Journal Articles by John Carr
Geoforum, 2021
The Florida Tampa Electric Company's Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend... more The Florida Tampa Electric Company's Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluent to survive during cold winter months. Visitors' reactions to the MVC are every bit as incongruous as a massive greenhouse gas pollutant source enabling a wildlife reserve. Notwithstanding its inescapable presence, visitor reviews of the MVC nearly uniformly ignore the immense power plant. We offer this study of online reviews of the MVC to examine how and why everyday people's interactions are fundamental to making dominant practices of anthropogenic ecological destruction unremarkable and, therefore, unfixable. Specifically, we argue the collective blindness reflected in the findings of this study exemplifies a broader sociocultural tendency to articulate and reinforce spaces of ecological "invisibility." In such spaces, our quotidian practices and discourses play a central role in enabling collective environmental inattention and environmental inaction, especially when we are confronted with places in which the constructed binary between human and "natural" realms spectacularly collapses.
Geoforum, 2021
The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend... more The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluent to survive during cold winter months. Visitors’ reactions to the MVC are every bit as incongruous as a massive greenhouse gas pollutant source enabling a wildlife reserve. Notwithstanding its inescapable presence, visitor reviews of the MVC nearly uniformly ignore the immense power plant. We offer this study of online reviews of the MVC to examine how and why everyday people’s interactions are fundamental to making dominant practices of anthropogenic ecological destruction unremarkable and, therefore, unfixable. Specifically, we argue the collective blindness reflected in the findings of this study exemplifies a broader sociocultural tendency to articulate and reinforce spaces of ecological “invisibility.” In such spaces, our quotidian practices and discourses play a central role in enabling collective environmental inattention and environmental inaction, especially when we are confronted with places in which the constructed binary between human and “natural” realms spectacularly collapses.'
Antipode, 2018
As ever expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development pave over endangered... more As ever expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development pave over endangered Florida manatees' warm water springs winter habitat, more than half of the manatees have come to depend upon fossil fuel-burning power plant hot water effluent channels for survival. In an effort to save these manatees, environmental activists have leveraged the US Endangered Species Act to protect the effluent streams and, by extension, have enshrined the power plants themselves as ecological saviors. This study interrogates the paradoxes within the resulting spatio-legal regime. Recognizing the problematic human/nature binary at the heart of dominant Western practices, our study suggests spatial and legal regimes do not simply reify and reproduce this binary but also produce invisible ecocultural spaces that are essential to prop up an inherently unstable , illusory, and ultimately destructive definition of human existence.
Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning, 2017
This research article offers and interrogates the possibilities for using purposefully designed, ... more This research article offers and interrogates the possibilities for using purposefully designed, regulated, and structured “Flexible Spaces” as tools for pursuing a third-way of engaging in urban planning. Offering an alternative to conventional expert-led and procedural-participatory frameworks, Flexible Spaces ideally are minimally regulated, reconfigurable spaces that are democratically made available on a rotating basis to individuals and groups who wish to use those spaces for projects and activities of a limited spatial and temporal tenancy. By enabling users to engage in the ongoing creation and management of the built environment, free from most of the traditional processes of land use regulation, Flexible Spaces potentially offer a new approach that sidesteps many longstanding shortcomings of urban planning. Based on a series of case studies in urban environments that have been disrupted either by natural disasters or economic distress, we offer a framework for designing and enabling Flexible Spaces, and thus empowering communities to plan through flexibility. In particular, we seek to build on the lessons from successful flexible urban recovery projects to explore the potential of flexible spaces to enhance community capacity, creativity, experimentalism, and innovation in non-disrupted environments, including contemporary cities, peri-urban zones, and even rural areas.
Sociology of Sport Journal , 2017
This study aims to address how, to what extent, and under what conditions may those who are not c... more This study aims to address how, to what extent, and under what conditions may those who are not cisgen-dered as male do the work of negotiating access to male sporting space. In doing so, it brings together critical geographies of masculinity and the critical literature on skateboarding to address the role of particular kinds of skateboarding spaces in either reproducing or potentially disrupting gender segregated, patriarchal skate-boarding cultures. This project is offered not only to challenge patriarchal practices and values, but also to step beyond theory and actually examine how sport environments might be designed and sited so as to enable a wider range of gender performances and more inclusive spaces. Specifically, my research suggests that certain types of skate environments can somewhat lower women's barriers to entering the gender charged realm of skateboarding if and when those responsible for those spaces take patriarchy and the needs of noncisgendered male skateboarders seriously. Cette étude a pour but de savoir comment, dans quelle mesure et dans quelles conditions, les personnes n'étant pas des hommes cisgenres négocient leur accès dans l'univers sportif masculin. Pour ce faire, elle réunit les géographies critiques de la masculinité et la littérature critique sur le skateboard pour examiner le rôle de certains univers particuliers de cette pratique dans la reproduction, ou dans l'éventuelle rupture avec la ségrégation genrée, des cultures patriarcales du skateboard. Le but de ce projet n'est pas seulement de contester les pratiques et les valeurs patriarcales, mais aussi de dépasser la théorie et d'examiner vraiment comment les environnements sportifs pourrait être conçus et localisés de manière à permettre une plus grande variété de performances en fonction du genre et de devenir des espaces plus inclusifs. Plus spécifiquement, ma recherche suggère que certains types d'environnements dédiés à la glisse pourraient contribuer à réduire les barrières que rencontrent les femmes pour entrer dans la sphère fortement genrée du skateboard si et quand les responsables de ces espaces prendront sérieusement en compte le patriarcat et les besoins des skatebordeurs qui ne sont pas cisgenres.
Urban Geography, 2012
This article begins to address why cities continue to use public participation-based planning pro... more This article begins to address why cities continue to use public participation-based planning processes to shape their public spaces, notwithstanding three decades of criticisms of such approaches. Based on ethnographic, activist participant research into Seattle Washington's planning for public skateboard parks, I argue that the mobilization of two ostensibly incompatible paradigms for planning—one vesting discretionary authority in experts, the other using the planner to develop consensus through inclusive public input processes—are popular precisely because they can be used together to frustrate truly democratic urban planning. This case study demonstrates how elites used the public input garnered by planners as a form of "shadow referendum," determining in advance whether there were any powerful actors that might oppose proposed policies. And by shifting between or combining the two planning models these elites could justify adhering to the demands of powerful neighborhoods, while discarding input from less powerful neighborhoods as politically irrelevant.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2009
We use this paper to argue that the contemporary tendency of urban governments to exclude a host ... more We use this paper to argue that the contemporary tendency of urban governments to exclude a host of “undesirables” from the city – such as the homeless, teens of color, and prostitutes – must be seen as part of a broader process by which the law includes and weighs assesses all urban denizens. We use three case studies from Seattle to demonstrate how the law enacts a vision of urban form that reflects and spatially enforces core normative liberal identities, even when the state seeks to render the city more inclusive, fair, and just. In so doing, we underscore how the incorporation of these identities into state processes not only solidifies and reinforces the exclusion of undesirable or disorderly ‘others’, but spatially sorts all urban dwellers along a variety of identity lines.
Urban Geography, 2010
This article argues that urban skateboarding and the laws by which the city is governed must be u... more This article argues that urban skateboarding and the laws by which the city is governed must be understood as intertwined. The transformation of skateboarding's most popular practices from the 1970s onward are a product of an ongoing dialectical engagement between young people and the law. When faced with shifting landscapes of property and liability, young skaters have adapted their practices, seeking out new types of terrain. This search has led skateboarding into the public spaces of the city and regimes of urban governance. Contemporary efforts to build public skateparks in cities such as Seattle, Washington are properly contextualized as part of a continuing evolution of skaters' agency in responding to and capitalizing on openings in the legal landscape. By working both within the political system and constructing skateparks outside conventional political avenues, skatepark advocates seek spaces that are free from increasingly restrictive conventional logics of private and public property.
Action Research Journal, 2012
This article offers observations from an ongoing action research project involving advocacy for p... more This article offers observations from an ongoing action research project involving advocacy for public skateboarding facilities in Seattle, Washington to demonstrate both the need for, and the inherent limits to an ethical framework for action rooted in the Kantian moral imperative of treating all people as ‘ends and not means'. By tracing the ethical dilemmas arising from work seeking to advocate on behalf of young people through conventional urban politics, I argue that a ‘covenantal’ ethic should be extended not only to the action researcher's research community, but also to those with whom we compete in the political arena. In support of this argument, Idescribe both the ethical problems arising from purporting to speak on behalf young people, and the difficulties in ethically seeking policy change through urban politics and planning – particularly given the tendencies for political debate to revolve around essentialized constructions of youth identities, and for urban planning processes to reinforce neighborhood level disparities in power.
Globalizations, 2016
While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and em... more While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of “development from below” does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are both enabled by and enable various political, cultural, and economic practices and programs operating at scales ranging from the household to the transnational. These contexts, practices and programs are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the “fix” of microcredit remains universal. This “flat” approach is problematic for two reasons. First, rather than empowering meaningfully informed private philanthropy and development decisions, Kiva.org presents a highly problematic financialization of social relations as a positive and unquestionable good. Secondly, by giving development choices to lenders, while hiding the factors that make microcredit potentially destructive, Kiva.org enables the entrenchment of financialization practices at the heart of the transnational development industry.
Howard Journal of Communication, 2013
Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microl... more Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This article first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.org's microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, arguing that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2014
The increasing prevalence, granularity and sophistication of quantitative data that include locat... more The increasing prevalence, granularity and sophistication of quantitative data that include locational content have been accompanied by a similar rise in public awareness and concern about such data. Once the exclusive purview of geographers and a limited cohort of social scientists and professionals, such "geocoded data" have become a matter of increasing public concern. Whether manifested in the form of protests against Google "Street View" cars entering communities, worries about the violations of privacy made possible by private and military drones, or outrage over recent revelations about the National Security Administration's systematic gathering of information about U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, there is a groundswell of concerns about how increasingly powerful and potentially useful tools for gathering, sharing, and analyzing data with locational content may produce negative consequences as well. And for educators whose pedagogy touches on the creation or analysis of such "geocoded data," it is increasingly difficult to overlook the ways that real-world problems continue to attach to the activities of geographers and other academics and professionals who deal with geocoded data.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2014
While established ethical norms and core legal principles concerning the protection of privacy ma... more While established ethical norms and core legal principles concerning the protection of privacy may be easily identified, applying these standards to rapidly evolving digital information technologies, markets for digital information and convulsive changes in social understandings of privacy is increasingly challenging. This challenge has been further heightened by the increasing creation of, access to, and sophisticated nature of geocoded data, that is, data that contain time and global location components. This article traces the growing need for, and the structural challenges to creating educational curricula that address the ethical and privacy dimensions of geospatial data.
International Journal of Communication
This article uses Jon Stewart’s October 15, 2004, appearance on the U.S. program Crossfire and St... more This article uses Jon Stewart’s October 15, 2004, appearance on the U.S. program Crossfire and Stephen Colbert’s April 29, 2006, speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to illustrate how the diffused nature of cyberspace enables Internet users to promulgate news stories. This allows users to drive mainstream media gatekeepers to engage in what is described as “forced reflexivity,” covering critiques of their own complicity in media hegemony. In each case, a prominent comedian offered an in-person critique of members of the mainstream media in a newsworthy context, arguing that the media had been complicit in the machinations of Washington politicians. And in each case, subsequent Internet dissemination of video clips of these appearances circumvented traditional media gatekeepers while forcing them to cover those critiques.
Surveillance and Society, 2005
Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public com... more Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public commons and as a tool for surveilling private lives. This paper addresses the manner in which such technological innovations have enabled a dramatically expanded market for public policy opinion data, and explores the potential role of that market in facilitating panoptic regimes of both private and state surveillance. Whereas information about public policy opinion used to be highly reductive, expensive to collect, and restricted to a limited number of powerful political actors, today it is much less expensive, highly nuanced, and widely available. Pollsters now also have the ability to extrapolate political information from our commercial and noncommercial activities. We investigate the work of two organizations, a public policy polling firm named Grapevine Polling, and an advocacy consulting firm named United Campaigns. We find that both the increased sophistication of these firms' methods and the reduced cost of increasingly personalized data together have the potential to undermine the very public sphere that digital media were hoped to reinvigorate. Moreover, overlapping state and private demand for the products of such pollsters reflects the extent to which politics and the marketplace are increasingly intertwined and inseparable under the current articulation of democracy in the US.
Surveillance & Society, Jan 1, 2002
The Conversation articles by John Carr
The Conversation, 2021
First paragraphs: Days after US rioters stormed Capitol Hill in January, a manatee was found in a... more First paragraphs: Days after US rioters stormed Capitol Hill in January, a manatee was found in a Florida river with the word “TRUMP” scraped into its back. The aftermath of the disturbing incident revealed a pervasive left-right divide that has long plagued environmental debate.
Polarised views dominate discussion on critical issues such as climate crisis and biodiversity protection. Typically, the left calls for more environmental protections, and the right claims these protections threaten economic prosperity or individual rights.
The election of the Biden administration raised hopes of a new dawn in environmental protections. Our research, however, suggests entrenched left-right views will continue to stymie effective environmental action in the United States – just as they do in Australia.
That’s because focusing on localised protections or individual rights leaves intact a cultural blind spot that conceals systemic issues threatening nature. Tackling these issues requires confronting environmental damage to which we all contribute.
Book Chapters by John Carr
Communicating Endangered Species: Extinction, News, and Public Policy, 2021
As ever-expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development destroy Florida mana... more As ever-expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development destroy Florida manatees’ warm water springs habitat, more than half the manatees have come to depend upon fossil fuel-burning power plant hot water effluent channels for winter survival. In an effort to save these threatened water mammals, environmental activists have leveraged the US Endangered Species Act to protect the effluent streams and, by extension, have enshrined the power plants as essential parts of the manatee protection regime. This chapter interrogates the paradoxes within the resulting spatio-legal regime. Recognizing the problematic human/nature binary at the heart of dominant Western practices, this case suggests spatial and legal regimes do not simply reify and reproduce this binary but also produce invisible ecocultural spaces that are essential to prop up an inherently unstable, illusory, and ultimately destructive definition of human existence.
by Tema Milstein, José Castro-Sotomayor, Laura Bridgeman, Carlos Tarin, Melissa M Parks, Jeffrey Hoffmann, Casper G Bendixsen, Emma Frances Bloomfield, Eric Karikari, Lars Hallgren, Dakota Raynes, John Carr, Bruno Seraphin, Carrie Packwood Freeman, Julia L Ginsburg, and Rebecca Banham Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, 2020
Use this link to join the discussion: https://www.academia.edu/s/da2195c5e5?source=link
For this... more Use this link to join the discussion: https://www.academia.edu/s/da2195c5e5?source=link
For this book discussion, we've shared the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity's Introduction Chapter, Table of Contents, Endorsements, and Author Bios. We look forward to discussing the book with you! "The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving."
Please write your thoughts, questions, and comments into the discussion. We will check in regularly to respond and move the conversation forward.
Note: Routledge is offering a 25% discount code for hardcover or Ebook until June 26. Routledge code=ACR02. (Order at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840)
You may enjoy the following podcasts on the book:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/ecocultural-identity/13311966
Climactic:
https://omny.fm/shows/climactic-1/gretchen-miller-tema-milstein-routledge-handbook-o
Custodians of the Planet:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/custodians-of-the/the-routledge-handbook-of-OuhdqzASWG-/
Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, 2020
Chapter 19 of the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity builds upon recent research into the origins o... more Chapter 19 of the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity builds upon recent research into the origins of political identity, outlining a broader preliminary hypothesis that the longstanding tension between “left” and “right” political biases has evolved, in part, to serve ecological purposes. Carr and Milstein engage in an experimental re-reading of pre-European contact Hawai’ian history, tracing how political disposition helped populations respond to changing relations between population size and ecological carrying capacity. Specifically, in times of plenty, there was a predominance of political approaches congruent with contemporary tenets of “left” politics – including a broad definition of “in group” belonging and openness to difference and novelty – all of which facilitated the growth of populations to meet available resources. In contrast, where populations met or exceeded ecological capacity, political approaches associated with tenets of today’s “right” politics – including suspicion, hostility to outsiders, and aggression – came to the fore, as violent conflict enabled groups to increase access to resources, while simultaneously and incidentally reducing populations. The authors contrast the potential survival functions of these historic emplaced ecopolitical identities with the current era, in which increasingly urbanized populations are removed from the locally direct influence of ecological patterns of scarcity and plenty, which are instead produced by capitalist political economies. Carr and Milstein close by exploring the ecological and cultural regenerative capacity of both “left” and “right” political identities in the contemporary epoch.
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Journal Articles by John Carr
The Conversation articles by John Carr
Polarised views dominate discussion on critical issues such as climate crisis and biodiversity protection. Typically, the left calls for more environmental protections, and the right claims these protections threaten economic prosperity or individual rights.
The election of the Biden administration raised hopes of a new dawn in environmental protections. Our research, however, suggests entrenched left-right views will continue to stymie effective environmental action in the United States – just as they do in Australia.
That’s because focusing on localised protections or individual rights leaves intact a cultural blind spot that conceals systemic issues threatening nature. Tackling these issues requires confronting environmental damage to which we all contribute.
Book Chapters by John Carr
For this book discussion, we've shared the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity's Introduction Chapter, Table of Contents, Endorsements, and Author Bios. We look forward to discussing the book with you! "The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving."
Please write your thoughts, questions, and comments into the discussion. We will check in regularly to respond and move the conversation forward.
Note: Routledge is offering a 25% discount code for hardcover or Ebook until June 26. Routledge code=ACR02. (Order at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840)
You may enjoy the following podcasts on the book:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/ecocultural-identity/13311966
Climactic:
https://omny.fm/shows/climactic-1/gretchen-miller-tema-milstein-routledge-handbook-o
Custodians of the Planet:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/custodians-of-the/the-routledge-handbook-of-OuhdqzASWG-/
Polarised views dominate discussion on critical issues such as climate crisis and biodiversity protection. Typically, the left calls for more environmental protections, and the right claims these protections threaten economic prosperity or individual rights.
The election of the Biden administration raised hopes of a new dawn in environmental protections. Our research, however, suggests entrenched left-right views will continue to stymie effective environmental action in the United States – just as they do in Australia.
That’s because focusing on localised protections or individual rights leaves intact a cultural blind spot that conceals systemic issues threatening nature. Tackling these issues requires confronting environmental damage to which we all contribute.
For this book discussion, we've shared the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity's Introduction Chapter, Table of Contents, Endorsements, and Author Bios. We look forward to discussing the book with you! "The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving."
Please write your thoughts, questions, and comments into the discussion. We will check in regularly to respond and move the conversation forward.
Note: Routledge is offering a 25% discount code for hardcover or Ebook until June 26. Routledge code=ACR02. (Order at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840)
You may enjoy the following podcasts on the book:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/ecocultural-identity/13311966
Climactic:
https://omny.fm/shows/climactic-1/gretchen-miller-tema-milstein-routledge-handbook-o
Custodians of the Planet:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/custodians-of-the/the-routledge-handbook-of-OuhdqzASWG-/