A place in space

It's funny how things, which analysed rationally have no particular significance, can make you feel so much, or set of a kind of chain reaction of feelings that affect how you see yourself. Last night a guest lecturer in the department gave a presentation on compulsory purchase, that is, when the government forcibly buys land for something or another. There are a few things about this presentation that I found interesting, and I want to try to put my finger on them before the ideas dissipate into nothingness (as they are wont to do).

What was interesting and different about the presentation was how personal it was. It started off in a somewhat scattered fashion, with many large-scale compulsory purchases being mentioned, including the flooding of a valley township in Wales to build a reservoir to supply Liverpool (very sore spot with the Welsh), as well as several cases of compulsory purchase to create army training areas, and plans for compulsory purchase to build an additional runway to Heathrow and for the Olympics.

The presentation then took a turn into a more personal view. The presenter used to live on a large farm with his extended family in South Wales. The farm was compulsorily purchased, then sold off in parcels to developers who built houses all over it. Many images were shown of the farm as it used to be and what had happened to it, as well as the views from the farm towards the Severn Estuary, also visible from the presenter's new farm. He then spoke about the damage it had done to the sense of identity of his family, particularly his parents and brothers who had actively farmed the land at the previous location, intimately knowing every rock and tree upon it. And the sense of dislocation that having that taken away and transformed led to.

People in the department (even ones who had asked seemingly interested and important questions after the talk) commented derogatorily later on that he had shared too much by talking about the mental health issues of his family members and so on. This made me sad, because however hard it may be to turn that critical lens on oneself and one's own life, I think it's valuable and significant. After all, what do we know better than ourselves, and the influence of the things, the places and events of our childhood? And the important aspect here, from an academic point of view is that this event has clearly shaped this person so much, so that when he now tries to look at this from an objective point of view, it is no doubt difficult, and ultimately the account that he may try to give of compulsory purchase will be colored by his own experiences and so of course this is very important to note. His aim is to find out how much compulsory purchase actually occurs and what happens to the people who are displaced, including how it affects their identity, and I think because of this personal experience, he is in a good position to do this, though he will be have to be careful not to let his own story dominate and shape those of others.

Another thing this made me think of is in fact, how much of our identity do we owe to place? I think it is quite a significant portion, though I would extend place to include nations as well, as we are well aware of the influence of belonging to a nation on people's sense of identity. Places, even if they are not compulsorily purchased, change. In addition, people move around, sometimes very long ways, and then their attachments to place are disrupted, although their previous places will often be etched in their minds (and you could argue bodies), through memory and through the way they've been shaped by those places. So in a way, even once a place is removed, or we are removed from it, it is still a part of us, has shaped us, as we have shaped it in some way too.

We probably think about this more in the context of nations. After all, it is our national identity that is asked for on forms, determines whether we can cross borders or not, appears on our identity cards and determines where we can live and work. It also gives us the right to vote, a small way of contributing to the shaping of a place.

In terms of rights, we feel that national identity accords us certain rights, such as the right to live and work in that nation. But we don't have the same rights with regards to place... or do we? Private property rights are this perhaps, and so we feel that our private property is in fact ours. The idea of private property is actually a relatively recent and specific cultural phenomenon. Many cultures do not recognize the idea of private property. You simply live in a place, you do not own it. I imagine the sense of dislocation if that place were destroyed or you had to leave it would still be similar regardless of the feeling of ownership, although unpicking the differences would be interesting. To what extent does the idea of ownership confer a sense of entitlement that results in a stronger sense of injustice and anger when something is taken away? I discussed this with my other half, and we tried to imagine a scenario in which someones place had been taken away through a natural disaster for example. In that case, we imagined the person might still have a sense of injustice, even anger and disappointment, in the same way as the guy who was faced with compulsory purchase would. But in the natural disaster case, that emotion would be directed not at the government, but at some higher force, god perhaps. And in some cases, it would be interpreted as the wrath of god/gods, requiring some kind of repentance or act of appeasement from the people.

The reason I find this all interesting because I wonder how our sense of attachment to place affects the extent to which we take care of that place, on a micro scale to a macro one. The feelings we have about place are complex. They are not just about ownership, although I think that has an effect. But on top of that feeling of ownership, there is something like love. If you love a place you feel strongly about protecting it, enhancing it, improving it, etc. And if it's destroyed it hurts you as though a family member has been hurt. It has to do with senses of attachment that go beyond those between humans. We develop senses of attachment for all sorts of other living creatures as well, but also to 'place', a complex space-time phenomenon that has it's own rhythms and patterns.

Practicing what we preach

Recently I attended a very large academic (geography) conference in Seattle, Washington. Thousands of people were in attendance, and I'd like to point out that many of the innumerable sessions focused on some aspect of the environment, climate change, sustainable living, etc. Why is this significant? Mainly because of the hypocrisy of it. Thousands of people flew from all over the place to attend, and thousands of programs, each 386 pages long, produced from 'mixed sources' were printed and distributed, only to be used for a few days and then discarded in some place or another. I felt it was really a shame that we weren't acknowledging the impact that we ourselves were having on contributing to environmental degradation, as we were in the midst of talking about the responsibilities of governments, corporations and individual citizens in reducing their environmental impacts. It made our concerns seem superficial. How can we criticize anyone else when we can't get our own organizations to undertake even the most simple of changes.

Leaving aside the issue of the transportation costs of attendees, and the impacts derived from all those sheets and towels washed in hotels, I just want to concentrate for the moment on the issue of the programs. All attendees at the conference would have had access to the internet, the program was available online beforehand and during the conference, including any changes. At any given hour on any given day of the conference, there were 87 sessions running concurrently. Of course, an individual would only be able to attend one, perhaps two (or up to 5 if they were willing to keep getting up and leaving sessions after each speaker). That means that all the rest of the abstracts for that hour were of no use to them. Multiple that by 9 hours a day for 5 days by 5000(?) people and that is a hell of a lot of wasted printing and paper! Online there was a possibility of building your own program, I think this is definitely the way forward. For each of the days that a person was attending (and I doubt many people went to sessions every day for 5 days), they could build themselves a program and if needed print that out, or just write down the details in a notebook (as I did). I've sent this suggestion to the Association of American Geographers and I hope that they do something of this sort for the next meeting. To transition to this system they could have a limited number of paper programs available in strategic locations around the conference, or even one per room, that people could consult in between sessions to see what they wanted to go to next. There was free wi-fi so people could look up the program on their various devices and the conference organizers could have provided a few computer stations where people could go to access and print parts of the program if they needed to. I hope this happens sooner rather than later.

On asking questions

The world of academia is funny. You meet people all the time who tell you what they are researching and you think: "what?" Sometimes it's because their topic is so obscure you can't imagine how they even came up with it in the first place. Othertimes you feel like asking "and what is this going to add to the great body of knowledge?" Sometimes the topics seem so incredibly self-indulgent, like writing about graphic novels or action films or basically hobbies. How many PhDs have I seen about some sport or another, skiing, surfing, hiking, camping. In fact, a lot of PhDs are probably written by obsessive hobbyists.

It's a peculiar world I suppose. And the more you become entrenched in it, the more selective you find yourself becoming. You might start out an open-minded and generally curious person with lots of interests, but the whole process of doing a PhD means you need to become more and more particular, draw lines so that certain things are inside your field of interest and the rest are outside of it. It's an exercise in focus in more ways than one, and you can easily be accused of 'eclecticism' if you try to cross boundaries between theoretical perspectives for instance, or consider the value of too many things at once.

Most of this happens fairly subconciously. At one time, when I was an undergrad for instance, I had interests in geopolitics, in cultural studies, classical history, homelessness and the concept of home, gender studies and general roles and relations... all these things and many more. Slowly though, I've found myself specialising more and more... except not necessarily based purely on interest, but also on available courses, supervisor interests, and a desire to contribute something to the world of knowledge that might have some positive effect in the long run (though the chances of that look ever more slim as each day goes by and I disappear into words and books).

The other day as I was sitting in the kitchen eating and listening to the radio and there was a program on about the cultural capital, and it was Derry/Londonderry that won, and the person accepting the award said something to the effect of 'if a place can't find a way to use culture to express the hardships and struggles and tensions and realities of its history and present, then what good is culture?' Prior to this I think 'creative city regions' and so on, a newish concept in geography had irked me a little (sometimes concepts just sit uncomfortably). Creative cities studies tended to focus on the impacts of capital of culture awards and the like on economic development. Ironically, economic development is pretty much my area of study, so this kind of does fall into my stated interests, though as I say, the more PhDing you do, the more specialised you get, and the more things actually find themselves outside of your interest net. So this was one of the things that had fallen outside.

So anyway, I was listening to this program and thinking, you know, this IS important, and maybe all of those studies that seem really particular or obscure or based on people's hobbies also have some kind of value and are worth at least being open to and open-minded about. I'm a believer in not closing the doors on inquiry, and while it can be exhausting to try and think about EVERYTHING that comes up, I think it's an important exercise of the mind not to fall into a pattern of having pre-made judgements about things.

Another example of this is a political one. We were having lunch the other day in the common room, and discussing the recent case of Raoul Moat, who shot his ex-girlfriend and her new lover (killing the latter) as well as a policeman, and made lots of threats besides. There was an outcry over the way the case was handled and the perspective that the man deserved to die for what he'd done. The most 'left-wing' person in our group made the argument that seeing the man simply as bad and thereby justifying his sort of assisted suicide if you like (tasering him as he had a gun to his head) was an incredibly right-wing thing to do, and it was worth looking into why he'd ended up like that in the first place and how the system had failed him. The most right-wing person in our group automatically supported the conservative party's statements and actions. In essence, party politics is sort of a way of simplifying the need to decide on issues based on whatever you can glean about them. If you are convinced by a particular party's ideology, you support it no matter what.

Of course now I am oversimplifying, and we still have a great deal of debate in this country at least about individual issues, yet I refuse still to align myself with any particular political or other kind of party because I think as soon as you do, you've shifted the responsibility for opinions and decisions about things to some group mentality and unless you're REALLY REALLY sure that that group is thinking more clearly than you and is aligned on all moral/ethical standpoints as you, my view is that it is detrimental to start relying on any group association in that way.

So what's this all about? Open-mindedness I guess. The value of thinking for oneself. And questioning your ideas and challenging yourself to consider alternatives and defend what you believe in rather than just accepting it and refusing to question it.