Reflecting on her own experience of being a graduate student in the early 1990s, Boyer (2004,(169)(170) suggests that 'if uncertainty existed over what it meant to be a feminist geographer, what it meant to be a feminist historical geographer was even less clear' (my emphasis). That was more than 25 years ago at around the time Gender, Place and Culture was first published (on which see Domosh and Ruwanpura, 2018) but much the same is arguably true today, even whilst women, gender and feminist approaches to the past are now well evidenced within the sub-discipline of historical geography. As Domosh and Morin (2003, 257) noted in their review in GPC, feminist historical geography 'rarely travels under its own name' and the term remains little used outside North America. As an UK-based scholar who consciously identifies as writing feminist historical geographies (McDonagh, 2017, 2), I am perhaps particularly aware of the challenges and opportunities presented by such ambiguities and uncertainties. In what follows, I explore some of the possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers.Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were -and are -co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published since 2000 and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. The material discussed here was primarily written by Anglophone geographers, whilst recognising and acknowledging that the Anglo-American hegemony in feminist geography -and feminism more generally -is problematic (on this, see Garcia Ramon et al., 2006)]. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home,
This paper examines issues surrounding protest, trespass and occupation -brought to the fore as a result both of recent social movements including the global Occupy movement and of emerging critical discourses about so-called 'new enclosures' -through a historical lens. Wary of histories of property and protest that rely heavily on the notion of the 'closing of the commons', the authors present a different story about the solidification of property rights, the securitisation of space and the gradual emergence of the legal framework through which protest is now disciplined. They do so via an exploration of three episodes in the making of property in land and three associated moments of resistance, each enacted via the physical occupation of common land. The first examines strategies for opposing enclosure in early sixteenth-century England; the second considers the Diggers' reimagining of property and the commons in the mid seventeenth century; and the third analyses the challenge to property rights offered by squatting and small-scale encroachments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In so doing, the paper begins to rethink the relations between past and contemporary protest, considering how a more nuanced account of the history of common rights, enclosure and property relations might nevertheless leave space for new solidarities which have the potential to challenge the exercise of arbitrary power.Suddenly, in 2011 occupations were everywhere. Student sit-ins, the symbolic gathering and occupying of prominent 'public' spaces during the so-called Arab Spring, the Indignados of Spain, the Direct Democracy Now movement in Greece, and the Occupy movement, all united by their shared use of the physical occupation of prominent and symbolic spaces by way of protest.If ultimately their aims were different, the technique of gathering together and occupying tied the protests together. The act of occupation is not a new one, though rarely has the physical and spatial act been given such symbolic prominence as in the Occupy movement. The practical and symbolic actand thus public performanceof occupying public space was not just rooted in political symbolism but also a direct critique of the 'privatization' of public space. Occupy thus reclaims and remakes space for the public against the interests of those who seek to exclude and delimit the use of space supposedly once of the public. 1 Central to this assertion is the mobilization of the idea of the 'commons' to historically and conceptually underpin its actions. Indeed, central to Occupy's declared intent is the belief in the importance of, and a desire to return to, the 'commons', to throw off private property in land and, simply put, return the land to the people. In this oft-repeated narrative, before the demonic act of enclosureon which more belowthe land was of the people, unrestricted and unregulated for all to use. Enclosure closed the commons down, the hedges and fences erected forcing the poor from their land and gifting it to the wealthy ruler...
This paper examines the role of elite women in estate management, enclosure and landscape improvement in eighteenth-century England, a topic which has to date received little in the way of sustained academic consideration. The paper focuses on four women who took control of sizeable Northamptonshire estates in the 1760s and early 1770s, and demonstrates that these women were active as both managers and innovators. In examining the women's involvement in estate management, the paper explores a series of important questions about women's place in the history of parliamentary enclosure and landscape improvement, as well as women's role in eighteenth-century society more generally.
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