Julie Cupples

The field as a landscape of desire: sex and sexuality in geographical fieldwork

This article calls for greater attention to be paid to the way that sex and sexuality impact on geographical fieldwork. By concentrating in particular on cross-cultural fieldwork, the article focuses on the ways in which attention to these questions has the potential to bring about greater self-reflexivity and to expose the contingency of the researcher’s sexuality.

Seen and not heard? Text messaging and digital sociality

Mobile phones have invited a number of dystopian understandings, particularly as far as young people are concerned. They have been variously argued to contribute to poor spelling and grammar, disturb attention to school work, facilitate text bullying, lead to brain cancers and promote the destruction of face-to-face relationships. Despite these concerns, text messaging is by far the most common form of mobile communication between young people in New Zealand. Drawing on actor-network theory and qualitative research conducted with New Zealand teenagers, we explore how teenagers, cell phones, socio-spatial relations and discourses exist within a hybrid and interdependent network which we have termed digital sociality. This network seems to facilitate rather than destroy proximal contact. The machine and the human, in a cyborgian sense, meld to develop new and complex workings of space and the social which suggests mobile technologies are not as damaging to young people as many have suggested and calls for preventative approaches to this technology might need therefore to be rethought.

“Put on a Jacket, You Wuss”: Cultural Identities, Home Heating, and Air Pollution in Christchurch, New Zealand

Central heating, insulation, and double glazing, such as you might find in many countries with colder climates in the northern hemisphere, are virtually lacking in Christchurch, in New Zealands South Island. In this city, houses tend to be inadequately heated and rely primarily on a combination of open fires, log burners, and electrical heaters. This form of home heating, combined with local climatic and topographical factors, results in high levels of wintertime air pollution. While much research has been conducted into the air-pollution problem in Christchurch to date, this research has focused on physical contaminants and their effects on health, rather than on the ways in which air pollution is socially and culturally mediated and on the sense-making practices of those who create pollution and suffer its effects. Based on information drawn from focus groups, we argue that reluctance to change behaviour results partly from investments in particular cultural identities which are tied into hegemonic masculinities and understandings of national identity, such as the masculine pioneer heritage established during the colonial period. We also explore the spatial relationships that air pollution plays out within and on the ‘body’ and how it transcends and weakens the bounded body. We believe that analyses which draw on theories of hybridisation, embodiment, identity, and discourse, and which highlight the links between modes of behaviour, identity and sense of place, and the interactions between humans and nonhumans, are able to shed new light on our understandings of public perceptions and responses to air pollution in Christchurch.

Heterotextuality and Digital Foreplay: Cell phones and the culture of teenage romance

The now ubiquitous cell phone as digital media and communication technology invites a proliferation of uses and meanings. The ways in which young people have taken up cell phones in general and text messaging in particular seems to create cyborgian subjectivities in a refashioned mobile social network. This resulting digital-social network constructs a space in which young people perform identities that, while conventionally gendered in some ways, also show signs of increasing communicative competence, particularly in potentially romantic relationships. Text messaging seems to become a nonthreatening space where young people check each other out without risking as much shame or embarrassment as may occur in face-to-face encounters. By focusing on everyday human-machine entanglements using actor-network theory as a framework, it is evident that gender is produced by technological devices as well as by discourses and human forms of meaning making, thus confirming the absence of either essentialised gender or essentialised understandings of technology. Gender is performed through a proliferating network within which humans, machines and other actors are entangled.

Far from Being “Home Alone”: The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork

Despite persistent images to the contrary, most fieldworkers are accompanied. Yet, there has been limited discussion on the nature of accompanied fieldwork, particularly by geographers. Drawing on our experiences in three countries in the tropics, we discuss the dynamics of being accompanied in “the field” by our children and female co-researchers. Specifically, we focus on issues of access and rapport; the impacts of their presence on our positionality; and the implications these have for power relations and research outcomes. We demonstrate how being accompanied entangles our personal and professional selves and can result in more egalitarian power relations as we become “observers observed”. We argue that by paying attention to the dynamics of accompanied fieldwork, there is the potential to enhance the conceptual focus of our methodological concerns and to provide a more theoretically sophisticated mode of exploring the ways in which our multiple identities intersect while in “the field”.

Love and Money in an Age of Neoliberalism: Gender, Work, and Single Motherhood in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua

Based on qualitative research conducted in 1999 and 2001 with a group of single mothers in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, this paper examines the contradictory impacts of neoliberalism on work, based on the understanding that economic restructuring can generate both crisis and a space for changes in gender identities. By focusing on the broader picture of womens work and on the intersections between paid and unpaid work, it discusses what happens to these intersections in times of intense political and economic change. Despite the hardships caused by neoliberalism, it appears that work is a site in which gender ideologies can be challenged. The paper has four main sections. First, it explores the ways in which certain cultural processes are intensified under neoliberalism which affects the relationship between constructions of masculinity and femininity. Second, it assesses the impact of neoliberalism on domestic work and the implications of this for GAD (gender and development) understandings of the double burden and of how the balance of womens paid and unpaid work changes under neoliberalism. Third, it examines the ways in which hegemonic understandings of femininities and motherhood and revolutionary legacies can be resistant to the neoliberal present. Finally, it discusses how work under neoliberalism can be a site of female empowerment or self-esteem.

Shifting Networks of Power in Nicaragua: Relational Materialisms in the Consumption of Privatized Electricity

Drawing primarily on actor-network theory, this article explores the aftermath of electricity privatization in Nicaragua. Privatization has not gone well for most low-income consumers in Nicaragua, who have faced rising and unaffordable tariffs and frequent power cuts that have been economically and psychologically devastating. Scholarship on privatization has focused on the social injustices and exclusions that privatization often engenders, but very little attention has been paid to how privatization is enacted materially. To implement privatization successfully across space, privatizers have to delegate some of their action to nonhumans that they anticipate will function as black-boxed intermediaries. In landscapes of economic hardship and popular suspicion, however, these intermediaries sometimes turn into mediators or technologies with political effects. Electricity consumers have resorted to a range of tactics to subvert the strategies of Spanish multinational Unión Fenosa, which took over the distribution of electricity, and these tactics have involved the creative and opportunistic enrollment of nonhumans. By tracing the shifting associations between the heterogeneous actors that make up the electricity (actor-) network, I seek to illuminate the relational materialisms in the consumption of privatized electricity and their potential for political transformation. An actor-network theory approach enables us to observe, amidst the entanglement of neoliberalizing maneuvers and disabling effects, material practices and translations in the network that are not always disempowering for ordinary people. It also reveals the contingency of multinational power and the (un)making of the global political economy in the spaces of everyday life.

Hybrid Cultures of Postdevelopment: The Struggle for Popular Hegemony in Rural Nicaragua

Abstract This article contributes to contemporary debates around “postdevelopment” by examining the new social alliances that are reimagining, rearticulating, and refashioning development discourses and practices in Northern León, an impoverished region on Nicaraguas Pacific coastal strip. We examine the strategies and tactics whereby Northern Leóns citizens, local leaders, and nongovernmental organizations have reworked the regions cultural, political, and economic terrains in ways that negotiate and contest Northern Leóns marginalization by the Nicaraguan central government, and that challenge and reshape global spaces and imaginaries constituted through the disciplinary and regulatory discourses of international financial institutions and predatory multinational capital. We draw particularly on Gramscian perspectives and other contemporary theoretical engagements with neoliberalism, globalization, and postdevelopment in order to present the case of Northern León as an opportunity to think through the possibilities for forms of grassroots globalism that mobilize strategies of discursive activism, disarticulation/rearticulation, and “place-projection” in ways that destabilize and disrupt the linear temporalities and spatial fixities of mainstream development thought and practice.

Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and Transgressions of WikiLeaks

The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assanges assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.

A Functional Anarchy Love, Patriotism, and Resistance to Free Trade in Costa Rica

During the Bush administration, the United States ratified a free trade agreement with five Central American countries and the Dominican Republic. Ratification in Costa Rica was considerably delayed because of widespread popular opposition that led to a referendum in October 2007. The strategies used to gain a victory for the Yes campaign were opposed by the Patriotic Movement for No, a diverse network of neighborhood-based patriotic committees, trade unions, agricultural organizations, academics, women’s organizations, environmental movements, and the Church. Resistance to the agreement in Costa Rica is helping to dereify free trade doctrines and producing proliferating forms of political association that articulate credible and appealing alternatives to neoliberalism. The referendum unleashed a struggle for hegemony in Costa Rica that has important implications for state—civil society relations and the rescaling of state power.