Sallie A. Marston

The social construction of scale

Over the last ten years, scholars in human geography have been paying increasing theoretical and empirical attention to understanding the ways in which the production of scale is implicated in the production of space. Overwhelmingly, this work reflects a social constructionist approach, which situates capitalist production (and the role of the state, capital, labor and nonstate political actors) as of central concern. What is missing from this discussion about the social construction of scale is serious attention to the relevance of social reproduction and consumption. In this article I review the important literature on scale construction and argue for enlarging our scope for understanding scale to include the complex processes of social reproduction and consumption. I base my critique on a short case study which illustrates that attention to other processes besides production and other systems of domination besides capitalism can enhance our theorizing and improve our attempts to effect real social change.

States, scales and households: limits to scale thinking? A response to Brenner

Neil Brenner’s response (this issue) to ‘The social construction of scale’ (Marston, 2000) raises a host of excellent points that might, as he intends, help focus and refine the blossoming discussion of geographical scale. His larger argument, that the popularity of scale theories has led to a certain ‘analytical blunting’ of this sharply defined concept and that scale is increasingly conflated with broader discussions of space, is surely correct. Yet two aspects of Brenner’s response are troubling: first, the idiosyncratic genealogy of scale theories he wishes to assert; and second, the refusal of feminist arguments about the scale of the household. Both moves compound and exemplify rather than resolve the problem he identifies. In the hope of sharpening the analytical debate, therefore, we would like to offer a brief sympathetic critique of these two foundations of Brenner’s approach to scale theory. Our argument is that the analytical blunting of scale can best be countered through the constant reinvention of scale theory ahead of the fetishist juggernaut. For exactly this reason the original article insisted on the constitutive but largely unheralded role of social reproduction and consumption, in conjunction with social production, in the production of geographical scale. It seems to us that Brenner’s commitment to a politics of scale is, following Lefebvre, only ‘spacedeep’. Brenner argues quite astutely that in the current literature there is a ‘noticeable slippage’ between ‘notions of geographical scale’ and other geographical concepts such as ‘place, locality, territory, and space’. At least methodologically, he wants to establish a radical separation between arguments concerning the production of space and the production of scale to retard any morphing of scale into space and vice versa. This argument makes sense, up to a point: scale is a produced societal metric that differentiates space; it is not space per se. Yet ‘geographical scale’ is not simply a ‘hierarchically

Who are ‘The People’?: Gender, Citizenship, and the Making of the American Nation

Although theorization about the role of the state and nation building has been a key element in the revitalization of human geography in recent years, very little attention has been paid to the concept of citizenship and its relationship to the state and the nation. This paper is an attempt to draw arguments about citizenship, particularly as they relate to gender, into the current human geographic discourse on theories of the state and nationalism. An examination of some of the historical research on how cultural ideals about the natural roles of men and women interacted with the construction of the early American national community is undertaken. The focus is upon seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century liberal bourgeois notions about public and private life and the way in which the problematic relationship between gender and nationhood undermined republican claims to universal membership. Geographers interested in issues of state formation and nationalism are encouraged to consider the importance of feminist approaches to citizenship.

Introduction: feminist engagements with geopolitics

Here, we introduce a themed set of articles that, using diverse feminist knowledges and practices, aims to expose the force relations that operate through and upon bodies, such that particular ‘geopolitical’ subjectivities are enhanced, constrained and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited and often abandoned. The substantive scope of these articles highlights the relevance of such feminist analysis, not as a universalising framework, but as a project of universal reach. The empirical depth of this work, founded upon (variously) a committed period of fieldwork, the careful gathering of lengthy, in situ interviews, participant observation, focus groups, visual methodology and months spent in the archives highlights a complex, feminist ethics of care. Taken as a collection, what we hope these articles make clear are the manifold struggles within feminist analysis in regard to ‘researching with’ embodiment, agency, passivity, vulnerability, emotion, praxis and care.

Making difference: Conflict over Irish identity in the New York City St. Patrick's Day parade

Abstract The controversy surrounding the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade suggests that Irish ethnicity in the United States is still an important site of identity formation and fragmentation. In this paper I examine the New York City parades between 1990 and 2001 where a conflict has developed between the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, who want a place in the parade but have been denied entrance. The identity politics that surround the St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy suggest that for diasporic communities, ethnic and national identities are highly contested and that boundaries—some hard and fast, others more permeable—are constructed along any number of axes. For the construction of Irish identity in New York City within-group identity is disputed across a number of these axes with the most important difference being sexual identity, particularly when it is being performed in a public space.

Public rituals and community power: St. Patrick's day parades in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1841-1874

Abstract The development of a political strategy to address the uneven distribution of power and resources in a 19th-century American city is the focus of this paper. It is argued that public celebrations of St. Patricks Day in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts must be seen as something more than simple expressions of Irish tradition and culture. Instead, as the literature in social history is making increasingly clear, parades and other forms of mass public ritual are better characterized as demonstrations of community power and solidarity and serve as complex commentaries on the political economy of urban-industrial social relations. In Lowell, the parades were at first used to impress both the Yankee and the Irish communities with the spectacle of Irish respectability. Ultimately they were used to press for Irish participation in republican America on specifically Irish terms.

The politics of autonomous space

This paper offers a further exploration of ‘flat ontology’, an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, and formal treatments of space. Our previous work in this area aimed at developing the concept of the site – via site ontology – as an ‘event-space’ that describes the differential contours and pressures of aggregating and dispersing bodies. This paper’s contribution lies in considering how politics and political potentials are specified by such event-spaces. In geography and other fields, politics has nearly always been thought to proceed from and to exist for subjects, regardless of how they get theorized. Here we explore how the site might initiate politics that neither presuppose nor undergird individual subject positionalities or mass identitarian categories. We argue that subjectivity – widely understood to be the motive force in organizing politics – is often ‘suspended’ where bodies encounter or get enlisted in the unanticipated connections and relations that site ontology describes. Thus, our account understands the site as autonomous with respect to the subject in two crucial ways. The site is: (1) organizationally autonomous: its rules emerge from its specific, localized relations and this material immanence makes the site the legislator of its own assembly; and (2) politically autonomous: that is, not conditioned by the political schemata of subjectivity per se, even though sites diversely and differently enlist and reshuffle bodies that often attend to, direct, participate in, and inhabit subjective politics.

The changing face of cities : a study of development cycles and urban form

Preface 1. Background to urban morphology 2. Fluctuations in urban development 3. Land values and land use 4. Innovation and planning 5. Fringe belts 6. Residential growth and change 7. Commercial cores 8. Conclusion

Flattening Ontologies of Globalization: The Nollywood Case

In this article we offer some criticisms regarding the spatial ontologies that have underwritten theories of globalization. We evaluate different approaches to understanding their workings, each of which must grapple with the problem of connecting the local and the global, and contrast these to that of our recent work aimed at elaborating a ‘flat ontology’. The central feature of this alternative ontology is the site: a material localization characterized by differential relations through which one site is connected to other sites, out of which emerges a social space that can be understood to extend, however unevenly and temporarily, across distant places. Yet, in light of its focus on practices—on situated sayings and doings—our ontology must refuse the spatial imaginaries that underpin nearly all discussions of globalization. To illustrate our position we examine the practices of popular filmmaking within Lagos, Nigeria (Nollywood). This site is an entry point for comprehending and enlarging upon the political implications of our ontology—one that is meant not only to rethink globalization but to unsettle the abstractions that enable its expanding hegemony.

The Art of Socioecological Transformation

This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the “work” art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geographys recent interest in “active experimentations and anticipatory interventions” in the face of the challenges posed by the environmental and social uncertainties of the Anthropocene. We propose two dimensions to the force of art with respect to these concerns. First, it provides a site and set of practices from which scientists, artists, and communities can come to recognize as well as transform relations between humans and nonhumans. Second, it encourages an accounting of the constitutive force of matter and things with implications for politics and knowledge production. Through these two dimensions, we explore how the arts can enable forms of socioecological transformation and, further, how things might be different in the future, enabling us to explore who and what might play a part in defining and moving toward such a future.