Spaces of Power: Historical and ContemporaryAuthor(s): Gillian RoseSource: Area, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Jun., 1993), pp. 177-178Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003270 .

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Annual Conference 177

conditions, helped shift the balance of power within the city: the maintenance of a regime required the successful maintenance of a stable electoral coalition. Huw Thomas and Vijay

Krishnarayan (Oxford Brookes) closed the session with a discussion of local authority practice on race and planning. Drawing on a national survey, they pointed to the wide variety of practice: awareness ranged from refusal to acknowledge a problem to complete commitment to race equality. Government advice to planning authorities contained few references to a multi-ethnic society. Large differences in perception of the issue were identified between councillors and local black populations.

Charles Pattie Nottingham University

Ronan Paddison Glasgow University

Spaces of power: historical and contemporary This four-module session was jointly sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geography Study Group and the Historical Geography Research Group. Its aim was empirically to elaborate recent theoretical discussion about the way in which the discursive construction of space is related to social relations of power. This goal was fully achieved; although a crowded programme unfortunately left little time for discussion, the papers addressed this issue in detail and with rigour.

The first three papers examined the meanings of the domestic. Susan Ford (Bolton) examined the ' homescape ' offered in a mid-nineteenth century guide to house and garden design, noting in particular the gendering both of certain spaces and of different ways of representing those spaces. David Crouch (Anglia) explored the construction of what he called ' outdoor domestic spaces 'such as allotments, community gardens and communitarian settlements. He suggested that, through their ethic of recycling, these places gave new meaning to objects, and that work on them embodied a strong feeling of closeness to the land and of reciprocity rather than of competition. Carol Bryce,

Helen Roberts and Sue Smith (Edinburgh and Glasgow) continued the theme of remaking mean ings in their discussion of the complex meaning of the home as both haven and danger in a working class area of Glasgow. They argued that although high levels of child accidents in this area were often blamed on the incompetence of parents, those parents in fact had a detailed knowledge of risk and danger and were very effective in protecting their children.

The second module took as its theme the making of public spaces. Miles Ogborn (Lampeter) began with a discussion of the politics of the city street in late eighteenth-century London. His interest was in specifying the public experienced through the bourgeois promenade: anonymous, practical, masculine, concerned to keep clean. Distaste for the abject was also a theme of the paper which followed, David Sibley's (Hull) discussion of hostility towards Gypsies. Drawing on certain psychoanalytic argument, David pointed out that groups such as Gypsies are not always abhorred as outsiders. They may also be seen as exotic, and this oscillation is an important part of understanding the ambivalence of hegemonic representation. Isobel Dyck (British Columbia) focused on efforts at self-representation. Drawing on a detailed ethnography of mothers in suburban Vancouver, she argued that many women feel dissatisfied if they do not work for wages but guilty if they do, and that this contradiction is ameliorated to some extent by the active renegotiation of the mothering role which takes place within women's neighbourhood networks.

After some opening remarks by John Allen (Open University) on the study of culture, power and the economy, the afternoon began with two papers on contemporary workplaces. Philip Crang (Lampeter) considered their processes of surveillance and display, using the example of a middle-market restaurant chain. In an intricate geography of spaces, gazes and bodies, he explored both managerial strategies of surveillance, discipline and control and the subversion of those strategies by workers hiding and posing. The following paper also had as one of its themes the performance of roles: Linda McDowell (Cambridge) examined the gender roles of City

workplaces. She described in graphic detail the dominant aggressive masculinity of the trading

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178 Annual Conference

floors and dealing rooms, and the rather more restrained gentlemanliness of directors of mer chant banks; and she suggested that women working in such places deliberately manipulated their display of femininity in order to succeed.

The final session considered the representation of colonial and post-colonial spaces. Through a discussion of the missionary James Philippo, Catherine Hall (East London) examined the Jamaica imagined by nineteenth-century British imperialism. She described the inscription of British imagined geographies onto the spaces of Spanishtown, and how those geographies were disrupted by black Jamaican protest. Derek Gregory (British Columbia) discussed the way in which colonised territories in Africa were gradually rendered legible to British narrative forms and modes of explanation. Steven Daniels and Catherine Nash (Nottingham) then described various radical efforts to challenge imperialistic cartographic representations. Using the work of several contemporary Irish artists and writers, they argued that the map can be re-appropriated for emancipatory ends. The session was brought to a conclusion by Nigel Thrift (Bristol) reflecting on the current vogue for studying imperialism. He suggested that it was a consequence of increasing reflexivity on the part of Western academics, changing spatial experiences and social memory, and the development of certain feminist and anti-racist work.

Gillian Rose Queen Mary and Westfield College

University of London

Getting published This one module session was convened by Margaret Bryon (Kings College, London) and Sarah

Whatmore (Bristol) on behalf of the IBG Publications Committee and Equal Opportunities Working Group. The objectives of the session were to provide junior members of the IBG

(especially graduate students and research assistants) with an opportunity to meet editors of the Institute's main journals and other publishers, to inform them about the research publication process and to help them develop their own publication proposals.

The session was very well attended and overall, was successful. A high level of interest was shown by the post-graduate community. 'Getting Published' was presented as two sections: publishing in refereed journals and book publishing (with hindsight, section 2 may have been better titled ' getting a book published '.

Publishing in refereed journals was launched with short talks on the process by Tom Spencer, editor, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms and Neil Wrigley, editor, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. In outlining the process of ' Submitting a paper to a scientific journal', Tom Spencer ran through the various scenarios of acceptance with minor or major alterations and of rejection of a paper. He identified key criteria in the process as the original contribution to knowledge, the communication of the argument and the contextual setting of the paper. In' Reflections of an out-going editor ' Neil Wrigley (Southampton) stressed that authors must learn to target papers very precisely to specific journals and to focus on journals which have the greatest impact on the audience and/or discipline. To Spencer's comments on alterations suggested by referees, Wrigley added that the editor does not expect every suggestion of the referees to be taken on board during revision.

The talks were followed by a panel discussion led by Neil Wrigley (Southampton), Tom Spencer (Cambridge), Sophie Bowlby (Reading), an experienced referee for numerous geogra phical journals and Joe Painter (Lampeter), book reviews editor for Antipode. This provided a good opportunity for the audience to clarify points and voice uncertainties about the publication process.

After a break for tea, the second part of ' Getting Published ' commenced with a talk by John McKendrick (Glasgow), secretary of the Post Graduate Forum of the IBG who provided a post graduate's perspective on getting published. McKendrick focused on the themes of' who pub lished ' (noting the growing contribution by post graduates to human geography publication), ' why publish' (observing, among other things, the advantage this gives in the labour market),

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