Nostalgia and Titanic commemorations in Cobh,Ireland

The year 2012 marked the centenary of the sinking of the liner Titanic. This event has been commemorated in a variety of ways, including the development of “authentic” and “created” tourist projects related to Titanic. This research presents one location's tourist response to the centenary. The heritage town of Cobh in Ireland was the last port of call for the ill-fated liner. Its commemorative activities focused on a week-long festival of cultural events from 9 to 15 April. It will be contended that its use of nostalgia and “vintage” can be interpreted more as a function of the interpretative agenda of Irish tourism policy and its heritage construction of Cobh than as a genuine symbolic expression of a town remembering its past.     

Biofuels and the politics of mapmaking

On a world scale companies and governments are acquiring tracts of land from rural communities across the developing world in what some describe as a global “land grab.” Yet looking into local settings reveals that negotiations and arrangements are often piecemeal and halting, with little resemblance to a coordinated seizure of land. Conflicting maps, overlapping territorial claims, and unclear acquisition processes are creating land disputes, mistrust, and ambiguity. Resulting cycles of contention are enabling companies to obtain—even appropriate—some land. Still, in at least some locales the process is doing more to undermine development opportunities for all parties.To probe into these local politics of mapmaking, this article draws on fieldwork from 2010 to 2011 in Tanzania's Rufiji District, located in the lower floodplain of the Rufiji River. Companies, one might surmise, should be able to exploit information asymmetries to wrest control of land from local villagers. Interviews, primary documents, and field observations reveal, however, that this is not occurring as much as one might expect along the lower Rufiji River. The politics of such land acquisitions, we argue, would seem to be better understood in terms of cycles of contentious politics, as an ongoing process in which movements and counter-movements vie for control through the strategic use of images, maps, and discourse.This research extends the understanding of the processes changing global agriculture and energy production by bridging the frames of the “politics of mapping” and “cycles of contention” to more fully reveal how and why control over land and resources is shifting in the global South.