Juliet Jane Fall

Planning Protected Areas Across Boundaries

SUMMARY This article, in two parts, starts by examining the process at play in the definition of a coherent planning unit for protected areas. The argument centers around the differences between the natural and social science approaches to defining the boundaries to such areas, indicating how the two have influenced planning. The difficult challenge of combining both visions is stressed, and illustrated by a discussion of the concepts of region and bioregion. The second part of the paper examines the biosphere reserve model and its application to areas spanning international boundaries. The five existing transboundary biosphere reserves, all situated in Europe, illustrate some of the issues facing transboundary planning.

Divide and rule: constructing human boundaries in 'boundless nature'

Rather than creating unproblematic ‘natural’ spaces, the definition of boundaries within protected areas formally reifies the modernist duality of nature and culture, leading to practical management conflicts between protected area managers. The current conception of protected area boundaries is the result of the historical construction of nature and space. The argument retraces the changes in the way these boundaries appeared and were subsequently defined in four consecutive ‘World Congress on National Parks’. The corresponding changes in the definition of insider and outsider are discussed, linked to the conception of what is ‘natural’ in the landscape. Such conceptions need to be examined critically, particularly if the expressed desire of transcending the modernist divide is to be realised in the future.

Lost geographers: power games and the circulation of ideas within Francophone political geographies

This paper takes a reflexive look at the production of scientific discourses by exploring the context and practice of political geography within the Francophone world. This article builds on the idea that the fundamental difference between Anglo and Francophone geographies relates to how theoretical writings and texts circulate, rather than to fundamental differences of content or topic. It examines how certain texts, ideas and thinkers have circulated, suggesting in particular that it is timely to reconsider Claude Raffestins contributions on power, territory and territoriality. It argues that his critical theoretical framework, inspired by a number of authors including Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Luis Prieto, has been overlooked by Francophone and Anglo geographers for a number of institutional, conceptual and personal factors. By focusing on institutional structure, the nature of the academy and styles of debate in the Francophone world, and in confronting Claude Raffestin to both John Allen and Yves Lacostes geographies of power, this paper questions the divide between these two academic traditions.

Unbounded boundary studies and collapsed categories: rethinking spatial objects

This paper is a response to Reece Jones’ ‘Categories, borders and boundaries’ (2009) that aims to give an alternate proposal to rethink geographical categories and boundary studies. First, it examines the various meanings of the word ‘category’ as used in Jones’ paper. We then stress the importance of the processes involved in constructing spatialized and unspatialized categories as a central issue for social sciences. Using different examples such as the city and the nation state, we finally argue that the triad of reification—naturalization—fetishization is a good tool to analyse the social construction of geographical categories and boundaries.

Not a geography of what doesn’t exist, but a counter-geography of what does Rereading Giuseppe Dematteis’ Le Metafore della Terra

The shaping of geography as a discipline has been the result of a combination of productive and successful communication and missed opportunities, of presence and absence, of fluid travels of ideas and projects, but also of closures, impediments, good lessons that got lost. This paper suggests that using a counterfactual approach to draw attention to specific geographies that remained unfulfilled and poorly known helps to think beyond linear genealogies. By discussing a particular book called Le Metafore della Terra by Giuseppe Dematteis, published in Italian in 1985 but largely unknown in English-language geography, we reflect on what happened when it was published – and also specifically what did not happen and, cautiously, what might have happened. In his book, Dematteis took issue with geography and geographers’ past and contemporary mistakes, suggesting that the depoliticization of geographical knowledge had served merely powerful interests, rendering the imagining of alternative worlds impossible. He picked apart sacred tenets of the geographical tradition: escapist fantasies of exploration and conquest, the poorly problematized use of scale, the faith in the power of cartographic reason, the metaphysics of organicism, and the magical belief in the power of the market. Here, by extending the idea of counterfactual histories to look inwards to the discipline of geography itself, we choose to engage with what might have happened if this particular critical approach to geography had become better known, exploring why this radical project for the discipline was cast aside, including by the author himself. In so doing, we consider how scholars are located in so-called ‘peripheral’ places of production of geographical knowledge, discussing how this helps to understand the circulation and non-circulation of certain ideas. We use these alternatively rewritten geographies to show how dominant linear narratives of the emerging of critical thinking in the 1980s tell us an incomplete story, suggesting instead a tangled, multiple history of the discipline. We are interested in how scientific knowledge is communicated and received, how this exposes both the multi-sited nature of knowledge production and circulation, and cultural and national differences in the reception of science, and what this says about the possibility of critical thinking and progressive ideas having real impact.

Embodied geographies, naturalised boundaries, and uncritical geopolitics in La Frontière Invisible

In this paper I explore embodiment and spatiality by discussing the example of a conflict between competing representations of landscapes and the female body in the two volumes of the comic books La Frontière Invisible. This piece of fiction deals specifically and explicitly with a reassessment of the gaze in the production of knowledge by examining maps as tools of power, control, and colonisation. However, despite an apparent desire to reject reactionary political approaches, the authors seem to associate the naturalised (female) body with (naturalised) geopolitical scenarios by fetishising the body through complex discursive transcodings between women and nature. In contrast to this, in this paper I suggest considering the body as a site and space of resistance to (political) imposition. Drawing on both feminist geography and critical geopolitics, I suggest an alternative way of considering the consequences of embodied geographies for cartography by examining the links between naturalised bodies and naturalised political boundaries. The main argument is that the body, by posing an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to regular ways of producing cartographic knowledge, entails the possibility of a counterstrategic reinscription of spatial discourses and the creation of an alternative, more ethical cartography. This ethical cartography is rooted in embodied recalcitrance to imposed inscriptions associated with hegemonic positions.

Reading Claude Raffestin: Pathways for a Critical Biography

In this paper I suggest fleshing out and making material the authorial voice by exploring pathways for writing a critical biography of Claude Raffestin, a Swiss geographer writing since the late 1970s up to the present day. In exploring his life and contribution as part of the wider Francophone tradition of social and political geography, I aim to engage further with the debate on the circulation of knowledge and the alleged hegemony of the English language within geography. In doing this, I suggest that the term ‘disciplinary Orientalism’ might help to think through some of the contradictions in geography, which both draws heavily from foreign critical thinkers, often removed from the spaces and contexts of debate they are/were writing in, and simultaneously ignores foreign geographical traditions and contributions. Building on Raffestins work—and drawing from diverse sources, including his writings, reviews of his work, and new interview material—I explore how his geographies might make sense here and now, to the extent that ‘here’ is inevitably an uncertain place, not only in where this paper is written and read but also because reading always takes place in-between contexts. Through this example I explore how scholars are embodied and located in uncertain places and points to the multiple circulations and noncirculations of theory and praxis within geography.

COMMUNICATING INVASION: UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL ANXIETIES AROUND MOBILE SPECIES

Abstract This article explores how discourses of threat concerning invasive alien species emerge and how ordinary citizens understand, receive and appropriate them. It explores the ambivalence of scientists and policy‐makers using emotive or highly charged terms and vocabulary, arguing that many make strategic yet cautious use of fear to raise awareness. Based both on in‐depth interviews of scientists and/or expert policy‐makers involved in communicating with the public about invasive species, as well as citizen focus groups, it further discusses how individuals reflect critically on the terms used in written documents. We argue that the various scientific uncertainties concerning the impacts of invasive species foster and feed other domains of social anxiety beyond the usual concern previous research has shown for xenophobic connotations. These include wider fears about environmental technology, science and expertise, changing environments, and threats to human health.