Ordinary ethics and craft consumption: A Southern perspective

Geography has recently experienced something of an ‘ethical turn’, and much attention has been focused on consumption as a site of ethical practice. Studies of ethical consumption tend to focus on explicitly socially or environmentally responsible purchasing decisions, but a growing body of research on ‘ordinary ethics’, starting from the premise that most consumption has a moral dimension, has opened up the notion of what counts as ethical to include everyday habits, considerations and desires. There remains, however, relatively little appreciation of the ethical agency of consumers within the global South, and little consideration of how enactments of ordinary ethics within Southern contexts may deepen understandings of the practices and meanings of diverse forms of consumption. Addressing this gap, this paper explores accounts of producers and consumers of craft in informal trading spaces in Cape Town, a city that 20 years after apartheid’s end remains deeply racially segregated and has seen numerous incidents of xenophobic violence. It is in this context that I unpack the ethical dimensions of a seemingly trivial form of consumption, arguing that sites of informal trade may provide spaces for the expression and enactment of care for the other. While not always entirely positive, these interactions reveal a complex moral landscape where shared identities and mutual recognition underpin mundane economic transactions. The paper concludes that ordinary ethics of care for the other go beyond explicit, rational responsibility, and that informal spaces of trade should be considered as key sites for the exploration of consumer ethics.     

Imaginative geographies of gender and HIV/AIDS: moving beyond neoliberalism

This paper examines how neoliberal development discourse contributes to the production and maintenance of problematic gendered hierarchies and spaces. By interrogating the basic assumptions undergirding this discourse, this paper explores how neoliberalism produces spaces which normalise certain identities—especially those associated with individualism and economic rationality, and makes errant values such as communalism and altruism. Drawing on perspectives from feminist geographies, we argue that by normalising and privileging certain masculine identities, neoliberalism reinscribes and legitimizes gendered power relations that are counterproductive to addressing HIV/AIDS. The ‘ideal’ person fighting HIV/AIDS in the neoliberal framework is rational, competitive and self-interested, but these characteristics are complicit in worsening HIV prevalence and mobilize problematic gender roles and identities. Given the pervasiveness of this ideology in Malawi, we propose ways in which families, communities and institutions can challenge and reshape gender identities and potential solutions to HIV within this context.     

Transforming identity discourses to promote local interests during municipal amalgamations

This paper discusses the different ways in which local identities are used in two Dutch municipalities. Like all local administrations these Dutch municipalities have to deal with external forces by plotting their own course between closing-off and opening-up. Local identities are used not only for resisting external threats like municipal amalgamations, but also to attract external resources. It proved useful to distinguish between primary identity discourses based on the widely recognised dominant characteristics of the local community, and secondary identity discourses based on how communities within a municipality have over time learned to deal with these different primary local identities. During an amalgamation this secondary identity discourse disappears with the old municipality. The disappearance of the protective shield of a secondary identity discourse can threaten the underlying primary local identities, and can bring local identities into the centre of the local political debate. A perceived external threat frequently changes the character of these local identities. They can become more inward oriented, focus more on their historical roots and their differences with others; they ‘thicken’ into resistance identity discourses. In other cases the secondary identity discourse of a municipality is too weak and indistinct to support the primary local identities of its communities. Municipal amalgamation can then help to promote a new more attractive secondary, ‘thin’ regional identity discourse based on a selection of characteristics used in established primary local identity discourses.     

What local people? Examining the Gállok mining conflict and the rights of the Sámi population in terms of justice and power

The global extraction of minerals is commonly located in areas populated by indigenous people; and while conflicts between multinational corporations and local activists and indigenous people are widespread today, the understanding of their dynamics are lacking. The Swedish government’s encouragement to an expanding mining industry has caused resistance due to environmental and social implications, particularly its effect on Sámi reindeer husbandry. The resistance to a mine in Gállok is based on the belief that the right to decide about land use historically falls on the Sámi people, and the right to affect land use is detrimental for the survival of Sámi culture and reindeer husbandry. Although the conflict may be perceived as concerning access to natural resources, we argue that the perceived environmental conflict can be viewed as part of a larger struggle over social status and recognition. Data have been collected using qualitative methods such as observations, interviews and documents. The subsequent analysis relies on a meta-theoretical framework of justice as recognition using a typology of relations of power. Our findings suggest that relations of power constitute different categories of social actors. Stakeholders like the Sámi population are subordinated to more dominant stakeholders such as the government, the company and media, who have ‘more’ power or ‘different’ kinds of power ‘over’ others. Through these asymmetric power relations, historical state-Sámi relations are continuously reproduced within prevailing institutions, and also in this mining conflict. Interviewees from business and the municipality testified to the discourses driven by a neoliberal and profit-focused worldview. Challenging the neoliberal discourse, other stakeholders, namely civil society and Sámi, expressed an alternative discourse based on a local, traditional, cultural, environmental and anti-neoliberal worldview.     

Policy discourse and biography: scripting adulthood into housing policies in comparative perspective

This article compares current Russian and Swedish policy discourses on state commitment to facilitating young adults’ access to housing by analyzing national, regional and municipal strategic documents. Both countries previously embraced the idea of housing as a commodified yet universal entitlement and exercised strong public regulation of housing redistribution, but are now establishing selective policies that support young people who comply with prescribed life-course norms. Thus, a life-course trajectory becomes integrated into the policy discourse, and a stable residential autonomy is considered a ‘crowning biographical event’, following a successful employment record and the establishment of a family unit. Notwithstanding important differences in policy formulation and realization, housing policies in Russia and Sweden are aimed to integrate emerging adults into market relations by increasing housing ownership through credit loans and stimulating individual responsibility for welfare provision.     

Mediating good food and moments of possibility with Jamie Oliver: Problematising celebrity chefs as talking labels

This paper explores the powerful and mediating role of celebrity chefs over audience relationships with food through analysis of Jamie Oliver and his recent series Save with Jamie. The paper firstly situates the role of celebrity chefs theoretically, defining them as ‘talking labels’ who may act both as knowledge intermediaries and boundary objects to connect audiences with food in multiple ways. Here chefs actively construct and mediate discourses around ‘good food’. As trusted, credible, well-liked public figures, chefs step into out private home spaces through our televisions to convey food information in a charismatic, entertaining and accessible way. Like traditional food labels, chef’s words can be ‘sticky’ and take hold in public imaginations in a way that goes far beyond the capacity of food products labels. Yet the relationship between chefs and audiences is far from straightforward and so the paper secondly aims to explore how these talking labels are understood and ‘used’ by audiences in their everyday food practices. Drawing selectively from a large scale audience survey (n = 600) as well as the series, Save with Jamie, this paper reveals the different ways that audiences ‘talk back’ to chefs both positively and negatively to create moments of simultaneous possibility and resistance for audience relations with food. This revealed complex relationships between audiences, chefs and food. It also suggests that the powerful work on celebrity chefs functions as part of a new mediated mechanism within today’s food governance.     

Environment as datascape: Enacting emission realities in corporate carbon accounting

Ecological modernist approaches to climate change are premised upon knowing carbon emissions. I ask how corporate environmental managers know and do carbon, i.e., shape the reality of emissions. I argue that for managers’ practical purposes carbon exists as malleable data. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a period of 20 months in a Fortune 50 multinational corporation, I show that managers materially-discursively arrange heterogeneous entities – databases, files, paper, words, numbers – in and between office spaces, enabling them to stage emission facts as stable and singular. Employing Annemarie Mol’s work on multiplicity, I show that multiple enactments of carbon hang together not by an antecedent body (CO₂) but through ongoing configurations of data practices. Disillusioning promissory economic discourses of ‘internalisation’, I demonstrate: Management is materially premised upon preventing purportedly internalised carbon realities from entering capitalist core processes. This undermines carbon economics’ realist promises. Staging some carbon realities as in control is premised upon managers’ ongoing, reflexive, partial and always situated configuration of, e.g., standards, formal meetings or digital data practices in which humans do carbon-as-data. Carbon practices are materially-discursively aligned, forming a configuration. This configuration effects carbon as a malleable and locally configurable space rather than as a closed fact. Reconstructing managers’ practices as configuring carbon-as-dataspace, I argue, allows grasping adequately the contingency and constraints of managing carbon as a particular material-discursive form of environment. In conclusion I generalise the environmental management office as a space that can be configured to stage, beyond carbon, other global environments as well.     

Changing climate discourse and politics in India. Climate change as challenge and opportunity for diplomacy and development

This article contributes to the study of changing climate discourse and policy in emerging powers through a case study of climate discourse in India since 2007. Based on interviews with key actors in Indian climate politics and textual analysis, three general climate discourses – the Third World, Win–Win and Radical Green discourses – are identified. The discourses are characterised by different constructions of India’s identity, interests, climate change exposure and climate policy orientation. At the most general level, the article finds that there has been a general discursive shift from the Third World discourse to the Win–Win discourse, and that the latter discourse is in broad agreement with the dominant international climate change discourse of ecological modernisation and thus supports an alignment between Indian and international climate politics. We also find, however, that India’s domestic climate politics is marked by co-existence and tensions between the three climate discourses, producing a complex and at times contentious discursive politics over climate change, identity and development. The case study presented in this article moreover demonstrates how national interests are socially constructed and how changes in policy reflect changes in the dominant discourse.     

FDI policy and political spaces for labour: The disarticulation of the Bolivian petroleros

Recent literature asserts that labour movements worldwide have been disempowered as a result of the various processes and discourses linked to economic globalisation. But there is a need to explore more carefully the mechanisms by which these processes and discourses affect resources for and constraints on effective union organisation. The purpose of this paper is to understand the construction of political spaces for organised labour and how these have been influenced by one such discourse: the policy discourse on foreign direct investments (FDI). It analyses the relationship between this policy discourse and political spaces for Bolivian petrolero unions through a case study of the period from 1984 to 2006. The policy discourse shifted the function of the state, fragmented symbols of collective identity, introduced flexible contracts, decentralised negotiations, rewarded individual achievement, and fostered competition rather than cooperation between employees. The shift towards an internationally integrated, FDI-driven economy shapes political spaces that allow collective action to be restructured from the workplace-based demands of unions to demands for democratic and indigenous rights of NGOs and other non-labour civil society organisations.     

Living off the land: Nature and nomadism in Mongolia

The demise of the Soviet Union precipitated profound changes in formerly collectivised rural spaces across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. However, it is only recently that attention to the post-Soviet ‘land question’ has begun to move beyond predominant, practical concerns with land restitution and fragmentation and towards engagement with diverse discourses of rurality, nature and modernity. In particular, longitudinal accounts of the narratives and practices of Soviet modernisation and post-Soviet “development” in specific rural places and societies are lacking. This paper is concerned with the complex linkages between environmental policies, practice and concepts of nature in such spaces and over recent history. Through examination of the management and representation of nature amongst pastoralist communities in Mongolia and in the collective and post-collective eras this paper seeks to understand local-level enactments, reworking and assimilation of externally-derived discursive and policy formulations. In doing so it acts as a corrective to state-centred and homogenising visions of Soviet and post-Soviet rurality. It highlights how local herders’ ‘room for manoeuvre’ in expression and enactment of diverse ideas of nature and its management resides primarily in informal spaces, facilitated by recent trends of devolution in natural resource management. Finally, the paper demonstrates how nomadism has been constructed and reconstructed as a component of, rather than inimical to, modernity, albeit with as yet unproven implications for livelihoods and for nature in rural Mongolia.     

Sharing and neoliberal discourse: The economic function of sharing in the digital on-demand economy

In this paper I offer a critical analysis of ‘sharing’ as a discursive formation in the emerging on-demand economy or, as its more commonly known, ‘sharing’ economy. The set of firms and digital platforms that constitute the on-demand economy evade precise definition, though in popular commentary include Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Couchsurfing, and Yelp, among others. I argue that sharing is a discursive formation that is produced through neoliberal economic practices and contributes to their constitution and performance, connoting the embeddedness and inter-determination of the economic with the social. I analyze interview material with software developers and others working for on-demand economy firms in San Francisco to underscore how the sharing discourse is produced, and to examine the possible relationship between the sharing discourse and working practices in the on-demand economy. I explore how sharing, though a fragile and contested discourse, has been used by some proponents of the on-demand economy in an attempt to justify and normalize flexible and precarious work through an ambiguous association between capitalist exchange and altruistic social values. This ambiguity is productive insofar as sharing has become associated variously with transactional platforms, digital peer review via surveillant and punitive ratings systems, and algorithmically mediated, precarious, and ‘entrepreneurial’ contract work, while retaining affective associations with community, inclusion, and participation.     

Systems of provision: Fast fashion and jeans

Using the example of jeans and the fast fashion sector, this critical review explores how systems of provision analysis can be used to understand geographical connections between spaces of production and places of consumption. The study of global commodity chains and production networks has proliferated in economic geography, yet the focus on transactions between places frequently omits to consider the material culture that surrounds processes of making and buying. In contrast, in cultural geography the meanings and transformations associated with ‘following things’ has explored the shifting meanings of commodities as well as personal experiences of shopping with a focus on signifying culture. Ben Fine’s systems of provision approach can offer a more comprehensive analysis. Fine considers how the role of the consumer has emerged as well as the economic processes through which value is established in goods and is an inclusive way of examining the activities that connect consumption and production. Through discussing some of the recent and emerging work on denim jeans this review shows how a systems of provision approach can effectively map a ‘fast fashion’ system and provides a framework that can be applied to other economic geographies.     

Representing the imagined city: Place and the politics of difference during Guangzhou’s 2010 language conflict

In this article we investigate local citizens’ place politics and discourses of place identity during the 2010 language conflict in Guangzhou, China. Drawing on geographical scholarship on the relational construction of place and the progressive politics of difference, we conceptualize place as an assemblage of trans-local connections and disparate trajectories which constitute the radical hybridity of any particular place. In concretizing a relational rethinking of place into a local politics of difference, we suggest that Doreen Massey’s thesis of a global sense of place provides an important epistemological basis for destabilizing the normative local/non-local boundary in order to realize a relational constitution of place-based cultural identity and subjectivity. Based on a social and political campaign against state-led hegemonic language standardization, the 2010 language conflict in Guangzhou is a socially and culturally constructed process in which the Guangzhou locals’ imagination and representation of place and identity are reproduced within a local geometry of social relations involving the state language policy, the local community and the city’s migrant population. Both exclusionary and progressive discourses of place identities have been articulated in this process of re-negotiation and re-imagination of place-based identities. This paper acknowledges that some place-bounded politics may demonstrate a counter-hegemonic dimension and are therefore not inherently regressive. But we also contend that any place politics needs to ask which elements are to be welcomed and which can be excluded in a fluid regime of politics within specific networks of social relations. The cultural boundary of insiders/outsiders must be constantly re-negotiated and rendered relational with the attentiveness to ethical responsibility towards otherness.     

Mining conflicts and transformative politics: A comparison of Intag (Ecuador) and Mount Ida (Turkey) environmental struggles

This article argues for an understanding of local socio-environmental struggles as political spaces that present possibilities for the transformation of subjectivities of the social actors participating in them. Relying on Gramsci’s theorization of state and society relations the paper analyzes whether and how these struggles foment challenges to hegemonic understandings and practices of development, environment and democracy. The analysis builds on a comparison between two mining conflicts—one in Ecuador’s Intag region, the other in Turkey’s Mount Ida region. The paper suggests that the two conflicts differ in the ways political subjectivities of the peasants opposing the mining projects were constructed. In Intag, the peasants framed their opposition to the copper mine project as a struggle for their right to have control over their lives and territories. They have participated in the construction of a vision of local development based on the promotion of sustainable economic activities, and of an organized society actively building its future. In Mount Ida, the peasants resisting gold mining have emphasized the distributional inequalities; yet have not linked their concerns to broader rights-based discourses or political and ethical principles. Their opposition has been confined to a particularistic defense of the place. The paper discusses the role of the state in the making of subjects, and the relationships among the resistance actors as crucial factors accounting for these differences.     

Tracing contingencies: analyzing the political in assemblages of web 2.0 cartographies

Our paper presents a theoretical approach to critical research on web 2.0 cartographies. Within the geoweb, dynamic and collaborative web based maps have become a popular medium for collating and communicating geographic information. Web 2.0 cartographies are often promoted as facilitating public participation and democratizing geographic knowledge. Such claims demand a closer look at the processes through which people do engage in these cartographic projects and the multiple actors, institutions, norms and technologies at work. In the context of ‘theorizing the geoweb’, here we propose conceptual tools for analyzing these myriad interactions within web 2.0 cartographies. We understand web 2.0 cartographies as assemblages of subjects, materialities and practices, or ‘actor networks’. Yet explorations of actor‐networks describe existing relations and as a consequence tend to overlook what has been excluded or lies outside of such assemblages. In order to overcome this blindness we suggest bringing together actor‐network theory with the concepts of hegemonic discourses, contingency and the political from Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. These two political theorists stress the idea that specific social realities become fixed, sedimented and perceived as natural while other possible social realities become marginalized. Using the example of the dynamic ‘Palestine Crisis Map’ (an Ushahidi Crowdmap) we demonstrate a methodology that emphasizes sensitivity towards moments of exclusion and struggle, where the political unfolds. Theorizing the political in this way extends the processual approach within Critical Cartography and offers a conceptual basis for critical research on the social dimensions of web 2.0 cartographies and geoweb practices.     

Reading political contestation in Pakistan’s Swat valley – From deliberation to ‘the political’ and beyond

In recent years, the Swat valley in North-West Pakistan has witnessed various waves of ‘politics’. Different groups have attempted to change socio-economic conditions, each according to their clear visions of a better future. After a period of top-down attempts at modernisation by the state, development projects inspired by deliberative democracy have attempted to increase political space for ‘local people’, but failed. Swat has also witnessed agonistic politics, with the emergence of a fundamentalist social movement that constructed a radical discourse of otherisation, entering into an antagonism with the state that created war and havoc. Thus, Swat offers a challenging learning ground to reflect on practices for producing change, as well as on theoretical currents in academia. I argue that deliberative and radical theorising provide insights into the political life of Swat, but fall short analytically (missing social complexities), procedurally (favouring specific techniques of social negotiation), and normatively (due to preconceived understandings of a ‘better future’). I substantiate my argument by showing that both positions take euro-centric conceptualisation of ‘citizens’, a (modern) ‘state’, and ‘citizen/state relations’ as universals – basic conditions that are not met in the post-colonial setting of Swat. I therefore argue that our curiosity should be redirected from ontologised explanation to an analysis of actual practices of societal negotiation and the norms within which these are embedded. Such insights will make it possible for us to appreciate the enormous challenges people in Swat face in their struggle to negotiate aspirations among disparate voices and to imagine some common understanding of a ‘better future’ – challenges that go beyond what deliberative or agonistic theorising can offer.     

Curating the quest for ‘good food’: The practices,spatial dynamics and influence of food-related curation in Sweden

What is ‘good food’? Is it fair trade, local, organic or ethically produced? With an ever-expanding array of products and ‘qualities’ to consider, consumers in the global North may find it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to make the ‘right’ choices. As a result, a range of intermediaries, including food apps and collective buying groups, are emerging to support and influence people with their food choices. While intermediation refers to all activities linking producers and consumers, this paper narrows the focus and considers one important, yet poorly understood, intermediary function within the food marketplace: ‘curation’. Although the concept of curation has long been associated with museums and art worlds, curatorial practices are evolving in the contemporary marketplace and are performed by a growing range of actors operating in physical, temporary and virtual spaces. Rather than acting as brokers or gatekeepers, curators interpret, translate and shape the marketplace by sorting, organising, evaluating and ascribing value(s) to specific products. They also offer general and personalised recommendations to consumers. Although the literature on local food privileges the direct relations between producers and consumers, this paper considers the important role of intermediaries. Drawing on interviews and participant observation in Sweden it contributes to the existing literature on curation by examining the spatial dynamics and nature of curatorial practices, the motivations behind them and the values they create for consumers. The findings demonstrate that a range of activities can be understood as curation and that in order to nuance and extend existing conceptualisations of curation a wider and more dynamic range of actors (food apps), spaces (blogs) and values such as inspiration, convenience and sense of community need to be considered.     

Shopping to save lives: Gender and environment theories meet ethical consumption

Much of the current work in the field of ‘gender and environment’ has been developed around case studies of environmental roles, rights and responsibilities at the community or household scale in the South. This paper asserts that the theoretical insights developed through these case studies can be of great use when examining issues of gender and environment in the North, particularly when it comes to issues of ethical consumption. In this paper I examine the promotional discourses of two cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns (where consumption of a CRM product triggers a donation to a development cause) using two such insights: (i) the mutual constitution of gendered subjectivities and environments and (ii) a gender and environment approach to questioning neoliberalization. This approach highlights the ways in which – through consumption – gender is constituted transnationally at the same time that it is constituted in relation to environments. This approach also emphasizes a series of questions about the neoliberal aspects of CRM campaigns that are usually hidden behind discourses of motherhood and responsibility. Overall, I argue that bringing gender and environment and ethical consumption research together allows us to advance both areas of study in critical and insightful ways.     

Contested diamond certification: Reconfiguring global and national interests in Zimbabwe’s Marange fields

This study examines the political uses of “conflict diamond” discourse in global debates about commodity certification and socially responsible mining in Zimbabwe. Engaging critical literature on “conflict-free” corporate branding initiatives, the study focuses on representations of conflict in Marange, in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands. In 2006, a diamond rush in Marange drew in tens of thousands of artisanal miners from across Zimbabwe as well as foreigners, and the government initiated military crackdowns in 2008. In a highly contested vote in 2009, the international government delegates who comprised the voting members in the Kimberley Process Certification System (KPCS) ruled that conflict in Marange did not meet the KPCS definitions of “conflict diamond.” The study examines discourses of key stakeholders in the multinational diamond industry, human rights organizations, policymakers as well as artisanal miners in Zimbabwe between 2006 and 2014. The article argues that advocacies against diamond certification as well as advocacies favouring certification both tended to overlook the interests of artisanal miners, focusing narrowly on certain forms of conflict while associating artisanal mining with illicitness. The Marange case illustrates how conventional discourses on “conflict diamonds” not only obscure the complex nature of conflicts in contemporary capitalist accumulation processes; they also risk contributing to new forms of structural violence. This analysis highlights the need to pay careful attention to how global commodity certification discourses inter-relate with political agendas at multiple scales. The study draws attention to dilemmas for geographers when portraying the interests of marginalized groups in – and affected by – the diamond mining sector.