Michael R. Glass

Teaching critical reflexivity in short-term international field courses: practices and problems

This study critiques the use of critical reflexivity in short-term international field courses. Critical reflexivity’s benefits include preparing students for professional research, deepening their learning, and giving the chance to see how student perspectives on fieldwork sites are influenced by their own identity and positionality. I use an inter-disciplinary review of reflexivity to describe four challenges faculty must address if they wish to train students to use reflexive practices in the field. I then describe student observations from a short-term field course to Southeast Asia that incorporated reflexivity and argue that faculty should include reflexivity cautiously on short-term field courses.

Innovation and Interdependencies in the New Zealand Custom Boat-Building Industry

Custom boat building in New Zealand is a globally competing industry comprising a densely interconnected community of small and medium-sized enterprises. Innovation in product and production processes is an essential feature in the industrys success. This article investigates innovation and interdependencies in the New Zealand boat-building industry and explores the notion that it is an example of an innovative regional milieu. The study includes a benchmark survey of the industry completed in 1998, which evaluates the sources of information and innovation, as well as a series of intensive interviews with leading firms to ascertain the characteristics of innovation. The peculiar cultural and social factors of New Zealand - and especially of Auckland, where the industry is spatially clustered - are found to have been significant in the growth of the industry. Furthermore, the contemporary prominence of sports and recreational boating has facilitated the industrys recent growth and exporting. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.

The World through Glass: Developing Novel Methods with Wearable Computing for Urban Videographic Research

Google Glass was deployed in an Urban Studies field course to gather videographic data for team-based student research projects. We evaluate the potential for wearable computing technology such as Glass, in combination with other mobile computing devices, to enhance reflexive research skills, and videography in particular, during field research. The utility as well as the limitations of Google Glass are discussed, including its actual and potential application for teaching and data gathering purposes in the field. As such, this article constitutes one of the first instances of evaluating Google Glass as a social science research tool.

Enhancing field research methods with mobile survey technology

This paper assesses the experience of undergraduate students using mobile devices and a commercial application, iSurvey, to conduct a neighborhood survey. Mobile devices offer benefits for enhancing student learning and engagement. This field exercise created the opportunity for classroom discussions on the practicalities of urban research, the survey data was available for immediate analysis, and students felt they were conducting meaningful research. The module experience supports recent research finding that mobile devices offer significant benefits for instructors, but using mobile devices also creates potential risks (to the students, equipment, and data) that must be considered while planning modules and during instruction.

International geography field courses: practices and challenges

Abstract This paper introduces a special issue of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education on the practices and challenges associated with taking undergraduate geography students abroad on field courses. I argue that geography is positioned to benefit from both the internationalization of higher education and the demand by students for global experiences. The papers in this special issue focus on three aspects of international field courses: curriculum design and international partnerships, student engagement during short-duration field courses, and how encounters with place can be aided through reflection and play. I conclude with suggestions for future research on international field courses.

Does the middle class have rights to the city? Contingent rights and the struggle to inhabit Stuyvesant Town, New York

From the housing projects inception, New Yorks Stuyvesant Town has been an unlikely site for struggles over inhabitance and social justice. Robert Moses used a public–private partnership to displace residents of the Gashouse district for the initially whites-only affordable housing project. Assisted by local rent-stabilisation legislation, Stuyvesant Town persisted as an affordable housing option until the early 2000s, when the new owners began converting the properties to market-rate rentals. An unlikely coalition of residents mobilised to block the sale, and by the late 2000s rent controls were re-established. This case links significant themes regarding social justice and housing including rent stabilisation, community activism, and neoliberal marketisation. We evaluate the utility of the right to the city perspective for understanding middle-class struggles in the context of housing financialisation. We argue that Lefebvres right to the city applies to the Stuyvesant Town context, although the movement to protect affordable housing was led by middle-income residents who are not the traditional working-class agents associated with his concept. While remaining sympathetic to recent critiques over the vulgarisation of Lefebvres principles, we argue that a focus on spatially contingent rights can transcend both a limited ‘politics of turf’ and empty ‘rights talk’ to create space for broadly empowered and inclusive communities.

Advanced manufacturing as an online case study for global geography education

Advanced manufacturing continues to be an important sector for emerging and industrialized economies, therefore, remaining an important topic for economic geography education. This article describes a case study created for the Association of American Geographers Center for Global Geography Education and its implementation. The international machine tool industry is particularly useful for introducing students to the regional impacts of broader economic processes.

Metropolitan Reform in Allegheny County: The Local Failure of National Urban Reform Advocacy, 1920-1929

During the 1920—1929 period, the Civic Club of Allegheny County supported political consolidation of the county’s municipalities and townships. Civic Club leaders sought boundary reform to tackle perceived social problems and political inefficiencies in the Pittsburgh region. This policy was aligned with a national network of Progressive urban reformers, some of whom guided the Civic Club’s plans. These reform efforts culminated in the 1929 Metropolitan Charter, which was rejected by Allegheny County voters. Traditional explanations of this failed vote emphasize the high threshold for success of the charter. However, such accounts ignore the apparent disjunction between the national perception of regional problems and the local reception of recommended solutions. Reform advocates were unable to adapt national Progressive theories to the local context of Allegheny County. This article first describes the national network of Progressive Era research that prescribed metropolitan solutions for urban problems in cities such as Pittsburgh. The article then examines attempts by the Civic Club of Allegheny County to introduce these theories to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The failure of the 1929 Metropolitan Charter is reevaluated, and the implications of these events for current proponents of metropolitanism and political reform are discussed.

The Lingering Effects of Neighborhood Appraisal: Evaluating Redlining's Legacy in Pittsburgh

Place-based classifications can create long-standing influences on neighborhood fortunes. Redlining is a classic example of these unintended effects. The Federal Home Loan Bank Board developed housing appraisal standards subsequently codified in Residential Security Maps. By georeferencing the 1937 map of Pittsburgh, we evaluated the spatial legacies of neighborhood appraisals. We identify persistent neighborhood conditions by comparing neighborhood evaluations with normalized census data from 1970 to 2000. Contemporary conditions correspond with security grades from the 1937 map. Concentrations of poverty, people of color, and vacancy persist in historically redlined areas. Concentrations of high incomes, home values, and homeownership persist elsewhere.

Seeing, feeling, and showing ‘bodies-in-place’: exploring reflexivity and the multisensory body through videography

Abstract This paper considers the challenge of representing embodied, multisensory experience of ‘bodies-in-place’ through film, an audio-visual medium. The first section, ‘Seeing bodies’, sets the context within a more general ‘return to the senses’ in the social sciences, and particularly within ethnographic fieldwork, in order to reconnect place and sense through mobile encounter. ‘Feeling bodies’, the second section on sensory reflexivity and positionality, considers the ensuing question regarding how researchers themselves are emplaced in embodied, ethnographic contexts. We argue for ways that the multiple senses of reflexive ‘bodies-in-place’ can be evoked or conveyed through multimodal (audio-visual) media, like film, especially through dialogue in accompanying screenings. The third section, ‘Showing bodies-in-place’, examines multimodal videographic practices that emerged whilst conducting interviews, ethnographic observation and impromptu videographic experiments in the field. The final section, ‘Showing bodies’, builds from those emergent practices to offer a series of practical methodological suggestions and provocations for future research to solidify the case for the utility of a reflexive haptic videography within fieldwork.