The Dictionary of Human Geography (45 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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digitizing
The process of converting images, texts, models, maps, sounds and data into digital and computer readable forms, with an expectation of ?value added? but a risk of infor mation loss. A paper map is easily digitized into bitmap or JPEG format using a conven tional, desktop scanner. However, the user may be disappointed by the result. First, the original image will be converted into a series of discrete (raster) pixels. The blocky nature of these will be evident in words or labels copied from the original document; the severity will depend on the resolution of the scanner (its dpi dots per inch). Second, loading the image into a geographic information system will not leave it positioned correctly with other maps and data on screen. The rea son is that although the digital image may show a map, no information has been encoded such that the computer can interpret it geo graphically. Providing a ?world file? assigns geocodes to the corners of the image and therefore locates it. Yet, if the user?s goal is to select all schools within a certain distance of a major road, for example, then s/he will still be left wanting: the original map has been digitized ?en masse? without encoding the two specific features of schools and roads. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The general point is that digitizing may appear straightforward, but producing an out come that is fit for purpose requires more careful thought. For example, it is easy to scan a manuscript and therefore archive it in an online depository. But unless some metadata about the document are also provided (year of publication, title, abstract etc.), then it will be hard for potential users to search the deposi tory and extract what they are looking for. It may also be beneficial to convert the scanned image using text recognition soft ware, permitting all documents to be searched for key words. However, this all takes time and money, as well as the development of stand ards and protocols to ensure consistency in how information is stored, catalogued and updated such as those developed for the JSTOR scholarly journal archive (www.jstor. org) that allow searching of the author, title, abstract and/or full text for all or a subset of the journals archived, for all or particular dates, and for all or specific types of journal content (e.g. article, review or opinion piece) (Schonfeld, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) There is also the issue of error management. Using manual digitizing tables and software to capture the geographies of schools and roads from a paper map assumes that the map is of reasonable quality, having not shrunk or stretched, and requires concentration from the person digitizing who may easily make mistakes (from a slight hand shake or from fatigue or boredom!). A lack of attention could lead to road sections that do not meet (an undershoot) or the creation of a new spur when the road is drawn past the intended intersection (an overshoot). If not detected, the errors could propagate and lead to mis leading analyses of the data concerned. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Digitization is always a change to the original. Whether it matters depends on the nature of the change and how the digital ver sion is applied. It could be argued that MP3s are inferior to vinyl records because they have a lower frequency range. But then have you ever tried to carry a thousand seven inch singles? rh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Clarke (2003); Schonfeld (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
disability
Conventionally understood as the state of being physically and/or mentally dif ferent from some assumed ?norm? of human corporeal and/or psychological functioning, the term applies to people with an impairment that supposedly limits their ability to perform activities in the manner taken as ?normal? for a human being. Disability is often framed negatively, couched as ?loss? (e.g. of a limb or vision) or ?lack? (e.g. of mobility or reasoning skills), with scant attention paid to the experi ences and aspirations of the people affected. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Proponents of the medical model of disability stress the apparently ?damaged? body or mind of an individual, and invite a personal narra tive of ?tragedy? followed by ?heroic? efforts at self adjustment (Golledge, 1997). Those of the social model stress not the individual but, rather, a wider society that fails to accommodate impairment, thus embracing a critical stance on the underlying ableism of a non disabled society (Chouinard, 1997). The latter model, casting light on ?disabling social and environmental barriers? (Barnes and Mercer, 2004, p. 2; emphasis added) and advocating a critical ?politics of access?, is inherently geographical in its alertness to the social and physical placing of disabled people within non disabled settings. This model also examines both the political economic forces impacting upon disability, as in the discriminatory dynamics of labour and housing markets, and the deeper roots of oppression occasioned by the stigmatization of ?imperfect? bodies (Hahn, 1989). It has itself been criticized for remaining too dis tanced from embodied realities, and thereby neglecting subjective experience as revealed in personal stories of pain, fatigue, rejection and simply ?getting by?. Some theorists hence call for a third way, a biosocial model, allowing bod ies and experiences into the picture while still retaining the critical sharpness of the social model (Watson, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These debates have played out within geo graphical research on disability (Hall, 2000b), which has become a recognizable sub field exemplified in review articles and edited book collections (Park, Radford and Vickers, 1998; Butler and Parr, 1999). Early work considered the wheelchair user or visually impaired per son negotiating the environmental obstacle course of streets, curbs and buildings fronted by steps (Golledge, 1993; Vujakovic and Matthews, 1994). The focus upon ?stairs? was then supplemented by a concern for ?stares? (Pain, Burke, Fuller and Gough, 2001, p. 177), so that the issue becomes not just physical accessibility but also the extent to which disabled people are marked as different, fundamentally unwanted and ?out of place? in public space (Butler and Bowlby, 1997). The broader context of ?disabling environments? here attracts critique, implicating architects, planners and building control officers (design ers and ?the state?) for producing spaces that effectively ?lock out? disabled people (Imrie, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . The longer term historical perspective reveals how modern capitalism has initiated an ongoing process of spatially marginalizing disabled people from meaningful economic roles and the normal rounds of social repro duction (Gleeson, 1999). Other geographical enquiries now use qualitative methods such as in depth interviewing to excavate the experi ential dimensions of being ?out of place?, detecting how the axes of disability, class, eth nicity, gender and sexuality meld together in (the enduring of) exclusionary spaces. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Disability geography deals with both phys ical and mental impairments, where the latter entail both people with mental health prob lems (the ?mentally ill? in a medicalized vocabulary, including the ?depressed?, ?schizo phrenic? etc.) and people with learning or intellectual disabilities (the ?mentally handi capped? or ?mentally retarded? of now disfavo ured vocabularies). There is a vibrant tradition of mental health geography (Smith and Giggs, 1988), exploring spatial epidemiological subjects as well as looking at both the emer gence of the ?lunatic asylum? and, more recently, processes of ?deinstitutionalization?, ?community care? and the sites of everyday survival today for people with mental health problems (see contributions to Philo, 2000c). Less extensive is work on geographies of intellectual disability, although historical and contemporary studies can be identified (see contributions to Metzel and Philo, 2005). There is potential for building theoretical, sub stantive and ethico political bridges between the different strains of disability geography tackling physical and mental difference, and perhaps too with parts of health geography exploring the circumstances of people with long term chronic illness (Moss and Dyck, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . cpp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Butler and Parr (1999); Gleeson (1999); Imrie (1996); Philo (2000c). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
disciplinary power
A form of power ana lysed in the work of Michel Foucault (1926 84) that in his analysis follows from classical sovereignty. Foucault claims that power is dis persed throughout society rather than com ing from a centralized source, and that is therefore important to analyse it within insti tutional and social practices. Disciplinary power emerged in Foucault?s published works with Discipline and Punish (1976), but was also analysed in his earlier lectures at the College de France that are now being published (see, e.g., Foucault, 2003 [1999], 2006 [2003]). (NEW PARAGRAPH) While sovereignty may showcase its power through individual events of spectacular vio lence, such as the fighting of battles or the torture of attempted regicides like the grue some description of the measures meted out to Damiens at the beginning of Discipline and punish discipline works in an entirely other way. Power is constantly exercised, over the smallest transgression, with repetition, certainty and consistency, key elements in establishing control. Its model is the modern army, with the training of individual bodies into collective ones, a process that Foucault describes as ?dressage?. The mechanisms can be found in schools, hospitals, factories and prisons. The model of spatial organization in a town affected by the plague is another of Foucault?s recurrent examples, which he finds taken to its ideal form in Jeremy Bentham?s plan for the panopticon. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A number of key themes emerge in Foucault?s analyses: the control of the body and its ritualized training and conditioning; the continuous nature of the exercise of discip linary power; the control and partitioning of time particularly illustrated by the modern mechanized factory and spatial organization and distribution. Spatial control works both on the level of architectural or urban planning, and on the ordering of individual bodies. Discipline is a distribution of bodies, of their actions, of their behaviour: a spatial strategy and analysis. These spatial strategies can be understood as enclosure or confinement; subdivision or parti tioning of this space; designation of a purpose or coding to these sites; and classification or ranking of them. These spaces of power have their concomitant knowledges, which Foucault designates by the power knowledge relation in a series of pairings: ?tactics, the spatial ordering of men; taxonomy, the disciplinary space of natural beings; the economic table, the regu lated movement of wealth? (1976a [1975], pp. 148 9). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In Foucault?s early work on sexuality (1978 [1976], 2003 [1999]), he utilized and devel oped these ideas about disciplinary power, and analysed how power over life itself could be understood as biopower. In his later writings on governmentality, Foucault developed an understanding of how liberal governments tried to govern as little as possible and to open up spaces for the circulation of goods, people and wealth (see liberalism). Although many (NEW PARAGRAPH) have found Foucault?s work on power gener ally unremittingly bleak, the critique of indi vidual agency and the analysis of the process by which subjects are formed a process that Foucault calls assujettissement, meaning both subject formation and subjectification have been extremely influential. sE (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Crampton and Elden (2007); Driver (1992a). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
discourse
A specific series of representa tions and practices through which meanings are produced, identities constituted, social relations established, and political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible. Although different fields in the humanities and social sciences have worked with varying accounts of discourse, all grow out of the dec ades of debates about language, interpret ation and understanding in the natural and social sciences (Howarth, 2000). As such, dis course is a concept that departs from the trad itional philosophy of language?s relationship to the world. Instead of seeing the world as independent of ideas about it, with language transparently reflecting a pre existing reality, theories of discourse understand reality as pro duced via practices of interpretation deploying different modes of representation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although philosophically well established, especially in post structuralism, discourse remains controversial in the social sciences. Those employing the concept are often said to be claiming that ?everything is language?, that ?there is no reality? and that, consequentially, a general inability to take a political position and defend an ethical stance abounds. These objections demonstrate how understandings of discourse are bedevilled by the view that interpretation involves only language, in con trast to the external, the real and the material. These dichotomies of idealism/materialism and REALisM/idealism remain powerful con ceptions of understanding the world. In prac tice, however, a concern with discourse does not involve a denial of the world?s existence or the significance of materiality. This is well articulated by Laclau and Mouffe (1985, p. 108): ?the fact that every object is consti tuted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism oppos ition . . . What is denied is not that . . . objects exist externally to thought, but the rather dif ferent assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence.? This means that while nothing exists outside of discourse, there are important distinctions between linguistic and non linguistic phenomena. There are also modes of representation that are ideational though strictly non linguistic, such as the aesthetic and pictorial. It is just that there is no way of comprehending non linguistic and extra discursive phenomena except through discursive practices. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These philosophical debates are implied by different uses of discourse even when they are not overtly discussed. They lead to an appreciation of the fact that discourses are per formative. This means that although discourses have variable meaning, force and effect, they constitute the ?objects? of which they speak and produce notions of ?the social? and ?the self? (see performativity). The meanings, identities, social relations and political assem blages that are enacted in these performances combine the ideal and the material. As a con sequence, appreciating that discourses are performative moves us away from a reliance on the idea of (social) construction towards materialization, whereby discourse ?stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface? (Butler, 1993a, pp. 9, 12). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The performativity of discourse calls atten tion to the discursive formations that are produced over time by the stabilization of some interpretations at the expense of others. Discursive formations such as neo liberal notions of ?competitiveness? (Schoenberger, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , gentrification and the racialization of Puerto Rican youth in Chicago (Wilson and Grammenos, 2005) or cold war derived geo political discourses of ?danger? in Central Asia (Megoran, 2005) are the culmination of discursive economies at work. In a discursive economy, investments have historically been made in certain interpretations; dividends can be drawn by those interests that have made the investments; representations are taxed when they confront new and ambiguous circumstan ces; and participation in the discursive econ omy is through social relations that embody an unequal distribution of power. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Within human geography, the use of the con cept of discourse can be characterized by a num ber of dimensions, though by no means would all scholars would accept every one of them: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discourses are heterogeneous: discourses are not the product of a single author or insti tution, and neither are they confined to literary texts, archives, scientific statements or political speeches. They come to have a dominant form over time, but they never eradicate alternatives or end resistance, and are thus constantly having to be reproduced. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discourses are regulated: discourses have coherence and systematicity, though they often contain contradictions, and are marked by their own ?regimes of truth? that police the boundaries that legislate inclusions and exclusions and establish criteria of acceptability. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discourses are embedded: discourses are not free floating constructions produced by thought alone, but are performances that materialize social life; they are embed ded in institutions, practices and subject positions, but typically cut across and circulate through multiple institutions and subject positions. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discourses are situated: discourses, their formations and economies are the product of historical practices and geographical location. As such, they provide situated knowledges, characterized by particular constellations of power and knowledge al ways open to contestation and negotiation, even as they seek to obscure their histor icity and specificity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discourses thereby shape the contours of the taken for granted world, naturalizing and universalizing a particular subject forma tion and view of the world. Theories of discourse have thus greatly enlarged the interpretive horizon of human geography. Insofar as critical human geography is con cerned with the connections between power, knowledge and spatiality, discourse will be a vital concept. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discourse has also altered the self understanding of the field. It has revivified the history of geography in which ?great men? or ?paradigmatic schools? have given way to a con cern with the discursive production of geo graphical knowledge. It has made obvious the complicity of human geography in colonial ism and imperialism (see post colonialism) and the way in which traditional geographical knowledge effaced the contribution of non Western subjects (Barnett, 1998). Theories of discourse have also played an important part in exposing the asymmetries of power that are inscribed within contemporary geographical discourses (notably ethnocentrism and phal locentrism), elucidating the role of rhetoric and of poetics more generally in legitimizing intellectual practice (Crush, 1991) and in allowing ideology to congeal as ?unexamined discourse? (Gregory, 1978a). dca (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault (1984); Howarth (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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