No abstract

In recent decades the body has become an important object of inquiry within the discipline of geography, as it has within the humanities and social sciences more generally. Though often critical of the tenets of poststructuralism, Marxist geographers have responded with enthusiasm to the imperative that we denaturalize the body, and have demonstrated a capacious store of resources available to this task. Building on recent efforts by geographers to conceptualize a Marxist theory of the body, this paper moves in two directions. Aligning myself with those interested in demonstrating the constructedness of the body, I begin by arguing both that the notion of bodies-as-produced is latent in historical materialism and that we can employ our insights about the production of space in order to think about the production of bodies. I then turn away from this discussion of the production of bodies and consider whether there is, in the bloodline of theoretical Marxism, any notion of the natural body with which we must contend. I argue that evidence of such a body can be found both in deliberate treatises on the subject and in the work of at least one scholar for whom the body was not an explicit object of study. These investigations, moreover, suggest that historical materialism implies not only the production of bodies but also what presupposes and enables this production. I conclude by considering some of the implications of subscribing to a historical materialist theory of the body.

We argue that legal geography’s ability to produce holistic knowledge about law and legal relations is hampered by the qualified dominance in the field of what we refer to as a contingency orientation. This phrase refers to both the belief that law, legal relations, and legal outcomes are more open and contingent than they appear to be, and to an empirical interest in bringing to light moments when law, legal relations, and legal outcomes appear to depart from dominant representations of these as closed, determinate, aspatial, and wholly formal. Because holistic accounts of the social world require attention to both agency and structure, both contingency and determination, we call for a stream of scholarship within legal geography the purpose of which is to give more explicit and concerted attention to structure and determination than there has heretofore been in the field, and to produce research-based theoretical knowledge that can thus improve the holism of our collective understanding of the law.

:  This paper examines the conservative critique of higher education in the USA. I argue, first, that the right's call for greater “intellectual diversity” in American higher education should be understood as an attack on the professional self‐regulation and disciplinary autonomy that are central to academic freedom in this country. Second, I suggest that the right's politicization of politics in the academy brings to light the importance of our developing a vision of the university that accounts for rather than disavows the political nature of the work we do.

In recent years, there have been several calls for geographers to engage more closely with the normative in their work. This paper supplements those calls by suggesting that geographers turn their attention to popular understandings of and discourses about justice. In the first part of the paper, I make a case for such scholarship and argue that it should be undergirded by two premises. The first premise is that understandings of justice depend not only on abstract ideas about the just, but on the geographical and historical frames -geographical imaginariesthrough which we understand the world; the second is that understandings of justice (including both abstract ideas and geographical imaginaries) are deeply historical and social. In the second part of this paper, I demonstrate the centrality of historical and social geographical imaginaries to assessments of justice by examining the discourse surrounding the controversial 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine. Put in place at the behest of British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, the Regulations restricted the areas in which Jews could buy land in Palestine. While Jews in Palestine condemned the Regulations as racially discriminatory, MacDonald defended them as necessary if the British were to fulfil the British Mandate Government's obligations to the Palestinians as well as to the Jews. A close look at the positions of each side reveals that their differences lay not in their abstract principles of justice but in the geographical imaginaries through which they viewed Palestine and the Palestinians.