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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]

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]

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]

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]