Place-based Work Research Articles

Advancing food systems governance: Perspectives of Canadian civil society organizations

ABSTRACT Civil society organizations (CSO) engaged in food systems work have grown substantially in number, scale, and scope. Many of these CSOs are seizing opportunities to engage with the globalized industrial food system in efforts to promote greater equity and sustainability and have realized that addressing issues at a systemic level demand engaging with governance. Despite increasing scholarly attention to food systems and to CSO engagement with governments, the diversity of governance arrangements remains understudied. In this paper, we explore the meanings and perspectives of food systems governance from the standpoint of CSOs leaders across Canada and Indigenous territories. Drawing on 70 semi-structured interviews, we argue that CSOs play a central role in advancing food systems governance by how they frame and act on food issues. We point to CSOs understandings and engagement with food systems governance as broader and more nuanced than what has previously been documented in the literature. A more discerning and comprehensive understanding of how CSO actors describe and advance food systems governance helps articulate how CSOs are scaling-up place-based work, modelling new forms of governance, and ultimately, impacting decision-making structures.

The Place-based Work of Global Circulation: Maritime Workers, Collaboration, and Labor Agency at the Seaport

How does place influence the work of global circulation, and how might that work enroll hitherto overlooked modes of collaboration, power, and agency? Geographers recentering labor in analyses of global production and circulation emphasize the labor–capital relation and employer control versus employee resistance. This can limit empirical and political prospects. Instead, we foreground two additional relationships: collaborative relationships of trust between workers across roles and organizations who coordinate circulation together; and relations between workers and place that unfold as tasks are completed amid challenging oceanic and climatic forces. Such relationships are forged by the need to collaborate and provide the foundation for transverse exercises of labor agency. To illustrate, we take to the water with maritime workers (marine pilots, tugboat operators, and liners), observing how shipping circulation is maintained. Seaports are idiosyncratic places—gateways and chokepoints for global circulation experiencing oceanic and atmospheric extremes. Coordination problems are pervasive. Disruption risks require maritime workers to collaborate in place to ensure circulation occurs through place. Demonstrating how the ocean's lateral forces mediate circulation, we emphasize three features of an on-water, place-based labor process: (1) choreographed coordination, (2) situational awareness, and (3) combined multidimensional skills. Navigating a labor process conditioned by the sea, port workers collaborate to manage risks and maintain circulation. In so doing, they also preside over risk and circulation. We argue for collaborative relationships and transverse expressions of agency to feature more prominently in analyses of the diverse, place-based, and interconnected labor upon which capitalist circulation depends.

Platforms of inequality: gender dynamics of digital labour in Africa

ABSTRACT Paid work and gender equality are key elements of international development discourse on women’s economic empowerment. New digital technologies are considered to generate paid work opportunities for the marginalised groups in Africa, particularly women. The rise of the platform economy (work digitally mediated via platforms), for example, is framed as a panacea to poverty and informality among women. Yet the evidence remains anecdotal so far. Drawing on the author’s empirical research conducted between 2015 and 2021 on two kinds of digital labour (remote and place-based work) in Africa, the paper examines the job-quality outcomes among women gig workers in five African countries. The paper highlights new gender-based inequalities on platforms and the ways in which women cope with such outcomes. In particular, it outlines economic insecurities, discrimination at work, high work intensity and adverse physical and psychological impacts among women workers on platforms. It advances the cause for women’s labour rights and offers policy recommendations for a gender-equitable platform economy.

Editors' Introduction: Materializing Immaterial Labor in Cultural Studies

This introduction frames the six original articles in this issue and the forum on "Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope" around the concept of immaterial labor. Two full years into a pandemic that has uprooted place-based work for many, and forced even more indoors, away from public spaces, and onto screens, we reflect on the very material effects of present-day immaterial and emotional labor.

Building sustainable community voices: Lifelong learning in Rochdale

This paper seeks to explore the potential for supporting the presence of 'community voices' in a local government-led initiative for lifelong learning (LLL). The initiative in Rochdale (UK) was a partnership between the local authority and a university. The paper seeks to situate the initiative and the lessons learnt in the context of the potential value to all participants in a collaborative approach to lifelong learning. The paper argues that whilst it is not necessary for all participants to have a shared definition of LLL, there are clear and tangible benefits for the partners which suggest that it is the focus on mutual gain that is critical in any shared initiative. The Rochdale-based initiative can offer some key lessons and it reinforces the lesson that long-term place-based work is not straightforward and has to navigate competing interests; securing respect for community voices requires accountability and a genuine commitment from all participants (academics, active citizens and professionals) that change can be achieved.

What Does It Take? Reflections on Foundation Practice in Building Healthy Communities, 2010–2020

Foundation practice — how a foundation goes about its work — plays a significant role in determining the results of the work, particularly for foundations that take on roles that position them as part of the action rather than solely as sources of funds. This article aims to build upon the lessons from past place-based work by examining the practices of The California Endowment as it designed and implemented Building Healthy Communities, a 10-year initiative to promote health equity. The initiative combined intensive investment in 14 historically disinvested communities with sophisticated state- and regional-level policy campaigns and coalition-building strategies to shift the public narrative toward a deeper understanding of systemic inequities and the potential of people power to transform them. More specifically, the article focuses on how the Foundation’s board was recruited, managed, nurtured, and leveraged to ensure support for the initiative over 10 years. Longterm community and systems-change work is notoriously challenging for foundation boards. The article suggests seven strategies that appeared key to effective board governance of Building Healthy Communities, and ends with some reflections on what it takes for a private foundation to succeed in such a complex and long-term enterprise.

Geographies of hope in cultural resources protection

This work to articulate a geography of hope in the face of institutionalized epistemic injustice extends the emerging Indigenous political ecology approach through engagement with cultural resources law and policy. While Indigenous political ecology offers a framework to understand the context in which geographies of hope are created, geographies of hope are specific spatial processes that exemplify resilience, vision, and ingenuity in adverse circumstances. This paper focuses on such hopeful, place-based work to bring US and, specifically, California, cultural resources and repatriation law and policy into alignment with contemporary international Indigenous human rights standards. The Native and non-Native allies advocating for legal and political change are both focused on protecting particular places and their entwined epistemologies, and on altering processes of decision-making that privilege non-Indigenous epistemologies. Hope is specifically fostered in efforts to educate non-Native citizens on the continuities between past and present, in highlighting the efforts of Indigenous people working to care for and protect their heritage on/in/with the land, and in fostering legal frameworks that center justice.

Designing Place-Based Interventions for Sustainability and Replicability: The Case of GO! Austin/VAMOS! Austin.

Place-based health efforts account for the role of the community environment in shaping decisions and circumstances that affect population well-being. Such efforts, rooted as they are in the theory that health is socially determined, mobilize resources for health promotion that are not typically used, and offer a more informed and robust way of promoting health outcomes within a community. Common criticisms of place-based work include the difficulty of replication, since engagement is so specific to a place, and limited sustainability of the work, in the absence of continued institutional structures, both within the community and supporting structures outside the community, to keep these initiatives resilient. This paper describes a place-based initiative, GO! Austin/VAMOS! Austin (GAVA), which was designed to harness the strengths of place-based work—namely, its specificity to place and community. From the start, the project was designed to balance this specificity with a focus on developing and utilizing a standardized set of evidence-informed implementation and evaluation approaches and tools that were flexible enough to be modified for specific settings. This was accompanied by an emphasis on leadership and capacity building within resident leaders, which provided for informed intervention and demand building capacity, but also for longevity as partners, philanthropic, and otherwise, moved in and out of the work.

‘Off Path, Counter Path': Contemporary Walking Collaborations in Landscape, Art and Poetry

This is a jointly authored practice-led article by a poet and artist who have produced place-based work based on slow-walking practices for exhibition and publication since 2011. It is developed out of close reading of our own work, our key consideration being whether and how collaborative walking and art together might be conceived of as counter-cultural. We consider our walking inheritance, from the Romantics, via Thoreau to mid-century painters and poets and contemporary ecocritical theorists including Doreen Massey, Yi-fu Tuan, Deirdre Heddon and Richard Kerridge. We trace changes in theoretical and artistic approaches to walking, perception and making art together. We reference other contemporary poet and artist pairings including Frances Presley and Irma Irsara and Thomas A. Clark and Laurie Clark. Finally, we consider how walking and working collaboratively in different artistic media might produce work that challenges and affects viewers in gallery and book spaces.

Power, Politics, and Health: A New Public Health Practice Targeting the Root Causes of Health Equity

Purpose Understanding the WHY, WHAT, and HOW of place-based work in maternal and child health (MCH) is critical to examining the components of the environment that shape health opportunity through the relationship between life expectancy and neighborhood residence. Description On September 18, 2014, during the CityMatCH Leadership and MCH Epidemiology Conference, Dr. Anthony Iton provided the Keynote Address focused on the root causes of health inequities. Assessment The address focused on issues of equity in California and initiatives designed to mitigate and prevent disparities, including the Bay Area Regional Health Equities Initiative framework. Dr. Iton presented information on how the framework translated into investment strategies and a policy and systems change approach to place-based work. Conclusion The field of MCH, because of its focus on supporting health during critical periods of development, is poised to play a significant role in reducing health inequities. Recognizing that human health suffers when low income communities are passive, disenfranchised and disorganized, in order to change this status quo, understanding that human capital is the greatest asset is the urgent challenge to the field of MCH.

Activating the Power of Place: A Case Study of Market Creek

This article tells the story of a placed-based initiative to develop well-being and wealth in the historically underserved Diamond Neighborhood in San Diego, and discusses the place-based philosophy of the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation and the foundation’s motivation for place-based work.

From student to artist: Supporting students’ creative development through place-based work

Abstract This article reports on work emerging from an earlier research project that investigated undergraduate students’ autobiographical experiences of creativity at the University of Brighton. It found that students’ creativity was effectively supported if opportunities were provided for them to reflect on the things within their experiences that inspired their creativity. This research informed the creation of workshops and interview practices seeking to improve postgraduate students’ resilience and self-belief surrounding their place within their discipline. We argue that by offering students opportunities to reflect upon their practice and identify existing skills and experiences that contribute to their development as artists, that they will feel better prepared for place-based creative work. We further suggest that a process of reflection, action and discussion can enhance their personal, vocational and academic development. Our findings indicate that these learning opportunities can help students through liminal spaces in their work. The authors present a case study from a post-graduate Creative Writing MA course at the University of Brighton where students are engaged as artists in residence on a specific core module. We identify our model of best practice as being a fundamental part of the transformation from student to artist.

Gender, Mobility and the Financialisation of Development

This article challenges popular claims about the capacity for microfinance to reduce poverty and empower women in the global South. Instead, I posit microfinance as a contradictory development tool, one that creates possibilities for both the contestation and continuation of unequal social relations at multiple scales. The article is divided into two major sections. I begin by examining the assumptions embedded in mainstream financial mappings of global space since the 1980s. In particular, I show how they privilege the transnational mobility of corporate capital and elide the everyday, place-based work of social reproduction. I examine the expansion and commercialisation of microfinance in this context, as an alternative mechanism for enabling poor households to continue meeting their everyday needs by taking on more debt. In the second section, I draw on fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, India, to show how these interlocking macro/micro financial flows interact with regional social histories to shape and differentiate people's mobility ‘on the ground’ according gender, caste, and class. I conclude by suggesting how a critical geopolitics framework can help formulate new questions about microfinance as a development strategy.