Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper is a praxis-based, theoretical analysis of the political ecology of place. The paper grew out of a multiyear activist project to redirect campus planning at our university onto a more sustainable footing. In our engagement with the unique institutional character of the university, we were required to address, on the one hand, its resistant power structures and, on the other hand, its real potential for fostering progressive social change. On the basis of this practical work, we develop a theoretical perspective on place-based change and articulate a situated conception of what we call ‘social rationality’. Turning from analysis to prescription, we then suggest a strategy of ‘comprehensive local innovation’ to allow universities to open up their potential to become working precedents that can address global issues through local action. Although the present paper does not articulate detailed proposals for specific institutional reforms, we consider such proposals in a related book.

In November 2003 thousands of demonstrators staged protests in the streets of Miami while trade ministers from across the hemisphere met for the Eighth Ministerial of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Accounts of these events tend to rehearse a common narrative about mass urban protests that frame such demonstrations as a conflict between proglobalization governments and antiglobalization activists. This narrative focuses on the physicality of the protests without considering their performative qualities, assumes that state practices and dissent are distinct, mutually exclusive realms of action, and takes ‘globalization’ to be a scale-fixed process. We call this narrative into question by pursuing two lines of inquiry. First, we analyze the spatial and discursive practices of three different groups of protesters so as to identify crucial affinities and distinctions in their positions and strategies. Second, we challenge the view that capitalist states are simply ‘proglobalization’ by considering resistance to the US delegation by South American delegations within the FTAA ministerial. From our reading of these events we draw lessons regarding the political and strategic effects of mass urban demonstrations.

The development of stable markets in ecosystem services is now a major neoliberal policy initiative in the United States and elsewhere. Such markets, however, require ecosystem scientists to play a new and challenging role in certifying the value of the commodities traded, which are defined using the holistic measures of ecology rather than the uncontroversial measures of weight, volume, or time. As ecosystem science increasingly serves as a metrical technology for the commodification of ecosystem services, its fine and fragile distinctions increasingly bear the weight of capital circulation. In this paper I report on fieldwork among ecosystem assessment technicians, and suggest that this new round of the commodification of nature may overwhelm the capacity of science to provide stable representations of commodity value. The methods and techniques of ecosystem assessment must describe a nature that capital can ‘see’—that has an uncontroversial measure—in order for trade to occur. However, these assessment methods currently produce unstable data that are rendered meaningful in economic terms only by dint of creative and ad hoc efforts at translation by field technicians. It is suggested that this may represent a practical limit or crisis point in the expansion of capital relations, or at least a complication in the streamlined neoliberal narratives about the commodification of ecosystem services.

In this paper I argue that increasingly neoliberal forms of governmentality are evident in the educational sector of the European Commission. This is especially the case vis-α-vis the institutional philosophy of how immigrants and second-generation ‘minorities’ should be best integrated into European society. Both the policies and the programs associated with education and training are becoming more oriented towards the formation of mobile, flexible, and self-governing European laborers and less oriented towards an institutionalized affirmation of personal development and individual or group ‘difference’. This represents a fairly substantive philosophical and practical transformation over the past five to ten years, with significant implications for conceptions of European citizenship, multiculturalism, and social belonging.

In this paper I critically examine new forms of state–civil-society arrangements via a case study of non business stakeholder representation in UK Training and Enterprise Councils and in Local Boards for Training and Adjustment in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on insights from both poststructural and regulationist approaches, I situate their development and crises in what Jenson and Phillips term ‘citizenship regimes’. Local representation of labour and equity groups could be effective and reflected struggles over both recognition and redistribution. However, representation often depended on resources drawn from other scales and especially on the relationship of stakeholders with the provincial and national state. Local representation has some autonomy from macroshift in citizenship regimes, but in both cases there is strong evidence that the state is able to incorporate stakeholder representation into what Jessop terms ‘metagovernance strategies’, although it cannot necessarily control it.

The purpose of this paper is to recast the politics of obesity in the United States in light of the unsatisfactory nature of the current, popular debates on this problem. The paper begins by taking stock of contemporary discussions about obesity through a review and analysis of the popular and academic literature on the topic. We show how discussions of obesity that rely on unidimensional structural, biological, and political causes are not only simplistic but also do not adequately historicize the present so-called epidemic of US obesity. To answer the questions ‘why now?’ and ‘why here?’, we argue, requires an ontological rapprochement between the more dialectical approaches to political economy, cultural studies, and political ecology. After laying out this more integrated approach, we apply it by showing how today's twin phenomena of the discursive war on obesity and the so-called epidemic itself are better understood through the historical lens of neoliberalism, both as a political–cultural economic project and as a form of governmentality. Our argument is that some of the central contradictions of global capitalism are literally embodied. The problem of obesity in its multiple material and discursive senses can then be seen as a partial fix—in some respects, even as a spatial fix—to some of the contradictions of neoliberalism. At the same time, we contend that the neoliberal shift in personhood from citizen to consumer encourages (over)eating at the same time that neoliberal notions of discipline vilify it. Those who can achieve thinness amidst this plenty are imbued with the rationality and self-discipline of perfect subjects, who in some sense contribute to the more generalized sense of deservingness that characterizes US culture today.

Despite the recent significance children's geographies have been afforded within many geographical subdisciplines, their experiences of migration have received relatively little attention. However, children do migrate and their migration is often distinct from that of entire households. In this paper we explore children's migration in southern Africa within the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, focusing in particular on the impacts of moving house on children's sociospatial experiences. Migration has consequences for several areas of children's lives, and the nature of those consequences is shaped by the context within which migration takes place. In southern Africa AIDS is an unavoidable aspect of the sociospatial context, but the impact it has on children varies. This exemplar has wider implications for two areas of geographical research. First, in the paper we advocate the importance of including children's experiences of migration within culturally informed studies of migration. Second, there is a need for research in children's geographies to extend beyond the microlevel. We advocate a refocusing of research beyond children's static relationship to environments to also encompass children's transient geographies in discussions of their life experiences.