhood characteristics of racial composition, income, and rurality.

Alternative visions for citizenship practice in an environmental justice dispute

Abstract. This paper explores the way in which multiple discourses of citizenship inflect environmental justice activism. A case study of a siting conflict in St James Parish, Louisiana (US) highlights that different citizen subjectivities and socio-spatial relations are imagined within alternative traditions of citizenship. The paper works through several moments in the St James controversy to illustrate the implications of each of these traditions for struggle over environmental justice. It is argued that in borrowing from both liberal and communitarian traditions, the activists at the centre of this case were fostering a hybridised conception of citizenship that helped them to negotiate the spatial tensions inherent in the idea of environmental justice.

The introduction of genetically modified food in the United States and the United Kingdom: A news analysis

Abstract Genetically modified (GM) food is a highly controversial topic. Research has shown that individuals gather information on controversial issues predominantly from newspapers. This paper compares newspaper coverage of GM food during the years 1993–2003 within two U.S. and two U.K. newspapers. The data suggests a greater affinity for similar coverage within the same country than between similar regions in different countries. Regardless of the geographic location, newspaper coverage appears to be event driven. The study reported here represents an exploratory engagement with GM food; we suggest that the topic warrants further study by geographers.

Reflecting on Role Play in Geographic Education: The Case of the Banana War.

Abstract Debates over the nature and extent of globalization raise many issues to be addressed in a geographic education. In this paper, I briefly review case method instruction and role-play as teaching strategies suitable for material on globalization and other geographic subject matter, and then sketch an overview of an undergraduate geography role-play that treats themes of globalization and agricultural trade. The role-play revolves around a real-world trade dispute, referred to as the Banana War, that was waged between the United States and the European Union during much of the 1990s over who could sell how many bananas to Europe. I conclude the paper by reflecting on the contributions of, limitations to and possibilities for case method instruction and role-play in geographic education.

Scaling Food Sovereignty: Biopolitics and the Struggle for Local Control of Farm Food in Rural Maine

Recent scholarship highlights the play of biopower in and through policies and practices shaping food systems, but says little about the practices of resistance to such power. Alternative food movements mobilize critique of and resistance to an industrialized food system from many perspectives. This article examines food sovereignty activism in Maine as an illuminating instance of contemporary biopolitics. This article investigates a “food sovereignty ordinance” passed in eleven towns in Maine since 2011 as an important moment in the biopolitical struggle over the nature of food systems. The ordinance exempts direct transactions of farm food from licensure and inspection in an effort to maintain the viability of small, diversified farms in a struggling rural economy. The ordinance effectively carves out a space of food sovereignty in each town that enacts it, thereby protecting conditions of life and livelihood within local food networks. The analysis focuses on the spatiality of the practices that comprise biopolitics, with attention to the scalar politics in play as well; that is, the ways in which modalities of power shape and are shaped by social, economic, and political scales of organization. This exploration of the scaling of biopolitics in relation to the concept of food sovereignty suggests insights into the contours of other moments of struggle over food regulations.

Placing the “Analyst” in Discourse Analysis: Iteration, Emergence and Dialogicality as Situated Process

Discourse analysis is a powerful and versatile methodological tool, informing a diverse body of critical geographic scholarship. Too often, however, discourse analysis remains unexplored, operating as a “black box,” underelaborated and hence undertheorized as to just what it offers. In this article, we articulate discourse analysis as inherently processual, by which we mean both that it should be understood as a process and that it can play an integral role throughout the research process. This article is derived from a meta-analysis of an exercise that invited early-career geographers to conduct discourse analysis on commentary centered on the 2013 U.S. federal government shutdown. The reflexive research process highlights the iterative, emergent, and dialogic properties of a processual engagement with a text. We suggest that recognizing these qualities enriches the role of both the analysis and the analyst(s) and expands the valence of discourse analysis as a productive and versatile component of critical human geography.