Interrogating the uses of culture in the politics of diversity: a case from South Korea

This article seeks to critically examine the ascendancy of culture in the arena of politics by analysing emergent multicultural discourses and policy development in South Korea as an illuminating case study. In exploring various discursive modalities of culture in the politics of diversity, it investigates how culture is identified as a source of social problems and concurrently employed as their solution. Combining discourse analytic and in-depth interviewing techniques, the article focuses on analysing how female marriage migrants and their children are constructed as cultural other, and how the language of culture is deployed to divert attention from issues of power and structural inequalities. In particular, it examines the discourse of ‘cultural deficiency’ and ‘cultural competence’ used in relation to migrants, and assesses the proposed conceptual shift in cultural policy development from multiculture to cultural diversity.     

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

ABSTRACT

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace – Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly cultureless Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are ‘real’ cities because they have ‘civilization’ and ‘history.’ By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as ‘not Dubai.’ This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy.     

The Politics of Spatial Policy and Governance in Post-1990 Hungary: The Interplay Between European and National Discourses of Space

There is now a wealth of literature discussing how regional development and spatial planning practices in Central Eastern Europe have been shaped through the alignment with EU policy frameworks. However, scholars have tended to study governance dynamics in terms of adaptation and learning, paying thus little attention to how spatial policy change is inherently interlinked with the political contestation of nation-state spaces. This paper proposes to address this lack by combining insights from political economic work on state spatial restructuring and discourse theory. From this perspective, the institutionalization of spatial policies is examined as a political process in which particular understandings of space become seen legitimate and stabilized depending on how well they fit existing discourses. The paper demonstrates the added value of this approach through a case study of spatial policy change in post-1990 Hungary, and argues that the approach is more generally applicable to examine shifts in spatial policies and to address concerns with the increase in uneven development at different scales.     

‘The Official Feast’: cultural tensions in U.K. carnival

Abstract

This paper reveals how U.K. street carnival is located within policy discourses that facilitate notions of creative economy, inter-place competition and the representation of institutionally-preferred versions of local, regional and national place-identity. The paper draws on ethnographic research within two community town carnivals and the professional Battle for the Winds carnival performances that launched the 2012 Olympic sailing at Weymouth. It considers the evolution of policy-driven carnival vocabularies that were designed to articulate preferred ‘Jurassic Coast’ and Olympic place identities for the south-west U.K. during 2012, and their effect on two vernacular, community street carnivals in East Devon and Dorset. The paper exposes the cultural tension between these vernacular events and the ‘official feast’ of Jurassic Coast and Olympic carnival, in terms of their performance of contradictory place-identities and contested notions of artistic community. It describes the popular challenge to aesthetic hegemony that these community carnivals presented during 2012. Finally, the author argues for a reassessment of the artistic value of vernacular carnivals, and affirms their status as a culture of resistance that creates alternative, sometimes inconvenient, symbolic constructions of community and place to those preferred by institutional actors operating within a neo-liberal discourse of inter-place competition.     

Rethinking culture and development: the culture-led community development project in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This study examines the use of culture in South Korean community development by analyzing four cases of ‘Initiative for Creating Culture Communities in Everyday Life’ (ICCE) and their development discourses. Effectively mobilized by the state during the period of industrialization and modernization that began in the 1960s, culture has been utilized for social development by the South Korean government since the 2000s. The complex relationship between development and culture in terms of economic and social approaches is reflected in the development discourses of ICCE projects. Indeed, as an alternative to previous economic approaches, these projects show that the government still strongly intervenes in social development through symbolic power. To examine this process, we administered a semi-structured questionnaire and held in-depth interviews with eight members of the government-led ICCE project, including its practitioners, artists, and residents. This study finds that despite its efforts to decrease direct intervention in the development of these societies, government power is strongly exercised in symbolic form through discursive practices. We thus suggest that to prevent a specific participant from unilaterally possessing symbolic power in the development process, the government should create an environment in which various agents can participate in the development discourse.     

Urban Policy Mobilities: The Case of Turin as a Smart City

This article analyses urban policy mobilities taking into consideration the idea of the smart city, which is currently a sort of leitmotif used in many cities within the framework of discourses on urban development. More specifically, this article offers an analysis concerning the circulation and implementation of the idea of the smart city in Turin, Italy. It investigates the actors, processes and networks involved in the mobilization and reproduction of the idea, as well as the mechanisms, concerning the embedding of the smart city discourse in the institutional fabric of the city of Turin, Italy. It also emphasizes how urban policy mobility can develop even without processes of “imitation” and “adaptation” of best practices from other cities.     

Senegalese street‐sellers,racism and the discourse on ‘irregular trade’ in Rimini

The coast of Emilia‐Romagna is a favourite destination for the seasonal movement of Senegalese street‐sellers. It is no coincidence that Rimini hosted one of the first racist demonstrations of shopkeepers in 1989. The situation has worsened over time. In fact, the local public discourse on immigration never developed autonomously but has always been connected to the discourse expressing the main concern of the town: irregular trade. Yet discourses do not work alone and are linked also to social relations and to economic trends such as the restructuring of the local retailing economy and the tourist sector. This article therefore shows how racism in Rimini is the fluid product of, first, the overlapping of discourses about differing social phenomena which shape the dominant discourse on immigration; and, secondly, the identification with this dominant discourse that has emerged from everyday social relations and institutional practices. The latter part of the article presents elements of the counter‐discourse, based on observations and conversations carried out with Senegalese immigrants in a summer camp outside Rimini. Finally, a proposal by the mayor of Rimini to exclude non‐resident immigrants coming from outside the province is analysed as an example of the criminalization of immigrants through the application of a ‘sedentarist metaphysic’.     

Planning Sustainability: Intergenerational and Intragenerational Justice in Spatial Planning Strategies

Abstract: Subsequent to the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Our Common Future), sustainability has been set up in many countries as a mission statement of cross‐sectoral policies. Sustainable development carries the normative notions of equity, empowerment and environmentally sensitive economic development. Thus, it seems to suggest a fundamentally different vision to neoliberal dogma, which is at the same time described as dominating all socio‐political processes. This paper intends to explore the relation between these two discursive framings of contemporary policies through the example of German spatial planning guidelines. More precisely, it addresses social justice as one pillar of sustainability and how it is operationalised in spatial planning policies in Germany. This may exemplify how the seemingly opposing discourses interact in policy practices. The empirical analysis suggests that the ways in which the German spatial planning report focused on social space in territorial terms promotes an economistic and truncated view of social justice, one which fosters the neoliberal idea of regional competition for global capital and reduces socio‐spatial justice to territorially equally distributed economic inclusion.     

Decontextualized Knowledge,Situated Politics: The New Scientific–Local Politics of Rice Genetic Resources in Thailand

Recent practices of scientific–local knowledge interaction in Thailand surrounding rice genetic resources have led to a new phenomenon, which this article calls knowledge inclusion. This study explores several forms of knowledge inclusion —participatory science, localized science, scientized knowledge and hybridized knowledge— as new loci of political practices among government rice breeders, non‐governmental officials and farmers. Ethnographic studies are used to reveal that, through selectively incorporating elements of each other's knowledges, these scientific and local knowledge practitioners have drawn on the discourses of scientific–local knowledges to their political advantage. The ramifications of this new politics vary according to different political arenas in rice genetic resource management. Based on these findings, the article argues that recent practices of knowledge inclusion should not be obscured by the notion of situated knowledge, but should be understood as situated politics of decontextualized knowledge in genetic resource management. The argument reconceptualizes the new scientific–local politics as a synthesis between the power–knowledge relation and the power–structural context in which genetic resource management takes place.     

Reframing and Reconceptualising Gambling tourism in Macau as a Chinese Pilgrimage

Abstract

While dominant discourses, media representations and corporate entities in China downplay the presence of Chinese mainland gambling in Macau, Beijing sanctions millions of its citizens to make the journey to Macau to gamble each year. While Macau’s success is often put down to the extent to which visitors are drawn to a secular destination with integrated resorts to engage in individualistic activities, our approach explores Chinese gambling tourists’ movements, rituals and behaviours along post-structuralist lines, so as to generate new insights. The analysis shows how the metaphor of pilgrimage is an important lens to address individual and communal practices amongst outbound Chinese gambling tourists and brings to light the hyper-meaningfulness, shared values, ritualization, play, risk, and liminal conditions that characterise the processes of their entanglements and the centrality of commercial and political interests. In particular, the analysis indicates the need to explore the significance of cultural, spiritual, economic and social dimensions of Chinese outbound tourism, as well as the unique discourses of power and control affecting their movement and practices. By reframing and reconceptualising gambling tourists as a Chinese pilgrimage, we account for manifestations of culture, governmentality and intentional ritualization as well as contribute an alternative construction of pilgrimage beyond euro-centric accounts, which in turn, will stimulate discussion on geographies of pilgrimage.     

Whose cultural value? Representation,power and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The debate around ‘cultural value’ has become increasingly central to policy debates on arts and creative industries policy over the past ten years and has mostly focused on the articulation and measurement of ‘economic value’, at the expense of other forms of value—cultural, social, aesthetic. This paper’s goal is to counter this prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts. We know that different social groups enjoy different access to the power to bestow value and legitimise aesthetic and cultural practices; yet, questions of power, of symbolic violence and misrecognition rarely have any prominence in cultural policy discourse. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to creative industry scholarship by tackling this neglected question head on: it calls for a commitment to addressing cultural policy’s blind spot over power and misrecognition, and for what McGuigan (2006: 138) refers to as ‘critique in the public interest’. To achieve this, the article discusses findings of an AHRC-funded project that considered questions of cultural value, power, media representation and misrecognition in relation to a participatory arts project involving the Gypsy and Traveller community in Lincolnshire, England.     

The Archaeological Heritage of Iraq in Historical Perspective

Abstract

In this paper I argue that members of the public are simultaneously attracted to and alienated by the uncannyin archaeology. I examine the role of popular culture representations of archaeology in these conflicting but connected processes, and strategies for overcoming them. By exploring Freud's notion of the unheimlich, or uncanny, in relation to archaeology and autopsies, I argue that it is mediated by popular culture, which alienates the public from the actual uncanny practices. By considering the relationship between archaeologists and the public as a discourse between actors and their audience, I examine ways in which this alienation can be overcome. My aim is to offer a better understanding of the complex ways in which people engage with archaeology.     

Contesting danger: a new agenda for policy and scholarship on Central Asia

Western geopolitical discourse misrepresents and constructs Central Asia as an inherently and essentially dangerous place. This pervasive ‘discourse of danger’ obscures knowledge of the region, deforms scholarship and, because it has policy implications, actually endangers Central Asia. This article identifies how the region is made knowable to a US–UK audience through three mutually reinforcing dimensions of endangerment: Central Asia as obscure, oriental, and fractious. This is evidenced in the writings of conflict resolution and security analysts, the practices of governments, the activities of international aid agencies and numerous lurid films, documentaries and novels. The article first establishes the tradition of inscribing danger to Central Asia, in both academic and policy discourse, from the colonial experience of the nineteenth century through to the post‐Soviet transition and subsequent considerations of the region in terms of the war on terror. It considers several examples of this discourse of danger including the popular US TV drama about presidential politics, The West Wing, the policy texts of ‘Washingtonian security analysis’ and accounts of danger, insecurity and urban violence in the Ferghana Valley. It is argued that popular policy and academic texts are relatively consistent across the three dimensions of endangerment. This argument is demonstrated through a discussion of how policy‐making and practice is informed by this discourse of danger and of how the discourse of danger is contested within the region. The example of urban violence in Osh, Kyrgyzstan and Jalalabad, Afghanistan in 2010 demonstrates how opportunities to mitigate conflict may have been lost due to the distortions of this discourse of danger. It concludes by raising the challenge to policy‐makers, journalists and academics to contest this western geopolitical discourse and provide better accounts of how danger is experienced by Central Asians.     

Storytelling as Method in Spatial Planning

Abstract

Drawing on the case of the Wageningse Eng in the Netherlands, this paper considers the role of “storytelling” within spatial planning practices. It moves away, though, from seeing it as merely a model of spatial planning, where “storytelling” is sometimes used to justify planners' ideals for the landscape, or a model for spatial planning, which pushes for a normative use of “storytelling” as a means of encapsulating local knowledge and the views of those who live in, and use, the landscape. Rather, the paper engages “storytelling” as a method for revealing how formal planning practices may be destabilized by more vernacular narratives seeking to subvert dominant discourses and processes. In doing so, it seeks to not only show the contested nature of participatory planning within the Netherlands, but also the ways in which narratives—as revealed via such a method—construct specific positionalities with real implications for notions of inclusivity within planning practices.     

Towards a more emotional geography of civic pride: a view from an English city

This article argues that civic pride has been relatively under-explored in geography and deserves greater attention as an emotional and political value associated with place. Through a case study of Nottingham, England, I examine how local civic actors perceive and express civic pride and the values it encompasses, using a discourse analysis of interviews, policy material and local media. I illustrate how civic pride is connected with everyday feelings of identity, community and what people value and aspire to in a given place, and demonstrate how we might think critically about civic pride’s connections to and relevance beyond local government. The analysis illustrates how, in the context of recent developments across British cities, civic actors and institutions engage with and value the city in different ways and that a diverse set of discourses and practices can emerge from a shared concern to protect civic identity and autonomy. Bringing together emotional and urban geographies literature, this paper challenges geographers to think carefully about how place-based values like civic pride can shape and reproduce often well-meaning but problematic discourses and practices within cities, but also how the underlying meanings and values associated with pride can surface in resistive and progressive ways.     

Renegotiating the Primary School: Children's Emotional Geographies of Sport,Exercise and Active Play

The current UK policy concern with children's health has led to primary school practices of sport, exercise and active play aimed, in particular, at constructing children's bodies as ‘healthy’. Qualitative explorations of children's own values and experiences however, reveal that their understandings of sport in school differ considerably from its potential to be healthy, instead emphasising emotional geographies of pleasure and enjoyment. This article aims to develop a better understanding of children's ability to modify and reconstitute discursive corporeal regimes through their own agency, thus highlighting the fluid nature of the primary school as an institution. Adult discourses and children's bodily challenges to these mingle and intersect, creating spaces of competing values and discourses that work to transform and renegotiate the primary school. Although this article focuses particularly on the UK context, the findings will be relevant for any country in which child obesity is of current concern for social and education policy.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

Learning from experience: Cultural policies and cultural democracy in the 20th century 1

Abstract

The discussion of the multicultural society has long been current in Danish social and educational policy, but it is only at the turn of the millennium that the issue has been placed on the agenda in a serious way in relation to the Danish national cultural policy. The transformation from a homogenous identity concept to the acceptance of a diversity of voices and interpretations is occurring only slowly in both the production and dissemination of art and culture. In the cultural policy discourse up through the 1980s there is an acute lack of discussion about the ethnic or multicultural. Far up into the 1990s, the cultural political contributions within the multicultural field are left to the social or humanitarian organs, with integration as the general goal. At the advent of the millennium we can identify greater openness and interest for the multicultural field. In the evaluation of The Ministry of Culture's Development Fund I have analysed the subsidized activities according to the strategies of ethnic revival , interculturalism and hybridisation , and in the article I discuss the problems of formulating criteria for artistic quality in an area new to members of the board. On this background I discuss the relation between multiculturalism and cultural diversity , where I find the concept of cultural diversity to be a better reflection of the new hybrid cultures, which not only transcend boundaries and traditional cultures but dissolve them and create new expressions across genres and cultural forms.