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The intricate relationship between border control and migrations is the core puzzle of this paper, which takes voluntary returns from Morocco as a case study and autonomy of migration (AoM) as a theoretical framework. More precisely, the paper examines voluntary returns from the perspective of migrants themselves to grasp border control through the lens of its disputed, distorted and sometimes subverted implementation. The paper draws on data collected during fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Morocco, including ethnographic observations and interviews with staff from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), migrants and local intermediaries. It focuses on the case of sub-Saharan migrants leaving Morocco through "Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration" programmes led by IOM and confronts empirical data with the AoM theoretical framework. The paper demonstrates that migrants' entangled appropriations of return are defined in close relationship with a wide range of actors intervening during the process of return. Ultimately, migrants reformulate the meaning of their involvement in voluntary return into strategic, moral, relative, and symbolic terms. However, these entangled appropriations of a deportation device simultaneously reinforce social norms and institutional regulations underlying migration dynamics and border control. Eventually, the paper draws conclusions on the political effects of migrants' entangled appropriation of a deportation device on the production of intertwined im/mobility regimes between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines diplomatic processes that compose our geopolitical world as dynamic and yet also seemingly affirm the status quo. It turns attention to the entrepreneurial creativity of individual diplomats, the transformations occurring at threshold moments, spaces and practices, and the materiality of diplomacy that exceeds human agency. The paper does so by forging an innovative dialogue between assemblage theory and the notion of liminality as developed in cultural anthropology, and by focusing on a hitherto overlooked set of diplomatic actors: British Overseas Territories. Three vignettes of Overseas Territory diplomacy are traced: an account of the liminal subjectivity of London-based Overseas Territory representatives, the 1982 Argentinian invasion that tipped the Falkland Islands into a state of greater autonomy, and the geophysical ‘tipping point’ of the 1997 volcanic eruption on Montserrat that made the island dependent for the foreseeable future. The paper concludes by noting potential avenues of future research that the synergy between liminality and assemblage may open up in the fields of Science and Technology Studies, anthropology, and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies atmospheres of stillness in a contested urban public space known as the ‘Bearpit’. The purpose is to provide a nuanced account of stillness and its relationship to atmosphere. Drawing on an ethnographic examination of the Bearpit, the paper finds that the positive and beneficial aspects of stillness can be found in unexpected and unconventional places. However, there is no single, unifying experience of stillness, but rather a plurality of ‘stillings’. The paper highlights three forms of stillness distilled from study of the site – calmness, control and withdrawnness – and demonstrates how these modalities emerge from and contribute to the construction of atmospheres in the Bearpit. Moreover, these atmospheres have direct political consequences for those who take part in city life. The paper’s contribution is found in the advancement of non-anthropocentric understandings of atmosphere and the development of stillness as a way of understanding city life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the existing body of geographical work on touch, the haptic and the surficial, as well as within the emerging field of haptic media studies, cartography has not yet been specifically considered. Moving beyond a technical examination of special tactile map products, this article explores the tactile, haptic and surficial qualities of everyday cartographic experiences in digital, non-digital and mixed formats. These qualities are researched through a phenomenologicalaesthetic lens, a sensuous disposition and a creative sensibility, thus enacting what could be described as 'non-representational cartography'. Drawing from multisensory visual ethnography, this paper explores the perspective of 'tactile empathy' through photographic/video recordings based on the matching of seen and experienced touch described by neuroscientists. Some personal 'map stories' generate a possible agenda for the study of haptic cartographies, which includes: representations of cartographic tactility; 3D sensations; cartographic surfaces; the spatialities of maps; gestures, or maps as a touch space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines biopolitical control practices at the Greece-Turkey borders and addresses current debates in the study of borders and biopolitics. The Greek and Frontex authorities have established diverse surveillance mechanisms to control the borderzone space and to monitor, intercept, apprehend, and push back migrants or to block their passage. The location of contemporary borders has been much debated in the literature. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of borders by demonstrating that while borders are diffusing beyond and inside state territories, their practices and effects are concentrated at the edges of state territories--ie, borderzones. Borderzones are biopolitical spaces in which surveillance is most intense and migrants suffer the direct threat of injury and death. Applying biopolitics in the context of borderzones also prompts us to revisit the concept. While Foucault posits that biopolitics is the product of the historical transition away from sovereign powers controlling territory and imposing practices of death towards governmental powers managing population mainly through pastoral, productive, and deterritorialized techniques, the case of the Greece-Turkey borderzones demonstrates that biopolitics operates through sovereign territorial controls and surveillance, practices of death and exclusion, and suspension of rights. This study also highlights the fact that, despite the biopolitical realities, migrants continue to cross the borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the importance of historic, social, and material connections in belonging to place. Mauss's anthropological concept of a 'gift' is deployed to understand how places are cared for by a community over time. The development of tangible and intangible connections between past, present, and future people and places is explored. On the basis of in-depth, qualitative research with a group of people who have long-standing connections to their local place, memories and life-narratives are unravelled to explore the social and material relationships that place embodies. An understanding of place as an inalienable gift may create a moral duty to nurture and pass on places to subsequent generations. The research takes a phenomenological approach in order to illuminate the largely unconsidered associations between personal biographies and material places. After a brief discussion of the data collection methods used, notably photo diaries, some empirical examples are put forward to demonstrate how the research participants act as current custodians of places. The paper concludes by bringing together the different aspects of belonging in place illustrated by these vignettes and shows how they contribute to belonging in place as a moral way of being-in-the-world; that is, what I term 'an ontological belonging'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, anthropologists have drawn attention to the disconnect between a political imagination that conceptualizes nation-states’ borders as unambiguous and linear, and the realities of borderlanders’ experience where cultural and social space is frequently folded and overlapping. Through their very focus on hybridity and crossborder linkages, however, border ethnographies have unwittingly given even more weight to linear demarcations—all the while insisting that they are abstract and ideological. In mining the border-as-skin somatic metaphor, this article foregrounds nonvisual bodily senses such as tactility in its analysis and suggests that the inclusion of proximate senses in ethnographies of border encounters offers significant analytical advantages. It moves away from the visuality that dominates political cartography, thus allowing for a more sensuous and synesthetic ethnographic work. Additionally, in heeding the recent research on topologies published by geographers and social theorists, the paper hopes to contribute to the emerging mathematical turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on “territorial stigmatization” analyzes how residents of stigmatized spaces negotiate their blemished reputations. It reveals their distress, despondency, and resistance as they encounter the space’s negative imagery. Building on this research, this paper introduces the concept of spatial anguish to capture the shame and embarrassment residents feel because of their stigmatized space. To do so, it uses an intersectional analysis to show how anguished residents try to deflect the stigma through reinforcing racist and sexist imageries of their neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Butler's argument that understanding the operations of power requires an examination of the contexts of 'infants' emergence', this paper explores the potential for infant geographies. Butler points to the importance of infancy to subjection, the formation of psyches, and the 'fiction' of an interior or socially anterior self. Attention to infants' everyday geographies therefore has the potential to unravel how individuals are subjected; how power becomes an embodied part of individuals' subjective identities, operating creatively to produce subjects with agency, and, at the same time, limiting and circumscribing appropriate subjectivities. A critical reflection on Butler suggests a need to focus upon how subjection occurs in specific material spaces, and the role of a host of human and nonhuman others to the process of subjection. Also pertinent is a fuller exploration of how diversities of kinship and nonkinship social relations might lead to other constellations of power in the subjection of infants. How the geographies of infants can be operationalised methodologically and epistemologically is also explored. The paper has broader resonance to issues of subjection; to how embodied inequalities are reproduced, transformed, or both; to questions of agency; and to concerns to deconstruct an autonomous, thinking, rational, human subject within human geography--reconfiguring individuals as constituted within emotional and psychic interdependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Butler's argument that understanding the operations of power requires an examination of the contexts of 'infants' emergence', this paper explores the potential for infant geographies. Butler points to the importance of infancy to subjection, the formation of psyches, and the 'fiction' of an interior or socially anterior self. Attention to infants' everyday geographies therefore has the potential to unravel how individuals are subjected; how power becomes an embodied part of individuals' subjective identities, operating creatively to produce subjects with agency, and, at the same time, limiting and circumscribing appropriate subjectivities. A critical reflection on Butler suggests a need to focus upon how subjection occurs in specific material spaces, and the role of a host of human and nonhuman others to the process of subjection. Also pertinent is a fuller exploration of how diversities of kinship and nonkinship social relations might lead to other constellations of power in the subjection of infants. How the geographies of infants can be operationalised methodologically and epistemologically is also explored. The paper has broader resonance to issues of subjection; to how embodied inequalities are reproduced, transformed, or both; to questions of agency; and to concerns to deconstruct an autonomous, thinking, rational, human subject within human geography--reconfiguring individuals as constituted within emotional and psychic interdependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proceeds from a moment of impromptu 'border-fixing' in the wake of an inter-communal conflict, to explore the everyday spatialisation of the state in a rural region of Central Asia. Drawing on ethnography from the Kyrgyzstan - Uzbekistan border, it contributes to a growing concern to understand how the state is rendered 'integral' in everyday life. Rather than focusing on the enactments and justificatory statements of state officials, the paper explores instead the diffuse but passionate work of borderland dwellers in policing the state edge in a context of political upheaval. 'Territory' in this reading is not just an a priori attribute of the state, nor only the product of official imaginings and interventions, but the site, too, of everyday practical and symbolic work, a vehicle for claims making and the means of performative enactments of belonging and difference. The paper calls for greater attention to the 'ordinary affects' that are elicited by borders and boundedness and the need to bring discussions of territoriality into conversation with a literature on the affective life of the state. Doing so, it argues, will both enrich our understanding of everyday state formation and give us greater purchase on the role of events in rupturing and reconfiguring state space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the passenger experience of travel time, and its translation into a transport model of travel time, which is of great significance in the potential funding and construction of infrastructural projects. In the economic appraisals of such projects, which are often of massive scale and impact, it is presumed that travel time is wasted, dead, or empty, and therefore should be minimised. However, in this paper we show how travel time is filled with activities and fantasies. We show that there are multiple travel times and places, and not just a single measured clock time that has to be minimised in getting from point A to point B. Travel time is situated in the sociomaterial practices of travel, which include engaging with other passengers, interacting with wireless networks, views out of the window, things packed in one's bag, and so on. We describe and evaluate various `moving methods' for researching places on-the-move, from survey to ethnography. Finally, we consider how to disrupt the assumption in transport appraisal that such time is empty and should be minimised, and suggest new approaches for presencing the richness of passenger travel time in transport modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with second-generation Barbadians or 'Bajan-Brits', who have decided to 'return' to the birthplace of their parents, focusing on their reactions to matters relating to race relations and racialised identities. The importance of race and the operation of the 'colour-class' system in the Caribbean are established at the outset. Based on fifty-two qualitative in-depth interviews, the paper initially considers the positive things that the second-generation migrants report about living in a majority black country and the salience of such racial affirmation as part of their migration process. The paper then presents an analysis of the narratives provided by the Bajan-Brits concerning their reactions to issues relating to race relations in Barbadian society. The impressions of the young returnees provide clear commentaries on what are regarded as (i) the 'acceptance of white hegemony' within Barbadian society, (ii) the occurrence of de facto 'racial segregation', (iii) perceptions of the 'existence of apartheid', and (iv) 'the continuation of slavery'. The account then turns to the contemporary operation of the colour-class system. It is concluded that, despite academic arguments that the colour-class dimension has to be put to one side as the principal dimension of social stratification in the contemporary Caribbean, the second-generation migrants are acutely aware of the continued existence and salience of such gradations within society. Thus, the analysis not only serves to emphasise the continued importance of racial-based stratification in the contemporary Caribbean, but also speaks of the 'hybrid' and 'in-between' racialised identities of the second-generation migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the notion that our movements in and through a place define our engagement with it and help to constitute it as a place. Concepts and concomitant interpretations of place as a ‘situated’ and contemplative experience have to date received much cultural geographical attention. In increasingly mobile societies, however, I argue that mobility should be central to the ways in which we conceptualise and understand the character and meanings of different spaces and places. Although geographical exploration has begun concerning the politics and power relations of the mobile subject, little attention has yet been paid to the experiences and spatialities generative of the body-subject in mobility. Whilst acknowledging the importance of representations in directing action, I strategically emphasise and explore the notion that we create meaning and belong in a place according to how we are in a place. Drawing upon ethnographic work with racing and touring cyclists in the United Kingdom and France, I consider how the conjoining of the person and bike and the resulting embodied rhythms and kinaesthetic sensations of the movement of cycling are constitutive of the character and meanings of particular places. Ultimately, in this paper I point to an understanding of the kinaesthetic and sensuous experiences of the hybrid subject-object (in this instance ‘the cyclist’) as fundamental in rethinking how people live, feel, and ultimately create meaningful spatial relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we document current research into new forms of public engagement presently taking place in UK biodiversity policy. This involves locating the main participants in such patterns of engagement; namely nature, amateur naturalists, and professional biologists and conservationists. Two interwoven and mutually interdependent perspectives or `imaginaries' -- the `cartographic' and the `ethnographic' -- are presented in the paper to explore the shaping and interpretation of such new forms of engagement. However, in this context the interest lies in the ways in which either perspective is foregrounded or backgrounded by the different parties involved. The described shifts and movements of a range of actors and processes being studied demonstrate the fluidity and instability of networks of 'knowing nature well', whose stability is often assumed. The tracing of two constants - expertise and exchange - within networks inhabited by nature and by amateur and professional naturalists allows for an exploration of ways in which social/natural inclusions and exclusions occur in new participatory practices designed as part of biodiversity action planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine intersections of food, identity, and place within the imagined 'regions' of everyday practices, stories, and memories. As such, I continue traditions of writing in cultural geography exemplified by David Bell and Gill Valentine's [1997 Consuming Geographies (Routledge, London)] focus on connecting cultures of food and place, Jon May's (1996a, "A little taste of something more exotic" Geography 81 57-64; 1996b, "Globalization and the politics of place" Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 21 194-215) nuanced explorations of 'exotic' eating in North London, and by Ian Cook, Phil Crang, and Mark Thorpe's [1999, "Eating into Britishness", in Practising Identities Eds S Roseneil, J Seymour (Macmillan, London) pp 223 - 2481 reflections on British culinary imaginaries and their 'multicultural' inscriptions. Specifically, this paper is concerned with ways that conceptions of ethnicity delineate and divide everyday spaces: how meanings of Britishness and Australianness, based in the primacy of 'tradition', 'the West', and Anglo-Celtic belongings, permeate everyday life in London and Sydney and shape their food cultures. The paper traces moments in the culinary biographies of two women, one English and one Australian of British descent, living in London and Sydney, respectively, and close to shopping streets known for the diversity of their 'ethnic' communities. The women's narratives are instructive in their continuities, as much as in their disjunctions. The argument follows some of these, including unexpected engagements with 'Asia' and 'Europe' and 'cosmopolitan identity- Resonances from these engagements contribute to a more complex and ambivalent sense of belonging than first supposed. This is still the region of 'mainstream', 'Anglo'-identity, yet it is one marked by constant spatial redefinition and by occasional porosity of boundary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory and nostalgia have attracted an increasing amount of critical interest in recent years. Whereas sites of memory often invoke, but also extend far beyond, spaces of home, nostalgia invokes home in its very meaning. And yet, whereas spatial narratives explore the sites and landscapes of memory, nostalgia is usually described in temporal terms rather than in spatial terms and is understood as a wider "desire for desire" [Stewart S, 1993 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, Durham, NC), page 23] rather than as a desire for home. In this paper 1 show how memory and nostalgia informed the establishment and promotion of an Anglo-Indian homeland called McCluskieganj in Bihar in the 1930s. Homemaking at McCluskieganj was enacted in gendered and racialized ways that inscribed and yet erased the collective memory of mixed descent shared by its Anglo-Indian residents. Whereas an imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, an Indian maternal ancestor was more usually refigured as Mother India. In this paper I examine Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj in terms of productive nostalgia. First, rather than a nostalgic desire for home being apolitical or confining, settlement at McCluskieganj showed its liberatory potential for Anglo-Indians. Second, rather than focus on nostalgia solely in narrative or the imagination, I show that productive nostalgia implies its embodiment and enactment in practice. Third, rather than nostalgia being seen in terms of loss, mourning, and the impossibility of return, productive nostalgia is oriented towards the present and the future as well as towards the past. Fourth, rather than focus on the temporality of home as a site of origin and an unattainable past, I show how productive nostalgia refocuses on the desire for both proximate homes and more distant homes. Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj enacted a productive nostalgia that was oriented towards the present and future as well as towards the past, and revealed an attachment to both India and Britain as home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli 'mixed city'. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the 'mixed city' is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. 'Mixed' spaces are both exceptional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of ethnicization prevalent in contested urban spaces. We theorize this setting as an 'urban ethnocracy', where a dominant group appropriates the city apparatus to buttress its domination and expansion. In such settings, conspicuous tensions accompany the interaction between the city's economic and ethnoterritorial logics, producing sites of conflict and instability, and essentializing group identities and ethnic geographies. Empirically, the paper focuses on the city of Lod or Lydda, Israel, where the production of contested urban space has been linked to the construction of an exclusionary Israeli-Jewish national identity and to the establishment of hierarchical ethnic citizenship. Like other previously Arab cities, Lod has been the target of a concerted strategy of Judaization, which has formed the city's central planning goal since the late 1940s. We analyze in detail various aspects and sites of the Judaization process, and of the ensuing urban conflicts. We point to the chronic instability of urban ethnocracies, and to the need of planning to rise above narrow ethnocentric considerations in order for the 'mixed city' to prosper as the home for all communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the production of local and remote knowledge about the flows of a large Italian lake (Lake Como) on the basis of a dual ethnographic engagement with lake fishermen and computer modellers. The focus is the relationship between these two ways of knowing a lake, in relation to the lake itself and the places where the knowledge is produced. I first argue that despite being seemingly located at different edges of the environmental knowledge spectrum--the local and the remote and computermediated-- the fishermen's and scientists' knowledges emerge from similar forms of skilled engagement in their respective environments. In other words, knowledge develops in place and fisherman and scientist do not know the same place in different ways; rather they know different places in similar ways. This raises the question of what kind of places these environmental modelling labs and offices are, and how they relate to the places they talk about, which are located elsewhere. I propose here the use of Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia to model this complex articulation of the 'here' and 'there' in environmental modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research, this study analyzes the work of a German political foundation in Ukraine. Departing from a governmentality perspective that closely examines concrete practices, I focus on the organization's attempts to establish itself as a political actor. This foundation aims to build more democratic political imaginations and open up different spaces for contestation. However, in both its rationalities and its practices, the foundation's project also (re)inscribes enclosures. It is both reflective and productive of boundaries between those who qualify as full political subjects, and others who do not, and claims a preformed knowledge of democracy and civil society. In examining situated and ambivalent claims to democracy and civil society--on the level of practices and beyond 'classic' liberal contexts of governance--this paper demonstrates that studies of governmentality provide analytical tools to shed light on subjects that have gained little attention in the field so far. It further contributes to a deeper understanding of what kinds of publics and political realities emerge in projects of 'actually existing democratization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine a struggle waged by production line workers at a formerly state-owned factory located in Israel's northern periphery. Intially an attempt to prevent the closure of the privatized factory, it soon became an all-out struggle through which production line workers deployed their peripheral location and ethnoclass identities to make claims for and enact their citizenship (at work). Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, we argue that despite--or perhaps because of--years of persistent labor market reforms traditional industrial factories remain critical spaces for the constitution of citizenship in Israel. In contrast to the past, in which state-sponsored industrial employment created a perfect congruence between labor market participation and citizenship ('I work therefore I am a citizen'), recent processes aimed at enhancing labor market flexibility have fundamentally altered these relations. Under constant threats of downsizing, precariatized industrial workers in privatized factories experience a restless citizenship, a ceaseless battle to secure their jobs through what might be called the work of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the practices and events of queer collectivity might encourage us to think differently about the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship. Through the exposition and discussion of four 'scenes' based on ethnographic engagements with various LGBT collectives in Baltimore, MD, it attends to the visceral and more-than-human registers in which a fragile sense of community comes into being, subsequently developing an understanding of intimacy as a transversal sphere of mutual investment in which political and civic practices can be cultivated. This entails an analytical shift from understanding citizenship as a 'practice of claims' within a (supra)national legal framework to its conceptualization as a 'practice of composition', which brings into relief the civic nature of collective efforts towards the creation and maintenance of safe environments that foster marginalized expressions of sexuality, gender, and pleasure. These attempts to experiment with new forms of belonging and 'the good life' are animated by the intimate associations, practices, and events that traverse public and private space-times. Ultimately, then, it is argued that intimacy is itself a proper mode of citizenship, one of its 'regimes of enunciation' that is folded into many contiguous others, and that a concern for the composition of 'civic intimacies' productively augments and complicates established research on intimate/sexual citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. 1 demonstrate that attention to the emotions framing such interactions, in both geographical and temporal terms, can help us to better understand migrant encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the ferry-dependent islands and remote coastal communities of British Columbia, this paper examines the process of catching a ferry in time for a scheduled sailing. Through performance, interactionist, and nonrepresentational theory, I argue that the weaving of a journey toward the ferry terminal can be a suspenseful drama, within which a scheduled departure works as a potential to be actualized through the performance of skillful acts of mobility. The affective, ritualistic, and playful components of passengers' journeys are examined through the lens of performance. Timing, spacing, and acting occasion differential ecologies of affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of a herd marks the point where ethnography and ethology meet. In the midst of this shared phenomenon, versions of ‘the social’ hinge on relations between herders and herd. In this paper I consider how our understanding of a herd might be extended by an awareness of its diverse geographies. This is achieved by reconstructing the entwined biographies of human and animal subjects dating from the reintroduction of reindeer to Scotland in 1952. The first transportation of reindeer from Scandinavia to the Cairngorm mountains was orchestrated by Mikel Utsi, a Lappish emigré from northernmost Sweden, and Ethel John Lindgren, a social anthropologist from Cambridge, of American-Swedish descent. What began as an ecological-economic experiment would occupy the couple until their deaths: Utsi's in 1979 and Lindgren's in 1988. 1 draw on a ‘make-do’ methodology undertaken in collaboration with past herders and the scattered company of the present herd: walking a sentient topography of traditional grazing grounds; renewing encounters with charismatic animals through photographic portraits; consulting an archive of herding diaries; and mapping a hidden ecology of landscape relics. These different registers of memory are used to explore how day-to-day engagements between herders and herd were rooted in unconventional systems of ecological and cultural knowledge. By reanimating a local landscape, the resulting narrative works at an intimate scale, while simultaneously gathering momentum from transnational movements of humans, animals, and traditions. Here, salvage and exchange are possible between geography's heritage of landscape and folk study and the sculpting of contemporary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To counter accusations that ethnic minorities in Britain are a problem, there is an emerging discourse that has begun to celebrate diversity as an asset, which contributes towards the nation's cultural and economic vitality. However, although this reevaluation of ethnic differences has proved to be a useful defence of the presence of ethnic minorities, the types of contributions and their significance have been left unexplored. In this paper I closely examine one such contribution, a Chinese pagoda, which was given to the City of Birmingham by an ethnic entrepreneur. By carefully analysing the views of the gift giver, planning documents, and public discourse on the pagoda, I argue that the different narratives—which encompass the themes of representing an ethnic community, hospitality, and gift giving—are discontinuous. In doing so, I illustrate some of the limits to Birmingham's hospitality and mark out a series of informal obligations of citizenship that are written into Birmingham's public space. I conclude by suggesting that if a gift of hospitality is to be given it is necessary to consider the other of the ethnic minority as an asset, citizenship, and presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I focus on a local initiative to produce a hiking map of Valtaleggio (in northern Italy). In the effort of redrawing the valley to attract tourism a group of locals engaged in planning and negotiating visibility, but also got involved in an exercise of memory, remembering the history of their valley through recent changes in the landscape. The ethnographic observation of the 'map enterprise' spurs reflections on differing local perceptions of the landscape—and, accordingly, on how practices of locality shape identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that certified-organic inspection agents play a key role in reworking transnational organic-product certification standards to the unique conditions found within Mexican (Oaxacan) organic-coffee producer villages. First, I document the steps through which transnational product-certification norms, under the International Organization for Standardization guide 65 rubric, are codified as practical standards by organic-product certifying agencies. These standards are found to embed contradictions between inclusiveness and transparency that lead to difficulties in field-level implementation: in essence, practices required to make organic production legible to transnational certifiers often have the opposite effect of making certification unintelligible at the village level. Second, I show how field-level certification inspectors, working under contract to certifying agencies, cooperate with village organic extension agents to make certification legible both to villagers and to transnational certifiers (thereby helping to ensure its success). A corollary methodological argument is made to the effect that the importance of field-level work becomes evident when inspectors are viewed—through the optic of labor-process ethnography—as ‘interactive service employees’. This work thus points to a need to understand with greater clarity how standards are enacted in local contexts and support the efforts of field-level workers with the often-difficult task of making standards legible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is in three parts. In the first I summarise and argue for the continued importance of the critique associated with the fetishism of the commodity. In the second part I report on an ethnographic study of the Internet and the lessons learned for how it could most effectively be used. In the third part I present the outline of a programme for inclusion within the school geography curriculum to use the Internet to educate children in their responsibilities as consumers. This consists of following three products, all of which are personalised to the children as end consumers. Using the Internet they would follow all stages of production, distribution, transportation, and the combination of elements that constitute the commodity. All such processes are seen through the labour of those involved. The result may not fully defetishise the commodity in respect to wider issues of power and control, but it might turn the current interest in commodity chains into an attempt to transform the consciousness of consumers for the benefit of producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]