Geographical Imagination

“Queer(ing) New York”: Education for Change, on May Day and Beyond

The CLAGS Seminar in the City that I am teaching, “Queer(ing) New York,” will begin this evening, May 1st. Since creating this course, a lot of activists have wondered why we would choose to begin on International Worker’s Day. I see May Day as not only the right to work but the right to learn and to know. Free, open, and accessible education–like Queer(ing) New York–must instead be made common and therefore part of our public commons.

Courses like this are the ways we can reimagine education, and also reimagine and enact equality. Lgbtq people live through and walk through absences everyday, ranging from issues of recognition to acceptance, from using bathrooms to using the subway, from the bar that used to be there but closed to the home that used to be there but doesn’t count you as family anymore. As a group that lives the marginalization

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How can we bring the issues and aches of Sandy into the classroom to help work through what has taken place? Here’s my take for the Environmental Methods course in the masters program in Sustainable Interior Environments program at the Fashion Institute of Technology SUNY that I am teaching. → 3 November, 2012

In order to grapple with Sandy and confront the effects of increasing natural disasters at home and abroad, my next class in will use our next class meeting to discuss the inequalities that Sandy re-revealed in the city, the politics of a “natural” disaster, and designing for what lies ahead. As I asked my students: These are all short pieces so please read them all. Think about how each piece–all from different interests, fields, and groups–fits into the next and how the design examples in the last NYT piece fall short or support these larger issues, from fish to tech, from → 3 November, 2012

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For those arriving from Feministing and/or Salon, welcome! I encourage you to wander around the site. You might especially be interested in a Gender, Sexuality, and Space Bibliography I have building for some time. I am also the webcaptain for the Gender & Geography Bibliography, a project begun over twenty years ago and still growing. Lastly, do wander over to outhistory.org which hosts tons of exciting content, both new and archival, on lgbtq experiences over time and throughout the world. → 28 August, 2012

Do check back! Over time I will create specific lists of readings for undergraduate students and teaching undergraduates, and graduate students and teaching graduate students, as well as readings by subjectivity and identity (lesbian, trans, etc.) and environment (rural, urban, suburban) → 28 August, 2012

The Lesbian-Queer Space Mapping Project will relaunch next year. → 28 August, 2012

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Below is the full interview between Gwendolyn Beetham with Maria Rodó-de-Zárate and Jen Gieseking for the blog feministing.com. You can read the feministing.com version here. → 14 August, 2012

Chat History with
Created on 2012-07-31 14:14:25. → 14 August, 2012

Gwendolyn Beetham: 13:19:28
Anyway, so, thank you both so much for your answers to the interview questions. I just read through them both a couple of times, and feel like they really speak to each other well. What did you think of seeing them together? → 14 August, 2012

Jen Gieseking: 13:19:57
I really like them too. They really pair well. What did you think, Maria? → 14 August, 2012

Maria Rodo de Zarate: 13:20:15
I also like them! → 14 August, 2012

Jen Gieseking: 13:21:14
I think there is a lot of personal experience that fuels our work. …maybe one good conversation question is…: what we have learned from each other, either in these written statements or when we got to work together at CUNY? → 14 August, 2012

Gwendolyn Beetham: 13:24:08
That → 14 August, 2012

… → 14 August, 2012

Today the NYTimes provided an incredible example of how they and others like them have the power to reorgazine space, time, and power through the geographical imagination. The newspaper labeled photographs of Michael Bloomberg’s two Victorian residences in New York City and London as the West Bank and East Bank in Diane Cardwell’s “Trans-Atlantic Living in the Bloomberg Style.” The labels given to the two photographs of these urban mansions equated the U.S. and Europe as the center of cosmopolitan upscale living with the Atlantic Ocean as our calm Seine River. The resultant effect reads like David Harvey’s notion of “time-space compression”–globalization and modern capitalist economies pull us closer and closer together, as if he entire “developed,” Western world was the city around which the “rest’ of the world gathered. As such, Cindi Katz’s “time-space expansion” comes out as well–when political and economic processes pull us closer together, → 3 October, 2007

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The “geographical imagination” is a popular catchphrase in the geographical literature with multiple, often unclear definitions and framings. The concept of the geographical imagination developed from C. Wright Mills’ (1961) “sociological imagination,” a conceptual tool for use by individuals to compare their personal biographies to larger social structures within their specific historical era. David Harvey (1973) coined the “geographical imagination” as he built upon the sociological imagination by also examining politics and geographies at individual and structural levels of multiple scales. As such, Harvey argued it is a tool he developed for social and spatial justice that people could use to compare themselves not only to larger social structures but to see the similarities and differences across spaces and times to fight various forms of oppression. The geographical imagination had grown substantially by the time Derek Gregory (1993) formally re-defined it as the spatialized cultural and historical knowledge that → 15 September, 2007

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Welcome. My name is Jen Gieseking and I am a geographer and Ph.D. Candidate in environmental psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. → 15 September, 2007

The primary purpose of this blog is to work through the question of and findings from my dissertation research project: to understand how lesbian/queer women’s everyday spaces and their associated economies in New York City have remained the same or changed over generations since 1983, and how they could do so while facing severe oppression. From a study performed in 1983, Manuel Castells (1985) argued that gay men in San Francisco developed a physical and social place/community by geographical gains intertwined with both unintentional and intentional cultural and economic shifts and decisions. The majority of research done on LGBTQ spaces since this period assumes geographical territorialization as a key tactic for gaining rights for LGBTQ people and a way of everyday queer life that → 15 September, 2007

… → 15 September, 2007

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