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Articles 1 - 30 of 47
Full-Text Articles in Human Geography
Exploring The Dynamics Of Cross-Boundary Interactions In Qinglinkou, China: The Perspective Of Networks Of Second-Home Owners, Meiling Wu, Mengqiu Cao, Jiuxia Sun
Exploring The Dynamics Of Cross-Boundary Interactions In Qinglinkou, China: The Perspective Of Networks Of Second-Home Owners, Meiling Wu, Mengqiu Cao, Jiuxia Sun
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Cross-boundary interactions between second-home owners and local are complex over time–networks form and evolve within second-home owners and between owners and locals, each with its deliberately selective inclusion and exclusion. However, little attention has been paid to this phenomenon in the literature. This study, based on social network analysis alongside qualitative interviews, explores the dynamics of interactions between second-home owners and locals by analysing the networks formed by second-home owners in Qinglinkou, China. The ways in which second-home owners maintain and strengthen pre-existing networks with other owners and forge new links with locals, shape the cross-boundary interactions between the two …
The Political Ecology Of Death: Chinese Religion And The Affective Tensions Of Secularised Burial Rituals In Singapore, Quan Gao, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong
The Political Ecology Of Death: Chinese Religion And The Affective Tensions Of Secularised Burial Rituals In Singapore, Quan Gao, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper explores the political ecology of death and the affective tensions of secularised burial rituals in Singapore. Although scholars have recently acknowledged the roles of biopower and affect in shaping environmental politics, religion and death as socio-affective forces have not been substantively engaged with by political ecologists. We argue that death is inherently both a spiritual and ecological phenomenon, as it exposes not only the spiritual geographies that structure how people see the natural world, but also the affective tensions and struggles over what counts as a “proper” form of burial in relation to religion and nature. First, we …
Infrastructure's (Supra)Sacralizing Effects: Contesting Littoral Spaces Of Fishing, Faith, And Futurity Along Sri Lanka's Western Coastline, Orlando Woods
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper explores the ways in which infrastructural development can cause the sacred to become a source of political legitimacy, and sacred authority to become a politically charged construct. For resource-dependent communities, the ecological damage caused by infrastructural development can cause ostensibly profane issues to be imbued with sacred meaning and value. With sacralization comes the expectation that figures of sacred authority will campaign for justice on behalf of the communities that they represent. However, when the authority evoked comes from outside the boundaries of institutionalized religion, processes of suprasacralization come into play. By exploring infrastructure’s (supra)sacralizing effects, I demonstrate …
A Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With A Single Step: Towards A Confucian Geopolitics, Lily Kong
A Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With A Single Step: Towards A Confucian Geopolitics, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This commentary welcomes the opportunity of a dialogue on the development of a Confucian geopolitics that offers an alternative to the prevailing dominant geopolitical theories. Three areas are discussed to further development of such an alternative. The first is the challenges (and not only the opportunities) of recovering Confucian values to inform foreign policy and international relations. The second is the appropriation of Confucian philosophy to legitimize state action, and how this is actually playing out in present-day China. The third is the slippage between narrative and practice – that is, how a narrative of Confucian geopolitics is translated in …
The Territoriality Of Teams: Assembling Power Through The Playing Of Pokémon Go, Orlando Woods
The Territoriality Of Teams: Assembling Power Through The Playing Of Pokémon Go, Orlando Woods
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper explores how the playing of Pokémon Go can cause power to be assembled, and team-based expressions of territoriality to manifest. By playing the game, players become embedded within digital assemblages of power, which they reproduce through their interactions with other players, game features, and public spaces. When digital assets—such as gyms—are indexed to public spaces, players work together in teams to compete for digital ownership, and control, of these assets. In turn, this leads to the forging of a team-based sense of territoriality that is pervasive, and maximized by consolidating the power of the assemblage. Qualitative data are …
“Daughter” As A Positionality And The Gendered Politics Of Taking Parents Into The Field, Menusha De Silva, Kanchan Gandhi
“Daughter” As A Positionality And The Gendered Politics Of Taking Parents Into The Field, Menusha De Silva, Kanchan Gandhi
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its implications on research and knowledge production, particularly through the case of researchers’ children and partners. In comparison, the tendency to seek assistance from parents is neglected within the scholarship. Drawing on the PhD fieldwork experiences of two researchers in their “native” country, specifically a Sri Lankan researcher conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka and a North Indian scholar researching in South India, the paper reveals parents’ contribution to the research process, in terms of enhancing researcher credibility, facilitating contact‐making and access, and providing emotional and …
No-Place, New Places: Death And Its Rituals In Urban Asia, Lily Kong
No-Place, New Places: Death And Its Rituals In Urban Asia, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In many Asian cities, particularly those that confront increasing land scarcity, the conversion from burial to cremation has been encouraged by state agencies in the last several decades. From Hong Kong to Seoul to Singapore, planning agencies have sought to reduce the use of space for the dead, in order to release land for the use of the living. More secular guiding principles regarding efficient land use in these cities had originally come up against the symbolic values invested in burial spaces, resulting in conflicts between different value systems. In more recent years, however, the shift to cremation and columbaria …
Review: Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search For Meaning By Yi‐Fu Tuan, Justin K. H. Tse
Review: Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search For Meaning By Yi‐Fu Tuan, Justin K. H. Tse
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Yi‐Fu Tuan's latest book is a defence of individualism aimed at a wide lay readership, “a book on education that could benefit children everywhere” (p. ix). It is also a fascinating illustration of the relevance of geographies of religion to ongoing interests in humanistic geography. Indeed, one of Tuan's central arguments is that “religious thinking both undergoes and completes humanist thinking” and is therefore not “a relic that humanism has to outgrow,” for that would be a “regrettable” narrowing of the “scope of inquiry” in humanistic geography that “offends the spirit of humanism” (p. 5). It is this latter interest …
Review: The Color Of Success: Asian Americans And The Origins Of The Model Minority Myth By Ellen Wu, Justin Kh Tse
Review: The Color Of Success: Asian Americans And The Origins Of The Model Minority Myth By Ellen Wu, Justin Kh Tse
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Weaving rich institutional histories of groups that have purported to speak for all Asian Americans, like the Japanese American Citizens League and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success meticulously describes how their claims to represent their ethnic communities were vigorously contested by Japanese and Chinese Americans themselves from the 1930s to the 1960s. Wu sets these representational challenges against the larger backdrop of the rise of an American liberal political framework and its assimilationist agenda for racial minorities in the United States in the 1930s, which was produced by the geopolitical challenges of totalitarian fascism …
Introduction: Religion And Place: Landscape, Politics, And Piety, Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins, Lily Kong
Introduction: Religion And Place: Landscape, Politics, And Piety, Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in a suburb outside of Rio de Janeiro when a group of skinheads observed him at a party and suspected that he might be gay (McLoughlin 2011). This scale of horrific homophobia is not uncommon in Brazil, where rates of violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are reported to be amongst the highest in the world. A study conducted with the support of Grupo Gay da Bahia offers the conservative estimate of 260 gays killed in the country in 2010, indicating that rates doubled in only 5 years. The statistic sits …
Balancing Spirituality And Secularism, Globalism And Nationalism: The Geographies Of Identity, Integration And Citizenship In Schools, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Geographies of education have drawn more research attention in the last decade. The varied motivations for geographical attention to education have led to divergent approaches. First, a macro, political economy or "outward looking" approach has examined educational provision and what it tells us about wider social, economic and political processes. Second, a micro, social-cultural or "inward looking" approach has emphasised social difference within school spaces, and the links between home and educational spaces. This latter approach has also acknowledged the importance of the voices of children and young people in understanding educational experiences. In this paper, l take stock of …
Homo Religiosus? Religion And Immigrant Subjectivities, David Ley, Justin Kh Tse
Homo Religiosus? Religion And Immigrant Subjectivities, David Ley, Justin Kh Tse
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Once ignored in national and international public policy, religion has made a comeback as policymakers have noticed the significance of the resurgence of religion, especially due to migration flows. While laudatory of these developments, this chapter specifies the need for a theological reading of the migrant religious practitioner as homo religiosus. First, we describe the social geographies of immigrant religion in an international context, drawing attention to the vibrancy of religious devotion, especially Christianity from the global south, among migrant groups. Second, we re-conceptualise religious belief through the theoretical work of John Milbank and Charles Taylor as they recuperate a …
The Geographies Of Religious Conversion, Orlando Woods
The Geographies Of Religious Conversion, Orlando Woods
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The paper reviews the corpus of research that attempts to explain the process of religious conversion, and explores the ways in which geographers can add new perspectives to the discourse. It argues that religious conversion is a phenomenon that goes beyond the reorientation of individual belief, and is instead a process of change that involves the (re)definition of self and other. Five conceptual frames are proposed - (1) conversion of space; (2) spaces of conversion; (3) spaces of negotiation; (4) the (im)mobile convert; and (5) the (dis)embodied convert - which are used to help define the geographies of religious conversion.
Singapore’S Chinatown: Nation Building And Heritage Tourism In A Multiracial City, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Lily Kong
Singapore’S Chinatown: Nation Building And Heritage Tourism In A Multiracial City, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper focuses on the pivotal role played by the state in refashioning the Chinatown landscape as part of both nation-building and heritage tourism projects, and the ensuing cultural politics. After a brief history of the creation of Singapore’s Chinatown, the paper discusses, first, Chinatown’s place in Singapore’s post-independence nation-building project and, second, the reconfiguration of the Chinatown landscape as a tourism asset. The final section reflects on the changing politics of place as Chinatown gains legitimacy in state discourses on heritage, tourism and multiculturalism, as well as in the popular imagination as an ethnic precinct par excellence.
From Precarious Labor To Precarious Economy? Planning For Precarity In Singapore's Creative Economy, Lily Kong
From Precarious Labor To Precarious Economy? Planning For Precarity In Singapore's Creative Economy, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The important place of the oftentimes "hidden" independent worker, or freelancer, has been acknowledged in developed countries where the creative economy has grown. These creative workers do not belong to the traditional employment set-up organized around firms. Instead, they move from portfolio to portfolio, assignment to assignment, interspersing corporation-based jobs with periods of self employment. Their work offers freedom, independence and creative space, but has also been characterized as precarious, because the securities of old working patterns no longer hold. While governments in many countries and cities have become attracted to the potential of the creative economy, those that have …
Global Shifts, Theoretical Shifts: Changing Geographies Of Religion, Lily Kong
Global Shifts, Theoretical Shifts: Changing Geographies Of Religion, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The paper evaluates the burst in geographical research on religion in the last decade. It examines: (1) the relative emphases and silences in analyses of different sites of religious practice, sensuous geographies, population constituents, religions, geographies and scales of analyses; (2) the rise in the discourse of postsecularization; and (3) four contemporary global shifts (growing urbanization and social inequality, deteriorating environments, ageing populations, and increasing human mobilities), the ways in which religion shapes human response to them, and the implications for new research agendas. © 2010 The Author(s).
Introduction: Culture, Economy, Policy: Trends And Developments, Lily Kong
Introduction: Culture, Economy, Policy: Trends And Developments, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The important nexus between culture and economy is by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in his foreword to Zukin's (1988)Loft Living, the artist, as one `representative' of the cultural class, has always shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans or as “cultural producers working to the command of hegemonic class interest”. In the last two to three decades, in the US and more lately, in western Europe, cultural activities have become increasingly significant in the economic regeneration strategies in many cities. Geographers, however, have …
China And Geography In The 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?, Lily Kong
China And Geography In The 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is …
Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities, Lily Kong, Lisa Law
Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities, Lily Kong, Lisa Law
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
A decade and a half after Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) wrote their seminal piece on ‘new’ cultural geography, the discipline of geography has experienced a ‘cultural’ turn. Economic geography, for instance, has been infleected through perspectives that take on board cultural retheorisations (see Thrift and Olds, 1996; Thrift, 2000). Within urban studies, the acknowledgement of culture’s powers is not new (see, for example, Agnew et al., 1984). Yet, geographers scrutinising urban landscapes have moved the field, using some of the retheorised perspectives that Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) encapsulated. Of most pertinence to this volume is the retheorised notion of culture …
Making Sustainable Creative/Cultural Space In Shanghai And Singapore, Lily Kong
Making Sustainable Creative/Cultural Space In Shanghai And Singapore, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Shanghai and Singapore are two economically vibrant Asian cities that have recently adopted creative/cultural economy strategies. In this article I examine new spatial expressions of cultural and economic interests in the two cities: state-vaunted cultural edifices and organically evolved cultural spaces. I discuss the simultaneous precariousness and sustainability of these spaces, focusing on Shanghai's Grand Theatre and Moganshan Lu and on Singapore's Esplanade-Theatres by the Bay and Wessex Estate. Their cultural sustainability is understood as their ability to support the development of indigenous content and local idioms in artistic work. Their social sustainability is examined in terms of the social …
Cultural Icons And Urban Development In Asia: Economic Imperative, National Identity, And Global City Status, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in - flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and …
Marketing The Chinese Dream Home: Gated Communities And Representations Of The Good Life In (Post-)Socialist Shanghai, Choon-Piew Pow, Lily Kong
Marketing The Chinese Dream Home: Gated Communities And Representations Of The Good Life In (Post-)Socialist Shanghai, Choon-Piew Pow, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper examines the advertising themes and rhetoric that have been assembled in the place-marketing of Shanghai's newly built gated communities. We demonstrate how place-marketing strategies, in this case selling the Chinese dream home, draws upon specific landscape meanings and values that are embedded in Chinese/ Shanghainese history, even as symbolic and cultural capital from the contemporary scene also exert their influences. Collectively, these representations of the good life both reflect and reinforce the exclusivist housing aspirations and privatist visions of middle-class residents of gated communities in contemporary Shanghai. While advertisements do not always achieve the outcomes that property developers …
The Development Of Social And Cultural Geographies In Taiwan: Knowledge Production And Social Relevance, Hsin-Ling Wu, Sue-Ching Jou, Lily Kong
The Development Of Social And Cultural Geographies In Taiwan: Knowledge Production And Social Relevance, Hsin-Ling Wu, Sue-Ching Jou, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Social and cultural geographies have long occupied a marginal position in Taiwan's scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Despite the influence of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ that has characterized much of Anglo-American scholarship since the 1990s (Barnett 1998), Taiwan's scholarship in the social sciences in general and human geography more specifically has remained relatively untouched by these intellectual currents till very recent years. This paper seeks to examine the social, intellectual and institutional contexts that explain this marginalization, and consider the possibilities for social and cultural geographies' emergence from marginality in Taiwan in the future. This possibility is considered …
Music And Moral Geographies: Constructions Of "Nation" And Identity In Singapore, Lily Kong
Music And Moral Geographies: Constructions Of "Nation" And Identity In Singapore, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In this paper, I attempt to pull together sociological and geographical perspectives in the study of music to understand the ways in which pop and rock music are socio-cultural products with political and moral meanings and implications. I examine state engineering of moral panics, focusing on a case study of pop and rock music in post-independence Singapore. Such engineering is aimed at political and ideological ends, in particular, "nation"- building outcomes. In engineering moral panics through both discursive and legislative acts, the contours of a moral geography are delineated at various spatial scales. First, at the scale of the national …
Cultural Economy: A Critical Review, Chris Gibson, Lily Kong
Cultural Economy: A Critical Review, Chris Gibson, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article reviews work on 'cultural economy', particularly from within geography, and from other disciplines, where there are links to overtly geographical debates. We seek to clarify different interpretations of the term and to steer a course through this multivalency to suggest productive new research agendas. We review and critique work on cultural economy that represents a relatively straightforward economic geography, based on empirical observation while theoretically informed and driven by debates about Fordism and post-Fordism, agglomeration and cluster theory. Some of these ideas about cultural economy have proven attractive to policy-makers and we map a normative script of cultural …
Re-Presenting The Religious: Nation, Community And Identity In Museums, Lily Kong
Re-Presenting The Religious: Nation, Community And Identity In Museums, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper examines the roles that museums play as 'unofficially sacred' places, underscoring or challenging the religious life of a people and 'nation'. It focuses on three key questions: (1) Do sub-national and transnational religious formations pose a challenge to or present opportunities for nation-building strategies, and what part do museums play in this struggle? (2) In what ways do re-presentations of religion in museums contest or reinforce religious community and identity? and (3) What challenges do museum displays pose to the understanding of religious meanings? This paper explores these three key questions about the intersection of religion with politics …
Social And Cultural Geographies Of South-East Asia, Tim Bunnell, Lily Kong, Lisa Law
Social And Cultural Geographies Of South-East Asia, Tim Bunnell, Lily Kong, Lisa Law
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The paper is an overview of English language publications that discuss what might be considered 'social' and 'cultural' geographies in Southeast Asia over the past two decades. We have strategically chosen two major themes that help us shape the mass of material into digestible strands: (1) the politics of social and cultural change; and (2) constructing identities. The former addresses various politics: the politics of nationhood; the politics of national development; the politics of cultural sites; the politics of urban change; and the politics of the global-local.
Cultural Geography: By Whom, For Whom?, Lily Kong
Cultural Geography: By Whom, For Whom?, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The "cultural turn," coupled by the "spatial turn" in recent years has drawn significant attention to cultural geography from those in other subdisciplines and disciplines. One might forgive those who sometimes mistake particular research as cultural geography which is in fact conducted by non-geographers or geographers who would not ordinarily identify themselves as cultural geographers. A pointed moment that illustrated this to me was when a sociology colleague insisted that he had read cultural geography, and when asked, indicated that he had read Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin. One interpretation of this is, as Shurmer-Smith (1996) offered through her title …
Religion And Technology: Refiguring Place, Space, Identity And Community, Lily Kong
Religion And Technology: Refiguring Place, Space, Identity And Community, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper reviews the literature on the religion-technology nexus, drawing up a research agenda and offering preliminary empirical insights. Firsts I stress the need to explore the new politics of space as a consequence of technological development, emphasizing questions about the role of religion in effecting a form of religious (neo)imperialism, and uneven access to techno-religious spaces. Second, I highlight the need to examine the politics of identity and community, since cyberspace is not an isotropic surface. Third, I underscore the need to engage with questions about the poetics of religious community as social relations become mediated by technology. Finally, …
Mapping 'New' Geographies Of Religion: Politics And Poetics In Modernity, Lily Kong
Mapping 'New' Geographies Of Religion: Politics And Poetics In Modernity, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article reviews geographical research on religion in the 1990s, and highlights work from neighbouring disciplines where relevant. Contrary to views that the field is incoherent, I suggest that much of the literature pays attention to several key themes, particularly, the politics and poetics of religious place, identity and community. I illustrate the key issues, arguments and conceptualizations in these areas, and suggest various ways forward. These 'new' geographies emphasize different sites of religious practice beyond the 'officially sacred'; different sensuous sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different constitutions of population …