Showing papers in "Geography Compass in 2015"

Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-material Power, Politics and Space

Abstract: Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory (ANT) have been at the forefront of a paradigm shift that sees space and agency as the result of associating humans and non-humans to form precarious wholes. This shift offers ways of rethinking the relations between power, politics and space from a more processual, socio-material perspective. After sketching and comparing the concepts of the assemblage and the actor-network, this paper reviews the current scholarship in human geography which clusters around the four themes of deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation; power; materials, objects and technologies; and topological space. Looking towards the future, it suggests that assemblage thinking and ANT would benefit from exploring links with other social theories, arguing for a more sustained engagement with issues of language and power, and affect and the body.

Tracing the water-energy-food nexus: description, theory and practice

Abstract: The ‘nexus’ between water, energy and food (WEF) has gained increasing attention globally in research, business and policy spheres. We review the premise of recent initiatives framed around the nexus, examine the challenge of achieving the type of disciplinary boundary crossing promoted by the nexus agenda and consider how to operationalise what has to date been a largely paper exercise. The WEF nexus has been promoted through international meetings and calls for new research agendas. It is clear from the literature that many aims of nexus approaches pre-date the recent nexus agenda; these have encountered significant barriers to progress, including challenges to cross-disciplinary collaboration, complexity, political economy (often perceived to be under-represented in nexus research) and incompatibility of current institutional structures. Indeed, the ambitious aims of the nexus—the desire to capture multiple interdependencies across three major sectors, across disciplines and across scales—could become its downfall. However, greater recognition of interdependencies across state and non-state actors, more sophisticated modelling systems to assess and quantify WEF linkages and the sheer scale of WEF resource use globally, could create enough momentum to overcome historical barriers and establish nexus approaches as part of a wider repertoire of responses to global environmental change.

Theorizing Energy Geographies

Abstract: Geography is witnessing a “boom” in energy research that has emerged alongside renewed interest in the humanities and social sciences over the role of energy in shaping modern social life. In this review article, I suggest that geographers need to connect better with new debates in critical social theory over energy through an emphasis on energy's role in the social production of space. I first review recent interventions in the social sciences and humanities on energy and suggest that as insightful as they are, they lack an attention to geography. It reviews how energy used to be a central theoretical concept in geography – specifically through “cultural ecological” approaches that saw the flow of energy and nutrients through human groups as a central aspect in explaining their cultural traits. The rise of political ecology – and its focus on resources rather than energy – led to energy becoming seen as simply an empirical object on inquiry as opposed to an underlying concept. Second, I argue political ecologies of energy are central to the production and reproduction of geopolitical imaginaries of nationhood and international relations, and thus, energy should be at the center of theorizing these ideas. Third, although geographers have long viewed urbanization as a sociospatial – and increasingly socioecological – process, the role of energy in shaping the material infrastructure and uneven nature of cities has been less discussed. Fourth, the ways in which energy is consumed, and the way energy shapes the geographies of everyday practice, is a critical aspect in the production of space. Fifth, I suggest that any energy transition toward a low-carbon energy system must understand that new energy systems will also require new spatialities and new spatial imaginations.

A Review of Volunteered Geographic Information for Disaster Management

Abstract: The immediacy of locational information requirements and importance of data currency for natural disaster events highlights the value of volunteered geographic information (VGI) in all stages of disaster management, including prevention, preparation, response, and recovery. The practice of private citizens generating online geospatial data presents new opportunities for the creation and dissemination of disaster-related geographic data from a dense network of intelligent observers. VGI technologies enable rapid sharing of diverse geographic information for disaster management at a fraction of the resource costs associated with traditional data collection and dissemination, but they also present new challenges. These include a lack of data quality assurance and issues surrounding data management, liability, security, and the digital divide. There is a growing need for researchers to explore and understand the implications of these data and data practices for disaster management. In this article, we review the current state of knowledge in this emerging field and present recommendations for future research. Significantly, we note further research is warranted in the pre-event phases of disaster management, where VGI may present an opportunity to connect and engage individuals in disaster preparation and strengthen community resilience to potential disaster events. Our investigation of VGI for disaster management provides broader insight into key challenges and impacts of VGI on geospatial data practices and the wider field of geographical science.

Spatial Imaginaries Research in Geography: Synergies, Tensions, and New Directions

Abstract: Human geographers have produced a diverse, and growing, body of literature documenting the existence and consequence of spatial imaginaries. However, reviews explaining and evaluating how geographers conceptualize and empirically verify spatial imaginaries, along with the field's tensions and potential directions, are lacking. This article addresses this gap by assessing geography's spatial imaginary literature. I identify shared features across the literature, while arguing geographers have, in fact, verified three different kinds of spatial imaginaries: imaginaries of places, idealized spaces, and spatial transformations. The article recommends researchers better account for these three, both their differences and relationalities. I also explain and evaluate geography's four competing conceptions of spatial imaginaries' ontology. Some geographers see them as semiotic orders, other geographers believe them to be worldviews, yet spatial imaginaries are predominantly viewed as representational discourse. Recently, however, some geographers have argued them to be performative discourses. This article advocates viewing spatial imaginaries as performative; arguing this view – among other things – clarifies the association between spatial imaginaries and material practices while offering new research directions for the field.

Legal geography: becoming spatial detectives

Abstract: Legal geography investigates the co-constitutive relationship of people, place and law. This essay provides an overview of how the law and geography cross disciplinary project emerged from a context of mutual curiosity, and explores how legal practice, in all its discretionary and rule-bound variety, co-produces places through an attentiveness to, and sometimes an apparent dismissal of, spatiality. The essay notes the formative importance of studies on power and inequality within urban governance in this predominantly critical field. However, it also considers how the cross-discipline is increasingly embracing legal geographic scholarship from within cultural, material and post-human geographies. Adopting the metaphor of the ‘spatial detective’, the essay situates legal geography as a way of examining law’s materialisation within space, considering the field’s methods, core concepts and the potential directions in which they may evolve.

Innovation Policy for Grand Challenges. An Economic Geography Perspective

Abstract: Grand challenges such as climate change, ageing societies and food security feature prominently on the agenda of policymakers at all scales, from the EU down to local and regional authorities. These are challenges that require the input and collaboration of a diverse set of societal stakeholders to combine different sources of knowledge in new and useful ways – a process that has occupied the minds of economic geographers looking at innovation in recent decades. Work in economic geography has in particular examined infrastructural, capability, network and institutional challenges that may be found in different types of regions. How can these insights improve researchers' and policymakers' understanding of the potential for innovation policies to address grand challenges? In this paper, we review these insights and then identify areas that push economic geographers to go beyond their previous focus and interests, notably by considering innovation policy in light of transformational rather than mere structural failures.

Navigating Pop‐up Geographies: Urban Space–Times of Flexibility, Interstitiality and Immersion

Abstract: ‘Pop-up’ has become a ubiquitous expression over the past decade and is used to designate a diverse range of temporary and mobile places and events. While pop-ups are increasingly noted in geographical literature they are rarely given the spotlight, usually mentioned alongside related forms of temporary urbanism. However, I argue that pop-up demands direct attention as the readiness of diverse groups including retailers, governments, cultural organisations and charities to take up the term suggests its logics have a particular purchase in contemporary cities. Surveying the emerging literature on pop-up geographies, I propose that pop-up is an arena in which space–time is being reimagined in ways that are increasingly influential. Specifically, I identify flexibility, interstitiality and immersion as three of pop-up's key spatiotemporal imaginaries and explore the urban processes which each imaginary implies and enables. I argue that these ways of imagining and distributing space–time have a particular instrumentality in cities characterised by recession and austerity but also widespread redevelopment and gentrification. Against this backdrop, I explore the ambiguous politics of pop-up's spatiotemporal imaginaries, considering the often contradictory ways in which they are mobilized by a broad range of urban actors.

The Feminisation of Mining

Abstract: This paper argues that feminisation is beginning to occur in the mining industry, a process associated with an expanded notion of mining as a livelihood in the radically changing political economy of extractive industries. It demonstrates that new gendered geographies are being created as grinding rural poverty pushes large numbers of women into informal mining (also known as artisanal and small-scale mining or ASM)—a fundamentally different type of economic activity from the capitalised, industrialised mining operated by large corporations. Further, it shows that a number of civil society initiatives, industry measures, policy processes and action-research with large-scale mining corporations are currently underway in response to an overall enhanced awareness of gender mainstreaming. It argues that these initiatives, ensued from women's struggles and feminist contributions, are helping to integrate gender more firmly in a wide range of extractive environments, and how these have enhanced the visibility of women and gender in mining. The paper ends by indicating the existing gaps in inquiry and possible directions for future research by feminist geographers into these gendered economic spaces.

Geographies of Caribbean Vulnerability in a Changing Climate: Issues and Trends

Abstract: While it is generally recognized that the projected changes in the global climate will have serious negative consequences for the Caribbean as a whole, it is becoming more and more evident that the impacts of climate change will not be uniformly felt across the region. The primary aim of this paper is to provide a review of the Caribbean climate change literature. The paper begins with a brief discussion on the shifting nature of Caribbean vulnerability within the context of the region's longstanding and continued exposure to forces of global economic and environmental change. Particular attention is paid to both the practical and discursive dimensions of vulnerability, and the specific ways the term has been understood and framed in relation to other crosscutting themes such as adaptation and resilience in the broader academic literature. In addition to providing an overview of the regional climate change science literature, the paper offers a critical review of the existing climate change impacts literature for the Caribbean. By drawing on, and taking stock of this growing body of impact studies, the paper seeks to shed light on the differential and multi-scalar drivers of social and economic vulnerabilities to climate variability and change in the Caribbean as well as highlight some of the existing knowledge gaps that need to be addressed. The paper ends by providing some brief reflections on the emerging themes arising from the discussion and highlights a few key areas for future academic research for the Caribbean in light of existing knowledge gaps observed in the regional climate change impact literature.

Geo-awareness, Geo-enablement, Geotechnologies, Citizen Science, and Storytelling: Geography on the World Stage

Abstract: Five converging global trends – geo-awareness, geo-enablement, geotechnologies, citizen science, and storytelling– have the potential to offer geography a world audience – attention from education and society that may be unprecedented in the history of the discipline. Issues central to geography are now part of the global consciousness. Everyday objects are rapidly becoming locatable, and thus able to be monitored and mapped. Many tools and data sets that were formerly used and examined only by geographers and other earth and environmental scientists are now in the hands of the general public. Citizens outside academia are becoming involved in contributing data to the scientific community. Multimedia and cloud-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have greatly multiplied the attraction that maps have had for centuries to tell stories. But despite these trends bringing opportunity to geography, is geoliteracy becoming increasingly valued? How can educators, researchers, and practitioners seize the opportunity that these trends seem to present to actively promote geographic content knowledge, skills, and perspectives throughout education and society?

Higher Education and the Creative Economy: Creative Graduates, Knowledge Transfer and Regional Impact Debates

Abstract: This paper highlights the growing importance of interdisciplinary research at the intersection between higher education, creative industries and growth of regional creative economies. The paper not only focuses specifically on the UK context but also encompasses issues of further international interest and debate. It undertakes a review of existing literature on the cultural role of higher education institutions (HEIs) and points to recent research on HEIs' increasing importance for embedding creative graduates into a region. We not only illustrate how this area of research aligns with the concepts of the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative class’ but also consider how talent attraction and retention processes include HEIs and art schools as part of a richer understanding of the creative economy as a contextualised production system. Furthermore, we investigate the role of HEIs as so-called ‘third spaces’ for creative knowledge transfer, which in recent years has become a popular cultural and higher education strategy to address the difficulties of feeding creative and cultural knowledge into the wider economy. The paper concludes by highlighting future avenues for cross-disciplinary research in three areas: communities of practice, local stakeholder management and a shared community agenda, to inform further policy and development in this area.

Assemblage Thinking and Participatory Development: Potentiality, Ethics, Biopolitics

Abstract: The politics and ethics of participatory development have been a topic of vibrant debate since the 1990s. While proponents assert that participation emancipates and empowers marginalized people, critics assert that it enacts new forms of control and regulation. This paper reads these debates through the analytical lens offered by assemblage thinking. Assemblage allows us to foreground affective relations between people and things, and the diagrams of power, or ideal sets of force relations, that attempt to direct these affective relations. On this basis, we characterize different participatory approaches in terms of their relation to the constitutive power of affective relations: modernist participation enacts a will to truth that attempts to objectify and control constitutive power through categories such as social capital and vulnerability; performative participation recognizes that participatory activities, while still entangled in power relations, may develop in ways that might challenge existing power relations, and the designs of the project organizer. This characterization helps us identify a politics of life enacted through participatory activities: on one hand, a negative biopolitics that problematizes constitutive power; on the other, an affirmative biopolitics that creates new possibilities for individual and collective life. Assemblage thinking can thus reconfigure participation around an affirmative biopolitics that positions the researcher as one resource among others marginalized people might use in their struggles against insecurity and suffering.

A Feminist Approach to Climate Change Governance: Everyday and Intimate Politics

Abstract: Neoliberal climate governance, which focuses on shifting responsibility for mitigating climate change onto individuals through their consumption of techno-scientific solutions, ignores and obscures the experience of differently situated subjects. This paper examines the consequences of both framing climate change as a problem of science and inducing individual behavior changes as a key point of climate policy. We build on climate governance literature and emerging feminist theorizing about climate change to understand how differently situated bodies become positioned as sites of capital accumulation in climate governance. We use the feminist lens of the “everyday”, which directs attention to embodiment, difference, and inequality. These insights provide points of leverage for feminist scholars of climate science and policy to use to resist and contest the production of neoliberal climate subjects. We argue that a focus on the “everyday” reveals the mundane decision making in climate governance that affect individuals in varying, embodied ways and which allows for climate governance to proceed as an ongoing process of capitalist accumulation.

Resident perceptions of new urban tourism: a neglected geography of prejudice.

Abstract: Research on urban tourism has focused on the search for alternative, authentic, lively, and mundane urban neighbourhoods by visitors. This so-called new urban tourism is characterised by the increasing quest by tourists for contact with mundane life in ordinary residential quarters. The intrusion of new urban tourism into day-to-day life also affects residents' perceptions of visitors, which are prone to become stereotypes and prejudices rather than just perceptions. The paper offers a review of the urban residents' perceptions research literature through the lens of the new urban tourism phenomenon, aligning it with wider geographies of prejudices. Consequently, the paper argues that an understanding of residents' attitudes towards the new urban tourism phenomenon offers a framework through which geographies of prejudices subtly at work in these resident/visitors encounters can be more deeply researched.

Geoengineering: The Next Era of Geopolitics?

Abstract: While geopolitics used to be about the context of global politics, now in the Anthropocene, it has become a matter of remaking that context rather than taking it as a given. What kind of planet is being made for what kind of civilization is now an unavoidable question of the global economy, as is the related political question of contemporary globalization concerning who decides the future planetary configuration. The discussion of geoengineering proceeds apace as the limited success of climate mitigation focuses attention on what comes next. Thinking about how to govern geoengineering before major experiments are tried unilaterally might be the key to preventing future conflicts over such practical issues as what temperature the planet ought to be. Such questions are the key to the new geopolitics of the Anthropocene, a debate to which geography in general and political geography in particular could have much to contribute.

Gentrification, Transit, and Land Use: Moving Beyond Neoclassical Theory

Abstract: Despite attention to social equity in the way public transit services are distributed, little work has considered how transportation systems may impact social equity through land use changes, particularly gentrification. Existing research on transportation and land use has been grounded primarily in a neoclassical urban economic perspective. However, the neoclassical framework is limited in its ability to handle issues of social justice such as the gentrification process. Meanwhile, critical gentrification literature has seldom considered the potential influence of transport systems to alter the distribution of accessibility benefits within a city. It is argued that a Marxist approach that considers the roles of capital and class in the gentrification process offers a better understanding of how transit infrastructure matters and contributes to a reinvigoration of transport geography. Finally, some directions for future research are suggested.

Public Participatory GIS

Abstract: Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) is a very broad field, and because of the direct outgrowth addressing questions raised regarding inequitable access to GIS and its societal impacts, PPGIS has become an exhaustive research area. Over the past two decades, several PPGIS initiatives have taken place in the western and non-western world. Several avenues have opened up, but nonetheless, questions regarding the effectiveness of such initiatives remain to be answered. Current research addressing the societal and political impacts of GIS have witnessed novel use of the technology and specialized spatial data provision such as volunteered geographic information, neogeography, geoweb, and map 2.0 (Goodchild, 2007; Elwood 2010; Sui 2008) and have received increased attention from GIS scholars (Goodchild 2007; Elwood 2009; Sui 2008). A common thread tying such specialized use of technology is the participation by citizens with little or no GIS training, a long standing objective of the PPGIS area of inquiry. So, as we move into an era that is gravitating rapidly toward more specialized use of technology built on a similar foundation, it seems timely to reflect on the effectiveness and sustainability of PPGIS initiatives. This article reviews the history of PPGIS, its genesis, and some of the critical work within the PPGIS research arena. Finally, the paper reflects on where PPGIS stands today.

Community-led housing and 'slow' opposition to corporate development: citizen participation as common ground?

Abstract: Coinciding with the ideological agenda of ‘new localism’ in welfare and planning policy is popular re-engagement with a convivial scale of participation in civil society. This is evident in a growing number and variety of community-led housing (CLH) groups and projects. It is also evident in ‘slow’ social movements, such as Cittaslow, that emphasise ‘quality of life’ and ‘sustainability’. Paradoxically, while home and community are essential to a local sense of identity and belonging, connections have not been made between ‘slow’ opposition to the homogenizing effects of corporate development and CLH. This paper draws particular attention to groups of ordinary citizens creating new or modified forms of housing that are not available in the mainstream housing market. A view is taken of CLH that encompasses wider aspects of community organising and resilience. The paper highlights the socio-spatial functions to citizen participation and motivations that drive CLH from the bottom–up. These need to be better understood if research and policy are to support and enable the process of growing locally driven housing solutions.

Participatory Action Research: Coproduction, Governance and Care

Abstract: In the wake of recent academic interest in coproduction, engaged research and transdisciplinarity, this article reviews some developments and directions in participatory action research (PAR), mainly within human geography. It examines one response to poststructuralist critiques that PAR either elides power relations or conversely can be equated to tyranny, namely a proposal to view PAR as a form of governance. Spatialising PAR then draws attention to the reach and relational workings of power. Counter-topography is discussed as a conceptualisation by which PAR can jump scales to inform theory. Prefiguring the social justice imperative with which it is invested, the potential of practising PAR as an ethics of care is explored. Consideration is given to how PAR's imperative for social change shapes the researcher's responsibilities vis-a-vis representation, political strategy and emotional engagement. Tensions between PAR's social change imperative, the needs of research partners and the institutional constrains of academia are a through-going theme. I conclude that PAR has much to offer research in human geography and, in turn, that work in human geography has provided PAR with space-relational strategies of engaging with power, which do not preclude emancipatory action.

Insider/Outsider Issues for Development Researchers from the Global South

Abstract: The insider/outsider dichotomy has been debated extensively, arguing for a more nuanced way of thinking about positionality. In this review article, membership roles of those with insider status will be expanded upon to include the ethical and methodological challenges and dilemmas faced by development researchers from the global South. This article argues for more critical thinking about difference or ‘sub-identities’ that grant the insider status. The discussion highlights experiences of researchers from the global South engaging with difference, shifting identities and expectations. This article concludes with some reflections on the limits of positionality and a need for more situated reflexivity.

Geographic Information Systems for Transportation in the 21st Century

Abstract: Geographic Information Systems for Transportation: Principles and Applications (Miller and Shaw 2001) remains the only major authored text on the interdisciplinary field of Geographic Information Systems for Transportation (GIS-T). However, Miller and Shaw (2001) is a product of the 20th century, and the fields of GIS, transportation and GIS-T have changed dramatically in the early 21st century. We are witnessing a revolution in transportation and urban sciences, fueled by a stunning advancement in capabilities to capture, store and process data, as well as communicate information and knowledge derived from these data. This paper is a review of GIS-T in the 20th and 21st centuries. Using Miller and Shaw (2001) as a touchstone, we discuss elements of GIS-T that have stood the test of time as well as new technologies and ideas that an updated GIS-T canon should include.

Animating the Sacred, Sentient and Spiritual in Post-Humanist and Material Geographies

Abstract: Materialist and post-humanist scholarship within the discipline has opened up exciting philosophical and theoretical possibilities with which to understand both human and nonhuman worlds. Yet, recent scholarship has been critical of the modern secular tendencies within this approach especially in its lack of engagement with sacred, sentient, and spiritual accounts and experiences. This review draws on perspectives from literary fiction, the subfields of indigenous and religious geographies and disciplines like anthropology, religious studies, and post-colonial studies to highlight these absences and spaces for meaningful engagement.

Knitting and the City

Abstract: In this paper, I introduce knitting as a popular and underexplored creative practice. Geographers have begun to take interest in craft, skill, and ‘the power of making’ to transform social and material relations and offer new possibilities for urban life. In this paper, I sketch ways that geographers may begin to engage with collective and interventionist knitting in urban environments - in terms of socialities, interventions, and materialities. From knitting circles, yarnbombing to community projects, knitters have begun to stitch new enthusiasms, temporalities, sensorial possibilities, and enchantments into the urban fabric. I conclude the paper - with future directions for geographical engagement with a variety of craft practices that encourage reflection on the people, places, and economies, of ‘making things’ through the example of knitting.

Everyday Ethics of Consumption in the Austere City

Abstract: This paper provides a first critical overview of literature within and beyond geography regarding the everyday ethics of consumption in times of austerity, with a focus on urban spaces How consumers balance their ethical imperatives in a time of austerity has significant, multi-scalar social and economic impacts, and yet there is a limited literature that addresses the everyday ethics of consuming in austere conditions By teasing out the differences between the ‘ethics of consumption’ and ‘ethical consumption’, and reflecting on research regarding consumption in contemporary and historical periods of austerity, I highlight the need for greater geographical insight into the impacts of economic and political change on everyday urban life I demonstrate that geographers might begin to tackle this emerging research agenda by attending to issues that impact on people's everyday lives, using the examples of ordinary mobilities, including home spaces and tourism, and food consumption in the case of food banks

The Rhetoric and Reality of Partnerships for International Development

Abstract: Over the past 60 years, the international development landscape has become far more complex. There is now a much wider range and number of organisations involved in some aspect of poverty alleviation, and an increasing emphasis on collaborative activities and forming partnerships to achieve development goals. This approach has been reinforced by the Eighth Millennium Development Goal, which calls for a global partnership for development, the emerging Sustainable Development Goals, as well as recent multi-stakeholder partnerships including the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation, which evolved from the Busan Partnership agreement devised at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. However, there are many challenges to partnerships, both in terms of defining their form and operation, but also achieving sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships for development. The advocating of partnerships in development policy suggests significant normative advantages to a more collaborative approach, however other literature is more cautious, highlighting a number of pitfalls including reductions in effectiveness, difficulties in implementation and conflicts of interest. This article reviews the contemporary nature of partnerships for international development, and considers their role in achieving more effective development cooperation.

Feminist Geographies “Beyond” Gender: de-Coupling Feminist Research and the Gendered Subject

Abstract: Increasingly feminist geographers are breaking the ties between feminist research and gendered subjects, envisioning feminist scholarship “beyond gender.” How did this trend emerge? This essay traces some of the significant shifts within feminist thinking that allowed the breakdown of such boundaries within feminist scholarship, and uses historical and contemporary examples primarily from feminist geography to illustrate that incomplete, and continually contested, transformation. I suggest that the history of feminist geographers' work to address critical questions about gender, race, and sexuality from outside the discipline has resulted in feminist projects that include, but are not limited to, a focus on gendered subjects. I argue that far from being finished intellectual projects, feminist geographies “beyond gender” represent new avenues for research about knowledge production, difference, and oppression. Who conducts research and what they study matters deeply for the scope and relevance of geographical scholarship as a whole, and contemporary feminist geographies point the way toward work that needs to be done especially around issues of uneven applications of intersectional analysis and the importance of race and postcolonial theory for geography.

Seeds, Agricultural Systems and Socio-natures: Towards an Actor–Network Theory Informed Political Ecology of Agriculture

Abstract: Agriculture has recently been the subject of considerable research and policy attention. Events such as the 2008 ‘world food price crisis’ and concerns over the future of global food security have led to calls for a ‘New Green Revolution’, with an emphasis on boosting yields through new transgenic crop varieties. However, critics have raised concerns over the growing role of global agribusiness and transnational capital in agriculture, as well as the potential social and ecological impacts of new technologies. An analysis of emerging agricultural trends thus demands a framework that is able to negotiate the complex multi-scalar interplay between environmental, technological, scientific, political and economic factors. In this paper, we focus on the potential contribution of a synthesis between political ecology and Actor–Network Theory to our understanding of agricultural networks. We review the literature with a view to teasing out key insights and sketching out future research priorities. We focus on questions surrounding power and agency, the political ecology of scale and the role of situated knowledges and practices.

Country Life: Agricultural Technologies and the Emergence of New Rural Subjectivities

Abstract: Rural areas have long been spaces of technological experimentation, development and resistance. In the UK, this is especially true in the post-second world war era of productivist food regimes, characterised by moves to intensification. The technologies that have developed have variously aimed to increase yields, automate previously manual tasks, and create new forms of life. This review focuses on the relationships between agricultural technologies and rural lives. While there has been considerable media emphasis on the material modification, and creation, of new rural lives through emerging genetic technologies, the review highlights the role of technologies in co-producing new rural subjectivities. It does this through exploring relationships between agricultural technologies and gender, changing approaches to understanding and intervening in animal lives, and how automation shifts responsibility for productive work on farms. In each of these instances, even ostensibly mundane technologies can significantly affect what it is to be a farmer, a farm advisor or a farm animal. However, the review cautions against technological determinism, drawing on recent work from Science and Technology Studies to show that technologies do not simply reconfigure lives but are themselves transformed by the actors and activities with which they are connected. The review ends by suggesting avenues for future research.

Contentious Politics in Austere Times

Abstract: The current conjuncture is becoming defined by political austerity, and this paper engages with different forms of contentious politics that are emerging in response. The paper reviews debates on post-politics arguing that while post-political perspectives speak to important tensions in relation to contemporary social and political relations, they also risk limiting an engagement with existing forms of political contestation. The paper makes three cuts through crisis geographies by exploring contested place making in relation to the 2011 riots, debates about localism and resilience, and the construction of spaces of antagonism by the Occupy Movement. By considering such diverse forms of resistance alongside each other rather than treating them separately, we emphasize the importance of attending to multiple articulations of contentious politics. We conclude by arguing that it is important to recognize the different means by which actors are seeking to bring crisis and austerity into contestation.