Publications
People, Place, and Space: A Reader will bring together already published texts from a variety of disciplines that examine the ‘spatial turn’ across the disciplines, focusing on environment, space, and place as they relate to the mundane and spectacular everyday lives of people. This book is intended to provide a broad but theoretically informed introduction to the issues that at once spur and call for a geographical understanding and imagination. At the same time it is meant to integrate works across a number of disciplines and thus appeal to those seeking to aerate and expand their disciplinary purview on key questions.
ARTICLES
Low, S.M., G.T. Donovan, and J. Gieseking. 2012. Shoestring Democracy: Gated Condominiums and Market Rate Co-operatives in New York. Journal of Urban Affairs. (Presently available online. Due to Wiley-Blackwell contract agreements, I am not permitted to place this article online.)
This article develops the concept of shoestring democracy as a way to characterize the resulting social relations of private governance structures embedded in two types of collective housing schemes found in New York City and the adjoining suburbs: gated condominium communities (gated condominiums) and market-rate cooperative apartment complexes (co-ops). Drawing from ethnographies of gated condominiums and co-ops in New York City and neighboring Nassau County, New York, we compare these two forms of collective home ownership regarding the impact of private governance structures on residents and their sense of representation and participation in ongoing community life. “Shoestring democracy” encompasses a broad range of behaviors utilized to insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreements, and limits rather than promotes political participation. The greatest differences between the co-ops and gated condominiums were found in discussions of safety and security… Moral minimalism and a lack of structural and procedural knowledge may insulate residents from local conflicts and disagreement, but also may discourage civic participation. Exploring the apathy residents expressed about participation and a lack of representation suggests that although the Rochdale principles of cooperation that are the legal and social basis for co-ops may have been important at one time, current practices of private governing boards do more to restrict participatory democratic practices than encourage them. The policy implications are outlined with suggestions of how to make homeowners associations and co-op boards more accountable and encourage greater adherence to the original co-op mandate.
Opotow, S., and J. Gieseking. 2010. Foreground and Background: The Environment as Site and Social Issue. Journal of Social Issues [75th Anniversary Issue], 67(1): 179-96. (Due to Wiley-Blackwell contract agreements, I am not permitted to place this article online.)
To examine how the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) has engaged with environmental issues throughout its 75-year history, we consulted five SPSSI-based data sources. Our analysis, attentive to the larger sociopolitical contexts over time, focuses on SPSSI’s attention to the physical environment, the places in which social living and interactions occur. In SPSSI’s early years, social issues research was often situated within specific locales. Since 1960 and the emergence of environmental psychology and the environmental movement, SPSSI increasing focuses on environment as a social issue in its own right as well part of other social issues. Over time there has been a decline in mentions of the physical environment in SPSSI’s methods texts. This historical analysis highlights the specifics of context in SPSSI’s environmental research and urges attention to the physical as well as social aspects of environment in research and activism.
SpaceTime Research Collective. 2009. To What Will We Resort When Capitalism Is Over? Human Geography, 2(2):101-4.
283 Collective. 2008. What’s Just? Afterthoughts on the Summer Institute for the Geographies of Justice 2007.Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, 40(5):736-50. (Due to Wiley-Blackwell contract agreements, I am not permitted to place this article online.)
Gieseking, J. 2007. (Re)Constructing Women: Scaled Portrayals of Privilege and Gender Norms on Campus. Area, 39(3): 278-86. (Due to Wiley-Blackwell contract agreements, I am not permitted to place this article online.)
How are privilege and/or particular gender norms for women spatially (re)produced over time and how are they challenged and changed? In interviews and mental mapping exercises with 32 students and graduates of an elite US women’s college from graduating classes spanning 1937 to 2006, women’s class and gender norms and expectations are found to have been produced, reproduced and reworked in their everyday experiences during college. Participants portray these norms through the scales of the body, institution and extra-institution in regards to the particular social and physical space of the campus. Participants’ experiences, as depicted in these scales, indicate that class norms remained stable over generational cohorts, but gender norms shifted drastically because the privilege found within and granted by the elite women’s college campus allowed for and prompted such changes. Transformations of women’s gender norms also correspond with changes in the larger social sphere with a particular split in how participants could enact their privilege to alter their gender norms before and after the late 1960s.
Gieseking, J. 2012 (In Preperation). Data Beyond Words: the Mental Mapping Methodology and Its Analytic Components for Social Science Data Gathering. Qualitative Inquiry.
BOOK REVIEWS
- Gieseking, J. 2009. Review of Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders by Yvette Taylor. Gender, Place and Culture, 16(3): 353-4.
- Gieseking, J., and Y. Hung. 2008. Review of A Postcapitalist Politics by J.K. Gibson-Graham. Environment & Planning A, 40(2): 505-6.
- Gieseking, J. 2007. Review of Changing Gender Relations, Changing Families: Tracing the Pace of Change Over Time by Oriel Sullivan. Contemporary Sociology, 36(4): 341-2.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY
- Gieseking, J. 2008. “Queer Theory” in Encyclopedia of Social Problems (eds. V.N. Parrillo, M. Andersen, J. Best, W. Kornblum, C.M. Renzetti, and M. Romero). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 737-8.
