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

  During the past year, the media, public and officialdom have focused on Sir Edmund Hillary, his achievements, and what they mean to New Zealand. In this commentary, we reflect on how they relate to human geography. Although we acknowledge the obvious tensions that exist between adventuring and the contemporary concerns of the discipline, we also illustrate how Hillary's life and actions resonate with many of the discipline's current hopes, aims and challenges. Specifically, we discuss thematic overlaps in the fields of geopolitics and national identities, colonial histories and resistances, as well as the emerging public geography. We posit that ‘Hillary's geography’ is closer to human geography than is realized or at least acknowledged by geographers.

This article illustrates how the works of Slavoj Žižek can advance the field of emotional geographies, as well as our understandings of emotion, space, and society. Žižek provides a rich social theoretical vocabulary that can help explain cultural discontent, how emotional worlds bond and fall apart, why there is no guaranteed harmony in love with our partner, and how emotional worlds are organized in ways so that people can hold onto something that resembles ‘subjectivity’ and ‘reality’. I focus on geographers’ interpretations of Jacques Lacan's notion of jouissance: a concept that is at the heart of Žižek's writings. First, I consider how geographers’ canonical portrayals of Lacan as the arch phallogocentric thinker rely on what Žižek calls the “false poetry of castration”. Second, I address how Žižek's notion of enjoyment (his usual translation of jouissance) as the “paradoxical payment” informs his critical engagement with Marxism, as well as questions about the political and emotional. I then turn to discuss how the irruptions of enjoyment can take place amidst spaces of nationalism and consumption. The article concludes by affirming the prospect of making emotional geographies less enjoyable than ever before.

IntroductionTwo Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis2Approaching Psychoanalytic GeographyReproaching Psychoanalytic GeographyFreudian ApproachesObject-relations TheoryLacanian ApproachesConclusion:Psychoanalytic Approaches?

Jacques Lacan coined the neologism ‘extimacy’ (extimité) in order to theorize two interrelated modes of psychical apprehension: first, how our most intimate feelings can be extremely strange and Other to us. Second, how our feelings can be radically externalized on to objects without losing their sincerity and intensity. Attending to the socio-spatial dimensions of extimacy, this paper provides insight into the importance of topology in Lacan's work. In so doing, the paper challenges the enduring doxa in geography that Lacanian theories ultimately devalue the intricacies and liveliness of space. To substantiate this claim, I explore the extimacy of the most popular vehicle accessory in the USA since the 1980s' ‘Baby on Board’ signs: the ‘ribbon magnet’. Specifically, I elaborate the extimate contours of two ribbon magnet slogans, ‘Half Of My Heart Is In Iraq’ and ‘I Support More Troops Than You’. Affirming a recent critique that social and cultural geographers have ‘tamed’ psychoanalysis, that is, shied away from working through psychoanalysis's allegedly unseemly conceptualizations of politics and subjectivity, this paper suggests that we have yet to catch up with some of psychoanalysis's most fundamental and valuable theorizations about space itself.

This paper is motivated by a concern about the limited critical attention directed toward the methodological challenges of conducting geographical research in the Caribbean. Drawing on social theories and our empirical experiences with doing qualitative research in Jamaica, we present a variety of methodological conundrums associated with three distinctive contexts: the street, the beach, and the bureaucracy. Such contexts in Jamaica, we argue, should be understood and approached by researchers with respect to their 'riddims,' that is, their distinctive socio-spatial textures and cultural expressions. We seek to foster critical discussion of how methodological problems can result from contextually and spatially insensitive research. This paper contributes to the critical literature on methodology in the Caribbean by showing how certain epistemological and methodological frameworks may hinder research in Jamaica. We do this by explaining how various micro-scale inter-personal dynamics between the researcher and the researched in Jamaica are shaped by the meso-scale riddims of the street, beach, and bureaucracy.

Critical approaches to tourism, united by a refusal to conceptualize tourism as mere enjoyment, illustrate how Third World tourism typically involves labor exploitation, unequal gender relations, cultural destruction, and environmental degradation. Researchers presuppose, however, that enjoyment is an innocent and self-evident psychological phenomenon underpinned by and opposed to worthier objects of inquiry such as exploitation, domination, and discrimination by virtue of their politically serious, conceptually profound, and empirically complex properties. These critical approaches, however, are not critical insofar as they tacitly assume that the phenomenon of enjoyment is just enjoyment: easily enjoyed and unrelated to the problems of tourism. The main thesis of this paper is that a thorough theoretical conceptualization of enjoyment is necessary for any analysis of tourism to be sufficiently rigorous. The psychoanalytic concepts of Jacques Lacan and the work of Slavoj Žižek offer an unparalleled theoretical vocabulary with which to investigate the subjective, material, embodied, discursive, and enacted dimensions of enjoyment in tourism. The paper elaborates what I call a politics of enjoyment using key psychoanalytic ideas that include jouissance, the pleasure principle, the Other, and fantasy to critically explicate the contradictions, antagonisms, and impasses that (de)structure Jamaica's “One Love” and “No Problem” tourism product located on a Caribbean island renowned for beach bliss and civil unrest.