The Guardian today published a piece asking “What would a city that is safe for women look like?” Using examples from Delhi, Barcelona, Nairobi, Cairo, and Kigali, the author outlines “…a number of measures [that] can be taken to make streets feel safer and to keep women more secure when moving around the city.” It should go without saying that the issue couldn’t be more timely. And while “…women are being consulted in planning new urban developments” (emphasis added), research by geographers shows that this is too seldom the case (see here, here and here).
Forthcoming in our March 2019 issue, and available online now, Sophie Cranston and Jenny Lloyd’s “Bursting the Bubble: Spatialising Safety for Privileged Migrant Women in Singapore” should prove invaluable to those thinking through these issues in radical ways. Their paper is a constructive engagement with work attentive to, and critical of, how safety is lived and narrated. In contrast to previous geographical work on safety that focuses on fear, “Bursting the Bubble” looks at safety as something more than an aspiration for women. To do so, Sophie and Jenny utilise the metaphor of the “expatriate bubble” to explore how safety is constructed and experienced by privileged migrants within Singapore. Mobilising research from two projects, they argue that we need to think about how gender and Othering intersect to construct safety. In doing so, they offer thoughts on how we might use conceptualisations of privileged migrants to research how safety can be understood, and therefore practised, more widely.
Sophie Cranston is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on the global mobility industry, mobilities as a field for understanding the different ways in which “expatriate” comes to be understood, and mobility and young people’s identities (looking at high school-aged children and university students). A well as Antipode it has appeared in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Environment and Planning D and A, and Geoforum, among other places.
Jenny Lloyd is a Research Fellow at the University of Bedfordshire’s International Centre for Researching Child Sexual Exploitation, Violence and Trafficking, where she works in the area of peer-on-peer abuse in adolescence (working with schools to identify enablers of, and barriers to addressing, harmful sexual behaviour). Her PhD, completed in 2015 at Newcastle University, focused on the experiences of migrant women in Singapore, developing a wider interest in women’s rights and social justice.
Their paper joins 14 others to make up Antipode 51(2), the second issue of 2019, the year in which we’re celebrating 50 years of the journal. Watch this space for updates on events throughout the year, and in the meantime check out the papers available below…
Antipode 51(2), March 2019
Contradictions of Spatial Governance: Bioeconomy and the Management of State Space in Finland
Toni Ahlqvist and Heikki Sirviö
The Pluralities of Black Geographies
Adam Bledsoe and Willie Wright
Territorial (In) Coherence: Labour and Special Economic Zones in Lao Border Manufacturing
James Alan Brown
From Grenfell Tower to the Home Front: Unsettling Property Norms Using a Genealogical Approach
Samuel Burgum
Raven Marie Cretney
Intimate Mediations of For-Profit Conservation Finance: Waste, Improvement, and Accumulation
Jessica Dempsey and Patrick Bigger
“Our life is a struggle”: Respectable Gender Norms and Black Resistance to Policing
Adam Elliott-Cooper
Disability Consciousness on the Frontlines of Urban Struggle
Mary Jean Hande
Nikki Luke and Maria Kaika
Onward Precarity, Mobility, and Migration among Latin Americans in London
Cathy McIlwaine and Diego Bunge
Elisabetta Mocca and Stephen Osborne
Making Space for Wind Farms: Practices of Territorial Stigmatization in Rural Denmark
David Rudolph and Julia K. Kirkegaard
Subcontracting Academia: Alienation, Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry
Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock
Labour Geographies of Workplace Restructuring: An Intra-Labour Analysis
Andrew Warren