Earth politics: Territory and the subterranean – Introduction to the special issue

The special issue Earth Politics: Territory and the Subterranean explores how and to what political and economic effects people have territorialized the underground. Through studies of a range of activities – from scientific exploration to 3-D geological modeling to laboratory analysis to recreational caving – authors in the issue challenge the idea that the subterranean is a world apart, detached from the sociopolitical worlds of the surface, and instead focus on the complicated relations and processes that remake and weave meaning into often unseen depths. In this introductory article, we situate the issue within expanding literatures on geological materiality, territorial politics, and vertical/volumetric space, and we discuss two overlapping themes running through the issue's articles: the politics of subterranean knowledge production and the politics of subterranean materialities. We conclude by reflecting on the meaning of ‘earth politics’, emphasizing the injustices that derive from – and are sedimented into – dominant modes of knowing and interacting with the matters of the subsurface.     

The Abeng’s Call: The Articulation of Place and the International in Black Power Print Production

This article engages with radical Black Power print production in order to examine the articulation of Black practices of place-making and Black internationalist spatial politics. These spatial politics and practices are developed through engagement with the Jamaican Black Power newspaper Abeng which was produced at the height of Black Power activity on the island in 1969. The paper draws on Black Geographies scholarship to demonstrate that Abeng represented a material and discursive means through which subaltern practices and places of resistance in Jamaica were enacted in opposition to and excess of plantation spatialities and regimes on the island. The carving out of such subaltern places allowed for the articulation of transnational imaginaries and translocal solidarities with similarly aligned communities and struggles across the diasporic world. The Abeng newspaper was again central in crafting these imagined Black internationalist geographies and coeval praxes of transnational solidarity.     

De-centring the European union: policy diffusion among European regional organizations – a comment

Abstract

This article comments on the special issue from a political science perspective. It starts with an attempt at interpreting the contributions from a diffusion perspective. The articles show a sophisticated understanding of diffusion as “interdependent decision-making”, that is multi- rather than uni-directional, focuses on diffusion as a process (not an outcome), and takes a decidedly agency-centered view. The article then highlights some of the empirical findings in this special issue. This concerns, among others, the crucial role of the Council of Europe (CoE) as a laboratory for generating new policy ideas and an agenda-setter, as well as the equally important function of the various parliamentary assemblies as mechanisms by which policy ideas diffuse. At the same time, there is also a power story in this special issue. The EC ultimately dominates the processes in most policy areas. The article concludes with remarks on the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and social scientists as documented by this special issue.     

Great expectations – the European Union and cultural policy: fact or fiction?

The European Union secured limited legal ‘competence’ to act in culture in 1992. This article examines the operational context and its complicated and countervailing tensions that make European cultural policy formulation and implementation difficult. Underlying problems originate in the failure properly to define what is meant by ‘culture’ in different contexts or to identify clear and pragmatic policy objectives, although legitimate ‘instrumental’ use of culture is common. The EU’s institutional structures (Council, Commission and Parliament) are often at cross‐purposes, while the national interests of member states can have a negative effect. The structure and internal politics of the Commission ensure that the Directorate responsible for ‘culture’ remains marginal, despite its growing ambition. An attempt to institute an ‘Agenda for Culture’ in 2007 has had some initial success, but given the definitional, legal, political and administrative problems, claims being made for significant progress seem somewhat premature.     

Heritage-making ‘from below’: the politics of exhibiting architectural heritage on the Internet – a case study

The ‘digital revolution’ created new opportunities for private persons to participate in the public discourse on architecture and architectural heritage. But has this new ‘participatory culture’ also triggered democratic polyphony and a questioning of dominant (expert) values and knowledge? And when considering official Internet representations – is there a proactive policy involving citizens? Taking the ‘virtual life’ of the Vienna Werkbund estate (1932), a modernist icon listed as a national monument in 1978, as a case study, the present examination tempers exaggerated hopes. The analysis of private and official websites shows that new information and communication technologies foster the expression of different viewpoints only to a limited extent. Although residents use the Internet to voice criticism, actors situated outside expert culture primarily reaffirm the estate’s cultural value and act as co-producers of the dominant discourse. Focusing on official heritage, this paper not only provides evidence for the perpetuating function of new digital tools but also reveals the power relations that underpin paternalistic cultural mediation. Given the technological possibilities of involvement, it criticises official web representations for the exclusion of ‘the public’ and raises the fundamental question of what the digital mediation of cultural heritage in democratic societies should look like.     

The Rural Estate through the Eyes of the Land Agent: A Community in Microcosm c1812 – 1844

This article explores how the Castleman/Anglesey archive forms a micro-study of an estate and its associated rural community at work. It will survey the type of data which can be found within the land agent’s estate vouchers and diurnal correspondence and why they are important. It will begin by examining the concepts and ideology of the rural community and seek to explain why it is so hard to define. The article will then investigate how a micro-study can assist in understanding the ways in which estates reacted to periods of economic difficulties. This will include: why landowners left rent arrears to accrue, the types of petition which the local populace presented, the reasoning behind improving landscapes and the ways an estate contributed to the relief of the labouring poor. The Castleman archive reveals the multi-layered, complex nature of the rural community and the diverse role of the land agent in balancing the relationships which existed within it. In effect it acts as an historical prism.     

‘Queen’s Day – TV’s Day’: the British monarchy and the media industries

In contemporary British history, Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 is typically imagined and narrated as the moment where television was anchored as a national cultural form. In addition, it is well documented by commentators and scholars that during preparation for the coronation, politicians and the palace had reservations that live television might fracture the carefully constructed mystique of monarchy. This article revisits the coronation to consider why and how television was perceived as a watershed moment for both monarchy and television, and what difference this has made to royal representations since. Using the work of Michael Warner, it argues that the mediated intimacies facilitated by television as a new cultural form encouraged viewers to enact participatory and active processes of spectatorship as royal ‘publics’, who are brought into being through being addressed. That is, it was the act of emphasising the centrality of television’s role in the coronation, and in reinforcing the apparent distance between monarchy and (popular) media, that these ‘meanings’ of the coronation were constructed in the public and historical imaginary.     

What is in a name? How caste names affect the production of situated knowledge

Patel, Desai, Kothari … to those literate in the workings of caste these names describe a network and its power in relation to other networks, they infer the rules of engagement within and between network members, and they ascribe a geographical terrain to home. In research, rules of behaviour and assumptions of place that are coded into names can affect access to respondents, their disclosure of data and subsequent claims to validity. This article explores the coded expectations of knowledge embedded in a name as seen by someone (me) fairly illiterate in the workings of caste by utilising the principle of Bourdieu’s doxa – a ‘pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge’ – to untangle and explore the effect of names on the production of partial and situated knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork in Gujarat, India, I analyse reflexive accounts through the lenses of feminist geographers and critical race scholars to illustrate the effects of being unknowingly and unwillingly placed into a social hierarchy of power in the field, introduce the idea of ‘us-ing’ (an opposite of othering) to describe researcher-respondent relations, and explore how readers might interpret the presence or absence of data and claims to validity. These accounts make visible the effects of positionality on knowledge production in ways that speak to feminist-postcolonial research, and specifically to feminist researchers of colour conducting research away from ‘home’.