Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I examine the Patriot Movement, a broad, right-wing social movement in the USA that emerged in response to the economic insecurities of globalization. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the movement's class-based concerns are articulated through discourses of local sovereignty and patriotism. Because patriots' class interests are articulated through the patriot category rather than through traditional class categories, I use identity theory to analyze the movement. The movement, with its legacy of violence and its calls for local control, illustrates that the submersion of class (as a category that crosses scale) can lead to militant and particularistic responses. The couching of local power within discourses of patriotism demonstrates that such politics continue to rely on larger scales for legitimization. Reference to patriotism is, however, mostly symbolic. As such patriots ironically are unable to conceive of class positioning or their responses to it as cross local. As a case study I examine the movement in central Kentucky, and an issue around which patriots there have galvanized—calls to legalize industrial hemp. The paper concludes by arguing that the Patriot Movement illustrates the need to actively create progressive discourses to address working-class concerns.

In this paper I explore connections between representational and material space as expressed in conflicts over ethnic tourism in the American Southwest. Using the case of Gallup, New Mexico, I first examine how a specific regional discourse was embodied in a plan to create a National Indian Memorial Park. In this discourse, space is rendered a quaint ‘Land of Enchantment’. In the remainder of the paper, I discuss attempts by American Indian activists to challenge this production of space through various material and representational efforts. The outcome of these efforts is reflected in the resulting space produced, and illustrates some of the complex spatial politics around ethnic tourism.

In this paper we discuss the apparent failure to couple together the constructs of ‘rurality’ and ‘homelessness’, and propose a critical deconstruction of this noncoupling. Three principal lines of arguments are employed. First, there are a range of physical and material reasons why rural and urban spaces have varying qualities for hiding or revealing homeless people, and why the embodied experiences of homelessness have varying geographies. Second, there are a series of obstacles that exist within the practices, thoughts, and discourses of rural dwellers themselves, which lead them to deny that homelessness exists in their place. Third, normalised conceptualisations about rurality and homelessness often serve to separate the two concepts, and contribute to the assumption that homelessness is an urban phenomenon, which is rendered invisible in rural space. In short, homelessness may be conceptualised as being ‘out-of-place’ in the purified spaces of rurality, and the imaginary geographies of rurality and homelessness become transformed into everyday practices and actions relating to what people actually do in and about rural places. This critical deconstruction will be important for any attempts to recouple homelessness and rurality in the understandings and actions of policymakers.

Within a growing and varied body of work exploring homeless people's own understandings and experiences of homelessness, increased attention has begun to focus upon the varying understandings of ‘home’ held by those who are currently ‘home-less’. Most such work has been concerned with an examination of people's experiences of ‘home as residence’, with far less attention paid to homeless people's understandings of what might be termed ‘home as place’. Given the extent to which homelessness continues to be constructed as an experience intimately if not inevitably associated with the experience of movement, such an omission is surprising. As homeless people move within, between, and through places—sometimes by necessity, sometimes by ‘choice’—such movements are liable to have a significant impact upon a person's sense of home as well as upon his or her experience of homelessness. The author examines understandings of home as place articulated by single homeless men living in night shelter and hostel accommodation in a large town on the south coast of England. Drawing upon a reconstructive life-history approach, the author sets the understandings of each respondent within the context of the mobility which has characterised that respondent's homeless career. In attempting to make sense of respondents’ experiences, four contrasting narratives of home as place are outlined, relating to the experiences of the ‘(dis)placed’, the ‘homesick’, those whose lives now move around a ‘spectral geography’, and of the ‘new nomads’.

The author, using textual analysis of architects' professional discourse and interviews with older people, examines their different perspectives on space utilisation in sheltered housing. Both designers and older people approach this matter by way of commonsense usages of home as a physical location and as a location in space. The differences between these individuals are explicated in terms of Schutz's notion of anonymous typifications. It is shown that architectural design briefs involve making predictions about the future lives of residents of sheltered housing. This results in a range of anonymous typifications informing architects' views on space utilisation. By contrast, when older people talk about their future lives in sheltered housing and space utilisation they rely upon features of their individual biographies: matters from which architects are inevitably excluded.