Abstract:The Biological Economies research project has involved a five-year exploration of new rural value relations in two New Zealand regions. In this paper, we explore what the project has taught us about the need to deploy new conceptual and methodological tools to perform regional development differently. We draw on examples of experimentation in value creation, our own methodological experimentation, and ideas of assemblage to argue that new knowledge categories of capability, platforms, land resourcefulness, experimentation and economic rent open up the potential for a new methodology for stimulating regional economic change that we label 'enactive research'.

No abstract

No abstract

Variable profitability within New Zealand's red meat sector has again led to the problematisation of its constitutive relationships. This problematisation has almost inevitably focused on the structural transformation of the sector. Rather than beginning with structural transformation, we draw on assemblage theory to trace the assembling work associated with three unstable bio‐economic projects: Primera lamb, Wagyu beef and FarmIQ. The paper offers a cautionary assessment of experimentation and innovation in the red meat sector, and suggests that the search for an enduring structural solution will continually be disrupted by the lively materialities upon which the red meat sector relies.

Our article builds upon the insights of recent critical geographic inquiry that has examined the involvement of geography in a multitude of power relations, and in particular the processes of European imperialism and colonisation. The focus of this article, however, is the involvement of the discipline of geography in the constitution and maintenance of a hetero-masculine nationalist discourse. We focus our analysis on articles published in the New Zealand Geographer, but suggest that such hetero-masculine nationalist discourse exists also in the works of geographers writing about other nationspaces. Our purpose is to draw geographers' attention to the constitutive effects of banal practices in geographic scholarship. We draw upon Michael Billig's concept of 'banal nationalism' to argue that the articulation of nationalist narratives is an endemic feature of the contemporary nation/state, and one that forms a particular discursive order that situates author, text and reader in an assumed national and hetero-masculine landscape.