Ruth Panelli

Placing Well-Being: A Maori Case Study of Cultural and Environmental Specificity

Studies of well-being have been dominated by perspectives that stem from Western, health-science notions of individual’s health and psychological development. In recent times, however, there has been a developing sensitivity to the cultural and place-specific contexts affecting the health and well-being of contrasting populations in different environments. Drawing on these advances, this article explores the potential in conceptualizing a place-based notion of well-being that recognizes the cultural and environmental specificity of well-being for specific populations in a given setting. We argue that a geographical approach to well-being enables the linking of culture and environment for future indigenous research into both ecosystems and human health. Taking the case of an indigenous population, we identify the contexts that affect Maori well-being and we argue that key sociocultural and environmental dimensions need to be integrated for a culturally appropriate approach to Maori well-being.

Young rural lives: strategies beyond diversity

The experience and competence of rural young people has been increasingly recognized in a range of social sciences over the past decade, Research in a variety of different settings is demonstrating the diversity of young peoples lives, but recently calls have been made to retain this acknowledgement of heterogeneous youth while working towards more generic or integrated understandings of youth geographies and so forth. This special issue draws together a range of contemporary work focusing on the lives of young people in different rural environments and cultures. This Editorial article discusses the papers and reports in relation to a set of strategies that may guide further development of rural youth studies. It is noted that a good deal of youth research has undertaken the important initial step of documenting the varied conditions of young peoples lives. However, more integrated and conceptual understandings of rural youth can look to identify generic dimensions and processes that shape their lives in rural cultures, economies, societies and spaces. A framework is proposed to assist in more explicitly theorizing the notion of young People; the contexts in which young people live; and the negotiations and multiple relations young people engage in while constructing dynamic (often creative and sometimes contested) understandings and experiences of their worlds

Why Community? Reading Difference and Singularity with Community

Geographers have increasingly recognised that communities are not homogeneous social formations but contain great diversity and are meaningful in a variety of material, relational and political ways. This has resulted in the apparently contradictory notion of “community with difference”; that community may be performed even while heterogeneity and disagreement are present. But geographers have yet to address satisfactorily the question of why communities continue to be the subject of fascination and study when attempts at definition have proved so problematic. Following on from Youngs critique of community, this paper first engages the work of Nancy and Secomb to consider Nancys conceptualisation of ‘singularity’ as a way to explain the human construction of—and possible need for—notions of community. In short we address the why community? question. Using a rural Australian case study, we demonstrate that meanings of community reflect many differences. This case also illustrates the role of human singularity in the negotiation of these differences, defining the manner in which individual perspectives of community are articulated as well as underpinning peoples responses and struggles when ideas of community are challenged.

A Community Issue? Rural Women's Feelings of Safety and Fear in New Zealand

Following previous geographies of gender and fear this article is stimulated by the dominance of urban accounts of womens experience of safety and fear in different ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces1. We argue that rural and emotional geography perspectives on these issues provide new directions for both a feminist critique of the notion of ‘rural community’ and broadening of the emotional geographies literature. Communities have been studied at length in rural geography, yet the term itself can be problematic and its emotional potency has not been rigorously interrogated. Differing experiences of the rural community in relation to characteristics of, for example, class, gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity have led to a questioning of idyllic assumptions attached to rural life and the construction of ideas about the rural community. In this article we extend existing debates to argue that constructions of the rural community as an emotionally harmonious, safe and peaceful space may be challenged by womens experiences of fear in various rural spaces. We take the specific case of two contrasting Aotearoa/New Zealand communities and document how women negotiate personal feelings of safety and fear in their own areas. We highlight the absence of a binary of fear/safety, noting that women often live with and through these emotions in more complex ways. Finally, we close by placing this discussion within broader reflections on community as an emotionally charged term and as a rhetorical space of concern and/or responsibility in agency discourse and crime management.

Teaching Research Through Field Studies: A Cumulative Opportunity for Teaching Methodology to Human Geography Undergraduates

Notwithstanding its iconic status within geography, the debate continues about how fieldwork should be taught to undergraduate students. The authors engage with this debate and argue that field studies should follow the teaching of research methodology. In this paper they review relevant literature on the place of fieldwork in geography training, the importance of problem solving and the challenges of group learning. Drawing on these themes they outline the 300-level human geography fieldwork course taught at Otago University (NZ) and review student responses to this curriculum. They record observations on both the field studies course and the linkages between it and the preceding research methodology training students receive. They show that while the wish for more ‘real’ or ‘hands on’ field practice is widely expressed by their students, so is satisfaction with the group learning approach adopted in the 300-level course and with the range of personal skills covered in the research methodology and field studies training received.

Narratives of Community and Change in a Contemporary Rural Setting: The Case of Duaringa, Queensland

Contemporary rural communities are being affected by a range of changes and processes in Australia, including major changes in demographic patterns; the organisation and performance of primary industries; levels of government support for economic and social infrastructure; and wider developments in technology and changing socio-cultural values. The impact of these processes has been felt unequally and small communities which have had a traditionally close relationship with agricultural industries are particularly challenged. The current paper reports on one such community and provides the opportunity to analyse both the the substance and cultural understandings of such forms of rural change/uncoupling. The paper presents local narratives of community and change in Duaringa, Central Queensland and responds to recent international literature suggesting that the meanings and politics of rural change are as significant as the economic trends that are occurring. The Duaringa narratives demonstrate both the substance and dynamics of expressions of community (and loss). And the paper concludes that these meanings are also influenced by wider processes including consumption-oriented lifestyles and national interests in South East Asian relations.

Teaching Research Methodology to Geography Undergraduates: rationale and practice in a human geography programme

Recent acknowledgement that geography students should gain knowledge and experience in the research process has not been matched by accounts of how this experience should be taught. In human geography, apart from a small selection of informative textbooks, scholars have remained relatively quiet on the matter of curriculum design and teaching programmes that would provide this experience. Instead, attention has been devoted to specific, individual research skills or selected intersections between teaching and research. In contrast, this paper argues that it is important to consider how we might best teach research methodology in a comprehensive manner to human geography undergraduates. The authors identify pedagogic and pragmatic reasons for teaching this material and then address some of the difficulties and challenges associated with this endeavour. Taking one New Zealand human geography example, the aims and structure of a 200-level course that attempts to provide such an example of research methodology teaching are then sketched out. Responses to the course are noted and followed by reflections on the pragmatic and disciplinary challenges that continue to exist.

Directions to enlarge our worlds? Social and cultural geography in New Zealand1

For a relatively small country, New Zealand is striking for its successive migrations and complex cultural politics. Following earlier arrivals of Maori, Abel Tasman ‘discovered’ the country in 1642, a fact commemorated by prominent poet Allen Curnow (1974), who in 1942 wrote, ‘Simply by sailing in a new direction/You could enlarge the world’. These words are emblematic of other geographical journeys (Kearns and Nichol 2004), for in the twenty-first century, the lines suggest the expanding and globalized subjectivities of New Zealanders, as well as the increasingly fluid boundaries of scholarship in social and cultural geography. Indeed, ours is a physically isolated country, yet one that is intimately connected to wider (predominantly western) worlds and ideas. For instance, debates concerning globalization have been vigorous here, and have spawned influential commentary (e.g. Larner and Le Heron 2002a, 2002b). Likewise core themes and approaches in social and cultural geography noted in AngloAmerican traditions resonate (though varyingly) within the research and teaching in this country (Panelli 2004). Geography is taught in six universities although few scholars focus on socio-cultural concerns. The fact that the community of academic geographers is small and that there are no formalized study groups has meant that the boundaries of professional interest are arguably more fluid than in the United Kingdom and North America. One result is that some colleagues who might not regard themselves as socio-cultural geographers per se intermittently make incisive contributions to the field (e.g. Britton, Le Heron and Pawson 1992; Le Heron and Pawson 1996; Roche 1997; Pawson 1992). Another is the fact that regular overseas visitors have provided stimulating collaborations and commentaries in social and cultural topics (e.g. Alun Joseph, Jo Little and Paul Cloke, to mention a few). This report cannot attempt an exhaustive account of all social and cultural geographies, including those generated by scholars who have spent passing or long-term periods in Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 7, No. 2, April 2006

Timely Partnerships? Contrasting Geographies of Activism in New Zealand and Australia

Analyses of activism have inspired geographers for many years, but most of this work has focused on relatively short time-frames, events and struggles. This paper suggests that there is much to be gained from a greater engagement with issues of time and time—spaces. It outlines and applies the contrasting conceptions of chrono/chora and kairo/topos notions of time—space as potentially useful ways to interrogate geographies of activism. The paper focuses on two specific forms of activism—an Australian women’s ‘Heritage Project’ and a New Zealand ‘Fishbowl’ evaluation of a community development programme— to show how politics is contingent on diverse temporal as well as spatial conditions. It reveals the complex navigations that are made as these politics are negotiated via both mutual learning processes and the forging of new activist—state relations. It is concluded that these ‘timely partnerships’ have involved moving beyond adversarial conceptions of ‘state’ and ‘activist’, but at the risk of reconstituting activism as ‘social capital’.

Creating collaborative living history: the case of the Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Heritage Collection.

The recognition and conservation of contemporary history is a growing interest of both professional and lay communities. In creating archives and cultural collections of local and wider interest, collaborative partnerships can produce rich and innovative constructions of history. This paper outlines the development of the Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Heritage Collection which involves a collaborative partnership committed to the appropriate preservation of cultural materials and stories associated with the Women on Farms Gatherings. The Gatherings are an annual event organised in various rural communities across Victoria since 1990, and this paper records the women’s own recognition of their heritage, and the partnership that was subsequently established between representatives from the Gatherings and Museum Victoria. This arrangement enabled pathways in history-making to be forged. The scope of the collection and decision making processes supporting its management are outlined, prior to an analysis of how this collection illustrates generic and theoretical issues surrounding the innovations that can be supported in creating living history. This article has been peer-reviewed.