This article calls for greater attention to be paid to the way that sex and sexuality impact on geographical fieldwork. By concentrating in particular on cross-cultural fieldwork, the article focuses on the ways in which attention to these questions has the potential to bring about greater self-reflexivity and to expose the contingency of the researcher's sexuality.

Much of the gender and disaster literature calls for more gender-sensitive disaster relief and research by focusing on the ways in which women are more vulnerable in a disaster or on their unique capabilities as community leaders or natural resource managers, which are often overlooked or underutilised in emergency management strategies. As well as seeking to overcome the (strategic) essentialism that is part of these calls and debates, this paper pays closer attention to gender identity and subjectivity as these are constructed and reworked through the disaster process to highlight the complexities and contradictions associated with women's responses to a disaster. This focus, while crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of the gendered dimensions of disaster, also complicates attempts to create more gender-sensitive frameworks for disaster response. It draws on qualitative research conducted with a number of women in the wake of Hurricane Mitch (1998) in Nicaragua.

It is not uncommon for many people in Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island to wake up on cold winter mornings and see their breath indoors. According to meteorologist Bob McDavitt,``dragon breathöa billow of vapour with every exhalationöis usually a sign that the room temperature is below 5 degrees centigrade'' (Welham, 2003, page D1). This quote was taken from a recent article in The Christchurch Press which reported that an estimated 60% of Christchurch's 72 000 homes are significantly underheated and underinsulated, putting residents at risk of heart attacks, strokes, and pneumonia (Welham, 2003). According to Statistics New Zealand, nationwide about eighteen New Zealanders die every day during the winter from the cold, suggesting we might well have higher winter mortality rates than either Sweden or Siberia in spite of our far more temperate climate (Hayman, 2004). In a city where locals refuse to use umbrellas in the rain and wear shorts all year round, central heating, such as you might find in the northern hemisphere, is virtually nonexistent. Neither insulation nor double glazing is common and homes are usually poorly heated by a combination of open fires, log burners, and electric heaters.There is clear evidence not only that inadequate heating causes poor health and leads to children underperforming at school (Welham, 2003), but also that in Christchurch our home-heating customs contribute to high levels of winter air pollution. During the winter months Christchurch has levels of particulate pollution that are high by world standards and regularly exceed guideline maximum values (Spronken-Smith et al, 2002). These high levels of air pollution during winter months are predominantly a result of heavy reliance on the burning of wood and coal for household heating,`P

Despite persistent images to the contrary, most fieldworkers are accompanied. Yet, there has been limited discussion on the nature of accompanied fieldwork, particularly by geographers. Drawing on our experiences in three countries in the tropics, we discuss the dynamics of being accompanied in "the field" by our children and female co-researchers. Specifically, we focus on issues of access and rapport; the impacts of their presence on our positionality; and the implications these have for power relations and research outcomes. We demonstrate how being accompanied entangles our personal and professional selves and can result in more egalitarian power relations as we become "observers observed". We argue that by paying attention to the dynamics of accompanied fieldwork, there is the potential to enhance the conceptual focus of our methodological concerns and to provide a more theoretically sophisticated mode of exploring the ways in which our multiple identities intersect while in "the field".

Mobile phones have invited a number of dystopian understandings, particularly as far as young people are concerned. They have been variously argued to contribute to poor spelling and grammar, disturb attention to school work, facilitate text bullying, lead to brain cancers and promote the destruction of face-to-face relationships. Despite these concerns, text messaging is by far the most common form of mobile communication between young people in New Zealand. Drawing on actor-network theory and qualitative research conducted with New Zealand teenagers, we explore how teenagers, cell phones, socio-spatial relations and discourses exist within a hybrid and interdependent network which we have termed digital sociality. This network seems to facilitate rather than destroy proximal contact. The machine and the human, in a cyborgian sense, meld to develop new and complex workings of space and the social which suggests mobile technologies are not as damaging to young people as many have suggested and calls for preventative approaches to this technology might need therefore to be rethought.