Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

The paper integrates spatial analysis with dynamic discourse analysis to look at the interplay among discourse, agency, and spatial practices in the social production of space. It examines the dual process of place making and discursive formation with regard to the campaigns over the Star Ferry pier and the Queen's pier in Hong Kong in 2006–07. Drawing on and extending Lefebvre's theory, which asserts the priority of space over language, I argue that social movement presents a case of reappropriation of space that is intended to be read and lived interactively. The two case studies show that the events became vehicles for oppositional ideas and practices that gradually crystallised into a counterdiscourse of people's space in the process of remaking places from below. The dynamic discourse analysis focuses on the contestatory process of multivocal claims and interpretations among the activists, the media, and the government regarding memory, history, living space, and agency. The spatial analysis sheds light on the material embodiment of meanings in places as well as the activists' tactics and actions. The interplay between discourse and spatiality is registered in how one informed or prefigured the other's development, how action-guiding narratives were recounted in spatial terms, and how the activists enacted the agency of the narratives in and through the places. I conclude that the struggle underscores the rise of a new social movement in society.

This paper explores how cougars and humans live together on Vancouver Island, Canada, a region home to what scientists estimate is the densest cougar population in North America and to one quarter of the continent's lethal and nonlethal cougar attacks in the last century. Drawing on biopolitical and spatial theory, I trace how safe space is made, maintained, and unmade and ask what the role of cougars has been in production of spaces and their imagined security. Discussion is informed foremost by stories of cougar - human encounters on Vancouver Island and then retold based on newspaper and archival research and semistructured interviews with island residents. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how nonhumans matter to the material - semiotic construction of safety and space. In particular, I examine attempts to discipline cougars in the name of biosecurity, how cougars discipline humans, and how cougars' bodies and behaviors have resisted and shaped spatial configurations. I argue that these contestations and enforcements are biopolitical. My empirical research supports recent theoretical arguments by geographers and actor-network theorists regarding space—namely, that space is produced within network formations of which cougars, in this case, are key actors. My analyses suggest that the biothreat cougars and humans pose to each other precludes the formation of ethics through encounter and that conservation strategies must account for cougars' spatial requirements.

This paper examines some of the emotions highlighted by interactions between British migrants and Gulf nationals in the emerging global city of Dubai. Tracing the emotions that emerge in ‘expatriate’ handbooks, field notes, and interview narratives, I contribute to an emerging body of work that focuses on the embodied migrant and troubles the notion of privileged migrants as being detached from place. I demonstrate that attention to the emotions framing such interactions, in both geographical and temporal terms, can help us to better understand migrant encounters.

Cattle and sheep breeders in the UK and elsewhere increasingly draw on genetic techniques in order to make breeding decisions. Many breeders support such techniques, while others argue against them for a variety of reasons, including their preference for the ‘traditions’ of visual-based and pedigree-based selections. Meanwhile, even for those institutions and breeders who promote genetic techniques, the outcomes are not always as predicted. We build on our recent use of Foucault's discussions of biopower to examine the effects of the introduction of genetic techniques in UK livestock breeding in order to begin to explore the diffuse and capillary nature of resistance within relations of biopower. We focus specifically on how resistance and contestation can be understood through the joint lenses of biopower and an understanding of livestock breeding as knowledge-practices enacted within heterogeneous biosocial collectivities. In some instances these collectivities coalesce around shared endeavour, such as increasing the valency of genetic evaluation within livestock breeding. Yet such mixed collectivities also open up opportunities for counter-conduct: heterogeneous resistances to and contestations of genetic evaluation as something represented as progressive and inevitable. We focus on exploring such modes of resistance using detailed empirical research with livestock breeders and breeding institutions. We demonstrate how in different and specific ways geneticisation becomes problematised, and is contested and made more complex, through the knowledge-practices of breeders, the bodies of animals, and the complex relationships between different institutions in livestock breeding and rearing.

This introductory paper establishes the grounds for a more sustained discussion of Claude Raffestin's understanding of human territoriality in its contribution to contemporary geographical debates. The purpose is to highlight the broad, and fundamentally interrelated, philosophical, epistemological, and political ambitions of Raffestin's work, before elucidating some of the key conceptual pillars of his relational thinking through territoriality. In this, particular emphasis will be placed on the concept of mediation. The proposed engagement with Raffestin's work offers an opportunity not only for revisiting territoriality in its value for contemporary political geography and sociospatial theory, and for rethinking the positioning and contribution of Raffestin's oeuvre itself, but also for critically reflecting upon the spaces and power relationships of geographical knowledge production today and in the past.

In this paper I reconstitute my own approach to the notions of space, territory, and territoriality. Developing from the early 1970s, my thoughts resided in the effort devoted to deriving from space the idea of territory qua production by the projection of labor, a Janus-faced category composed of energy and information. The construction of territory is the consequence of territoriality—defined as the ensemble of relations that a society maintains with exteriority and alterity for the satisfaction of its needs, towards the end of attaining the greatest possible autonomy compatible with the resources of the system. I also propose a descriptive model utilizable in the production of territory as well as in the production of representations of this territory in making available ‘images’ or landscapes. In the conclusion I draw attention to the fact that if labor is always a mediator, it is not thereby any less subordinated to the money whose possessors are in a position to alienate labor by subjecting it to orientations that can be undesirable. Money accelerates the process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Geography, by considering only territorial productions, has neglected to take up the issue of labor; consequently, it has not been able to demonstrate the effects on labor of money as a mediator that has rendered everything more and more fluid.

This paper is focused on the contribution that French Swiss geographer Claude Raffestin has made to Italian geography studies and, more generally, on his role in linking Italian geography to social theory and philosophy. It also explores the adoption of, and the engagement with, his ideas by a select group of Italian geographers during the last three decades or so. The first part of this paper claims that one reason for such an influence is Raffestin's capacity to be often conceptually ‘ahead of time’ and to his extraordinary capacity to present his theoretical approach in a very accessible way. While reflecting on how his concepts of ‘territory’ and ‘territoriality’, together with his speculation on the relationship between semiotics, power, and space, left a deep mark on the ways in which the discipline is practised in Italy today, the paper also shows how and why other aspects of Raffestin's work were less received. The second part of this paper is thus focused on four key ‘intersections’ of people, concepts, events, etc in which Raffestin's specific contribution to the Italian intellectual scene became particularly remarkable. The conclusion, while restating that any clear cultural mapping of Raffestin's ‘Italian travels’ is, perhaps, an operation doomed to failure (if anything, because of the complexity of his diverse interventions), at the same time highlights how his work has been and continues today to be of extraordinary relevance for Italian geographers and for their practice.

Two of the most prolific contributors to the theoretical literature on territoriality—Robert Sack and Claude Raffestin—treat territoriality in fundamentally different ways. Sack conceives of territoriality as a spatial strategy that individuals, groups, and organizations use to achieve particular social and political ends. Raffestin, in contrast, takes a relational approach to territoriality—seeing it as arising out of, integral to, and reinforcing of interactions and structural circumstances. These contrasting approaches reflect different types of scholarly projects. The reading of one against the other shows that Raffestin's relational approach is critical to capturing the territorial ideas and practices of everyday life, as these are not reducible to simple strategies to control space. But as these ideas and practices congeal into territorial structures and norms of the sort exemplified by the emergence of the modern state system they produce understandings and arrangements that lend themselves to the type of theorization of territoriality proposed by Sack. Rather than treating the relationship between Raffestin's and Sack's approaches to territoriality as strictly oppositional, it is more constructive to explore the circumstances in which relational territoriality, as developed by Raffestin, produces understandings and arrangements that can be effectively captured through the territoriality-as-spatial-strategy approach of Sack.

In this paper I suggest fleshing out and making material the authorial voice by exploring pathways for writing a critical biography of Claude Raffestin, a Swiss geographer writing since the late 1970s up to the present day. In exploring his life and contribution as part of the wider Francophone tradition of social and political geography, I aim to engage further with the debate on the circulation of knowledge and the alleged hegemony of the English language within geography. In doing this, I suggest that the term ‘disciplinary Orientalism’ might help to think through some of the contradictions in geography, which both draws heavily from foreign critical thinkers, often removed from the spaces and contexts of debate they are/were writing in, and simultaneously ignores foreign geographical traditions and contributions. Building on Raffestin's work—and drawing from diverse sources, including his writings, reviews of his work, and new interview material—I explore how his geographies might make sense here and now, to the extent that ‘here’ is inevitably an uncertain place, not only in where this paper is written and read but also because reading always takes place in-between contexts. Through this example I explore how scholars are embodied and located in uncertain places and points to the multiple circulations and noncirculations of theory and praxis within geography.