(RE)PRODUCING A “PERIPHERAL” REGION – NORTHERN SWEDEN IN THE NEWS

Building on theories of internal orientalism, the objective of this study is to show how intra‐national differences are reproduced through influential media representations. By abstracting news representations of Norrland, a large, sparsely populated region in the northernmost part of Sweden, new modes of “internal othering” within Western modernity are put on view. Real and imagined social and economical differences between the “rural North” and the “urban South” are explained in terms of “cultural differences” and “lifestyle” choices. The concept of Norrland is used as an abstract essentialized geographical category and becomes a metonym for a backward and traditional rural space in contrast to equally essentialized urban areas with favoured modern ideals. Specific traits of parts of the region become one with the entire region and the problems of the region become the problems of the people living in the region. I argue that the news representations play a part in the reproduction of a “space of exception”, in that one region is constructed as a traditional and undeveloped space in contrast to an otherwise modern nation. A central argument of this study is that research on identity construction and representations of place is needed to come to grips with issues of uneven regional development within western nations.     

“You don't go there”: Spatial Strategies of Stigma Negotiation in a Post-Industrial Town

This paper draws on a multimethod ethnographic study, conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, England—a small and relatively isolated deindustrialising colliery town—examining how residents negotiate living in stigmatised territory. In doing so, microspatial strategies of distancing, avoidance, and deflection are illustrated, revealing how residents reassign and deepen stigma in particular locations within a stigmatised territory. This highlights the relationship between social and physical space, and while spatial strategies of negotiation do not mitigate stigma, they do (re)produce internal social hierarchies within a place that is homogenised from the outside through disparaging narratives. A key contribution reveals the significance of the racialised production of space in shaping how territorial stigma is negotiated within this distinct socio-spatial location. Residents use strategies to redirect the stigma toward those seen as out of place and draw attention away from sticky sites of racialised urban stigma towards symbols of unspoilt rural Englishness.     

Reflective Action in the Academy: Exploring Praxis in Critical Geography using a “Food Movement” Case Study

Abstract: One of the key components of critical geography is praxis—defined here as the melding of theory/reflection and practice/action as part of a conscious struggle to transform the world. Put simply, praxis is giving life to ideas about the way the world is—and could be—by acting on one's convictions in daily (work and home) life. Praxis can thus take many forms, and can occur both within and outside the academy. This paper examines how research and practice can be co‐constituted by examining the “food movement” (ie the mobilization of disparate social actors in resistance to various aspects of the dominant corporate–industrial food system) in Canada as a case study. Through this lens, different forms of praxis are interrogated, not to identify a uniform “best praxis”, but rather to highlight the benefits and drawbacks of particular approaches in this one specific context. In so doing, the paper explores how critical geographers might contribute, through praxis, to the recognition and restructuring of social relations as part of the broader emancipatory project that is central to critical theory.     

“Peace is Our Only Shelter”: Questioning Domesticities of Militarization and White Privilege

Abstract: This paper traces how Los Angeles peace activists tried to make visible the grave domestic effects of Cold War militarization. Women Strike for Peace went beyond a focus on the productive relations between the state, military and industry captured by the term “military–industrial complex” to analyze how reproductive spaces were part of this complex. In opposing war, they challenged what I am calling militarized domesticities: how war‐making shapes the ‘home front’ and home as the spaces national security states claim to protect. I build on feminist antiracist intersectionality theories to situate the military–industrial complex per se within broader processes of the militarization of society and daily life. The questions become how do gendered processes of militarization—that work in conjunction with relations of white privilege—produce and connect differently situated “private” spaces or home places? How might strategies for dismantling the military–industrial complex emerge from the contradictions of these processes?     

Sites of Social Centrality and Segregation: Lefebvre in Belfast,a “Divided City”

Abstract: This paper applies Henri Lefebvre's ideas on participatory democracy and spatial politics to the context of “divided cities”, a milieu often overlooked by scholars of Lefebvre. It considers, via Lefebvre, how the heterogeneous and contradictory statist methods to deal with ethno‐national violence in Belfast have in effect increased segregated space. State‐led approaches to public space as part of conflict transformation strategies appear contradictory, including attempts to “normalize” the city through inward capital investment and cultural regeneration, encouraging cosmopolitan notions of inclusive “civic identity”, and reinforcing segregation to contain violence. These processes have done little to challenge sectarianism. However, as Lefebvre suggests that dominant representations of space cannot be imposed without resistance, this paper considers the alternative strategies of a disparate range of groups in Belfast. These groups have formed cross‐cleavage networks to develop ritualized street performances which challenge the programming of public space for segregation.     

Spatializing the ecological Leviathan: Territorial strategies and the production of regional natures

This paper explores a dual absence — the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of the state and nature, this paper combines work on the production of nature and state strategy with Lefebvre's recently translated writings on state space and territory. By focusing on the production of territory (or state space), we explore the interaction of the state and nature in the context of the political management of social and ecological space. We unravel the spatial entanglements of the state and nature through an analysis of the British state's territorial strategies within the West Midlands region. By considering three key historical periods within the history of the West Midlands we reveal how the emergence of the regional space called the West Midlands is a product of the ongoing spatial dialectics of state and nature therein.     

Primitive Accumulation and the Production of Abstract Space: Nineteenth‐century Mire Reclamation on Gotland

In Henri Lefebvre's work, abstract space entails qualitatively new ways of envisioning and strategically arranging the sites within which capital accumulation and everyday life are to unfold. This paper sets out to delineate how this premise can be profitably used to decipher contested tactics of primitive accumulation. Arguing from a particular case—nineteenth‐century reclamation of mires on the island of Gotland, Sweden—the paper explores how primitive accumulation was made possible through the conjunction of three spatialities, representing three key lines of struggle over abstract space. The abstraction and avowed homogeneity of space was produced and regulated by concurrent ideological maneuvers against customary practice, leveled by scientific discourse, and pursued through a legally endorsed material transformation of nature.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

“Compassionate” Strategies of Managing Homelessness: Post‐Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco

Abstract: After almost 30 years of Federal retraction from anti‐poverty initiatives, many American cities have been left with the dual burden of intensified poverty and far fewer resources to combat the problem. At the same time, such devolution has afforded cities the authority to forge poverty policy at the local level, such that the familiar neoliberal imperatives of state retraction and the mobilization of territory for capitalist expansion are frequently tempered by more progressive political imperatives at the local scale. What has thus emerged is a deeply ambivalent policy landscape, of which “kinder and gentler” poverty management strategies are a central feature. Using the example of a recent homeless program in San Francisco, “Care Not Cash”, this paper argues that such poverty management strategies, while less punitive than their revanchist predecessors, nonetheless introduce a new set of exclusions to the service delivery system, many of which are obscured by the language of compassion. In order to illustrate those new exclusions, I describe the city's homeless geographies—the public spaces, shelters, service sites, and housing models—that have been produced and reconfigured according to a logic of managing homelessness through the provision of care.     

“Love,Peace and Nato”: Imperial Subject‐Making in Central Europe

Abstract: This paper uses NATO enlargement to examine the processes through which political subjects are made. Starting from the observation that the world's most powerful military alliance is increasingly framed not in terms of military defence, but in terms of democracy, freedom, and “European values”, the paper analyzes how this process works, and with what effects. It shows how NATO is, on the one hand, being made so common‐sense as to be boring—below political debate—while, on the other, being made existential and essential—above debate. The effect is a kind of banal militarism: an unremarkable assumption that the military apparatus is ethically grounded and capable for achieving peace. By showing how this assumption is produced and maintained, the paper highlights a key mechanism in the militarization of political life.     

The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”: Alter‐globalization,Anti‐privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South

Abstract: In response to the growth of private sector involvement in water supply management globally, anti‐privatization campaigns for a human right to water have emerged in recent years. Simultaneously, alter‐globalization activists have promoted alternative water governance models through North‐South red‐green alliances between organized labour, environmental groups, women's groups, and indigenous groups. In this paper, I explore these distinct (albeit overlapping) responses to water privatization. I first present a generic conceptual model of market environmentalist reforms, and explore the contribution of this framework to debates over ‘neoliberalizing nature’. This conceptual framework is applied to the case of anti‐privatization activism to elucidate the limitations of the human right to water as a conceptual counterpoint to privatization, and as an activist strategy. In contrast, I argue that alter‐globalization strategies—centred on concepts of the commons—are more conceptually coherent, and also more successful as activist strategies. The paper concludes with a reiteration of the need for greater conceptual precision in our analyses of neoliberalization, for both academics and activists.     

Labor's Geography: Capital,Violence, Guest Workers and the Post‐World War II Landscape

Abstract: The impetus to labor geography—putting workers and their practices and interests right at the heart of our analyses and making these ontologically prior in our theorizing—is the right one. Because this is the right impulse, work in labor geography has tended to over‐valorize both the ability of workers to shape the landscapes of capitalism and the long‐term efficacy of any such “shaping”. Arguing from a specific case—the struggles over agribusiness in California in the immediate post‐World War II California—this paper seeks to understand those moments when workers are all but powerless. It argues that those of us interested in politically charged and politically efficacious labor geographies need to retrain our focus as much on the structures within which workers live and work as well as on the actions undertaken by powerful forces within capital and the state whose interests are served by various forms of worker powerlessness.     

Practising Development at Home: Race,Gender, and the “Development” of the American South

Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international development—a form of hegemony different from but related to colonialism—needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered “undeveloped” in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African‐American women.     

The Production of Commons and the “Explosion” of the Middle Class

Abstract: This paper builds on the author's previous theoretical work on the role of processes such as enclosures, market discipline and governance. It discusses the middle class in terms of a stratified field of subjectivity within the planetary wage hierarchy produced by these processes. It discusses the thesis that the middle class, qua middle class, will never be able to contribute to bring about a fundamental change in the capitalist system of livelihood reproduction. The production in common centered on middle class values—however historically and culturally specific they are—is always production in common within the system. Our common action as middle class action, whether as consumers, workers, or citizens, reproduces the system of value and value hierarchy that is the benchmark, the referent point for our cooperation. The paper then discusses some of the implications of the conundrum faced by those who seek alternatives: there will be no “beginning of history” without the middle class, nor there will be one with the middle class.     

Preferences for Water Policy in the Ogallala Region of New Mexico

In the late-1970s, Congress formed the High Plains Study Project to assess and study various management and water supply strategies for the Ogallala basin. In the early-1980s, the High Plains Study Council released its findings and recommendations, which in turn stimulated numerous interpretive critiques. A decade has passed since the High Plains Study Council report, yet water management problems persist. Using data from a survey of water experts in New Mexico, we identify the determinants of support and opposition to three water management options: voluntary conservation, mandatory regulation, and water importation. Preference for water management strategies is a function of how policy is perceived (regulatory vs. distributive). Water users in the Ogallala East region of New Mexico tended to oppose mandatory regulatory policies that provide the best option for conserving ground water resources for future generations; voluntary conservation-the least effective option—enjoyed the strongest support from respondents. The findings of this research should be of interest to persons concerned with the future of the Ogallala aquifer and to students of public policy.     

State Discourses of Indigenous “Inclusion”: Identity and Representation in the Arctic

Arctic decision‐making processes are often praised for including Indigenous peoples. Yet, state practices of “inclusion” may also inadvertently delimit what can be meaningfully said from a stage already set for a highly specific role as “Arctic voices”. This paper draws on reflections offered by Norwegian and Icelandic state personnel on the meanings of Arctic statehood and identity, showing how often well‐meaning attempts to “include” may serve the includer more than the included—indeed, may serve to uphold the same power structures they seemingly seek to improve. In so doing, the paper contributes both to understandings of Arctic statecraft and to work seeking the “peopling” of geopolitical concepts such as the state. By focusing on the operation of dominant discourses, the paper argues that current prescribed performances of “inclusion” are not enough in a region marked by histories of dispossession, assimilation, and colonisation.     

Balancing London? A Preliminary Investigation of the “Core Cities” and “Northern Way” Spatial Policy Initiatives Using Multi-City Corporate and Commercial Law Firms

This paper reports a preliminary investigation into the economic efficacy of two spatial frameworks—English Core Cities and the Northern Way—recently promoted by national policy makers. We ask whether they are consistent with contemporary economic process in the UK space economy through analyses of commercial multi-city law firms. The latter are treated as an “indicator sector” to define the contemporary UK space economy as practised by law firms. Within this new space of flows, the location strategies of the law firms do confirm the salience of the Northern Way (as trans-Pennine corridor) and Core Cities as part of a larger UK metropolitan space of flows. Conflating the two spatial frameworks leads us to identify hints of a rebalancing of London within a metropolitan UK space. A Manchester polycentric mega-city region is found to be the likely candidate for this role. This finding in no way impinges on London's dominant global role, and we conclude that perhaps mutuality between London and provincial cities is beginning to replace past negative dependency relations.     

Respacing for Peace? Resistance to Integration and the Ontopolitics of Rural Planning in Post‐War Burundi

This article investigates the politics and social impact of post‐war ‘respacing for peace’ strategies in Burundi from within a set of contested spatial arrangements — or rather, post‐war socio‐spatial experiments — including peace villages, IDP site clearances and land sharing. The author takes a critical look at these reconfigurations, and the resistances and manipulations that result when people (or their remains) are moved or placed in the name of coexistence, integration and sharing after the war. In this way, the article contributes to a post‐conflict planning literature that is mostly concerned with overcoming segregation and cleansing through integration, by exploring some of the complexities and problems that can arise with unquestioned embrace of the latter. It shows that a very particular and problematic logic of ethnic coexistence and physical integration drives post‐war respacing in Burundi and that people resist it with strategies in both physical and reflexive space. Proceeding through a set of paradoxes — such as the refusal to return and staying put, or re‐emigration as a response to settling — the article explores how and why respacing‐for‐peace might produce, or fail to prevent, the opposite outcome: community conflict, social tension and segregation.     

“DOING TIME” IN CARCERAL SPACE: TIMESPACE AND CARCERAL GEOGRAPHY

By bringing debates over experiential time within human geography and criminology/prison sociology into dialogue with one another, this article draws attention to the imperative of considering time in the geographical study of incarceration. Informed by an understanding of space and time which sees them as analytically inseparable from each other, TimeSpace, it revisits existing empirical material previously generated through qualitative research within criminology and prison sociology, and identifies some potential synergies with human geography; in highlighting overlapping temporalities in a carceral context, and in demonstrating both the significance of perceived control over time, and the experience of the lifecourse, when past, present and future are viewed through “each successive now” in a context where (clock) time “moves on” but space is fixed.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.