Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I explore the cultural politics of memory and longing in northern New Mexico. The paper begins by examining the ways that, for many Hispanos, land and identity depend on remembered Spanish and Mexican pasts. It continues by showing, through the case of the violent takeover of an old land grant, the political possibilities and contemporary identities that are enabled through the linking of distant past and contemporary land politics. It also demonstrates the ways in which deviating from the past dilutes these same formations and possibilities that accompany these histories—clearly delineated by treaties, deeds, patrimony, etc. The paper then explores—through the contemporary political struggle surrounding the dismembering of a statue erected to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Spanish arrival in northern New Mexico—the ways in which these very memories also tie Hispanos to alternative violent histories of conquest and colonialism. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates the ways that contemporary land and identity politics in northern New Mexico trap Hispanos between what they need to remember and what others will not let them forget.

Fisheries scientists established institutions, engaged metropolitan ideas and local knowledge, and worked out particular spatial practices to produce fisheries science in early-20th-century British Columbia. Problems of distance and the mobility of scientific specimens shaped practices. The difficulties of operating in a peripheral location influenced the institutional development of the field and the emphases of science towards commercially important problems focusing on salmon migration and life history. In this case study I compare and integrate approaches to science and distance from Latour's work and postcolonial historiographies of science in an empirical context.

The 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) epidemic in the United Kingdom resulted in the popularisation of the concept of biosecurity. At its most basic, biosecurity refers to simple cleansing and disinfecting, but during the FMD epidemic it became associated with a powerful system of surveillance. We characterise surveillance as a thing in itself, a mode of ordering that can be added to others. The establishment and maintenance of categories are fundamental to the practice of surveillance, but social studies of surveillance have not yet fully realised the way such categorisation operates within the nonhuman and the spatial. Strange materialities are those things which do not quite belong within a particular order. We examine the actions of surveillance in the world of strange materialities that was the FMD epidemic. Here we see that surveillant practices acted on the nonhuman FMD virus by constructing territories to control humans. Surveillance seems to proceed as the translation of a worldview (a system of categorisation) into materiality and we conclude with some thoughts on what this may mean for geographical studies of technical, biological, and human materialities in which surveillant processes are at work.

In this paper we explore the expert controversy over the management of a major rural risk issue, the foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak that affected the United Kingdom in 2001, and in particular the role of predictive epidemiological modeling in the decisionmaking process. We pose the questions of why this technique was identified as the right tool for the job by government and why, at the same time, its use was so fiercely contested by other experts in animal health. To set our analysis in context we outline briefly the causes, characteristics, and consequences of FMD together with its history in the United Kingdom. We then provide an account of the 2001 FMD outbreak and the policies that were employed to control the epidemic. In the main discussion we integrate the geographical concept of spatial practices with the concept, drawn from the sociology of scientific knowledge, of styles of scientific practice and apply this to the analysis of the knowledge practices and arguments of the scientific groups that advised on controlling the epidemic. We analyse the key differences between expert groups and their policy recommendations in terms of their different styles of scientific spatial practice. In the rhetorical boundary work of the opposing scientific groups we see these differences in ‘style’ being invoked to delineate the boundaries of ‘sound science’ and thereby legitimate their respective policy prescriptions. We conclude by discussing the relationship between styles of scientific spatial practice and recent trends in government policy style and its implications for future risk policy.

Global climate change is the focus of climate politics organized across scales by a range of organizations. These organizations represent climate change in ways they hope will make the problem relevant to people and thereby inspire political action. The strategies require a choice of objects to bring climate change home to constituents. Some objects are ‘more local’ to certain constituencies—that is, they are more meaningful. Greenpeace Canada represents the impact of climate change via the object of the hungry polar bear. The Cities for Climate Protection campaign makes climate change relevant, in part, by its focus on the cost-saving benefits of energy efficiency. The process of localizing climate change constitutes society. I use feminist science studies as a theoretical basis to support my argument that organizations localizing climate change might choose objects that are more accountable to their constitutive effects on societies. I point out potential pitfalls in the choice of the polar bear and energy efficiency, and suggest some possibility in these objects.

Supported by scientific modes of representation, wildlife-management agencies commonly adopt policies that subordinate nonhuman species and resubstantiate human–nonhuman hierarchies. In this paper I illustrate the inadequacy of current management policies by drawing upon Deleuzian notions of immanence and movement and applying them to the specific case of Yellowstone bison. Modes of representation that define nonhuman ontology in terms of genetics are shown to be inadequate for they separate essence from experience and facilitate the removal and exclusion of nonhumans. In contrast, a Deleuzian theory of wildlife accentuates the importance of movement, contact, and contingency in the constitution of nonhuman ontology, thus outlining an approach that can also lead to a revision of human–nonhuman relations. In particular, movement provides a physical mechanism to bridge the theoretical gap that separates human from nonhuman, and suggests a means to link together ethical and evolutionary concerns regarding nonhumans. With the distinctions between Deleuzian theory and common wildlife-management practices in mind, the paradigm of sustainability is criticized for prioritizing demographic and genetic stability over spatial transgression, thereby minimizing the developmental capacities of nonhumans and legitimizing existing spatial structures of exclusion and control.