Wendy Larner

• Provost at Victoria University of Wellington

This article is designed to stimulate debate over the possibilities for thinking feminist futures. It argues for moving away from a linear understanding of feminism which assumes that past feminism produces present and future feminism as a response to its previous waves. Instead, we argue for embracing the multiplicity and simultaneity of contempor...

The conversation begins from a focus on the field of social policy before exploring practices of resistance and refusal.Resistances and refusals. It goes on to examine the significance of ideas of contradiction and complexity in studying welfare changes. It ends by returning to social policy as a field of possibility.

The introduction establishes the main concerns of the book, locating the challenge of thinking critically as a fundamentally collaborative and dialogic process. It develops an argument about dialogic perspectives as central to the social sciences. It introduces the voices inIntroducing the voices in conversation in the book and discusses some of th...

This final conversation opens around experiences of collaboration, including our own long history of the process. It shifts tio a discussion of the pessimism of critique, before turning to the encounter between Marxism and Feminism. The chapter moves on to the challenges of looking for the current moment and what is politically at stake, before ret...

The chapter opens with a discussion about the place and significance of disciplines and disciplinary knowledge before reflecting on the processes of thinking across or beyond boundaries. The conversation moves to the unsettling implications of talking (and listening) to people in the research process. Finally it turns to consideration of emerging r...

The conversation begins with an exploration about what it means to think with multiple resources (in theoretical and disciplinary terms). It then turns to the importance of seeing political subjects ’behaving badly’. It then explores the productive problems of defining NGOs, before ending with troubling thoughts.

The chapter opens with reflections on some of the paradoxes of popular politics. It moves to a discussion of our relative political trajectories. It ends by considering the relationship between certainty and ambivalence in political terms.

The conversation opens with reflections on the process of thinking with others, including the place of ‘ancestral voices’. It considers the delicate balance between certainty and uncertainty in critical thinking before turning to thinking with and through ‘race’. From there, the conversation explores some of the dimensions and dyna mics of crisis.

The chapter opens with a conversation about the demands and difficulties of theory, before turning to a reflection on the pleasures of seductions of discovering theory. We then reflect on the spaces between theory and politics before turning to issues of intellectual and political ambivalence.

The conversation starts by exploring how we discuss and reflect on our differences, before turning to what it means to take up positions provisionally as a way of thinking things through talking through differences. We then consider some of the pains and pleasures of working collaboratively. Finally, we discuss the contemporary challenges of lookin...

The chapter opens with reflections on conversations within and across disciplines and issues of disciplinary marginality.It moves to the processes of changing institutions and then to questions of unorthodox intellectual formations and trajectories. Discussion then turns to questions of discourse, assemblage and articulation

The conversation begins from a collaborative puzzle, exploring our different journeys towards collaborative working. It then considers how we see concepts being made to work in practice, before turning to issues of conservative dominance in contemporary politics. The chapter ends by discussing the emerging global crisis of work and livelihood.

The chapter opens with a discussion about the ways in which the Open University provided a space for critical thinking and for collaborative working. At the heart of this is a sense of ways in which new intellectual and pedagogical spaces were opened up. The conversation moves on to questions about the relationships between disciplines and interdis...

The conversation begins from reflections on place and being ‘out of place’ in intellectual work, before turning to puzzles about studying policy. It then considers the practices of making things up (imagining and assembling) and the place of agency in studying such practices. It ends with a discussion of the fear of being found out.

Urban entrepreneurialism is generally characterized by a series of spectacular events, organized and orchestrated by powerful actors. Recently, this has given rise to a series of urban policy agendas that have become ubiquitous across the world. This paper draws attention to an emergent form of urban entrepreneurialism that privileges environmental...

What is the state of play for science advice to the government and Parliament? After almost ten years with a prime minister’s chief science advisor, are there lessons to be learnt? How can we continue to ensure that science advice is effective, balanced, transparent and rigorous, while at the same time balancing the need for discretion and confiden...

Community economy, since the mid‐1990s, has signalled an expanding and evolving project within radical geography that resonates with a host of initiatives taking place around the world. Activating community economy as an object of analysis and economic practice requires a rethinking of economy where the economy loses its power to structure and figu...

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the 2018 celebration, with contributions from Professors Wendy Larner, Mark Macklin, Yadvinder Malhi, Bhaskar Vira, and Paul Rose. The...

In the last chapter, the editors identify the key issues raised from the individual chapters and present a broad analysis of the insights that an assemblage approach offers into neoliberalism. Future research directions are also considered.

Taking the UK city of Bristol as a case study, this chapter focuses on the concept of resilience in neoliberal governance and the emergence of so-called “resilient subjectivities”. Drawing on insights from assemblage theory, we argue that resilient subjectivities are not stable and durable. Rather, they are processual, mutable and dynamic—ever shif...

This book examines how neoliberalism is constituted from multiple, diverse elements; how these elements are brought together and made to cohere; and the challenges, contestations, and consequences of such. Informed by assemblage thinking, the collection builds on research that emphasizes the forms of experimentation, adaptation, and mutation throug...

Whether writing about gentrification or nature, the production of space or the politics of scale, uneven development or public space, globalization or revolution, the geographer Neil Smith was nothing if not provocative. Neither Festschrift nor hagiography, this special issue of Antipode critically engages Smith's work—not to unpick the rich tapest...

The opening chapter provides a context for subsequent chapters by offering a broad introduction to the social science literature on neoliberalism and highlighting what makes the approach taken in the book different to previous work on the topic. Crucially, the chapter outlines the key features of assemblage thinking—composition and holding together...

In Naomi Klein's latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), the activist, journalist, and author lays out an argument that will probably be familiar to many readers of Human Geography. Carbon is not the problem, but rather a symptom of the real problem: global capitalism. The purpose of this Human Geo...

As diaspora strategies have become an integral aspect of national economic development strategies, so too have universities begun to formally identify and mobilise diasporic scientists, researchers and scholars in an effort to create global knowledge networks. This paper will identify this new role for diasporic academics. It begins by emphasising...

This chapter examines the limits of post-politics through a case study of CoExist. CoExist is a registered Community Interest Company based in Stokes Croft, Bristol. It was set up in August 2008 to manage spaces in which people can coexist (verb – to exist in harmony) with themselves, with each other, and with the environment. The expressed ambitio...

Drastic changes in the career aspirations of women in the developed world have resulted in a new, globalised market for off-the-peg designer clothes created by independent artisans. This book reports on a phenomenon that seems to exemplify the twin imperatives of globalisation and female emancipation. A major conceptual contribution to the literatu...

This paper emerged from discussions held over a two-day symposium hosted by the University of Western Sydney and the Institute of Australian Geographers in December 2011. Drawing on contemporary themes in economic geography around postcolonial theory and a concern with the histories of the sub-discipline, the symposium sought to triangulate these d...

The special issue is based on the contributions to an ESRC Seminar Series called Feminism and Futurity held at the University of Bristol during 2010 and 2011. This series, organized by four feminist geographers, drew together feminist academics from a diverse range of disciplines to foster debate and dialogue around the present status and future po...

This chapter is an introduction to Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy, which attempts to rethink the relationship between changes in the global cultural economy over the past 20 years and changes in middle-class women's working lives through the exemplary case of the New Zealand designer fashion ind...

The authors of this chapter conducted the research on the New Zealand fashion industry because the proliferating activities that comprise the New Zealand fashion industry and the 'virtuous circle' they create are profoundly gendered. The chapter focuses explicitly on the feminisation of the New Zealand designer fashion industry, showing how the ris...

This chapter focuses on the cultural effects of 10 years of designer fashion on the identity of New Zealand and New Zealanders themselves. The authors show how the pedagogy of 'fashionability' works across three domains such as aesthetics, identities and subjectivities. The chapter provides an account of the New Zealand design aesthetic as it emerg...

This chapter examines existing literatures in detail to show that silences and failures of women to talk to each other, suggest the need to rethink analyses of gender and globalisation. It shows that the study of small, female-headed, entrepreneurial, export, designer fashion firms that make up the New Zealand designer fashion industry opens up the...

This chapter examines the characteristics of the New Zealand designer fashion industry a decade after it first came to prominence and now that it has developed a stable structure. Although the New Zealand fashion firms have remained small, this is not seen as an economic failure. It is shown in the chapter that how this industry structure is a dist...

To assess the New Zealand designer fashion industry only in terms of its export earnings and the establishment of international markets is to fundamentally misunderstand the broader significance of this unlikely gendered success story, never mind its implications for globalising economic and cultural processes. The current shape of the New Zealand...

IntroductionTheoretical SubjectsNeoliberal SubjectsKnowing SubjectsLaboring SubjectsConclusion References

This commentary stretches Jamie Peck’s (2012) allegorical account of ‘island life’ by discussing the characteristics of ‘island scholarship’. It argues such scholarship involves an academic style based on bricolage and borrowing, inflected with homegrown innovation and ingenuity. It occupies awkward conceptual spaces that demand conversations acros...

Commissioned to celebrate the 40th year of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, this book evaluates the role of the critical social scientist and how the point of their work is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. Brings together leading critical social scientists to consider the major challenges of our time and what is to be do...

It is now widely accepted that this is a period of crisis, although commentators differ as to the appropriate comparisons. This article begins by emphasizing that this is not the first time that social scientists have invoked claims of crisis and qualitative change, then examines geographical accounts of neoliberalism to see how crisis is analysed...

  Activists often strategically negotiate sectoral boundaries by switching between public, private and voluntary sectors over the life course in order to pursue their aims. This paper draws on a cross-national study that explored the extent of this inter-sectoral movement and the specific “career pathways” activists developed in relation to governm...

This paper interrogates the concept of cultural intermediaries through an analysis of the New Zealand designer fashion industry, an industry composed of small networked enterprises which offer a wide range of educational, aesthetic and business services. The authors argue that ‘cultural intermediaries’ can no longer be thought of in terms of partic...

Analyses of activism have inspired geographers for many years, but most of this work has focused on relatively short time-frames, events and struggles. This paper suggests that there is much to be gained from a greater engagement with issues of time and time-spaces. It outlines and applies the contrasting conceptions of chronol chora and kairoltopo...

The decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s was a key moment in the unfolding of the global privatisation agenda. During this decade privatisation shifted from a nation-state project to become part of the structural adjustment measures associated with economic globalisation. These measures were not only promoted by international institutions suc...

The main aim of this book has been to explore how standards — and associated technologies of governing — are produced as objects of knowledge, and the various ways in which they contribute to the configuring as well as reorganizing of local practices. In pursuing this aim, contributors have drawn upon post-realist analytical approaches, and specifi...

In recent years there has been an increased interest among social scientists in issues of standards and attempts at standardization in all aspects of economic, political and social life. Once regarded as technical issues of concern primarily to specialists (see Barry 2001, p. 63), standardization is now viewed as a legitimate site of social scienti...

All of us have probably eaten Chiquita bananas. Some of us may even remember the Chiquita banana jingle and the blue sticker with Miss Chiquita. Few of us know how the company has engaged with issues of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the implications for women workers in ‘the very, very tropical equator’ where bananas grow.

Mike Moore is a working-class boy from rural New Zealand who subsequently became Director General of the World Trade Organization. This paper uses his experiences and understanding to analyse the embodied forms in which neoliberalism travelled from nation-state to global settings. It shows that neoliberal discourses and techniques do not always eme...

This paper arises out of research on the New Zealand designer fashion industry. An unexpected success story, this export-oriented industry is dominated by women as designers, employees, wholesale and public relations agents, industry officials, fashion writers and editors, in addition to women holding more traditionally gendered roles as garment wo...

This paper focuses on the claim that the child is emerging as a key figure of social governance. International studies suggest that as liberal welfare states increasingly draw on social investment discourse, the child—particularly the child-as-worker-in-becoming—has emerged as an iconic figure. This has resulted in the child becoming the central su...

Globalization, Neoliberalism, NeoliberalizationNeoliberalization in New ZealandGlobalizationKnowledge Economy/Knowledge SocietySustainabilityCreative IndustriesSocial DevelopmentStates, Networks, PeoplesConclusion AcknowledgmentsNotes

It is a challenging time to be a social scientist. Many of the concepts and categories we took for granted have been revealed as temporally and geographically specific. It is now widely accepted that the nation-state is no longer the sole container for economic, political and social processes, if indeed it ever was. This is where Kevin Stenson begi...

This paper uses the New Zealand designer fashion industry as an analytical lens through which to examine the co-constitution of political projects in what we label ‘after-neoliberalism’. The paper begins by tracing the making of New Zealand designer fashion as an industry, and relates this process to four political projects in which designer fashio...

Governments across the world are thinking about their expatriate populations in new ways. These new understandings of expatriates emerged as the problem of ‘human capital’ became central to development strategies premised on increased participation in the globalising economy. The ‘expertise’ of expatriates has also been re-imagined through a series...

Research on so-called 'global cities' dominates the existing literature on globalization, fashion, and cities. In this we paper analyze the recent rise of a designer fashion industry in Auckland, New Zealand. The designer fashion industry has emerged as an unlikely success story as the New Zealand economy has globalized. Together with other creativ...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

The term ‘neoliberalism’ denotes new forms of political-economic governance premised on the extension of market relationships. In critical social science literatures the term has usurped labels referring to specific political projects (Thatcherism, Regeanomics, Rogernomics), and is more widely used than its counterparts including, for example, econ...

Consistent with an ongoing experience of neo-liberal experimentation, tertiary sector reform in New Zealand is being driven by the ambition to re-create universities in a qualitatively new form. We argue that, through calculative practices, New Zealand universities are being positioned and are positioning themselves in the neo-liberalizing spaces o...

In Aotearoa New Zealand, as elsewhere, partnership programmes overtly targeted to the strengthening of local communities are developing in a range of institutional sites. This development, it is claimed by some, moves social governance well beyond the narrow, market-oriented, contractualism of earlier forms of neoliberalism, and into a new era of j...

Neoliberalism is a term most often used by those working in the field of political economy, including human geographers, to refer to the new political preference for market mechanisms as a way of ensuring social and economic wellbeing. To date, however, analysts of neoliberalism have focused on the decline of the national economy, and on the erosio...

This research was funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology research programme UOAX000233

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

This article compares government promoted call centre initiatives in New Zealand and New Brunswick, Canada, thereby identifying differing policies and practices associated with ‘globalization’. Both New Brunswick and New Zealand are small resource based economies in which policy makers aspire to attract foreign investment into call centres as a new...

In this paper we aspire to develop a situated method in order to interrogate the spaces and subjects of the globalising economy. In our brief review of the social science literatures on economic globalisation, we identify a promising intellectual convergence around the theme of imaginaries. We develop an argument that global imaginaries involve bot...

Representations of motherhood are central to the process of constituting a market for milk powder in Sri Lanka. Mothers are the primary providers of food and nutrition for their families and communities and have a profound influence on food production and consumption. Consequently, a focus on mothers shapes the efforts of both the New Zealand Dairy...

Through a case study of the New Zealand Call Centre Attraction Initiative this paper draws attention to the forms of expertise and knowledge practices through which low wage labour forces are being constituted in the name of 'globalization'. Drawing on the neo-Foucauldian literature on 'governmentality', it identifies the significance of 'post-welf...

This article examines claims about the emergence of a ‘‘triadic’’ world in which political-economic blocs centered on Europe, the Asia-Paci¢c area, and North America e¡ect the regionalization of international space. The triadic vision can be situated in broader intellectual e¡orts to de-naturalize the ‘‘national’’ as the taken-for-granted expressio...