introduction:

In recent years, political geography has contributed to understandings of the political in the everyday, largely due to efforts within feminist political geography (Staeheli 2001; Brown and Staeheli 2003; Painter 2006) .   This emphasis has not revoked the political from state-centered geographies, but has served to demonstrate the political across scales - including global, stately, urban, and bodily political geographies - while exploring the relationships among these discursive and material perspectives.   Specifically, my interest in political geography is motivated by a curiosity about power and the ways in which geographers have brought theorizations of power to bear on their analyses of politics, place, and community.   Due to the emphasis I place on theories of power in political geography, it should be rather unsurprising that my readings of place and community are necessarily pre-given to questions of method - that is, how power operates to render 'the political' visible and viable.

emphases:

Political geography has become increasingly diverse; even recently published articles (and special issues) in Political Geography have more fully de-centered the state and have contributed to multiple knowledges of 'the political' (e.g., most recently in a special forum on governmentality in volume 26, issue 1).   Feminist geographies, queer geographies, and critical geographies have contributed significantly to this diversification, making it increasingly difficult to identify a bounded political geography as separate from cultural or social geographies (publishing in journals such as Antipode , Social & Cultural Geography , and Gender, Place & Culture , as well as Society & Space and Space & Polity ).   In my own research on the intersections of place, technology, and identity, political geographies contribute to my understandings of the processes by which spaces and places constitute an insistent political-ness.   Concepts such as place and community ultimately remain devices of politicizing geographies.   In this description of research interest, I shall review three topics I invoke in political geography: place and the political, power and governmentality, and community and exclusion.

Place and the political: Geographers interested in 'the political' have intently focused on place, as a co-production of the social and the local (i.e. Agnew 1987) , as mediated by state institutions (i.e. Cox 2002) and through the economy (i.e. Harvey 2001) , as a production of local, politicized experience (i.e. Massey 2005) , through the complex interweavings of the local, the global, the colonial, and the national (i.e. Gregory 2004; Sparke 2005) , and through projects of normalization (i.e. Brown 2000) .   These political geographies are influenced by political philosophies and their cross pollinations: marxist, feminist, queer, poststructuralist, etc. (McDowell 1992) .   Political geographers, in promoting these different perspectives on place and philosophy, also invoke different understandings of 'the political'.   Brown and Staeheli (2003) , in their overview of feminist political geography, offer three conceptualizations of 'the political': the distributive, the antagonistic, and the constitutive.   Distributive understandings of the political emphasize the balance of resources between entities (whether access, capital, visibility, etc.). Antagonistic understandings focus on the contestation between entities, while the constitutive emphasizes the becoming or formative aspect of the political.   This framework aptly categorizes the geographies of the political, and argues for political geographies that are always-already conceptualized by feminist re-workings of boundaries, territories, and place.

In her review of feminist political geographies, England (2003) insists upon a notion of political geography that interrogates the "territory and territoriality" of places as they are permeated by power relations (612).   Place, in this political sense, operates as a multiplicity of boundaries and boundary-making which are "defined, defended, and contested" (612) - a similar argument made by Kevin Cox (2001) in his challenge of the concept of 'urban'.   Feminist geographers have challenged Marxist geographers to insist upon variability of expressions of economies, patriarchies, hetero-archies within places (perhaps most notably, Massey 1994; Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996], 2006) .   Additionally, feminist geographers (and theorists) brought attention to the place of the 'home' and 'community', emphasizing the political processes of identification and subjectification (Young 1997; Domosh 1998; Connolly 2000; Elwood 2000; Joseph 2002; Brown 2003; Staeheli 2003) .   This recognition of the variability and difference across multiple places represents a significant contribution to political geographies (McDowell 1995, 1999; Lawson 1995) ; however questions remain as to how this recognition contributes to the realization of collectivities and viable political projects (Haraway 1991; Butler 1993; Brown 2002) .   In my own research on the use of geographic information technologies, I intend to interrogate the territories and boundaries, subjectivities, and collectivities constituted through these technologies as they are used in the everyday actions of community residents and nonprofit volunteers.

Power and governmentality: Concepts of 'power' carry a great analytical burden for the political geographies described above, and, as Murray Low (2005) has argued pace John Allen (2003) , the concept remains largely under-theorized within human geography more broadly.   Low additionally points to movement within political geography beyond state-centered approaches, an argument he draws from Joe Painter (1995) , as providing the context for an emerging social-cultural geography (to which I would emphasize feminist, queer, and body/bodily geographies).   Most central to my research (hopefully serving to actually de-center my findings!) is the notion of power drawn by Michel Foucault and the various re-interpretations offered by feminists such as Judith Butler (1997) and Donna Haraway (1991) and substantiated by geographers interested in governmentality and population (Brown and Knopp 2006; Brown 1997; Legg 2005; Philo 2005) , calculations and space (Crampton and Elden 2006; Elden 2001, 2007; Rose-Redwood 2006) , and de-stabled narratives of resistance (Pile and Keith 1997; Sharp et al. 2000) .   This narration of power serves to re-work more classic notions of power offered by Dahl (1961) , Bachrach and Baratz (1962) , Lukes (1974) , and overviewed by Barry Hindess (1996) .

Geographers drawing on Foucauldian power often cite the chapter titled "Governmentality" in Power/Knowledge , based on one of Foucault's lectures on the topic, as well as a textbook by Mitchell Dean (Foucault 1991; Dean 1999) .   It might be argued that 'governmentality' and what Foucault describes as the "conduct of conduct" or the "art of government", has become overly signified for a whole series of (state) processes.   Certainly, Foucault's work does not serve to demonstrate the complete emptiness of state power, but has explored how modern power works through a tripartite sovereign-disciplinary-governmental power (Elden 2007; Foucault 1995 [1977], 1990 [1978]; Foucault et al. 2003) .   Judith Butler explores how this power works through discourse and action, particularly iterative performance, to re-materialize certain kinds of bodies - a topic I shall re-introduce in my third research area below (Butler 1993, 1997, 2004) .   My interest in governmental notions of power (which Stuart Elden calls for us to re-think, pace Foucault, as a sovereign-disciplinary-governmental power) emerges from this feminist insistence of the internalized workings of power to constitute certain geographic identities.

Community and exclusion: Community is a floating signifier in geography; in other words, 'community' is a discursive production that has material effects (a partial overview in Delanty 2003, and in geography, a special issue of E&P A 31:1) .   As mentioned above, my MA thesis attempted to render more visible this production within the field of public participation GIS (Wilson 2005) .   My continued interest in this topic is to broaden my understanding of this production as it is mobilized in the use of geographic information technologies.   To engage with 'community' as a political and geographic concept, geographers have emphasized exclusions through constructions of place, found in the work of Steve Herbert (1997; 2001; 2005; 2006) , Timothy Cresswell (1996) , Don Mitchell (1997; 2003) , Deb Martin (Martin 2002, 2003, 2004) , David Sibley (1995) , and Miranda Joseph (2002) , a friend of geography.   More recently, political geographers have drawn upon Agamben (1993 [1990]; 1998 [1995]) to theorize this exclusion as a contingency of power's operative effects (Wright 2004; Sanchez 2004; Pratt 2005; Mitchell 2006) .

ongoing research:

[coming soon]

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