Caring about ‘brain drain’ migration in a postcolonial world

The migration of health professionals has been accompanied by politically and morally charged discussions on the effect of such migration on the health of those left behind in their countries of origin. In the UK, the National Health Service, which has long been dependent on overseas migrants to bolster its own staffing, has responded to critics accusing it of ‘poaching’ health professionals from poorer countries with a range of measures to limit health worker mobility. These measures counterpose the right to mobility of health workers with the right to health for those they leave behind, posing academics working on brain drain with a quandary: how do we think ethically about brain drain migration? This paper aims to address this question by exploring the spatial and temporal ontologies that are being mobilised in current thinking around the brain drain. It explores how these ontologies shape both public debates and policy initiatives, foreclosing other ways of thinking about health worker mobility. It argues that routing discourses of brain drain through insights drawn from care ethics and postcolonial thinking will highlight the historical transnational connections that mark medical labour markets and how the category ‘medical worker’ is precisely dependent on this transnationalism.     

Mobile pastoralism on the brink of land privatization in Northern Côte d’Ivoire

Côte d’Ivoire’s adoption of land privatization policies promoted by the World Bank and European Union is producing new land use patterns in the countryside. A centerpiece of these policies is the 1998 Rural Land Law that aims to restructure rural economic life along agrarian capitalist lines. The purported “development” objective of land privatization is to stimulate agricultural productivity based on the assumption that land titling will lead farmers and herders to make greater investments in their production systems. This paper argues that the mobile livestock raising system of immigrant FulBe pastoralists in Côte d’Ivoire is threatened by the new land law. Since mobility is crucial to animal health and fertility rates, I argue that reduced mobility will lead to lower livestock productivity. Although the land law has yet to be implemented, its very existence is leading prospective claimants to test their land rights by planting orchards and lending land to immigrant farmers. The monetization of land lending and grazing rights is increasingly common. Land disputes over who has the power to allocate land are also on the rise. I argue that this heightened interest in “tenure building” is constraining herd mobility, especially for herders with limited resources to negotiate access to rangelands. On the other hand, land privatization is strengthening the hand of local cattle-owning farmers who increasingly practice mobile livestock raising and compete with FulBe herders for grazing lands. Under these new conditions of land access, control, and competition, FulBe herd mobility and productivity are at risk of declining.     

Moving young lives: Mobility, immobility and inter-generational tensions in urban Africa

This paper explores young people’s experiences and perceptions of mobility and mobility constraints in poorer urban areas of Ghana, Malawi and South Africa within the specific context of inter-generational relations. Drawing principally on qualitative research findings from a study involving both adult and child researchers, our aim is to chart the diversities and commonalities of urban young people’s mobility experiences in the everyday - how they use and experience the city - developing a comparative perspective across three urban study sites which links young people’s mobility with the power relations that operate to shape their movements in individual locations. In particular, we consider how positive and negative images of young people’s mobility play out in terms of the inter-generational frictions and negotiations generated by their mobility performances. We also reflect on the developmental implications, in terms of young people’s access to services and income and their participation in the social networks and peer culture which may shape their life trajectories. Three themes are explored in detail: mobility as challenge, mobility as temptation and mobility control.     

The complex mobilities of homeless people in rural England

This paper explores the interconnected issues of mobility, power and meaning in the context of rural homelessness. It explores two common assumptions relating to these interconnections: that rural homeless people move to cities thereby transposing homelessness into an urban problem; and that mobility is deeply implicated in the mapping of moral codes in rural areas. Drawing on a range of interviews with homeless people, and workers with homelessness agencies in the rural areas of Gloucestershire and Somerset, the paper discusses four types of movement: ‘local’ homeless people moving out of rural areas; ‘local’ homeless people moving within rural areas; homeless ‘incomers’ moving to rural areas; and itinerant/transient homeless people moving through rural areas. The complex mobilities of rural homeless people influence common ideas about where homelessness occurs and how it is experienced. These mobilities also affect how homelessness is ‘made known’ in rural areas, as different elements of the mobility of homeless people are discursively scattered amongst identity labels and policy arenas other than homelessness. Finally, homeless mobilities problematise the adequacy and nature of policy responses to homelessness in rural areas.     

Failure and strategic projects: Australia’s Asia-Pacific vision

This paper uses Australia’s 1980s shift to a new accumulation strategy of ‘international competitiveness’ to examine the role of failure in shaping state strategic projects. The paper argues that the Australian strategy’s gradual shift from an interventionist to a market-led orientation played out in competing representations of failure. Whether particular policies were perceived as failures depended not only on their material effects, but also on the ways in which failure was defined and on the values underpinning those definitions. As representations of failure establish the boundaries between the incremental adaptations that stabilise an accumulation strategy and the more radical failures characteristic of crisis, they illuminate how processes of discursive selectivity ‘fix’ state projects’ temporal, scalar and spatial dimensions.     

Shifting spatialities of power: The case of Australasian aviation

This paper explores how different modalities, spatialities and scales of power operate in a geopolitical context. By tracing the dynamic geographies of state and firm power in the events leading up to the collapse of a major Australian firm, Ansett Airlines, it reveals the difference that place and position make to the creation and use of power. The paper stresses agents’ relational positioning, their ‘places’ in multiple networks of association and the ways in which their past actions and visions of the future condition their strategic options. The paper contextualises the workings of power and explores how power relationships are re-configured in specific contested events. It concludes that power cannot be separated from the spatial and temporal dimensions of actual contexts, from actor’s positions in contexts, or from their strategic objectives.     

Putting principles of linguistic rights into practice: Geographical perspectives on a contemporary European problem

The political salience of demands from minority and regional groups for greater language rights increases across Europe. To draw more geographical attention to a particular aspect of these developments, this article identifies the main generic problems of converting demands for ‘linguistic rights’ into applied language policies. It does this by first outlining how the historic process of nation-state building in Europe reduced linguistic diversity, but has not eliminated language demands emanating from regional minorities. It then analyses how the concept of ‘linguistic rights’, as a part of human rights in general, has been developing within the United Nations and bodies including the Council of Europe and the European Union. Having outlined the political-legal frameworks within which minority language rights are pursued, the article then discusses the major difficulties of putting them into practice in particular places and spaces. They can be summarised as: the weakness of relevant international agreements; the dominance of state sovereignty in determining language policies; the limited public support for minority language rights; the difficulties of defining minority languages and delimiting the geographical spaces they occupy; the challenges posed by the growing geographical mobility of populations; and the problem of balancing collective and individual rights. Two fundamental issues linking these different problems are identified. First, there are problems of definition: what constitutes a ‘minority’ or ‘regional’ language and within what geographical space(s) is such a language spoken? This spatial dimension underlies a second fundamental problem, namely that of resolving conflicts between individual personality rights and collective territorial rights in increasing hybrid geolinguistic situations created by the growing geographical mobility of populations. Sociolinguists study these issues, but usually treat these essential spatial dimensions in a superficial fashion. Thus, there is an opportunity for geographers to develop more sophisticated geolinguistic analyses as a contribution to this interdisciplinary field.     

Job access, location decision, and the working poor: A qualitative study in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area

The critical perspective in job accessibility research argues that access to employment opportunities in an urban area is a complex process. This paper explores the role of individual level location decision-making as it relates to job access. In US metropolitan areas, a worker must consider where to live, where to work, and how they will commute between these locations – the residential–commuting–employment nexus. But limited work has been done to understand how this home-work link influences job access. This research interviews thirty working poor individuals in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area. One unexpected finding was the spatially transitory nature of these individuals’ lives – frequently changing both jobs and residences. Negotiating the nexus is a process of spatial decision-making determined by their individual urban mobility. Residential choice is made based on mobility options, not work location. They have diverse job commuting experiences as their mobility options change over time, and those mobility options often dictate their capacity to access existing job opportunities. From the experience of these individuals, Columbus has a strong local economy with many low-skilled higher paying jobs, but a weak public transit system. This article also contributes a qualitative based research perspective to a body of literature that historically under utilizes the approach.     

Organisational geographies of power: Introduction to special issue

This paper introduces the special issue ‘organisational geographies of power’ by examining the theoretical and empirical context for debates. It does this, firstly, with reference to existing theoretical work on what power is and does as well as work on the construction of power relations. Building on this, the paper then, secondly, examines the way relational and production network approaches have incorporated power into work on transnational corporations before, thirdly, considering how work on neoliberalism has studied the construction of spatial power relations. In doing this the paper highlights four important questions for future research relating to the practices and spatiality of power, the exercising of power and the situated effects of power relations.     

Ranching and the new global range: Amazônia in the 21st century

This paper seeks to understand how the Brazilian Amazon, which many thought unsuitable for agricultural development, has yielded to a dynamic cattle economy in only a few decades. It does so by embedding the Thunian model of location rents within the regime of capital accumulation that has driven the Brazilian economy since the mid-20th century. The paper addresses policies that have created location rents in Amazônia, the effect of these rents on land managers, and the spatial implications of their behavior on forests. Thus, the paper connects macro-processes and structures to agents on the ground, in providing a political ecological explanation relevant to land change science. The policy discussion focuses on reductions in transportation costs, improvements in animal health, and monetary and trade reforms. To illustrate the impact of policy, the paper presents data on the geography of Amazonian herd expansion, on the growth of Amazonian exports, and on the profitability of the region’s cattle economy. It follows the empirical presentation with more abstract consideration of the spatial relations between cattle ranching and soy farming, and implications for deforestation. The paper concludes on a speculative note by considering the likelihood of forest transition in the region, given the transformation of Amazônia into a global resource frontier.     

Factory daughters and Chinese modernity: a case from Dongguan

This article investigates how a group of Hong-Kong Chinese managers of the offshore facilities of a US-based corporation extend their firm’s base in southern China while simultaneously establishing themselves as a new kind of “Chinese” manager. These new managers set out to accomplish what their colleagues in other corporate sites have not been able to do: control the turnover rate of a female labor force, described as sexually tumultuous and hormonally problematic. To control the labor turnover rate, these managers create a strategy for keeping workers “just long enough” before they lose their dexterity and attentiveness as a result of repetitive work. Their strategy relies on a discourse of in loco parentis to justify invasive policies for monitoring workers’ bodily functions and basic mobility inside and outside of the factory. To make this argument, the article combines a Marxian critique of value with post-structuralist theories of discursive subjectivity. The objective is to demonstrate how the negotiation of social identity within the capitalist firm proceeds through the representation of binary cultural and sex differences that reinforce the dichotomies of laborer and manager. However, these binaries unfold in unpredictable and uneven ways that can prove problematic for the capitalist endeavor. The material for this article comes from an ethnographic study of this company’s operations in southern China and in northern Mexico.     

“We will go side-by-side with you.” Labour union engagement with Aboriginal peoples in Canada

The inclusion of new groups of workers has been an important component of union renewal efforts. Several unions in Canada have begun to dedicate significant resources to better organize and represent Aboriginal workers. Drawing on interviews with union activists, organizers and representatives from two national public sector unions in Canada, we present an overview of union strategies to engage with Aboriginal peoples. Results suggest that understanding the distinct territorial context of Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work and unions has been necessary to the success of these union strategies. This approach begins by drawing connections between Aboriginal peoples’ present-day relationships to work and their prior occupancy of, and dispossession from, lands and resources. Because of the geographical specificity of how the colonial experience affected Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work and unions, unions have had to adopt non-normative approaches to their engagements with Aboriginal peoples. In workplaces where settlers were dominant, addressing racism in the workplace and gaining support for initiatives to hire and train Aboriginal workers were important. Alternatively, in Aboriginal workplaces, organizing was a priority. Here questions of union legitimacy have taken precedence and the focus of unions has been on partnership building. Most importantly, however, engagement with Aboriginal peoples has brought attention to the colonial practices within unions and helped to foster growing Aboriginal voice within the labour movement.     

Moving workers with the work: State selection, key workers and spatial development policy in post-war Britain

Spatial and planning policies in Britain have increasingly become focused on regional inequalities and the creation of mixed, sustainable and balanced communities. Within these new policy paradigms the category of the key workers has emerged as an essential element in the socio-economic sustainability of any bounded area programmes have been introduced to support their needs. Yet, defining key workers is an inherently political process as it necessitates the selection of essential and non-essential workers. Theoretical approaches that highlight state selectivity and the ways in which key policy subjects and objects are identified and mobilised have become increasingly popular across the social sciences and key worker support programmes provide a clear example of these processes in action. This paper draws on archival research to explore the formation of the category ‘key’ worker as an object of government in spatial development policies of the post-war period. It examines how key worker programmes were established to tackle the economic problems of Development Areas. It argues that definitions of key workers were forged in and through particular social, political, and economic contexts and that their emergence as an object of government presupposed and reinforced the existence of different classes of workers and different types of citizens. The paper highlights the significance of such historical work in assessments of contemporary policy and academic debates concerning the changing character of sustainable communities and citizenship, regional development, and changing modes of state regulation.     

Mobilizing research on Africa's development corridors

Across Africa, development corridors – networks of roads, railways, pipelines and ports that facilitate the movement of commodities between landlocked production areas, processing zones and global markets – are being built at an unprecedented pace. In mainstream development discourse, these mega-infrastructure projects have been framed as an effective way of creating conditions that are attractive to investors while simultaneously driving inclusive economic growth and development. Yet, recent geographic research on new development corridors has revealed certain tensions and inconsistencies in this win–win narrative, drawing attention to cases where the spatial reorganization of land that has accompanied corridor development has introduced new patterns of spatial exclusion and immobility. This article shows how approaching the study of development corridors using the new mobility paradigm – paying attention to uneven and conflicting mobilities along new corridor routes – stands to generate important empirical and theoretical insights about peoples' lived experiences with corridors, as well as about the trajectories of power enacted through corridor development. Ultimately, it is argued that applying the new mobilities paradigm in future research on development corridors may help researchers to better understand emergent forms of spatial exclusion and immobility created by new corridors.     

Tales of power in biotechnology regulation: the EU ban on BST

Biotechnology regulation has been dogged by allegations of bias, usually phrased in terms of ‘conflicts of interest’. Social constructionist analyses of regulatory science have shown up serious epistemological difficulties with such ‘interest’ explanations of regulatory power, but in the process they have also destabilised the platforms such as ‘objectivity’, upon which critiques of regulatory bias are usually grounded. This paper argues that their critical impotence follows from not being constructivist enough. Building on Hajer’s notions of ‘story-lines’ and ‘discourse coalitions’, it argues that recovering the non-human, material components that construct regulation offers sufficiently firm ground for evaluating regulatory power even in the absence of the firm benchmarks assumed by interest accounts. The paper develops this approach by focusing on a single story-line, characterised as ‘scientism’, as it is deployed in the build up to a European Union (EU) ban on bovine somatotrophin, the first food-related product of the ‘new biotechnology’. The essay ends by discussing how far this retrospective analysis can help us to understand and intervene in the current and future EU regulation of biotechnology.     

Migrant pathways to resource access in Lampung’s political forest: Gender, citizenship and creative conjugality

An important theme in studies of enclosure and resource access in Southeast Asian hinges on the concept of the ‘political forest’, a particular constellation of power constituted by ideas, practices and institutions that seek to regulate peoples’ access to resources, providing recognition and legitimacy to some, whilst excluding and criminalizing others. Whilst issues of class and ‘race’ underpin work in this vein, in Indonesia, much less attention has been directed towards the ways in which gender inheres in the regularisation of land and livelihood, and the ordering of upland spaces. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theorizing of the links between citizenship, recognition and hetero-normativity, and on analyses of the social relationships through which resource access is negotiated and realized, the paper presents a feminist political ecology of the gender dynamics inherent in the power plays of resource access as land-poor rural migrants negotiate a shifting landscape of enclosure in Lampung province. Through an analysis of three periods of resource governance and control in the province, the paper shows how the negotiation of resource access is simultaneously a process of self-regulation and subject-making that draws on particular ideas about family and conjugal partnership, inculcating gendered and hetero-normative ideologies of the “ideal citizen”. Through particular representational strategies - positionings - necessary to qualify for resource access, and through the material practices necessary to realize the benefits of resource access, conjugal partnership is reiterated and remade as an important social relationship through which resource access may be realised, for men as well as for women.     

Feeling Slow Food: Visceral fieldwork and empathetic research relations in the alternative food movement

This paper details the author’s experiments with accessing the visceral realm in research on the food-based social movement, Slow Food (SF). “Visceral” is defined as the bodily realm where feelings, sensations, moods and so on are experienced. Fieldwork methods aimed at participatory co-creation of data through verbal communications in the form of in-depth conversations and group discussions, as well as non-verbal communications in the form of “intentionally designed experiences” and other forms of sensory involvement. Communications centered on understanding how foods and food-based settings elicit feelings and sensations that move and power bodies differently, and specifically how SF guides bodies to be affected by specific foods and environments. The paper details how data were created and recorded, specifically exploring how sensory-based research events were translated to data through the creation of imagined bodily empathies. The paper also discusses the emergence of change-oriented communications that pushed for transformation in SF’s (in)attention to visceral differences, thus demonstrating how visceral research can challenge researchers and participants to critically reflect upon, and perhaps transform, how their own bodies feel (and respond to) the world.     

Undoing violence, unbounding precarity: Beyond the frames of terror in the Philippines

Geographers’ interest in the productive intersections between fear and issues of (counter)terrorism has flourished in recent years. These studies have been important in their critical analyses of geopolitical relations by exposing how fear has been driving unjust policies and violent initiatives. However, I suggest that these lines of inquiries often neglect the localized playing out of fears, particularly how such sentiments can potentially stimulate actions and affect the practices and progress of politics at different geographical scales.This paper addresses the aforementioned lacuna by scrutinizing how fear is bounded up with the geographical extension of the US-led ‘war on terror’ to the Philippines in the post 9/11 era. I argue that the framings of terrorism in the country have allowed the government to manipulate fear to justify destructive strategies for the eradication of imminent ‘threats’. However such initiatives are not only counterproductive to rooting out the sources of terror but also aid in the (re)production of violence. Not assuming the inevitability of such elegaic outcomes, I showcase the efforts of the Philippines communist ‘rebel’ group, Rebulusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa ng Mindanao (RPM-M), in repudiating official terrorism discourse by emphasising instead issues of state-induced vulnerability and marginalization. This in turn allows fear to be transformed into other modalities of emotions that are central to the formation of coalitional resistances to the arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes.By illuminating the constitution of (non)violence through emotions, there is an inherent wish to disrupt the natural conjoining of fear, terror and violence dominating contemporary geopolitical imaginations. Crucially, the implications of emotions for the thinking and doing of nonviolence augments a concrete pathway for operationalising a radical praxis of peace and justice that explicitly eschews a resort to force.     

Negotiated space: Tourists, pilgrims, and the Bahá’í terraced gardens in Haifa

This paper explores the inherent contradiction and conceptual conflict that arises when sacred sites are marketed as secular for the purpose of promoting tourism. The question of conflict is further frustrated within the context of Israel’s contested religious landscape and Israeli policy. Using a Lefebvrian framework, the historical development of the Bahai Gardens in Haifa, Israel, the tourism board’s promotion of the site as Haifa’s primary tourist designation, and the distinct spatial practices that have been used by both constituencies are investigated. Further, the authors posit that the Bahai Gardens are multi-dimensional spaces characterized by two different socio-spatial processes and practices that co-exist—the tourist’s and the pilgrim’s. These practices transform the holy site into a secular shared community asset. The paper concludes with a discussion of the socio-spatial implications of the case and its broader implications concerning the globalization of tourism and the efficacy of developing “layered” Lefebvrian triad to try and avoid conflict.