Robyn Longhurst

• PhD
• Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic at University of Waikato

Despite ongoing debates about its origins, the Anthropocene—a new epoch characterized by significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems—is widely acknowledged. Our environment is increasingly a product of interacting biophysical and social forces, shaped by climate change, colonial legacies, gender norms, hydrological processes, and...

Despite ongoing debates about its origins, the Anthropocene—a new epoch characterized by significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems—is widely acknowledged. Our environment is increasingly a product of interacting biophysical and social forces, shaped by climate change, colonial legacies, gender norms, hydrological processes, and...

This article considers the everyday spaces and places of disability activism for parents of disabled children in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Geographers and disability scholars are yet to consider disability activism in a range of everyday child‐parent spaces. Parents resist, rework, and subvert ableist structures and spaces in ways that may...

This article addresses embodied and emotional geographies of (not)belonging for disabled people in Aotearoa New Zealand. The concept of ‘embodied belonging’ is used to show that bodies, things, place and space intersect in complex ways to produce contradictory feeling of (not)belonging in ‘disability spaces’. Disability spaces can offer a direct ch...

Fieldwork is being stretched in new directions across time and space. In this article we examine the kinds of emotional and affective encounters constructed in online interviews. We draw on Lefebvre's notion of rhythm and Ash's concept of 'affective atmospheres' to help identify moments of disjuncture in research interviews. These moments of disjun...

Over the past three decades feminist geography and the concept of gender have been deployed unevenly by geographers in Aotearoa/New Zealand. A politics of knowledge production means that feminist geography occupies both the centre and the margins of academic knowledge. In order to highlight the diversity of feminist geographical knowledges we pay a...

This article traces a line between two literatures that can usefully be drawn into deeper conversation: geographies of digital media, and geographies of emotion. Its broad theoretical aim is to ascertain what insights might be gleaned by increasingly bringing together these two literatures. The more specific and primary aim, however, is an empirica...

This article examines research on embodiment published in Gender, Place and Culture (GPC) over the past two decades. We searched using the keywords ‘body’, ‘bodies’, ‘embodiment’, ‘embody’, ‘flesh’, ‘fleshy’, ‘corporeality’ and ‘corporeal’, the titles and abstracts of all the articles that have appeared in GPC since it first began publication in 19...

This article considers the relationship between food, eating and home for a group of eleven migrant women, each from a different country, currently living in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. Interviews and cooking sessions with these women prompted mixed feelings to surface, aligning women with both their new and old homes. They discussed the numero...

Addressing the question ‘does using the term “Other” in relation to geographies of love flatten out difference?’ we argue that, while it may have this potential, it can also recognize collectivity (which is not necessarily the same as uniformity) among people. Politics involves working out which differences matter, when and where. Critiquing opposi...

Geographers to date have resisted writing about feelings, affects, places and spaces of love. It is timely to put love on the geographical agenda. We begin by addressing the question ‘what does love do?’, and we review the work of geographers who have been thinking about love via a number of different theoretical lenses. We then argue for a conside...

In order to understand social recovery from mental illness, it is important to examine the role played by social space, including virtual space. This article examined blogs and online forums for people with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). In particular, it addressed gender differences in the metaphors used by men and women in these virtual spa...

This research examines how a group of mothers in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand are developing and maintaining emotional and familial links with their children of a variety of ages via video calls using Skype. More specifically it seeks to deepen understanding of how seeing one's child or children as part of the communication affects mothers' feeli...

Over the past decade geographers have shown a growing interest in 'the body' as an important co-ordinate of subjectivity and as a way of understanding further relationships between people, place and space. To date, however geographers have published little on what is one of, if not the, most important of all bodies - bodies that conceive, give birt...

This study examines twelve lone mothers' experiences of higher education at two universities in New Zealand. Interviews illustrated that lone mothers are often constructed by society as people who deserve to feel guilt for burdening taxpayers and for raising children without a live-in father. This guilt is visceral. It is felt in and lived through...

This article focuses on embodied geographies of food, belonging and hope for a group of migrant women in the small city of Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. We explore the complex nature of multiculturalism as it is produced via place and food-sharing. Interviews and cooking sessions with 11 migrant women in Hamilton, each from a different country, p...

In New Zealand universities, gender is still not a substantial part of the curriculum in most geography departments. Although at the University of Waikato, the situation is different. Its specific history of radical scholarship has enabled feminist academics in a variety of disciplines including geography to have had a stronger voice than in other...

This research focuses on the spaces and politics of weight loss. It is informed by “fat studies”, critical geographical scholarship on fat, and two contrasting feminist readings of Michel Foucault's notion of “care of the self”. Using autobiography as a method of inquiry I share my experience of “becoming smaller” through weight loss dieting. I arg...

This article reviews the book: “Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness”, by Elizabeth Farrelly.

In-depth, semi-structured interviews are verbal interchanges where one person, the interviewer, attempts to elicit information from another person by asking questions. Even though interviewers tend to prepare a list of predetermined questions, in-depth, semi-structured interviews usually unfold in a conversational manner offering participants the c...

Birth, in many societies, is considered to be a private affair. Although health and medical professionals usually assist, the only other people who share the birth process with mothers are their nearest and dearest. With the rise of information communication technologies, however, birth is no longer an exclusively private event. Some women are now...

People’s visceral experiences of food – the tastes, textures and aromas – can tell us a great deal about their emotional and affective relations with place. Questions of bodies and embodiment are increasingly becoming a focus for geographers and migration scholars. In this article we extend some of this work by examining how the visceral can shape...

Over the past 15 years geographers in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere have been increasingly concerned with issues of sexuality and space and have produced an array of work under the heading ‘queer geographies’. This paper considers the importance of place in the production of queer geographies. Material representing queer...

Feminist approaches to geography have become increasingly sophisticated. Reflections on and a vision for feminist geography at the University of Waikato offers an avenue for other geographers to begin thinking through development in their own personal teaching and research agendas and initiatives in their own departments.

Often researchers position themselves in relation to race, age and gender, but the body is less often discussed as an actual ‘instrument of research’. We aim to extend thinking on this point by reflecting on a project we conducted on migrant women and food in New Zealand. We present a vignette as an example of how we used our bodies as ‘instruments...

This paper aims to make questions of the body explicit in geography. Constructionist and essentialist feminist approaches to the body are outlined and the distinction that is commonly made between them is prob-lematised. Also problematised is the mind/body split. The Pregnant Woman is used to question the epistemology and ontology of geographical d...

This paper is based mainly on the stories of 31 women who were living in Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand between 1992 and 1994 and were pregnant for the first time. The majority of these women claimed that they tended to withdraw from public places (for example, night clubs, bars, pubs, restaurants, cafes) and from public activities (for example, sp...

ABSTRACTI discuss the discursive constraints on the participation in sport of 22 Hamilton women who are pregnant for the first time. Most women tended to withdraw from sport especially as they became more visibly pregnant. Their withdrawal can be partly explained using Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection. Pregnant bodies are often considered to be...

This paper focuses upon a growing activity within New Zealand’s ecotourism market: viewing and swimming with dolphins. Drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory we examine some of the ways in which New Zealand dolphin tour operators and others represent dolphins in relation to sex and gender. Three sets of data inform this research: (1) promotio...

In the first half of this paper it is argued that cultural geography is a dynamic and diverse field that extends well beyond a single branch of human geography. The boundaries between it and other sub-disciplines are often blurred. People have «different» encounters with cultural geography depending on their sub-disciplinary convergences. People al...

Bodies and FeminismsGrowing Popularity of BodiesBodies, Subjectivities, and SpatialitiesWhere to from Here?Conclusion

In the first half of this paper it is argued that cultural geography is a dynamic and diverse field that extends well beyond a single branch of human geography. The boundaries between it and other sub-disciplines are often blurred. People have «different» encounters with cultural geography depending on their sub-disciplinary convergences. People al...

Currently, gardens, gardening and horticulture—plots and plants—are receiving increasing attention from geographers and others interested in spatial disciplines because they provide a useful lens for understanding the complex politics surrounding social and cultural life. In this paper I aim to add to this literature by examining contemporary domes...

The aim of this article is to illustrate that the moral boundary between what is considered 'normal' and what is considered 'perverse' is constantly struggled over and is spatially specific. In order to illustrate this point I offer a critical reading of approximately 20 media reports published in October and November 2002 after a New Zealand 60 Mi...

The article examines the ways in which pregnant women in the West use clothing as a means of constructing a range of complex and seemingly contradictory gendered subjectivities in public spaces. The article draws on interview data collected from 19 first-time pregnant women in Hamilton, New Zealand. These women were asked about maternity wear, body...

'Place matters' in the production of knowledge. This article examines the production of feminist geographical knowledge at a particular place - the Department of Geography, Tourism and Environmental Planning at the University of Waikato. Feminist geography at Waikato represents a nexus of international, national, regional, and local politics. It re...

Over the past decade geographers, especially social, cultural, critical and feminist geographers, have shown a keen interest in the mutually constitutive relationship between bodies and spaces. There is, however, one aspect of embodiment that has escaped geographers' attention, that is, fatness. In this paper I aim to develop some geographical rese...

The article examines the ways in which pregnant women in the West use clothing as a means of constructing a range of complex and seemingly contradictory gendered subjectivities in public spaces. The article draws on interview data collected from 19 first-time pregnant women in Hamilton, New Zealand. These women were asked about maternity wear, body...

Introduction There has been an increasing focus in feminist and pro-feminist inspired studies on examining men, male subjectivities and masculinities in the decade since Gender, Place and Culture began publication. Our aim in this article is to provide readers with a brief overview of some of this recent research, and then to place these works with...

The recent growth in critical geography suggests this may be a ‘critical’ time for raising issues about the intersections between feminist and critical geography. This is not the first time these issues have been aired. For example, the Women and Geography Study Group (1997: 49–85) questions whether feminist geographers ought always to accord prima...

In this paper we trace one pervasive expression of hegemonic New Zealand national identity that developed around the sport of mountaineering from the 1880s, culminating in Sir Edmund Hillary's historic first climb of Mount Everest in 1953. The image of the masculine mountaineering hero, developed on and around New Zealand's highest peak, Mount Cook...

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Drawing on Judith Butler's notion of performativity I examine some of the ambivalences and contradictions surrounding the exposure of pregnant bodies in public places. I focus on a bikini contest that was held on 7 October 1998 for pregnant women in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. I also focus on the narratives of thirty-one women who were pregna...

Robyn Longhurst and Carla Wilson enlarge the question of both national identity and gender by investigating the aptly-named Heartland documentary series. They analyse both the series itself and the discourses around it from the book of the series to the press cuttings. In doing so they pinpoint images of nation, masculinity and femininity that are...

Geographers are beginning to show interest in corporeality. The body is becoming evident in numerous geographical studies. It is timely, therefore, momentarily to ‘step back’ and address the question ‘what is a body?’ This article begins with an examination of some recent approaches to understanding embodiment – for example, phenomenological, psych...

Three of five attempts to organise focus groups 'failed' when only two participants showed up. The decision to go ahead with the discussion with only a very small group was by way of experiment. I discuss my experiences of this 'small group method' in relation to post structuralist feminist research on the 'geographical experiences' of pregnant wom...

This is a report on a workshop on feminist geography organised by the Department of Geography, University of Waikato, Te Whare Waananga o Waikato, held at Pirongia Forest Park Lodge, 29-31 July 1994.

This paper highlights some of the major issues involved in theorising the body. Dualisms such as mind/body, sex/gender and essentialism/constructionism are discussed in order to provide a starting point for understanding the historical privileging of the conceptual over the corporeal in the production of hegemonic, masculinised and disembodied geog...

This article reviews the book: “Teaching Social Geography in New Zealand”.