Reflection 2

Students must draw on all of the readings for the particular selected unit in their reflections. For example, if students choose to do a reflection based on Unit 2, the paper must draw on the Dicken (2011) reading and the Knox et al. (2015) reading.

Although students are expected to demonstrate a clear understanding of the readings, reflection papers are not intended to simply summarize the readings. Rather, students should outline the main points of the readings and use this as the basis for a critical reflection.

Critical reflections should demonstrate depth in thinking about the material they are learning, and evaluate critically how theories and practices of geography can influence their own lived experiences and observations about the world.

Students are encouraged to draw on other sources in addition to course materials, including the weekly discussion postings from previous Units if applicable.

All sources, including the course readings, lecture notes, and discussion postings must be properly cited using APA.

Reflection papers are to be written according to academic scholarship standards (1,000 +/- 100 words excluding title page and references).

Unit reference notes below

https://issuu.com/wiley_publishing/docs/fouberg_hg11e_c05identityraceethnic

Pg 117-142

Unit 5 Notes: Geographies of Culture and Identity

The reading this week comes from chapter 5 in the textbook, Human geography: People, place, and culture, by Fouberg, Murphy, and De Blij (2015). This chapter begins by examining the intersections of culture and identity, and in particular the gendered division of labour in different societies. Gender is an important identity category that human geographers seek to understand, especially how it relates to power and intersections with other identity categories, such as ethnicity, race, class, and sex. Human geographers are especially concerned with investigating how identity categories are propped up by unquestioned assumptions and stereotypes. Different societies often impose well-defined identity categories that conceptualize people not as individuals, but as members of a category assumed to behave and act in certain ways.

Geographers understand identity in two ways: as a way that individuals define themselves, and as a way individuals are defined by others. Both often rely on processes of inclusion and exclusion, where identity relies on what political and gender theorist Judith Butler (1993) refers to as a 'constitutive outside': defining a particular subject according to what it is not, or according to what it excludes. Place and connections to place can also deeply influence the construction of identity, most obviously at the national scale (think of images often associated with being “Canadian”), but also at more local scales. Race continues to define an identity category, even though a scientific consensus has emerged that physical differences in human appearances do not constitute significant differences in the human species that can be described as race. Race is usually an identity imposed on people, and is based primarily on skin colour and other physical features. Geographers and other social theorists often use the terms racialize and racialization to refer to identities that are subjected on people, mainly based on skin colour. As opposed to the term race, which implies an objective category, racialize and racialization suggest a process that has been imposed on some subjects by others. These terms are usually associated with processes of racism, the act of associating negative or inferior behaviours and traits with specific groups of people. Racism has often been used as the rationale or excuse for colonial and imperialist domination of some groups by others for the sake of cultural and economic exploitation. Although all terms describing racial category are problematic, it is now common in Canada to refer to certain groups of people by skin colour (e.g., Black, Brown, White); generic cultural grouping (First Nation, Inuit), or nationality (e.g., Chinese, Mexican, Icelandic, Samoan). However, as Fouberg et al. (2015) show, different countries refer to cultural groups and identity categories in different ways, as evidenced by census categories that continue to separate out society along identity categories (p. 120). This illustrates the role that place has in shaping or imposing identity.

As opposed to race, which is based mainly on physical attributes, ethnicity is an identity category that refers to a placed based cultural grouping formed over a long period of time, and which often become associated with specific languages and sometimes specific national or sub-national boundaries. In immigrant receiving countries like Canada, ethnicities are often hyphenated, such as Chinese-Canadian, Indo-Canadians, English-Canadian, French-Canadian, and so on. In the United States, race and ethnicity are sometimes conflated, such as with the term African-American.

Geographers also study the identity category sex or sexuality, often drawing on queer theory, a body of literature and theorizing that disrupts heteronormative and naturalized divisions of humans into two discrete sexes, male and female. Moving beyond questioning gender in terms of cultural assigned roles and assumptions, queer theorists disrupts the biological, as well as cultural assumptions that give rise to the normalization and dominance of heterosexuality and the division of individuals into two opposite sexes based exclusively on sex organs.

A final crucial point that Fouberg et al. (2015, p. 132) make is that geography shapes power relationships and directly influences identity: "Power relationships can ... subjugate entire groups of people, enabling society to enforce ideas about the ways people behave". These ideas, or cultural norms, are the subject of the videos for this week, both of which are TED Talks. The first (2014) questions assumptions between place and identity. The second (2015) is a humorous but nevertheless critical view of the cultural identities of a number of American towns from the perspective of a black man who finds he is not part of the cultural landscape. These videos also show how individuals can resist identities imposed on them by others, and advocate for identities that move beyond stereotyped assumptions based on race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Identity also has intersections with political geographies, as we will discuss in Unit Seven. For example, nations and nationalism are often functions of identity, as groups of people, sometime around ethnic lines, identify as belonging to a particular territory. Identity can also be defined along sectarian lines, which sometimes coincides with particular geographical territories. Identity can be disrupted when colonial and imperialist powers impose their own power on groups of people and destabilize existing spatial relationships, when internal and external conflicts pit certain groups of people against each other, or when warfare leads to redefinitions of boundaries, as is what happened with the Ottoman Empire after the WWI.

The discussion this week focuses on processes of identity formation. In discussing identity, please keep in mind the points from this week's readings and videos: that identity is both imposed upon, and taken on by individuals. Identity is both self constructed and resisted in many ways. Geographers pay particular attention to the role of place in these two dimensions of identity formation.

Things to Work On

Part C of the Research Project (annotated bibliography) is due this week.

Active discussion posting is required every week.

The second reflection paper is due in Unit Seven.

References

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of 'sex'. New York, NY: Routledge.

Fouberg, E., Murphy, A., & De Blij, H. (2015). Chapter 5: Identity: Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In Human geography: People, place, and culture (11th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved from http://issuu.com/wiley_publishing/docs/fouberg_hg11e_c05identityraceethnic

TED. (2015, May). Rich Benjamin: My road trip through the whitest towns in America [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/rich_benjamin_my_road_trip_through_the_whitest_towns_in_america

TED. (2014, October). Taiye Selasi: Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local