The purpose of my paper is to offer an understanding of home hospice from a perspective of political geography. Informed by critical political theories of care, and recent work on the geographies of public and private spheres, I explore one set of consequences of the spatial shift towards home death in metropolitan Seattle, Washington. Terminal hospice care done in the home creates an especially paradoxical home space. By blurring public–private boundaries, hospice care produces a political geography of home interpretable through four spatial paradoxes: a normative paradox of home being a good and bad place to die, a territorial paradox of control itself changing the home, a constitutive paradox between heart and welfare politics, and a relational paradox between autonomy and dependency. The implications for political and health geography, as well as political theory and hospice work itself are discussed as a consequence of recognizing these spatial paradoxes.
This paper responds to recent calls for a Foucauldian population geography by critically analysing the 2004 Gay and Lesbian Atlas (a US‐oriented product of demographers at Washington, DC's Urban Institute, a public policy ‘think tank’). We employ a framework that foregrounds issues of governmentality, sexuality, gender and scale to explore how both the Atlas and the 2000 US Census from which the Atlas's data are drawn socially construct, for governmental purposes, certain sexualised populations and spaces. We pay particular attention to the power of scale‐framing in this process by varying the spatial scales at which location quotients for same‐sex households are situated for census tracts in Seattle. Following the Atlas's classification and coding algorithms, we show how the resulting cartography can reveal elements of a population that has previously been invisible in the census – but only relative to certain larger scales. The question of scale therefore becomes an important matter of governmentality, rather than solely a technical issue. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sociospatial distances fostered by recent geographies of AIDS are critiqued in this paper through cultural criticism and my own ethnographic work on AIDS politics in Vancouver, Canada. Specifically I note the tendency of medical geography and spatial science to distance themselves from gay men and their spaces, I argue this distancing is perpetrated by: (1) a focus on the virus, with gay men's bodies serving as vectors of transmission; and (2) an unobtrusive, detached rendering of the travels of the virus across space. In turn, I demonstrate how an ethnographic approach mitigates spatial science's erasure of gay men and space. Turning the critique of distance back on my own ethnographic research I then discuss the ironic benefits of distance in geographic research. I conclude that distance in itself is neither essentially concealing nor revealing, but its implications for research must be constantly considered.
Where has welfare gone? Introductory remarks on the geographies of care and welfare Shortly after World War 2, T H Marshall (1950) argued that the provision of social welfare services was needed to sustain a polity in which individuals were capable of truly being citizens. During that same period, the apparatus of the modern welfare state was built to deliver those services (Schottland, 1967). The ways in which social welfare was provided in various countries reflected different strategies and ideologies concerning how best to achieve the social rights that Marshall identified, as well as how best to construct inclusive and just societies (Esping-Anderson, 1990). In the past decade, these welfare regimes have been the subject of reforms that have radically reshaped the relationships between individuals, families, citizens, communities, and states (Gilbert, 2002;Katz, 2001;Zijderveld, 1999). These reforms are the outgrowth of concerns that`something' was not working with the ways in which social welfare had been provided. Politicians and activists on both the right and the left pointed to the large numbers of people who seemed dependent on social welfare services, rather than enabled by them. The quality and cost of services were decried. And the polities within these countries seemed fragmented, atomized, and incapable or unwilling to act as citizens.Much of the debate over welfare focused on institutional structures, policies, and behaviors that limited the effectiveness of social welfare. Embedded in these debates, however, were competing moral philosophies concerning social justice and how justice might be enhanced. These were never just debates of philosophy or policy, of course. They were debates over geography: where welfare ought to be and what form it should take there; how places (for example, cities, households, regions, the nation) and movements (migrations, household reconfigurations, etc) ought to be constituted through the welfare state. The following set of papers discusses the implications of these philosophies and geographies for the ways that social welfare and care are provided and for the kinds of societies they enable. In this introduction, we will attempt to provide a framework through which these philosophies can be interpreted. We begin by situating the papers within geography through a very brief and admittedly partial consideration of the ways in which geographers have approached the study of welfare and care. We then outline a perspective towards social justice that highlights the significance of care and welfare in creating an inclusive society. Finally, we highlight the ways in which each of the papers addresses these issues and helps us to understand where welfare has gone in this era of retrenchment and decline. Geographies of welfareIn the 1960s, welfare geography was part of an attempt to create a relevant, socially aware scholarship that could inform policy decisions and other kinds of praxis (for example, Ha« gerstrand, 1970;Harvey, 1973;Morrill, 1969;. In conjunction with the ...
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