‘I am Tower of Hamlets’: enchanted encounters and the limit to art’s connectivity

‘I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are’ (2011–2012) was an artwork by Argentinian artist Amalia Pica, and involved a pink-granite sculpture touring around different homes in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets for one year. This paper offers a geographical investigation into the type of encounters and relations created by this artwork. Rather than assume the progressive role of such art encounters, the paper casts a critical eye on to the actual forms of association that they foster and the normative social logics they may perpetuate. In doing so, it suggests that while enchanted, ‘meaningful’ encounters did occur between participants and the sculpture, these occurred within a pre-existing art community, something which compounded problematic class boundaries. Thus, the paper utilises this artwork to identify how encounters can be meaningful whilst maintaining embedded social and cultural divisions. It concludes with a discussion on the relationship between art and the geographies of encounter.     

New State Spaces,Agency and Scale: Devolution and the Regionalisation of Transport Governance in Scotland

Abstract: New state spaces can be seen as products of the interaction between emerging initiatives and pre‐existing institutional arrangements ( Peck 1998 , Space and Polity 2:5–31). In the devolved territories of the UK devolution has created new political centres of policy formulation and this paper is concerned with how devolved policy initiatives are reshaping and rescaling sub‐national spaces of governance. We focus on the rescaling of transport governance in Scotland through a nationally orchestrated process of regionalisation involving the creation of Regional Transport Partnerships (RTPs), an initiative that has been shaped by tensions between changing national political objectives and local interests. Our approach draws on Neil Brenner's “new state spaces” (NSS) framework, which has value in emphasising the historically embedded and path‐dependent nature of restructuring processes. At the same time, its abstract nature leads the NSS approach to privilege the broad processes that generate new configurations of state power over the complex politics associated with the restructuring of particular spaces. In response, we suggest a new theoretical synthesis that draws NSS together with the ancillary notions of “regional armatures” and “the politics of scale” to provide a stronger purchase on the political agency and struggles that “form” and “mould” particular spaces.     

Increasing livelihood vulnerabilities to coastal erosion and wastewater intrusion: The political ecology of Thai aquaculture in peri-urban Bangkok

Most livelihood research focuses on micro-level decisions affecting occupations but fails to examine wider scale processes that shape markets, institutions, and thus livelihood choices. A political ecology framework can help address this gap by providing ways to analyse how multi-scalar and extra-local practices, policies, and discourses affect local-level socio-environmental outcomes. In the qualitative research reported here, that framework is applied to Tha Kam, a peri-urban coastal sub-district of Bangkok, where most residents are small-scale aquaculture farmers. These farmers have experienced precipitous drops in incomes because of two major environmental changes: coastal erosion and wastewater intrusion. The causes are multiple and complex, and many originate not from practices within Tha Kham but from challenges present at a larger scale or that start upstream. The political and economic drivers of these problems stem from Thailand’s fragmented vertical and horizontal governance structure, unequal class relations in which smallholder farmers and peri-urban residents are marginalised, and lack of accountability and representation. This combination of multi-scalar factors and power imbalances has contributed to evolving injustices of peri-urbanisation, all of which are profoundly geographical in their significance.     

Studies on Amerindian dogs, 3: Prehistoric wolf/dog hybrids from the northwestern plains

Discriminant function analysis is an invaluable statistical tool for the taxonomic identification of hybrids between various extant species of Canis in the eastern United States. This technique has recently been applied to the taxonomic identification of canid skulls from several Wyoming archaeological sites. Analysis indicates most canid remains, originally identified as wolf (Canis lupus), to be wolf/dog hybrids exhibiting constant and continual backbreeding to the local wolf populations. The spatial and temporal extent of the form is discussed.