"Geography is not, however, secure and unwavering; we produce space, we produce its meanings, and we work very hard to make geography what it is...We make concealment happen..." (xi).
"...the politics of black geographies expose racial disavowal on spatial terms: what is seemingly not there, is; what is geographically missing for some is geographically relevant to others" (18).
"Recognizing black women's knowledgeable positions as integral to physical, cartographic, and experiential geographies within and through dominant spatial models also creates an analytical space for black feminist geographies: black women's political, feminist imaginary, and creative concerns that respatialize the geographic legacy of racism-sexim" (53).
"...it is not simply a marginal spatial-partial vantage point that divulges the workings of black womanhood or black feminism or feminism. And this is exactly where feminism(s) and other identity-theories sometimes get stuck, by recycling and politicizing biocentric modes of humanity in the margins, in the classroom, in theory; this emphasizes that hierarchical genres of human/gender difference will somehow complete the story. Instead, it is useful to imagine the ways in which the margin is a serious conceptual intervention into what it means to be/not be a black woman: the margin is part of the story, not the end of the story" (134).
“Figure 1. Today’s scientific publications are static—meaning finalized versions exist that cannot be changed. Dynamic publication formats have become possible with the Internet. The publication can now evolve with the development of new knowledge. In dynamic publications many parts and texts can be ‘reused’ (as represented by the parts of the text that keep the color; new additions represent novel scientific knowledge).”
“The knowledge creation process is highly dynamic. However, most of current means of scholarly publications are static, that means, they cannot be revised over time. Novel findings or results cannot contribute to the publications once published, instead a new publication has to be released. Dynamic publication formats will change this. Dynamic publication formats are bodies of text / graphic / rich media that can be changed quickly and easily while at the same time being available to a wide audience.”
“With the Internet came new possibilities for publishing, transporting results, and defining the nature of ‘a publication’. Dynamic publications can adapt to the development of knowledge. Just as Wikipedia is developing towards completeness and truth, why not have scientific publications that develop in pace with the body of scientific knowledge?”
“An important feature of dynamic publications is the availability of a history functionality so that older versions of the publication are still available and referencing to the older versions can occur. This might not only be of interest to historians of science, but may also be very valuable in assessing the merits of earlier scientific discoveries and documenting scientific disputes.”
“A SNS for scientists combined with a text editing and publishing platform might be the ideal platform to realize a dynamic publication system.”
“We late moderns are said to struggle to maintain meaningful place attachments and places themselves struggle to be distinctive” (1).
“What is clear is that a diverse set of social actors in late modern America are making place vital to their cultural existence. Place is being positioned as central to the construction of selves and communities. Emotionally felt and morally loaded meaning is being attributed to place. Place is being used as a symbol of, a resource in, and a starting point for resistance to expansive and powerful macrosystems. Place is consistently treated as a contested social space: as redeemable, as the locus of power, as something to rally around, but something endangered and under threat. In short, there are high stakes involved with place, in which political, social, personal, ecological, economic, and ethical gains are up for grabs” (3).
“To conclude, I will not suggest but say: this essay is a promise. Through ethnographies of place, anthropologists of late modern America will uncover Low’s “systems of exclusion,” see Feld and Basso’s fusions of “locality to life-world” at work, and come to terms with the political, economic, and ethical possibilities that people invest in their places” (10).
"A woman was supposed to be someplace, but she never arrived" (34).
"Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society's problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward...Complex personhood means that even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not" (4-5).
"In a 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison wrote: 'despite the bland assertions of sociologists, [the] 'high visibility' [of the African-American man] actually rendered one un-visible' (xii). Hypervisibility is a persistent alibi for the mechanisms that render one unvisible: 'His darkness ... glow[ing]... within the American conscience with such intensity that most whites feigned moral blindness toward his predicament.' The difficulty for us now, as it was for Ellison when he published Invisible Man in 1952, is the extent to which the mediums of public image making and visibility are inextricably wedded to the cojoined mechanisms that systematically render certain groups of people apparently privately poor, uneducated, ill, and disenfranchised.
"Ellison's Invisible Man gives double reference both to the unvisibility of the hypervisible African-American man and to the invisibility of 'the Man' who persistently needs an alibi for the blindness of his vision. As a strategy of analysis, Ellison's insight underscores the need to conceptualize visibility as a complex system of permission and prohibition, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness. If Ellison's argument encourages us to interrogate the mechanisms by which the highly visible can actually be a type of invisibility, Toni Morrison's (1989) argument that 'invisible things are not necessarily not-there' encourages the complementary gesture of investigating how that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence. Both these positions are about how to write ghost stories—about how to write about permissions and prohibitions, presence and absence, about apparitions and hysterical blindness. To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories. To write ghost stories implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material effects. To impute a kind of objectivity to ghosts implies that, from certain standpoints, the dialectics of visibility and invisibility involve a constant negotiation between what can be seen and what is in the shadows. Why would we want to write such stories? Because unlike DeLillo's indifference, in the end and in the beginning it does matter what they see or think they see. It matters because although the terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, they cannot decode the secret of every item, infallibly. Indeed, what is at stake here is the political status and function of systematic hauntings" (17-8).
"The photograph is involved in the ghostly matter of things and not surprisingly, since the wavering quality of haunting often hinges on what sign or image raises the ghost and what it means to our conscious visible attention. The photograph's relationship to haunting is never simple. When photographs appear in contexts of haunting, they become part of the contest between familiarity and strangeness, between hurting and healing, that the ghost is registering. The photograph is involved in the ghostly matter of state-sponsored disappearance" (102-3).
“Although the HHID and resulting study, like all research, remains a work in progress, we believe it also offers a solid, innovative foundation from which others—inside and outside academia—can continue to build. This is so for several key reasons:
“It is historically attentive. Unlike prior research that starts with current sites of concern and then works backward in time to discover what else had operated there in the past, our methods historicizes sample selection as well as data collection by tracing forward, over time, the fate of all sites that once operated in locally hazardous industries.
“It is spatially refined. Unlike prior work on urban-industrial hazards, our method treats parcels (or addresses) as the primary unit of analysis, rather than blocks, block-groups, or census tracts. Yet, it still remains amenable to using data from these sources as a means of analyzing and contextualizing important historical processes of residential churning that have co-occurred with industrial churning.
“It is transportable to other cities. Unlike prior in-depth case studies of a specific area, our method can be readily applied to many cities, providing a middle path between large-scale quantitative studies that track known hazards across the nation as a whole and more fine-grained, site- and neighborhood-specific historical analyses.
“These innovations, we believe, can be leveraged by a wide range of stakeholders to develop and promote a more historically grounded and environmentally attuned understanding of the urban environments we call home. In the academy, these advances can contribute to a new generation or urban studies that links urban and environmental sociologies not only to each other but also to allied fields of environmental history, public health, geography, and planning. Outside the academy, related insights can be used to better inform public and environmental policy at the local, state, and national levels. Such policy can help not only inform residents of risks related to relic hazards in their own neighborhoods but also facilitate bridge-building across communities throughout the nation. Such work is important because, as our research has shown, underlying processes are ubiquitous and ongoing.” (124)
“Publishing preprints, postprints, or even the peer-review process allows the tracking of the development of a final version of a scholarly article”
“Its impact is measured by counting the amount of citations to it, references which result at article level … it remains unclear as to whether the article is referenced as a citation within the introduction, a reference to similar ‘Material and Methods,’ or whether the cited article is being disputed in the discussion”
The production process is not visible to the reader … currently, final versions of scholarly publications do not contain traces of their production process.
The contribution of individual authors is not visible
Finalized versions do not allow changes, thus making corrections and additions nearly impossible
The current publication system is a consequence of a scholarly knowledge dissemination system which developed in times before the Internet when printing and disseminating printed issues of papers were the only means for distributing scientific results.
Dynamic.. Meaning no static version exists. Dynamic publications evolve.
Working version
Message boards where threads are initiated by posting open questions leads to a question-centered discussion and the discussions in turn stay on topic
“... stress that if practices of subjugation are also spatial acts, then the ways in which black women think, write, and negotiate their surroundings are intermingled with placebased critiques, or, respatializations.” (xix)
…”naming place is also an act of naming the self and self-histories…. Landscape does not simply function as a decorative background, opens up the possibility for thinking about the production of space as unfinished, a poetics of questioning” (xxiii)
…”to use Doreen Massey’s metaphor, different layers of life and social landscape are sedimented into each other. Deep space is the production of space intensified a writ large, ideological and political shifts that impact upon and organize the everyday in multiple contexts and scales … Deep space and its production… are crushingly real” (15)
FIGURE 1. On page 39 - a reconstruction of Harriet Jacobs hiding place - then used to explore different and contradictory forms of captivity, concealment, and resistance. Thinking about concealment.. Confined spaces.. But also about seeing and hearing.. “For seven years Brent holds her body captive while observing activities not always meant for her eyes and ears. There is both a separation from and connection to the world outside the attic; she is both inside and outside, captive and free” (42)
“If scale is socially produced, but implicitly profitable and materially hierarchical, then an analysis of body-scale on and in relation to the auction block demonstrates how social processes organize the world into intelligible and different “clusters” and locations. That is, the auction block differentiates the black body by visually demarcting it and attaching it to discourses of dispossession and captivity to the flesh. The sacel of the body, then, necessarily identifies the ways in which the historical and geographic particularities of the plantation are socially produced through powerful material technologies … This is not to suggest the scale of the body is bound, cut off from its surroundings, but rather that social processes create the idea that balck flesh is distinct, radically different, captive, and not white” (75)
“If the plantation represented the scale of a town, the auction block figuratively and materially displays a smaller scale--the body or bodies--within the town. … social differences, instigated through scaled different bodies therefore materially and ideologically contribute to the meaning of the plantation town. To put it another way, the auction block, like the main house or the fields, is a geographic economic site, which is also required within the plantation town to convey power, hierarchy, and social roles.” (75)