Robert M. Vanderbeck

Masculinities and Fieldwork: Widening the discussion

Although recent work on masculinities has emphasised the complex ways in which masculinities are produced, performed and interpreted in different contexts, to date these insights have been given little consideration in relation to the process of ethnographic research itself. In this paper, I explore the negotiation of masculinities during fieldwork, with an emphasis on issues confronting male researchers who fail to conform to dominant expectations of ‘manliness’ which have currency in a given setting. I review how male social scientists have written about their fieldwork experiences, and note that many of these accounts in some ways serve to reinscribe the hegemonic masculine positions of their authors. Through a discussion of my own fieldwork with young people in a British voluntary organisation, I address how my masculinity was critiqued and policed, particularly by young men. I conclude by calling for a wider discussion of masculinities and fieldwork. However, I also note my ambivalence about writing the gendered self into research, if this means that those who conform to hegemonic ideals will be validated in reaffirming these identities in print while others are asked to expose the ways in which they fail to do their gender ‘right’. Aunque obras recientes de masculinidades han enfatizado las maneras complejas en que masculinidades se producen, se representan su papel, y se interpretan en contextos diferentes, hasta la fecha estas perspicacias no han dado mucha consideración con relación al proceso mismo de investigación etnográfica. En este artículo, exploro la negociación de masculinidades durante el trabajo de campo, con un énfasis de temas se enfrentan investigadores masculinos los cuales no se conformen de las expectaciones dominantes de ‘hombría’, lo que tiene valor en escenarios específicos. Reviso como científicos sociales masculinos han escrito sobre sus experiencias en el campo, y noto que muchas de estos relatos en algunos modos sirven para reinscribir las posiciones hegemónicas masculinas de sus autores. A través de una discusión de mi propio trabajo de campo con jóvenes de una organisación voluntaria británica, concluyo que requerimos una discusión mas amplia de masculinidades y trabajo de campo. Sin embargo, también noto mi ambivalencia de escribir su género mismo dentro de su investigación, si se significa que los que se conforman a las ideales hegemónicas estén validado en reafirmando sus identidades publicado, mientras se preguntan otros a revelar las maneras en que se fracasen para hacer su género ‘correcto’.

Morality plays and money matters: towards a situated understanding of the politics of homosexuality in Uganda

Since the drafting of Ugandas anti-homosexuality bill in 2009, considerable attention has been paid both in Uganda and across the African continent to the political and social significance of homosexual behaviour and identity. However, current debates have not adequately explained how and why anti-homosexual rhetoric has been able to gain such popular purchase within Uganda. In order to move beyond reductive representations of an innate African homophobia, we argue that it is necessary to recognise the deep imbrication of sexuality, family life, procreation and material exchange in Uganda, as well as the ways in which elite actors (including government officials, the media and religious leaders) are able to manipulate social anxieties to further particular ends. We employ a discourse analysis of reporting in the state-owned newspaper New Vision , first considering how the issue of homosexuality has been represented in relation to wider discourses regarding threats to public morality and national sovereignty. Then, through fieldwork undertaken in Uganda in 2009, we explore three key themes that offer deeper insights into the seeming resonance of this popular rhetoric about homosexuality: constructions of the family, the nature of societal morality, and understandings about reciprocity and material exchange in contemporary Ugandan society.

Anti-Nomadism, Institutions, and the Geographies of Childhood

Despite an increasing interest in the geographies of childhood, geographical research has given little attention to issues concerning young people from traditionally semi-nomadic groups, such as Gypsies and other Travellers. In this paper I explore the discursive construction of Traveller childhood within contemporary Britain, with an emphasis on the ways in which state educational discourse constructs young Travellers as needing greater involvement with the ‘mainstream’ education system. I draw on a range of sources, including documents, participant observation, and interviews with practitioners in Traveller education conducted between 1998 and 2001. I argue that contemporary discourse often continues to reflect long-standing notions of cultural disadvantage and deficit which have often been applied to Travellers, although more subtly expressed than in the past. I also argue that childrens rights discourses are often employed to construct Traveller parents as obstacles to their childrens development and well-being, and that these discourses can be used to legitimise various exertions of power (such as legal measures to prosecute parents). The evidence of the research highlights the need for more nuanced, empirically informed theorisations of the interface between Traveller children and state institutions than has generally been the case to date.

Introduction: geographies of exclusion, inclusion and belonging in young lives

The papers that comprise this theme issue on Exclusion, Inclusion, and Belonging emerged from a set of sessions on children’s geographies conducted at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New Orleans in February 2003. In many respects, these themes are familiar ones for geographers interested in childhood and youth. One of the central projects of recent work in children’s geographies, for example, has been the analysis of young people’s exclusion from full participation in society’s activities and spaces by both formal legal frameworks and everyday practices that serve to naturalize adult authority. However, the papers in this collection by Caitlin Cahill, David Dodman, Louise Holt, Peter Hopkins, Kathryn Morris-Roberts, and Pamela Wridt collectively enhance our mappings of familiar territory while also pushing us to explore challenging new directions empirically, theoretically, and methodologically. In particular, the papers enrich our understanding of how various dimensions of social difference (including ‘race’, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexuality, and disability) are implicated in processes and experiences of exclusion, inclusion, and belonging at multiple scales (cf. Holloway and Valentine, 2000). The young participants in this diverse set of studies, as the authors demonstrate, often reproduce broader societal discourses and practices which serve to ‘other’ particular groups of young people, but they are also active cultural producers in their own right, capable of challenging exclusionary discourses and practices and creating their own complex systems of inclusion and belonging. In addition, the papers illustrate the increasingly diverse range of ‘inclusive’ methods being employed by geographers which allow young people greater latitude to express their views, represent their lives, and, in some cases, even to frame research questions and shape research agendas. Before discussing the individual contributions of the papers in greater depth, however, we briefly review some of the key ways in which themes of exclusion, inclusion, and belonging have featured in broader debates in the social sciences and specifically within children’s geographies. The concept of exclusion has featured prominently in academic and social policy discourses over the past several decades, perhaps most notably in the countries of the European Union (where ‘social exclusion’ is a major political and academic

Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness

Abstract The U.S. state of Vermont is often portrayed as a place where “race” is of little significance, yet notions of whiteness are central to how the state has been represented and represents itself. A critical analysis of historical and contemporary economies of representation examines how Vermont has been imagined as one of the last remaining spaces of authentic Yankee whiteness while more recently becoming an imagined homeland for particular brands of white liberal politics and social practice in the United States. Narratives of white Vermont identity have often explicitly drawn on oppositions to other forms of whiteness, particularly those associated with the U.S. South, in constructing an image of a comparatively racially benign Yankee whiteness. Recent right-wing discourses have explicitly attempted to construct Vermont whiteness as outside the American mainstream (not least through its discursive association with gay and lesbian sexualities), suggesting a need for geographical work on the (re)configuration of whiteness to reconsider where “normal” American whiteness is imagined to reside. The examination of the case of Vermont highlights the need for future geographical research to attend to continuities between various territorialized constructions of whiteness as well as contestations within whiteness.

New York Encounters: Religion, Sexuality, and the City:

This paper explores questions of sexual difference and religious belief in relation to recent debates in urban studies and geography on urban encounters. Although it has been widely suggested that increased contact between members of different groups is an important driver for tolerant and respectful intergroup relations, there is need for more careful consideration of the kinds of sites that actually facilitate ‘meaningful encounters’. Specifically, we draw on empirical research in Episcopalian churches in New York City and examine how straight-identified parishioners and clergy narrate and perceive their encounters with the citys LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) population. Moving beyond the traditional focus on public space in the literature on cosmopolitan urbanism, we examine how churches serve as ‘micropublics’ which organize, facilitate, and/or limit encounters with sexual difference. To capture the tension between orthodox theological understandings of human sexuality and lived experiences in a metropolitan context where homosexuality is expressed relatively openly, the discussion focuses in particular on an evangelical case-study parish, where the church leadership is opposed to full LGBT inclusion in the church.

Youth, Racism, and Place in the Tony Martin Affair

This paper provides an analysis of media discourse surrounding the arrest, trial, and conviction of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin for the murder of 16-year old Fred Barras, a Traveller from Newark, Nottinghamshire. The paper argues that discourses about Travellers (re)constructed in the media during the Martin affair showed evidence of both older, stereotypical representations of Travellers and newer ways of locating them in relation to contemporary societal anxieties about “dangerous youth”, the “underclass”, and “social exclusion”. The coverage was often emblematic of political discourses in Britain, which too often emphasise the moral failings of the “excluded” without any significant discussion of the sources of inequalities.

Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness

Although there has been rapid recent growth in the volume of research on both whiteness and childhood within geography, these literatures have only infrequently intersected explicitly. In this paper, I argue that a focus on narratives of childhood and child rearing can significantly enrich current understandings of how imaginative geographies of American (non)whiteness are sustained and reproduced. I develop this argument using a case study of recent narratives concerning one well-known program for children living in New York City, the Fresh Air Fund, which arranges for ‘inner-city’ children (most of whom identify as black or Latino) to spend portions of their summers living with host families (most of whom are white) in rural and suburban areas. The activities of the fund generate regular media coverage in both New York City and many of the destination communities, contributing to a wider public narrative concerning what white families and spaces have to offer ‘inner-city’ children. Drawing on journalistic accounts produced over the past two decades within one important destination site for the program, the US state of Vermont, I examine the racialized imaginative geographies of city, country, and suburb mobilized and reproduced within these stories of the Fund and its effects. I specifically argue that these accounts (re)script whiteness such that it becomes a solution to, rather than a source of, inequalities.

Sexuality, Activism, and Witness in the Anglican Communion: The 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops

The international Anglican Communion is a key site for struggles over the status of gays and lesbians within Christian churches. This article examines the forms that movements for gay and lesbian inclusion have taken in the Communion through an analysis of collective action at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a central event in Anglicanisms institutional structure. The analysis builds on recent critiques of the state-centric orientation of much social movement research, arguing that intrareligious movements provide important sites for understanding contemporary processes of social change. Although prior accounts of the sexuality debates within Anglicanism have tended to provide relatively monolithic portrayals of a “gay rights lobby,” activists at Lambeth employed diverse and contested repertoires of action. Although some use was made of conspicuously oppositional protest, many campaigners framed their activities as forms of Christian witness emanating from within the boundary of Anglicanism (rather than the field of secular politics). Gay and lesbian groups sought to complicate overly binaristic notions of conservative (or traditional) versus liberal Christians, stressing aspects of their Christian orthodoxy and their commitment to patterns of lifelong partnership and monogamy. At a moment when many secular gay and lesbian organizations are taking more notice of religion, there is a need for future research to consider how gay and lesbian Christian movements will engage with and influence wider equality struggles.

Ecological Identity Work in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and a Case Study

This paper develops and extends the concept of ecological identity work through an investigation of issues of identity among students studying the environment at one US university. We conceptualize identity work as both an individual and group process through which students locate themselves in relation to particular, relatively preformed ecological identities, while also attempting to redefine the boundaries of ecological identity itself. Using interview and participant observation data we ask what kinds of ecological identity work takes place among students and who is involved in defining and policing ecological identities. We argue that this approach can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between environmental education, philosophy and action.