Walking women: interviews with artists on the move

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Open borders, closed minds: the discursive construction of national identity in North Cyprus

The article investigates the discursive construction of a Turkish Cypriot national identity by the newspapers in North Cyprus. It questions the representation and reconstruction processes of national identity within the press and examines the various practices employed to mobilize readers around certain national imaginings. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the article analyses news reports of the opening of border crossings in Cyprus in 2003, based on their content, the strategies used in the production of national identity and the linguistic means employed in the process. In this way, the nationalist tendencies embedded in news discourses, as well as discriminatory and exclusive practices, are sought out

Using websites to disseminate research on urban spatialities

This paper reviews a selection of websites that explore urban geographies. Many sites use the web as a depository for large amounts of research data. However, many are using websites to disseminate research findings, and the paper focuses on these. It suggests that, thus far, there are three significant ways in which urban researchers are exploiting the potentialities of web technologies to interpret urban spaces: by evoking a sense of the complexity of urban spatialities; by inviting site visitors to engage actively and performatively with the research materials; and by emphasising the sensory qualities of urban spaces. The paper discusses how one website in particular invites its visitors to engage with complex, sensory urban spatialities. The paper compares geographers' use of collage and montage as part of this discussion, and ends by reflecting on current work and commenting on its future development

'Mindless markers of the nation': The routine flagging of nationhood across the visual environment

The visual environment has increasingly been used as a lens with which to understand wider processes of social and economic change with studies employing in-depth qualitative approaches to focus on, for example, gentrification or trans-national networks. This exploratory paper offers an alternative perspective by using a novel method, quantitative photo mapping, to examine the extent to which a particular socio-cultural marker, the nation, is ‘flagged’ across three contrasting sites in Britain. As a multi-national state with an increasingly diverse population, Britain offers a particularly fruitful case study, drawing in debates around devolution, European integration and Commonwealth migration. In contributing to wider debates around banal nationalism, the paper notes the extent to which nations are increasingly articulated through commerce, consumption and market exchange and the overall significance of everyday markers (signs, objects, infrastructure) in naturalising a national view of the world

'Mine's a Pint of Bitter': Performativity, gender, class and representations of authenticity in real-ale tourism

Leisure choices are expressive of individual agency around the maintenance of taste, boundaries, identity and community. This research paper is part of a wider project designed to assess the social and cultural value of real ale to tourism in the north of England. This paper explores the performativity of real-ale tourism and debates about belonging in northern English real-ale communities. The research combines an ethnographic case study of a real-ale festival with semi-structured interviews with organisers and volunteers, northern English real-ale brewers and real-ale tourists visiting the festival. It is argued that real-ale tourism, despite its origins in the logic of capitalism, becomes a space where people can perform Habermasian, communicative leisure, and despite the contradictions of preferring some capitalist industries over others on the basis of their perceived smaller size and older age, real-ale fans demonstrate agency in their performativity

Retracing trajectories: the embodied experience of cycling, urban sensescapes and the commute between ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘city’ in Utrecht, NL

This paper looks into the experience of “passing through different territories of the city” (Sennett, 2006, p. 3). Despite their importance for making sense of the city as a whole, these experiences are often not acknowledged in urban planning. This paper compares the everyday, embodied experiences of commuter cyclists with the planners’ perspective on Utrecht. ‘On the ground’ data was collected via ride-alongs with 15 inhabitants of the Leidsche Rijn neighbourhood. Our analysis reveals cycling trajectories composed of diverse sensescapes. It paints a much more complex picture of intra-urban divisions and connections than the planners’ perspective of the ‘new’ Leidsche Rijn neighbourhood separated from the ‘old’ city by major infrastructure lines

Hospitality, Culture and Regeneration: Urban decay, entrepreneurship and the "ruin" bars of Budapest

This paper considers the relationships between hospitality, culture and urban regeneration through an examination of rom (ruin) venues, which operate in dilapidated buildings in Budapest, Hungary. The paper reviews previous work on culture and urban regeneration in order to locate the role of hospitality within emerging debates. It subsequently interrogates the evolution of the rom phenomenon and demonstrates how, in this context, hospitality thrives because of social and physical decay in urban locations, how operators and entrepreneurs exploit conflicts among various actors involved in regeneration, and how hospitality may be mobilised purposefully in the regeneration process. The paper demonstrates how networked entrepreneurship maintains these operations and how various forms of cultural production are entangled and mobilised in the venues’ hospitality propositions

A critical geopolitics of observant practice at British military airshows

ArticleCopyright © 2015 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers)This paper demonstrates how visual cultures of militarism take shape as part of a ‘thick’ geopolitics of being-in-place. It draws on historical accounts of, and empirical observations at, British military airshows, which it interprets via the concept of ‘observant practice’. The paper argues that the imaginative and rhetorical force of military spectacle and popular militarism are tied to its markedly enclavic spatiality, i.e. to seeing and doing in-place. By taking seriously the spatial and sensory experience of British airshows, the paper extends recent work in critical geopolitics that questions the spatialised politics of experience, and brings them into dialogue with cultural geographies of tourism. It provides a brief history of the spectacular origins of aviation and of the use of airshows to the practice of statecraft, and demonstrates how airshows are an important element in the cultural phenomenon of militarisation. The paper takes forward debates around ‘the vision thing’ in critical geopolitics by illustrating why the notion of observant practice should not be dissociated from consideration of the spaces in and through which militaries become the object of visual curiosity. It expands, therefore, the potential of observant practice as a critique of popular military cultures.ESR