No description available.

No description available.

It is impossible to understand the gendered relation between women and public space without taking into account its other, that is, male engagements with and in space. Our joint paper contrasts the public spaces of a market and a bus station in central Accra, Ghana. While the former is historically associated with female entrepreneurship, masculinity is deeply inscribed in the activities defining the latter. However, recent developments gradually undermine this gendered divide. Evermore men enter into the predominantly female occupation of market trade. Simultaneously, the public space of the bus station, complementary to many of the market’s economic activities and to its gendered significations, is increasingly shaped by intensive negotiations between male station personnel and ‘intruding’ female entrepreneurs over the scarce resource ‘space’. By focusing on interpersonal claims to entrepreneurial places in these two locations, we contest that structural determinants such as trade liberalization and employment strictures sufficiently explain the complex renegotiation of gendered entitlements to space. We illustrate how the configurations (and co-constructions) of gender and space are exposed to on-going, often subtle shifts, which are impelled by dialectically grounded transformations of quotidian spatial practices and social relations. Expanding upon the notion of viri-/uxorilocality, we explore shifts in the gendered strategies of newcomers establishing their presence in the two spaces and the extent to which these practices may alter gendered spatial significations.

Moving beyond objectivist stances that are largely dominating the climate change research agenda and international policy making, this paper explores an alternative ontology of the Adaptation to Climate Change discourse. By tracing a travelling idea about ‘Adaptation to Climate Change’ (ACC) along a variety of places and multiple encounters the epistemological and political challenges that are entailed by this narrative in the making are laid bare. It focuses on the power dynamics that are revealed by and fostered through the discursive practices that characterize the emergence of this nascent discourse in Tanzania. It is argued that this travelling idea – which is continuously coproduced and reshaped by varying actors in its journey to the ‘local’ level – brings longstanding tensions to the fore that exist between Maasai agropastoralists and the Tanzanian government. Whereas the government portrays the pastoralists in the debate both as victims as well as perpetrators of a changing climate, the grassroots organizations representing the pastoral communities view the Maasai rather as masters of adaptation. It will be shown how the ACC paradigm is wholeheartedly embraced by several actors along its journey until it reaches the rural village of Terrat, where it is by and large rejected. By shining light on these translation practices it is argued that in face of this emerging discourse, adaptation should not solely be seen as a collective human response to (external) changing bio-physical stimuli, but rather as an integrated process that cannot be detached from adaptations to its discursive formations.

No description available.

No description available.

How do people anticipate the future and plan their lives when little is certain? How can we take account of the significance of demographic ‘vital events’ (such as marriage, childbirth or migration) when the horizon of a possible future within which these events acquire meaning becomes pluralized, fluid or contested? How do changing life-course patterns relate to social transformations on larger spatial and temporal scales? Which social and economic institutions construct and normalize life-stages and, vice versa, how do life-course patterns affect and transform institutions? Finally, how do these processes relate to the construction and practice of gender orders? These were the central questions debated during the workshop on ‘Vital Conjunctures — Gender in Times of Uncertainty’1, where the papers by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks and Erdmute Alber compiled in this SPP 1448 Working Paper were presented, the first as keynote and the second as critical comment.

This paper is a contribution to the long-standing interest of geographers in the contingent, but the focus is on the politics of contingency (and the contingency of politics).

The task of this working paper, through a presentation and subsequent discussion of six empirically grounded ‘vignettes’, is to conceptualise significations in relation to ordering practices (in addition see the SPP working paper on ‘technology’ and ‘space’).

To belong is not always an easy thing, especially when ideas surrounding a person’s ability to fit in, join in and be in, is dependent upon normative codes of gender and sexuality. This is especially true for individuals whose genders and sexualities run counter to those normative ideals that have become cemented in the discourses of state and nation. Departing from this supposition, this article is interested in the national imaging and imagining of variant1 genders and sexual orientations; that is, the way in which citizenship, as a form of belonging, is visually negotiated from an lbgti (that is lesbian, bisexual, gay, trans and intersex) perspective. Images that speak of/to the nation on the topic of lbgti citizenship are complex representational devices, as they encapsulate a marked sense of difference and departure, while they also reveal a profound desire for solidarity and reconciliation.