Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

The author traces the origins, evolution, and contested meanings of the ‘keyword’ workfare (work + welfare) in the United States which, in the space of 30 years, has evolved from a technocratic term deployed in the process of intrawelfare reform, through to powerful signifier of a systemic, postwelfare ‘alternative’. Discursive struggles around workfare are shown to have played a decisive role in reencoding the language of poverty politics, as ‘old’ discourses of needs, decency, compassion, and entitlement have been discredited, while ‘new’ (or more accurately reworked) discourses of work, responsibility, self-sufficiency, and empowerment have been forcefully advanced. This process is a geopolitical one in the sense that local models and stories of workfare have been absorbed—in a transformative way—into the new orthodoxies of policy discourse and practice. The ascendancy of local workfare (represented as the ‘solution’ to the ‘welfare mess’) over federal welfare (itself now a political attack term) has been associated not only with a rolling back of the language, routines, and systems of welfarism, but also with the rolling forward of radically new institutions and vocabularies of regulation. Although it continues to be contested, workfare is becoming the regulatory antonym of welfare; the programme is becoming programmatic. The paper presents a political-economic contextualization of workfare discourse.

Strategies for indigenous self-determination have emerged at unique junctures in national and global geopolitical arenas, challenging the formal hegemony of the nation-state with claims to land rights, sovereignty and self-governance. These movements are reflected qualitatively, in a variety of social, political, and cultural forms, including popular music in Australia. An analysis of the ‘cultural apparatus’, recordings, and popular performance events of indigenous musicians reveals the construction of ‘arenas of empowerment’ at a variety of geographical scales, within which genuine spaces of Aboriginal self-determination and self-expression can exist. Although these spaces often remain contested, new indigenous musical networks continue to emerge, simultaneously inscribing Aboriginal music into the Australian soundscape, and beginning to challenge normative geopolitical doctrines. The emergence of a vibrant Aboriginal popular music scene therefore requires a rethinking of Australian music, and appeals for greater recognition of Aboriginal artists' sophisticated geopolitical strategies.

The authors focus on the rise of adventure tourism in New Zealand and suggest that the growth of adventure-tourism attractions is related to important transformations in the sociocultural geographies of the places concerned. Three issues are addressed: first, the increasing importance of adventure-tourism facilities, practices, and subcultures, which have interconnected with the social spatialisation of places and landscapes; second, the ways in which adventure tourism transcends the metaphor of the tourist ‘gaze’, and suggests attention to the embodiment of tourist practice; and third, the implications for an understanding of nature—society relations inherent in representational texts used to advertise adventure tourism.

Many social scientists and development experts working in the South have dismissed postmodernism and related perspectives as irrelevant in the context of continued poverty and struggles for modernisation. Conversely, Northern authors on postmodernism frequently imply the global salience of the paradigm in a universalising manner redolent of modernist discourse, whereas critics of conventional development(alism) tend to base their arguments on caricatures in which the diversity of real-world experiences and some important improvements in the quality of life over the last 30 years are ignored, Neither approach is tenable, and in this paper the author explores the scope and basis for more fruitful engagements with postmodernism, postcolonialism, and related perspectives, including Southern notions of posttraditionalism, in the context of current developments and popular aspirations in the South. A critical reading of the literature is combined with examples drawn from different regions. In the analysis a pathway is offered through these often confusing fields and the relationships between globalisation, modernisation, and postmodernism, the changing roles and abilities of state and nonstate actors, and the complex ways in which local communities engage with such dynamics in pursuit of a better life, are encompassed.