The spatial economy of North American trade fairs

Through a study of trade fairs, this article illustrates that relational approaches to economic geography are not limited to the sphere of economic and social relationships. These relationships are influenced by and, in turn, shape material realities, such as specific infrastructure and the labour market, in a reflexive manner. Trade fairs are “relational events” that bring together regional, national, and often international producers, users, suppliers, and other agents of a value chain or technology field for the purpose of exchanging knowledge about technological and market developments, building partnerships, and maintaining existing networks through learning by interaction and observation. However, these events are also situated in space and time, grounded in the contexts of particular industries, trade patterns, public and private investments, as well as the economic geographies of places. Focusing on North America, this article presents and analyzes data on the economic geography of trade fairs and their regional economic impact (number of events, exhibitors, attendees, exhibition space). It explores regional trade fair patterns and dynamic changes in major trade fair cities by emphasizing the role of history and industry context.     

Political economic reorganization among non-state societies: A case study using Middle Holocene mortuary data from the Cis-Baikal,Russia

The extraordinary record of prehistoric funeral activities in Russia’s Cis-Baikal region provides an opportunity to study changes in political strategies that boreal forest hunter–gatherers employed at these events in the Middle Holocene. I use published data on burial treatments (quantities of grave goods, presence of exotic materials, burial layouts) from 10 Late Neolithic (henceforth referred to as “LN,” 4000–3000 BC) and 11 Early Bronze Age (“EBA,” 3000–2000 BC) cemeteries to explore important and previously undetected shifts in the ways that funerals during these periods articulated with political life. LN groups used funerals to emphasize affiliation with corporate institutions, while EBA funeral participants employed political strategies focused on displaying wealth. Current evidence indicates that groups on the western peripheries of the Cis-Baikal started employing semi-nomadic pastoral subsistence practices at the time of the LN-EBA transition, and I suggest that these groups presented new opportunities for Cis-Baikal inhabitants. Interactions with mobile, food-producing groups may have indirectly stimulated indigenous populations to redefine funeral gatherings as venues appropriate for cultivating long-distance economic and political support through competitive displays of wealth.     

Governing events and life: ‘Emergency’ in UK Civil Contingencies

Emergency is now a taken-for-granted part of how 21st century life is governed, being applied by states, corporations and non-governmental organisations to a wide range of events. Despite its ubiquity, there are few reflections on emergency itself in distinction from the ‘state of emergency’. In this paper we complement and extend existing work on the legal–political geographies of the ‘state of emergency’, by arguing that distinct versions of emergency are produced in apparatuses of security. We exemplify this approach to the political geographies of security through a case study of the apparatus of organisational forms and techniques through which the UK state responds to a range of events: UK Civil Contingencies. Drawing on documentary analysis, interviews and observation, we show how events are governed in UK Civil Contingencies through a number of distinct versions of emergency that open up a specific field of action: an interval after an event occurs but before that event becomes a disaster. In relation to this interval, UK Civil Contingencies revolves around a ‘state of preparing for emergencies’ and a ‘state of responding in emergency’, whilst the ability to proclaim a ‘state of emergency’ remains in potential. In conclusion we set out the implications of our approach for future work on how events and life are governed.     

Practices of judgement and domestic geographies of affect

This paper describes how practices of judgement take place from within the ‘life’ of ‘everyday life’. It does this, in part, to counter the assumption that the expression of taste necessarily acts as a strategy of distinction that creates hierarchized relations between different types of body. Instead the paper argues that considering practices to be of everyday life involves attuning to how different modalities of the more-than-rational are bound up with the making of value. This means, however, refusing to suspect the making of a judgement. In contrast, the paper exemplifies an ethos of engagement that functions affectively to discern traces of something better in these most judged of practices. Practices of judgement with music are thereafter disclosed as concerned with the momentary (re)ordering of what William Connolly (1999 Connolly, W. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  [Google Scholar]) has termed ‘thought imbued intensities and feelings’. They occur from within the contradictory, often confused, affective imperatives that both circulate to pleat together everyday life and form the multiple, intersecting, topologies of affect that enact domestic time-space.     

Not all dogs go to heaven,some go to Battersea: sharing suffering and the ‘Brown Dog affair’

This paper concerns the memorialisation of a dog's (after)life. It traces the story of the ‘Brown Dog’: a terrier allegedly vivisected in 1903 by English physiologist Sir William Bayliss and subsequently commemorated by two statues in Battersea, London. Each statue has been the locus for ethical encounters between human and animal, and I draw upon the work of Donna Haraway to explore them. The first, installed in 1906 in Battersea borough, enjoyed a prominent social existence at the centre of Edwardian anti-vivisectionism. The second, by contrast, erected seven decades later in 1985, was welcomed with minimal fanfare and now sits, an obscure curiosity, in a corner of Battersea Park. Both statues attempt to honour the non-human lives lost through the unequal and instrumental power relations of animal testing. Here, I see the statues as experimental means of ‘paying attention to’ the suffering inflicted through animal experimentation and vivisection, mobilising Haraway's concept of ‘shared suffering’. I also argue that their varied success demonstrates how both the nature of and responses to the animal suffering they embody are historically contingent. The paper follows recent trends in animal geography arguing that explorations of ‘discomforting encounters’ might offer better ways of relating with animals.