The Dictionary of Human Geography (208 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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transnationalism
A concept that describes a movement or set of linkages that occur across national borders. Transnationalism is a rela tively new term, and its growing popularity indicates the heightened interconnectivity of people and things that now flow across bor ders and boundaries in greater volume and with greater speed than ever before. While closely linked to the processes of economic gLobaLization, which are often conceptual ized in abstract global terms and decentred spaces, transnationalism is generally invoked to express transcendence of the specific work ings of the nation state (Kearney, 1995). It is thus used most widely in the social sciences to describe phenomena in which the cultural or territorial boundaries of the nation and/or the regulatory apparatuses of the state are crossed or contested in new kinds of ways. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While this notion of crossing boundaries is pertinent to many cross border articulations, including the circulation of commodities and the flows of culture and ideas (e.g. Jackson, Crang and Dwyer, 2004), the contemporary movement of migrants is most frequently as sociated with the term. Unlike earlier theories of migration, which generally characterized movement across borders as either perman ent rupture followed by assimilation in a new society, or as temporary sojourning followed by a return home, transnationalism describes a migration pattern of simultaneous connec tion to two or more nations (Basch, Glick Schiller and Blanc, 1995). In numerous case studies, migrants have been shown to con struct an intricate, multi webbed network of ongoing social relations that span their country of origin and their country (or coun tries) of settlement. While a pattern of trans national life has been present in past migrations to varying degrees, the new trans portation, communication and computing technologies of the past few decades have greatly facilitated such arrangements in the contemporary era. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In addition to technological advances, many scholars have associated the growth of this type of migration pattern with changes in the nature of global capitaLism (Ong, 1999). The organization of production on a world wide scale has affected the volume and flow of migrants across national borders, and led to a transformed culture and experience of migration and of the nation. These dynamics are implicated in the wider boundary crossing conceptualization of transnationalism, in which the significance of national cultural narratives and the meanings and practices of state regulations are reconsidered and often reworked. One of the key signifiers of both cultural belonging and state control that is reworked under conditions of contemporary transnationality is citizenship. The impli cations of transnationalism for citizenship formation are enormous, ranging from ques tions of state jurisdiction over borders to sociocultural considerations of identity and belonging. km (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001); Mitchell (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Smith and Guarnizo (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
transport costs
The total costs involved in moving between two places, which in the case of goods movements involves not only the freight rate but also the costs of documenta tion, packaging, insurance and inventory. Transport costs are a central element in most classical Location theories, being presented as a primary determin..ant of both agricultural land use (see von thunen model) and indus trial location theories, as well as most theories of spatial interaction (cf. distance decay): they were at the heart of arguments for geography as spatial science, or as a ?discipline in distance? (Watson, 1955: cf. locations analysis). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
transport geography
This field of study focuses on the movement of people and goods, the transportation systems designed to facili tate such movement, and the relationship of transportation to other facets of human geography such as economic deveLopment, energy, land use, sprawL, environmental degradation, vaLues and cuLture. Long standing, strong ties with the fields of civil engineering and economics have imbued transport geography with a tradition of quan titative methods, particularly the use of mathematical modeLs. These ties have at once enabled transport analysts to respond to pressing planning problems and tended to limit the questions that transport geographers ask, often directing attention towards tech nique and away from theory (Hanson, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Studies of the movement of people and goods have sought to build predictive models of the volume of fLows between places; these models predict flows as a function of the demand for movement between nodes (usually associated with various measures of node size) and the cost of movement between nodes, which in turn is related to distance, the mode of travel (e.g. airplane, ship, automobile), and the ease of movement, inter alia. Such models of spatial interaction are important to a range of actors including urban transportation planners, who are responsible for providing transport fa cilities that will handle predicted flow volumes, and commercial airlines, which must also pro vide sufficient capacity to meet predicted de mand. In transportation geography, the linkages among modelling, prediction and plan ning have been exceedingly strong. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Studies of transportation systems have fo cused on patterns of networks and nodes and have often considered how these patterns affect ease of movement and therefore shape land use and settlement patterns. In the USA, the advent of the inter state highway system, beginning in the 1950s, led to the demise of some places by passed by the system and to the growth of other places, whose accessibiL ity was enhanced by connection to the inter state system (Garrison, Berry, Marble, Nystuen and Morrill, 1959). More recently, the deregulation of the airlines led to the development of the hub and spoke system that describes the current network of air travel in the USA (O?Kelly, 1998); again, the network configuration favours certain nodes (the hubs, many of which have grown into thriving com mercial centres) to the detriment of others (nodes at the extremities of the spokes, which have seen their accessibility via air decline). Transport systems studies have also examined competition between and among modes (e.g. trucking versus the railroads and waterways) and between and among routes on the same mode (e.g. among the multiple routes between Chicago and the US east coast in the early twentieth century). Of current interest is the impact of internet commerce on transport: whereas such commerce might reduce the number of person trips, it has led to an enor mous increase in the demand for goods move ment (Aoyama, Ratick and Schwarz, 2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Transport is intimately related to a host of issues that lie at the heart of human geog raphy. energy consumption and environ mental degradation are just two that link closely to the nature society tradition in geog raphy. Because transportation systems are designed to increase accessibility and accessi bility is central to land use patterns and to economic development, transport studies have much to offer the field of deveLopment. vaLues and cuLture, which are hugely import ant to understandings of transport patterns and systems, have been mostly neglected by transport geographers. sha (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Black (2003); Rodigue, Comtois and Slack (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
transportation problem
A special case of Linear programming, where the objective is to find the minimum cost solution that trans ports goods from N origins to M destinations. The supplies available at each origin and the demands required at each destination define the constraints, and the transportation prob lem assumes that each origin is directly (NEW PARAGRAPH) connected to each destination by a route with a specified unit cost. Problems with this simple spatiaL structure may be solved very effi ciently, and the method is used in both public sector (e.g. allocating pupil to schools) and business (cheapest routing of distribution), though many recent applications use a more general network structure. Lwh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hay (1977); Taaffe and Gauthier (1973). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
travel writing
A genre of prose about the experience of being away from home. While travel writing in europe can be traced back to Homer?s Odyssey, it has rarely been considered either serious Literature or credible ethnog raphy, and was typically excluded from the conventional history of geography (see geog raphy, history of). In the past several dec ades, however, the genre has been reassessed within the humanities and the social sciences, and there has been a resurgence of critical interest in travel writing. This can be traced to a number of broader changes in academic fashion. One was the rise of postmodernism, which validated the study of popular forms of cuLture, including writing, rather than simply ?the Greats?. Within many of the social sci ences, postmodernism was closely associated with a cuLturaL turn that focused greater attention on practices of representation. A second, related source of interest in travel writ ing was the development of post coLoniaLism and the key role played by literary scholar Edward Said (1935 2003) in its articulation. The success of Said?s (2003 [1978]) critique of orientaLism created a multidisciplinary growth industry in the study of colonial repre sentations of other places and peoples. Travel writings were seen as primary sources for the recovery of imaginative geographies. A third influence was Feminism, which showed that nineteenth and early twentieth century travel accounts written by women were important but marginalized sites of the production of geo graphical knowledge (indeed, they had been marginalized by Said too) (cf. McEwan, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Within human geography, interest in travel writing has had a number of different foci. Among these has been a renewed interest in records and writings produced under the signs of expLoration and science, but now read critically as texts, using the resources of the literary as well as the historical disciplines to disclose the multiple ways in which the dis course of exploration and enumeration worked to produce its objects of inquiry. As the discourse of Orientalism produced ?the Orient?, for example, so the discourse of tro picaLity produced ?the Tropics? (Driver and Martins, 2005). Such studies feed into an interest in the spaces through which scientific knowledges are produced, the channels through which they circulate and the centres at which they accumulate. The same spatial thematics animate studies of travel writing outside the nominally scientific domain (Gregory, 2001a). In Europe, the distinction between ?travel? and ?tourism? is an historical one, freighted with assumptions about edifica tion and independence that register a series of cLass distinctions. But travellers and tourists throughout the nineteenth and on into the twentieth centuries had a compulsion to write their journeys, and the critical scrutiny of their texts has much to tell us about not only the production, and on occasion the disruption, of cultural stereotypes and processes of trans cuLturation (Pratt, 1992) few travellers arrived at their destination with their cultural baggage intact and simply unpacked it to make pre configured sense of what they saw but also about the formation of national iden tities and the consolidation of bourgeois cuL ture (Buzard, 1993; Duncan and Gregory, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Travellers did not only write diaries, journals and letters; they also sketched, painted, and took photographs, and the inter rogation of this visual archive has been of con siderable importance in the recovery and analysis of cultural constructions of Landscape in particular (Stafford, 1984; Osborne, 2000; Schwartz and Ryan, 2003). Travel was also historically coded through notations of gen der and sexuaLity, and there has been a not able interest in the ways in which travel could permit the realization of desire and transgres sion that was simply impossible at home (Aldrich, 1993; Boone, 1995; Gregory, 1995a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This brief summary suggests a series of la cuna in work on travel writing that are only now starting to be addressed. First, research has been dominated by studies of European and North American travellers beyond their own shores but what of the ?return gaze? (e.g. Burton, 1998)? Second, the texts under closest scrutiny were typically produced by those who chose to travel under the signs of science, culture or pleasure but what of the experiences of those who were obliged to travel under other signs: commerce, capture or duty (e.g. Colley, 2002), or as fugitives from disaster or war (see reFugees)? Third, much of this work has fastened on historical rather than contemporary writings, a focus (NEW PARAGRAPH) that forecloses questions about the complex reactivation of older, often colonial images in our own present (cf. Tavares and Brosseau, 2006) and the ways in which what Lisle (2006) calls ?the global politics of contempor ary travel writing? now participates in and responds to the anxieties created by gLobaL ization. jsd/dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Duncan and Gregory (1989); Hume and Youngs (2002); Lisle (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
travelling theory
Intellectual ideas that move from one location to another and, in the process, change in response to new cir cumstances. The original formulation was by Edward Said, who identified three critical moments: (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first was origination, the circumstances within which a body of ideas emerges. Ideas are not free floating constructions, on this reading, and their analysis requires what historians of science and of geog raphy call a ?contextual history?. Said (1984, pp. 241 2) called for a ?critical con sciousness?, a ?spatial sense, a sort of meas uring faculty for locating or situating theory? by understanding it ?in the place and time out of which it emerges as part of that time, working in and for it, respond ing to it? (cf. situated knowLedge). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The second was institutionalization. Said knew very well that ideas move the cir culation of ideas is an enabling condition of intellectual activity but he was also concerned that as radical, unsettling ideas become fashionable so they are domesticated: ?Once an idea gains cur rency because it is clearly effective and powerful, there is every likelihood that dur ing its peregrinations it will be reduced, codified and institutionalized? (Said, 1984, p. 239). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The third was revivification. Said subse quently accepted that a theory could be reinterpreted and reinvigorated by travel ling and responding to a new situation. These transgressive theorizations his ex amples were Adorno and Fanon give one a sense of ?the geographical dispersion of which the theoretical motor is capable? by pulling ideas from one region to another and realizing the productive possibility of ?actively different locales, sites, situations for theory? a sense of active, operative, concrete differences that allow no ?facile universalism or over general totalizing? (Said, 2000 [1994], p. 452). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Said?s own account of orientaLism has been interpreted as a classic instance of travelling theory (Brennan, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In human geography travelling theory has its place in a wider landscape that includes geographies of intellectual production, dis semination and circulation, and reception. Journeying across this landscape raises import ant and interrelated questions about the fix ation of high theory on fashionable thinkers; about the commodity chains that make up the international publishing industry; about the trafficking in metropolitan ?high theory? and the use of other regions as resource banks; about the dominance of English language publication and the problems of translation (see angLocentrism); and about the place of the modern corporate university and its rela tion to other sites at which geographical know ledge is produced (cf. pubLic geographies). (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is not only ideas that travel, and Living stone (2003b) sees travelling theory as part of a larger apparatus of circulation that is indis pensable to the scientific enterprise: ?Ideas and instruments, texts and theories, individuals and inventions to name but a very few all diffuse across the surface of the earth (see science).? Their circulation raises similar questions about the hierarchies and the net works through which they move, both in wards and outwards, and their reception and reworking also raises questions about ideoLogies of respect and techniques of trust: ?Scientific knowledge has been expanded by circulation... [but] distance and doubt have always been close companions? (p. 178). dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Said (1984). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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