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Statistics are central to the state's capacities. However, with the advent of 'big data' some argue it is being undermined in favour of a new configuration of corporate power. We need to understand statistics both historically and geographically to understand how it is intertwined with the geography of power today. Three strands to the geography of statistics are proposed: the geography of statistical institutions and agencies; the geography of 'datafication'; and the geographies produced by statistics. Tracing the geography of statistics demonstrates its role in the construction of a hierarchical world and explains the consequences of changes in statistical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal-free animal food products, such as lab-grown meat and synthesized milk, are on the cusp of appearing in the supermarket. With the network of techno-science startups and university laboratories with venture capital, research grants, and donations flowing into them, the transition from techno-fantasy to actually existing industry could occur in the next few years. But the emerging animal-free food industry is a site of social and economic experimentation beyond what is occurring in the laboratory. A particular ethical and moral claim is at the center of this industry-in-potential, with it offering a food future free from the environmental degradation and animal cruelty of existing animal agriculture-led food chains, and it is around this claim that experiments with the construction of value are occurring. Drawing on assemblage theory, we argue that practices associated with things like veganism and beneficent techno-scientific research emerge from existing assemblages, including agrifood production networks, and get arranged and deployed in ways that are potentially economically productive in the making of this industry. This demonstrates how ethics are not just something folded back through the production process from the consumption end but are at the heart of how value is formed within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider what impact a biopolitics that creates a compliant self-governing weight-focused population has had on Māori health in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We frame this discussion with three vignettes that in different ways demonstrate the deleterious effects of the individualisation of health on Māori. We argue that the current biopolitics is best explained as 'the health of Maoris' not 'Māori Health'. To counter this current biopolitics we put forward an alternative epistemology, the 'Atua Matua' framework. This epistemology pays respect to a Māori view of health that is holistic, encompassing physical, emotional, spiritual, cultural and familial well-being and does not give ground to the requirement for individualism so prevalent in neoliberalism. Finally, we consider what this new epistemology might offer to the public health agendas in Aotearoa and other countries where indigenous populations suffer ill health disproportionately. Thus, our implications have potential not only for Māori health but human health in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how the technocracy contributes to the mobilisation of policy, and in doing so suggests that this allows for a systematic explanation for policy mobility that is based on a particular form of expert practice rather than ideologies such as neoliberalism. It argues that the technocracy has topographies through which different places are materially connected and through which policy knowledge flows in various forms. But it also has topologies that emerge from the practice of measurement through which often distant places can be made to loom much larger, or nearby places fade into insignificance. Together they help to materialise the spaces ‘in between’ policy-making sites through which policy is often transferred. Considering the technocracy in this way demonstrates how apparently autonomous political–economic contexts shape patterns of policy mobility and state change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consultants have emerged as significant actors in the assembling of culture after neoliberalism. This paper considers their role in the assemblage of the British subsidised cultural sector as part of the assembling of culture more generally. In particular, it is concerned with the status of consultants as private sector actors, which differentiates them from other forms of expertise that tend to be located in the state apparatus, in that they must earn money to resource their work and remain solvent. By placing their work of assemblage in relation to this imperative, we can understand the difference it makes. Based on a close study of a London cultural consultancy, it is argued that specific governmental and managerial trends send trajectories of value through the assemblage which the networked consultants attempt to control and capture. These economies have seen consultants contribute to the broad shift in the assemblage of culture from something that occupied a distinctive sphere requiring protection from the ravages of the market to a potential contributor to economic and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern for the creep of surveillance and control into the everyday lives of citizens has revived contemporary debates over the politics of health promotion. We examined how political changes have impacted on the work of health promoters through qualitative research with individuals working in the health promotion sector. Interviews and focus groups were undertaken between January 2008 and March 2009. Caught in a neoliberally influenced drive to increase the efficiency of the health sector, health promotion in New Zealand has been subject to considerable changes in the funding and provision of services. Characterised by a growth in limited-term contracts with constrained budgets, health promoters have responded to fiscal limitations by pooling resources. We find that rather than being uncritical agents of the government’s health promotion agenda, health promoters often became advocates of the community’s agenda, occupying a ‘grey space’ where the demands of contracts create tension with their commitments to communities. Any portrayal of health promotion must acknowledge the contested nature of the spaces of governance health promoters occupy and resist reducing them to uncritical agents of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]