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.     

Entitlement Failure?

In this article, the literature around the entitlement approach to famine is assessed against the background of recent developments in economics which are perceived to have increasingly encroached upon the previously neglected subject matter of the other social sciences. In this light, emphasis is given to the tension that exists in the entitlement approach between its micro-foundations and macro-consequences and causes. This, in turn, is related to the broader problem in social theory of the relations between structures and agency. Whilst it is found that the entitlement approach does embody an implicit causal content in the filtering of socioeconomic mechanisms through the distribution of individual entitlements, it is ultimately argued that the approach is primarily suited to investigative rather than causal analysis.     

Land in Kwara'ae and development in Solomon Islands

This paper documents land tenure and the effects of economic development in Kwara'ae on the island of Malaita. It uses local histories to confirm the essential flexibility of a system of cognatic inheritance, based on social and economic values which contradict the more exclusive unilineal emphasis preferred and promoted by government land and development policy in Solomon Islands. In considering the resulting problem of land disputes, the paper questions the value of reforms which undermine the tradition of communal control of natural resources.     

The Social and Economic Complexity of Ancient Jerusalem as Seen Through Choices in Lighting Oils

This paper presents and discusses the results of residue analysis conducted on 78 ceramic lamps found in archaeological excavations in ancient Jerusalem, in an attempt to identify the types of oils used and the reasons for their preferential choice. The oil lamps chosen for the study were taken from a variety of contexts, which represent the different periods during which Jerusalem was settled and the different sectors of the city. The results of the study show that even the most mundane activity of lighting using oil held within it social and economic choices, as mirrored in the different excavation areas.     

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.     

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.