Conferences for 2013

Thanks to the part sponsorship of the Geographical Society of Ireland, I am off to the Nordic Geographers’ Conference in June. The conference is in Reykjavik and so much of the first few days will be an attempt to understand why the sun hardly sets. Like some others I am planning for 2013 (CIG, ISASR), planning for these events means bending current research interests to suit conference themes. I’m speculating that this session is the best suited to where I am right now, about one year to go on my thesis. It is only an abstract and I’m hoping the organisers will accept it as a contribution to the workshop. Geographies or emotion and memory connects with my doctoral work but more particularly I want to ground the directly political nature of spatialised memory, if I can. To my mind, so much of that kind of academic work is currently about hand-waving.

“During 2010 and 2011 I conducted fieldwork in four sites of pilgrimage in Ireland and Spain, gathering data from my doctoral thesis. The fieldwork began as an exercise in non-participant observation; it ended on my knees in the rain on an island in a Donegal lake. I began by thinking about how to elicit pilgrim responses to the settings. I ended by walking a week of the Camino in Spain and three days of penitence in Lough Derg, Ireland.

How is memory spatialised and how memories might be theorized remains a significant challenge for geography. Those who provided accounts of walking on the Camino referred to memories in places. Those I spoke with at Lough Derg repeatedly referred to how difficult it was in the past. How does the embodied experience get translated into something spiritual? These little acts of translation are filled with the spatial. But how do places form memories and how are they translated into ‘the spiritual’? How is memory spatialised and what kinds of methods serve this process? My contribution (based on my fieldwork on pilgrimage) hopes to unpack some of these questions.”

What is change anyway?

Last week, I was listening to my OH’s mother’s stories from her childhood. This is a woman who grew up in rural Leitrim in a time of radio and long drop toilets. She was recalling how people would call to her family home during the evening time and tell stories and share gossip. These visits of course generated their own stories. Inevitably perhaps, there was a little conversation about the decline of domestic story telling and the rise of the television. Which got me thinking: how do neighbourly concerns and stories get folded into national concerns? I mean it is not as if our everyday experiences are spatially or temporally nested like Matryoshka dolls, the local into the regional, the national and international. Briefly, where exactly do anecdotes about Jimmy Frank’s outdoor toilet cease to have a relevance? I inarticulately introduced this into a later conversation with OH but I needed to keep my eye on the road.

On Tuesday morning last, the report of the Advisory Group to the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector was released. Aside from it being a nice little headline-earner for Quinn as he attended the INTO annual conference, it is not an insignificant report. Certainly in the first twenty pages or so, the Group’s overview of the development of primary education in Ireland threw up some surprises, to me. For example, religious ethos being distributed across the school curriculum came only in political moves of the late 1960s: a certain consolidation by the Catholic bishops in the face of seeming momentous alterations in the political landscape.

As is stated in the text above, such a development represents a “significant change” in a few different things. Change is a repeated theme in the first section of the  report. On a simple accounting, the word ‘change’ appears 93 times in the document.

The changed character of the population is evidenced in Section II of this Report. p.1

The cultivation of trust and confidence in the process of transition is important so that people can understand the rationale for change and the values for the common good… p.3

Regarding the administration of primary schools a striking feature of the political changeover was the lack of change, and the continuity of the inherited tradition of primary schooling. p.10

No significant policy changes affecting Irish primary education took place thereafter until the 1960s. The sixties was a period of significant political, economic, social, cultural and demographic change. p.13

You get the idea. What strikes me on reading this first part of a very well written document is the notion of change as being symbolic to the stories we all tell collectively or, in the content of primary educational policy, ‘nationally’. Change in Ireland, like Obama’s 2008 Hope, is reserved for some elements of political life in Ireland. A change in policy to favour land speculation is not considered Change although it represents one of the turning points of our recent history. Under what conditions does Change happen in Ireland and most particularly where does it happen?

Change in this sense is too static a conception of how we notice things being one way and then becoming another way, over time. Change for the Advisory Group is a grab bag of assumptions which occludes the lived reality of people’s everyday life where symbolic and actual violence was evident. There is a story in Ireland about how Change occurred in the 1960s and 1970s: where women bought condoms and brought them to Dublin on a train, where telephones became more widely available in homes and Phil Lynott came from London a hero. In this narrative, change occurs on many scales and in different places at different times, e.g. Leitrim is temporally ‘behind’ Mount Merrion. Places coexist but differentially access something called Change, because where ‘we are now’ is the achieved terminus of progress. I might call this a Reeling In The Years phenomenon. It is not as if people in these places wake up and say to themselves ”that new measure that Maurice O’Doherty read on the news last night? That’s going to change things from today!”  This is a really difficult narrative to employ when talking about changes to primary provision in Ireland or how a Change in religious practice occurs over time.

What is this Change? Can you yet tell that I’m struggling with this?  

How far is ‘too far’ again?

Someone called Baroness Warsi has penned a piece in this morning’s Daily Telegraph, my attention to which was drawn by a tweet by C4 news reader Cathy Newman. Notwithstanding the fact that I link to the Telegraph and that I struggle to find a justification for “fighting for faith”, this is not an unfamiliar argument in Ireland. Recalling the visit by Margaret Thatcher to the Vatican some three decades ago, therefore aligning herself with a seamless tradition of shameless self-promotion, Warsi argues that her leading a Vatican visit “is about recognising the deep and intrinsic role of faith here in Britain and overseas” and that she “profoundly believe[s] that faith has a vital and important role to play in modern society”. (The lack of actual facts to back this up makes it more egregious still.) The fact that her delegation is heading to Rome and not Makkah or Salt Lake City should not be lost on us. Warsi’s declaration of intent goes on to argue “for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity”. Now we’re getting closer.

It is suggested that closing the Irish embassy to the Vatican state was a smokescreen for other matters, namely the closure of two others in East Timor (remember them?) and Tehran. This might be right but the issue remains alive only because a substantial number of FG TDs think this is one they believe they can ‘win’. Goodness knows that they’ll not win much else with billions being used to prop up non-existent banks. This morning it rumbles on with Gilmore stating that he might review this closure, as if we are are all waiting with breath abated for such an announcement. It now seems that Gilmore is a willing accomplice in this distracting and overtly stupid public discussion.  The standard criticism from FG deputies (and others) is that the closure of the embassy is a step too far and ‘so soon after Enda’s speech rebuking the Vatican’ for its inaction over abuse. Talk of rosary beads being swung in the air is all very jolly stuff for the idiocratic fourth estate that maintains itself in Leinster House but there’s a bigger point to me made here.

For Europe to retain its ‘Christian heritage’ and to foster the values that are apparently understood by all is to draw attention to those who are not Christian as problematic. If Europe is a Christian space then Muslims and others are not really European. Asad maintains (OK, Kevin I’ll bring it in tomorrow) that Islam is seen as a carrier civilization by those who espouse an epistemology of bounded ‘Europe’ . It brings problems with itself into the European political space from ‘outside’. Those who are insufficiently European need to conform  to ‘our’ dress codes and ways of behaving. (Lentin and Titley draw upon the narratives around the politics of anxious queuing among their many fine examples.) Europe is Christian so everywhere else is merely playing catch up. ‘Their’ dress, food prep and other basic rituals are problematic so a restatement of Europe as Christian space means that we do not have to dialogue, merely reject. Islam ‘carries’ culture according to this way of telling the story; the religious aspects are but codes for other ways of life which we can no longer criticise for fear of being ‘politically incorrect’.

The overreaction (fighting for faith) implicit in Warsi’s argument is that  secularisation has taken totalised control over something called ‘our culture’, as if this is universally agreed upon and can the elide massive gulfs of experience and knowledge that exist between a ministry to working class communities in Leeds and the kind of high church that Warsi admires so much (from under a mantilla?). This from an MP in a parliament that draws upon its legitimacy from a regent who is the head of a church. A reaction such as we have seen from Warsi in England and Creighton and Matthews  here relies on a narrative that ‘things have swung too far the other way’.  We see this again and again in the writing of John Waters and Mary Kenny: I used to be a radical but then I grew up. This has the additional effect of unifying people around the notion that we all know and agree what religious faith is and that there is ‘a place’ for it in something normatively constituted as a public sphere. In short, the privatisation of religious life suits neoliberalism far more than the interests of those with a religious conviction.

Not only should we reject FGs attempts to recast what the secular and the faithful are but also the racialising tendency that Europe is a Christian political space.  These are rallying calls for a very different political battle, one which Christians should be exceptionally cautious about.

GY802 Key Concepts In Geography: week 2

Reaction paper for the second week’s reading. I cannot provide links to all referred publications, many are behind paywalls and limited access resources.

Geography and empire: a continuing love story

The Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) is based in Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The fort is over 170 years old and is intimately associated with the colonial expansion of Europeans into the west of north America in the first half of the 19^th century. The fort has a total area of 23 square kilometers and has over 1,000 buildings within its bounds. By its own description, FMSO “conducts unclassified research of foreign perspectives of defense and security issues that are understudied or unconsidered but that are important for understanding the environments in which the U.S. military operates.” It makes hundreds of papers available to the public through its website including a 2001 paper called IT Requirements for “Policekeeping” written by Timothy L. Thomas. In the paper, Thomas shows the ways in which information technology can be used to compel “compliance by simulating actions and consequences”. At the Dayton Peace Accord talks, to resolve the Balkan conflict in the 1990s one participant is recorded as stating how:

Digitized map information (points, lines and areas in vector form), names data, elevation data, scanned map images and imagery could be pulled into the PowerScene terrain visualization systems and presented to negotiators as still screen shots, fly-through videos, or dynamic fly-throughs under joystick control… [it] also supported dynamic annotation and visual assists such as flooding, slope computations and intervisibility exploration.

Additionally, Thomas states that “digital mapping allows policekeepers to intimidate negotiators by showing detail, displaying the instantaneous ability to change the format from peacekeeping to war, providing absolute consistency and offering flexibility and responsiveness of support.” This use of a geographic information systems to influence negotiations as well as provide intimidation potential for ‘policekeepers’ points to some of themes in this week’s reading. Hudson’s paper refers explicitly to the militarism of the last decades of the 19^th century and its influence on the development of geography as a discipline in Britain. The reader is left in little doubt that imperialism made European geography what it is today. In particular, specialization among early geographers meant that they were in great demand “by the new imperialism”. Hudson’s lack of clarity about who this is exactly does not hinder the force of his argument.

“For mission success, it is crucial to have reliable and correlated geographic data produced for all these systems as quickly as possible.”

“[Battlespace Terrain Reasoning and Awarenss]’s primary objective is to empower commanders, soldiers, and systems with actionable information that allows them to understand and incorporate the effects and impacts of terrain and weather on their functional responsibilities and processes.”

From ESRI’s GIS in the Defense and Intelligence Communities Volume 2.

MacKinder’s ‘brute force realism’ lives on. Kearns charts the terms under which MacKinder felt geography should be developed. It was masculinist, based on underdeveloped social Darwinism and placed emphasis on a “fidelity to duty at risk of life and limb [that] was celebrated as patriotic virtue” (192).

There are more than a few echoes of Mackinder’s politics in Bush the Younger’s War on Terror, facilitated as it was at the time by British universities and the LSE. The tailoring of the educational systems within states to the imperatives of domination should come as no surprise though.  From a close reading of Lacoste’s account of US Air Force dike bombing strategies in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s to the accounts by Bunge on Detroit’s working class housing projects, a strong geographic sense is at the centre of municipal and military domination of internal and external threats. To the present day, one of the main providers of GIS technologies, ESRI, is engaged with the US military and others in a continuing hegemonic struggle with people. ESRI provides specific technologies to the US defense and military. Those who express surprise and outrage at the actions of Dobson and his Mexican indigenous mapping project (funded by the FMSO) must take account of the deep engagement of the discipline as a whole in processes of domestic and foreign domination. Naturally, Dobson will defend his actions of getting a photograph taken at the Buffalo Soldier statue with General Patraeus at Fort Leavenworth. It is entirely consistent with the brief provided by his funders – the FMSO. Bryan’s “rhetorical technique” is condemned by Dobson in his reply to his critics because, for the latter, geography also includes the work and demands of the US military. Building on what Maddrell refers to her in her paper, geography is called into existence through geographers becoming “disciplinary  ‘strategists’ at some stage” (152) during a career.

In his paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics, Walter Williams proposes an analytic he calls domopolitics. This is “an analytic which captures certain significant features and tendencies within the political meaning and governance of security today” (241). It implies a “reconfiguring of the relations between citizenship, state, and territory.” Domopolitics sets up a tension between a strengthening of discourses of citizenship and social trust in communities at home while simultaneously portraying the chaos of outsiders’ lives elsewhere. Additionally the domopolitical seeks “to domesticate the forces which threaten the sanctity of home” (242). ESRI’s extension of its technologies to US federal spending stimuli and to regular budgetary measures is an aspect of the domopolitcal. The grittiness of politics is ‘militarized’ through the use of technologies such as that provided by ESRI to the US federal government. MacKinder’s politics and the geography that flows from it is embedded within the development of ESRI and other companies. To ignore the embedded nature of this does not bring a full critique of MacKinder to the forefront. The militarization is the technique of internal and external domination within which the development of geography has taken place. And this, for me, remains a weakness of Kearns’s analysis. He concludes his critique of MacKinder with the statement that “the world is not only to be apprehended through force” (201) but is this not a statement of what ought to be rather than what is?

Place holder

I’ve had my head and both feet stuck in all things political economy this last month. There was something called a budget and something else called a ‘bailout’ happening. You may have read something about it in the your daily paper. When I wasn’t compulsively re/tweeting, I was whooping like a US sophomore at Gavan Titley on the Vincent Browne show. I may have lost some friends along the way, but there’s nothing like a bit of collective political action to soothe the anger one feels at one of the most regressive ‘adjustments’ ever. But now that I can put down the stick of political righteousness for another while, I have to concede that the PhD’s progress has taken a dent in recent weeks. Gone is the discipline of the 6am rise, the checking of Sage email alerts and the pretence that I can write anything of substance before 2010 ends. Christmas arrives and an NUIM fee demand is imminent.

It is not that there’s been a paucity of religious meaning about this last while. Brian Lenihan has been speaking about faith and confidence, and the IBECs of this sad little country respond in kind. Immanent Frame keeps churning out wonderful articles, debates and reviews. Kevin is putting Hebrew aside (well done) and Naomi is blogging again. And yes, the whole seminar / colloquium / conference whirligig gets going again. Two things have caught my imagination in the last few weeks:

Sociological Imagination put the following two short pieces in front of me. The first is amusing; the second rather creepy. Developing a religious habitus, having completed Roose’s book on his semester at Liberty, is not something I am entirely unfamiliar with. There’s a point in my interactions with people and ideas where I begin to make more theo-etymological connections in the middle of conversations. The word ‘mission’ in particular has caught my imagination. When I was 8, a mission was a day spent wandering around exploring and getting up to no good and learning something about friends. At 13, it was marvelling at NASA’s space shuttle and wondering if I could just get better at maths I could find a back door into that world. A few years back, going on a mission meant seeking out an open off-license.

The second is so strange to me, it is worth embedding the video and then providing you with the link, should you, you know, really wish to follow it.

I wonder if socialisation is an insufficient word to describe what is occurring here. Holloway (Environment and Planning A, 2003) writes:

Not only is the sacred reproduced or reinvented in certain ritual practices or forms of spirituality, but the very division on which we can define what is sacred and what is profane is theoutcome of such religious and spiritual work.

That may very well be the final jumping off point for my research questions, four of which will be discussed with The Supervisor on December 22nd.