Search

The Lord of the Rings entwined Middle‐earth with Aotearoa New Zealand in popular imagination. More than this, the films reached beyond the cinema into everyday practices and experiences of landscape, particularly through film tours. The paper argues that thinking of film‐landscape relations allows exploration of these co‐constitutive experiences. Through rich empirics, the paper illustrates the performative practices on film tours that enact film‐landscape relations. Situated within landscape literature, the paper employs assemblage thinking to productively hold in tension multiplicity, and the relational and enactive elements that were found in the research. Engagement with film‐landscape relations enriches geographic literatures on landscape and assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the implications of assemblage as an analytical framework in the context of regional economic planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of territoriality to examine the efforts to create temporal stability in the emergent regional economy. We focus on the reterritorialisation of Central Otago through the district council's destination management project centred on the collective branding of the region as ' A World of Difference'. The implementation of this programme contends with the diverse, incongruent boundaries of emergent tourism activities. The paper, thus, addresses the potential for state initiatives to manage uncertain and ephemeral assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores value making practices by asking how we know and make new relations of economy. The paper seeks to understand the connectivities that constitute the Hawkes Bay wine economy in a way not confined by sector or regional matrices. We explore the making of relations of (wine) economy, studying relationships among actors in Hawke's Bay wine economy, including cross-sectional exchanges, investment patterns and value chain linkages. This enables a more practice-centred and relational understanding of wine economies as constituted by assemblying practices. Thinking about wine economies as assemblages facilitates an enactive engagement in economic practices by geographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attempts to recreate the wealth once generated in New Zealand from wool are discussed. These attempts are theorised as active processes of assemblage within overlapping and interacting social worlds. The focus of the paper is ethnographic, engaging with the actors in worlds of wool as they experiment with ways to retain and add value by enhancing connectivity between farmer-producers, manufacturers and consumers; delineating and capturing value by constructing new products and brands; and continually developing metrologies, making new animals and advancing an array of environmental and social values. The study focuses on fine and strong wool worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]