Chapter 3 What Difference Does Difference Make to Geography? Katherine McKittrick and Linda Peake, York University Ron Johnston’s chapter argues persuasively that the discipline of Geography no longer has any recognized core but rather is characterized by its ‘diversity and divergence’ in the sense that its sub-disciplines are running off in all directions, creating communities of researchers that simultaneously look inwards to their own areas of specialization while also stretching out, making contact with researchers in other disciplines. In this chapter we specifically address how this very geographically evoked understanding of ‘diversity and divergence’ necessitates engagement with a third ‘d’, that of difference (or, to be more exact, differences in the plural). We suggest that these contemporary trajectories, while allowing for the reproduction of sameness, have also resulted in encounters with difference(s). These encounters have increasingly caused geographers to think about how their discipline reproduces itself and how the two central concerns of Human Geography, that is space and place, are central to the production of difference. These concerns we refer to as ‘geography’, as distinct from the discipline, ‘Geography’, and which we speak of together as ‘G/geography’. We should also indicate that our interests in this chapter lie specifically in Human Geography. In order to delineate how sites of G/geographic inclusion and exclusion can be understood we start this chapter with a brief outline of ‘difference’. We then go on to address difference in Geography (the discipline) and difference in geography (space and place): that is, the ways the Anglo-American tradition of Geography has traditionally included Western, white men and excluded women, non-white communities, and non-Western geographical subjects; and the material and conceptual spatialization of difference. This is followed by a discussion pointing to two key concepts geographers have used in order to think through difference and exclusion: nature-culture and the body. We conclude briefly with alternative geographies and imagining G/geography and difference in more just ways. <h1>What is Difference and Why Study Difference? There are several ways to approach the concept of difference. While geographers and other social theorists have used divergent definitions of ‘difference,’ we understand difference through socially produced markers (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) and their attendant geographies (colonial geographies, post-colonial geographies, patriarchal geographies, feminist geographies, white geographies, non-white geographies, cross-cultural geographies and so on). The relationship between these markers and their geographies is a dialectical one: one constitutes the other with neither being understood outside the context of the other. Difference, then, signals diverse geographies and geographic experiences; it implies that ‘the social relations of spaces are experienced differently, and variously interpreted by those holding different positions’ (Massey, 1994:3). Hence, difference always implies difference-in-place. Moreover, the concept of difference also signals the ways in which non-dominant identities are socially constructed as different from dominant identities. Thus, rationality has been centred on the figure of the white, heterosexual and patriarchal Western man with all others deemed to be ‘outside’ this orienting figure. To put it another way: social markers such as race and gender are visible social constructs which mark differences (between whites and non-whites and men and women, for example); these differences are spatially organized and therefore not only visible through the scale of the body, but also through material geographies – different people hold different geographic positions (in the home, the workplace, the city, or the suburbs for example). Difference-in-place, then, allows us to examine ‘the hierarchical and unequal relationships among different groups’ (Scott, 1988: 179). It also gives insight into the ways in which the geographic positions of non-dominant groups challenge geographic hierarchies. For example, how we come to know difference through geography, is framed by geographic projects such as imperialism and capitalism. These projects signal how broad geographic patterns (such as spatial and economic expansion) shape our world according to profit, displacement and power. Yet difference also signals critical emancipatory knowledges (such as feminism, post-colonialism, and anti-racism) and experiential knowledges, such as the geographies which we all live in the every day, which unsettle broad geographic projects such as imperialism and capitalism. In other words, ‘different’ bodies are not only assigned ‘different’ geographies, they are also actively experiencing and producing space. A further point is worthy of note in relation to difference-in-place. Not only do various people occupy place in various ways – across time and space – but control over the production of space gives powerful groups the ability to produce difference as well as the right to be in space. Ghettos, under-funded women’s shelters, sprawling suburbs, over-polluted regions, gated communities, under-developed and over-developed nations, homeless hostels, and native land claims, are just some examples of how geography and geographic knowledge are, locally and globally, tied to practices of spatial unevenness. What these spatial formations reveal is the ways in which geography is mapped according to race, class, and gender specific interests. They also reveal that geographic knowledge – how we ‘know’ and ‘understand’ the external world – is inevitably tied to spatial formations and hierarchies. We are not asserting, however, that formations of race, class, gender and so on are spatially rendered in the same ways over time and space but, rather, that geographic expression is extremely variable. David Delaney contends that axes of power can combine in multitudinous ways ‘to produce the richly textured, highly variegated, and power laden spatialities of everyday life’ (Delaney, 2002: 7). He claims that what is important about these spatialities is how the division of continuous territory into ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ facilitates the categorization of groups into ‘us v. them’. He states that racialized, gendered and classed identities ‘[are] what [they are] and [do what they do] precisely because of how [they are] given spatial expression’ (Delaney, 2002: 7). In other words, these spatialities are not simply reflections of axes of power; rather they are constitutive of them. It follows that it is insufficient to simply recognize difference; we need to ask how and where difference is produced, and as we address in the following sections of this chapter, for what purposes and whose interests? We start by addressing difference in relation to the discipline of Geography itself. <h1>Coming to Know Difference Through Geography Historians of Anglo-American Geography have only recently addressed the exclusion of subordinated groups from the discipline. It took nearly a century of study before questions were asked about the exclusion of these groups, both as practitioners of the discipline and as subjects of study. It was the tumultuous late 1960s – the Vietnam War protests, strikes and student uprisings throughout Western Europe – that created a dissatisfaction among certain groups of geographers with the seemingly apolitical nature of their discipline. But we argue the discipline has always been political. The way in which a discipline develops over time – what kinds of questions it asks and of whom, what is considered ‘knowable,’ and how we can know things –I s saturated with politics. Thus, the kind of Geography that develops depends on who geographers are. In other words, the practitioners of a discipline are not coincidental to the dominant forms of knowledge that are produced in the discipline. The problem was (and is) not only that middle-class white men were numerically dominant in departments of Geography in Britain and North America in the twentieth century but also that they held sway over the status quo. It was hardly surprising that knowledge production was pervaded by a particular kind of ‘masculinism’, one that valued objectivity and rationality above everything else and which assumed that this knowledge was free of values and spoke directly to all people in all places (see Rose, 1993). But as the work of Donna Haraway (1991) and other social theorists has since shown, the knowledge produced by white middle-class males is as partial and situated as the knowledge produced by any other group. The continuing dominance of this masculinist form of knowledge production meant that the interests of these practitioners were served by studying people like themselves and not others. This resulted in the dismissal of class-based studies until the early 1970s; the exclusion of the study of women and women’s activities until the mid 1970s; the disregarding of sexualities until the late 1980s; and the neglect of non-humans until the late 1990s. The exclusion of non-dominant groups/species was and is not simply a dilemma of Geography. Second wave feminism and feminist studies, Native studies, black studies, queer studies, and studies of civil rights and multiculturalism illustrate that several academic disciplines (and political agendas) were not adequately addressing diverse and different histories and lives. For example, with the collapse of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, the issue of class fell out of favour in many academic analyses in the late 1980s although it re-emerged in the late 1990s (see Haylett 2001 for example). And until the 1990s the last sustained discourse on white identity by geographers took place between 1890 and 1930, coinciding with the peak and then decline of the British Empire (Bonnett, 1997). Indeed it is impossible to recognize the spaces of exclusion that exist within Anglo-American Geography – its hidden geographies – without an understanding of its origins in the nineteenth century in relation to European economic dominance and to practices of empire building. Geography was utilized as a tool to document and facilitate the building of empires and the mapping of colonial expansion. The work of Felix Driver (2001) for example outlines how the practice of British Geography in this period explicitly reproduced masculinist and white-European ways of knowing. But attempts to open up these ways of knowing only appeared from the 1970s onwards. The general silence around what one might term ‘meta-narratives’ of whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity and middle-classness made these axes of power appear normative or natural, suggesting that they could not be questioned. But in opening them up to inspection geographers have begun to unearth the legacy of domination within Anglo-American Geography and its attendant ideologies of patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, racism, disablism and anthropomorphism. Notwithstanding these efforts, and despite the fact that a number of geographers are already challenging the demographic makeup of the discipline, the legacy of patriarchal whiteness is still very influential.1 David Delaney recently, and wryly, noted that Geography “is nearly as white an enterprise as Country and Western music, professional golf, or the Supreme Court of the United States” (Delaney, 2002: 11). And while he is referring to Geography in the United States where over 90 per cent of Geography department members are white (Puildo, 2002) these comments could equally apply to departments in Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and in Europe (ask yourself, how many of the lecturers and professors in your department are white, compared to the population at large where you live?). <h1>Coming to know Difference through geography The legacies of whiteness and masculinity within the discipline of Geography can undermine what Donna Haraway (1991) calls ‘situated knowledges’. We argued earlier that Haraway’s contention, that knowledge is local, specific and embodied, encapsulates an important way in which difference can be understood. That is, space and place are intimately connected to race, gender, class, sexuality and other axes of power; all geographic knowledges are situated, and location matters. Situated knowledges create a conceptual and material space through which non-dominant geographies can be articulated and theorized. Difference, it could be said, can be located within and around situated knowledges. So, what is considered different in geographic terrains and why? How does the landscape perpetuate or democratize difference? Why does difference matter so much to spatial organization? Do difference and situated knowledges unsettle conventional geographic patterns? That geographic organization is also an organization of difference is probably most obvious in colonial projects, which segregate and hierarchically ‘manage’ non-white populations for economic and geographic profit. But difference in geography is also produced in other ways. For example, home may be a place in which different people occupy different areas and perform different tasks according to age or gender (and this differs, of course, from home to home, region to region). Who cleans homes? Is a clean home a gendered space, a racial space? How are local, regional, national and global spaces differentiated according to social markers? What we are trying to stress is that the particularity of ‘identity’ and ‘self’ (who is different) implies some sort of spatial difference–be it race, sexuality, gender, body, dress, community, nation, citizenship, or status: socio-cultural markers make a geographic difference, and vice versa. Difference reflects both oppressed/oppressor relations, and the complex situated knowledges that challenge these relations. Geographic difference is layered. It is a spatial expression of geographic problems (such as the ‘other’ who is segregated, incarcerated, profiled) and it is a spatial opportunity to express political, social, and economic possibilities. Racial segregation, for example, is a spatial expression of difference–it separates communities, perpetuates uneven economies, and geographically marks the landscape.2 But geographies of segregation also invoke varying responses to cycles of domination: migration, music, graffiti, art, community gatherings, literature, protests, violence, and celebrations all reconfigure the meanings of places. The tensions between difference and geography point to the ways in which, despite progressive resistances to social and geographic domination, the spatial organization of the world is still hierarchical. This hierarchy is, moreover, naturalized; it emphasizes and hides particular processes which profit from what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘the displacement of difference’ (2002: 16). That is, geographic hierarchies – different scales of power and knowledge which can be seen in cities, on streets, in homes, on bodies, across nations–continually privilege white, heterosexual, and patriarchal patterns so that different bodies are shaped by the world around them in favourable or adverse (or both) ways. As demonstrated in Table 4.1 the scales of the body, the home, the nation, and the globe are interwoven with broad geographic projects of domination. These include imperialism, globalization, transatlantic slavery and the ‘carving up’ and colonization of Africa, processes of ‘white flight’ and of ‘no go’ zones in cities. These dominant geographies contain within them experiential geographies and critiques, that is those spaces and places where the ‘dailyness’ of difference is lived (gendered workplaces, heterosexualized homes, buildings only accessible to the able-bodied and so on) and resisted (through, for example, narratives of displacement, difference, race/racism). INSERT TABLE 3.1 ABOUT HERE Table 3.1 illustrates that the geographies and knowledges that have developed from legacies of difference have been repeated and recycled in particular ways at multiple scales and yet are inevitably intertwined. Different forms of domination and of experience produce variegated flows which shape complex geographic subjects and spaces. Table 3.2 outlines some of the ways we can imagine how spaces – of assimilation, exclusion and containment for example – can be rendered at different spatial scales and how any geographic site can act to include and/or exclude at the same time. Shopping malls, for example, can be places where one can encounter many others, but as privately owned places, anyone deemed undesirable can be removed and denied re-entry. Similarly, suburbs can be seen as the natural preserve of certain ethnic groups – whites and non-whites – serving to include some and exclude others. INSERT TABLE 3.2 ABOUT HERE Geographic difference is both the profitable spatialization of non-dominant groups and critical/resistant responses to this spatialization; this two-way process indicates that the difference ‘difference(s)’ make to geography is not only about mapping unjust spaces and places of subordination, but is also an indicator of the ways in which geography, as an analytical tool and an experiential process, makes available a place of resistance. We turn to nature-culture and the body in order to show how difference(s) have been taken up in the discipline of Geography and to illustrate that difference(s) have advanced important challenges to how we can and do imagine Geography and geography. <h1>Geographic Responses to Difference: Nature/Culture and the Body Some of the key concepts geographers have raised in order to think through difference include nature/culture, human species, uneven development, the body, the psyche, and race, gender and sexuality as social constructs. In this section we address the ways geographers have drawn attention to one particular aspect of difference, namely its visibility. Difference is placed, in part, because difference is visible. So being able to see difference, through social markers (race, gender, class, for example) speaks to historical and contemporary practices of racial, sexual, and economic domination.3 Visible differences, although having different meanings to different social groups, have been used by dominant groups to structure geographic organization i.e., uneven social relationships are spatialized according to social markers. We briefly explore two key modalities - hybridity and corporeality - for thinking through visible differences in relation to the concepts of nature/culture and the body. The nature/culture divide has long been a preoccupation with geographers, most commonly with individual geographers studying just one side or the other. A number of critical geographers have, however, pointed out that this separation is impossible; both humans and non-humans are now recognized as active agents (although not necessarily intentionally or consciously) in the making of geographies. From initial Marxist concerns with the ‘production of nature’ through interest in the worlds of animals and animal geographies, to more recent work on the interaction between nature and culture, geographers have turned their attention to the necessity of a ‘relational resituation of the human’ (Matless, 1996: 381).4 David Harvey (2000: 208), for example, discusses the notion of ‘species being’: he states that we ‘are sensory beings in a metabolic relation to the world around us’, thereby viewing human nature in relative or hybrid terms and recognizing the need to take into account more than human differences. Thinking about species-difference, as bound to human relations and social systems, reconfigures the work of Human Geography. Casting the analytical net wider, to include the question of ‘species being’ rather than simply humans dominating the so-called ‘natural’ production of space, makes clear that human beings are not outside of nature (Harvey, 2000: 218). The nature/culture divide, and debate around it, also signals the body–the feminine, the masculine, the rational, the irrational, ‘good’ flesh, ‘bad’ flesh, the natural body, the cultural body. There is now a vast amount of work on the body and it is not easy to categorize but two major camps may be discerned, those who prioritize the body as a discursive construction versus those who start with the ‘real’ body, seeing the body as more than representation. Geographers did not focus on the body until the 1990s however. Before then, Geographers were preoccupied with the distinction between sex and gender, arguing that the former was a matter of biology but that gender was a social construction that varies over space. This early focus on gender at the expense of the body can be explained by the pervasiveness of masculinist rationality as a form of knowledge that is divorced from emotions and the body and the attendant mapping of the mind-body dualism onto masculinities and femininities. However, a number of geographers have increasingly turned their attention to the body (see Longhurst 1997 for an overview). An interest in the corporeal – the flesh – and of thinking through the body has developed alongside an understanding that the body is not only the primary site of identity but also the place, the site, of the individual. Indeed, it is bodily practices that enable us to become subjects. The feminist scholar Judith Butler (1990) has argued that woman and men learn to perform their gendered identities in bodily ways that are so routinised and habitual that they appear totally natural. Thus, Butler argues that identity is not fixed but performed. Embodiment–the ways in which identity, corporeal markers, and the self simultaneously exist and articulate themselves–is an important geographic process; bodies that are differentially racialised, sexualized, nationalized (and so on) perform their identities differently. Moreover, as Neil Smith has argued, the body does not ‘stand alone,’ unitary and untouched. Rather, community, regional, national, and global processes are inscribed onto it (Smith, 1993: 87-119). The site of corporeality, the flesh and the self, thus performs ‘expected’ or ‘habitual’ tasks (such as keeping certain kinds of dress or displays of affection in their ‘appropriate’ places) while they are also continually expressing different geo-political conditions (such as poverty, violence, pleasure, commodification, and racism). We end this section with an illustrative human geography drawn from the Caribbean scholar Edouard Glissant. The passage in Box 3.1 addresses how the physical landscape is a site through which Glissant can politicize difference and humanness. The landscape itself, he writes, ‘unfolds,’ and reveals hidden geographies such as those of the maroons–escaped slaves–locations of retreat, sites of indentured labour, and resistance/strikes. Nature-culture coalesce; tree roots, the North, the mountain and the leaves, are underwritten by a nonwhite, and violent, human bodily history which has seeped into the land. This selection, then, uses the physical landscape, nonwhite cultural histories and bodies, and the human and nonhuman to signal species connections. INSERT BOX 3.1 ABOUT HERE <h1>Just Geographies We have argued that dominant geographic patterns, while uneven and hierarchical, also contain alternative geographic locations, imaginations, and knowledges. These alternative geographies are predicated on difference and the spatialization of non-dominant groups; alternative geographies are points of struggle which highlight the tension between dominant geographies and difference. Thus, imaginary geographies which do not neatly align themselves with conventional geographies, knowledges which reconfigure established geographical meanings, and resistant political locations, all suggest that difference is indicative of alternative geographies and geographic struggles. Of course these dissenting practices do not obliterate the unevenness of spatial hierarchies. But they do suggest that spatial experiences, of the dominating and the dominated, are neither distinct and separate, nor wholly stable, indecipherable or unchangeable. Those identities, places and geographic arrangements which crisscross and subvert the ‘natural’ geographic hierarchy–‘other’ scales of power and knowledge, narratives of displacement, difference–are unseen and/or deemed outside the ‘natural’ order of geography. Articulating difference, writing and living geographies which are not replicating spatial hierarchies, is, however, a way through which more just, or re-politicized geographies can be imagined. This can be seen in David Harvey’s (2000) re-imagination of local-global geographic organization (Box 4.2), where boundaries and connections are supposed to dissolve and re-emerge in a new way, ‘natural’ spatial hierarchies are not immovable, geographic knowledge is in no way bound to natural spatial hierarchies; Harvey makes available a different ‘place’ for difference in geography, one which is predicated on geographic-species mutuality and fluid boundaries. INSERT BOX 4.2 ABOUT HERE We end by asking is there an orthodoxy being produced from the somewhat variegated and burgeoning body of work about difference? Does it give rise to hope and to hopeful, more just geographies? Clyde Woods argues that his experience of the ravages that have been experienced by African American communities in the United States have led him to: “seriously question a social science literature that is, for the most part, seemingly incapable of hearing the cries emanating from the soul of this nation. The same tools that symbolize hope in the hands of the surgeon symbolize necrophilia in the hands of the coroner. Have we become academic coroners? Have the tools of theory, method instruction, and social responsibility become so rusted that they can only be used for autopsies? Does our research in any way reflect the experiences, viewpoints and needs of the residents of these dying communities?” (Woods, 2002: 63). Similarly, Neil Smith (1996) wrote a tongue in cheek editorial for the journal Society and Space about the nature of sleep. It was a metaphorical cri de couer that so many geographers appear to be sleeping i.e., are indifferent to a world characterized by profound injustices and material inequalities. David Harvey (2000: 254), however, argues that our ability to create new geographies (and inevitably having to do so constrained by geographical conditions that are not of our own choosing) is hampered or enabled by three aspects of our intellectual engagements: where we can see geography from, how far we can see, and where we can learn geography from Building on feminist concerns with ‘situated knowledges’ and going beyond the visibiliy of difference, Harvey highlights the necessity of recognizing alternative ways of thinking and dreaming about our futures, in ways that consciously desire difference. <h1>Conclusion We hope we have shown that G/geography invokes both openings and closures when we investigate difference. G/geography is an analytical and material site through which the particularities of social difference can be perpetuated, exposed, and challenged. Recognizing difference(s) asks that processes of geographic placement and displacement be understood not simply for what they are or where they are, but also for the ways the rules and regulations that result in geographic ‘placing’ reveal how we know and organize the world we live in–and how we might come to know and organize this world differently. More clearly, geographies of difference ask how we are differently implicated in the production of space, and how geography shapes our present life. This means that we must think through how we participate in processes of exclusion, the displacement of difference, and socio-spatial order, within and outside the academy. This is not an easy task; indeed geography is difficult. It is difficult because it is a site of desire. We are rewarded for different forms of capitalist geographic ownership, we succeed (particularly in overdeveloped nations) when we own space, place, and ‘things’; we are rewarded when we control space, provide spatial order, exude spatial authority, follow maps. And we are punished when we act ‘out of place,’ or are simply deemed ‘out of place.’ Hence we argue for a confrontation with the geographic desire to profitably displace difference but also for a recognition of the ways in which we perpetuate this desire through recycling body-codes, nature/culture divisions, race, and geographic differentiation which is predicated on visible (racialised, sexualized, classed) bodily differences. <h1>Essay Questions and Further Reading How are visible body differences such as gender, race, class, and sexuality, spatialized in your home, community and beyond? To answer this question see Neil Smith’s (1993) discussion of the impact of homelessness and difference upon various spatial scales in New York City; see also Haylett (2001) and Woods (2002) for analyses of the ways in which white and nonwhite racial codes are spatialized. To what extent has human geography, as a discipline, acknowledged ‘differences’? Most of the sources for this chapter are relevant, but see in particular the books by Don Mitchell (2000), Gillian Rose (1993) and Sarah Whatmore (2002), and articles by Gilmore (2002), and Pulido (2002) <h1>Notes 1 See, for example, articles in the special edition of The Professional Geographer (2002), 54 (1), devoted to studies on race and racism. 2 Don Mitchell, for example, points to the geographical project that spatializes difference vis-à-vis the racialization of both whiteness and blackness: “the aim has been–and is–in white racist societies to create and maintain a world in which whites have near total freedom of movement precisely because blacks do not. The ‘travel’ of whites is predicated on the sequestration of blacks” (Mitchell, 2000: 257). What Mitchell allows us to see is the ease with which whiteness, and white identities, through a constant process of distancing, can displace, and hold in place, nonwhite communities and their geographies. The principal geographies of whiteness they point to include freedom, the creation of the world, and movement; the ‘natural’ exclusion is of blackness. See Peake and Ray (2001) and McKittrick (2002) for examples relating to the Canadian context. 3 Implicit to visible differences (such as race) are practices which dismiss and/or erase the histories and voices of non-dominant groups. The flip-side of what might be called racial-sexual hypervisibility, then, is invisibility, disavowal, and silence. See Trinh (1989). 4 See, for example, the special issue of Society and Space (1995), edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel and Sarah Whatmore’s (2002) book Hybrid Geographies. <h1> References Bonnet, A. (1997) Geography, ‘race’ and whiteness: invisible traditions and current challenges. Area 29, 193-199. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. Routledge, London. Delaney, D. (2002) The space that race makes. The Professional Geographer 54, 6-14. Driver, F. (2001) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Blackwell, Oxford. Gilmore, R. W. (2002) Fatal couplings of power and difference: notes on racism and geography. The Professional Geographer 54, 15-24. Glissant, E. (1989) Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans., Michael M. Dash. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville. Haraway, D.J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, New York and London. Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope. Blackwell, Oxford. Haylett, C. (2001) Illegitimate subjects? Abject whites, neoliberal modernization, and middle-class multiculturalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, 351-370. Longhurst, R. (1997) (Dis)embodied geographies. Progress in Human Geography 21, 486-501. McKittrick, K. (2002) ‘Their blood is there and you can’t throw it out’: Honouring Black Canadian geographies. Topia 7, (Spring) 27-37. Mitchell, D. (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford and Malden, MA. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Matless, D. (1996) New material? Work in cultural and social geography, 1995. Progress in Human Geography 20, 379-391. Peake, L. and Kobayashi, A. (2002) Anti-racist policies and practices for geography at the millennium. The Professional Geographer 54, 50-61. Peake, L. and Ray, B. (2001) Racialising the Canadian landscape: whiteness, uneven geographies, and social justice. The Canadian Geographer 45, 180-186. Pulido, L. (2002) Reflexions on a white discipline. The Professional Geographer 54, 42-49. Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Polity Press, Cambridge. Scott, J. W. (1988) Gender and the Politics of History. Columbia University Press, New York. Smith, N. (1993) Homeless/Global: Scaling Places. In: Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T., Robinson, G., and Tickner, L. (eds.) Mapping Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Routledge, New York and London, pp. 87-119. Smith, N. (1996) Rethinking sleep. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, 505-506. Trinh, M. (1989) Woman Native Other. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies. Sage, London. Woods, C. (2002) Life after death. The Professional Geographer 54, 62-66. Table 3.1 Some Examples of Scales of Difference Body Home Nation Globe Geographies of Domination Racialization and racism, heterosexism Domestic violence, domestic labour Colonization and genocide, uneven distribution of national resources, systems of apartheid Imperialism, globalization, re-distribution of natural resources and of people Experiential Geographies Bodily geographies of difference such as queer bodies, transgendered bodies. Geographies of fear; geographies of fleeing or of staying put. Geographies of diaspora and of migration; critiques of the nation and of belonging. Geographies of fair trade and of refugees; anti-globalization activism Some Useful Theoretical Concepts Body, scale, embodiment, race, gender and sexuality as social constructs, naturalization Sex-gender systems, patriarchy, scale, home-work, value, social reproduction Nation, citizenship, nation-state, colonialism, scale, geographical expansion Scale, globalization, capitalism, global-capital, time-space compression Table 3.2 Some Examples of Scales of ‘Inclusions’ and ‘Exclusions’ Home Neighbourhood Nation Globe Spaces of assimilation and/ or exclusion Master bedrooms, den Suburbs, ethnic neighbourhoods, gated communities, golf courses Public spaces e.g. parks, shopping malls, airports, national borders Common markets, trading blocs Spaces of containment / internment / exile Homeless shelters, homelessness Ghettoes, Ethnic neighbourhoods Concentration camps, prisons, reserves, refugee camps Systems of apartheid Spaces of objectification Women in the home being viewed solely as housewives Youth hanging out in shopping malls and street corners being labeled as idle and/or delinquent Immigrants and/or refugees being portrayed as a drain on national welfare Third World women stereotyped as victims of development processes Box 3.1 Nature, Culture, Bodies, Race: Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse Throughout his book Caribbean Discourse (1989), Edouard Glissant, uses the natural landscape to explore nonwhite identities and philosophies in the Caribbean. The passage below is an example of how nature, culture, racialization, bodies and difference, and history, together, frame Glissant’s concerns and delineate his interest in a spatial politics of being. “…[the landscape] is a concentrated whole that offers an intelligible dimension. At the same time, the threshold of heat blocked by rain; deeper yet, those fissures that become visible when the landscape unfolds. In the north of the country, the knotted mass of somber greens which the roads still do not penetrate. The maroons found refuge there…The root of vine and its violet flower. The dense network of ferns. The primordial mud, impenetrable and primal. Under the acomas that disappear from view, the stuffy erect mahogany trees supported by blue beaches on a human scale. The North and the mountains are one. There were dumped those peoples from India who were part of nineteenth century trade and whom we call Coolies, in Guadeloupe, Malabars. Today, the flat fields of pineapple cut arid grooves in this aloof and remote world. Yet this prickly flatness is dominated by the shadow of the great forests. The strikers of the Lorrain district, coolies and blacks, all Martinican, were trapped there in 1976: they turned over with their machetes the field of leaves soaked in blood” (1989:10). Box 3.2 An alternative spatiality: David Harvey’s ‘Edilia’ One example of a different imagining of the organization of space is given in an appendix to David Harvey’s book Spaces of Hope (2000) in which he describes a utopian future he calls ‘Edilia’. In this future people do not live in families but in ‘hearths’, that is groups of 20-30 adults and children, ten or so of which group together to form ‘neighbourhoods’. Approximately 20 neighbourhoods combine together to form an ‘edilia’ (of about 60,000 people). About 20 to 50 edilias come together to form the largest contiguous political unit, called a ‘regiona’ (of at most three million people). This is also a bioregion that aims to be as self-sufficient as possible for its inhabitants. This spatialized form of organization may not seem to be very different from what already exists in a number of places and at a number of scales but Harvey radically departs from current forms of organization in that regionas combine to form ‘nationa’, which are not spatially contiguous but combine regiona in temperate, tropical, sub-tropical and sub-arctic parts of the world, brought together for the purposes of trade and barter. Moreover, nationa are not permanent features of the geopolitical map. They are expected to periodically dissolve and reform. Table and Box captions Table 3.1 Some examples of scales of difference Table 3.2 Some examples of scales of ‘inclusions’ and ‘exclusions’ Box 3.1 Nature, culture, bodies, race: Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean discourse Box 3.2 An alternative spatiality: David Harvey’s ‘Edilia’ 24