Gavin Brown

University of Leicester | LE · Department of Geography

This paper provides an overview of a transnational research project exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and public health responses to it, on sexual and gendered politics. It sets out a framework for rethinking sexual and intimate citizenship during the COVID-19 pandemic, and draws on examples from India, Italy, Mexico and the UK to illu...

This paper reviews current concepts from the social sciences and humanities through which to understand and interpret the sexual and gendered politics of the COVID-19 pandemic. We revisit Sedgwick’s ‘epistemology of the closet’ to think about the ways in which sexuality and gender have become known and understood in new ways through a different for...

Drawing on our situated experience as geographers of sexualities living and working in the Minority World, this response addresses some of the concerns raised by our interlocutors around the use of assemblage thinking, socio-spatial inequalities and subject formation.

Sexually inflected and queer geographies have variously responded to the changing legal, social and cultural landscapes of the 21st century. This report explores the spatial normalisations that these changes have created, through the concept of homonormativity, and the locatedness of these homonormative critiques. It then examines how these changes...

Recent biomedical innovations in the field of HIV prevention and treatment – namely PrEP, TasP, and ‘undetectability’ – have completely reshaped the experience of living with HIV, as well as the meanings of ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ in relation to sexual practices, leading to new forms of pleasure and sociality for gay and bisexual men in the Minority Wo...

Gavin Brown (University of Leicester, UK) is one of today’s most eminent scholars of political geography and sexualities. In this intellectual-biographical interview, he describes his academic path, as well as discusses some of his major contributions to the fields of geographies of sexualities and gender and protest movements and activism. This in...

This paper offers a new way of conceptualising how intersectional solidarities are actualised. It recounts and theorises an outbreak of radical internationalism, when working class struggles in Britain and South Africa were unexpectedly linked. It examines how intersectional solidarity was materialised through a process of coming together against t...

This chapter explores how and why badges, as objects, are useful devices for geographers interested in radical politics to consider. It also considers how the social role of badges and badging has changed over the lifetime of Antipode. For centuries, badges and insignia of various types have been a means of demonstrating political allegiance. In th...

This paper advances a theory of “cohortness” for understanding the experience and articulation of identities. Using a case study focusing on higher education students, we argue that thinking in terms of cohorts enables an alternative way to examine how people perform, feel, and express their subjectivities collectively, especially within institutio...

This chapter concludes the volume by highlighting key themes that have run through the book and the case studies of diverse contemporary and historical protest camps contained within it. The chapter recognises that protest camps have come into being motivated by a diverse range of political imperatives and that these political motivations, as much...

From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies from five continents, this t...

In this section introduction the authors consider the different elements that are brought together to create the material and social infrastructures of camps. Taking seriously the material and social infrastructures of camps, they examine the spatial division of labour within protest camps. They also introduce how the architecture of the public squ...

Introduction All forms of protest have a geography and interact with the spatiality of the world in particular ways (Nicholls, 2009). This is particularly evident in the case of protest camps: they take form and materialise through an occupation of space, a piece of land, for an extended period of time. Many protest camps simultaneously occupy phys...

Present tents: Protest camps in the contemporary world This book examines protest camps as a key expression of contemporary social movement politics. From Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square, from Wall Street to the London Stock Exchange, 2011 was not just the year of the protester, but also the year of the protest camp. From the squares of Spain to t...

Introduction Convergence and assembly in physical space provides a protest camp's foundation. Yet a protest is not only comprised of bodies together in space. The dynamics and political trajectories of a protest camp are formed from the entanglements and interactions of material objects (canvas tents, city roads, bicycles, wooden pallets, tarps and...

Introduction Protest camps occupy a unique position within collective action as they are not only the site of protest but they simultaneously double as home places (hooks, 1990; Roseneil, 2000); places where participants are fed, cared for and sheltered. Previous parts of this book have examined how protest camps manifest their protest in relation...

Introduction This book has taken a journey through sites of protest across the world, attempting to understand better the place-based politics expressed in protest camps and related forms of occupation-based politics. The case studies in this book were organised into three sections that allowed exploration of some of the differing processes through...

Protest camps are a common and recurring feature of social movements around the world. From Tahrir to Taksim, acts of occupying squares, parks and streets together, have made protest camps into a key site of democratic politics in the 21st century. Since the Arab Uprisings and Occupy movement of 2011 brought protest camps to global attention, more...

Heteronormativity and homonormativity are connected. Changing social attitudes to homosexuality and the creation of new homonorms influence changing social norms around heterosexuality. To study the emerging sexual politics of austerity it is important to consider how normative social attitudes to both heterosexual and homosexual relations are chan...

This paper rethinks the origins of contemporary homonormativity. Through an analysis of archival material from a rural lesbian and gay social movement from the 1970s, it questions the common link between homonormativity and urban neoliberalism. The Gay Rural Aid & Information Network (GRAIN) provided support to lesbians and gay men living in rural...

This paper rethinks the origins of contemporary homonormativity. Through an analysis of archival material from a rural lesbian and gay social movement from the 1970s, it questions the common link between homonormativity and urban neoliberalism. The Gay Rural Aid & Information Network (GRAIN) provided support to lesbians and gay men living in rural...

This article reports on reusable mobile digital learning resources designed to assist human geography undergraduate students in exploring the geographies of life in Dublin. Developing active learning that goes beyond data collection to encourage observation and thinking in the field is important. Achieving this in the context of large class sizes p...

International solidarity is frequently presented as an asymmetrical flow of assistance travelling from one place to another. In contrast, we theorise the more complex, entangled and reciprocal flows of solidarity that serve to enact social change in more than one place simultaneously. The international campaign against apartheid was one of the most...

The late nineteenth century saw a burgeoning of geographical writings from influential anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus. Yet despite the vigorous intellectual debate sparked by the works of these two individuals, following their deaths anarchist ideas within geography faded. It was not until the 1970s that anarchism was onc...

This article is part of a review symposium of Sheila Cavanagh's book Queering bathrooms: gender, sexuality and the hygienic imagination, 2010, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 295 pp., £19.94 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4426-10736

Social scientists often use the notion of ‘transition’ to denote diverse trajectories of change in different types of bodies: from individuals, to communities, to nation-states. Yet little work has theorised how transition might occur across, between, or beyond these bodies. The aim of this paper is to sketch out a multiple, synthetic, and gene...

From April 1986 to February 1990, the supporters of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group [City Group] maintained a Non-Stop Picket outside the South African Embassy in London calling for the release of Nelson Mandela. Whilst the Non-Stop Picket was one of the most visible expressions of British anti-apartheid activism at the time, the Picket was...

There has been little consideration to date regarding how we might best adjust our assessment protocols so that the overall learning experience remains appropriately aligned to both content and teaching approach when adopting location-specific mobile learning. This paper explores the success of a novel strategy to design an assessment regime that c...

This edited volume proceeds from the perspective that as contemporary global challenges push anarchist agendas back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might yet contribute to the discipline. We develop an exploratory volume, where explicitly and...

For the last decade, the aspirations of working class young people have been a significant policy concern in the UK, with a range of interventions being implemented to work on and ‘raise’ them (particularly through initiatives to widen participation in higher education). This paper considers the emotional geographies of young people's aspirations....

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950—2009) was one of the founders of queer theory and a significant contributor to the fields of literary theory and philosophy. The four papers in this forum consider the impact and influence her work has had on diverse fields of research in human geography. Specifically, the papers examine how her work on the epistemology...

Recent years have seen a dramatic upsurge of interest in the connections between sexualities, space and place. Drawing established and 'founding' figures of the field together with emerging authors, this innovative volume offers a broad, interdisciplinary and international overview of the geographies of sexualities. Incorporating a discussion of qu...

This paper scopes the contemporary literatures that examine sexualities in/of the Global South. Recognising the complexities of both ‘sexualities’ and ‘the Global South’, the paper outlines key areas that can be explored under these headings. It questions the conflation of sexualities with homosexualities and contests the assumptions that spatial a...

Mobile technology mediated learning, or m-learning, is a relatively recent approach within Geography but one that is increasingly being adopted. Despite this rapid uptake there has been considerably less thought applied as to how we might adjust our assessment protocols so that the overall learning experience remains appropriately aligned. In this...

This paper explores the role of emotions in activism. Although, increasingly, researchers have examined what emotions inspire or deter different forms of political and social movement activism, this paper takes a new direction by considering what spaces, practices and emotional stances are necessary to sustain individual and collective resistance i...

This paper performatively decentres the role of mainstream gay consumption in contemporary thought about the economic and social lives of lesbians and gay men in the Global North. It is simultaneously critical and reparative in outlook. This paper critically engages with recent writing on homonormativity, suggesting that this work presents ‘homonor...

This paper provides a new approach to the geographies of cruising and public homosex. For some time, social scientists have contended that, in those semi-public spaces where men meet each other for sex, actions speak louder than words and men's competency in using the space is more important that the (sexual) identities they claim in other aspects...

This article appraises the current state of research on urban sexualities and suggests some underexamined areas of research that might productively be explored further. This review primarily focuses on studies of gay space and urban homosexualities, as this remains the largest body of work on urban sexualities within geography. I argue that this wo...

We would like to comment on Ip and McManus’s editorial on our extended medical degree programme (EMDP) at King’s College London.1Firstly, our aim in setting up the programme was to enable bright motivated pupils from inner …

This paper offers a reflexive ethnography of a set of queer autonomous spaces created in London over the last five years. It traces the political genealogies of a recent strand of radical queer activism that is broadly aligned with the anarchist and anticapitalist wings of the global justice movement. In line with the usage of the term ‘queer’ by t...

This paper highlights the need for health geographers to consider the social and cultural geographies of who gets to train as a doctor. The paper presents a case study of a scheme intended to widen access to medical education for working class students from inner London. This work examines the role of local education markets and cultures of educati...