“You don't go there”: Spatial Strategies of Stigma Negotiation in a Post-Industrial Town

This paper draws on a multimethod ethnographic study, conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, England—a small and relatively isolated deindustrialising colliery town—examining how residents negotiate living in stigmatised territory. In doing so, microspatial strategies of distancing, avoidance, and deflection are illustrated, revealing how residents reassign and deepen stigma in particular locations within a stigmatised territory. This highlights the relationship between social and physical space, and while spatial strategies of negotiation do not mitigate stigma, they do (re)produce internal social hierarchies within a place that is homogenised from the outside through disparaging narratives. A key contribution reveals the significance of the racialised production of space in shaping how territorial stigma is negotiated within this distinct socio-spatial location. Residents use strategies to redirect the stigma toward those seen as out of place and draw attention away from sticky sites of racialised urban stigma towards symbols of unspoilt rural Englishness.     

Making waves: the valuation of innovations in San Sebastian’s surf economy

This study takes a valuation perspective to study how and where products and innovations are gaining ‘economic significance’ in the contemporary economy. Building on a recent research stream in economic geography and urban and regional studies, it highlights that the economic value of many products is not formed within production systems alone, but relies on co-constructed connections between production and consumption systems, playing out across multiple geographies. It distinguishes between three types of economic valuation pathways – namely technical, experiential and identity-based – which although analytically distinct may actually build and reinforce one another. This approach is empirically illustrated with the case of the surf-related economy in the city of San Sebastian (Basque Country, Spain), which is used to make a broader point about the growing relevance of a valuation approach to understand competitive advantage and economic renewal in localized production systems.     

The Importance of Status: The US–ROK Alliance Cohesion and the First Korean Nuclear Crisis, 1993–94

The US–ROK alliance during the First Korean Nuclear Crisis provides the most likely case of high alliance cohesion. Curiously, however, instead of dancing to the American tune in their joint management of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) threat, the Republic of Korea (ROK) caused frequent policy collisions – supporting the US–DPRK negotiations at one point and opposing it at another – at the risk of jeopardizing its physical security. The main finding here is that the variations in the South Korean behavior were a function of their experience of status inconsistency. In particular, the ROK became compliant with the US–DPRK talks when it believed that its desired status marker of taking the leadership role in crisis management was within reach, and unyielding otherwise. These fluctuations ended up not only eroding the US–ROK alliance cohesion but also inhibiting a successful resolution of the crisis. All this bears directly on the fundamental question of whether international politics is to be understood in essentially realist terms.     

IS TRUST A DRIVER FOR TERRITORIALLY EMBEDDED INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS? A CASE STUDY OF THE HOME‐BUILDING INDUSTRY IN NORWAY

Trust is said to be necessary for creating and maintaining territorially embedded industrial systems. On the basis of data for the Norwegian home‐building sector, this article analyses trust and price competition; how trust is built and dismantled; and trust and place. The main findings are that: trust and price competition interact, but trust is more important in the design and planning phases than in the construction phase; economic factors are important for building trust, together with competence and team work; and trust is related to space, partly through places embodied in trust and partly through trust embedded in places. However, this embeddedness is not like that which has long been claimed to exist in territorially embedded industrial systems, but embeddedness where trust acts as a reinforcement, contingent upon other factors, as a capacity restraint and a socially constructed need for face‐to‐face meetings.     

Stable Isotopes,Chronology, and Bayesian Models for the Viking Archaeology of North-East Iceland

This paper reviews the results of a long-term research project that used stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, δ³⁴S) and Bayesian mixing models to better model the chronology for a presumed Viking Age cemetery at Hofstaðir, near Lake Mývatn in north-east Iceland. δ¹³C and radiocarbon dating indicated that many of the individuals consumed a large amount of marine protein, which results in a marine reservoir effect (MRE), making ages older than expected. In addition to the MRE, geological activity in the region has the potential to introduce massive quantities of radioactive ‘dead’ carbon into the freshwater system, resulting in a very large freshwater reservoir effect (FRE) that can offset radiocarbon ages on the order of a few thousand years. The radiocarbon dates of organisms that derive an unknown proportion of their carbon from both marine and freshwater reservoirs are extremely difficult to ‘correct’, or, more appropriately, model. The research not only highlights the complexities of dealing with multiple reservoirs, but also how important it is to develop models that are temporally and geographically relevant to the site under study. Finally, it shows how this data can be used to inform the development of chronological models for refining the dating for archaeological activity.     

La rivière Romaine en chantier : Transformations contemporaines des territorialités des Innus d'Ekuanitshit

Since 2009, Innu members of the community of Ekuanitshit have faced a major hydroelectric project on the Romaine River, an integral part of the Nitassinan, their ancestral territory. In this paper, we study the project's impacts on the material and ideational relationship the Innu have with the river. We explore the idea that the project transforms the traditional relationship to territory into a more pragmatic one, marked by economic and political interests. Our analysis reveals that the Innu's territorialities, though partly transformed by increased contact—and sometimes conflict—with hegemonic non‐indigenous society, remain anchored in a strong cultural heritage and a deep identification with territory. We argue that these seemingly differentiated conceptualizations, of traditions on the one hand and development on the other, are not incompatible. These conceptualizations comprise dynamic cultural, social, and political territorialities which are thus internal and external, ancestral and contemporary.     

Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non‐commodified, self‐managed social spaces. In response to the ever‐changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.     

Local territorial attachment in times of jurisdictional consolidation

Many European countries are changing political boundaries at the local government level. Reforms consolidating local jurisdictions have recently been implemented in a number of countries, and more mergers/amalgamations are ongoing. We examine whether citizens' attachment to their local political unit is affected when municipal maps are redrawn. Our study is based on a dataset from Danish local governments with survey data from before and after a major reform of municipal mergers, and the traditional endogeneity problems are thereby circumvented. Drawing on Scannell and Gifford's tripartite model of person, place and process, we find that person characteristics affect local territorial attachment as well as the intersection between places of residence and the processes leading to the new jurisdiction. It is not an increase in the absolute size of the municipality (i.e., place) or the amalgamation as such (i.e., process) that affects the level of attachment, but rather the relative size of the former municipality compared to the new municipality and thereby the specifics of the redrawing of boundaries. When smaller municipalities are amalgamated with larger municipalities, the local territorial attachment decreases among citizens living in the smaller municipalities but not among citizens living in the larger municipalities.     

About time: age,period, and cohort effects on support for Quebec sovereignty

Can age, period and cohort effects help explain support for Quebec sovereignty? Previous work on this question has focused mostly on the effects of age and cohort. We contribute to this debate by adding a period perspective. As such, our study is the first to investigate the impact of age, cohort and period effects in a single study of opinion towards sovereignty in Quebec. We take advantage of an original dataset that includes survey data collected between 1985 and 2012. We use these data to examine the impact of age, birth year and survey year on support for this constitutional option among francophone Quebeckers. Our results are in line with previous work: we show that younger Quebeckers are more likely to support sovereignty, and that some cohorts – namely, respondents born between 1945 and 1959 – are also more likely to favour this option. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find that specific events are comparatively the most important factor to explain fluctuations in Quebeckers' attitudes towards sovereignty.     

Operationalizing a contested concept: indicators of territorial cohesion

European territorial policies increasingly refer to broad goals such as sustainability, well-being and cohesion. For their operationalization as political goals, there is a need to create indicators. But how can an indicator be meaningful in relation to a complex concept that is not well defined? If the creation of an indicator is primarily aimed at quantifying a concept and making it more operational, in the case of a contested concept (such as territorial cohesion), the process of building indicators also helps stabilize it, allowing a potential decontestation. A participatory constructivist approach – as used by the ESPON project Indicators for Territorial Cohesion (INTERCO) – is considered to be the most suitable for building indicators of contested concepts. While ensuring computability of the indicators, it allows more flexibility and reconciles the different meanings of the concept in order to stabilize it. Ultimately, the validity of indicators of contested concepts lies in pragmatic criteria: usability, usefulness and use.