Conspicuous redemption? Reflections on the promises and perils of the ‘Celebritization’ of climate change

With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science-policy-celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees.     

Mucky carrots and other proxies: Problematising the knowledge-fix for sustainable and ethical consumption

This paper uses evidence from focus groups in England to consider how consumers think about and, more importantly, distinguish foods by both primary and secondary qualities, using both their own judgement but also advice produced by various organisations acting as ‘knowledge intermediaries’, such as independent certification bodies. We thus consider the ‘sorting out’ that consumers do with food, particularly in developing typologies of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’, and the cues on which they base these judgements, from the material immediacy of ‘mucky carrots’ to the abstract remoteness of organic certification. In particular, we problematise the ‘knowledge-fix’ that underlies attempts to provide knowledge to promote more sustainable and ethical consumption. This raises problems of how consumers give assurance schemes meaning, how ethical and sustainable schemes are subject to re-fetishization and how consumers tend towards increasing scepticism and distrust of such claims, thus making a ‘politics of reconnection’ far from easy.     

Violent morphologies: Landscape, border and scale in Ahmedabad conflict

Conflicts produce violence through death, confinement, torture, and control of spaces of everyday life. This paper investigates how spatial morphologies, like landscapes, borders and scales, are re-ordered and re-imagined to materialize violence. A Hindu–Muslim conflict in the globalizing city of Ahmedabad, India in 2002 is used as a case study. The conflict unfolded in a dying industrial city, now being re-envisioned through neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism into a ‘global city’. During and after the riots, the majority Hindu community, and the local Hindu fundamentalist government, annihilated the life spaces of the minority Muslim community. Through a combination of Hindu rioting and urban renewal, landscapes were destroyed, new spaces produced, borders re-imagined, and new ones imprinted on the landscape, to segregate previously co-existing communities. Local government and Hindu ideologues creatively juxtaposed neoliberal economic polices, global discourses of Islamophobia, local ethnocentrism to alter the spatial morphologies of Ahmedabad. Justice entails the democratization of space by altering the violent morphologies of Ahmedabad.     

The mirror of consumption: Celebritization, developmental consumption and the shifting cultural politics of fair trade

This paper explores the shifting cultural politics of development as expressed in the changing narratives and discursive transparencies of fair trade marketing tactics in the UK. Pursued through what I call ‘developmental consumption’ and the increasing celebritization of development, it is now through the global media mega-star that the subaltern speaks. After a more general discussion of the implications of the celebritization of development, specific analysis focuses on two parallel processes complicit in the ‘mainstreaming’ of fair trade markets and the desire to develop fair trade as a product of ‘quality’. The first involves improving the taste of fair trade commodities through alterations in their material supply chains while the second involves novel marketing narratives designed to invoke these conventions of quality through highly meaningful discursive and visual means. The later process is conceptualized through the theoretical device of the shifting ‘embodiments’ of fair trade which have moved from small farmers’ livelihoods, to landscapes of ‘quality’, to increasing congeries of celebrities such as Chris Martin from the UK band Coldplay. These shifts encapsulate what is referred to here as fair trade’s Faustian Bargain and its ambiguous results: the creation of increasing economic returns and, thus, more development through the movement of fair trade goods into mainstream retail markets at the same time there is a de-centering of the historical discursive transparency at the core of fair trade’s moral economy. Here, then, the celebritization of fair trade has the potential to create ‘the mirror of consumption’, whereby, our gaze is reflected back upon ourselves in the form of ‘the rich and famous’ Northern celebrity muddling the ethics of care developed by connecting consumers to fair trade farmers and their livelihoods. The paper concludes with a consideration of development and fair trade politics in the context of their growing aestheticization and celebritization.     

Pragmatic localism uncovered: The search for locally contingent solutions to national reform agendas

This paper analyses the complexity and attempted pragmatism of current practices surrounding the management of current local government policy reform in England. In particular, it focuses on the tensions and contradictions between a national policy dynamic which seeks to encourage locally contingent solutions to be developed for localised problems, and the centralising tendencies of the national state which result in ‘blueprints’ and ‘models’ being developed for local policy delivery and a requirement to meet centrally derived targets. These assumptions are explored through the experiences of local government attempts to introduce innovative and experimental praxis in line with the complex cultural and political changes of ‘modernisation’ agendas advanced by the UK government. This is being rolled out by an overarching project of ‘new localism’ - an attempt to devolve power and resources from the central state to front line local managers, sub-local structures and partnerships and to deliver ‘what works’. It is argued that new attempts at subsidiarity should be more flexible to local conditions rather than directed by national policy and that greater discretion and freedom should be given to local managers to achieve this task. Using the concept of ‘pragmatic localism’ and grounded examples from a recent initiative - Local Area Agreements - it is highlighted that there are signs that local state management of national policy could be becoming increasingly adaptable, enabling managers to deal with the fluid nature of ongoing public policy reform, although this is far from a completed project with many factors still constraining this change process.     

Engaged pedagogy and responsibility: A postcolonial analysis of international students

This paper responds to increasing discussions about responsibility within geography by exploring some of the spatialities imbued in thinking responsibly about internationalisation in the UK Higher Education system, and it uses the categorisation of the international student as a way in to this exploration. Although international students have been considered from the viewpoint of migration studies, global education studies and critical pedagogical studies, this paper attempts a postcolonial analysis of international students, to consider what forms of pedagogic responsibility are called forth through this framework. Building on bell hooks’ call for an ‘engaged pedagogy’, this paper shows that routing care and responsibility through postcolonial geographies incites a more sharply demanding political praxis.     

Negotiating the boundary between state-led and farmer approaches to knowing nature: An analysis of UK agri-environment schemes

This paper explores the role of knowledge in the development of more environmentally sustainable farming systems in the UK and specifically seeks to reveal the porosity of the boundary between state-led and farmer approaches to knowing nature. Its empirical focus is two government sponsored ‘agri-environment schemes’—the Countryside Stewardship scheme and the Environmentally Sensitive Area scheme—which offer financial incentives to farmers and other land managers who agree to undertake environmentally beneficial practices. As a framework for analysis, the paper draws on the notion of ‘knowledge culture’, with agri-environment schemes represented as an emerging ‘policy knowledge culture’ that is seemingly distinct, in its approach to knowing nature, from pre-existing ‘agrarian knowledge cultures’. Data are derived from two large scale, countrywide surveys of agreement holders in the two agri-environment schemes. These reveal that alongside some resistance to the policy knowledge culture of AES, there is also negotiation and interchange taking place between knowledge cultures, and the policy knowledge culture is adapting to and accommodating aspects of the other. As such, the paper contests the findings of previous studies which assert that the codified knowledge of agri-environment schemes always wins out in the implementation of scheme agreements, with the subsequent marginalisation of other knowledge(s). In turn, it suggests that policy knowledge cultures can give voice to farmers’ ways of knowing nature with benefits both for them and nature itself. The paper concludes with some reflections on the extent of knowledge culture transformation and offers some policy recommendations.     

Making autonomous geographies: Argentina’s popular uprising and the ‘Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados’ (Unemployed Workers Movement)

This paper addresses the idea of autonomy—the desire for freedom, self-organisation and mutual aid. Through challenging economic neoliberalism, state repression, a powerful transnational elite, and the commodification of nature and resources, many communities, especially in the global south, are trying to manage their own affairs. Using the example of the Movement of Unemployed Workers (El Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados) in Argentina, I explore the idea of autonomous geographies and how they are made and remade at three overlapping levels: the territorial, through the emergence of networked autonomous neighbourhoods which are selectively open and closed to translocal links; the material, through the development of a solidarity economy where immediate needs are met and work is redefined, and; the social, where collective action and daily practice helps constitute more collective, autonomous forms of social interactions. In their desire to manage connections with the outside world while at the same time inspire autonomous place projects elsewhere, the MTDs represent both a ‘militant localism’ and ‘militant pluriversalism’. Moreover, while such experiments in making and embedding ‘autonomous geographies’ face limits and have few widespread examples on which to draw, it is through constant questioning and collective struggle at the everyday level that autonomy is made real.     

Living it up: Super-rich enclave and transnational elite urbanism in Singapore

Notwithstanding the burgeoning scholarship on enclave urbanism, urban gating has often been pigeonholed as an intra-urban development that is somewhat ‘epiphenomenal’ to wider global processes. Overlooked in the literature is how gated communities as globally-oriented spaces are intertwined with the transnational lifeworlds of its elite inhabitants. As key sites where transnational super-rich elites organize their consumption and reproduce their purportedly global lifestyle, gated communities are now emerging as a new ‘meta-geographical form’ that circulates in and around rapidly globalizing cities. Drawing on the case study of Sentosa Cove, an exclusive waterfront gated community in Singapore catering to ‘high net-worth’ residents, this paper critically examines how elite localities and transnationalism are being socially and spatially reproduced in the city-state. To this end, the paper makes a distinct contribution by bringing to bear critical transnationalism perspectives in the understanding of urban gating and the privileged geographies of the global super-rich.     

Whiteness, space and alternative food practice

The paper demonstrates how whiteness is produced in progressive non-profit efforts to promote sustainable farming and food security in the US. I explore whiteness by addressing the spatial dimensions of this food politics. I draw on feminist and materialist theories of nature, space and difference as well as research conducted between 2003 and the present. Whiteness emerges spatially in efforts to increase food access, support farmers and provide organic food to consumers. It clusters and expands through resource allocation to particular organizations and programs and through participation in non-profit conferences. Community food’s discourse builds on a late-modern and, in practice, ‘white’ combination of science and ideology concerning healthful food and healthy bodies. Whiteness in alternative food efforts rests, as well, on inequalities of wealth that serve both to enable different food economies and to separate people by their ability to consume. It is latent in the support of romanticized notions of community, but also in the more active support for coalition-building across social differences. These well-intentioned food practices reveal both the transformative potential of progressive whiteness and its capacity to become exclusionary in spite of itself. Whiteness coheres precisely, therefore, in the act of ‘doing good’.     

Gender equity in fairtrade-organic coffee producer organizations: Cases from Mesoamerica

Data from Mesoamerican studies shows that the proportion of women registered as ‘farm operators’ in fairtrade-organic coffee producer unions has increased significantly. However, this increase is uneven across Mesoamerican communities and the prospects for improved gender equity rest on several questions that we explore in this study. First, what explains the large discrepancies in participation across groups? Second, what effect does the ‘farm operator’ status have on women’s ability to participate in producer unions and in fairtrade-organic coffee networks? Third, how will fairtrade-organic organizational and procedural norms affect women’s insertion into the coffee ‘value-chain’? Making use of ethnographic, archival, and survey data we find that fairtrade organizational norms combine with organic procedural norms to bring significant impacts in three areas: women’s organizations have greater access to network benefits, women gain greater control over farm practices, and women enjoy increased access to cash. However, we also find that the burden of complying with norms together with stagnant real prices excludes some women who might otherwise benefit from expanded participation.     

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.     

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.     

Between difference and adjustment - The re-/presentation and implementation of post-socialist (communist) transformation

Since the collapse of the communist regimes some 15 years ago, the at first rather simplistic assumptions about the quite similar nature of the ‘other side’ of the Iron Curtain soon were revealed as such. The conditions in the different countries proved to be much more complex and differentiated, making policies more difficult to target and outcomes to predict than initially presumed and propagated. As it emerged, the process of ‘transition’, has thus emerged as a multidimensional, complex phenomenon of ‘transition’, shaped by a set of overlapping and intersecting variables, pointing to the need for a more detailed understanding and interpretation of the changes observed. And this includes the use of terminology, even such fundamental terms as ‘post-/socialism’ versus ‘post-/communism’ or ‘transition’ versus ‘transformation’. These differences reflect variations in the perception and implementation of post-communist regimes, as viewed and interpreted from both within and without the relevant countries or regions. And this is illustrated by the collection of papers in this special issue.     

Anticipating ubiquitous computing: Logics to forecast technological futures

Visions of the future predict spaces apparently teaming with ever more novel and pervasive technologies. Significant amongst such forecasts is the notion of ‘ubiquitous computing’ (ubicomp), understood as an affordance or capacity tied (in)to people, places and things. This article stages an encounter between the futurity of ubicomp and recent debates in geography around anticipation. So, first, the future orientation in ubicomp research and development (R&D) is investigated as a mode of anticipation. ‘Knowledges’, and ‘logics’ of anticipation are subsequently, and second, discussed as the conceptual apparatus that constructs and perpetuates the ‘proximate future’ of ubicomp. This analysis connects recent discussion about ‘anticipation’ in social sciences research with the methods of ubicomp research, which fits with an emergent agenda around futurity in human geography. Third, the conceptual articulation of ‘anticipatory logic’ is applied to the analysis of empirical investigations of ubicomp R&D to identify the specific logics of anticipation at play. This article accordingly examines the logics of anticipation that both support and destabilise the certainty with which the future is imagined within ubicomp. In conclusion, the multiple ways of anticipating a future world and the ways in which they discipline understandings of futurity are framed as a politics of anticipation.     

Enacting things through numbers: Taking nature into account/ing

In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the ‘critical limits’ of nature under the impact of acidification was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not ‘Nature’ as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the effect of this process was to produce ‘a nature as a whole’, in a process of unification. This I argue can only be understood relationally: ‘Nature’ is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour’s work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look first at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.     

Private sector involvement in urban governance: The case of Business Improvement Districts and Town Centre Management partnerships in England

Although it has many merits, the voluminous literature on urban governance gives scant attention to the actual involvement and positioning of business elites and businesses within Public-Private Partnerships. There is also little consensus among academics as to why the private sector become involved in such schemes. This paper begins to address these issues through a critical empirical examination of how and why the private sector is involved with three English Town Centre Management (TCM) partnerships and the Business Improvement District (BID) subsidiaries all three partnerships have recently developed. In order to do this, the empirical study is guided by a conceptual framework that foregrounds the relationship between (a) the opening up and monitoring of ‘institutional space’ by partnerships and the state, and (b) the motivations and ‘constrained agency’ of the business elites. The paper demonstrates that the positioning of the private sector is more multifarious and fractured than previous studies of urban governance have suggested. It also reveals that business elites and businesses view their participation as an ‘investment’ that needs to accrue significant financial returns and that partnership and state officials are highly selective in their choice of ‘who governs’.     

Food commodities, geographical knowledges and the reconnection of production and consumption: The case of naturally embedded food products

This paper focuses on a particular group of food commodities, associated with the wider turn to ‘alternative food networks’, that are described as ‘naturally embedded food products’ (NEFPs). These are commodities (specifically meats and cheeses) that utilise grassland biodiversity as an input into production to positively influence, in various ways, the final qualities of the commodity. Building on the geographical literature on commodity circuits and analysing data derived from NEFP promotional materials and focus groups with urban and rural residents in the UK, the paper interrogates the geographical knowledges that are deployed by producers in the promotion of NEFPs and how these knowledges are accommodated and contested by consumers as they bring their own geographical knowledges to the interpretation of these commodities. The paper undertakes this task in order to problematise the extent to which alternative food networks in general and NEFPs in particular are bringing about a reconnection of producers and consumers and, concomitantly, a defetishisation of food, as is claimed for them by many of their policy and academic proponents. In the process the paper reveals how the food commodities associated with alternative food networks entail the creation of new and rival fetishes paradoxically as a result of efforts to ‘thicken connections’ between the production and consumption of food.     

Manufacturing rural finance in Asia: Institutional assemblages, market societies, entrepreneurial subjects

This paper takes up the proposition that institutions mediate market formation, through a comparative study of rural finance in Nepal and Vietnam. It explores how microfinance, as an iconic institution of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’, articulates political-economic and cultural-political milieux—with particular emphasis given to the ways in which the Vietnamese Party-state has engaged rural finance to further the socialist transition even as it has undergone significant ‘economic renovation’. In so doing, the paper adopts a processual interpretation of institutions not as bounded structures, but as arenas of ongoing debate over culturally constructed meanings and ‘practices of assemblage’ [Li, T.M., 2007a. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society 36 (2), 263–293] that are inextricably linked with wider-scale political-economic and cultural-political formations. A comparative approach is pursued here to emphasize spatio-temporal contingencies in the articulation of a market-led development institution with specific national regulatory frameworks and political cultures. A critical-geographical orientation helps to deepen Polanyi’s proposition that the economy is an instituted process, to challenge the prevailing binary opposition between state- and market-led development, account for the multiple scales at which power and interest reside in the formation of markets, and highlight the variable ways in which markets are embodied and enacted in particular places.     

Stuck in transition? Exploring the spaces of employment training for youth with intellectual disability

This paper is concerned with the experiences of young adults with intellectual disabilities as they transition from high school in search of paid employment. The experiences of people with intellectual disability remain under-researched within geography. We use qualitative techniques to examine the experiences of six young adults with intellectual disabilities. Data are drawn from interviews with the youth themselves, their parents, and employers, as well as from participant observation at an employment training program for the intellectually disabled. While the primary goal of the youth and their parents was to make a transition to competitive paid work, a lack of transition planning, a shortage of appropriate opportunities and other factors meant the youth spent considerable time in ‘transitional spaces’ such as the vocational training centre, sheltered workshop, and supported employment placements. While these spaces are organized around an explicitly economic goal of augmenting the youth’s employability, they can play a critical role as spaces for social interaction and meaningful activity outside the home. Study findings point to the importance of moving beyond paid employment as the core of a successful transition to consider a broader goal of ‘meaningful activity’.