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In 2006 two pieces of Zimbabwean political ephemera began circulating, caricaturing senior political and military officials. The anonymously produced objects – a Guide to Dangerous Snakes in Zimbabwe and a deck of playing cards – present criticisms of an authoritarian regime within a curtailed public sphere. They capture and represent context‐specific power relations, politics and resistance in post‐colonial Zimbabwe. Critical engagement with these ephemera highlights challenges to the process of democracy, contests over power and resistance within Zimbabwe, and engagement with international dimensions to these concerns. The paper also extends recent critical geopolitical work on political satire in Africa.
The effects of neoliberal contexts on livestock production have been relatively ignored in geography. This paper contributes to this literature through a case study of continuity and change in pastoralism on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Since use rights to winter pasture were allocated to individual households, herders in Gouli, Qinghai, have developed an extensive, new practice of renting livestock and pasture from each other. Written contracts entail a calculation of potential price of livestock and pasture, as well as a mechanism for the wealthy to offload risk of livestock loss onto the poor. Social relations between family members have become monetised as herders become market actors. At the same time, however, these transactions allow herders to partially maintain flexibility over the opportunistic use of pasture resources that has long been at the basis of pastoralist livelihood strategies. They engage in these practices in order to maintain, rather than give up, their identities as Tibetan pastoralists, which also manifest in the limited spheres in which profit‐making and entrepreneurialism are condoned. Thus, pastoralists are adapting to their new circumstances, though in potentially compromising ways. As a form of governance, neoliberal rationality intersects in contingent ways not only with other logics of governance but also with historically rooted identities and cultural idioms....
The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of assemblage and how I have deployed it in my work on urban policy mobilities and harm‐reduction drug policy. My research entails the detailed tracing of flows of policy knowledge among cities around the world. In detailing and conceptualising these circulations, I am interested in how they are actively and purposively assembled and negotiated in place in productive ways. The paper uses the case of harm reduction – a public health approach to the governance of illicit drug use – as a frame within which to discuss the benefits of assemblage in the study of urban policy‐making, urban politics and global–urban connections....
In thinking through how different registers of power, that are neither centred nor radically dispersed in pattern, come into play with different outcomes in different times and places, the notion of assemblage has its appeal. Two qualities come to mind. First off, it allows for non‐coherence as a way of thinking about how institutional arrangements of power more or less hold together, despite being made up of a co‐existence of often diverse logics and practices. Second, spatio‐temporal assemblages offer a way of understanding the various power plays that shape, say, the politics of regions and nation states, by invoking a topological sensibility around proximity and distance that appears more productive than the familiar topographies of scale and networks. Weighed against such attractions, however, the notion of assemblage lends itself to a number of pitfalls: endless description is one, weak conceptualisation another....
In this introduction to the special section on ‘Assemblage and geography’, we reflect on the different routes and uses through which ‘assemblage’ is being put to work in contemporary geographical scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular definition of assemblage, or to prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reflect on the multiple ways in which assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared orientation to the composition of social‐spatial formations....
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