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Abstract

This article examines how photographic interviews can be used to represent the life stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender refugees. Transnational and cross-border movements have a significant impact on the photographic and narrative self-representation of such refugees. By focusing on the example of a photographic interview project, The Story That Travelled, this article demonstrates how ideas surrounding community, citizenship, and transnational mobility are interpreted and visualized by refugees who have fled their countries of origin because of their sexuality and/or gender. In addition, this article considers how digital technologies impact lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender refugees and their experience and negotiation of borders.

Abstract

Based on an extensive bibliographical review of the region– gender nexus, the article first assesses the quasi inexistence of gender issues in regional journals and the symmetrical absence of regional issues in gender publications. In so doing, it establishes the specific positioning of the Regions & Cohesion journal within that broad panorama. In launching an agenda to reverse that trend, the text then sets to offer two goals for future research and publication: (1) gendering the people, feminizing the regions; (2) queering the regions: the transborder condition as an inspiration.

Ann Petry, The Street (London: Virago, 2019), 416pp., £9.99 (soft back)

Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), xxi +239 pp. $16.99 (paperback).

Abstract

Humans and elephants have historically shared the forested mountain ranges of Zomia, a geography defined by the regular movement of people and an ecology shaped by the movement of its elephant population. This article will examine how free-roaming elephant pathways facilitated human mobility in the highlands defining the Indo-Myanmar border. It will analyze the more-than-human agency that emerges when following elephant trails and the varying role this forest infrastructure might have played in the social and political history of the region. The article will explore two historical examples. First, the migration of a Lisu community in Upper Myanmar who utilized elephant paths to navigate their passage. Second, how the British Empire exploited a network of elephant-human tracks to subjugate the peoples living in Mizoram, northeast India. In these regions the patterns of migration, history of colonization, and identities and practices of communities must be understood in relation to wild elephants.

Abstract

There exists today a large consensus among scholars of different disciplines that regions are more than a geographical concept and that they are socially constructed. This implies that somehow people must play a role in the emergence of a region as an entity of governance and as a source of identity. But the relation between regions and the socio-psychological processes that constitute them remains unclear. This article aims to clarify what the social construction process of a region means and what kind of psychological processes play a role in it as well how such social construction relates with how regions contribute to people's identity formation. For this theoretical exercise, use will be made of the so-called Vygotsky scheme that distinguishes between four different conversational spaces.

Abstract

This article examines transportation infrastructures’ capacity to produce and transform social space through a focus on the contested history of railway development in Valsusa, Italy. I draw on participant observation and interviews with local residents and activists during ethnographic fieldwork in 2014–2015. I first describe how railways helped form modern sociality in Valsusa in the twentieth century. Subsequently, I explore contrasting topological effects of a projected high-speed rail through the valley. For planners envisioning a trans-European space of exchange, the railway is a powerful way to “shrink” space; for local residents, this implies reducing Valsusa to a traffic “corridor.” Yet their protest generates new social relations and knowledges, giving rise to a notion of “territory” as unbound and connected to a transnational space of resistance to capitalist expansion.

Abstract

This article suggests that the quarter of the world's states that are African can yet contribute to new “developmental” regionalisms in theory and practice, as the North enters a period of ambivalence about, if not retreat from, positive global engagement. This article builds on the pioneering analysis of Björn Hettne with Inotai on new regionalism and the related contributions out of contemporary “development” studies by Jan Nederveen Pieterse on East-South relations and Oliver Stuenkel on a non-Western world.

Abstract

The regions–cohesion nexus focuses on how much people and place “prosperity” cannot be readily distinguished but are intimately connected. After reviewing some older sources on this logic, the article examines the current status of social cohesion within the European Union and what the future might hold depending on how much a crucial balance between global competitiveness and social cohesion is restored as the centerpiece of the supranational union. Current trends point in different directions, so critical choices will have to be made if the European Union as a whole is to survive and prosper. The income and fiscal divides between East and West and North and South should be the primary focus for rehabilitating the regions–cohesion nexus.