‘Fire in the House’: Gendered experiences of drunkenness and violence in Siem Reap, Cambodia

After decades of turmoil and international isolation, Cambodia has embarked on a threefold transition: from armed conflict to peace, from political authoritarianism to liberal democracy, and from a socialist economic system to one based on market-driven capitalist growth. In this context of transition, the paper explores the perceived linkages that exist between drinking, drunkenness and gender-based violence in rural and urban Siem Reap, home to the global tourism site of Angkor. By considering the ways in which men and women relate alcohol use with violence, the paper questions what implications these social constructions have for tackling gender-based violence and concludes that challenging such external explanations for violence is needed in order for gender-based violence to be understood as the struggle for equality in men and women’s everyday lives.     

The ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes in Barbados: New spatialities and the implications for sustainability in small island states

The transformation of rural areas into up-scale leisure amenity landscapes has become a global phenomenon. Small islands, especially in tropical and subtropical regions, are particularly attractive magnets for this kind of development. Yet it involves land use changes that challenge the sustainability of small island development as set out in the United Nations program for Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SDIDS). Through a case study of Barbados this paper critically examines the ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes on small islands. It ties together Lefebvrian concepts of the production of space with the perspective of political ecology to argue that the agendas of global capital impose new spatialities involving social constructions of space and socio-environmental transformations by an offshore elite who are insensitive to local interests as well as the smallness of small islands. This creates conflict between space and place - between the spaces produced by the global leisure economy and the places that have purpose and meaning for local people. It challenges the possibility of local, community-based development solutions and imposes serious constraints on the implementation of the SDIDS agenda. More research into the nature of the new leisure spaces and how they are perceived and experienced by local populations is needed.     

The international developmental state: The Japanese intellectual property system in Vietnam

This article explores the international implications of the developmental state model of Japanese capitalism. It does so by investigating the extension of Japanese intellectual property (IP) policy and practice in Vietnam. The escalating role of intellectual property within Japanese industrial policy is first framed according to Johnson’s developmental state thesis and extended in reference to the ‘flying geese’ model of regional development in East Asia. This latter approach anticipates Vietnam’s growing importance as a site for Japanese foreign direct investment and technology transfer. Interviews with key informants from both countries and analysis of policy documents provide evidence of the extra-territorial practices employed by Japanese companies, government agencies, and IP intermediaries in Vietnam. These accounts bring to light key developmental mechanisms, such as the packaging of IP internationalization within Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) and the overseas pro-bono work performed by IP intermediary associations in which the line between benevolence and self-interest is blurred. The paper concludes by interpreting these practices in accordance with the broader strategic imperatives of Japan in the region.     

‘You can get away with loads because there’s no one here’: Discourses of regulation and non-regulation in English rural spaces

Using qualitative data from a research project investigating contemporary rural identities in England this paper examines the apparently contradictory discursive claims that are made on rural spaces. It looks in particular at the ways in which these are narrated - through the notions of rural space as a site of safety, orderliness and community on the one hand and as a site of freedom, anti-order and non-regulation on the other. While the former is a familiar, entrenched and critiqued representation of rurality, the latter narrative has a more marginal and ambivalent place in the dominant rural imaginary. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of panopticism and heterotopia the paper demonstrates the ways in which the rural is a highly labile concept and emphasises its continual ‘unfinishedness’. However, alongside this, the paper suggests that the tensions and contradictions of the orderly and anti-orderly discourses are underpinned by a particular coherency that is driven by senses of community, belonging and self-regulation. While these do not resolve the contradictions of the discursive claims the potency of such drivers are sufficient to produce a particular inclusive spatiality which is able to accommodate and incorporate the different discursive positions and the practices that are associated with each.     

The construction of Slovenia as a European tourism destination in guidebooks

Geographic research in tourism recognizes destinations to be socio-spatial constructions shaped by historic, cultural, and political discourses. These discourses are reflected in and reproduced by tourism literature such as guidebooks. Guidebooks are a key resource for potential tourists to learn about a destination. These texts produced by international publishing companies draw upon existing discourses for a place that will allow external audiences to make sense of the contextual information provided for the destination. At the same time, they reify these discourses by presenting them to readers as objective facts. This paper uses discourse analysis to examine tourism guidebooks for the European destination region, the Eastern and/or Central European sub-region, and Slovenia. In particular, it examines the competing and conflicting discourses of Eastern and Central Europe in these externally authored and oriented texts to understand the socio-spatial construction of Slovenia as a European tourism destination.     

Defending identities or segregating communities? Faith-based schooling and the UK Jewish community

The educational reforms that are at the heart of the British Government’s plans for its second term include an explicit call for more faith-based schools. This paper examines Jewish day schools as examples of these. It considers attempts by community leaders to defend Jewish identities and promote religious ways of life through the construction and maintenance of socio-spatial educational boundaries. The nuanced ways by which parents accept, resist or try to bypass the aims and objectives of community leaders is also discussed.     

‘The health event’: Everyday, affective politics of participation

This paper is about a single event: a conference (A.K.A. ‘the health event’) held in the English East Midlands in July 2005, at which findings from a policy-led research project regarding young people’s health needs were fed back to research participants. The paper foregrounds some of the everyday work, happenings, emotions, conversations and materialities which were fundamentally constitutive of ‘the health event’ and, thus fundamentally constituted the moments of affirmative, politically-charged participation which could and did happen therein. Thus the paper bears witness to the sorts of practices, minutiae and highs and lows which are surely fundamentally constitutive of participation, policy and politics per se, but which (despite the growing visibility of nonrepresentational theories) are typically absent from salient accounts of participation, Children’s Geographies and Post-medical Geographies.     

Imagining migration: Placing children’s understanding of ‘moving house’ in Malawi and Lesotho

Research pertaining to children’s geographies has mainly focused on children’s physical experiences of space, with their ‘imagined geographies’ receiving far less attention. The few studies of children’s imagined geographies that exist tend to focus on children’s national identities and their understanding of distant places. However, children’s lives are not necessarily static and they often move between places. Research has not so far considered children’s images of these transitional spaces or how such images are constructed.Through an examination of over 800 thematic drawings and stories, regarding ‘moving house’, produced by children aged 10-17 years in urban and rural communities of Lesotho and Malawi, this paper explores southern African children’s representations of migration. The research considers how ideas of migration are culturally-constructed based on notions of family, home and kinship, particularly in relation to the fluid family structure characteristic of most southern African societies. The results suggest that most children imagine migration as a household rather than an individual process, rarely including micro-migrations between extended family households in their drawings. Further, children’s images of migration are place-rooted in everyday life experiences. Their representations concentrate on the reasons for migration, both negative and positive, which are specifically related to their local social and environmental situations and whether house moves take place locally or over longer distances. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of these conceptualisations of moving house for children’s contemporary migration experiences, particularly in light of changing family structures due to the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.     

An archaeology of fear and environmental change in Philadelphia

This paper examines how mechanisms of social control function to mediate human-environment relations and processes of environmental change in the city. Using the Fairmount Park System of Philadelphia as a case study, I argue that a history of social control mechanisms, both formal and informal, maintained viable socio-environmental urban relationships. Their decline over the last several decades has produced a legacy of fear towards the city’s natural environment that has had, and continues to have, profound socio-spatial and ecological implications. I argue that these changes have their origin in a set of racially motivated decisions made during the volatile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s and that African American women, in particular, have been impacted disproportionately by their consequences. Fear of crime in the natural environment and suspicion of environmental change have resulted in the exclusion of local women and children from what was, historically, a politically and socially viable public space. In this context, urban ecological change is locally understood as more an issue of social control than one of environmental concern.     

Nuances of neighbourhood: Children’s perceptions of the space between home and school in Auckland, New Zealand

This paper examines primary school children’s experiences of travelling between home and school within three neighbourhoods. Our investigation is set in Auckland, New Zealand, where parental practices such as chauffeuring are commonplace, yet are increasingly recognised as limiting children’s physical fitness and environmental awareness. Drawing on children’s voices, writing and photographs, we investigate how children currently travel to school, how they would like to travel, and how their perspectives on neighbourhood space vary by age, socio-economic status and school location. Findings reveal that over half of the participants did not like the way they travelled to school. Most desire to travel independently within public space, but are limited in their ability to do so, given the fears and obstacles that prevail within their neighbourhoods. We contend that restricted use of public space diminishes children’s agency in inner suburbs. Our analysis reveals that children favour ‘active travel’ for many of the same reasons as health professionals and transport planners. We conclude that as long as children are seen as innocents in need of protection, they will have limited agency in travel decisions and highly contingent access to public space.     

When seed fails: The contested nature of neoliberalism in South Korea

In recent years, many geographers have examined the ways that the production of nature has changed as a result of neoliberal practices. In this paper we examine a conflict in South Korea that started when some Chinese-cabbage seeds were affected by a virus, causing crop failure. This failure came shortly after liberalization in the Korean seed industry led to foreign ownership of the firm that sold the seed. We focus in particular on the farmers’ creative political responses - and their subsequent defeat in court. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s insights on politics, science, and law, we examine how the seed failure came to be evaluated through scientific and legal practices. We argue that the adjudication of the truth of the seed failure through science and law reveals how socionatures are contested under prevailing hegemonic conditions. These conditions are both general and specific: although law and science are relatively hegemonic spheres of truth-production in all capitalist societies, the ways that the seeds were disputed and evaluated were distinctly Korean.     

“This is a Montreal Issue”: Negotiating responsibility in global production and investment networks

While geographers have increasingly focused on how global commodity and production networks create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ there has been little empirical work considering how responsibility is worked into management systems and social activism in such networks. Drawing on literature from global production networks, geographies of responsibility and other literatures, this paper explores the dynamic and contested ways in which concepts of responsibility can play a role in network regulation. Both foreign direct investment and commodity networks (here referred to as ‘global production and investment networks’) are subject to complex negotiations and compromises involving corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives as well as shareholder activist, human rights, labor, and environmental activism. This is illustrated by reference to conflicts in Canada over Alcan, Inc.’s investments from 1993 to 2007 in the Utkal Alumina Project in Orissa, India. The project involved significant socio-environmental conflict. In Canada, Alcan’s investment was met by civil society campaigns that tested the company’s commitments to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The case study suggests revising theories of geographies of responsibility. While foreign direct investment can create new relationships between distant others, these are fluid and contingent and not necessarily desirable. Rather than see networks as a source of responsibility we should work to ensure that the relationships that networks foster be structured to ensure our deeper values are respected.     

Quo vadis neoliberalism? The remaking of global capitalist governance after the Washington Consensus

The Washington Consensus, through which neoliberal global capitalist governance gained hegemony over the third world, entered a crisis in the late 1990s. Triggered by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and by contestations of neoliberal governance from global civil society, two remakings of global capitalist governance can be identified: A ‘post-Washington consensus’ whose relation to neoliberalism is complex; and a ‘new development economics’ that advocates Keynesian principles. Irrespective of the trajectory of this emergent phase of re-regulation, particularly after the 2008 global finance crisis, these remakings can be conceptualized as supplements reinforcing an imaginary of capitalism as the solution to, rather than progenitor of, uneven development. Through discourses of capitalist development as a sequential trajectory to be followed by all countries, as flattening the world to enable catch-up by backward countries, and as incorporating socio-spatial difference via its commodification, this socio-spatial imaginary functions to legitimate expertise located in the first world, and global capitalist governance, irrespective of serial policy failures.     

Metropolitan deconcentration, socio-political fragmentation and extended suburbanisation: Brazilian urbanisation in the 1980s and 1990s

The aim of this paper is to discuss the phenomena of socio-political fragmentation of urban space, extended suburbanisation and metropolitan deconcentration, which have been important features of Brazilian urbanisation since the 1980s (metropolitan deconcentration partly since the 1970s). At the beginning it profiles the recent evolution of the country's economy, in order to make sense of the worsening situation in terms of exclusion and violence in big Brazilian cities since the 1980s. Against this background, recent trends both in terms of socio-spatial segregation and social conflict within cities (formation of enclaves dominated by drug trafficking organisations and self-segregation of the élites as a response to this) and in terms of the growing attractiveness of areas outside the biggest metropolises (extended suburbanisation and metropolitan deconcentration) are analysed. The main focus is the socio-political dimension of Brazilian urbanisation in the 1980s and 1990s, which has been undervalued by analysts.     

Experiencing agricultural failure: Internal migration, tourism and local perceptions of regional change in the Yucatan

In response to a growing body of literature encouraging geographers to present textured, regional case studies that demonstrate how neoliberalism functions at diverse scales, this article presents a nuanced account of neoliberalism in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The study seeks to illustrate how neoliberal reforms to agriculture and ongoing neoliberal tourism development in the Yucatecan state of Quintana Roo intersect to create a unique regional context for migration between the state’s rural areas and Mexico’s largest planned tourism development zone in Cancun. The research presented is based on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews that took place in 2003 with rural residents and regional migrants working in Cancun. Through the employment of an experiential definition of neoliberalism, grounded in the lived experiences and perceptions of study participants, the article suggests that rural-urban tourist pole migration is the result of a complex negotiation of the region’s neoliberal landscape. The article argues that rural residents’ and migrants’ perceptions of the failure of agriculture as a livelihood is shaped relative to the perceived success of the tourism industry and better livelihood opportunities in Cancun. These widespread perceptions of agricultural failure in the Yucatan peninsula are constructed not solely in response to local conditions but rather in response to the overall regional outcome of neoliberal economic restructuring initiatives which have negatively affected traditional agriculture in the rural sphere while privileging tourism development in the urban sphere centered in Cancun.     

Geography’s changing lexicon: measuring disciplinary change in Anglophone human geography through journal content analysis

Much writing on changing trends in geographical practices is based on subjective interpretations of the discipline’s scholarly output. This paper introduces a data source which provides quantitative information on the discipline’s lexicon through full-text searching of the contents of five of the discipline’s major Anglophone journals. Analysis of the large data set identifies two main trends in geography’s language and practices during the period 1950-1998: one group of terms associated with quantitative work became prominent in the 1970s but declined in relative importance thereafter - though by no means disappearing from the lexicon; the other, comprising a range of terms generally associated with cultural and social geography, increased in prominence from the 1980s on.     

‘Digging-up’ Utopia? Space, practice and land use heritage

In this paper we explore history and heritage mobilised to do service for marginalized interests. We discuss how resources, such as, place, texts, artefacts and practice are drawn upon to forward particular political interests. Touching on recent work in non-representational theory we suggest that more attention be paid to the micro-politics of doing and link more formal action to that of ‘everyday’ practice. The examples used show how particular actors draw on history and heritage to advance their positions and how their performances reinforce claims based on alternative practices. The examples used illustrate how this involves the notion of ‘reclaiming’ historical action, historical texts and historical place. In particular how this relates to land and specifically in this paper the metaphor, representation and practice of ‘digging’.     

Rural gentrification in Catalonia, Spain: A case study of migration, social change and conflicts in the Empordanet area

The intensity of rural depopulation in Catalonia has diminished since the 1980s. New population growth patterns are occurring in rural areas, basically due to immigration. Although there has been a certain awareness of the magnitude of this process and its territorial distribution, little is known about the protagonists in this immigration and the impact on rural municipalities. Results are presented from a study of the immigration process in a group of rural inland municipalities close to the Costa Brava, a Mediterranean coastal region with extensive tourism. The great beauty of the landscape and the existence of housing stock that is being abandoned but remains desirable have led to a population influx from Catalonia’s large urban areas, especially Barcelona, purchasing these homes as a primary or secondary residence.This has led to rehabilitation of the housing stock, but also to higher housing prices and the resulting exodus of the young local population that cannot afford them; a potential source of conflict between the local population and the newcomers. The study is based on census data and statistical records, as well as extensive fieldwork, including interviews with local residents, newcomers and key informants.     

Some things old, some things new: The spatial representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement

Despite continued uncertainty about the physical realities and political, economic and social implications of peak oil, combined concerns about oil scarcity, climate change and globalisation has spawned an energetic relocalisation movement dedicated to achieving a comprehensive reduction in oil dependency through community-scale initiatives. This paper uses a discourse approach to examine the emergence, geographical spread and practices of the Transition Network, a UK-originated relocalisation movement now involving 186 local initiatives in the UK and other countries. We trace the movement’s drawing upon, and innovation from, discourses and techniques used by other grassroots environmental movements to promote a spatial representation of peak oil as an inevitable and geographically undiscriminating problem, and its use of addiction metaphors and participatory techniques to promote personal and community-scale energy descent initiatives as a viable and necessary alternative to globalisation. We also analyse the spatial representations and techniques used in the Network’s “rhizomic” spread across multiple localities around the world and embedding in communities where relocalisation initiatives are established. We conclude by examining the future challenges these spatial constructions of peak oil pose for the relocalisation movement.     

Socio-spatial segregation and urban form: Belém at the end of the 1990s

In the second half of the 1990s, socio-spatial segregation increased in Brazilian cities, accentuating inequity among social groups. Using a combination of space syntax techniques and statistical analysis, this paper explores locational differences in central and peripheral portions of Belém. The analysis shows how socio-spatial segregation was made more pronounced by relationships between urban form, infrastructure provision and locational values. Social groups' opportunities in the city are suggested to be limited by features of its urban form, associated with infrastructure provision, especially for groups unable to take advantage of intra-urban accessibility. The paper also discusses the findings of the study in relation to the Brazilian urban context at the end of the 1990s.