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Affective Assemblages and Local Economies PDF

195 Pages·2021·1.824 MB·English
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Affective Assemblages and Local Economies Radical Subjects in International Politics Series Editor: Ruth Kinna This series uses the idea of political subjection to promote the discussion and analysis of individual, communal, and civic participation and activism. ‘Radical subjects’ refers both to the character of the topics and issues tacked in the series and to the ethics guiding the research. The series has a radical focus in that it provides a springboard for the discussion of activism that sits outside or on the fringes of institutional politics, yet which, insofar as it reflects a commitment to social change, is far from marginal. It provides a platform for scholarship that interrogates modern political movements, probes the local, regional and global dimensions of activist networking, and the principles that drive them, and develops innovative frames to analyse issues of exclusion and empowerment. The scope of the series is defined by engagement with the concept of the radical in contemporary politics but includes research that is multi- or interdisciplinary, working at the boundaries of art and politics, political utopianism, feminism, sociology, and radical geography. Titles in Series Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space, Edited by Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong The Politics of Transnational Peasant Struggle: Resistance, Rights and Democracy, Robin Dunford Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action: Case Studies in Dialectical Activism, Benjamin Heim Shepard Participation and Non-Participation in Student Activism: Paths and Barriers to Mobilizing Young People for Political Action, Alexander Hensby The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Path Ahead, Bernd Reiter Becoming a Movement: Identity and Narratives in the European Global Justice Movement, Priska Daphi Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation, Sara C. Motta Autonomy, Refusal and The Black Block: Positioning Class Analysis in Critical and Radical Theory, Robert F. Carley A Post-Western account of Critical Cosmopolitan Social Theory: Being and Acting in a Democratic World, Michael Murphy Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action: Case Studies in Dialectical Activism, Benjamin Heim Shepard The Confrontational ‘Us and Them’ Dynamics of Polarised Politics in Venezuela: A Post-Structuralist Examination, Ybiskay Gonzalez Torres Affective Assemblages and Local Economies, Joanie Willett Affective Assemblages and Local Economies Joanie Willett London • New York Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www .rowman .com Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Willett, Joanie, author. Title: Affective assemblages and local economies / Joanie Willett. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book explores what becomes visible if we look at peripheral, deprived rural regions through the lens of a complex adaptive assemblage and how we can better support these communities”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021032123 | ISBN 9781538150702 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781538150719 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Rural development—Sociological aspects. | Regional disparities— Social aspects. | Regional planning—Social aspects. Classification: LCC HN49.C6 W546 2021 | DDC 307.1/412—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032123 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Willet_9781538150702.indb 4 9/21/2021 6:17:05 PM Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Why the Need for the Complex Adaptive Region Assemblage? 1 2 The Affective Assemblage 21 3 The Evolutionary Regional Assemblage, Becoming and Economies 43 4 Southwest Virginia and Cornwall: Constructing the Complex Adaptive Regional Assemblage 65 5 Southwest Virginia 85 6 Cornwall 115 7 What Do We See? Spaces of Possibility in Southwest Virginia and Cornwall 145 8 Conclusion 159 References 165 Index 179 v Acknowledgments There are many people that I want to thank for your help and support over the past few years of putting this book together. From the Regional Studies Association for their membership research grant to the wonderful residents of Bristol TN/VA amongst whom I lived and who welcomed me into your com- munity so warmly. Thanks too to so many people from all around Cornwall who have been so supportive of this project in many ways. Of course, I also need to thank my family, Donal, Elena, Jayd, Jamie, Holly, and Theo, for their patience, love, and enthusiasm. Last, but by no means least, I have to mention the awesome Angie, who was so much more than a landlady, and became guide, interpreter, and firm friend. vii Chapter 1 Why the Need for the Complex Adaptive Region Assemblage? Although I have been working with the ideas that I explore in this book for many years, the book only really started to take shape in the immedi- ate aftermath of the 2016 referendum for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. It was at this point that the fragmentation of the human, social, political, and environmental worlds really became evident to me on a regional level. The results of the referendum in certain regions also strongly indicated some of the mistakes that were made because of the atomisation that accompanies that fragmentation, and the wider effects that those mis- takes could have. One of the big puzzles of the time was about why the regions in the United Kingdom who in the past or present had received the highest levels of EU structural funding, should vote for Brexit, or at least, with the exception of Northern Ireland, vote disproportionately highly for it. Structural funding has been a central way for the EU to produce ‘territorial cohesion’, evening out the inequalities between regions within and amongst member states, a member of the EU, UK regions had benefited from the funding significantly. Regions with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of less than 75 per cent of EU averages received the highest levels of funding, with the goal of improving their eco- nomic fortunes. Structural funds were also a part of ‘Europeanisation’ strate- gies (Dabrowski, 2012), with the rationale that receipt of EU monies would help to build a sense of shared identities and commonalities built around the EU as an institution. The development ethos at the heart of Structural Funds and its associated LEADER project was that they would foster rural development by supporting grass-roots activity. This was about bottom up, endogenous ideas, developing a range of different social programmes aimed at promoting social mobilisation so that individuals and localities could make the most of their potential (Canete et al., 2018; Barke and Newton, 1997). In 1

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