Geographies of Urban Politics: Pathways,Intersections, Interventions

This paper deals with urban political geographies and, most particularly, with political economy perspectives on urban politics. It offers an account that narrates what I see as influential pathways and intersections, theoretical debates, and methodological developments that have shaped contemporary urban political geographies in this vein since the 1970s, including: the ‘new urban politics’, intersections with postmodernism, and postcolonialism; urban neoliberalism and the contingency of urban politics; and, most recently, poststructural political economy and the notion of assemblage. This leads me to trace the implications of the shift in understanding from urban political geography to geographies of urban politics, and the growing emphasis on practice, contingency, relationality, and assemblage that accompany this shift. I conclude with reflections on new directions, new productive questions and tensions, and on the knowledge politics of how we do and might do contemporary urban political geographies.     

DEVELOPMENT,FRENCH NEOCOLONIALISM,AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE TUBUAI ECONOMY

The contemporary structure of the rapidly modernizing Tubuai economy (French Polynesia) is examined and it is argued that specific local structures, notably a strong subsistence-oriented productive sector and a system of collective (familial) land holding, are not ‘traditional’ vestiges of the past, but are actively integrated components of the modern rural household economy. Their functions and utility to islanders are generated as external, neocolonial inputs and interact with local conditions and islanders' own goals and priorities. These internal structures play a significant role in negotiating islanders' particular adaptation to integration into the French/Territorial capitalist economy and to externally-planned ‘welfare and subsidy-oriented’ agricultural development programs.     

The enemy as the unthinkable: a concretist reading of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political

This article offers an unconventional interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political. It first identifies two alternative readings – an ‘exceptionalist’ and a ‘concretist’ one – to make the claim that in the late 1920s he laid the foundations for a theory of politics that overcame the flaws of his theory of exception. It then explains why the concretist reading provides an insightful key to Schmitt’s take on the relationship between politics and law as a whole. Despite this, the chief aim of this analysis is not interpretive. Rather, the article claims that such a paradigm change was related to Schmitt’s pondering on the elements that were menacing to draw the experience of modern statehood to an end even more seriously than any upheavals and revolutions. For he came to the conclusion that the mere claim to political self-sufficiency on the part on non-state social entities was able to defy the idea of the state as the political entity par excellence. While these reflections urged Schmitt to reformulate many features of his conception of the political, the article contends that this particular juncture in his production sheds light on a crucial feature of contemporary politics.     

ACTION AS METHOD: Ethnographic approaches for impact

Anthropologists have persuasively made a case for critical ethnographic engagement with elites in recent years. The most significant risk of such an approach is that it may appear meaningless to powerful actors who claim they want to ‘do good’, such as impact investors and philanthropists. This article suggests that producing intermediary outputs targeted at these powerful actors first would generate the potential for solving contemporary problems, which, in turn, would help develop theory.     

重申全球化时代的空间观:后现代地理学的理论与实践

"空间"是人文地理学研究的核心概念。全球化时代,空间概念的内涵与外延都发生了重要变化。本文通过重述后现代主义哲学、当代城市与区域空间重构的社会实践、当代人文地理学前沿理论三者之间相互印证的理念与事实,重申全球化时代的空间观为空间与社会辨证统一的后现代空间观,并阐述了其对当代人文地理学研究的重要意义。     

Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration,digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.     

Slum Wars of the 21st Century: Gangs,Mano Dura and the New Urban Geography of Conflict in Central America

The political economy of violence in Central America is widely perceived as having undergone a critical shift during the past two decades, often pithily summarized as a movement from ‘political’ to ‘social’ violence. Although such an analysis is plausible, it also offers a depoliticized vision of the contemporary Central American panorama of violence. Basing itself principally on the example of Nicaragua, the country in the region that is historically perhaps most paradigmatically associated with violence, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the changes that the regional landscape of violence has undergone. It suggests that these are better understood as a movement from ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ ( Wolf, 1969 ) to ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ ( Beall, 2006 ), thereby highlighting how present‐day urban violence can in many ways be seen as representing a structural continuation of past political conflicts, albeit in new spatial contexts. At the same time, however, there are certain key differences between past and present violence, as a result of which contemporary conflict has intensified. This is most visible in relation to the changing forms of urban spatial organization in Central American cities, the heavy‐handed mano dura response to gangs by governments, and the dystopian evolutionary trajectory of gangs. Taken together, these processes point to a critical shift in the balance of power between rich and poor in the region, as the new ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ are increasingly giving way to more circumscribed ‘slum wars’ that effectively signal the defeat of the poor.     

Places of difference: narratives of heart-felt warmth,ethnicisation, and female care-migrants in Swiss live-in care

Care for the elderly is a contemporary issue of multi-level, feminist concern. In Switzerland, private agencies offer so-called 24-h care services, for which they place or employ mobile women as live-in caregivers in private households. The larger discourse has debated care workers’ movements to Switzerland with much controversy. The article explores this interest in issues of mobility and place in an analysis of three central narratives within the larger discourse: care agencies’ ‘warmth’ discourse, scholarship’s uses of ‘ethnicisation’, and public discussions of ‘female care migrants’. Analysis of the narratives shows how care agencies ascribe care workers a particular ‘heart-felt warmth’ based on their so-called countries of origin. Scholarship’s reference to processes of ‘ethnicisation’ in live-in care illustrates a similar focus on care workers’ characteristics, nation-states, and nationalities. While the public discussion of care workers as ‘female care migrants’ frames care workers’ movements as a migration between discreet and distant places. The article argues that the ways in which the three narratives emphasise the places associated with care workers position these places in terms of difference. From a feminist perspective, this focus on difference is of underlying significance for the perpetuation of fundamental inequities in live-in care. In particular, the discursive differentiation between nation states serves to continually justify lower pay for workers associated with ‘other’ places. As such, the article’s analysis suggests that the discursive invocation of places of difference underlies the marked inequities in Swiss live-in care.     

Hill of Thorns: Custom,Knowledge and the Reclaiming of a Lost Land in the New South Africa

This article provides a detailed ethnographic exploration of a case of land restitution in South Africa. It shows how the development discourse invoked during the process of reclaiming land, rather than being imposed in an entirely top‐down manner, has been the result of negotiations between those claiming and those — in government and NGOs — who have helped them claim. The resulting knowledge about the ownership and appropriate governance of land reveals a complex and often contradictory understanding of concepts like ‘custom’, ‘community’ and ‘power’.     

Human rights in a global ecumene

How should we understand the cultural politics that has surrounded the development of international human rights? Two perspectives frame contemporary debate. For ‘cultural particularists’, human rights are western artefacts; alien to other societies, and an inappropriate basis for international institutional development. For ‘negotiated universalists’, a widespread global consensus undergirds international human rights norms, with few states openly contesting their status as fundamental standards of political legitimacy. This article advances an alternative understanding, pursuing John Vincent's provocative, yet undeveloped, suggestion that while the notion of human rights has its origins in European culture, its spread internationally is best understood as the product of a ‘universal social process’. The international politics of individual/human rights is located within an evolving global ecumene, a field of dynamic cultural engagement, characterized over time by the development of multiple modernities. Within this field, individual/human rights have been at the heart of diverse forms of historically transformative contentious politics, not the least being the struggles for imperial reform and change waged by subject peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds; struggles that not only played a key role in the construction of the contemporary global system of sovereign states, but also transformed the idea of ‘human’ rights itself. In developing this alternative understanding, the article advances a different understanding of the relation between power and human rights, one in which rights are seen as neither simple expressions of, or vehicles for, western domination, nor robbed of all power‐political content by simple notions of negotiation or consensus. The article concludes by considering, in a very preliminary fashion, the implications of this new account for normative theorizing about human rights. If a prima facie case exists for the normative justifiability of such rights, it lies first in their radical nature—in their role in historically transformative contentious politics—and second in their universalizability, in the fact that one cannot plausibly claim them for oneself while denying them to others.     

Positionality,subjectivity, and race in transnational and transcultural geographical research

This article investigates the complexities of negotiating subject positions in transnational and transcultural research by focusing on the gendering of race and racialization. As more people claim to be of mixed ‘racial’ descent and Western researchers grow more diverse, it is increasingly important that this diversity is reflected within geographical research; however, much of the existing research on subjectivity and its role in the research process has focused either on ‘white’ researchers in Global South contexts or on researchers working in their ‘home’ country or community. Less visible are accounts from those who challenge conceptions of ‘white’ Western researcher or whose racial identity can be conceived as hybrid. Moreover, there is a tendency to conceptualize race/racialization and their effects on subjectivity and positionality in relatively narrow terms. This article draws attention to the changing subjectivities of a racialized gendered body as it moves into different contexts. I examine how conceptualizations of race and discourses of racialization constitute researcher subjectivity, and how different understandings of ‘race’ mediate relationships between researcher and research participants (and others). To understand the spatial (re)configurations of (race) subjectivities and how this affects researcher positionality, I offer an autoethnography of a bi/multiracial Western woman of New Zealand Māori/Pākehā descent interpellated as ‘insufficient Other’ in her home context of Aotearoa New Zealand, then reconstituted as white and ‘sufficient Self’ in the Philippines by her research participants and Filipino ‘family’ and friends.     

Cougar figures,gender, and the performances of predation

This article considers how nonhuman animals are enrolled in the construction of gendered identities. Specifically, I interrogate two gendered figures with which I was repeatedly confronted over the course of researching cougar–human relationships on Vancouver Island, home to what is estimated to be North America's densest population of cougars. The first figure, Cougar Annie, was a woman ‘settler’ on western Vancouver Island, reputed to have killed over 100 cougars in her lifetime and now celebrated as a strong, independent female. The second figure is a contemporary trope, an older woman who expresses interest in younger men, known in slang speech as a ‘cougar’. Both figures are intimately bound to a third figure, the animal cougar, Puma concolor, whose material–semiotic relationship to humans both performs and is performed by ‘cougars’ and Cougar Annie. Haraway's conception of figures as embodied and performative mappings of power is central to this article's discussion, which lies at the intersection of animal studies, more-than-human geographies, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Methodologically, I draw on interviews and archival research to trace the historical and contemporary specificities of these two figures – Cougar Annie and ‘cougars’ – revealing how they are informed by, and simultaneously produce, uphold, and perform, gendered understandings of the relationship between humans and cougars, predator and prey, humans and animals, and culture and nature.     

KEEPING THE PEACE

This paper locates the emerging professional police force in Copenhagen both in a European‐wide context and in the context of Danish absolute monarchy between 1660 and 1799. The surviving source material on the activities of the new police force itself (from 1683) is reviewed, but the notion of ‘good police’ is placed in a much broader early modern framework involving not only daily security in the city, and matters of criminal and civil law arising naturally in a growing urban environment, but also the relationship between the police master and the many other existing agents of domestic policy in early modern Denmark. The role of ‘good police’ in terms of begging, vagrancy and the workhouse conform largely to contemporary European patterns, but when the police was also (from 1773) given powers to control newspapers and the press, questions of civil rights and obligations were bound to be raised – not least once public opinion became fully aware that the mental condition of Christian VII meant that absolutism could not operate in the normal way. Although the Copenhagen police provided a tool for more co‐ordinated implementation of social policy in the 18th century, there were no sudden changes in domestic agenda.     

Some Stray Folklore Notes

This article uses ideas developed in the philosophy of science to examine two concepts of culture used in contemporary folkloristics. One of them appears mainly in the context of archival work, while the other occurs chiefly in discussions on themes such as identity politics and ethnic minorities. The main difference between the two concepts is that one is used when formulating ‘substantial theories’ related to ‘kinds’, whereas the other is a bone of contention in ongoing debates on the level of ‘grand theories’. Theoretical tools developed in earlier cultural research are taken into use in contemporary cultural movements, and this affects theoretical debates on the level of grand theories.     

Enlightenment and Empire,Mughals and Marathas: the Religious History of India in the work of East India Company servant,Alexander Dow

This article situates the work of East India Company servant Alexander Dow (1735–1779), principally his writings on the history and future state of India, in contemporary debates about empire, religion and enlightened government. To do so it offers a sustained analysis of his 1772 essay ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, as well as his proposals for the restoration of Bengal, both of which played an influential part in shaping the preoccupations with Mughal history that dominated the contemporary crisis in the Company’s legitimacy. By linking these texts to his earlier work on ‘Hindoo’ religion, it will argue that Dow’s analysis of the relationship between certain religious cultures and their civic qualities was rooted in a deist perspective. It doing so it restores the enlightenment components of Dow’s thought, and their impact on the ideology of empire, in a crucial period of British expansion in India.     

美国劳工史研究中“阶级”的概念重构与范式更新

在20世纪美国劳工史研究中,“阶级”概念的内涵被多次重构。旧劳工史家们依据马克思主义的社会分析理论,把“阶级”视为在生产力基础之上形成的一种社会结构。60到80年代美国的新劳工史家在社会史的广阔视野中重新研究阶级。他们反对“阶级”的结构化定义,重视工人自身在“阶级”形成中的能动性,但是,这种“社会转向”也让阶级研究变得碎片化。90年代以后,受后现代主义思潮影响的学者们把种族、性别等分析范畴嵌入劳工史研究,从而解构了“阶级”概念的确定性,将其变为一个不稳定的、模糊不清的“社会和话语构造物”。随着“阶级”概念被多次重构,其作为一个分析范畴在劳工史中的重要性也呈现出弱化的趋势。     

THE BUSINESS OF WELFARE

A common narrative in welfare state research is that Sweden exemplifies a specific model of welfare, ‘the Swedish model’, or ‘the Social democratic welfare regime’. From this perspective the emerging welfare state left little room for private initiatives – the stage was set for the development of an encompassing welfare state in the 1950s. In this article I argue that this, virtually hegemonic, perspective has hindered an analysis of how private insurance co-existed and thrived within the emerging Swedish welfare state. As an alternative approach to ‘modelling’ – the concept of welfare-formation is developed to analyse mutually sustaining practices of welfare. I show how the insurance business and its protagonists influenced the settings of public pension schemes in a way that underpinned their own interests. A close cooperation with the state apparatus was fundamental for creating a trustworthy insurance market and legitimizing the business claim of fulfilling a social mission. The business adaptability in the shifting landscape of social policy also influenced perceptions of security and welfare in general. Commercial ideals became an essential dimension of the welfare state. By exploring this marginalized history – the business of welfare – the study deepens our understanding of modern welfare societies.     

UNDERPOPULATION, TELEVISION ECONOMIES, AND THE POWER OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION

This article addresses the power of popular geographical ‘imaginations’ and ‘knowledges’ to foreclose public debate and, in the process, to reinforce often contentious policies or practices. It argues that historically, a prominent example of such a powerful geographical knowledge has been that of ‘ overpopulation’. The concept of ‘underpopulation’, meanwhile, has been much less discussed, but in this article I argue that it, too, needs to be queried in much the same way that critics have examined claims of overpopulation. I make this case first at a generic level, describing some of the main situations in which notions of underpopulation are popularly invoked, before substantiating it in much greater detail in one specific context: that of the television economy in New Zealand, a country, it is frequently said, with ‘too few people’ to support a publicly funded broadcaster. I show that in this particular instance the underpopulation thesis is backed by flawed arguments, but that none the less it is widely accepted and seldom countered, hence serving to protect its protagonists from disclosing in public debate the real reasons for the television policies they pursue and which the idea of underpopulation actively allows.     

Gabriel Germinet and the ' Livre d'or du théâtre radiophonique français ' (1923-1935)

The Ecole de Brive represents one of the most successful examples of marketing literary texts in recent years. The Ecole consists of eight authors all of whom publish with Editions Robert Laffont and write novels that deal with the rural France of bygone eras. Laffont has grouped these writers together, created a ‘school’ and then marketed their work as a healthy alternative to the overly introspective fiction produced by Parisian intellectuals. With the Ecole de Brive Laffont has cleverly exploited the traditional tensions between the city and the country, the widespread dissatisfaction with the political and cultural status of contemporary France, and the perceived inaccessibility of currently fashionable literature, in order to sell novels that claim to renew average French peoples’ contacts with their putative roots in the quasi‐mythic world of la France profonde.