- Director,
The City Institute, York University
www.yorku.ca/city
Urban Studies Program, Department of Social Science,
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies,
Kaneff Tower 731, York University, 4700 Keele Street,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
Linda J Peake
York University, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Member
- York University, Geography, Faculty Memberadd
In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology... more
In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre's ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban. The changing geographies and pace of urbanization over the past half century have been recasting urban theory, governance, and policy on a global stage. The second decade of the 21st-century is proving to be an especially momentous time for urban knowledge production in which the political stakes are enormously high, with the urban figuring as both cause and consequence of many contemporary planetary issues: the urban is both the instigator of and the solution to global climate change; it is the site of increasing inequality and the urbanization of poverty even as it is also a crucible for innovation and creativity; and it is ground zero for a new era of global governance. 1 Within this climate of different political possibilities for the urban, a number of competing, conflicting, and complementary geographical imaginaries have emerged to make sense of contemporary urbanization.
The purpose of this essay is to initiate a conversation about the production and analysis of knowledge on women and the urban. Starting with a brief overview of how women have been addressed in the field of urban studies, I turn to their... more
The purpose of this essay is to initiate a conversation about the production and analysis of knowledge on women and the urban. Starting with a brief overview of how women have been addressed in the field of urban studies, I turn to their treatment in works by critical urban scholars, revealing how women fall away from urban theories. The dis missal of women from theory construction and the impact on women's lives of the imbri cation of the gendered subject into neoliberal discourses about the city adds urgency to a feminist intervention. A feminist analytic requires the promotion of a new kind of global urban studies that takes seriously women's struggles, strategies and everyday desires. In this essay I argue for the importance of feminist understandings of knowledge production about the urban. Beyond agreement on the simple but essential point that more and more of the world's population lives in areas defined as urban (and suburban), there are sharp divergences in the current range of approaches to studying the urban, from perspectives as diverse as the critical literature on the right to the city (Kofman) to the millennial 'twenty-first century of the city' analysis (World Bank Infrastructure Group for Urban Development, 2000), from postcolonial and subaltern analyses that aim to provincialize Western urban theory, presenting knowledge of the urban as partial and contestable (
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Addressing issues of mental health became virtually unavoidable in the AngloAmerican academy during the last decade, particularly in relation to students. Conversations about mental health have begun to proliferate among graduate students... more
Addressing issues of mental health became virtually unavoidable in the AngloAmerican academy during the last decade, particularly in relation to students. Conversations about mental health have begun to proliferate among graduate students and other scholars contingently employed in the academy. The increasing visibility of graduate students experiencing mental and emotional distress is indicative of how the ground upon which “normal” is defined has been shifting rapidly beneath our feet. The relationship between the social and the physiological across different states of mental health is one that continues to be contested among scholars. Studies that examine how the corporatisation of higher education affects mental health are only just starting to appear in geography. One study of geography graduates in the US reveals their co‐optation into a neoliberal ethos of individuality, competition and heightened pressures of productivity and performance, resulting in feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, and indicative of a survival‐oriented campus culture.
An increasing number of students seeking mental health services across university campuses have prompted faculty, administrators and student service providers to call attention to what some describe as a crisis. In exploring what a... more
An increasing number of students seeking mental health services across university campuses have prompted faculty, administrators and student service providers to call attention to what some describe as a crisis. In exploring what a critical commitment to addressing emotional and mental distress in the academic context of the global north might look like we discuss different understandings of what is meant by mental health and the manifestation of distress in the academy as the 'new normal'. After examining data from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom for different constituent groups within university communities we turn to understand this crisis beyond instances of individual distress by situating it within the context of the conditions of knowledge production in neoliberalizing universities. We conclude by imagining a different kind of academy, exploring how the practices that produce it can be differently enacted, outlining the opportunities for and obstacles to a collective and professional response. University campuses are enriched when they recognize and make space for the diversity of mental states that constitute the human condition, but devalued when they create stressful work environments that exacerbate or initiate mental distress. Critical Reflections on Mental and Emotional Distress in the Academy 254
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Key Messages There is a crisis of mental health in the academy. This special issue, the first to address this crisis, brings together three bodies of research: geographers' understanding of the relationship between mental health, social... more
Key Messages There is a crisis of mental health in the academy. This special issue, the first to address this crisis, brings together three bodies of research: geographers' understanding of the relationship between mental health, social space, and material places; mental health initiatives in higher education; and the neoliberalization of the academy. In this introduction we discuss two particular foci: defining the crisis of mental health and wellbeing in neoliberalizing universities, and institutional and individual responses. Drawing upon recent initiatives to highlight issues of mental health in the academy we focus in this special issue on work by geographers from Canada, the United States, England, and New Zealand that aims to shed some light on the ways that the organized practices of the academy are implicated in the current state of mental health of a broad cross section of its members across university campuses. In bringing the perspectives of Geography graduate students and faculty to bear on questions of mental wellness, this special issue is unique in its attempt to bring together three bodies of research: geographers' understanding of the relationship between mental and emotional health, social space, and material places; mental health initiatives in institutions of higher education; and the neoliberalization of the academy. Drawing together review articles, interview-based research, collective writing, and personal narratives, the articles and viewpoints bring together understandings of the crisis of mental health and wellbeing in neoliberalizing universities, and institutional and individual responses. R eflexions critiques sur la formation d'une ethique du bien-^ etre en g eographie Prenant appui sur les d emarches entreprises r ecemment pour mettre en evidence les probl emes de sant e mentale dans le milieu universitaire, ce num ero sp ecial se consacre aux travaux effectu es par des g eographes en provenance du Canada, des Etats-Unis, de l'Angleterre et de la Nouvelle-Z elande afin de jeter un eclairage sur le rapport entre les modes d'organisation du milieu universitaire et l' etat actuel de sant e mentale d'un vaste echantillon du personnel en poste dans plusieurs campus universitaires. En d egageant les perspectives des etudiants des cycles sup erieurs et des professeurs en g eographie qui se penchent sur le bien-^ etre mental, ce num ero sp ecial innove en proposant une synth ese de trois champs de la connaissance scientifique : la compr ehension par les g eographes de la relation qui unit la sant e mentale et emotionnelle, l'espace social et les A video presentation is available at
Mental health and wellness are issues of growing concern on campuses across North America. While feminist geographers have done important work over the years to organize, mentor, gather, and publish collectively on issues related to... more
Mental health and wellness are issues of growing concern on campuses across North America. While feminist geographers have done important work over the years to organize, mentor, gather, and publish collectively on issues related to wellness, much more remains to be done. In this article, we—a collection of scholars who identify as feminist geographers—comment on our experiences of mental wellness in the academy, and engage in a collective self-analysis to better understand the silences, invisibilities, and hesitancies surrounding these issues on the campuses where we work. We argue that not only does more attention need to be brought to bear on this topic, but also that it needs to be more broadly understood. We find that there are institutional, cultural, political, and intersectional factors that impede active engagement with mental health and wellness in the academy, and we discuss strategies for deeper engagement with such important issues for our students, colleagues, research participants, and ourselves.
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Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The main part of the... more
Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider
how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The
main part of the article considers three strands of work on friendship that push the boundaries of research in
human geography: (1) geographies of affect/emotion and the ontological construction of the human; (2) children’s
and young people’s geographies and the (re)production of social ordering; and (3) geographies of mobility and
transnationalism in a world of increased human spatial movement and social relations at a distance.
how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The
main part of the article considers three strands of work on friendship that push the boundaries of research in
human geography: (1) geographies of affect/emotion and the ontological construction of the human; (2) children’s
and young people’s geographies and the (re)production of social ordering; and (3) geographies of mobility and
transnationalism in a world of increased human spatial movement and social relations at a distance.
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Conclusion This is not the biggest crisis in educationbut I would argue that it is the biggest crisis facing the future of geography in England. A greater awareness is a first step, at least. If others share my concern, they may wish to... more
Conclusion This is not the biggest crisis in educationbut I would argue that it is the biggest crisis facing the future of geography in England. A greater awareness is a first step, at least. If others share my concern, they may wish to alert others. The Geographical Association ...
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ABSTRACT There appears to be something of an anxiety-producing impasse in British social geography with repeated calls to examine its positionality. Simultaneously, British, indeed Anglo-American, social geography appears to be enjoying... more
ABSTRACT There appears to be something of an anxiety-producing impasse in British social geography with repeated calls to examine its positionality. Simultaneously, British, indeed Anglo-American, social geography appears to be enjoying something of a renaissance in the new millennium. I argue that such a paradoxical situation owes its existence to the hegemonic narrative of Anglo-American social geography. Starting with an overview of the development of constructions of the social in British social geography, I explore the extent to which such recurring identity crises are opening up avenues for change. Turning to the place of Anglo-American social geography in the international field, I examine the specificity of the institutional and linguistic positioning of British social geography claiming that change will remain surficial until it develops ways of thinking that do not deny the multivocal voices that have made it what it is. This denial constitutes social geography's ‘unspeakable’ and has two intertwining dimensions, an unwillingness to engage with its own whiteness and to move outside its own established repertoire to encompass non-western knowledges. Speculating about the redirection of Anglo-American social geography, I make a claim for a social geography that is constantly reinventing itself in ways that desire difference.
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If this book had been published a decade ago it would no doubt have started with the assertion that women have largely been absent from studies of urban life. In recent years, however, the growing interest in the activities and... more
If this book had been published a decade ago it would no doubt have started with the assertion that women have largely been absent from studies of urban life. In recent years, however, the growing interest in the activities and experiences of women has transformed this statement into something of a truism. There is now a growing body of writing on feminist issues relating to gender and the urban environment to which geographers have contributed alongside sociologists, historians, planners, architects, anthropologists, policy analysts and environmental psychologists. (See, for example, Antipode, 1984; Built Environment, 1984; Matrix, 1984; WGSG, 1984.) The aim of this book is to elaborate the particular contribution that feminist geography can make to the analysis of women’s activities and experience and the nature of their oppression in urban areas, and to indicate the kind of research agenda to which it gives rise.
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‘Gender in the city’ is a topic that has attracted attention mostly from feminist scholars working in a variety of disciplines such as geography, history, sociology, political science, planning, and architecture. Its development, from the... more
‘Gender in the city’ is a topic that has attracted attention mostly from feminist scholars working in a variety of disciplines such as geography, history, sociology, political science, planning, and architecture. Its development, from the 1960s, has followed two separate trajectories with work focusing either on women’s lives in Western cities or on women in cities in the Global South. The first half of this article gives an account of how these two fields emerged and what their major contributions have been and how these have changed over time. I then summarize work in the major current fields of interest to feminist urban scholars: the restructuring of urban form and of women’s lives; urban planning and design; urban public space and urban citizenship; housing/ homelessness/ homes; and women’s fear and pleasures in the city.
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ABSTRACT The “racial” reproduction of labor forms the central concern of this paper, which comprises an investigation of low-income African-American and Anglo-American wome's engagement in waged and unwaged reproductive activities... more
ABSTRACT The “racial” reproduction of labor forms the central concern of this paper, which comprises an investigation of low-income African-American and Anglo-American wome's engagement in waged and unwaged reproductive activities in a downtown area of Grand Rapids, Michigan. A snowball sample was conducted with 97 women. n“Race” was shown to structure options in relation to occupations, access to transportation, and child care provision, as well as formal and informal community networks. An emphasis on the practices underlying the creation of social constructions of gender and “race” reveals that even within the same geographical location women have different experiences of urban poverty.
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Page 1. TOWARD A SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE CITY: Race and Dimensions of Urban Poverty in Women's Lives LINDA J. PEAKE* York University ABSTRACT: Focusing on processes of racialization in the lives of women ...
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ABSTRACT In this response to Ananya Roy’s paper, I ask: who are the allies of feminist knowledge production about the urban? To explore this question, I specifically ask what feminist scholars may find of use in two books, namely Arrival... more
ABSTRACT In this response to Ananya Roy’s paper, I ask: who are the allies of feminist knowledge production about the urban? To explore this question, I specifically ask what feminist scholars may find of use in two books, namely Arrival Cities by Doug Saunders and Implosions/Explosions edited by Neil Brenner, that are representative of two major discourses on the urban, respectively, the “Urban Age” and planetary urbanization, currently favored by policy bodies and (some) academics. Their limited engagement with politics leads me to conclude with a call for a feminist mode of situated knowledge production to engage with (the limits of) urban theory and the urban as a site of praxis.
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... 'PROPER WORDS IN PROPER PLACES
' OR, OF YOUNG TURKS AND OLD TURKEYS'. LindaPeake. Article first published online: 28 JUN 2008. ... Get PDF (296K). More content like this. Find more content: like this... more
... 'PROPER WORDS IN PROPER PLACES
' OR, OF YOUNG TURKS AND OLD TURKEYS'. LindaPeake. Article first published online: 28 JUN 2008. ... Get PDF (296K). More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Linda Peake. ...
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Research Interests: Mental Health and Toll
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In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology... more
In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre’s ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban.
Research Interests:
Key Messages There is a crisis of mental health in the academy. This special issue, the first to address this crisis, brings together three bodies of research: geographers' understanding of the relationship between mental health,... more
Key Messages There is a crisis of mental health in the academy. This special issue, the first to address this crisis, brings together three bodies of research: geographers' understanding of the relationship between mental health, social space, and material places; mental health initiatives in higher education; and the neoliberalization of the academy. In this introduction we discuss two particular foci: defining the crisis of mental health and wellbeing in neoliberalizing universities, and institutional and individual responses. Watch a video presentation of this Special Issue
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The purpose of this essay is to initiate a conversation about the production and analysis of knowledge on women and the urban. Starting with a brief overview of how women have been addressed in the field of urban studies, I turn to their... more
The purpose of this essay is to initiate a conversation about the production and analysis of knowledge on women and the urban. Starting with a brief overview of how women have been addressed in the field of urban studies, I turn to their treatment in works by critical urban scholars, revealing how women fall away from urban theories. The dismissal of women from theory construction and the impact on women's lives of the imbrication of the gendered subject into neoliberal discourses about the city adds urgency to a feminist intervention. A feminist analytic requires the promotion of a new kind of global urban studies that takes seriously women's struggles, strategies and everyday desires.
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Drawing on GenUrb’s comparative research undertaken in mid-2020 with communities in five cities—Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Georgetown, Guyana, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China— we engage in an intersectional analysis of the... more
Drawing on GenUrb’s comparative research undertaken in mid-2020 with communities in five cities—Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Georgetown, Guyana, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China— we engage in an intersectional analysis of the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in women’s everyday lives. Our research employs a variety of context-specific methods, including virtual methods, phone interviews, and socially-distanced interviews to engage women living in neighbourhoods characterized by under-development and economic insecurity. While existing conditions of precarity trouble the before-and-after terminology of Covid-19, across the five cities the narratives of women’s everyday lives reveal shifts in spatial-temporal orders that have deepened gendered and racial exclusions. We find that limited mobilities and the different and changing dimensions of production and social reproduction have led to increased care work, violence, and strained mental health. Finally, we also find that social reproduction solidarities, constituting old and new circuits of care, have been reinforced during the pandemic.
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and concrete dimensions of analysis and of the ways in which planetary urbanization is being applied “in many different ways, and from various angles and approaches.” Like Brenner, Schmid concludes that these applications are evidence of... more
and concrete dimensions of analysis and of the ways in which planetary urbanization is being applied “in many different ways, and from various angles and approaches.” Like Brenner, Schmid concludes that these applications are evidence of affinities among the plurality of voices in urban studies. In the particular light of postcolonial and feminist engagements with planetary urbanization, Schmid holds fast to the heterodox potentiality of the theory and calls for an “open-minded, respectful, and joyful” engagement with
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ABSTRACT The “racial” reproduction of labor forms the central concern of this paper, which comprises an investigation of low-income African-American and Anglo-American wome's engagement in waged and unwaged reproductive activities... more
ABSTRACT The “racial” reproduction of labor forms the central concern of this paper, which comprises an investigation of low-income African-American and Anglo-American wome's engagement in waged and unwaged reproductive activities in a downtown area of Grand Rapids, Michigan. A snowball sample was conducted with 97 women. n“Race” was shown to structure options in relation to occupations, access to transportation, and child care provision, as well as formal and informal community networks. An emphasis on the practices underlying the creation of social constructions of gender and “race” reveals that even within the same geographical location women have different experiences of urban poverty.
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Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The main part of the... more
Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The main part of the article considers three strands of work on friendship that push the boundaries of research in human geography: (1) geographies of affect/emotion and the ontological construction of the human; (2) children’s and young people’s geographies and the (re)production of social ordering; and (3) geographies of mobility and transnationalism in a world of increased human spatial movement and social relations at a distance.
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COVID-19 travels along existing lines of inequality, gender being one of these major fault lines. We refer to gender as the social relations of power that operate to build hierarchies between differently embodied people. Because of its... more
COVID-19 travels along existing lines of inequality, gender being one of these major fault lines. We refer to gender as the social relations of power that operate to build hierarchies between differently embodied people. Because of its relational nature, analyses of gender require an intersectional approach, such that gender is examined in relation to ‘race’, class, sexuality, and stage of the life cycle. We argue, moreover, that while a social construction, ‘gender’ takes place within the fleshy confines of a complex biological and physiological bodily system. Hence, we examine COVID-19 disparities between gendered bodies in relation to biological as well as social and behavioural factors. Despite a globally equal rate of infection between men and women, there is a more severe level of disease and higher level of mortality among men than women, and yet COVID-19 has a disproportionate impact on women because of gendered social factors. Indeed, COVID-19 has served to heighten awareness of the gendered analyses of institutional racism and violence against women and is eroding the limited gains in gender equality made over the past decades, with the pandemic deepening pre-existing inequalities.
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... 'PROPER WORDS IN PROPER PLACES
' OR, OF YOUNG TURKS AND OLD TURKEYS'. LindaPeake. Article first published online: 28 JUN 2008. ... Get PDF (296K). More content like this. Find more content: like this... more
... 'PROPER WORDS IN PROPER PLACES
' OR, OF YOUNG TURKS AND OLD TURKEYS'. LindaPeake. Article first published online: 28 JUN 2008. ... Get PDF (296K). More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Linda Peake. ...