Affective Assemblages and Local Economies

195 Pages·2021·1.824 MB·English

by  Joanie Willett

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
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Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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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