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.     

Epistemology and conceptions of people and nature in geography

The paper attempts to integrate two major issues of debate in geography which are conventionally discussed separately: epistemology and conceptions of the relationship between people and Nature. Whichever issue we start with, two concepts are essential: intersubjectivity and labour. Knowledge of natural objects is tied to labour, which both subjects ideas to a kind of test and changes our position within Nature. All knowledge depends upon intersubjective understanding between people, but this implies that in social science, and hence in human geography, the traditional subject-object relationship should be recast as a form of communication between ‘knowing-subjects’. These relationships are not limited to some separate sphere of epistemology but are constitutive of society in Nature itself. Labour, though traditionally overlooked in geography, is the most active and transformative process in changing Nature and society, and intersubjectivity is an essential element of the irreducibly social character of human life. In this attempt, the paper outlines and justifies a historical materialist perspective through critical engagement with positivist and humanist approaches. It is then argued that false conceptions of people and Nature in geography are grounded in the structure and selfunderstanding of our own society such that a critique of these ideas becomes a critique of our society.     

Problematising justice definitions in public food security debates: Towards global and participative food justices

In the current environment of austerity, social justice concerns are increasingly permeating the food security agenda. However, there is a need to clarify what it means to create socially just food systems conceptually and practically. To address this gap, this paper proposes an analytical framework to embed a more complex conceptualisation of justice in food security debates that also serves as a bridging device across competing narratives. This framework is mobilised to analyse the framing process of the UK media, which plays a key role in developing narratives that provide audiences with schemas for interpreting events. Results show the emergence of eleven frames which highlight different solutions to deliver food security. The application of the justice analytical framework evidences the contingent relationship between food security and justice claims and discusses how these food security frames address differently what counts as a matter of justice (including economic, socio-cultural and political dimensions) and who counts as a subject of justice, tackling issues around delimitation of scales and sites of justice. The analysis reveals polarised positions between whether the sites subject to justice should be individuals or structures and uncovers how political and global elements of justice are largely by-passed in food security debates. These conceptualisations of justice and associated policy recommendations neglect the potential for people to participate fully in the conditions and decisions that give rise to particular distributions of goods and bads in the first place; limiting the construction of shared responsibilities to deliver global and participative food justices.     

Competitiveness versus ‘clean and green’? The regulation and governance of GMOs in Australia and the UK

It is increasingly argued that we are entering into a “biotech century”, in which biotechnology promises major advances in agricultural productivity. The development of biotechnology is not a straightforward affair, however, and the advent of GMOs has led to public protest and consumer resistance. This paper draws upon a comparative Australian-UK project concerned with the role of regulation and governance in mediating the debates and managing the associated risks. Regulatory responses and the mediation of conflicts by the Australian and UK governments have been shaped by the institutional and policy environments in these two countries. The implications of these public debates and regulatory responses for the capture of competitive opportunities are considered. The fact that the two countries have broadly similar systems of governance and regulation reveals how alike the circumstances are in many respects. But at the same time there are important differences in both the style and the content of the policy debates. In both the UK and Australia, the respective central governments remain committed to a ‘biotechnology future’. Against this background, there is little doubt that the choices about biotechnology will play a defining role in shaping the future of rural places.     

The racialized geographies of news consumption and production: contaminated memories and racialized silences

With its longstanding history and interest in issues of landscape and representation, geographers are ideally positioned to analyze the relationship between media, identity and place in media. What is missing, however, is a grounded understanding of the dynamics of the locally produced politics of representation and, in particular, how these representations are perceived by different members of the audience. This paper briefly explores the nexus of race, news production and news consumption through an analysis of interviews with racialized journalists (journalists who identified as members of minority racial groups) and a focus group conducted with self-identified Iranian Canadians. The paper looks specifically at two themes that emerged in the empirical material: the contamination of memory and the creation of colonized memory media-spaces for some participants in the focus group, and the nature of racialized silences in the newsroom. I suggest that geographies of news might well be understood as a complex, interactive process of the production of meaning between both producer and consumer, where news content, ethics, roles and values are negotiated through multiple social contexts.     

Contested expectations: Trump International Golf Links Scotland,polarised visions,and the making of the Menie Estate landscape as resource

In initiating the development of a large-scale golf resort in Aberdeenshire, Trump International Golf Links Scotland made a relatively unknown site central to Scottish planning debates. A stretch of land along the North Sea coast north of Aberdeen became linked to new possible futures.Part of the site developed consisted of moving sand dunes given environmental protection as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and from the onset a heated debate has concerned the transformability of these dunes. The land was simultaneously seen as perfect for a golf resort of a scale previously unseen in the UK and as sensitive land threatened by the development. Proponents asserted that future economic benefits would outweigh any environmental impact. Opponents in turn contested such expectations through asserting other variables to be counted, or questioning the possibility to control the dunes altogether. Hence, the resort’s eventual relation to sand dunes, migrating pink-footed geese and fog along the coast became political arguments.In this article I utilise this case to illustrate how the ways futures are expressed produces both political subjects and objects in the present. I argue that a process where social struggle is conducted as the production of future scenarios posits important opportunities for public engagement while also leading to new problems. This I shed light on by bringing together Callon’s notion of performative theories with the literature on post-politics, offering a critique of expert-led environmental governance.     

The emotions of racialization: examining the intersection of emotion, race, and landscape through public housing in the United States

This paper analyzes racialization—the social construction of ‘race’ as a normative dimension of everyday life—and shows that emotion plays a central role in this process. My focus is the representation of post-World War II public housing, a key site of white-black racialization in the United States. Representations of filth, decay, and danger separate African-Americans from mainstream, white society as disturbingly different. I argue that this particular representation carries heavy emotional value, specifically that of disgust and fear. It is disgust and fear that racializes this landscape, giving meaning and force to an ideology that views African–Americans as inherently inferior to whites. Policy is framed by these emotions, impacting decisions made about public housing. I explore these ideas through contemporary representations of public housing by federal officials in Washington, DC and by newspapers in Charlotte, North Carolina as well as the federal program HOPE VI.     

The future of Geography: when the whole is less than the sum of its parts

In a recent article, Thrift has presented an optimistic account of the future of Geography. While this reply is broadly supportive of his claims that Geography is more diverse, and has more to offer than ever before, it is less optimistic with respect to the prospects for the survival of Geography as a unitary academic discipline. Experiences over the last 20 years in the UK higher education, in particular, the 2001 RAE exercise, point to an unfavourable institutional climate for the discipline. Within Geography, the ever-increasing diversity of its subject matter and research philosophy poses problems for disciplinary identity. This is reflected in the more restricted perspective of the subject outside the universities, and is compounded by a weakening of the link between Geography in the universities and the schools. In these circumstances, serious attention must be given to the changing nature of the discipline, to its positioning with respect to other subjects, and to its relations with the wider world. At a time of academic, cultural, technological and social dynamism, there are, nevertheless, opportunities as well as dangers for the subject. Although this reply is an explicitly bleak one regarding the future, the implicit message is that Geography can (and should) still prosper. The more positive outcome, however, rests on an appreciation and nurturing of a more traditional geographical heritage than Thrift identifies, as well as a more creative view of the relationship between fundamental and applied research.     

‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

Conspiratorial thought has been highly visible in post-September 11th America, manifest through the continued growth of a public ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ as well as at the state-level, through the Bush administration’s conspiracy rhetoric of Islamic terrorists intent on infiltrating the US homeland. In this paper, I demonstrate how conspiracy can be understood as a ‘knowledge-producing discourse’; dialectically engaged across multiple subject positions and through which geopolitical narratives are performatively produced and contested at interconnected scales of bodies, homes, city streets and national ‘homelands’. Through drawing on, and challenging, the conceptual and methodological approaches of a burgeoning feminist geopolitics, I ground my analysis in the embodied performances of ‘patriotic dissent’ by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement in New York City, as well as through my own situated and ethical engagement with positions of political difference.     

“We Don’t Take the Pledge”: Environmentality and environmental skepticism at the epicenter of US wind energy development

This study analyzes pro-wind, “anti-environmental” discourses prevalent among key stakeholders in Nolan County, Texas, the epicenter of US wind power. We draw upon interviews conducted within a Q-method study to examine environmental views held by key actors in wind-farm development. We frame our analysis within the theoretical field that engages the formation of environmental subjects, defined as the process through which individuals and communities align their environmental practices with state ends. We argue that this is a process that can be incomplete or in tension with other subject positions, which together may lead to unexpected environmental views. We introduce “environmental skepticism,” defined as a rejection of ecological science steeped in deep anthropocentrism and possessive individualism, as a dominant counter-narrative informing certain environmental subjectivities. The remainder of the paper describes Texas wind stakeholders’ views or subject positions on energy and the environment and reveals how environmental skepticism is not overturned even as renewable energy supports the local economy. We analyze wind stakeholders’ environmental subjectivity in terms of emergent subject positions as “reflexive environmental skepticism,” a view that accepts the economic products, processes, and policy innovations advocated by ecological modernization without accepting the core claim that innovations are required to adapt to environmental change.     

Learning to trade ethically: Knowledgeable capitalism, retailers and contested commodity chains

This paper explores what happens when corporations engage explicitly in practices of organisational learning not only to become better capitalists by generating ever more innovative ways of maintaining profitability, improving competitiveness and maximising shareholder value, but also to become more responsible corporate citizens in their business practices. In particular, I evaluate the ways in which UK food and clothing retailers are learning to develop their ethical trading programmes in response to political calls for more responsible trading. Thrift’s [Thrift, N., 2005. Knowing Capitalism. Sage, London] notion of ‘knowledgeable, or soft, capitalism’ is adopted to understand the creative and experimental ways in which retailers and their mentors (ethical consultancies, social auditors and multi-stakeholder organisations) are learning to trade ethically. Two specific examples of formal learning spaces experienced by UK food and clothing retailers are examined: (i) training courses on social auditing and (ii) corporate awareness-raising courses on ethical trade. These courses are shown to encompass various participative and affective practices of learning. And while particular limits to the success of these courses are argued to exist, ethical learning practices discussed in this paper are nonetheless suggested to play a role in the making of new, albeit moderate, forms of responsible capitalism.     

Urban renewal, immigration, and contested claims to public space: The case of Piazza Garibaldi in Naples

This article examines the relationship between immigration and urban renewal in Naples during the 1990s through the conflicting representations and uses of Piazza Garibaldi, a large piazza located in front of the city's central railway station. As well as the hub of the city's public transport network, since the mid-1980s this piazza has been the multifunctional space for a number of immigrant groups. Re-envisioned as the `gateway' to the city's regenerated centro storico (historic centre) during the 1990s, the piazza became a focus of public debates on security, tourism and, in particular, immigration. I examine how these issues intersected with political discourses about a renewed sense of citizenship in redefining the piazza as a strategic but problematic public space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of local newspaper reports, the article looks at the ways in which the piazza has been appropriated by different immigrant groups for social and economic purposes, and how, at the same time, they have been excluded from discourses about a `new' Naples.     

Fleshing out expertise: The making of creative industries experts in the United Kingdom

The place of expertise in modern systems of government continues to be of concern to critical social scientists. Recent years have seen something of a shift away from conceptions of expertise that tended to see it as distant, overly technical and aligned with the needs of the state and capital. Expertise is increasingly recognised as having a more complex relation with the subjects of government than just as a means for shoring up authority, offering them a space for engagement, critique and counter-expertise. This paper argues that focusing on particular experts and their changing roles in governmental assemblages can flesh out one-dimensional conceptions of expertise and provide insights into governmental change. Drawing on a variety of literature, it is argued that expertise can usefully be conceived as; first, a social relation based on one party having access to knowledge which gives them authority over another; second, as distributed across a governmental assemblage in a particular way, with some expert relations being positioned to have more influence, understood here as expert power, across the assemblage; and third, as a matter of strategic engagement on the part of experts located in particular epistemic communities seeking to gain expert power. The potential of this perspective is explored through an analysis of an emergent expert system for the creative industries in the UK where a small community of actors have realigned their practices and cast themselves as creative industries experts. This has allowed then to reshape the governmental assemblage forming around this economic sector in a direction favourable to their own ideas. It is concluded that efforts to convert expertise into greater expert power is a key dynamic transforming governmental assemblages.     

Probing the (in)compatibilities of social theory and policy relevance in Piers Blaikie’s political ecology

One of Piers Blaikie’s most important contributions to the development of political ecology is his critique of land and resource conservation policy in the global South. In this paper I trace the development of Blaikie’s ideas about the policy relevance of political ecology, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by the introduction of poststructural social theory into the field. I begin by revisiting Blaikie’s earlier critiques of environment and development policy. This will provide the departure point to explore how his thinking on the relationship of theory and policy and of academic and development practices has evolved in subsequent writings. I have invented two personas, “early Blaikie” and “late Blaikie”, to facilitate this task. Second, I want to probe some of the challenges that late Blaikie presents for doing political ecology research, to some extent by pitting early Blaikie against late Blaikie and letting them hash it out. Third, I turn to my own and others’ research and consultation experiences as a way to examine the possibilities for reconciling theoretically driven critiques with policy relevant research.     

Methanol maser groups and class I emission: Flux density distribution

A search for a relationship between class I and class II methanol maser flux densities has been carried out. A large sample of mixed-type sources has been studied, with each source in the sample radiating as a class I and class II maser simultaneously. In methanol maser groups for which the positions of prominent spectral features at different radial velocities coincide at different frequencies, the fluxes are anticorrelated, and are related as log S _6.7+12.2 = (?1.68 ± 0.38) × log S ₄₄ + (4.01 ± 0.60). For group I, which includes sources with preferred pumping for masers emitting at 6.7 GHz, the relationship between the 6.7 GHz masers and 44 GHz masers is less steep than for group II, which contains sources with normal pumping of class II masers. This implies that class I methanol masers that correspond to group I are suppressed more strongly.     

Volunteered geographic information and networked publics? Politics of everyday mapping and spatial narratives

The issue of a changing public that undertakes and underpins Volunteered geographic information (VGI) practices has not been discussed in depth in the existing literature. This paper seeks to tackle this issue of publics regarding the intersection between VGI and public participation GIS. I draw upon the notion of “networked publics” to illustrate the complexities of social relations intersecting with VGI practices. Networked publics involve a connected set of social and technological developments associated with the growing engagement with digitally connected media. Networked publics embody several major characteristics including multiple memberships spanning over vast locations and possibilities for horizontal connections and bottom-up engagements. I argue that the emergence and proliferation of VGI reflect the major characteristics of networked publics. Through two examples of VGI constructions in China, I depict types of networked publics involved in these processes. I show that the mutual constitution of networked publics and sociopolitical and technological transformations has produced new landscapes of civic engagement in China. I also show the limits and challenges of these VGI practices in this context. As such, this study contributes to the efforts of theorizing the geoweb through conceptualizing and foregrounding these new forms of social relations and interactions engaging with VGI practices, which in turn may entail new forms of knowledge production and politics.     

Public space design as class warfare: Urban design, the `right to the city' and the production of Clinton Square, Syracuse, NY

Urban designers and their design process remain largely outside the literature on public space. Either designers are cast as simple tools of capitalist social relations, producing exclusionary public spaces, or they figure as entrepreneurs that complement economic renewal schemes through beautification measures that bring business and jobs to the city. This paper analyzes both of these arguments, through an ethnographic analysis of the urban design process behind the redevelopment of a public square in Syracuse, NY. I argue that aesthetic considerations most often derive from economic and political pressures, pressures that draw upon the social contexts of urban designers within an international division of labor and their relationship to class struggle. Because public space serves such an important role in political and social life, its status as a product of urban design should therefore act as a crucial component in any discussion of rights to the city.     

Of tidy gardens and clean houses: housing officers as agents of social control

This paper seeks to contribute to the theme of institutional geographies by exploring how the prevailing socio-spatial order is recreated and legitimated in the ways in which public rented housing is managed and delivered by housing associations and local authorities in the UK. The public rented sector has been increasingly catering for the most vulnerable sections of the population who are dependent on state benefits and cannot afford any other form of housing. As a result, housing staffs have found themselves having to take on a welfare role which entails controlling and policing social tenants who are seen to be causing disorder in society. This paper shows how a dominant housing management discourse reproduced by policies and staff at both front-line and management levels is that of an emerging ‘underclass’ promoted by right wing politicians and the media since the 1980s. According to dominant housing management discourse the members of this underclass are disrupting traditional patriarchal and capitalist institutions and values. Tenants’ houses and gardens not conforming to culturally and socially acceptable standards of cleanliness and tidiness symbolises tenants’ lack of conformity to the prevailing institutional order. Drawing on in-depth interviews with housing officers and managers, and observations of interviews between staff and tenants in six housing organisations, this paper analyses the ways in which housing organisations seek to control social tenants through the imposition of certain norms of cleanliness over their houses and gardens.     

Visualizing the relationship between geographic and social media network space

This research explores the relationship between geographic and social media network space. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to perform a geo-enhanced network analysis and to create an example social media network using a select location identified in the study area as important in the results of the geo-enhanced network analysis. A straightforward, non-technical example is provided to the readers on how location data and social media network data can be overlaid to visualize potential local firm to firm and firm to customer connections in geographic and social media network space. An example of how to identify these potential connections locally through social media networks using Twitter is demonstrated. By considering the geographic location in network structures, it is possible to convey the role distance plays in discerning prospective local social media marketing partners, and also track the spread of information flow through social media networks.

     

Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’

Through the lens of the dancing body, this paper examines practices of health and wellbeing produced in response to City of Vancouver urban governance policies. In particular, it calls attention to the legislative onslaught by city government in the years abutting the 2010 Winter Olympics to cultivate and manage healthy people, communities, and environments. In an effort to sell Vancouver’s ‘liveability’, I argue City of Vancouver endorsed a new legislative alliance that merged a conspicuously Anglo-American wellbeing lexicon, favouring individual responsibility and self-governance, with the performing arts industries. Drawing upon interviews and performance-based research, the paper illustrates how Karen Jamieson’s community dance project Connect, created for the In the Heart of the City festival, embodies Vancouver’s tri-level legislative ambitions to nurture A Healthy City For All. This materialised through the crafting of a dance-health body practice (healthy people), by choreographing a sense of belonging among ‘at risk’ communities (healthy communities), and in the uniting of the arts and health professions in the process of ‘cleaning up’ disenfranchised neighbourhoods (healthy environments). In bringing together scholarship on cultures of wellbeing and creative dance practice, the article contributes to understandings of how the health-seeking subject is embodied and performed. It also offers a productive critique of the exclusionary nature of urban health legislation, and of the contested role artists and arts festivals can play in nurturing urban wellbeing and normalising inequalities.