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Despite much time and attention by academia and policy to bring about cohesion between core and peripheral regions, still there are large disparities of wealth and outcomes. Recent literature suggests that part of the problem lies in the ways that core regions represent peripheries in discourse and practice (Willett and Lang, 2018; Willett 2016; Lang et al. 2015), meaning that peripheries need to find better ways to challenge negative core representations of place. This paper argues that a critical ontological perspective based on Deleuze and Guattari's (2004) affective assemblages can help to understand this phenomenon better. The paper uses this framework to explore the periphery as a complex adaptive organism -or a periphery-assemblage. Local government is identified as an important structure, potentially enhancing and facilitating better adaptation to change. Using this perspective, and a research methodology that uses creative techniques to uncover the meanings underlying performed responses, the paper takes a case study of local government in Cornwall in the South West of the UK. Research was conducted between May and June 2016. It is claimed that one way for peripheries to challenge core representations more effectively would be to enhance communications within local government, which can better channel and develop information flows within peripheral regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heteronormativity and homonormativity are connected. Changing social attitudes to homosexuality and the creation of new homonorms influence changing social norms around heterosexuality. To study the emerging sexual politics of austerity it is important to consider how normative social attitudes to both heterosexual and homosexual relations are changing in the current period. This paper examines two recent social policy developments in the UK to this end. It interrogates the debates about 'marriage equality' for same sex couples in conjunction with recent changes to welfare benefits, particularly the 'Bedroom Tax' which penalises social housing tenants receiving housing benefits, if they are deemed to be living in accommodation with more bedrooms than they need. While marriage equality (re)privileges certain types of couples and domestic economies, simultaneous attacks on the welfare system are disproportionately affecting single people and those couples who find their relationships outside the reconfigured normative values of austerity Britain. The paper concludes by considering what these changes reveal about the sexual politics of austerity and the role of mainstream lesbian and gay advocacy groups in shaping them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undocumented migrants often experience how their spatial vulnerability continues across their life trajectories through different forms of displacements in the form of forced migration, being at risk of deportation and being victims of gentrification or policies that make it difficult to find a stable housing situation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden and the UK, the paper shows how weak the position of undocumented migrants is on the housing market through recently established policies in the UK which criminalizes the letting of housing to undocumented migrants and the practice of sharing address information between the social services and the border police in Sweden. This intervention argues that these policies that construct spatial vulnerabilities locally are connected to national and transnational policies of displacement globally and suggest that "displaceability", the potential of being displaced, is a strategy for governing vulnerable groups at every scale where governing takes place. Consequently, this intervention suggests that displaceability can help us capture the universal, interconnected experience of spatial vulnerability shared by many differently positioned groups in the world who are susceptible to forced mobility or removal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to recent critical geographical writing on university campuses by setting their physical production and reproduction centre stage and taking an historical perspective. Focusing on a single case study campus in the UK we revisit the archival record on its planning and early years, revealing gaps between stated intentions of increasing equality between social classes and discourses and practices which reinforced middle and upper class cultural hegemony. We then draw on oral history interviews with residents of the social housing estates immediately adjacent to the campus, including its former builders and cleaners, to explore the spatialized subjectivities of people who were generally absent from the consultations conducted by the university's planners, and whose perspectives are not found in its official history. The findings confirm the idea of university campuses as paradoxical spaces for their working-class neighbours, at once excluding and, in unexpected ways, potentially transformational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]