Experimentation as infrastructure: Enacting transitions differently through diverse economy-environment assemblages in Aotearoa New Zealand

Radically new economic arrangements are needed for just and sustainable transitions to a more environmentally and ecologically resilient world. Yet little progress is being made to imagine the new economy-environment relations around which resources, actors, and ethics might be configured to enact the novel economic forms needed. This article uses a Social Studies of Economisation and Marketisation (SSEM) approach to examine a suite of differently scaled and structured environmentally focused economic development initiatives in New Zealand. We explore how the initiatives have assembled diverse actors and investment projects into experimental economy-environment relations. Our account highlights experimentation as a pivotal mode of economisation, and we argue that the initiatives studied by us expose a new experimentation-led agenda for transitioning to more environmentally and economically just futures. Working with the idea of experimentation in an SSEM framework, we also argue that the diverse initiatives are creating an experimentation infrastructure that provides a more generative platform for novel economy-environment relations than top–down models of change such as transition pathways. The article opens up a critical politics of environmental economy that focuses attention on emergence, agency, and practice and allows us to reimagine processes of transitioning.     

‘Lost in Thailand’: the popular geopolitics of film-induced tourism in northern Thailand

The recent blockbuster hit ‘Lost in Thailand’ had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation’s highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples and around the city of Chiang Mai. These intertextual performances have made headlines in national and international media for how they reflect various articulations of cultural dissonance. This paper draws on structured interviews among Thai residents and Chinese tourists, as well as a discourse analysis of English- and Thai-language media reports to argue that popular responses to the impact of film-induced tourism in the region are strongly embedded in historical and contemporary Sino-Thai political-economic relations and corollary geopolitical imaginaries of place. These imaginaries are frequently reconstituted through the ambivalent economies of tourism encounters. This paper contributes to emerging research on how geopolitical assemblages are co-constituted by a range of popular discourses, tourism practices, media engagements, and political-economic relations and how they inform popular geopolitical experience of and in place.     

Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: reconceptualising rural childhood roaming

This paper argues for reconceptualising how children use technology ‘outdoors’ as a technology-nonhuman-child assemblage, or roaming pathway. Founded in contemporary fears about children’s reduced opportunities to access nature and roam in rural environments, in part due to the ubiquitous presence of technology in their lives, we instead illustrate how the agencies of technologies and plants are folded into children’s outdoor roaming. Combining visual methods, video analysis and qualitative geovisualisation, and in collaboration with the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, this paper exposes how assemblages are contingently brought into being through the actions of what technologies, plants and children do together. We demonstrate how the agentic capacities of non-humans and technologies are assembled through children’s imaginative interaction with them, and how these imaginative interactions make such agencies visible.     

试论陶器生活遗存所见西汉铁器手工业作坊的性质——以邰城铸铁作坊为案例

汉代铁器手工业的组织形式,一直以来讨论较多,却未有定论。本文提出,手工业作坊出土的陶容器的组合,有助于讨论作坊工匠的居住与组织形式,提供解决上述问题的线索。本文以陕西邰城铸铁作坊为案例,首先利用类型学建立分期框架,探讨作坊可能的运营持续时间。经统计分析,本文发现邰城作坊中炊煮陶容器的比例甚少。这一现象在西汉时期其他县级手工业作坊中相对普遍,但与战国时期作坊工匠居住于作坊范围内的情况不同,进而提出这一现象可能与工匠的居住和工作模式密切相关。本文指出,作坊出土的陶容器组合情况表明工匠可能不在作坊区内长期生活;铸铁作坊中工匠的身份可能也为雇佣工人,家庭式手工业作坊生产者的可能性不高。     

Who Shapes the Politics of Expertise? Co-Production and Authoritative Knowledge in Thailand's Political Forests

Expert environmental knowledge has often been described as a governmental rationality that reduces political debate and facilitates state control. In this paper, I argue instead that this line of reasoning simplifies how knowledge gains political authority, especially when expertise is shared and left unchallenged by diverse actors, including those in conflict with each other. Using the framework of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I apply this argument to conflicts over the supposed watershed functions of forests in Thailand, where simplified narratives about the impacts of land use on water supply are used as justifications for territorialisation and restrictions on forest land. In particular, I focus on local resistance to the proposed Kaeng Sua Ten dam in northern Thailand in order to demonstrate how protestors have deliberately reproduced formal expertise to empower themselves, but by so doing also reinforcing simplified visions of watershed science and community culture. I argue that exposing the co-production of authoritative knowledge and visions of social order offer greater opportunities for understanding the role of expertise as a political force than analysing competing assemblages based on oppositions of state-led expert knowledge and traditional local practices.     

Door Locks,Wall Stickers,Fireplaces: Assemblage Theory and Home (Un)Making in Lewisham’s Temporary Accommodation

This paper explores resident experiences of life in PLACE/Ladywell, a “pop-up” social housing scheme in London providing temporary accommodation for homeless families. Specifically, we consider barriers to, and assertions of, homemaking in this temporary setting through fixtures and fittings—a door lock, wall stickers, and a fireplace. The paper utilises assemblage thinking to understand homemaking within these time-limited and constrained circumstances. Despite their seeming banality, fixtures and fittings offer a material, politicised, and lively means of studying the attempted and thwarted production of home by residents living in PLACE/Ladywell. The absence of door locks reduces parents’ ability to maintain privacy and intimate relations; restrictions on hanging pictures and other decorative measures are circumvented by the use of wall stickers; and a defiant decorative fireplace establishes a sense of home in a temporary setting. Together, these objects constitute vital elements in negotiations between fixity and impermanence in temporary accommodation.     

Assembling attachments to homes under bushfire risk

This research, conducted in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia, explores attachment to the home in the context of bushfire risk. The paper builds on existing research that has focused both on the home and on emplaced and mobile methods therein and seeks to understand the range of human and non‐human attachments. We situate our examination of attachment in the context of a bushfire‐prone suburban area to consider whether attachments to home may be influenced by an external risk. We use a mix of verbal, visual, and sensory methods (walking and image‐led interviews) to examine both verbal and sensorial articulations in place and in the home. We report on a stepwise analysis of place attachments, home, and bushfire risk. First and while interviewing, we moved with the participants inside and outside of their homes to understand how attachment to those sites was constructed and maintained. Second, we considered those encounters as assemblages of attachments to place. Finally, we studied those assemblages of home‐bound attachments in the context of the risk of bushfire in proximate suburbs.     

Living the cruel futures of industrial change

Industrial change is related to and experienced by those affected by such changes through particular sets of relations with futures. However, engagements with industrial change have in large part included futures only in the role of the temporal, and often teleological, background of industrial change rather than addressing futures in their own right. Through an engagement with the closure and later reopening of a steelworks within Teesside, UK, this paper argues that attending to futures allows the complex relationships through which industrial change comes to be rendered present, related to and lived to be brought into accounts of the experience of industrial change. Through diverse modalities such as phone calls, tones of voice, news reports, rumour and soundscapes a future of works closure was rendered present by and for the steelworkers of Teesside. In addition to this, the paper also goes on to exemplify how such relationships with futures of industrial change can be theorized through the example of engaging with pension entitlements through the concept of ‘cruel optimism’ after the work of Lauren Berlant.     

They're here—I can feel them: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges

Indigenous Knowledges (IK) are continually contrasted with Western positivist sciences. Yet the usual conception of IK—as a translatable knowledge about things—renders incomprehensible its discussion as a spiritual or ethical practice. A practice taking place within what we call an epistemic space. A moose hunting event can demonstrate how IK is produced through the epistemic spaces within which hunting is performed. Part of the performance is becoming-animal; as practiced by Koyukon Athabascans, a moose hunt reproduces the social relations between hunter and prey, spiritual relations that demonstrate an ontology and ethics seemingly distinct from those of the Western wildlife sciences founded upon Enlightenment humanism. Yet such ‘Western–Indigenous’ dichotomies falsely indicate entirely separable spaces within which to produce accounts of reality. Instead, this account of a moose hunt demonstrates an assemblage of actors within one space, who together become more than the authors' individual positions and selves, and becomes an event. We additionally argue that more faithfully representing this assemblage requires changing the form of the usual academic paper. Thus tacking between a narrative and theoretical approach that switches from each of our first-person points of view, we aim to depict how knowledge of one hunting event becomes assembled.     

Charred remains of grains and seeds from the medieval high-status farm site of Reykholt in western Iceland

Abstract

Iceland was settled, primarily by peoples from Norway and the northern British Isles, in the 9th and 10th centuries. The first settlers brought with them from their homelands an agricultural system based on animal husbandry, of which cereal cultivation was an element and also with inputs from fishing, hunting and gathering of wild plants. There are strong indications that barley was cultivated during the first centuries in some parts of the country and that cultivation was at least attempted in other areas. However, Iceland is near the climatic limits of the barley-growing zone, and it is open to discussion how reliable a food source locally grown barley would have been. This paper discusses a seed assemblage of cultivated barley and archetypical weeds of cereal crops dated to between the 10th and 12th centuries AD obtained during archaeological excavations at the high status farm of Reykholt in western Iceland.