Natalie Oswin

Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
McGill University
805 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, QC H3A 2K6
Canada

Phone: 514-398-5232
Fax: 514-398-7437
Office: Burnside Hall, Room 418
E-mail: natalie.oswin (at) mcgill.ca

AFFILIATIONS

Co-editor, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2009-)

RESEARCH

My work crosses the subdisciplines of urban, cultural and political geography and is inflected by a broad interest in critical social theory. Research to date has coalesced around two main themes:

1) Queer geographies

I am broadly interested in the uses of sexuality in the production of space. My current research examines family norms in Singapore from its late colonial period to the present. It explores how the reshaping of ideas about the family is a crucial part of globalization, urbanization and modernization processes in this postcolonial city-state. The geographies of heteronormativity are explored through examinations of housing initiatives, family planning programs, marriage legislation and migration policy.

South Africa, the first country in the world to constitutionally prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, was the site of my previous work in this vein. I explored the post-apartheid era’s newfound queer citizenship through examinations of debates over the inclusion of ‘sexual orientation’ in the constitution’s Equality Clause, initiatives to market Cape Town as an international pink tourist destination and the urban politics of post-apartheid gay and lesbian activism.

2) Urban mobilities

After the romanticization of motion and nomadicization of thought that characterized much social theory in the 1990s, a more critical ‘mobility turn’ has recently gripped the social sciences and humanities. It attends to the power and politics of movement – to its friction, its unevenness and its inevitable territorialization. Informed by this scholarship, I am interested in the ways in which ideas about the city move. I co-edited a special journal issue on the theme of ‘Mobile City Singapore’ that explores the linkages between nation-building and discourses of motion and flow in the city-state and am currently exploring Singapore’s role as a model for urban development.

TEACHING

Fall 2012:
GEOG 331: Urban Social Geography
GEOG 507: Sex, race and space

Winter 2013:
GEOG 217: Cities in the Modern World (co-taught with Prof. Ben Forest)
GEOG 381: Geographic Thought and Practice (co-taught with Prof. Sarah Turner)

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Journal Articles

2012. “The queer time of creative urbanism: Family, futurity and global city Singapore.” Environment and Planning A 44(7): 1624-1640.

2010. “The modern model family at home in Singapore: A queer geography.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35(2): 256-268.

2010. “Sexual tensions in modernizing Singapore: The postcolonial and the intimate.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(1): 128-141.

2008. “Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality.” Progress in Human Geography, 32(1): 89-103.

2007. “Producing homonormativity in neoliberal South Africa: Recognition, redistribution and the Equality Project.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32(3): 649-670.

2007. “The end of Queer (as we knew it): Globalization and the making of a gay-friendly South Africa.” Gender, Place and Culture, 14(1): 93-110.

2006. “Decentering queer globalization: Diffusion and the ‘global gay’.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(5): 777-790.

2005. “Researching ‘gay Cape Town’, finding value-added queerness.” Social and Cultural Geography, 6(4): 567-586.

2004. “Towards radical geographies of complicit queer futures.” Acme: An international E-journal for critical geographies, 3(2): 79-86.

Editing - Journal Theme Issues

2010. “Mobile city Singapore.” Theme issue of Mobilities 5(2) (with Brenda Yeoh).

2010. “Governing intimacy.” Theme issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(1) (with Eric Olund).

Book Chapters

Forthcoming. “Queer theory,” in The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman and Mimi Sheller (editors). Routledge Press.

Forthcoming. “Geographies of sexualities: The cultural turn and after,” in A New Companion to Cultural Geography, Nuala Johnson, Richard Schein and Jamie Winders (editors) Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Press.

Forthcoming. “Queering the city: Sexual citizenship in creative city Singapore,” in Urban Politics: Critical Approaches, Mark Davidson and Deborah Martin (editors). London: Sage.

2011. “Sexuality - Part I,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography, John Agnew and James Duncan (editors). Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, pp. 465-474.

Reviews

2011. Editor/ introducer (with Farhang Rouhani). Review forum on Racism and Sexual oppression in Anglo-America: A genealogy. Ladelle McWhorter. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009. Social and Cultural Geography 12(3): 319-329.

2010. Review of Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Social and Cultural Geography 11(4): 401-403.

2009. Review Essay, “Freedom and the Feminist Subject.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(4): 751-756.

2007. Review of Judith Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Social and Cultural Geography, 8(6): 932-934.

2004. Review of Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan (eds). New York: New York University Press, 2002. Antipode 35(5): 1032-1035.

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GRADUATE STUDENT OPPORTUNITIES

Students interested in MA or PhD research projects that connect to my broad interests in urban cultural politics and/ or geographies of sexualities are welcome to contact me. I have some funding available for students entering in 2013, but applicants (especially international applicants) should be prepared to seek external sources of funding.

For information regarding admission procedures to the Department of Geography, please see the Department Graduate webpage.

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