Hospitality workers and the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility

ABSTRACT

Building on the recent interest among labor geographers for workers’ ability to strategize around their mobility, and tourism researchers’ longstanding examination of mobile tourism workers, this paper explores the mobility agency of differently positioned hospitality workers. The findings suggest that workers are not always ‘strategic’ in relation to labor mobility, and that labor mobility and career paths must be recognized as fragmented, happenstance and erratic. Furthermore, this article argues for an approach to the study of mobile tourism workers that takes the relational as well as temporal aspects into account. This endeavor is in particular guided by the notion of stories-so-far and the understanding of people as both being and becoming. The empirical basis of this paper consists of 22 interviews with hospitality workers in four hotel workplaces in Sweden; the luxury city hotel, the suburban chain hotel, the city chain hotel and the seasonal hotel. Ultimately, I suggest that the multifaceted complex of considerations which workers negotiate, could be conceptualized as the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility.     

Post conflict identities: Affiliations and practices of Somali asylum seeker children

Following the 2005 terrorist attacks on London it emerged that two of the terrorists charged with the failed 21st July bombings had arrived in the UK as child asylum seekers from East Africa. In the ensuing debate the bombers were represented as children that turned to hate. In this discussion paper we draw on empirical work conducted in Sheffield, UK to explore the identities, affiliations and practices of Somali asylum seeker children, aged 11–18.1 ¹This ongoing research is being funded by the ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme (Award No: RES-148-025-0028) View all notes Specifically, we argue that the actions of the two bombers need to be framed within a broader understanding of the complex processes of social identification that take place as young people negotiate what it means to be a child in the context of different ‘age’, gender and racialised expectations and against a backdrop of discrimination and social exclusion in different relational geographical spaces. We begin by outlining the context of UK immigration policy, before reflecting on dominant constructions of both childhood and asylum seekers. We then discuss how these may shape young refugee and asylum seekers' own narratives of the self and the role that their mobility and specific sites of identity formation may play in this process. In doing so, we contribute to children's geographies by addressing a group – refugee and asylum seekers – that has been neglected within the sub-discipline.     

Australia's diplomatic asylum initiative at the United Nations: comparing international law rhetoric with foreign policy practice

In 1974, Australia took the initiative to have an item on diplomatic asylum inscribed on the UN General Assembly's agenda for that year. Its original ambition was to procure an international treaty on the subject. This article traces the history of that initiative from its inception to the acknowledgement seven years later that it had come to nothing. It also investigates the impact that Australia's initiative at the UN had on its foreign policy practice in relation to diplomatic asylum through two administrations: the Whitlam government (5 December 1972–11 November 1975) and the Fraser government (11 November 1975–11 March 1983). It demonstrates that, while the initiative generated a great deal of bureaucratic work, it wrought no real change in Australia's practice on the ground.     

The novel spaces and power-geometries in tourism and hospitality after 2020 will belong to the ‘local’

Abstract

The global crisis we have experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic emergency challenges our perception of the global and local context in which we live, travel, and work. This crisis has spread novel uncertainties and fears about the future of our world, but at the same time, it has also set the ground to rethink the future scenario of tourism and hospitality to bring about a potentially positive transformation after 2020. Such a scenario can be understood in light of the work of Doreen Massey and the pivotal theorisations on ‘space’ and ‘power-geometry’ she presented in her book For Space (2005). Massey conceives space as the product of multiple relations, networks, connections, as the dimension of multiplicity, the result of an ongoing making process, and in a mutually constitutive relationship with power. Interweaving Massey’s theorisations with a critical examination of the neoliberal capitalism approach to the conceptualization of space, the COVID-19 global crisis prompts us to rethink the space inside and outside of tourism and hospitality by re-focusing on the local dimension of our space as the only guarantee of our own wellbeing, safety, and security. While the global dimension seems more broken than ever, the urgency of belonging to the local is more and more evident. Hence, we propose a critical reflection on the implications of such a scenario in the space of tourism and hospitality, foreseeing a potentially positive transformation in terms of activation of local relations, networks, connections, and multiplicities able to open up such space to multiple novel functions designed not just for tourists and travelers but also for citizens.     

Watching the city: the politics of space in Pizza,birra, faso

In this article, I discuss the representation of Buenos Aires in Pizza, birra, faso. Paying attention to some of the film’s salient aspects vis-a-vis its portrayal of urban space, my analysis has as its ultimate goal to reveal the ways in which the film engages in a political critique that might seem absent if studied solely from a narrative point of view. In this sense, Pizza, birra, faso is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which many of the films of New Argentine Cinema engaged with their political context differently to films of the post-dictatorship generation. To unearth this political content, I will argue, it is necessary to study these films as films, and not merely as texts.     

Local press,dispersal and community in the construction of asylum debates

How has the prominent and contentious international issue of asylum been debated at a local level; what local variations are there and why? This paper presents analysis of local newspapers and interviews with press workers for Cardiff and Leeds, two UK case study locations that have received asylum seekers through the dispersal policy. The case studies show that asylum is framed and constructed differently by the local press in different places with implications for reactions to asylum seekers and community cohesion. The relations between local press and community are explored as explanations for varying discourses. It is found that the way the local press represents and constructs local identity sets the framework for reactions to dispersal; and that the operation of the local press within local networks of power and information shapes the extent to which established discourses can be challenged. For Cardiff, the localising of asylum through the dispersal policy created an opportunity for local negotiation of difference in the context of the national moral panic on asylum.     

Towards an embodied securityscape: Brian Chikwava's Harare North and the asylum seeking body as site of articulation

This article introduces the concept of an embodied securityscape, arguing that asylum seekers embody a point of articulation between two differently located security nexuses: security-migration and security-development. Drawing on Brian Chikwava's novel Harare North, the article illustrates this articulation, not only in the thematic development of the embodied experiences of the narrator, but also in the way the novel articulates differently located conventions of form. Ultimately, the article argues that this embodied securityscape, as illustrated through this novel, produces an alternative narrative space for the messy politics of asylum.     

The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal

This paper considers how discretion, understood as both a capacity to make decisions and a form of influence that is often hidden, operates within the accommodation and support of asylum seekers. Combining critical discussions of discretion with accounts of a ‘local turn’ in migration policy, I argue that discretion plays a key role in shaping how policy is implemented and offers insight into the changing governance of asylum at national and local levels. Drawing on empirical material examining the development of the UK's asylum dispersal system, the paper extends accounts of discretion beyond ‘street-level’ to argue for a focus on how discretion reflects different claims to institutional authority. Addressing four accounts of discretion in dispersal, I argue that tracing discretion can offer insights into how ‘implementation gaps’ in asylum policy are negotiated and how tensions between national and local governments are contained. Tracing discretion in this way may advance critical interrogations of power relations in welfare bureaucracies and develop understandings of institutional agency and influence within liberal democracies.     

Regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the English question

Amid the globalization of economic life and a myriad of powerful challenges to Westphalian traditions of political statehood, it is now routinely contended that regions are 'in resurgence'. Nonetheless, much of the debate on this purported regional renaissance is bedevilled by confusion over what scholars and activists mean by regions and an analogous mystification as to why some regions are 'successful', 'lagging' or 'different'. Our paper aims to instil some coherence to this debate by distinguishing between what we term regional spaces and spaces of regionalism . It then draws on this distinction to explore the institutionalization of England's South West region, highlighting some tensions which prevail over its economic future, its political representation, its territorial shape and cultural vernacular. In undertaking this, we demonstrate how the formation of any given regional map is reflective – and indeed constitutive – of an unevenly developing, often overlapping and superimposing mosaic of economic practices, political mobilizations, cultural performances and institutional accomplishments. This prompts us to question the currently fashionable inclination to fully jettison a scalar and/or territorial approach to the theory and practice of spatiality in favour of relational/topological/non-territorial approaches.     

A relational approach to walking: Methodology,metalanguage, and power relations

To better understand walking practices and the power relations informing them, Mattias Kärrholm and colleagues argue for a relational methodology and metalanguage. In the process, they propose a threefold approach: (a) identify different walking assemblages; (b) investigate how diverse types of walking assemblage relate in series; and (c) study how certain objects can gather or bind series together and act as boundary objects. In this article, we explore the worth of that approach, drawing on research interviews held over 2015–16 with residents from Wollongong, Australia, during a period when their municipal government was implementing a walkable city strategy. Here, we analyse participants' conversations with us for what they reveal about walking types, walking assemblages, interseriality, objects of passage, and boundary objects—five terms used by Kärrholm et al. to interrogate urban walking. Our work suggests that participants are adept at gauging the constant transformations that characterise their walks. This narrative evaluative capacity is, perhaps paradoxically, both compelling and mundane and suggests that participants make sense of a range of meanings from complex social and spatial dynamics and do so in ways that highlight privilege and disadvantage in the city. These findings have wider relevance for those interested in walking and mobilities studies and methodologies.     

Ethics Ex Machina: popular culture and the plural futures of politics

ABSTRACT

The articulation of ethical responsibility can be conceived as a condition of ethical practice that brings into being a human subject to whom we owe consideration, and the reverse must also hold: we are brought into being – subjectified – through these relational connections. But can these connections exist between human and non-human subjects? In this short paper, we analyse the representation of artificially intelligent machines in the popular television series Westworld and the movie Ex Machina and elaborate on the boundary between human and non-human as a complex and contested ethical space. We argue that taking popular cultural representations of machine learning seriously can offer significant insight into how futures of human subjectivity and ethicopolitical responsibility might unfold. (117 words)     

The limits of responsibility: a postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production

A range of recent debates in geography have considered responsibility and/or critical practice, including the connections between knowledge production, ethics and politics. Taking our cue from these debates, this paper explores the question and limits of responsibility in research across a global North–South divide. Emerging from reflections on our own research projects, we interrogate a central challenge of postcolonial knowledge production by examining two limits to, and constraints upon, responsible knowledge production across the global North–South: abstraction and representation, and learning. First, we argue that the forms of distancing that can inhere in abstraction risk sidestepping the concerns of 'the field' by decontextualising places/constituencies/ideas. This involves considering the representational economies at stake in negotiating slippages of distance or practices of learning. We argue in favour of creative and generative representations that might be produced through more participatory and uncertain practices. Second, we explore an ethical and indirect conception of learning as a basis for alternative modes of engagement with communities and researchers in research practice. In making this argument, we do not offer a kind of formula for responsibility in research nor do we argue simply for research to be more 'relevant'. Instead, and alert to our own positions of privilege, we seek to draw attention to these two limits to responsible praxis in the academic knowledge production process precisely because they can act as important registers for thinking through the politics of conducting research between different and sometimes co-constituting cultures of knowledge production.     

The relational turn in island geographies: bringing together island,sea and ship relations and the case of the Landship

Island studies are a growing field of research. A relational turn has recently taken place in island studies alongside relational turns in associated fields of research, including oceanic and ship geographies (although not always in conversation with them). While all three now challenge the landlocked nature of geography and related disciplines, this paper suggests that islands, oceans and ships should not always be reductively conceptualized in isolation, because they are often bound together through complex and shifting relations and assemblages. After reviewing debates and conceptual gaps in the critical island, sea and ship literatures, the paper makes this argument by reference to an island dance performance and social institution that is not wholly of the island, the ship or sea, called the Barbados’ Landship.     

Linked (im)mobilities and the relational politics of movement in post-earthquake Nepal

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the importance of various (im)mobilities that were induced by the massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on 25 April 2015. It analyzes over 120 news articles published in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, arranging these into a mobility-centric narrative that highlights the politics of movement in the disaster’s wake. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological “mobilities turn”, I introduce the concept of linked (im)mobilities to demonstrate the complex dialectics structuring (im)mobilities after the disaster. More specifically, Nepal’s post-earthquake (im)mobilities intersected with one another and with a variety of geographic and political factors to produce a mutually constitutive web of contingent movements. Attending to these not only underscores the centrality of (im)mobilities themselves. By raising questions of scale, inequality, bordering, and “islanding”, the approach advanced here widens our analytical frame. It offers a conceptual architecture capable of encompassing more factors (beyond mobility), thereby facilitating a broader understanding of the disaster event and its various outcomes.     

The politics of holding: home and LGBT visibility in contested Jerusalem

This article explores LGBT politics of space in Jerusalem, a contested and fractured city. By interpreting the challenges and contradictions inherent in the Jerusalem Open House (JOH), a social movement and community space in Jerusalem, the article will show how the discourse and the practice of the JOH lead to a politics of holding. This LGBT spatial politics consists of striving to include oppositional politics, emphasizing the consolidation of public and private LGBT politics of home. The JOH persistently maintains a politics of holding, continually balancing inclusion, creating a home-like space and framing the organizational space as a shelter for all LGBT individuals in Jerusalem, while adopting a politics of visibility. This visibility enhanced processes of politicization which at many points stand in contrast to the JOH’s goals of being accessible, inclusive, and safe. The politics of holding illustrates the religious, political, national, and ideological fractures’ at work in producing a unique kind of LGBT spatial politics in the conservative Jerusalem space.     

Responsible girls: the spatialized politics of feminine success and aspiration in a divided Silicon Valley,USA

This article offers a comparative ethnographic examination of working-class Latina and middle-class white girls' narratives of aspiration and expressions of self-cultivation in early twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, USA. I argue that such girls' subject-making statements of aspiration and gendered practices of self-cultivation reflect their emotively charged negotiations of race and class differentiated ideals of feminine success, their experience of school and community spaces inscribed by hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and shifting political-economic circumstances. Moreover, I maintain that such statements and practices reveal girls' engagements with an open-ended gendered dynamic of responsibilization.     

Sustained Organizational Influence: American Legislative Exchange Council and the Diffusion of Anti‐Sanctuary Policy

Building upon existing literature, we offer a particular model of network policy diffusion—which we call sustained organizational influence. Sustained organizational influence necessitates an institutional focus across a broad range of issues and across a long period of time. Sustaining organizations are well‐financed, and exert their influence on legislators through benefits, shared ideological interests, and time‐saving opportunities. Sustaining organizations' centralized nature makes legislators' jobs easier by providing legislators with ready‐made model legislation. We argue that sustaining organizations uniquely contribute to policy diffusion in the U.S. states. We evaluate this model with a case study of state‐level immigration sanctuary policy making and the role that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) played in disseminating model legislation. Through quantitative text analysis and several negative binomial state‐level regression models, we demonstrate that ALEC has exerted an overwhelming influence on the introduction of anti‐sanctuary legislative proposals in the U.S. states over the past 7 years consistent with our particular model of network policy diffusion. Implications are discussed.