Geoforum最新文献

With the wide adoption of the Internet worldwide, virtual space (or cyberspace) has become a key concern for geographers. Virtual space and physical space are increasingly recognised as interwoven, interdependent, and complementary. However, extant literature has offered insufficient explanations of how virtual and physical spaces are entwined. Specifically, little attention has been drawn from an economic geography perspective to understand how virtual space and physical space complement each other to facilitate economic relations and activities. To fill this gap, this study—through a case study of the creative ceramic industry in Jingdezhen, China—unpacks the interwoven nature of virtual and physical spaces and reveals how the interdependence between these spaces facilitates the two most important dimensions in economic geography: knowledge exchange and market transactions. Identifying certain limitations of virtual space alone in enabling knowledge exchange and market transactions, this study finds that knowledge transfer and co-production via virtual communities and electronic commerce via online retail and social media platforms occur most effectively when being combined with some interactions in physical space. It shows that relational networks, trust, and mutual understanding established through offline interactions could significantly encourage knowledge exchange and market transactions in virtual space.

A recent economic phenomenon has emerged where gamers can earn money by playing blockchain-based games and accumulating cryptocurrency rewards. Known as “play-to-earn” (P2E), this gaming model has drawn a large following of economically struggling players during the pandemic, many of whom are in the Global South. This paper positions P2E gaming as an emerging form of digital labor where work and play are blurred. Using the highly popular P2E game Axie Infinity as a case study, this paper traces the everyday realities of players as workers through document analysis of the grey literature and textual analysis of Reddit user comments. The results reveal a form of blockchain-based precarity that is manifested in volatile earnings, insecure contractual “employment” and onerous working conditions among player-workers. Such precarity is driven by P2E’s embeddedness within broader cryptocurrency markets and the platformed blockchain ecosystem, the reworking of capital-labor relationships that are distinguished by ownership of productive virtual assets, and by ongoing code-enabled changes to P2E’s platform governance mechanisms. Examining P2E through a precarity lens reflects the ongoing financialization of labor that is enabled by blockchain.

This article focuses on understanding the territorialization processes caused by the decision of the Constitutional Court in Colombia to grant rights to the Atrato River. Against the background of the social-ecological conflicts of extraction, contamination, and direct use of the river's resources, state actors, ethnic and campesinos communities, and social organizations are now required to comply with Sentence T-622/16 and actively work together. The case is approached by using the hydrosocial territory framework and analyzing how this resonates with the territorial pluralism of the region. Based on field interviews and secondary data and documents from the first five years of implementation of the Sentence, we discuss how the Sentence defines a new hydrosocial imaginary around the collective territories of ethnic communities that we call territories-in-territory. We conclude by outlining the implementation struggles of Sentence T-622, especially those related to the requirement of participatory processes.

On September 7th, 2021, El Salvador became the first nation in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, opening up its rapidly developing coast to a new form of crypto tourism and investment. Given the potential access it provides to those outside the traditional banking system, Bitcoin proponents – most notably Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele – have touted the ability of Bitcoin to promote “economic freedom,” poverty alleviation, and development in the country. In the rural coastal community of El Zonte, Bitcoin has been pioneered as a tool for everyday transactions and social programs targeting the town’s majority poor population. As Bitcoin enthusiasts have flocked to El Zonte, inspired by the imaginary of a Bitcoin-friendly paradise, these mostly White crypto tourists from the Global North have bought up land, patronized exclusive hotels and resorts, and rebranded the town as “Bitcoin Beach.” Drawing on the case study of El Zonte, this article unpacks the material implications and contradictions of Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador. I argue that while Bitcoin has created some opportunities for small-scale aid and the business sector, these benefits are limited and largely undermined by the uneven and neocolonial impacts of crypto on local people, land and resources, and power. Situating the findings from El Zonte within a broader discursive and political analysis of Bitcoin legalization in El Salvador, the paper warns of the ways in which crypto facilitates novel forms of territorial, resource, and political control, while reproducing many of the uneven dynamics of neoliberal economic development.

Crucial for international trade, cross-border payments are conducted via the correspondent banking (CB) system, a decentralised network of bilateral agreements between more than 11,000 banks in different jurisdictions, and supported by a centralised messaging network (SWIFT). This global twin infrastructure consists of highly complex socio-technical and socio-spatial arrangements pressured to change, but resistant to it. Beset by inefficiencies, from which the gatekeeper incumbent banks profit, the international payments system lacked alternatives until the recent tech threat of disintermediation and re-organisation of legacy serial messaging chains to big data arrangements and centralising platformisation. We show how the CB/SWIFT nexus, an integral part of the financial and advanced services providers (FABS) complex and, as such, also a specific and important part of obligatory passage points (OPPs), creates and extracts monopoly rents, now and into the future. Challenged by new technology and the resulting push to re-form its (global) organisational architectures, understanding and conceptualising change in and of OPPs – here, the global payment infrastructure – is therefore vital. We capture the complex relationships between the CB and SWIFT for a better analytical understanding of change at the system level. Methodologically, the analysis draws on insights from an explorative research design, including 30 semi-structured expert interviews. We show that mobilising 11,000 banks across the globe to innovate and upgrade from rent extraction to new, forward-looking sources of profit, that is, data, is no straightforward process despite the governance of SWIFT to ‘nudge’ its member banks to preserve incumbency and, ultimately, its survival.

This paper examines the entanglement of science and politics through a case study of a controversy over hunting as a form of environmental management in a suburban town in the northeastern United States. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders, meeting observation, and media reports, we examine the justifications for and resistance to a municipal-level recreational deer hunting program. Our study reveals how participants activate discourses of science-based management and scientific (un)certainty (regarding deer populations, their impacts on forest ecosystems, and deer control approaches) to support arguments for and against hunting. In focusing on questions of science and rationality, the arguments of both opponents and proponents of the hunting program elide the varying human values, ethics, and emotions that underlie the deer management debate, even as they frame their positions as an act of care for the environment. In contrast to oft-cited cases where scientific uncertainty has primarily been deployed strategically by powerful actors, our analysis reveals nuance and complexity in the activation and mobilization of science and uncertainty in environmental politics and decision-making. As both hunting proponents and opponents appeal to the collection of further scientific data to resolve the controversy, we argue for greater attention to the ethical and emotional dimensions of this value-laden conflict.

The UK appears fixed in perpetual care crisis propelled by austerity-driven funding cuts and the country’s intensifying care labour shortage. Austerity in the UK has generated an operating environment that has accelerated privatisation and incentivized and necessitated private innovation. In this writing, we examine how the infrastructure and delivery of social care in the UK is being radically reimagined through technology. Promising to deliver critical efficiencies and cost savings, new automating technologies are being tested and introduced to reorder how and where care is managed and delivered. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with local authorities in the UK and the executives of private companies, our task is not to assess the efficacy of new technologies; rather we examine how these public-private partnerships raise difficult questions: Who will deliver caring futures in the UK? Who is absorbing the fiscal risk of technological innovation? Who is profiting? And what are the limits of technology as a response to our care crisis?

This paper investigates work undertaken by clients of voluntary sector mental health services in the context of austerity. While mental health geographers have often interrogated ‘work cures’, little attention has been paid to client work within traditional care-oriented services. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in a mental health day centre threatened with closure, I demonstrate that client fundraising can become a crucial source of income when marketised services face budget cuts. Clients are incentivised to act as entrepreneurs, developing creative strategies to secure funding. I conceptualise this as a novel form of conditionality, as access to services comes to depend on entrepreneurial activities. Existing theories offer a narrow conception of conditionality, as behavioural standards imposed through rules. Entrepreneurship appears more flexible, autonomous and voluntary than such rule-based conditionalities. Yet in practice clients face the same choice: work or lose access to welfare provision. I argue that entrepreneurship transforms the institutional geographies of services, directing them towards economic productivity. This can undermine longstanding practices of care, leading some clients to withdraw from services. By focussing on client responses to austerity, this paper makes a crucial contribution to geographical research into voluntary sector precarity, which has tended to focus on staff. More broadly, it advances understandings of the institutional geographies which embed the politics and economics of austerity within everyday experiences of care provision.

This study explores music geography beyond the Anglo-American circle through an investigation of the spatiality and mobility of musical workers in a Chinese context. Drawing on a dataset containing the information of 3,689 influential musicians in China’s music market, we investigated the (1) geographical landscape of China’s music industry, (2) spatial mobility of musicians at different stages of their careers, and (3) impact of digital technologies on the clustering of creative musical workers. Our study discovers a conspicuous clustering of post-work musicians in large metropolises, which reflects both the dynamics of scale and scope economies and the influence of state on the offering of cultural infrastructures and institutions in China. Most Chinese musicians have high trans-regional mobility and target locations (increasingly on the Chinese mainland) with large consumer markets or important art education institutions. The impact of geographical distance and agglomeration economies on musicians’ mobility varies at different stages of their careers. In addition, while digitalisation generates certain decentralising effects, enabling more musicians in formerly peripheral areas to enter the market and reducing the need for long-distance mobility, it also strengthens the advantages of dominant music clusters and produces precarious and volatile consequences in China’s music industry.

Over the last fifteen years, most national parks in Cape York Peninsula, far north-east Australia, have been transferred to Aboriginal ownership and are now jointly managed by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and the relevant Aboriginal traditional owner groups. The park in which this research was conducted has been jointly managed for just over a decade, but the transition to joint management is entwined with challenges related to the bringing together of different knowledge and management systems. The main forum for discussing and implementing change is in the mutual space of formal joint management meetings. However, this mutual space is not co-produced on equal terms. Joint management meetings and the production of management plans function as a way for Queensland Parks to fulfil their obligations to Aboriginal traditional owners while simultaneously reaffirming their status as the more powerful co-managing institution. Rather than fostering a space of indeterminacy, in which management partners could co-create new forms of managing and caring for land, meetings and management plans function to construct a ‘stable relation’ between Aboriginal traditional owners and Queensland Parks.