Paul Kingsbury’s research while affiliated with Simon Fraser University and other places

This paper engages Slavoj Žižek's thesis that people's integration into a dominant culture requires successfully negotiating certain “distances” towards what Jacques Lacan called the “big Other,” that is, a nonexistent locus that subtly guides symbolic rules, conventions, and mandates. My main goal here is to illustrate how Žižek's conceptualizations of distance and the big Other can further our geographical theorizations of culture, especially in terms of Sigmund Freud's notion of the “uneasiness in culture.” I explore Žižek's identification of three modes of distanciation towards the big Other—“inherent transgression”, “empty gesture,” and “fetishistic disavowal,” which abound in uneasiness because they are sublime, that is, demarcated by virtuality and unfathomability. I also discuss how the demise of the big Other's authority has produced new spaces of cultural uneasiness that can be usefully understood in terms of increased interactions between everyday microcultures. © 2017 The Author(s) Geography Compass

Online professional networks have the potential to expedite and expand the success of corporations and, especially, socially oriented enterprises – such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social enterprises, which are businesses owned and operated by a non-profit. Research to date has not examined the extent and composition of online professional social networks among social enterprise employees nor their inter-relationships. Specifically, the link between individual connectivity and physical workplace is not understood. The purpose of this study was to provide a geographical understanding of communication amongst social enterprise employees. In British Columbia, Canada, 358 social enterprises and their most senior staff member were located on LinkedIn. Social network analysis, geographic information system (GIS) analysis and statistical analysis revealed that senior staff which had a betweenness centrality score were more than expectedly located in workplaces within the metropolis (Greater Vancouver) and within very highly materially deprived areas within the city. Further analysis showed that the majority of senior staff that had a betweenness centrality score, or that were directly connected to a senior staff member with a betweenness centrality score, were clustered within a 65 square kilometre downtown zone in the metropolis. This suggests the existence of ‘local buzz’, ‘regional pipelines’ and a digital divide drawn along metropolitan lines. This research represents the early understanding of social networks and their role in connecting enterprises with similar (or competing) goals along the axis of space.

In the spring of 2014 I designed and taught an interdisciplinary graduate seminar in international studies called Race, Sex, Dif- ference, choosing Sexual Difference Between Vitalism and Psychoanalysis as one of the main course texts. My own theoretical interests in sexual difference had come largely from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and from the works of the Belgian French feminist theorist and psy- choanalyst, Luce Irigaray. Grosz’s (2012a) work, Becom- ing Undone, was also important to me. It examines the Darwinian roots of vitalist thinking (speci cally, in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze) in relation to Irigaray’s (post-Lacanian) insistence that positive differences exist between the sexes and that this difference has historically mattered. In aligning Darwin’s and Irigaray’s insights, in particular, Grosz made it plain that sexual selection has been a force of life that exceeds the survivalist “logic” of natural selection. It has been a kind of fuel for life’s in- exorably creative movements, the inorganic inextricable from (and enfolding into) the living. Grosz’s lucid elabo- rations allowed me to better imagine radically different ways of thinking about life (and psy- choanalysis), the materiality of the unconscious, and the problematic sub- disciplinary split between human and physical geography.

Critiquing dismissals in geography of the aesthetics of multicultural festivals as bland, superficial, and apolitical, this article illustrates how they can be also invigorating, imaginative, and empowering. To elaborate my argument, I draw on interviews and participant observations of the 2010 Fusion Festival (hereafter Fusion), an annual event located in the “ethnoburban” context of the city of Surrey, British Columbia. My theoretical framework uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of aesthetic “justification,” which refers to art’s capacity to infuse human experience with constructive meaning and affirmative power. For Nietzsche, aesthetic justification incorporates two artistic forces: the Apollonian, which refers to illusion, beauty, and order, and the Dionysian, which refers to music, sensuality, and ecstasy. The article explores three ways through which Apollonian and Dionysian delimitations of space and time justify the multicultural values and identities of Fusion’s participants: first, how the Apollonian illusions of “cultural pavilions” manifest the creative capacities of local communities; second, how musical and theatrical performances generate Dionysian senses of belonging among performers and audience members; and third, how the embodied and transfiguring practices of dancing, painting, singing, and dressing up shift perspectives in ways that affirm diversity, combat despair, and raise awareness about protecting the environment. The article concludes by considering some future directions in geographical research on the aesthetics of multicultural festivals.

For many of us, doing psychoanalytic geography demands something akin to a leap of faith. Questioning this assumption, the main purpose of this paper is to shift the terms of discussion about doing psychoanalytic geography from the realm of faith to critique. Drawing on Joan Copjec’s, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994), I argue that much of the uncertainty surrounding the research practices of psychoanalytic geography results from inadequate understandings of two fundamental and interrelated psychoanalytic principles. First, causes and effects cannot occupy the same phenomenal terrain. Second, the taking place of society involves a split between appearance, that is, its observable positive facts and relations, and being, that is, its generative principle and the mode of its institution. According to Copjec, a syncopated relation between being and appearance is not only central to Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire; it is also a neglected axiom that distinguishes psychoanalytic from historicist accounts of the spatial and temporal configurations of society. But what is desire and how can we become, to use Copjec’s phrase, ‘literate in desire’? To answer this question, I explore the empirical example of the fictional comic character Alan Partridge (played by Steve Coogan) who exemplifies the taking place of desire as a self-hindering process in terms of the illusoriness, opacity, and duplicity of language.

Medical tourism (MT) can be conceptualized as the intentional pursuit of non-emergency surgical interventions by patients outside their nation of residence. Despite increasing popular interest in MT, the ethical issues associated with the practice have thus far been under-examined. MT has been associated with a range of both positive and negative effects for medical tourists’ home and host countries, and for the medical tourists themselves. Absent from previous explorations of MT is a clear argument of how responsibility for the harms of this practice should be assigned. This paper addresses this gap by describing both backward looking liability and forward looking political responsibility for stakeholders in MT. We use a political responsibility model to develop a decision-making process for individual medical tourists and conclude that more information on the effects of MT must be developed to help patients engage in ethical MT.

This paper explores the emotional geographies of State of the Heart and Larry's Kidney—two nonfiction narratives about medical tourism wherein American patients and their caregiver companions travel abroad for life-saving surgeries. The paper has two main goals: first, to illustrate the importance of emotional geographies in medical tourists' lived experiences of travel and tourism, as well as the giving and receiving of transnational health care and second, to generate empirical, theoretical, and methodological discussions between geographical, travel, tourism, and health studies on the relevance of emotional geographies. Medical tourists' experiences of travel and health care have been usually examined as spatially distinct rather than as entwined phenomena. We address the above goals by discussing how the narratives of traveling thousands of miles to a radically different socio-cultural milieu in order to receive essential medical care produce two interrelated emotional geographies: first, they demonstrate the existence of ‘emotional amplification’ (increase in the intensity of emotions) and ‘emotional extensivity’ (increase in the range of emotions) and second, they show how anxiety is underpinned by proximity to Otherness, uncertain boundaries, and isolated decision making. We conclude by briefly addressing how our examination of these narratives can be usefully expanded.