ALBERT

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rebecca Sandover, Samuel Kinsley, Stephen Hinchliffe〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Geographers and other social scientists have for some time been interested in how scientific and environmental controversies emerge and become public or collective issues. Social media are now key platforms through which these issues are publically raised and through which groups or publics can organise themselves. As media that generate data and traces of networking activity, these platforms also provide an opportunity for scholars to study the character and constitution of those groupings. In this paper we lay out a method for studying these ‘issue publics’: emergent groupings involved in publicising an issue. We focus on the controversy surrounding the state-sanctioned cull of wild badgers in England as a contested means of disease management in cattle. We analyse two overlapping groupings to demonstrate how online issue publics function in a variety of ways – from the ‘echo chambers’ of online sharing of information, to the marshalling of agreements on strategies for action, to more dialogic patterns of debate. We demonstrate the ways in which digital media platforms are themselves performative in the formation of issue publics and that, while this creates issues, we should not retreat into debates around the ‘proper object’ of research but rather engage with the productive complications of mapping social media data into knowledge (Whatmore, 2009). In turn, we argue that online issue publics are not homogeneous and that the lines of heterogeneity are neither simple or to be expected and merit study as a means to understand the suite of processes and novel contexts involved in the emergence of a public.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 12 November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Courtney Work〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Fears of climate conflict expected to erupt in states with unstable political and economic systems contribute to the global land rush through emerging politics of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Scholarship reveals, however, that solutions to the problem of climate change, like biofuel production, carbon capture, and ‘climate-smart’ industrial agriculture, are exacerbating both conflict and environmental change. This contradiction is created in part by long-standing and unchanging policies regarding societal security, which legitimizes economic development’s extractive resource transformations to avert conflict, incorporates climate change mitigation and adaptation into a development framework, and exacerbates the environmental crises of over-development. On a positive note, the obvious failure of these policies gives rise to social and scientific collaborations that disrupt the conflict scenarios promoting continued economic growth as the path to peace. New cooperation from the ground up can create new possibilities for integrated, and thus actually sustainable futures.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 21 December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Neville R. Ellis, Petra Tschakert〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉'Triple-wins' has emerged as a powerful rhetorical device for instigating responses to linked climate-development challenges. By promising to deliver synergistic mitigation-adaptation-development outcomes via a single intervention, triple-win logic has proven immensely appealing to policymakers and researchers alike. Although heralded by its proponents as an enabler of transformational change towards desirable low-carbon and climate-resilient futures, emerging critiques suggest focus upon triple-wins detracts attention from pressing social questions pertinent to integrative efforts, including how trade-offs are deliberated, for whom wins and losses accrue, and who decides. Here, we review emerging critiques of triple-win rhetoric within climate-smart agriculture and climate compatible development, and explore its suitability as a device for enabling transformational change. We argue that triple-win rhetoric, as currently conceived, fails to engage with the social complexities inherent to the pursuit of integrated outcomes, as well as the underlying social conditions that perpetuate business-as-usual development. In response, we propose a more dynamic 'pathways' approach to triple-wins that foregrounds normative commitments to recognition, rights and justice in the pursuit of desirable climate-resilient futures.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 21 December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Nicholas Philip Simpson〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Landscape-scale shocks, in the forms of Hurricane Maria and an unprecedented drought, have provided significant disruptions to the respective centrally designed water and energy networks of Puerto Rico and Cape Town. Despite a number of contextual differences, this article considers what can be learnt from the two cases as they present significant similarities in off-grid responses and adaptation endeavours by a range of key actors. The cases illustrate how these large and centrally planned utility providers were ill-equipped to perceive and appropriately respond to both the landscape-scale shocks and the associated social and technological disruptions which they brought about. The cases illustrate similarities in how back-burner technologies can cascade, at unprecedented speeds, to fill polycentric niches created by failure of centralised service delivery. A fundamental lesson, which illustrates the challenges to transition to decentralised and off-grid systems, is the push-back from a disrupted regime. The cases demonstrate centralising endeavours by utilities to reconfigure and recover from both the environmental shock as well as the novel governance arrangements of economic, social and technological shifts which occurred.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 19 December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): John Derek Scasta〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The extant and often burgeoning feral horse herds in several countries have become a contentious issue for animal welfare and biological conservation. The emotions humans express for horses have escalated to a divisive level that has consequently hindered administrative actions. While human emotions are important for resource management as motivation enhancing awareness and action, emotions may hinder management due to a lack of reconciliation with data. For the emotions surrounding feral horse management, I conducted a critical review of the history of horse domestication, the contemporary understanding of the psychology of human-horse relationships, and the current status of feral horse ecology and management. Domestication of horses ∼5500 years ago in Eurasia coupled humans with horses in a symbiotic relationship where the two functioned almost as one. This process enabled the spread of human genes and food production. Human reliance on horses became a working relationship founded on trust and respect that facilitated bonding via overcoming adversity that likely deepened human-horse emotional connections – a coevolutionary process for which there are few analogous examples. While human reliance on horses has waned in developed countries recently, it has been humans that have largely facilitated the spread of horses through space and time. Contextualized with contemporary data, feral horse populations in the United States and Australia have increased dramatically. Consequently, horses have had negative effects on native ecosystems in some areas, and degradation has led to emaciated horses in some areas. The public often expresses opposition to horse management, likely out of an innate emotional reaction. However, the emotional co-evolutionary history, coupled with cognitive appraisal of contemporary data including horse welfare, offers an opportunity for emotional regulation and de-escalation for this contentious issue.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 28 September 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Ella Harris, Mel Nowicki, Katherine Brickell〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉PLACE/Ladywell is a block of modular and mobile “pop-up” housing, currently occupying a council owned site awaiting redevelopment in Lewisham, South East London. It houses 24 families on the borough's homelessness register. The development has received multiple awards, been highly praised in the media, and cited by the Greater London Authority as prototypical of pop-up housing as a ‘solution' to London's housing crisis. Yet amidst the widespread excitement around PLACE/Ladywell, experiences of urban precarity persist for the families living there. In this paper we examine how resident experiences of being ‘on-edge' are defined both by personal crises as they await permanent rehousing, by job losses, evictions and school moves, as well as by anxieties relating to the housing crisis as a wider structure of feeling, including fear after the Grenfell Tower fire and anxieties about gentrification. In doing so, we offer a timely conceptualisation of how experiences of urban precarity persist and mutate in a political moment defined by a growing sense of urgency around finding solutions to the housing crisis.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 2 June 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Nanneke Winters〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In migration scholarship, the migrant body has recently begun to gain recognition as a productive analytical scale for exploring politics of mobility: the highly differentiated ways in which migration is accessed and lived. However, a tendency to treat bodies as sites of gendered and racialized suffering can obscure migrant agency and differentiation as well as the ways in which migrant bodies can also be seen as sites of resistance and achievement. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the ways in which mobility politics shape divergent migrant trajectories by putting forward a translocal embodiment perspective. The paper argues that migrant bodies constitute key sites of struggle over mobility, and that looking at migrant embodied practice in translocal context can further unravel the differentiations that shape migrant trajectories across space and time. The paper’s argument builds on theoretical notions of intersectionality, embodied cultural capital and translocality to enrich the discussion of mobility politics. Empirically, it draws on multi-sited ethnographic research with Nicaraguan families, focusing on female Nicaraguan migrants working in informal domestic employment in Spain, to explore how bodies and embodied practices matter throughout these migrants’ trajectories. In particular, the paper intends to do justice to migrant agency by exploring how bodies that are often victimized can also be considered as stratified resources of translocal negotiation. The translocal embodiment perspective put forward in the paper shows that migrant bodies constitute a multi-faceted, non-erasable component of the unsettled yet situated mobility politics that shape divergent trajectories.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 13 December 2017〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Joëlle Moret〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Based on a case study of Somali migrants who have been living in Europe for at least a decade, this paper challenges the view that post-migration life is sedentary and pleads for a dialogue between mobility studies and migration studies. It explores the various cross-border mobility practices these migrants may undertake from their country of residence and how they can be transformed into social and economic advantages. “Mobility capital” consists of the ability to engage in cross-border mobility practices at particular times but also to remain immobile by choice. Social actors with high levels of mobility capital are in a position to articulate and benefit from local anchorage and mobility practices simultaneously and to control when and how they want to be on the move. There are two facets of mobility capital: the accumulation of past experiences of crossing borders; and the potential for future movements, or the unequally shared ability to be mobile again when it appears worthwhile to be so. The diachronic focus of the study shows that biographies evolve in response to external constraints and opportunities. Furthermore, migrants’ control over their (im)mobility is shaped by their transnational social positions in their place of residence, but also in other places, including their place of origin. I argue that mobility capital is a neglected dimension of migrants’ strategies to negotiate multiple and contradictory social positions in a transnational social field.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 28 March 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rosine Tchatchoua-Djomo, Gemma van der Haar, Han van Dijk, Mathijs van Leeuwen〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper explores claim-making to land in Burundi, where civil war and multiple waves of displacement and return have resulted in complex disputes over land. Zooming in on two different regions, the paper shows that, as people articulate their claims and defend their interests in land disputes, they strategically draw on a diversity of arguments, related to legal categories, notions of belonging and citizenship, social categories derived from (land) policy, but also victimhood, security concerns, and political loyalty. Post-peace agreement land policies play an important role in this, as they instrumentalise war-based categories of identity and victimhood, privileging certain groups of displaced people for political purposes. As we show in two case studies, claim-making tactics follow shifting political discourses and policy changes, as people seek to secure the support of (powerful) allies. A perspective on processes of making claims to land allows us to explore the entanglements between multiple waves of displacement, policy implementation and the instrumentalisation of identities in conflict-affected settings.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Adam Branch, Giuliano Martiniello〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The politics of global energy are subject to increasing academic interest. Most work on energy politics focuses on oil, based upon a normative vision of a global energy modernity of fossil fuels and a transition to renewables. In many African countries, however, the most prevalent source of energy is not oil, but woodfuel. Charcoal is of particular importance due to its centrality to urbanization: charcoal is the primary household energy source for up to 80% of urban Africa, and its consumption is expected to continue increasing with expanding urbanization. Despite this centrality, the politics of charcoal remain largely unexplored. This article asks how political power shapes charcoal production and how charcoal as an energy source shapes political power through an in-depth study of charcoal extraction in northern Uganda. It argues that charcoal production, and its particular destructiveness, should be understood as a continuation of the violence of the 1986–2006 war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government. Based on long-term fieldwork in northern Uganda, the article draws a distinction between the politics of small-scale household production and of large-scale industrial production. By focusing on the political violence of industrial charcoal production, we argue that orthodox academic and policy narratives about the charcoal industry in Africa can be qualified, and new questions can be raised concerning broader narratives of energy modernity and global energy politics.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Yolande Pottie-Sherman〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Donald Trump’s recent restrictive migration regime – symbolized by border walls, Travel Bans, and Hire American policies – presents new concerns for student migrants, the practitioners who advise them, and the institutions that rely on their tuition fees. But a competing migration regime exists at the subnational scale that frames international students, particularly those who study in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and business fields as ideal future citizens. Recent geographical scholarship on the local as a site of contested immigration politics suggests a need to understand student migrants as also enmeshed in the spatial politics of the states and cities in which they reside, as well as the institutions they attend. This article is concerned with international student mobility in the ‘age of Trump,’ with a focus on the local geographies of exclusion and inclusion this age both instigates and contests. The study findings are based on eighteen in-depth interviews conducted with recent graduates of six northeast-Ohio colleges and universities. Their experiences demonstrate the emergence of new and differentiated everyday landscapes of exclusion, which introduce new obstacles for international students and the local as a scale of inclusionary immigration politics.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 12 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Fatoumata Binta Barry, Sue C. Grady〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉A feminist perspective within political ecology and political ecology of health considers gender dynamics in the use of environmental resources, labor division, and health inequalities. However, a feminist perspective may not adequately engender the perspectives of Africana women as many embrace their roles of the nurturer, protector and provider of their families. Africana womanism, an African theoretical perspective that is family-centered and focuses on women’s concerns only after the community’s needs are met, provides a different lens by which to conduct research in sub-Saharan Africa. However, in today’s (post-colonial) reality, Africana womanism cannot remain isolated. This forum paper focuses on the importance of including Africana womanist perspectives in political ecology and political ecology of health research by integrating African feminism and Black feminism, which are grounded in the multiple oppressions that Africana women historically and currently face. These multiple perspectives from Africana women will enable a better understanding of gender dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa and will enable Africana womanism to be used as an extension of feminism to account for a uniquely Africana perspective in future political ecology and political ecology of health research.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 9 June 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Ian Scoones, Rebecca Smalley, Ruth Hall, Dzodzi Tsikata〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Global resource scarcity has become a central policy concern, with predictions of rising populations, natural resource depletion and hunger. The narratives of scarcity that arise as a result justify actions to harness resources considered ‘underutilised’, leading to contestations over rights and entitlements and producing new scarcities. Yet scarcity is contingent, contextual, relational and above all political. We present an analysis of three framings – absolute, relative and political scarcity – associated with the intellectual traditions of Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, respectively. A review of 134 global and Africa-specific policy and related sources demonstrates how diverse framings of scarcity – what it is, its causes and what is to be done – are evident in competing narratives that animate debates about the future of food and farming in Africa and globally. We argue that current mainstream narratives emphasise absolute and relative scarcity, while ignoring political scarcity. Opening up this debate, with a more explicit focus on political scarcities is, we argue, important; emphasising how resources are distributed between different needs and uses, and so different people and social classes. For African settings, seen as both a source of abundant resources and a site where global scarcities may be resolved, as well as where local scarcities are being experienced most acutely, a political scarcity framing on the global land rush, and resource questions more broadly, is, we suggest, essential.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Monika Egerer, Madeleine Fairbairn〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Community gardens are often positioned as spaces where urban people can build community, reclaim common space, and reassert a “right to the city” in urban landscapes that are shaped by gentrification and the privatization of space. However, the literature on urban agriculture often focuses on the struggles of gardens to endure external political-economic processes, largely overlooking within-garden tensions relating to social inequality and resource access. In this study we examined how the pressures associated with urbanization are inscribed in three community garden landscapes in the central coast of California—a region undergoing massive urban transformation in recent decades. The cases reveal that social tensions from urbanization permeate garden boundaries to influence the production of space and the social relations within the garden. Specifically, the resource struggles and social inequities in these regions are made visible in the gardens through conflicts over membership rules, resource management, and theft of produce. The analysis of these conflicts illustrates how extreme real estate valuation and gentrification shapes the particular ways in which the urban commons are managed, including the forms of inclusion and exclusion, claims-making, and racialization of resources that are employed. Uncovering and complicating our understanding of the struggles of and tensions within community gardens is a necessary step in the pursuit of “just sustainability” within changing cityscapes.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 17 April 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Lukas Ley〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This article investigates stagnation as a product of hydrosocial relations in light of ethnographic research conducted in the port city of Semarang, Indonesia. In Semarang’s coastal north, river water spills daily into neighbourhoods during high tide, and often stagnates in houses and streets. While recent studies have shown that water governance is a form of social control, reproducing (infra)structures of subjugation and social inequality, little attention has been paid to the margins of water infrastructure, especially in cities. By focusing on stagnation, this article examines hydrosocial arrangements in the margins of postcolonial drainage infrastructure. When the peripheral and densely populated neighbourhoods in Semarang’s north are flooded during high tide, residents resort to private or semi-public pumps to get rid of stagnant water. Residents deplore insufficient state attention to their area, reflected in collapsing or seeping riverbanks. A relatively reliable flood prevention is the timely and regular raising of house floors and streets. The municipality responds to dramatic rates of land subsidence (10–15 cm/year) by raising roads and riverbanks. Yet, many dwellings along the Banger River have been destroyed by intruding sea water and left behind in ruins, suggesting a permanent failure of the city’s drainage system. Residents bear the brunt of supplementary infrastructural labour, their efforts of infrastructural repair and maintenance sustaining a bare minimum of safety. The article mobilizes Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of quasi-events to understand the hydrosocial relations that shape peoples’ precarious relation with drainage infrastructure as unequal yet generalized. Quasi-events, that is, efforts to hold water at bay, suck energy and resources from marginalized residents. As such, the article argues that the margin of the hydrosocial is integral to the political configuration of land and water.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 12 February 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Karen P.Y. Lai, Fenghua Pan〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Brexit could have profound impacts on the global financial landscape, as the global economy and financial markets are increasingly inter-connected. London’s role as the top international financial centre in Europe could be threatened due to the uncertain consequences of Brexit. Therefore, the geographies of Asian financial centres might shift as a result of Brexit, since London plays a central role in the existing global financial centre networks and many Asian financial centres, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, have strong financial connections with London. On the one hand, how Asian financial centres are linked with London and other European financial centres is key to understanding the potential impacts of Brexit on them. On the other hand, the reactions to Brexit of Asian economies, in particular, China, will also influence the role of London as a financial centre.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Cristina Gauthier, Emilio F. Moran〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Located in the State of Pará, along the Xingú River, the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Complex is the largest, most recent project in the Amazon region and third largest in the world. The city of Altamira, located 52 km upstream from the Belo Monte dam, served as the main stage for its construction. Using surveys and interviews performed in 2016 as social and quantifiable tools, we determine basic sanitation practices in Altamira after the construction of Belo Monte and reveal issues that can impact the environment and public health of the population. Through analysis of national policies and the use of publicly available information, we identify discrepancies between Altamira's current reality and Brazil's existing national public policies, mainly Brazil's Water Resources Policy and the Federal Sanitation Law. Similar basic sanitation provision and waste disposal practices along the region lead us to believe that, if not addressed, the implementation gaps observed in Altamira are likely to emerge in future hydroelectric development projects currently envisioned throughout the Amazon Basin. As more dams in the Amazonian region are planned, identifying public policy implementation gaps that affect basic sanitation and water resources creates opportunities to anticipate problems that could impinge on the public health needs of residents where such large infrastructure projects will be implemented.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 25 August 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rory Hearne, Mark Boyle, Audrey Kobayashi〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper offers a reading of anti-austerity protests in the Irish Republic, placing under scrutiny in particular the origins, meaning, and implications of the country's water wars. It notes the proclivity of some post-crash anti-austerity populisms to fall prey to a politics of retrenchment and exclusion and even to degenerate into nationalist spasms or what Jean Paul Sartre would term fraternity terrorisms. It contributes conceptual novelty to existing human geographical scholarship on protest movements by convening Jean Paul Sartre and Judith Butler in conversation; registering therein the political potential of the fused group, performing popular sovereignty through public assembly. What makes the Irish case fascinating and worthy of scrutiny is the fact that protest never ossified and totalised into an oppressive or regressive form of political populism. Our central argument is that Ireland's water protest movement was effective because it was constituted from outside mainstream politics; from molecular and atomised struggles which scaled and agglomerated into large public assemblies which, whilst ultimately inchoate and indeterminate, signified that popular sovereignty had usurped the centre-right representative regime and challenged the latter's right to custody over democracy.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Meredith Root-Bernstein, Jennifer Gooden, Alison Boyes〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Rewilding is a conservation approach that is gaining increasing attention from academics, public opinion-makers, and policy makers. But what is rewilding? A large number of academic definitions coexist along with many different on-the-ground practices, and a lack of clarity at the policy level. Here, we trace the transformations of rewilding between practice and policy, following an anthropology of policy approach. We also enroll the “policy assemblage” concept to ask how rewilding is mobilized and how rewilding actors change their relations within assemblages across these practice-policy transformations. We look at how rewilding is made into a reality at particular sites, as projects. We compare this to how rewilding is understood, positioned, used and produced at the policy level. We use a comparative approach, looking at projects in the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as policy frames and interactions in each of these countries and at the EU level. In order to secure future funding flows and institutional security, projects eventually (or immediately, in Denmark) present themselves as successful and normative within the existing regulations defining success or acceptability. At the same time, the practice of rewilding and the policy of rewilding define failure in different ways. At the project level, flexible long-term goals and adaptive learning allow failures to be avoided by definition. For policy makers, the fear of failure leads to avoidance of projects that cannot be defined as successful. We note that if high-level policy eventually defines normative success in rewilding it will probably do so in terms of its technical practices of reintroduction and passive management. It will be much more challenging to enshrine in policy the “meta-practices” of flexibility, long-term thinking and adaptive learning, which ensure rewilding success in practice. A broad acceptance of rewilding, as it is mobilized between projects and policies, may lead to radical changes in how rewilding is enacted.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 21 February 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Sabine Dörry, Gary Dymski〈/p〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 21 February 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Sarah Hall, Dariusz Wójcik〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This critical reviews section explores the implications of Brexit from a financial geography perspective in a number of different geographical settings. These range from the epicentre of Brexit in London's financial district, to its implications for the wider UK economy before extending the analysis to financial centres in Europe and Asia.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 9 July 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Lesley Instone〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper emphasises the generative qualities of the Anthropocene to explore how the geological turn with its interplay of life and nonlife might prompt new urban natureculture imaginaries and practices. In order to work towards an otherwise ontology that blurs the distinction between life and nonlife I think 〈em〉with〈/em〉 the above- and below-ground composition of the urban grasslands of Melbourne, Australia. I consider what it might mean to live urban life as a becoming-geologic agent and geologic subject by drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, Elizabeth Povinelli and Hugo Reinert. The paper explores the multiple geontologies of Melbourne’s grasslands to emphasise how entities are assembled and made to matter in quite divergent ways that lend power to some modes of urban existence and not others. It considers the possibilities of a postcolonising urban cosmopolitics of geologic conviviality where humans live in concert not just with lively nonhumans, but with inert, inhuman, inorganic, non-biological entities.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 19 March 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Lotje de Vries〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This article analyses the ways in which the nomadic Mbororo’s claim to grazing land in the territorial margins of the Central African Republic (CAR) has shifted under the influence of increased competition. It unpacks the ambiguities of a nomadic lifestyle that requires navigation between acquired political inclusion, and increasing social exclusion. The paper explores how the Mbororo adapted their strategies under the influence of changing political and security situations since their arrival in the country around a century ago. The Mbororo’s initial strategy to keep a low profile and occupy the largely empty pastures came under pressure due to increased competition from various armed groups over the territorial margins. Rebel groups, transhumance, poachers, and highway bandits now occupy the same territories for their political and economic projects. The country's recent and ongoing crisis has imposed unprecedented new challenges. The Mbororo adapted their strategies to uphold their claims to land and belonging: the majority temporarily sought exile, while some others have resorted to joining armed groups. Meanwhile, their political and economic inclusion weakened and their cattle became one of the main sources financing the conflict economy. The paper argues that increasing social and political marginality combined with the violence in the territorial margins will make it hard for the Mbororo to reclaim the Central African pastures that are the heart of their lives and livelihoods.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Yinnon Geva, Gillad Rosen〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Market-oriented housing regeneration policies rely on private entrepreneurs for implementation. As these policies proliferate globally, they increasingly bring developers in direct contact with residents from diverse tenure groups, including homeowners. Building on institutional analysis of developer behavior, we explore the variegated roles and competencies that developers assume and employ in their interaction with homeowners. Raze and Rebuild – a national housing redevelopment program in Israel – serves as the case for analysis. The program presents developers with the opportunity to capitalize on valuable urban land, but also carries a risk that stems from the need to strike a complex deal with multiple and diverse homeowners. Based on interviews, observations, and analysis of shareholder reports, title deeds and media articles, this paper explores the ways in which developers attempt to mitigate and manage this risk. We identify three major approaches to reaching the regeneration deal—a contractual agreement between developers and homeowners. The deal requires developers to acquire new competencies such as organizing homeowners, building trust via interpersonal relationships, and maintaining a strong local presence. The three resultant approaches differ in the way the risk components are distributed between various actors, namely between developers and newcomer intermediaries. The new roles of developers are found to be crucial in implementing the regeneration of homeowner communities, as they motivate homeowners to act collectively towards rent-maximizing.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Saskia Warren〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Since the 2000s, a rapidly expanding Muslim marketplace has offered faith-centred digital content produced by and aimed at Muslim women. In geopolitical events post 9/11, adoption of the term ‘Muslim women’, especially by younger generations, has grown in an act of supra-national identification with the Muslima – Muslim female community – that crosses race, ethnicity, sects and class. This is reflective of a wider prioritisation of religion in the construction of personal identity by ethnic minorities and in particular by Muslims, understood as a response to unfair treatment, stigmatisation, and higher levels of social and economic exclusion (McGhee, 2008, Khattab, 2009). In the UK social exclusion has most impacted on sense of belonging for Muslim women (Karsen and Nazroo, 2016). Yet the professional and civic roles of Muslim women in challenging negative representations and discrimination are often overlooked, along with the personal impacts of performing this labour. This article highlights the experiences of Muslim women working in media as they attempt to build new Muslim female identities and spaces of belonging, and renegotiate their own position in the process.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 4 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Jessica Budds〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Chile has operated a system of private tradable water rights since 1981. In theory, this framework contributes to water security by instituting private property rights to water to enable permanent access, and by using market transactions to facilitate the reallocation of scarce water to ensure optimal distribution. Yet, since 2010, the country has faced critical water scarcity in several regions, arising from a combination of overexploitation and dry weather. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between water markets and water security in Chile. It has two objectives: to examine how the water policy framework has shaped responses to acute water scarcity, based on a case study of the La Ligua river basin during the 2014–15 drought, and to explore how water-society relations have influenced the nature and implications of these responses. The analysis employs a relational approach to water security that attends to the configuration of hydrosocial relations, as opposed to the supply of water. I make three related arguments. First, the framework fostered supply-led responses to drought that were counterproductive to water security. Second, these responses can be attributed to the privatised and individualised hydrosocial relations under the market system, which now present an internal contradiction by threatening to undermine it. Third, supply-led responses were not merely pragmatic solutions to water shortages, but a means to neutralise this internal contradiction so as to stave off the potential destabilisation of the water policy framework.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 3 January 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Nauja Kleist〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉 〈p〉This paper examines social and migratory trajectories of involuntary return, with a focus on Ghanaian labour migrants who have engaged in high-risk and precarious migration projects. Four types of involuntary return are identified, based on state involvement and forced relocation processes: deportation by air, overland deportation, evacuation and flight from conflict. I show that migrants may go through several – and different modes of – involuntary returns, sometimes over just a few years. Though different ways of returning have implications for future legal mobility, it is less pertinent for migrants' post-return life where the main question confronting them is what they brought back. That involuntary returnees are seen as successful if they manage to return with money, skills or exposure reflects that migration constitutes local collective hope – an imagined pathway to transform one's life and establish a better future for one's family and oneself.〈/p〉 〈p〉Following returnees over time, I distinguish between three overall trajectories: continued precariousness, re-migration, and social and economic regeneration. Some returnees find themselves in the same or worse social and economic situations as prior to migration. Others succeed in social and economic regeneration, establishing livelihoods and (re-)positioning themselves as respectable persons. However, in many cases, post-return life is characterized by uncertainty and many returnees are engaged in several migration projects over time, regardless of the mode of involuntary return. Hence, involuntary return disrupts, slows and hampers migration projects but it does not necessarily end them.〈/p〉 〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 9 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rohan D'Souza〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Scarcity is ideologically charged and shapes political possibilities. The recent but richly debated formulation termed the Anthropocene – as a distinct intellectual rubric for exploring human challenges and prospects in an already climate changed world – claims to offer new conceptual grounds for radically re-envisioning the existing challenges that confront humanity. Instead of the earlier anxieties about an over populated planet running out of resources, the Anthropocene warns of a crisis brought on by tipping points from excess Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, climate chaos from a heated planet and the crossing of critical bio-physical thresholds. The Anthropocene eco-catastrophe, hence, is less about the struggle over resource scarcities than it is about sustaining conditions for planetary life. But does dealing only with the excesses of GHG emissions entirely revise the urgency for engaging with the notion of scarcity? Not so, this essay argues, especially if scarcity continues to imply finite limits and boundaries that cannot be crossed. Uncovering the Athropocene notion of scarcity, however, requires one to see double. First, the idea of scarcity can only be meaningfully fleshed out when located within broader discussions about environmental change and environmentalism. And second, through a comparative contrast with environmental histories of South Asia, I argue, the novel claims of the Anthropoene discourse can be brought into sharp and visible relief. The Anthropocence, I suggest, is not only compelled to acknowledge a strong version of scarcity but, critically as well, its notion of finite limits shapes, defines and influences a Neo-Malthusian variant of environmentalism that, in essence, rests on the politics of pre-emption.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Diana Suhardiman, Ram C. Bastakoti, Emma Karki, Luna Bharati〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Since the late 1990s, river basin planning has become a central idea in water resources management and a mainstream approach supported by international donors through their water programs globally. This article presents river basin planning as a function of power and contested arena of power struggles, where state actors create, sustain, and reproduce their bureaucratic power through the overall shaping of (imagined) bureaucratic territory. It argues that river basin planning is not an antidote to current ‘dysfunction’ in water resources management, rooted in overlapping jurisdictions, fragmented decision making, and bureaucratic competitions between various government agencies. On the contrary, it illustrates how river basin planning becomes a new ‘territorial frontier’, created and depicted by different government agencies as their envisioned operational boundary and as a means to sustain and increase their bureaucratic power and sectoral decision-making authority, amidst ongoing processes of federalism in Nepal.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 26 July 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Zachary Hyde〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In recent years local governments in many North American cities have engaged in “land value capture,” which involves state actors exchanging greater density for condominium developers through rezoning as a way to build social housing and affordable rental units. This paper focuses on how these policies are framed and implemented by developers, planners and politicians in two large Canadian cities, Toronto and Vancouver, to address a long-standing but under-theorized question: what is the relationship between altruism and profitability for private development companies? Drawing on concepts from economic and cultural sociology, including Beckert's fictional expectations, Goffman's frame analysis, and Bourdieu's forms of capital, I challenge existing accounts of developers as either following the logic of profit maximization, or “giving back” through charitable acts. Instead, I argue that land value capture policies involve the process of “giving back to get ahead;” through acts of gift-giving developers enhance their symbolic capital, or reputational prestige, leading to new opportunities for profit-making. Thus I show how meaning and symbolism accompany the pursuit of monetary gains and mystify “giving back” as a strategy of accumulation for the private sector. This research holds implications for understanding “condo-ization” as a form of urbanism, as well as the increasing privatization of affordable housing in North America.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Sabina Maslova, Francesco Chiodelli〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The paper focuses on residential strategies and patterns of 〈em〉highly skilled〈/em〉 migrants from Western countries in Moscow. During recent decades, transnational migration of highly skilled workers has grown and diversified; as a consequence, residential practices and socio-spatial behaviour of this kind of migrants (the so-called 'expatriates') in the destination city diversified as well. The spatial impact of 〈em〉highly skilled〈/em〉 migrants on the destination city, however, is still rather underexplored (e.g., the analysis is limited to the upper strata of expatriates). The present paper fills this gap by focusing on the 'middling' group of highly skilled transnational migrants in Moscow. The research questions the view that expatriates tend towards socio-spatial clustering and homogenization, which are both commonly associated with the rise of transnational residential compounds. We argue that, on the contrary, the housing pattern of expatriates in Moscow has a multi-faceted spatial structure and is embedded in a heterolocal model of socio-spatial behaviour. The pulling factors of expatriate residential choices are similar to those choices of local people, while some elements—typically used to explain expatriate spatial preferences (e.g., localization of international schools or jobs)—are inconsequential. This dispersed and variegated settlement pattern seems to be linked to the 'middling' and increasingly heterogeneous nature of transnational migration and the cultural differences determining the host-home context divide.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 28 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Shenjing He, Jun Wang〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In East Asia, a top-down discourse of making creative/cultural cities, accompanied by widespread local state-led campaigns and their contestations, are now in full swing. ‘Creative/culture-oriented’ local governments equipped with various entrepreneurial strategies, as well as the grassroots creative class, have emerged as two distinct forces shaping new urban spaces that differ significantly from their Western counterparts. East Asian cities have thus gained value for the revisiting and interrogation of established academic debates regarding creative/cultural cities, which until recently were based primarily on Western experiences. This themed issue thus aims to present a fresh and enriched understanding of the making of creative/cultural cities in East Asia and the emerging contestations based on two sets of interrelated analyses: first, a multi-scalar analysis of the role of the state in the making of creative/cultural cities and various forms of creative and cultural clusters; and second, the discontent and resistance of the creative class and wider social groups against top-down strategies. We hope that this concerted effort can contribute to the unravelling of the complexity and peculiarity of the policies, practices, outcomes, and, especially, contestations of East Asia’s creative/cultural city making efforts. More importantly, we expect this collective effort to be added to the growing body of work challenging Western urban theories, which can be of limited utility in understanding urbanism elsewhere.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Katrina Jurn, Joseph Lavallee, Lawrence King〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Mangrove wetlands, which provide critical ecosystem services in tropical and subtropical coastal regions around the world, are increasingly threatened, with total mangrove area declining steeply in recent decades. Focusing on the mangrove wetlands of the Cayman Islands, we use remote sensing and spatial analysis to document past and project future trends of mangrove clearance, and 57 interviews with key business and political figures and members of environmental NGOs to shed light on the social forces driving these trends. The analysis shows a loss of approximately 27.9% of mangrove wetlands present in 1965 as of 2013 (7072.7 ha versus 9809.8 ha) on Grand Cayman. At this rate of loss, the island’s mangroves, excluding the 1668.9 ha of mangrove wetlands currently protected, could be lost by 2108. Analysis of the satellite and aerial images and the interview results suggest that the destruction of mangrove forests is attributable in part to consumption generated by Grand Cayman’s financial sector. The demand for real estate by international investors initially attracted by the island’s financial services, along with that of the professionals employed to provide these services, has been one of the key drivers of mangrove wetland clearance. Interview results suggest the hypothesis that these dynamics have persisted due to the alignment of political forces that has emerged in their defense: a state structurally-dependent on development fees for revenues and dependent for political support on landowners and the development and real estate industries.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Kris Hartley〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The transition from an industrial to knowledge-based economy is impacting urban growth across Asia. Many cities now seek to lure educated professionals through arts and cultural amenities, with a common focus on disinvested neighborhoods. The underlying planning tactics often favor top-down intervention over multi-sectoral collaboration, marginalizing and displacing the politically weaker constituencies that give neighborhoods their authenticity. Many studies have examined the drivers and impacts of this process in Western contexts, but further research is needed to understand collaborative governance for urban art districts in neoliberal contexts. Mullae, an artist-originated district in Seoul, illustrates collaboration between civil society and local government in such a context. Based on in-depth interviews, document analysis, and observational research, this study examines tensions among parties participating in and affected by urban development in art districts. Empirical findings are interpreted through a framework that focuses on three dialectics: economy, policy, and culture. Government overtures to collaboration are found to provide only limited avenues of policy influence among artists. This suggests the need for further research about the role of neoliberal forces in replicating elite place-building power structures, which remain at theoretical and practical odds with the concept of collaborative governance.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Marianna Markantoni, Artur Steiner, John Elliot Meador, Jane Farmer〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In the transition from welfare to ‘enabling’ states, governments move away from their previous roles as providers of services. Individuals and communities as collectives of individuals are encouraged to play a more active role in improving their own wellbeing and resilience, thus shifting from dependence on the state to self-reliance. This proposed transformation is highly complex and poorly understood. We question whether government interventions and policies aimed at strengthening community empowerment can lead to an enabling state. By examining externally funded community projects in six rural Scottish villages, we investigate whether these development initiatives helped to improve socio-economic aspects related to community resilience. We used uni/bivariate and multivariate analysis with data from 345 structured interviews. Our results show that those communities where projects were completed had a higher average social resilience than the communities where projects remained incomplete. Social resilience factors, including social ties and networks, were predictors of completing community projects. Our results indicate that some communities are harder to activate and require external state support which addresses local needs so that these communities play a more active civic role. If states seek ‘resilient communities’, interventions must be co-designed with citizens to create conditions that will engage and enable people to take more control of aspects of their future, including those communities with a history of minimal civic participation.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): S. Manda, A. Tallontire, A.J. Dougill〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In critical agrarian studies, the connections between large-scale agricultural investments and outgrower schemes are strong, but evidence on which model produces improved livelihood outcomes remains relatively weak. This paper examines livelihood impacts in two differently structured outgrower schemes under Zambia Sugar Plc – ZaSPlc, a subsidiary of Illovo Sugar Plc. The first scheme centrally controls land through an integrated company, renting out sugarcane plots to smallholders whilst acting as an intermediary. The second scheme amalgamates individual smallholder plots of land to form a contiguous block-farm managed by a ZaSPlc intermediary, integrating smallholders as shareholders. We identify the former scheme as producing greater livelihood impacts across financial capital and other dynamics but emphasise that these remain low quality and fail to produce significant path-changing gains for households. Analysis of livelihood groups and strategies, livelihood contributions of LaSAIs and sugarcane uptake, and livelihood response pathways reflect causes and consequences of differences in the evolution, operation, and integration of outgrower schemes. One outcome is the production of narrow as opposed to broad-based livelihoods. Livelihood diversification away from sugarcane schemes are forged within land-based and agrarian activities and show that smallholders do not always switch to profit-maximising strategies. Our findings show that greater attention must be paid to the role of institutional arrangements and local conditions in unfolding outcomes for land and water relations, and how emerging relationships shape inclusivity of an agricultural investment. Thus, outgrower arrangements that ensure commodity production alongside alternative farmer activities that boost livelihoods are thus strengthened for this purpose.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 22 November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Sander van Lanen〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Lived experiences of austerity implemented in response to the 2008 financial crisis receive increasing attention in geographic scholarship. This paper adds to this literature by investigating the role of urban geographies in encounters of austerity and spatially differentiated austerity experiences. It combines the lifeworld and assemblage thinking to consider the avenues through which austerity reaches into the lifeworld of disadvantaged urban youth in Ireland. This paper builds on qualitative interviews with young adults, aged 18–25, living in two disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Cork and Dublin. The combination of youth’s vulnerability to austerity and the implementation of a fierce austerity regime in Ireland make this population suitable to reveal dynamics otherwise more subtly present. The interviews suggest that the three most important spheres of austerity emergence for disadvantaged urban youth – the household, work and social welfare, and the neighbourhood – are shaped by the micro-geographies of the neighbourhood and their embeddedness in the wider urban context. It is thus argued that austerity’s emergence is spatially contingent and depends on the neighbourhood’s embeddedness in local social and urban geographies such as institutional penetration, costs of living, labour market conditions, and histories of policy intervention. This leads to the conclusion that lifeworld colonisation by systemic imperatives, of which austerity is considered a symptom, is path-dependent and relates to previously existing social, economic, political and cultural contexts. To understand the spatially and socially variegated creation of austerity worlds thus requires critical interrogation of the interaction between local urban geographies and higher-scale complexes of austerity.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 12 November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Mónica Farías〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The literature on solidarity economies deconstructs totalizing accounts of global capitalism, opening space for a politics of economic possibility beyond, outside, but also within the capitalist norm. Solidarity economies are spaces of “becoming,” where subjectivities can be reworked in ways that challenge dominant discourses and governmental practices. In this paper, I draw on fieldwork conducted in an 〈em〉asamblea popular〈/em〉 and its soup kitchen in Buenos Aires that works for and with homeless people in the local community to call attention to the interrelation between space and subjectivity. 〈em〉Asambleas populares/barriales〈/em〉 are neighborhood-based political organizations that emerged during the socioeconomic and political crisis of 2001–2002 in Argentina, and they have the potential to disrupt normative views about social problems in ways that resubjectify people. I draw on relational poverty theory to show how the subject-making power of solidarity spaces articulate with, and at the same time challenges, hegemonic economic imaginaries that exclude and de-value certain subjects. Through this case, I argue that there is a close and necessary relationship between imagining and enacting solidarity and reconceptualizing those who are devalued and deemed “excess” to the capitalist economy.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Ismael Yrigoy〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉 〈p〉A growing body of literature is studying how real estate markets are recovering in the post-crisis context. Within this literature, it is often assumed that the extraction of derivative rents from real estate assets has increased since 2008. This article argues that the role of derivative rents in the broader post-crisis dynamics of land rent extraction needs to be more carefully scrutinized. Using as a case study the Spanish hotel-backed non-performing loan market, this article argues that such an increased prominence of derivative rents may not always occur in post-crisis real estate markets.〈/p〉 〈p〉As the paper unveils the different strategies that have allowed a transformation in the performance of loans, the shifts in 〈em〉how〈/em〉 rents are extracted from hotel assets and 〈em〉who〈/em〉 is extracting rents from hotels are scrutinized. The main findings of the paper are the following. First, as the crisis unfolded, derivative rents lost prominence vis-à-vis other forms of land rents, even if derivative rents still play a key role in the circulation of capital from and to the built environment. Second, there has been since 2008 a shift in the typologies of landowners and rentiers: from national actors such as hotel corporations or banks, there has been a transition towards global actors such as REITs or private equity funds. Third, monetary policies are boosting a shift in the ownership and mechanisms of rent extraction from hotel assets.〈/p〉 〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Anna Plyushteva, Tim Schwanen〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉As they go about everyday life, members of households negotiate complex arrangements around mobility and immobility, which continue to change over time. Mobility biographies research has made an important contribution to our understanding of these dynamics. At the same time, mobility biographies often rely on limited definitions of the household and change over the life-course, reflecting an empirical focus on cohabiting nuclear families in North-West Europe. In this paper, we approach everyday im/mobilities as based in the changing relations of care which shape the everyday life of households. We demonstrate how the care relations which underlie everyday im/mobilities are gendered and intergenerational, exceeding distinctions between productive and reproductive activities, or living together and apart. The transformations which everyday im/mobilities undergo over the life-course are not limited to pre-defined milestones, but unfold through a range of abrupt, subtle and multi-directional processes. Drawing on data from Manila and London, we examine these dynamics with particular reference to childcare and ageing, in order to make visible the complex ways in which households negotiate and re-negotiate everyday im/mobilities.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): 〈/p〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 23 November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Leila Dawney, Samuel Kirwan, Rosie Walker〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉 〈p〉In the context of a perfect storm of measures – welfare reform, precarious work, stagnating wages – increasing numbers of households find themselves in complex webs of debt. This paper addresses the lived experience of debt in the UK, tracing some affective contours of indebtedness that are often overlooked in debt research. Focusing on domestic settings and emotional routines, the paper explores how the everyday experience of indebted life seeps into relationships, frames life projects, and mediates hopes for one’s children.〈/p〉 〈p〉The paper argues that the affective architecture of debt operates just as much through moments of intensity – the letter of default, the pressure cooker of an advice session – as through a 〈em〉background hum〈/em〉 in which individuals are engaged in ongoing practices of self-assessment, despair, desire and satisfaction. Drawing on in-depth interviews with indebted subjects, this paper investigates contemporary financial subjectivities through such forms of affective modulation that “run in the background”. In addition to those moments of intensity, it argues that indebted lives are composed through low-level affective states that include hypervigilance, dissociation and anxiety. It examines the deep entanglements of people, technologies and objects that produce these affective states, highlighting relations of obligation and codependency, and the forms of vigilance and anxiety these relations create. In doing so, the paper troubles understandings of debt as a binary relationship between creditor and debtor and argues for a perspective that considers the complex affective entanglements of indebted lives and the imbrication of indebtedness, financial subjectivity, love and care in the making of life projects.〈/p〉 〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 20 November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Lyla Mehta, Amber Huff, Jeremy Allouche〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Scarcity is a dangerous idea and has long been a totalising discourse in resource politics and mainstream economics. A large body of work has critiqued the naturalisation of scarcity in discourses of environmental change, and has highlighted problems in how scarcity is conceptualised and the ways in which scarcities are socially and politically generated. Despite this, the ‘scarcity postulate’ – an assumed mismatch between infinitely expanding human desires and finite means to realise them – remains a powerful concept that continues to be deployed and re-deployed in a host of debates concerning environment and natural resources. From the ‘Limits to Growth’ debates that influenced environmental movements in the 1970s, discussions concerning the causes and consequences of the overlapping food, fuel and finance crises of the 2000s to debates concerning climate change, environmental security and militarisation in the Anthropocene, the discursive constellation of scarcity seems always at work. The focus of this special issue is the cross-scalar dynamics of what we identify as a ‘new politics of scarcity’. This new politics is associated with new framings, contestations and entanglements of scarcity that are associated with new configurations of actors, new political economic relations and new spatialities and geographies of resource control and violence. Building on the empirical cases developed in this special issue, we examine the dynamics and the ‘work’ of the new cross-scalar scarcity politics in sustaining elite and capitalist power through justifying resource acquisitions and enclosures, large-scale policy reforms in the name of ‘austerity’ and intensification of extraction whilst politically side-stepping more thorny politics of (re)distribution, mis-appropriation, dispossession and social justice. We conclude by looking at alternative framings and vernacular conceptions of sustainability that challenge dominant scarcity-driven policies and programmes that intensify local exclusions and inequalities.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 15 November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Shaen Corbet, Charles Larkin〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In the midst of the banking and economic crises that evolved most aggressively within the peripheral European states, the European Central Bank proceeded to overcome their rigid approach to monetary policy as the Eurozone edged closer towards economic collapse. The financial crises have now been closely followed by a political crisis inspired by the dramatic influx of illegal immigration. As a result, Europe finds itself at a crossroads inspired by political spectrum shifts to the left and the right, with fear, uncertainty fuelling nationalist revolt across a host of European nations. We briefly consider explanations for the individual political spectral-shifts within the European Union, while outlining the growth of populist movements since the most recent parliamentary elections.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Kirsten Maclean, Carol Farbotko, Aditi Mankad, Cathy J. Robinson, Matt Curnock, Kerry Collins, Ryan R.J. McAllister〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Biosecurity is often conceptualised and managed as an issue of biological risk. However, biosecurity policy and programs need to also manage for the social risks and impacts of biological invasions. This paper applies theory on the social aspects of social-ecological system resilience to understand how growers from the Queensland Banana industry in north east Australia coped with the social impacts of the Panama Tropical Race 4 incursion. We present a conceptual framework that highlights how emergency responses can also support programs to build and enhance the social resilience of affected actors. Management programs and activities can be designed to support affected actors to cope with the impacts of the invasion, at the same time as working to eradicate or contain the invasive species. Short term immediate management actions coupled with developing institutions and process to support and build social resilience of actors in the longer-term, may enable them to learn to live with a new species in the landscape, and, or be able to better cope with the social impacts of future invasions.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Kessie Alexandre〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Across the United States, a number of older cities face the immediate challenges of aging and inadequate water systems. Given the fragilities of water systems, municipalities have begun to manage the effects of flooding and reduce the impact of disruptive weather events using a range of stormwater management strategies. This article offers an ethnographic account of flooding and stormwater management in the city of Newark, New Jersey, examining stormwater management, urban redevelopment, and their entanglements in a postindustrial landscape. It discusses the implications of stormwater management strategies in a city that is reinventing itself with an eye to a history of economic decline and deindustrialization and another to chronic flooding and increasingly vulnerable infrastructures. First I analyze public contestation surrounding redevelopment and displacement to argue that a focus on infrastructure burdens as it pertains to flooding helps us to understand urban transformation as it is experienced through the body. Then I focus on the use of open space gardens for stormwater management, revealing the ways in which flood resilience is built into the landscape and the lives of residents. Juxtaposing increased density and vacancy in different parts of the city, this article reveals how concurrent measures of time, progress, and development emerge through stormwater management in the process of building flood resilience.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 23 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Kaya Barry〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Urban infrastructures enable mobilities that entangle humans and nonhumans. Infrastructures that afford ‘slower’ mobility, such as a pedestrian bridge, offer particular spaces for sensing, feeling, and moving through urban or city areas in a particular way. Bridges are composed of materials that expand and contract with alterations to the weight, airflow, and temperature, while absorbing movements from a variety of human and nonhuman users. The bridge structure oscillates and sways with the exertion of walking movements, and in doing so, becomes a site of encounter in which individual movements are subsumed into larger entanglements of more-than-human mobility. Although these sensations may be subtle, it can be seen as an opportunity to explore human scale in relation to the nature-culture entanglements of the Anthropocene. In this paper I explore an inner-city pedestrian bridge in Brisbane, Australia, as a site where we momentarily become aware of nature-cultures, that is, an ecology of more-than-human movements. Using an autoethnographic approach, I contemplate moments that entangle and make accessible the resonances and mobilities in the site. I negotiate the Anthropocene as a more-than-human mode of relating and understanding the mobilities that urban infrastructures enable.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Ileana I. Diaz, Carol Hunsberger〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper explores the potentials and limitations of growing coffee as part of an approach to achieving food sovereignty in Puerto Rico. Efforts to promote food sovereignty are not normally associated with non-food crops – particularly those with a colonial plantation history, such as coffee. However, many agroecological farmers who grow coffee in Puerto Rico consider coffee production an important part of their life and work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with agroecological and conventional coffee farmers throughout the island, this paper investigates farmer perspectives on what food sovereignty means in the Puerto Rican context and whether and how agroecologically grown coffee can contribute to a food sovereignty strategy. We find that, despite coffee’s fraught history, agroecological coffee farmers believe that growing coffee can indeed help achieve food sovereignty for two reasons: because coffee is central to their cultural identity, and because they believe it can be grown in ways congruent with the values of food sovereignty. Research participants also drew direct links between efforts to promote food sovereignty and political sovereignty in Puerto Rico, an import-dependent island territory with limited political autonomy – adding to ongoing discussions about the relationships between small-scale farming decisions, alternative food systems and political economic change.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): José Prada-Trigo〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The concept of “urban vulnerability” has emerged in recent years within the fields of study of various disciplines. In relation to socioeconomic studies, the recent crisis has generated a series of works on the unequal vulnerability that exists at different scales. In this context, this article asks about this question from three approaches that can be considered novel: a diachronic perspective, which shows the uneven territorial evolution from 2007 to 2015; an inquiry into the unequal “post-crisis” trajectory, which affects the consolidation of a territorial vulnerability, with deep roots, but which is consolidated during and after the crisis; and an intra-urban perspective, which serves to apply this issue in a scale not much studied but which allows one to obtain interesting contrasts between the different areas of the city. For this, a statistical analysis is applied in three stages through correlation, spatial autocorrelation and bivariate spatial autocorrelation. The results confirm the unequal trajectory in the districts of the city of Madrid and the deepening of a situation of socio-economic vulnerability for the most disadvantaged before and during the crisis.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 19 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Nina Garthwaite, Mick Hatter, Jon Jonn, Stewart Maxwell, Frank Benson, Lynne Friedli〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉An edited transcript from a conversation between Nina Garthwaite, a former receptionist at a homeless hostel in London and four of the hostel residents: Mick Hatter, Jon Jonn, Stewart Maxwell and Frank Benson. In it, they reflect on a series of discussions held in 2015 and 2016 chaired by Dr. Lynne Friedli, a freelance researcher with a special interest in mental health and social justice. These discussions covered topics from welfare benefits, housing, politics, work, rest and everything in between. Reflecting on these discussions, the men critique the institutional structures that frame their experience of homelessness and joblessness. They argue that these institutions are failing the individuals that they claim to serve. They also reflect on their encounters with academia through this project. They question whether academic research adequately engages with those experiencing austerity first hand. Finally, they question whether it is sufficient to research and discuss these issues without a corresponding focus on action. The paper includes commentaries by Lynne Friedli and Nina Garthwaite, reflecting on the discussion and the use of personal stories, as well as the complex ethical issues involved in bringing together academic and non-academic voices. These include the impact of structural inequalities, power relations, the intersection of class and gender and the power dynamics that flow from the radically different positions of the authors and participants in relation to homelessness and employment and precarity.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Annika Lonkila, Minna Kaljonen〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Livestock breeding is an exercise in value creation: to breed animals, certain individuals must be deemed valuable while others are rendered killable. However, value must be performed again and again to retain its meaning in a network of heterogeneous actors, both human and non-human. Recently, genomic technologies have redefined breeding practices and opened up possibilities for new breeding goals in order to answer the calls for increasing the efficiency of dairy farms. We examine how genomic knowledge is coordinated regarding on-farm practices – how it breaks through, takes over and is transformed and contested in making choices about animal value. Building on empirical work on twenty farms, we draw attention to how genomic knowledge can exclude, become irrelevant to or hang in tension with other ways of knowing animals. We draw attention to how subtle and small shifts in the coordination of different breeding knowledge transform the role of farmers as they navigate the loss of expertise in unexpected ways and carve out new spaces for their agency and know-how. Similarly, the focus on modes of coordination highlights the transforming value of a dairy cow, as it is rendered multiple in the genomic era. Finally, we draw attention to how the different modes of coordinating of multispecies practices on farms are attached to a broader agricultural change—associated with transforming human-cow relationships, ethics and efficiency goals.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Yi Yu〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Recently, feminist geographers have been calling for research that contributes to a more ethical geography of care that is responsible to society. However, after thoroughly examining the care ethics of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, this paper argues that adhering to these ethics in caring relations actually exploits caregivers, instead of contributing to a more just society. Based on empirical research in Shanghai and Beijing, this paper examines the nature of caregivers’ work and provides three significant insights: (1) Care ethics embedded into job requirements demands that caregivers conduct not only bodily and “dirty” work, but also emotional work. (2) The involvement of care ethics in care work establishes different social relations between caregivers and care-recipients, which produces a different subjectivity that blurs the boundary between life and work. (3) The new subjectivity formed when operating under care ethics tends to put caregivers in a “prison of love” situation, where being ethical means being willing to work long hours for low wages. By theorizing the ethics of care work from the three aspects indicated above, this paper challenges the geography of care agenda that seeks to promote the care ethics of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): A.D. Rowe, D.E. Pitfield〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Social media has enabled people to do things differently across different campaigning spheres. For campaign groups, social media provides frequent interaction and an ability to quickly disseminate information (Harrington and Lewis, 2014; Poell and Van Dijck, 2015). But the incorporation of social media can cause challenges for existing campaign groups. This paper uses social network analysis to explore the challenges created by social media’s incorporation through an anti-airport expansion group associated with the ongoing campaign against Heathrow airport expansion; Airport Watch. NodeXL and Twitonomy were used to extract social media data and interviews were undertaken with the social media coordinator of Airport Watch to answer questions resulting from the social network analysis findings. The results demonstrate a difference in interaction within its Twitter social media networks whilst its Facebook page provides a clear indication of Airport Watch dominating influence and power over other users. Furthermore, the interviews enabled an understanding behind the reasons for the utilisation of social media as an information dissemination platform and how the chairperson and volunteer base do not have the experience to operate social media and thus cannot always respond instantly or even at all; something which is a requirement on social media. The implications of these results are also discussed in relation to future social media practice.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Austin Dziwornu Ablo〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Local content laws are essential for promoting positive synergies between extractive industries and broader economies. This paper is a critical evaluation of the employment effects of Ghana's local content law. It draws on the relational geography concept of scale – a constructed arena of activities that are highly interrelated – to examine the dynamic roles and relations between actors and how that shapes employment opportunities and outcomes for Ghanaians in the oil and gas industry. The paper shows that Ghanaians dominate onshore administrative positions and low echelon (ratings)/low skill positions offshore. There is a significant salary disparity between Ghanaians and expatriates due to poor regulation by the petroleum commission, corruption and undercutting by local recruitment agencies. It is imperative that the petroleum commission stringently enforce the regulation on skill transfer, introduce guidelines on salary and conditions of service as well as effectively monitor and regulate the activities of local recruitment agencies to limit their ability to undercut Ghanaian workers.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Monika Rut, Anna R. Davies〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Following a series of global food crises and an increasing dependence on food imports, the Singaporean government has begun to support local food production as a means to improve the sustainability of its food regime. This extends to the development of state-led ventures which support shared food growing in the city. In parallel, informal citizens' groups are experimenting with collaborative forms of food provisioning. Both types of initiatives utilise Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to facilitate their practices of shared growing and seek to reorient the current food regime onto a more sustainable pathway. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with two initiatives representative of both organisational positions, this paper critically examines the efficacy of using a transitions thinking approach to assess their actual and potential contribution to the disruption of the food regime in Singapore. The paper first reviews existing approaches to transitions thinking in order to distil insights for examining shared food growing initiatives in Singapore as niche projects. The broader socio-cultural and political context of Singapore's food system and the food growing niche projects which are emerging within it are then delineated, followed by a strategic niche management (SNM) analysis of the two initiatives. Ultimately, the paper makes two linked contributions: firstly, it diversifies the empirical foundations and the sectoral and geographical reach of sustainability transitions research. Secondly, it provides space for critical reflection on transitions thinking when applied beyond the Western liberal democratic settings from which it emerged.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 17 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rebecca Witter, Terre Satterfield〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Over the past decade, South Africa’s Kruger National Park has become embroiled in a rhino poaching crisis. In response, state authorities are applying military logics, personnel, training, and equipment to protect endangered black and threatened white rhinos. Many suspected poachers are Mozambicans, including those who are resident in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park (LNP). Based on a sequence of fieldwork conducted in the LNP between 2003 and 2016, we examine the relationship between this extremely tense and armed clash and the thousands of already socially and economically marginalized LNP residents targeted for resettlement as part of conserving rhino habitat. As they await relocation, the basic human security of residents has become deeply undermined by decreased access to basic services and environmental resources and the criminalization of their livelihoods. While much of the critical scholarship on anti-poaching focuses on the spectacular forms of violence that characterize rhino poaching, beneath this a more structural and “slower” form of violence persists. Seeking to develop an understanding of violence that extends beyond the spectacular, we argue that the cumulative losses and instability that have followed conservation created the conditions under which rhino poaching unfolded in the LNP. Communities found guilty of rhino poaching by mere association bear tremendous costs while the reduction of resettlement to an urgent need to control aberrant human behavior masks tremendous opportunity costs forgone. Better understandings of these costs and their links to violence need be taken seriously in any serious discussions of poaching response and poaching motivation.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Bartosz Bartkowski, Insa Theesfeld, Frauke Pirscher, Johannes Timaeus〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉CRISPR/Cas genome editing has the potential to revolutionise agricultural biotechnology and breeding. Also, it can contribute to advancing modern agriculture in multiple respects and lead to shifts in market structure. However, genetic engineering is a highly contested and controversial societal issue. Thus, CRISPR/Cas poses new questions regarding preferences of consumers and producers, food ethics and governance. Precision, easiness-to-use and low costs of CRISPR/Cas make it a viable alternative to conventional breeding. Yet, nature-identical GMOs blur the boundary between nature and technology and result in non-traceability of modifications, which calls for a rethinking of regulatory approaches. Finally, the speed with which the technology advances contrasts with the pace of related societal debates and regulatory processes.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Mirza Sadaqat Huda, Saleem H. Ali〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Multilateral cooperation on hydroelectric dams in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin has been suggested by a number of academic studies as an economically viable and environmentally friendly solution to the chronic energy insecurity of South Asian countries. Despite recent efforts to rejuvenate subregional cooperation on hydroelectric projects, interviews with policymakers in India, Bangladesh and Nepal have revealed that significant obstacles exist towards the realization of these projects, key among which are environmental issues which are often related to political challenges. Using data collected from fieldwork in three South Asian countries, this article argues that an environmental peacebuilding approach can adequately resolve some of the impediments to the realization of the proposed hydroelectric projects in the GBM basin. Such an approach can also reduce regional conflicts and incentivize integration. To this effect, the article attempts to invigorate innovative policies by outlining a framework for cooperation on hydroelectric projects which is underpinned by environmental peacebuilding mechanisms. The article also contributes to existing literature on environmental peacebuilding by analysing how hegemonic dominance can be a significant obstruction to the wider conceptualization of peace and how such obstacles can be overcome.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): 〈/p〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Matthew A. Zook, Joe Blankenship〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In less than a decade Bitcoin and the technology of blockchain – a cryptographically-secured, algorithmically-regulated, distributed-ledger – emerged as the 〈em〉enfant terrible〈/em〉 of the global economy. Ironically, as cryptocurrencies reached collective valuations of hundreds of billions of dollars the Bitcoin project failed in its original purpose as an alternative currency governed by code rather than trust. Not only has Bitcoin not become a popular means of global peer-to-peer transactions but the much vaulted purity of algorithmic governance is heavily entangled in social relations. This article reviews blockchain’s computer architectures, its connections to materiality and space and the complexity of its established practices. This analysis shows that rather than occupying an algorithmic place apart, blockchain contains multiple and conflicting agencies and is messily embedded in the code/space of materiality. Nevertheless the faith in the superiority of algorithmic governance has injected a powerful discourse in economies that has proven more important and disruptive than the actual practices of Bitcoin or blockchain.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Niina Kotavaara, Ossi Kotavaara, Jarmo Rusanen, Toivo Muilu〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉A high level of human capital is considered as an essential precondition for economic performance and regional competitiveness. However, university regions do not always manage to take advantage of the full potential of local higher education, as they are not always able to retain university students after graduation. Previous studies have presented remarkable regional differences concerning the share of graduates who remain in their university region after graduation. Hence, this paper has focused on geographical distribution and inter-regional mobility of university graduates in Finland. Long-term migration behaviour of all university graduates who completed their master’s or equivalent degree in 2000–2015 was analysed using geographic information systems (GIS). The main finding of the paper is that university graduates in Finland are rather immobile, as the most active mobility takes places when transitioning from university to their first job. After that, the geographical distribution of the graduates is rather stable, which contradicts the general assumption of high mobility of university-educated people. Further, the migration flows are directed mainly towards the four largest city regions of the country, especially to the capital city region. Cross-migration between city regions with similar population sizes and population growth rate is marginal, and it seems that the difference in the population size and growth between the graduation region and the destination region has to be large enough to exceed the threshold for migration. Retaining university graduates seems to be especially challenging for the smallest and declining university regions.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Joel E. Correia〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Despite recent advances to create a robust body of international and domestic indigenous rights law, indigenous peoples' rights are increasingly under threat across the Americas. Amidst these challenges, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has become an important legal avenue to support indigenous territorial claims that communities use to seek redress for human rights violations. This article examines the implementation politics regarding two Enxet-Sur indigenous communities that received favorable rulings from the IACtHR. The judgments state that Paraguay must restitute land for the Enxet-Sur as reparations for the socioenvironmental injustices and human rights violations both communities have endured. However, land restitution is complicated by histories of indigenous dispossession and contemporary politics shaped by racist and classist logics that frame private property as a productive resource and indigenous peoples outside of production. Thus, I untangle the shifting forms of power, representation, and land control that accompany struggles over the IACtHR judgments and their implementation in Paraguay. I weave interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary legal geography scholarship together with theories of legal abandonment and an ethnography of Enxet-Sur resistance to argue that the politics of implementing IACtHR judgments in Paraguay produces spatial and temporal liminality that positions Enxet-Sur peoples as rights-bearing subjects who are subject to the abandonment of their rights. Employing the symbolic notion of the crossroads alongside an analysis of Enxet-Sur struggles for rights at a material crossroads, the article shows that legal abandonment is not always the end of political struggle and can be a site of political possibility where indigenous self-determination is changing the practice of human rights.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Luise Porst, Patrick Sakdapolrak〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Currently two strands of research on migration are producing seemingly conflicting narratives on migration and its impact: one emphasizes potentiality while the other one highlights its link with precarity. Publications addressing the developmental impact of migration and its role for climate-change adaptation often portray migrants as agents of change and highlight the positive potential of migration for resilience. In contrast, research on migration and labour relations indicates the increasingly precarious travel-, working-, and living conditions of migrants – both domestic and international – and the adverse effects on migrants’ well-being. Our objective is to understand the interrelatedness of the seemingly disparate empirical evidence, which results from differences in both foci and socio-spatial scales in the analysis of migration and its impacts. To decipher the interlinkages between the two sides of migration and resilience, we propose a translocal approach, which systematically addresses socio-spatial dimensions and the simultaneity of mobility and situatedness of migrants and non-migrants across space. Our results show the interdependence of translocal connections (e.g. remittances), which reproduce migration motives, and the embeddedness of migrants at the place of destination – a process that is socially stratified and thereby articulates the disparate socio-economic wealth levels of migrants’ households of origin. We conclude that, both the type of embeddedness and the exposure to precariousness determine the extent to which their sojourn proves to be a risk or an opportunity for the migrants and their household of origin.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Glyn Williams, Umesh Omankuttan, J. Devika, Berit Aasen〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper looks at two governance challenges that sit behind global commitments to deliver ‘cities without slums’: under what conditions can participatory ideals be successfully transferred to housing redevelopment programmes, and under what conditions can participatory slum redevelopment trigger wider shifts towards inclusive urban governance? It does so by examining Indian national slum redevelopment policy and its implementation in Kerala’s capital city, Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram). Kerala’s track-record of participatory governance and the lead role given to its women-focused poverty alleviation mission, Kudumbashree, in implementing housing projects make it an ideal place in which to examine these questions, and their gender implications. Primary data focusing on two housing projects are used to contrast intended governance changes featuring female-centred community participation with their actual operation on the ground. Despite moves to foreground women’s engagement, both projects suffered from shortfalls in institutional design, the inevitable administrative complexity of housing delivery, and resistance from local power brokers. Given Kerala’s favourable starting conditions, these outcomes highlight the need for slum redevelopment to be based around a deeper analysis of power dynamics and the explicit articulation of an agenda for inclusion at a city-level if participation is to realise its transformative potential.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Jesse Montes, Shiva Raj Bhattarai〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper employs a “variegated governmentality” framework to analyse Bhutan’s well-known Gross National Happiness (GNH) agenda. GNH is both a philosophy and form of governance that the Royal Government uses to guide national policymaking. While previous research frames GNH in terms of Foucault’s early discussion of governmentality, it does so by establishing monolithic characterizations of governance rationalities and positioning them against one another. By contrast, we suggest that GNH can be more productively understood in terms of Foucault’s more recently translated work as embodying multiple governance rationalities situated alongside each other and locally understood as complementary. From this perspective, recent promotion of neoliberalism within the country can be understood not as an intrusion of “western rationality” upon a distinct GNH but rather as a component of the complex bricolage that GNH has become. We suggest that this produces an indigenous form of biopower, which we term ‘Buddhist Biopower’, appealing to a combination of Bhutanese tradition and religious belief to legitimize the state’s claim to govern in the interest of the population. A policy review of Bhutan’s GNH Index and Eleventh Five Year Plan is conducted to illustrate this analysis. In this way, the paper brings together research concerning multiple governmentalities and variegated neoliberalization to illuminate the complex ways that biopower can be exercised in the contemporary world.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Akiva Blander, Sarah Moser, Nufar Avni〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Recent scholarship on gated communities has challenged assumptions about the homogeneity of aesthetics and motivations for enclosure, emphasizing the place-bound origins and meanings attached to exclusionary development. It has also called for a conceptual shift in classifying gated communities from the ‘hard’ boundaries of a gate or wall to more ‘soft’ boundaries that achieve a similar outcome of limited or discouraged access. In this article, we examine urban luxury gated communities in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to demonstrate three main points. First, we explore how the unique and vastly different socioeconomic contexts and built characters of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv influence the aesthetics, marketing techniques, and residents of their respective gated communities. Second, we demonstrate how ideological and neoliberal interests have converged in new luxury gated communities, while emphasizing the diverse manifestations of exclusionary development within a single country. Third, luxury gated communities in downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv illustrate the need to shift attention away from an increasingly outdated notion of ‘hard’ gatedness towards accounting for the diversity and range of ‘soft boundaries’ that enclose and serve to privatize space while relying upon and perpetuating both local and national social and economic polarization.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rosanne de Vos, Izabela Delabre〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In this paper, we explore the gendered experiences of, and responses to, socio-economic and environmental change evoked by processes of land acquisition for oil palm plantation development. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, we examine the heterogeneous and differentiated nature of women’s lived experiences in resisting, accepting and enacting agrarian change. We find that impacts stretch beyond livelihood opportunities, access to land and resources, and labour conditions: plantation development also affects and changes social relations, leading to insecurity and anxiety and new forms of solidarity. Using an analytical framework of ‘spaces for participation’ we highlight how women are excluded from participation during negotiations and contestations around land acquisition for the development of oil palm plantations. Yet, women also challenge their exclusion by claiming space for participation in different ways, including by engaging in alternative, more subtle forms of resistance that frequently go unnoticed by policies and practices that aim to empower women.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Hyun Kim, David W. Marcouiller, Kyle M. Woosnam〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In this study, we explore cumulative exposure, climate justice, and flood risk with specific reference to community resilience, vulnerability, and social justice characteristics at the county-level within the U.S. Mississippi River basin from 1990 to 2009. Using a basic conceptual model of spatial resilience to climate risks, temporal lag effect of community capacity, urban and rural spatial classification, integrative cumulative exposure, and spatial clustering of risk, we examine spatial climate risk outcomes and the role of community resilience in reducing such risks. Our approach accounted for local social, economic, environmental, regulatory policy, and planning mitigation contexts. Results suggest that community social and ecological characteristics were influenced by flood losses and that social capital and climate justice characteristics combined with local proactive planning and policy measures lead to lower disaster losses and enhanced community resilience.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Tania Murray Li〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Plantations are back. Colonial-style large scale corporate monoculture of industrial crops on concession land is again expanding in the global south. The biggest expansion is in Indonesia, where oil palm already cover 11 million hectares, and 10–20 million more hectares are planned, most of it in plantation style. The land dimensions of renewed plantation expansion were thrust into public debate in 2008–9, when there was a spike in transnational land-acquisitions widely described as a global land-grab. The polemical term “grab” usefully drew attention to what was being taken away: customary land rights, diverse farming systems, and ecological balance. Drawing on ethnographic research in the oil palm zone of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, this article examines what happens 〈em〉after〈/em〉 the grab, highlighting the violence embedded in the material, social and political infrastructure that plantations install. Promises to reform plantations through regulation and certification ring hollow as law, government, and livelihoods are subordinated to plantation logics; a trajectory that worsens over time as plantation zones expand and become saturated, and everyone is locked in. Indonesia's plantations cannot be redeemed, hence they should not be expanded.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Laura Caplins, Sarah J. Halvorson, Keith Bosak〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This article examines the factors and processes that influence the collection of cordyceps (〈em〉Ophiocordyceps sinensis〈/em〉), an emerging alpine niche product in the Garhwal Himalaya of north India. Cordyceps, as it is commonly known, is a medicinal fungus that grows in high elevation meadows of vast areas of the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau. As one of the most valuable biological resources in the world, its collection and sale is highly lucrative for Garhwali families. Our investigation of cordyceps-related harvest and market interests reveals how mountain geographies and conservation policies interact to shape the ways in which local residents, the Bhotiya, engage with this unique alpine-based commodity. This unusual fungus is at the center of a livelihood strategy which is leveraged by nearly all study participants in this research setting, regardless of economic standing and social categories of difference. We also find that alpine meadows, and the natural capital contained within these spaces, are largely viewed as falling under customary resource governance frameworks, regardless of state-imposed conservation policies that dictate otherwise. In most cases, state conservation policies curtailing access to meadows are largely ignored, and local regimes governing alpine resources are followed. Our analysis demonstrates how resistance to exogenous conservation efforts has shifted in light of expanded livelihood choices, thereby suggesting the need for new interpretations of niche product development schemes and Indigenous governance regimes pertaining to alpine meadows.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Nikos Kapitsinis〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper explores the roots of firm relocation through the lens of the differentiation of economic and institutional framework across countries. Specifically, it examines movements of small- and medium-sized enterprises from Greece to Bulgaria, by comparing the pre- and post-crisis socio-economic conditions between the two countries. A cultural political economy perspective facilitates a firm-focused approach to the analysis of distinct political economies by examining the business decisions for relocating. Drawing upon original data from a fieldwork survey conducted in 2014, it is demonstrated that firm relocation from Greece to Bulgaria has recently increased due to the divergence of the socio-economic conditions between the two countries in the aftermath of the 2007 global economic crisis. Firm relocation was not perceived as a solely economic decision; rather, it reflected several aspects of the Greek political economy. Overall, this paper highlights the crisis-driven disruption of the differentiation of distinct political economies through the study of business mobility.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Julia M.L. Laforge, Stéphane M. McLachlan〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This research examines the agroecological learning processes of new farmers in Canada in order to understand the role of learning communities in transforming food systems. We consider how these learning communities represent new farmer engagement with agroecology and community-based economies as part of a global movement building alternatives to dominant capitalist and productivist food systems. In particular, we examine how the lack of formal education in agroecological alternatives in Canada is being overcome by these new farmers. Our results arise from interviews conducted in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba with new and aspiring farmers, mentors, and farmer trainers. Farmer learning networks were described and compared according to factors that include region, gender, years of experience, and production practices. These networks showed remarkable similarities across these categories, indicating the importance of informal networks and the relevance of relationships that support farmers on their learning journeys. Farmers placed the greatest value on social learning, followed by independent learning, whereas institutional learning had much less value. Farmers who did not know each other were learning in similar ways, indicating that they may be part of a broader agroecological movement which relies on global assemblages of neighbours, peers, online tools, and mentors. Farming knowledge, as a component of a reimagined, sustainable, and just food sovereignty movement, has the potential to change the way farming is practiced and to facilitate the emergence of alternative food systems in Canada and indeed the world.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Benjamin Feldman〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Geographic research about digital technologies sometimes frames software as a locus of social, economic, and political agency that successfully mediates a range of corporate, governmental, and institutional practices. But some digital technologies lack support from authoritative actors. How and why might some effects of software be modulated, challenged, or subverted, even if programmers’ and other stakeholders’ intentions are not malicious? This essay argues that a nuanced geographic understanding of software should encompass varieties of actors, regimes, interactions, and experiences that can limit and complicate use of everyday technologies in space and time, fortifying some digital assemblages but not others. Using content from 〈a href="http://reddit.com/" target="_blank"〉Reddit.com〈/a〉, I conducted an observational discourse analysis of the popular Augmented Reality (AR) game Pokémon-Go. Reddit users reflected on occasional moments when the game conflicted with governmental, institutional, cultural, and/or locational realities and decisions that revealed the contested and fragile nature of some software-mediated practices. Three thematic areas generated considerable audience reception and engagement, which I have termed “location,” “governance,” and “encounter.” They structure the analysis that follows, along with connections to AR research in engineering sub-disciplines. It may be useful for geographers to pay greater empirical attention to everyday moments when socio-spatial practices, regulatory logics (both formal and informal), and sub-cultural tensions limit what some digital technologies and their users can do in public space.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rik P. Huizinga, Bettina van Hoven〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The Dutch government currently underemphasises the interaction between refugees and 〈em〉place〈/em〉 in the context of refugee spatial dispersal policy. This paper seeks a more detailed understanding of refugee integration by looking at opportunities for, and obstacles to, belonging within the ethnically homogeneous context of the Northern Netherlands. We draw on in-depth and walking interviews to provide a rich illustration of the daily routines and activities of ten Syrian male refugees in and around their residential neighbourhoods. Our findings highlight that a sense of belonging is grounded and embodied in space and place, and emphasise the role of everyday neighbourhood places as sites where refugee (non-)belonging emerges through social (non-)encounters and (non-)interaction with others. Daily life in transitory neighbourhood spaces provides opportunities for refugees to develop and maintain social relationships, asserting their presence and belonging in neighbourhood life. However, at the same time, refugees are demarcated as others because the different time geographies of refugees and existing residents form barriers to establishing nodes of encounter. Their otherness is further accentuated as potential places of encounter are often legally or economically inaccessible. Due to these experiences, or at least in part, refugees develop ‘new places’ built around shared memories, stories and food practices from their home country. Consequently, we argue for a more constructive understanding of migrant communities and suggest allowing multiple spaces of refugee belonging. Our study shows that achieving belonging is a multifaceted, nuanced and relational process, and one that is undervalued in the context of refugee dispersal in the Netherlands.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Ahmad Maryudi, Rodd Myers〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Over the past few decades, transnational and supranational market-based forest governance systems have been developed to address the complex problems associated with deforestation, by improving the legality and sustainability of timber traded in global markets. This is catalysed by the increasing global production and consumption of timber products and increasing sensitivity of interest groups to how timber products are produced. A broad range of actors is involved in global production networks. This paper discusses how hierarchies and networks of power across the timber production network are encountered and negotiated. More specifically, it investigates the power constellations of wood furniture actors in Indonesia, nested within global production networks: who holds the power, how power is gained and maintained, and who wins and loses over time. Using the case of the timber legality assurance system in the context of the European Union Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative, we demonstrate that legality verification in Indonesia is both entrenching pre-existing inequitable power relations while producing new modes of elite capture. Legality verification requires new knowledge and additional costs that are sometimes beyond the capacity of certain (particularly smaller) furniture manufacturers operators. This has driven a new practice of renting out FLEGT licenses by larger producers/manufacturers to smaller ones in the country. Although the practice implies potential risks (e.g. fines), large companies in Indonesia manage risk by drawing from pre-existing patronage relations. They also appear to find the risk worthwhile, as it produces financial gain but moreover, a new form of control over the market. Meanwhile, small operators and artisanal producers that still aspire to global markets face disproportionate challenges to engage in legality and are becoming more vulnerable as a result of new legality measures.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Laura Pottinger〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Sharing economies hold significant potential to unsettle dominant capitalist economic relations and to inspire more responsible and collaborative ways of utilising resources. Recent, prolific writing on the topic in geography, however, tends to prioritise novel, digitally mediated and often for-profit iterations of the ‘on-demand’ economy over the lived experience of sharing and its relationship with activist praxis. Centring on the everyday, ‘analogue’ practice of sharing in communities of gardeners concerned with conserving agricultural biodiversity and reviving the skill of seed saving, this paper interrogates the relationship between mundane performances of sharing, the circulation of material items and the micro-political. With reference to original ethnographic research with gardeners involved in seed conservation and exchange in the UK, I argue sharing is a way to understand economy through everyday practice, offering opportunities for the enactment of economic diversity and critique of neoliberal food and seed systems. Via the themes of 〈em〉growing〈/em〉 and 〈em〉guarding〈/em〉, I show that the circulation of seeds and garden produce can galvanise diverse economic dispositions, communities of connected growers and cultures of non-monetary exchange. Sharing is conceptualised not as a distinctly altruistic, non-reciprocal social practice but as ‘generous exchange’: a practice and discourse that draws together and renders legible a range of interwoven practical concerns, enthusiasms, and material and interpersonal relationships. I suggest it is vital to interrogate the mundane, material dimensions of diverse sharing economies in order to understand the role of reciprocity in transforming relationships with natural resources and commodities, and in generating temporally and spatially extended practices of care and communality.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Elizabeth Duncan, Raewyn Graham, Phil McManus〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Traditionally, the concept of SLO has been applied to resource-based industries, when companies seek legitimacy because their practice is seen to cause environmental and/or social harms. Recent use of SLO has extended to animal-based industries to address animal welfare concerns. A framework for discussion of such welfare issues is offered by considering SLO in relation to the Australian thoroughbred racing industry, as an example of an animal-based sporting institution. We focus on the visible issue of whipping horses; exploring how visibility as a factor impacts on four key dimensions of the SLO – legitimacy, trust (procedural), transparency and communication. Concluding, when a SLO is under threat, it is often a result of tension between transparency and communication, which in turn impact trust and legitimacy. Furthermore, our findings illustrate that it is the visibility of practices that are seen to cause ‘harm’ that have the potential to trigger a tipping point for a SLO. Our conclusions contribute to an understanding of how the ethical framework of human-animal relations is constructed and to debates about the potential and limitations of applying the concept of SLO in a range of animal-based industries.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Andrew Telford〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Whether formulated as a security risk, a form of climate adaptation, a legal dilemma, or an issue of (in)justice, the debate on climate change and migration draws upon multiple, oftentimes contradictory, discourses. This paper examines the role of racial identities in debates about the security implications of climate-induced migration (CIM). The paper proposes a reconceptualization of ‘racial logics’: a form of discursive construction that connects naturalized assumptions about racialized Others with possible outcomes in conditions of future climate insecurity. The paper argues that ‘Muslim’ and ‘African’ migrant populations – in the context of possible CIM from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to the EU – are racialized with a potential capacity for radicalization and terrorism. Constructed as racialized Others, ‘Muslim’ and ‘African’ migrant populations could face exclusionary containment policies in climate-insecure futures. The article concludes with a call to challenge racial logics and the restrictive, unjust possibilities they suggest for future climate security politics.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Yunan Xu〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉 〈p〉While most studies focus on large-scale foreign corporate-dominated land grabbing, relatively small-scale land acquisitions initiated by local villagers receive much less attention. This reflects that the scale, the identity of investors and a simplified role of villagers tend to take precedence in analyses of land grabbing. However, the common dichotomies of “large vs small”, “outside vs local actors” and “victim vs grabber” might be problematic and even misleading, considering the case of Guangxi.〈/p〉 〈p〉In China’s Guangxi province, with the rise of the industrial tree planation (ITP) sector, some villagers have gained control over the land from local or nearby village collectives and have become owners of ITPs. Over the course of these practices, grabbers are not from “outside”, but “local villagers” themselves. They are then able to control the land, which was originally collectively used and benefit from it at the expense of their neighbours and kin, under certain contexts. Such land control change is called 〈em〉intimate land grabbing〈/em〉.〈/p〉 〈p〉This case demonstrates that: (1) small-scale land grabs are not necessarily less significant than large-scale ones; (2) land grabs dominated by local actors sometimes have more serious adverse impacts on local communities; and (3) villagers can also be grabbers, rather than simply victims, or otherwise resisters. In bringing the issue of intimate land grabbing into the debate, this paper argues that the importance of a land grab is neither represented by its scale nor the identity of the grabber(s), but by its 〈em〉de facto〈/em〉 consequences, especially the distribution of the costs and benefits. This piece hopes to highlight the importance of 〈em〉dynamics of social relations around land and production processes〈/em〉 in analyses of land grabbing and contribute to a fuller picture of global land grabbing.〈/p〉 〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Tom Perreault〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper is a commentary on Tania Li's paper, “After the land grab: Infrastructural violence and the 'mafia system' in Indonesia's oil palm plantation zone.” In her paper, Tania Li considers plantations as a spatial, politico-economic and socionatural assemblage. Drawing on her recent work on African palm plantations in Indonesia, Li asks not only what is lost with the establishment of plantation, but also and perhaps more importantly, what is newly produced? The present paper notes the striking similarities between plantations and mines as territorialized sites of capital accumulation conditioned on radical ecological and social simplification.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 2 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Michele Lancione〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The paper provides a nuanced reading of the ways in which conditions of precarity arising from forced evictions are ‘made’ and ‘unmade’ in their unfolding, offering a way to appreciate their performative politics. Grounded in an activist ethnography of evictions against Roma people in Bucharest, Romania, the work provides a reading of urban precarity as not only an embodied product, but also a producer of the urban political. It advances an innovative methodology to investigate the politics of urban precarity, which focuses around four intersecting processes: the historical pre-makings of precarity; the discursive and material displacement of its in-making; embodied resistance as a form of un-making; and authoritarian responses as its re-making. Through its theoretical and methodological insights, the paper contributes to scholarship interested in a critical understanding of embodiment, politics, and urban precarity beyond the analysed case.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Laurie Guimond, Alexia Desmeules〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This article studies the everyday lives of Indigenous workers at the Romaine River hydroelectric project, in the heart of the Innu ancestral territory in northern Quebec (Canada), to better understand their place in northern resource development. Using a qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews with workers and key players, both indigenous and non-indigenous, we draw on three perspectives to examine the actual situation of the indigenous people at the construction site: employment; intercultural space of encounter; and sense of place. Our analysis reveals that professional, social and spatial exclusionary practices remain, despite integration measures, awareness-raising efforts, services and infrastructures dedicated to Indigenous workers and likely intercultural interactions. The numerical minority of Indigenous workers, the undervalued jobs they occupy, the many socio-professional difficulties they encounter, the hard adaptation to lifestyle on the worksite, prejudice, discrimination and racism confine them to the margins of these major projects. Part of a wider critical reflection on neocolonialism, our analysis of the workers’ everyday lives questions the current neoliberal resource development model in indigenous territories.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 3 May 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Yamini Narayanan, Sumanth Bindumadhav〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉India’s rapid urbanisation and biodiversity decline together have critical global implications in the Anthropocene. However, the complex socio-religious dimensions of urban biodiversity are overlooked in current planning. This paper casts animals as vital components of urban societies in India to argue for species-inclusive zoöpolises as viable cities of the future. It proposes ‘posthuman cosmopolitanism’ as a planning ethic that extends pluralism to multispecies in the Anthropocene, cognisant of the socio-cultural and religious frames in which animals are enmeshed in India. These narratives have significant implications in the Kali Yuga or the apocalyptic cosmological epoch, which Hindus believe is currently underway. Akin to the Anthropocene, human action bears an exceptional significance in the events of the Kali Yuga, which is believed to be a precursor to human, ecological, and even planetary annihilation. The paper examines human-snake conflict, one of the most widespread human-animal encounters in Indian cities. Snakes play vital roles in urban ecologies and religio-cultural narratives in India. Simultaneously, religious and social perceptions of serpents contribute to a fear of snakes. Fundamental to snake preservation in the Indian urban Anthropocene is an expansion of diversity to ‘multinatural diversity’, and a reconfiguration of human-snake relations in socio-cultural frames.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 8 February 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Rebecca Hui, James L. Wescoat〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Drinking water programs in India treat urban and rural areas separately, generally neglecting the special conditions of settlements referred to as peri-urban or rurban. We show how the historiography of peri-urban areas acquired negative connotations of poor water and sanitation services while rurban places have come to be associated with positive well-disciplined conditions. Previous research on drinking water programs has taken two paths, one of which generates rigorous qualitative case studies that criticize neoliberal policies, while the other employs larger scale quantitative methods to advance neoliberal policy reforms. This paper adopts a hybrid pragmatic approach to visualize strengths and weaknesses of water and sanitation services in urbanizing rural areas of Pune district, Maharashtra. We re-assess demographic definitions of the rural-urban dichotomy in India, distance-based criteria used in Maharashtra, and Census of India water and sanitation data. A combination of field research and GIS mapping identified four main peri-urban patterns in Pune district: (1) megacity fringe; (2) highway corridor development; (3) industrial zones; and (4) block town expansion. We show that while water supply has improved in some rurban areas, sanitation and drainage problems have not kept up. A second pattern of deficiency was observed in transitional towns of 5000 persons. Annually updated water and sanitation datasets at the national and state levels will make this pragmatic combination of GIS mapping and field research approaches valuable for visualizing peri-urban and rurban conditions at the district scale of water governance and planning in India.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 8 June 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Wen-I Lin, Shu-Yi Chiu〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Creative City Building (CCB) agendas have become a global policy trend for re-governing urban decline. Taipei represents a postcolonial and global South city, in which the universal CCB agenda is regarded as a win-win solution for its long-standing crises. This paper shows that the exercise of the CCB agenda in Taipei: a not-so-global/non-western city represents the pursuance of a new governmentality, relative vision and toolkit produced from and embedded in logics of cities in the global North. We point out that research on CCB to-date tends to underplay engagement with debates on governmentality. We provide both theoretical and empirical reflections of the political rationality, specific technologies of governance and related social exclusion in Taipei’s practice of CCB agenda. While highlighting the usefulness of the framework of governmentality, we suggest that such a framework has greater explanatory power when complemented by critiques of universal rationality, (post-) colonial governmentality and modernisation. Empirically, we develop a critical illustration of the process and characteristics of transferring universal rationality and agenda of CCB in Taipei’s context. Consequently, this paper argues that behind the rhetoric of being inclusive, diverse or tolerant, the practice of CCB in Taipei instead reproduces the closure of cultural production and social exclusion.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 18 March 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Clayton Whitt〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In the floodplains of Bolivia’s western highlands, or 〈em〉Altiplano〈/em〉, farmers, herders, and fishers maintain their livelihoods at water-land interfaces that are riddled with disaster risk. This paper draws on 13 months of fieldwork in the region as well as contemporary press accounts to explore water-land disasters in the Desaguadero River floodplain and Lake Poopó watershed. My analysis builds on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythm to articulate a “politics of cyclic dissonance” – struggles and negotiations surrounding cyclical relationships like rainfall and annual flooding that break apart and leave dangerous consequences in their wake. I analyze two recent cases in Bolivia related to climate change taken from opposite extremes of the water cycle. The first case is the drying of Lake Poopó in 2015, an event that garnered headlines around the world as a representation of a drastic impact from climate change. The second case is the struggle of farmers in a community in the Lake Poopó watershed to manage flood irrigation in their canal systems without becoming victims of flooding themselves. Both cases illustrate how managing cyclic dissonance is a matter of negotiation, both between people representing different communities, between political constituencies and political leaders, and even between people and the environment, but such politics also works to obscure solutions to environmental problems that emerge from desynchronized cycles.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 8 September 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Michelle Duffy, Michael Gallagher, Gordon Waitt〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In this paper, we aim to better understand what mobilises people into being and becoming named as leaders in sustainability in the places where they live. Our premise is that action for sustainability originates with passionate individuals who lead action at the local level. We present our analysis of a walking sensory ethnography conducted in 2012 undertaken as part of exploratory research on adaptation to climate change in the coastal town of Dunbar, Scotland. We sought to understand the complex, embodied and sensorial ways in which places, and our experiences of connection to places, are constituted. The starting point for our discussion is the recognition of the intricate, deeply entangled relations between the human and nonhuman world that have historically been obscured by western understandings of a pristine nature set apart from the world of human culture. Building on literature under the umbrella of “Anthropocene feminisms”, we suggest that a visceral approach as conceptualised in the work of Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2008) and Hayes-Conroy and Martin (2010) offers embodied knowledge as a radically relational view of the world that allows an entry into the ways in which the micro-scale of the body intersects with the global scale of political praxis. Our detailed discussion of one of our research participants provides an example as to how this individual came to feel connected through a shared sense of consciousness with the human and non-human. In this exploration, we found possibilities in thinking beyond the otherwise paralysing narratives of anthropogenic climate change. Our argument is that this focus brings to the fore the transformative capacity of viscera, emotional and affective responses to anthropogenic climate change, and that these are integral to hope, albeit this is a hope that needs to consider capacity and vulnerability in new ways.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 12 April 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Fons van Overbeek, Peter Andrew Tamás〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉 〈p〉Those who have settled in Bukavu’s periphery in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo cannot rely on statutory title or practices to secure their claims to land. Land is scarce, institutional competition rampant, and predation endemic. Land administration in Bukavu is a paradigmatic case of hybridity: there are a diversity of interpenetrating but competing governance structures, sets of rules, logics of behavior, and technologies by which claims to land may be secured.〈/p〉 〈p〉Motivated by hybridity’s promise of moving beyond normative and often functionalist preoccupations, this study departs from the prevailing actor-oriented approaches on claim-making and instead focuses on the hybridizing, regulatory mechanisms through which subjects become able to make claims to land. For this study we use an ethnographic understanding of Foucault’s Governmentality as that framework allows us to examine subjectivation of land claimants: the technologies, conditions, and effects of the processes of subject formation.〈/p〉 〈p〉In this paper we examine subjectivation within the urban associations which support their members’ claims to land. Each example discussed offers both a description of the technologies by which subjects able to author claims are formed and illuminates distinct aspects of our theoretical framework, governmentality. When looking at claim-making through subjectivation, we find that framework well-fitted to explore ways in which hybridity in land administration in Bukavu may restrict the progress of the most poor by making visible the costs of becoming a subject who may make a valid claim to land.〈/p〉 〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 14 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Zareen Pervez Bharucha〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉 〈p〉This article traces the evolution of water scarcity narratives in the Indian drylands.〈/p〉 〈p〉In doing so, it shows how the politics of water scarcity has remained undergirded by a persistent and ubiquitous framing of climate-driven scarcity framings, which predates widespread recognition of anthropogenic climate change as a pressing concern. Using a combination of existing sources and analysis of key national and state level policy documents, I show how scarcity-focused narratives have remained stable over time and across the range of policies and sectors.〈/p〉 〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Sophie Pascoe〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper traces the relations and frictions that make up the institutional assemblage for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program in Papua New Guinea (PNG). By engaging with REDD+ using assemblage-thinking – a theoretical orientation and method that focuses on relationality, heterogeneity and emergence – this paper interrogates the dominance of scalar discourses around climate change and environmental governance. While scalar discourses predefine categories and hierarchies (such as the ‘global,’ ‘national’ and ‘local’), assemblage-thinking offers a method to resist such framings and reimagine relations between power and spatiality. Through institutional ethnography and discourse analysis, this paper critically examines how scalar discourses become dominant and how they translate into environmental governance projects, specifically the Central Suau REDD+ Pilot Project. By using assemblage-thinking to problematise scalar discourses, we can see how such discourses may reinscribe inequalities by defining arenas of governance that work to exclude certain groups.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 16 December 2017〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Franz Krause〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉 〈p〉This article argues for conceptualising the land-water nexus not primarily in spatial terms, but above all as a set of spatio〈em〉temporal〈/em〉 rhythms of increasing and decreasing wetness and fluidity. By investigating human engagement with water and land as rhythms, the corresponding and conflicting dynamics of particular places becoming – for longer or shorter periods – land, water or a mixture of both can be traced as an evolving web of relationships between human imaginations and practices, and the materialities of water, mud, sediment, dams, floodgates, etc.〈/p〉 〈p〉The article illustrates this approach with two brief ethnographic examples from northern Europe: In the depopulated Estonian Soomaa wetlands, some of the few remaining inhabitants are in the process of redefining unruly fluctuating water as a tourism destination. In doing so, however, these tourism operators are finding themselves and their “products” caught up in volatile and complicated spatiotemporal dynamics, including the difficulty to predict flooding and to coordinate high water with their potential customers’ spare time, which is bound to working/school weeks and public holidays. On the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, water flows are not only conditioned by precipitation and seasons, but also – through an intricate hydropower infrastructure – by the electricity market, triggering continued disputes about appropriate spatiotemporal rhythms in the land-water nexus.〈/p〉 〈p〉Seasonality and hydroelectricity generation point to the inherent rhythmicity of the land-water nexus, which is significant not only because it reflects the experience of people inhabiting and engaging with their in-between environments. A rhythms approach can also de-centre the (often illusive) quest for 〈em〉what〈/em〉 the water-land nexus is, and instead focus on 〈em〉how〈/em〉 this nexus continually comes into being and is negotiated by both its inhabitants and other people. This argument builds on anthropological thinking about temporality and materiality, and indicates how the two must be combined for better understanding how human life relates to the land-water nexus.〈/p〉 〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Nathan Clay〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Agricultural intensification has long been a core focus of agrarian change research. Work demonstrating the capacity of rural societies to innovate in the face of scarce resources has helped counter and complicate the neo-Malthusian narrative that scarcity causes land degradation. Intensification has also featured prominently in agricultural development programs and policies aiming to spur economic growth in the global South. Intensification agendas drove Green Revolutions in Asia and Mexico in the 1960s and underwrite ongoing development efforts throughout sub-Saharan Africa. These large-scale intensification programs rely on adoption of ‘improved’ seed, chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and agro-engineering to increase yields of staple crops. These external visions of intensification often fit poorly with cultural-ecological realities of smallholder farming systems where producers pursue locally-viable intensification strategies tailored to complex social-environmental systems. However, little work has explored how various intensification models can overlap and hybridize. In this paper, I explore intensification as a social-environmental process with empirical material from Rwanda, where a recent large-scale agricultural intensification campaign intersects with centuries of smallholder-led intensification. I demonstrate that these polarized strategies of intensification converge as tradeoffs for some and synergies for others, leading to uneven rural livelihood outcomes. Considering agricultural intensification as a plural, dynamic, and contested social-environmental process situated within broader currents of agrarian change helps nuance binary depictions of intensification programs as purely success or failure. Moreover, understanding how modes of intensification hybridize may help enhance justice in Green Revolutions by facilitating more constructive dialogue among smallholder communities, researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: November 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 96〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Jonathan Rigg〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉In this commentary I reprise the case that Li makes in her paper and ask whether there is scope for ‘redemption’ in the totalising system that she so powerfully describes. With reference to early work on the Green Revolution in rice in Asia, I ask whether it is not the plantation system or crop that creates the remorseless conditions she describes, but the geographies and the development time in which they are embedded.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 28 March 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Kolar Aparna, Joris Schapendonk〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Hospitality as a notion has emerged as a critical philosophical category in human geography for addressing various issues around asylum migration and citizenship. In this paper, we identify two major limitations of empirical studies focusing on hospitality in this context. First, empirical studies tend to investigate relations between pre-known guests (“migrants”) and pre-defined hosts (states, local organisations, activist movements, churches), thereby overlooking shifting dynamics of social relations. Second, although critical geographers have emphasised a relational sense of place in their empirical discussions on hospitality (in the context of asylum migration), observations are mostly place-based and focus on how different cities or organisations provide hospitality (or not). To re-think hospitality, we instead start from negotiating our own practices as researchers in relation with actors in the field of refugee support, actively forging and navigating shifts in these relations, thereby creating action research processes under the title of ‘Asylum University’. In so doing, we re-position Derrida’s concept of ‘cities of refuge’ in the in-between spaces of shifting roles, (un)certain (im)mobilities, border-crossings and tensed emotional geometries that intertwine in an entangled web of hospitality, in ways that are yet-to-be-known. In other words, we challenge researchers that investigate hospitality in the context of asylum migration to apply a process geographical approach that actively follows guest-host relations (including the ones they become entangled with) instead of freezing them in time and space. This allows for an approach that is more self-critical and sensitive to what we call “asylumscapes” - the dynamic processes of refugee hospitality.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Levon Epremian, Cathrine Brun〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉Initiatives designed to increase transparency have become a tool for improving governance and fighting corruption in the natural resource sector. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is an international organisation that administers a voluntary standard for natural resource revenue transparency. In line with liberal democratic ideals, EITI aims to empower citizens through the dissemination of information supporting governance improvements, public scrutiny and accountability in the sharing of benefits from resource extraction. Adopting a critical lens to transparency, the article examines EITI's efforts to disseminate natural resource revenue data in rural Liberia. By focusing on how transparency is performed through dissemination workshops, the article creates a nuanced understanding of transparency by analysing how it is operationalised and practiced in encounters with people in areas where resource extraction takes place. The paper begins with an overview of relevant research and the conceptual framing of the study focusing on the performance 〈em〉in〈/em〉 and 〈em〉of〈/em〉 transparency and continues with a discussion of EITI internationally and in Liberia. Then follows a discussion of the ethnographic approach - travelling with the Liberian EITI-team on their dissemination trip. Through the analysis the article enables an understanding of the workings of transparency by examining how practitioners perform transparency through the performance 〈em〉in〈/em〉 the workshops: the structure and orchestration of the workshops; and the performance 〈em〉of〈/em〉 transparency by understanding the ways in which the workshops become spectacles that help to legitimise, rationalise and camouflage the fragmented and contradictory realities of extractive industries and their implications for people.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Scott Orford〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉There has been a growing academic and policy debate in the UK on the relationship between school choice, educational performance and house prices. School choice and the chances of attending a good school are important as it relates strongly to educational attainment and qualifications, University entry and access to the labour market. This debate was reinvigorated recently when the Conservative Party announced that state schools which select using academic ability (grammar schools) may be able to expand in England for the first time in decades. Some commentators argued that this may exacerbate and re-enforce existing inequalities in the education system by allowing wealthy parents to ‘buy’ into a particular grammar school via the housing market, leading to “selection by mortgage” as well as by academic ability. This research investigates the extent to which state schools are capitalised into house prices using Buckinghamshire in England as a case study. It differentiates between grammar schools and all ability state schools, using a novel multi-level specification of the repeat sales model. It concludes that single sex boys’ grammar schools attract a higher premium than single sex girls’ grammar schools and that in general, grammar schools attract a higher premium than all ability state schools. These premiums are a function of educational attainment and demand for places and tend to vanish once these have been taken into account, although for a small number of schools notable premiums remain, perhaps reflecting school characteristics such as reputation not captured in the models.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 6 October 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Alison Stenning〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper seeks to explore the experiences of recession and austerity in a small number of low-to-middle income households in North Tyneside. To try to make sense of the diverse and intimate ways that austerity is thought about, felt, related to, engaged with, and contested, the paper connects a psychosocial perspective to a focus on everyday social geographies and insists on the relation between the psychic and the social. It starts by exploring the coordinates of a psychosocial geography, outlining and building on the growing work in psychosocial studies and connecting this to an explicitly geographical perspective. It then sets out the focus of this particular study – low-to-middle income families in North Tyneside – placing them in the narrative context of the squeezed middle, both sketching the demographic outlines of this cohort and interpreting the squeezed middle as a psychosocial category. At this stage, it also describes and reflects on the research process, one designed to access the psychosocial dimensions of living with austerity. The focus then shifts to narrating and exploring the researched households experiences of austerity, framing them through a focus on ‘big things’ and ‘little things’, following the language and sense-making of my participants, and at every stage engaging with the psychosocial aspects of these experiences, attachments, values, practices, spaces, senses and times that need to be understood by holding together the psychic and the social. These experiences are drawn together in a discussion section which attempts to map the psychosocial landscapes of austerity and which concludes by making connections to wider psychosocial framings that signpost further explorations.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 25 September 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Samuel Strong〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as ‘actually existing austerity’—referring to the uneven ways through which austerity is felt, negotiated, embodied and contested in the varied spatial tapestry of everyday life. Through theorisation of the contemporary operation of food banking in the UK, it will be argued that the gaps in provisioning (in this case, of food) left by welfare reform and state spending cuts in the UK under the guise of austerity are engendering new forms of responsibility that are unevenly distributed and performed—often by those already excluded, marginalised and impoverished. This localisation of responsibility has crucial implications for how austerity becomes embodied and negotiated, as well as the unequal material implications it holds for different people and places. This paper concludes by arguing for a future research agenda concerning actually existing austerity, signalling the need for 'thicker' and more grounded accounts of austerity at scales beyond the nation-state and/or city alone.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: Available online 12 December 2017〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Joel Wainwright, Bram Büscher〈/p〉

Description: 〈p〉Publication date: December 2018〈/p〉 〈p〉〈b〉Source:〈/b〉 Geoforum, Volume 97〈/p〉 〈p〉Author(s): Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Martin Fonck〈/p〉 〈div xml:lang="en"〉 〈h5〉Abstract〈/h5〉 〈div〉〈p〉The current boom of private conservation reveals a strong alignment between neoliberal processes of dispossession and environmentalism. Yet, private conservation can also serve as the setting for the development of critical environmental agendas raised by NGOs. Based on ethnographic research in the southern Chilean Andes, this article shows that dispossession and collaboration are intertwined features of private conservation. These two processes are engendered by changes affecting not only farmers’ access to natural resources, but also their specific forms of engagement with landscape constitutive of senses of belonging. Property constitutes a compelling technology in the enforcement of wilderness enclosures and yet it can offer means for farmers to mediate between conservation and farming concerns. Attention to mediations and property exposes the ambivalences of private conservation under neoliberalism.〈/p〉〈/div〉 〈/div〉