Concept Caching: Moscow

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Moscow has long been the center of Russian politics, whether it was the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or the Russian state of today.  In fact, Russian governments and politicians are often referred to simply as Moscow.  As mentioned in the post A Russian re-turn?, there seems to some political momentum among the former territories of the Russian Empire and of the former Soviet Republics to make a re-turn back toward Moscow since their abrupt Western turns made in the 1990s.

A Russian re-turn?

Russia has been a significant global and Eurasian presence for much longer than many contemporary Western perspectives give credit to.  This may be because the Russian Realm has existed, and at times prospered, as ideologically distinct from the rest of the world system.  Some historical similarities aside (like, colonialism, imperialism, and empire), autocracy and communism separate this ideological set from the democratic and capitalist nearly everywhere else.  The subtle power of memory and history has begun to reassert themselves as some of the former Soviet territories and Republics reverse their primary political associations from west to east.  Yet, what is seen as a contemporary “turn to Russia” today would not be so much a “turn”, but perhaps a “re”-turn for some Eastern European states.

A brief look at Russian historical and territorial geography provides an insight into the recurring, although contentious, allegiance and memory across, now “independent,” territorial borders.  The ties that unite places like Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian core, are quite deep-rooted as they define significant parts of the shared “historical heartland” between these Slavic peoples.  Such memories are often revisited earnestly, despite their temporal distance of thousands of years back.  In more recent memory, the legacy of the Soviet system and its tenuous, federal “union” of diverse nationalities have also left an imprint.  The cultural organization of the Soviet system represented a fine line between political subordinance and cultural independence.   In the early 1990s, the appeal of cultural and political independence certainly won out.  However, the Soviet political and economic system, although globally judged as a failure, was somewhat a success on the ground as it provided a tangible safety net for people.  Communist-style support is now missed as capitalist alternatives have proven uneven and ultimately dissatisfactory.  In terms of global alliances, even former Republics that made the quickest turn to the West, are now rethinking such strategies as they find themselves increasingly peripheralized in complicated Western supra-national systems.  This geopolitical disillusionment has found a new opportunity as the Russian state has recently been making its own global resurgence, riding the wave of favorable global energy prices, reasserting its “need” for autocratic-style democracy, and reemerging as a global power in this multipolar world.

The strongest return has been that of Ukraine.  In 2004, the Orange Revolution was hoped to bring democracy and stronger ties to Europe.  However, since then, disenchantment has reigned and in February 2010 a pro-Moscow president was elected.  President Viktor Yanukovich ingratiated Ukraine with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, negotiating and signing some significant treaties and agreements that will have lasting effects.  This “re-turn” was not unilaterally endorsed, and some of the most comical political machinations resulted during the Ukrainian Parliament’s debate over these treaties.  Going even a step further, the new pro-Russian government is also rewriting its history books and erasing references to the pro-democracy interlude of the Orange Revolution.

In Latvia, economic troubles have contributed to the near return to Russian influence.  Historically, Latvia was one of the three Baltic States that declared their independence from the Soviet Union and made the quickest about face turn to the West.  However, following a recent economic collapse which associated blame with the West, the country nearly turned power over to a political party that is backed by the significant ethnic Russian population, itself a legacy of Soviet Russification.   Interestingly, there is an increasingly Latvian contingent that seems to view Russia as a lesser evil than Western Europe.

As Russia reemerges on the world political stage, there may be more former satellites that choose to return to its influence.  Especially as economic and governing politics in the European Union become increasingly uneven and contentious, perhaps even the most unexpected reversals may take place.

Concept Caching: The Flag of the European Union

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The European Union is truly a grand political, economic, social and cultural experiment.  Quite revolutionary for even a region of revolutions, the EU marks a fine line between inter-governmental and supra-national.  Complexity and compromise are what define the diplomatic-style interactions and the creation of cross-national policy.  Member states in the EU are entangled with one another across diverse policy areas and across scales.  Never has this been more apparent than with the 2010 Debt Crisis in Europe as discussed in the post Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga.  This image shows the nested and connected nature of various scales in the EU, and how certain cities and localities are directly connected to the European scale.

Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga

Part Two

Political Economy in Europe: Austerity and Political Repercussions

Geography, as a discipline, is well-suited to a review of the events of the European Debt Crisis, the resulting policies of austerity, and the social and political implications of those economic events.  As described in Part One, the world economy is deeply uneven, unequal and inequitable.  And yet, that unevenness still manages to affect many people and markets in far-reaching ways.  The bursting of the American housing market bubble instituted global recession, which exposed the overextended deficits of many European Union member states sending the region into its Debt Crisis.  Part Two of this saga will explore the role of the State, or national government, as well as the supra-State of the European Union in managing the crisis and what such a moment holds for the future of these institutions and for the peoples of Europe.

Political Economy

A political economy perspective of economic geography is worthwhile because of its focus on the social relations and power that underpin economic activities and outcomes.  In cultural and critical theories, this perspective is often broadly described as an analysis of the social and political context of phenomenon.  The social context refers to the many relationships between various groups of people in society that form the foundation for its interactions, like employers and workers in production activities.  The political context, in turn, refers to the power, or different abilities, capabilities, and capacities of certain people or groups to act in ways that will impact others.  This can be seen in the power of an employer to hire or fire employees; yet, that power is still subject to other decisions, perhaps some made by stockholders or by market conditions.

Political economists firstly see that there is no such thing as a “free” market and that economies are normatively regulated by larger social systems built on informal and formal habits, rules or customs.  The most power-ful actor in regulating economic geographies is the state.  The state is often more than just the national government, but it also includes its partnered set of public institutions all devoted to social and economic stability.  Thus, it is the state that has been charged with a litany of economic roles to influence a wide breadth of scales and peoples.  These many roles are divided into two main, related functions:  one focused on sustaining economic development or growth; and one focused on maintaining social order.  These functions are related in the global, capitalist system:  on one hand, the system requires economic growth and investment to fund state enterprises that redistribute the wealth associated with economic growth; and on the other hand, that reinvestment into the peoples’ wellbeing is seen to ensure the stability of social conditions required for economic growth to continue.  This partnership of private and public activity in the capitalist system is mutually dependent, for better or for worse.

The State and Economic Stability

There are two general scales that economic regulation occurs at in the European region, that of the European Union at the supranational scale and of the European state at the national scale.  In trying to recover economic stability, the EU supra-state has revisited its eurozone economic policies.  In so doing, the politics of power in the EU are revealed as complicated and compromise-oriented as the European Commission works on one set of new rules while a committee of member states works on another.  Further, the uneven power within the EU is also shown as leading economies like France and Germany call for the imposition of heavy sanctions to those members that exceed the deficit cap, now and in the future.  Although, in 2003 both countries had exceeded the deficit cap and, at the time, swayed the other member states to block sanctions that should have been applied.  Ultimately, the EU approved tougher rules, including sanctions, for the eurozone.  This ruling has also been made into a political opportunity to change the EU’s main governing treaty, the Lisbon Treaty.  The main proposed amendment to the treaty would primarily involve the creation of a permanent crisis fund.  At the national scale, the member states seem wary of this treaty change, as passing the Lisbon Treaty was a cumbersome effort at agreement across national boundaries.

Interestingly, there has been a near consensus in how member states have responded to their shrinking revenues and the resulting Debt Crisis.  Enter the “Age of Austerity”, where many European governments have started to reverse decades of “cradle-to-grave” social welfare policies that have made Western Europe a “lifestyle superpower.” This strikes at the heart of European lifestyles, social customs and political ideologies.  Such policies aimed at wellbeing have long been financed by debt in prosperous times and are now seen as a significant social burden in times of austerity.  And now that it is time for payback, the policies of the Social Democrats of the European political left have been silenced and their legitimacy bankrupt.  Cuts in services are especially difficult to accept as unemployment rates soar alongside national debts and personal incomes fall in step with national revenues.  The loss of the European socialist safety net is occurring when that safety net is most needed.

Austerity and Social Instability

This combination of social burden with debt burden has led to some significant compromises to the stability prized by national governments.  The first tremors were seen in Greece, where violent protests engulfed Athens and general strike echoed throughout the country.  Such demonstrations became a common reaction in the face of austerity cuts.  Workers across Europe organized for a “European Day of Action,” against austerity cuts in the European capitals of Spain, Greece, Belgium, Poland, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, and Lithuania.  Later, the French came out again to dispute the raising of the retirement age and pension reforms.  France was paralyzed as students took to the streets and union workers went on strike for weeks creating fuel shortages, train and air delays.  Such prolonged protests threaten the political stability in Europe and the painful adjustments that come out of this economic crisis will certainly “test” established systems.  Already, debates in national governments are deadlocked as conservative and socialist legislators can’t find common ground for future budgets and the extent of austerity cuts.  States are effectively torn between their obligations and allegiances to markets or citizens.  At the peoples’ scale, these cutbacks are seen to result from the recklessness of the financial elite which now impact livelihoods and lifestyles of the many.  A series of interviews conducted by the New York Times in a piece titled, “The Austerity Zone: Life in the New Europe” revealed the anxious ambivalence of the western Europeans who look to both their national politicians to make necessary cuts and to the EU to fix the situation that led to such a crisis.

Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga

Part One

Economic Geography and the Global Recession:  The uneven geographies of economic and financial globalization

The 2008 global recession both revealed and complicated many existing notions of the interconnections and interdependencies that make up the web of the world economy.  Focusing on the European world region provides a very interesting, and at times mind-boggling, example of this web and how it links people, institutions, and futures across all geographical scales.  The global recession began in the United States, but it has undermined the established, overarching economic theories of Western, capitalist institutions as well as institutionalized lifestyles of European peoples.  Part One will focus on the unevenness of the world economy and how a select few, speculating on local markets caused a global recession.

Economic Geography and Uneven Globalization

In order to understand these complexities, one must turn to some kind of theory of the world economy.  Economic geography provides an excellent approach for its focus on the spatial patterns of economic activity and the economic processes that shape and change those patterns.  Economic geographers see that the contemporary, globalized economy has emerged along with technological advancements in communication and transportation, which have engendered a truly global financial system and have necessitated the creation of global governance structures to “coordinate” trade and development.  Yet, economic globalization is a very spatially uneven phenomenon.  That if anything, some economic geographers have argued that it is ‘regionalized’, as the actual geographies of trading, production and consumption, finance, and development convey.  This unevenness is most significant in the concentration of power that qualifies globalized networks, especially in finance.  It is the decisions of a few, concentrated in specific locales that can influence sweeping global trends.  The consequences of this unevenness are best seen in the 2008 global recession.

The Local Making of a Global Recession

True to the unevenness and complexities of the global financial system, the story of Europe’s Debt Crisis does not actually begin in Europe.  Instead, the 2008 global recession was set up as a house of cards built on rampant spending and loose lending in the US housing market.  The big players of the global financial system were wooed by seemingly lucrative investments in the mortgages and rising home prices of select local contexts in specific US-states, notably California.  Both European and American investment banks fueled the frenzy by crafting complicated bundles of these mortgages into their investment portfolios.  As long as home values and borrowers were buoyant, these portfolios were literally money in the bank.  However, this buoyancy was illusory; much of these mortgages were predatory and the loans were undersigned with doubtful prospect for repayment.  Further, the overconfidence in the market led to an oversupply of homes which eventually slowed the housing market, instituting a downward spiral of home prices, foreclosures and more empty homes.  This hit directly at the inflated portfolios of US and European investment banks, which were loaded up with convoluted packages of these insolvent mortgages.  When home values tanked and loans defaulted, these portfolios were rife with toxic assets and significantly devalued.  In these banks, assets and capital vanished, leading to the first ripple of a financial crisis.  Ultimately, this crumbling of the major global investment banks (nearly all concentrated in the US and Europe), triggered the dwindling of available capital for lending and borrowing at all scales, now commonly recognized as a “credit crunch.”  Further investing was limited by the credit crunch, but also by a reversal in lending ideology that saw many ventures as increasingly risky even to those banks not initially affected.  This had far reaching impacts in places like India, Asia, Latin America and beyond.

From Private to Public:  the European Debt Crisis

Ultimately, the insolvency of private lending institutions made its way onto public balance sheets, as US and European governments sought to stabilize their markets through bank bailouts and the purchase of toxic assets.  Following the bailouts and the decline in global lending, global economic activity overall slowed or crashed into a global recession, and local tax bases in the US and Europe subsequently dwindled.  In Europe, national governments found themselves with significant budget shortfalls which overextended their current debt obligations.  In Europe, united by the political and economic structures of the European Union (EU), this would reveal another pattern and scale of unevenness.  The “convergence criteria” for the eurozone, the EU’s economic space, dictated the approved debt levels of member states.  In prosperous times, these debt levels were not rigidly enforced and were veiled by dubious accounting and statistics of some member states.  However, with the reality of global economic downturn, these national governments were no longer able to hide their massive national deficits that grossly surpassed EU limits.  The first, and most desperate, of these debt-laden member states was Greece.  Greece’s national debt was seen to overshadow the value of its entire economy.  The deficits in Spain, Portugal and Ireland were next to come under scrutiny.  Fears were then directed at the euro, its threatened credibility and devaluing, and the European Debt Crisis was in full swing.  The New York Times created a series of maps to illustrate the changing geographies of European Debt.  The situation in Europe has also influenced other centers of the world economy: some argued the Europe’s crisis could aid the U.S. recovery, others hinder it; for China, the situation complicated changing currency policy and boosted its share in international aid agencies, like the International Monetary Fund.  The European Debt Crisis shows the same uneven, concentrated economic and financial system at work.  Even more so, it illustrates hierarchical diffusion as troubles erupt at economic epicenters, ripple outward, and trigger new economic aftershocks and financial tremors.

Upcoming:  Part Two will dive into the local and national effects of the European Debt Crisis by investigating the turn to austerity, the reactions of  European citizenry and the social and political implications.

Geography Directions: Topography & Cultural Exclusion

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

In the October 2010 issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Dr Sergei Shubin explores the sociological and topographical history of cultural exclusion in the Republic of Ireland and the Russian Federation – two nations with remarkably similar agricultural and industrial narratives. Shubin’s work concerns the processes and infrastructures of cultural exclusion and isolation within societies. History has, perhaps unfortunately, imbued both Ireland and Russia with images of idealised, utopian rural life. Such perceptions marginalized contemporary understanding of poverty and helped erode long-standing folk traditions.  Dr Shubin effectively applies the notion of ‘cultural capital’ – a paradigm first discussed by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977) – to the analysis of historical and contemporary social hierarchies. Rural poverty, Dr Shubin notes, is part of a much broader cultural past that has allowed some to prosper, while others are caught in a vicious cycle of debt, abuse, isolation, and exclusion.

An intrinsic part of this issue lies with topographical geography. Although immensely varied, the Russian landscape is defined by a relatively standard framework. Expansive urban agglomerations are connected by major thruways (e.g. Moscow to St Petersburg; Rostov-na-Donu to Volgograd). Smaller communities are dotted in the rural countryside that lies between. This geographical arrangement is advantageous for class and cultural distinction, and ultimately, discrimination. A similar situation exists in Ireland. Roughly speaking, one can divide the rural/urban organization of island into quarters. The eastern and southern quarters are relatively wealthy and cosmopolitan. The northwestern quarter, however (as well as the region surrounding the Aran Islands), faces away from the rest of the British Isles and mainland Europe, and remains rural, sparsely populated, and low-income. In both Russia and Ireland, a sharp urban/rural divide exists, determining personal incomes, material wealth, access to domestic and foreign goods, and health.

Discussions of cultural exclusion are by no means limited to Russia and Ireland. The current controversy of the French Republic’s dealings with Roma migrants reflects long-standing cultural tensions between native-born French citizens and immigrants, who are often forced into undesirable jobs or in positions far from major cities. As Dr Shubin pointedly argued, relegation is a particularly effective mean of excluding certain cultural groups, ‘limit[ing] an individual’s cultural resources and forc[ing] people to take up less desirable positions in the community’. Le Monde recently highlighted inter-governmental confusion over the legality of the forced deportations. Yet the Roma fiasco hints at a much more deeply-rooted issue in France. Article 1 of the French Constitution declares that, ‘France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion’. Yet, Article 2 begins by clearly stating that French is the national language’. Over generations, this distinction has established a strong dichotomy between “French” and “non-French” constituents in the national culture. Is it possible for France to embrace multi-ethnicity as part of its national identity? Or will cultural exclusion continue to inhibit immigrants, second-generation families, and non-French speaking peoples?

By Benjamin Sacks

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Interconnections amid the floodwaters of Pakistan

The devastating floods that have inundated most of Pakistan over the summer provide plenty of opportunity for a sobering look at the interconnections between climate, politics, economy, and society, across scales.  Outside of the aid and trade questions that have been raised among the international community in helping Pakistan recover, there have been other interesting connections that can be discussed in many geography classes.

For many following this story, it seemed to begin with the torrential monsoon rains.  However, the actual events began with drought.  Below average rainfall levels were experienced in 2009 and as of early July 2010 they were expected to worsen.  National Geographic released a series of photos titled, “Amid Drought, Pakistan Prays for Rain.” And come the end of July, their prayers were answered.

Only a few weeks after the National Geographic photos, torrential monsoon rains begin to engulf Northern Pakistan, the very area shown to be stricken in the photos.  The levels of rainfall in just a few weeks broke records for the last 100 years.  Early on, there were cautionary words for the stressed Pakistani government, already fighting insurgency and coping with other domestic disasters, as they began to appeal to the international community for aid.  Following the initial rains, Pakistan was hit by high temperatures and continued rains that caused additional flooding and landslides.

For a developing world infrastructure, already uneven and inconsistent, the magnitude of destruction during and following the floods proved immense.  The first reports profiled the human devastation as thousands of people were killed and millions made homeless.  Included in these reports were the effects on livelihoods, as entire villages and towns, agricultural fields and livestock herds, food stores, and essential transport and social networks of roads, hospitals, etc., were wiped out.  The widespread damage is seen to set back the Pakistani infrastructure by many years.

For survivors, they were challenged with the day to day battle for food, limited by actual provisions or by rising food prices.  Limited access to clean water was leading to dehydration and dangers of water-borne disease.  The lack of shelter saw many flood victims exposed to the sun, high temperatures, disease-bearing insects and poisonous snakes.  The largest at-risk group of survivors are the millions of Pakistani children who are incredibly vulnerable to disease and malnutrition.  Continued rains on top of existing destruction meant survivors had to improvise transport and had to continue moving from one flood-ravaged area to the next.  The spreading impact of the floods and of survivors led to renewed fears over the future food and livelihoods of much larger populations.

Amid the devastation, some reports focused entirely on the destabilizing affects of such a natural disaster, in the already delicate stability of a place like Pakistan.  Much of this potential destabilization was shared between two foci:  the government and the Taliban.  The recovery was argued as the “Last Chance for Pakistan” being the “gravest security crisis” to be faced by the country and the South Asia region.  There were discrimination accusations of aid being delivered first to certain party supporters or wealthy landowners diverting floodwaters from their own fields to others’.  Out of this disarray, it was reported that the Taliban in Pakistan were able to regroup to the degree that considered targeting the already under-resourced aid workers in the country.  In the last few weeks after the flooding, the same problems remain, yet political in-fighting on how to move forward and who should act is now worse than ever.  This has led some to argue that it is the civil-military elite in the Pakistani government that have hindered international aid and that should be relieved of their duties in leading the recovery.  Ultimately, the appeals for international aid have been made on behalf of political stability, fighting insurgency, and also in mitigating the effects of climate change.

Through the drama of Pakistan’s natural disaster, issues of environment and society can be discussed in geography classes.  In physical geography courses, the discussion can focus on big scale issues of climate change and increasing extreme weather events, or can be smaller scale in illustrating flood plain events, like 100- and 500-year events.  In human geography courses, the discussion may venture into economic and social development, political structures, inequality, and the consequences of these for certain cultural/social groups, or overall recovery.  In world regional courses, the discussion can weave these issues together looking at the many human-environment interactions within the country, but also investigate global connections among security, international aid, and sovereignty.

As if this event was not powerful enough in black and white print, there have been many accompanying photo reports.  They add a greater significance to in-class discussions allowing students to visually identify the magnitude of the flooding, destruction and human devastation that these reports entail.  Photojournals have been posted by the Huffington Post, NPR, NPR’s The Two-Way blog, NPR’s Picture Show blog, and National Geographic.  NPR has also produced an interactive map detailing the extent of the floods in Pakistan’s four provinces, providing links to images and videos.

Discussion Questions:

1. Identify what climate region is Pakistan and the Indus River included in and what other climate regions border it?  How might this climate position explain the cycles of drought, monsoon rains, and flooding stages that have been seen in the 2010 Pakistan Floods?
2. Review some of the articles discussing the extent and effects of the Pakistan flooding.  What do these impacts tell us about the economic and social development in Pakistan, and in South Asia?  Think about infrastructure and settlement, population and poverty, and gender equity, among others.
3. What is the primary economic activity in Pakistan?  In what ways is it already environmentally vulnerable?  How has this vulnerability informed issues related to food security and development?  What additional vulnerabilities are revealed in the 2010 Pakistan Flood event?
4. What are some of the global concerns that hinge on Pakistan’s political security?  How are arguments over aid or trade in Pakistan’s recovery aimed at serving global security concerns?

The “Ground Zero Mosque” and Cultural Geography

There has been plenty of, well, talk about the proposed building of a Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero.  The chatter has manifest around political arguments, religious liberties, urban development strategies, community-building, and mostly, impalpable feelings.  With no attempt to take sides or to analyze such points of view, this topic can be investigated from a cultural geographic approach that may offer insight into the contradictions, controversies and commotion.

In cultural geography, we investigate the context of a place.  In this case, we would interrogate the perspectives, activities, histories and futures that all overlap in the place we know as Lower Manhattan.  By interrogating the spatial context of a site, we find traces of culture imbued with change, power, and struggle.  These traces can be material acts, messages, and presences in place from yesterday, today and tomorrow; these traces can be non-material, emanating from peoples’ memories, emotions and psyches of place.  Cultural geography, and its approach, is particularly apt for considering the competing claims over the place of Lower Manhattan.  It is the simultaneous site for competing claims made by New Yorkers, Muslim-Americans, 9/11 victims and survivors, and all Americans.  These traces are what make the proposed placement of an Islamic community center such a contentious prospect.

At the heart of this debate is the intersection of national memory and place.  Lower Manhattan is the site of one of the most emotionally-stricken events in the American memory: the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers.  This national memory is itself composed of millions of individual acts of remembering.  Each colored by individual experiences, knowledges, prejudices, and perspectives.  That memory has a clear visual impression that does not require a precise knowledge of the actual geographies that contextualize that landscape.  It is the tensions within this national memory that draw the battle lines in this culture war over the site.

There are several themes that emerge from this controversy.  One of the first themes that occurs over and over is location.  Distance and proximity are paramount among the arguments over the location of the Muslim community center.  To some the simple math of counting city blocks settles the dispute.  To others, it is the traces of the event that call for more relative notions of adjacency and nearness.  This is perhaps the most obvious cultural act of bordering a place in order to underscore its meaning.

Another theme relates to the establishment of presence in the place: in particular, the presence of Muslims in Lower Manhattan.  By some, this presence has been continuously claimed from the past and into the present.  That existence has preceded and persisted with the main event at the heart of this debate: 9/11.  This is another act in claiming: by asserting belonging to the place, then rights to the place are substantiated.

Another theme relates to various the scales of the debate.  Ultimately the unease or struggle is sited not only in Lower Manhattan, but at the national scale of America.  Some of the ways this has become discernable is through the discursive focus on the planned cultural activity (Islam) and on the associated cultural identity (Muslim).  First, cultural activity is focused on at the site, but also can be seen being fought over at the national scale.  The space within the community center in the place of Lower Manhattan is not defined broadly as an interfaith space of worship or prayer, but narrowly as a space of Muslim worship or prayer.  It is respected that in America, religious freedom is to be tolerated.  However, as a result of national memory, many of the individual acts of remembering now associate that certain religion as inappropriate or out of place at this site.  Some have argued this distinction stems from the conflation of Islam with terrorism, and of Muslim with foreign.  And they would see this as resulting in the discomfort, fear, xenophobia that is heard among the chatter.  Second, cultural identity is also seen to be conflict-ridden at all scales.  Perhaps as a response to the conflation of Islam with terrorism or foreign, there have emerged discursive efforts to open up Muslim cultural identities to include not only religion, but to include coexisting roles as citizens, neighbors, stakeholders, and insiders.  This can be heard as claims to identities as New Yorkers, as Americans, and as families.

Such a controversy provides a rich opportunity for the application of the cultural geographic approach.  This approach is also often the least recognized or understood by non- and lay- geographers.  And yet, the processes that it investigates are the subconscious, intuitive and most human which we employ as we shape and engage with our world.  Introducing undergraduate geographers to the cultural geographic approach is a way of introducing them to human society, and to themselves.

Cultural Geography References:

Anderson (2010) Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces, Routeledge.

Mitchell (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell.

Discussion Questions:

1. Recall your experience on the day of September 11, 2001.  Attempt to describe what might be the overall national memory of that day.  Where would your memory and the national memory converge and diverge?
2. Review the two ways that location is approached (i.e. the rigid distance approach or the affective adjacency approach) in this controversy along with the accompanying validation for their claim over the site.  Evaluate each argument separately.
3. Assess the importance of establishing presence and belonging.  What are some of the strategies that cultural presence or belonging is seen to be validated or negated?

Geography Directions: The British Impact on Indian Geography

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

This past week, the Prime Minister completed an official visit to India, leading a large entourage of government, business, sport, academic, artistic, and cultural leaders. The visit to India was intended to strengthen long-standing bilateral ties between the two nations. By opening a new chapter in an intimate, if often tense relationship, Mr Cameron stressed the economic and cultural benefits that India and the United Kingdom share – a common language, government organization, social priorities, and investment in key industries. In an editorial for The Hindu, Mr Cameron summarized his position by stating that, “I know that Britain cannot rely on sentiment and shared history for a place in India’s future. Your country has the whole world beating a path to its door. But I believe Britain should be India’s partner of choice in the years ahead”.

Indeed, India of the twenty-first century is prime real-estate for global investment. With well over one billion constituents, a burgeoning economy, and a fledgling middle class, India is poised to become a global player. Why might Britain enjoy an advantage over other global powers in competing for Indian business? The answer may lie in geography.

From a human geographical perspective, the contemporary Indian Diaspora in Britain is tremendously important, providing lucrative commercial, social and creative models that have permanently altered the British cultural landscape. This immigration influx was reactionary in nature, a post-colonial response to eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century British rule of the Indian subcontinent. The geographical impact of the British Raj was immense. In a century, India was transformed from a vast agricultural region, separated by dozens of feuding kingdoms, into a prized economic asset – ‘the Jewel of the British Crown’. As early as the 1770s the East India Company commenced cartographic surveys of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Reorganized under the Ordnance Survey Office, the Survey of India created a distinctive urban infrastructure, facilitated the development of the world’s most extensive railway network, and led to more efficient agricultural production and output. The developments of the India Survey were closely followed by the British public; an 1898 issue of The Geographical Journal complained that the annual issue of the Survey of India Report (12[6]: 606-607) had been inexplicably delayed, angering investors and observers alike. In 2007 The Geographical Journal reviewed an excellent treatise on the subject. Entitled Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India (Saraswati Raju, M Satish Kumar and Stuart Corbridge, eds.), this text successfully analysed changing Indian geography through Western and Indian eyes. Owing to the Royal Geographical Society’s long association with Indian exploration and cartography, the Society’s journals provide ample discourse of Indian-British narratives, including Miles Ogborn’s “Writing Travels,” and Alison Blunt’s “Imperial Geographies of Home”.

By Benjamin Sacks

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Geography Directions: Energy Security

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Our dependence on energy is increasingly fragile. In the US, oil companies are drilling deeper and taking more risks in response to the demand for cheap oil. In April, a Transocean/BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and sank, resulting in a massive oil spill. Regardless of how the situation has been managed, it was the demand for oil that meant that the oil rig, with all its associated risks, was there in the first place. Energy supplied by fossil fuel is becoming more risky to obtain.

Meanwhile, on the Isle of Eigg, off the west coast of Scotland, residents have been urged to use household appliances less as a lack of rain has reduced the amount of electricity generated through hydro-power schemes. Energy supplies are becoming more difficult to sustain.

In Belarus recently, piped gas supplies from Russia were reduced in response to a disagreement over payment for gas and the use of transit pipelines. Energy security is therefore not just a case of the geographical distribution of supply and demand, but is also dependant on complex social processes and international relations.

Michael Bradshaw deals with these themes in an article in Geography Compass, published in 2009. Bradshaw illustrates the multidimensional nature of energy security. For example, climate change policy is driving a reduction in reliance on carbon-based fossil fuels. At the same time, China and India’s rapidly developing economies are increasing their demand for energy, reshaping the challenges of energy security as they add their voices to the debate.

Geographers are well placed to understand the interface of the physical and political drivers of changing energy supply and demand. A key challenge remains in translating this into an understanding of energy security and the policies needed to sustain affordable and sufficient energy supplies.

By I-Hsien Porter
To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

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