Welcome to the second Geography Symposium section of Disability Studies Quarterly's Summer 2004 issue. We once again acknowledge David Pfeiffer for his kindness in affording us the opportunity to bring a variety of geographical perspectives to readers of this journal, and thank the new editors Beth Haller and Corinne Kirchner for providing the support and assistance to see this issue through to completion. We thank all of the authors and reviewers who generously spent much time and effort to help us produce this issue, as well as the other staff that support the continued publication of Disability Studies Quarterly.

Geographers are interested in the use and habitation of space. Social geographers are particularly interested in the spatial patterns and processes, or "spatialities," of people's lives, and as will be evident in this issue, in the manifold spatial aspects of lives lived with disability. Our understanding of social geography is neatly captured in these succinct statements by Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear (1987, p. 9) describing the power of geography: "Social practices are inherently spatial, at every scale and all sites of human behavior. Geography is thus an important element in social reproduction." They continue by describing three socio-spatial premises: 1. Social relations are constituted through space; 2. Social relations are constrained by space; and 3. Social relations are mediated by space.

The papers in this issue amply demonstrate these premises and show how space is an active medium with direct impacts on people's lives, whatever the disability. Readers will observe that these papers all use qualitative methodologies to tease out the rich details that help answer the research questions, and to illuminate how subjective space can be, particularly in applied geography.

This issue begins appropriately with a paper entitled "Points of Entry" by Penny Richards presenting a historical social geography of people with disabilities and the process of immigration, focusing on the first great peak in immigration at the turn of the 20th century. Not only does the author discuss the factors that fed into the immigration decision, but also she provides a glimpse of the lives of migrants with disabilities, in both the Old World and the New.

Louise Holt explores the ongoing issue of the socio-spatial inclusion of children with various (dis)abilities into one of the most important systems of socialization - education. Her case study of two schools in Great Britain is a good example of how the inherently spatialized practices of elementary schools can serve to both liberate and constrain children with (dis)abilities. By comparing schools with strikingly different student populations and neighborhood environments, she exposes how widely institutionalized meanings and implications of disability may diverge.

The social and economic marginalization of women with disabilities in Canada is discussed by Valorie Crooks, whose findings add weight to the argument that the regime of income assistance produces additional and confusing barriers. Her descriptions of particular spatial outcomes of 10 women illustrate the uneasy tension between dependence and independence of the women that result from state and political structures.

Cathy Antonakos, Bruno Giordani, and John Ashton-Miller add to the knowledge base of wayfinding strategies for people following stroke or brain injury. The authors pursue wayfinding in both in-home and out-of-home environments to initiate research and findings that lead to practical solutions based on individualized needs.

In this follow-up article to her earlier contribution (see Fall 2001 of DSQ), Inge Komardjaja examines the types of assistance -- paid and unpaid, human and technological, legislated, enforceable or not -- that exist for women with disabilities in developing countries, drawing on her own experiences and those of fellow informants in Indonesia's third largest city.

This issue also includes Cathleen McAnney's review of a series of web-based field guides aimed at supporting students with disabilities in fieldwork and related activities. The guides, developed by Mick Healey, Phil Gravenstock, and a team of researchers of the Geography Discipline Network (GDN), a consortium, at Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education, UK, are successful in making it easier for university and college instructors to include student with disabilities in a variety of field experiences.

We conclude this section with the Victoria Lewis' provoking meditation on modes of spatial praxis and the various spatialized vocabularies employed by disability activists and playwrights. In a reverse of the anthropological trope of "going native," Dr. Lewis is an activist who has expressed her appreciation of disability street theater in her own plays, while at the same time entering the emerging discussion on disability studies in the humanities disciplines.

We are happy to be continuing a conversation on the geographical dimensions of the disability – of bodies in or out of 'place,' of socio-spatial positionings imposed externally and/or internally, of migrations halfway around the globe, or boldly across the proscenium. If we have piqued your interest in geography and disability, we encourage you to join our conversations on the GEOGABLE discussion list. But first, you should head to the Disability and Geography Resource pages at http://isc.temple.edu/neighbor/research.

References:

Wolch, J. & Dear, M. (eds). (1987). The Power of Geography: How territory shapes social life. Boston & London: Unwin Hyman.