No abstract

Identity, a term that was not yet included in Williams' important Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1976), has become a major watchword since the 1980s. Traditional territorialized battles over democracy, political status/citizenship and wealth have been complicated by the struggle over 'race', ethnicity, multiculturalism, gender, sexuality, recognition and a new symbolic economy characterized by the production/marketing of images (Isin and Wood, 1999;du Gay et al., 2000; Lash and Featherstone, 2002). The identity discourse has emerged concomitantly with such arguments that the world, particularly the western world, is moving towards a 'forced' individualization: people's lives are increasingly being left as their own responsibility, so that people shape their lives and environments through personal identities rather than through categorizations such as nationality, class, occupation or home region (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Contrary to previous arguments, however, people's awareness of being part of the global space of flows seems to have generated a search for new points of orientation, efforts to strengthen old boundaries and to create new ones, often based on identities of resistance (Castells, 1997;Meyer and Geschiere, 1999;Kellner, 2002). It is argued that collective action cannot occur without a distinction between 'us' and the 'other' (Della Porta and Diani, 1999) but identity movements do not always base their activities on difference as it may be strategically beneficial to stress similarities (Bernstein, 1997).This report will review one specific part of the complicated identity discourse, the question of regional identity. Along with the tendencies depicted above, this old idea has gained new importance not only in geography but also in such fields as cultural/economic history, literature, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and musicology. I will first reflect the premises that geographers and others have associated with this mushrooming but rarely analytically discussed category, then map the conceptual gaps, and, finally, suggest some possible avenues for further research.

The expansive understanding of borders and boundaries in recent scholarship has enriched border studies, but it has also obscured what a border is. This set of interventions is motivated by a need for a more sophisticated conceptualization of borders in light of the recent trajectories of border scholarship. In contrast to the much-feted "borderless world" of the early 1990s, the trend during the past decade has been to consider the exercise of state sovereignty at great distances from the border line itself as "bordering". Indeed, Balibar's (1998) notion that "borders are everywhere"-that the sovereign state's loci of bordering practices can no longer be isolated to the lines of a political map of states-has gained tremendous currency but it is also quite a departure from traditional border studies. Thus the broad question posed to our contributors was: Where is the border in border studies?

The author examines the fundamental categories of geographical thought: region, locality, and place, the keywords in geographical discourse during the 1980s. The relation of these categories to the sociocultural context and the everyday practices of individuals is discussed, and a reinterpretation of the concept of region as a sociocultural and historical category is put forward. The region is comprehended as a historically contingent process whose institutionalisation consists of four stages: the development of territorial, symbolic, and institutional shape and its establishment as an entity in the regional system and social consciousness of the society. During the institutionalisation process a region becomes an established entity—with a specific regional identity—which is acknowledged in different spheres of social action and consciousness and which is continually reproduced in individual and institutional practices. The constitution of the local or regional consciousness of individuals is interpreted through the concept of place, which refers to personal experience and meanings contained in personal life-histories. These concepts together promote an understanding of how regions can be created and reproduced as part of the regional transformation of society and how individuals are contextualised into this process by reproducing region-specific structures of expectations. Generation is suggested as a mediating category for comprehending the relations between region and place.

Geographers have been arguing recently that the idea of what is ‘international’ in this field has been occupied by the hegemonic discourses of Anglo-American geography and journals. This paper takes this lively debate as an indicator of the global challenges facing higher education and research and provides an analysis of the changing conditions of knowledge production, characterised by internationalisation and competition. Knowledge production is governed to an increasing degree through practices based on market-like operations. The author argues that this may lead to the homogenisation of social science publication practices, which are known to be heterogeneous and context dependent. One indicator of this homogenisation is the demand for publishing in international journals that is arising in social sciences and humanities round the world. Both ‘international’ and ‘quality’ are increasingly being connected with the journals noted in the Institute of Scientific Information's (ISI) databases. Starting with an analysis of the changing conditions of knowledge production in general and in human geography in particular, the author scrutinises the spatial patterns of the international journal publishing spaces constituted by the ISI. The results show specific geographies: not only the manner in which the Anglo-American journals dominate the publishing space in science but also how the publishing spaces of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities are very different. The publication space of social science journals is particularly limited to the English-speaking countries, and this is especially the case with human geography.