New Directions in Cultural GeographyAuthor(s): David MatlessSource: Area, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1989), pp. 332-334Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20002771 .

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332 Conference reports

The first of the locality and regional studies of British emigration was presented by Jonathon Beaverstock (Bristol). He examined the case of commercial bankers departing from the South East. Ian Seccombe (Institute of Manpower Studies, Sussex) emphasised the scale of both skilled immigration to and emigration from the South East, a feature which has received surpris ingly little attention given the increasing concern about skill shortages in the region. Not only does it appear that companies are moving larger numbers of managerial staff and specialist labour within Europe, but the nature of these moves is changing with the virtual disappearance of the cadre of permanent expatriate staff as a result of the adoption of a ' fast in-fast out ' approach.

Very different pictures of skilled emigration emerged from the case studies of northern and western Britain and Ireland. Allan Findlay and Lesley Garrick (Glasgow) reviewed the nature of contemporary Scottish emigration, while Bill Gould (Liverpool) reported on occupational conti nuity and international migration amongst Mersey port workers. In both Scotland and Mersey side the majority of emigrants were departing, not as a result of multi-national companies making intra-company transfers to foreign postings, but through the activities of recruitment agencies and the international activities of small and intermediate sized companies. These two studies

made apparent that the channels of migration operating in the so-called peripheral regions of the country were very different from those in London and the South East.

The second day of the conference commenced with two papers on aspects of Irish emigration. Ulrich Kockel (Liverpool) presented a paper, provocatively entitled ' If you have not the skill, you go to England ', which usefully contrasted the character of Irish emigration to England and that to other foreign destinations. While the UK seemed to still be the dominant destination, it

was pointed out that many graduates either went elsewhere or opted to stay in Eire. Ian Shuttleworth's (Dublin) analysis of Irish graduate emigration added helpful empirical detail to some of these arguments, while both of the papers on Irish migration trends endorsed the view that many of the less skilled Irish emigrants achieved their moves either through kinship or friendship networks or else simply bought coach tickets to London, arriving in the UK capital

with no pre-planning about jobs or accommodation. The final session of the meeting was devoted to considering the general processes which were

responsible for moulding regional patterns of skilled emigration. The most fundamental distinc tion seemed to be between the characteristics of migrants moving as a result of skill transfers

within the internal labour markets of multi-national companies and those of migrants departing through the more diverse migration channels found in ' external labour markets'. This dichot omy was largely responsible for the marked difference between the South East of England and the rest of the country in the nature of the migration process, in the development impacts which the process is having on the local economy, and in the likely migration trends which can be expected to emerge in 1992 and beyond.

Allan Findlay University of Glasgow

Reference

Findlay A and Gould W (1989) Skilled international migration: a research agenda. Area 21, 3-11

New directions in Cultural Geography

Report of a symposium held at Syracuse University, New York State, 23-24 March 1989

Both days, on waking, I saw a masked man above me, part of a Carnivale scene painted on an 18th century Venetian headboard. I was sleeping in an 18th century Venetian bed; the hospitality provided by James and Nancy Duncan was generous and gratefully received by all of the speakers and many of the participants. It tempered the two days of debate over new directions for Cultural Geography, not that these directions were always all that clear. If not clearly signposting the future, though, the meeting did at least indicate some terms of reference for the present.

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Conference reports 333

Much of the meeting operated between two conceptions of culture; of 'material culture', with culture as concrete artefact, manifesting ways of life; and of culture as a system or looser formation of signs, basically illusory. The two, rarely stated explicitly, and perhaps not easily combined, could be read as conforming to two strands of Cultural Geography which infused the proceedings; a broadly Sauerian tradition, accompanied by the conviction of a need to look to traditions of geographical inquiry; and a movement of more recent momentum which, given new objects of geographical inquiry such as modes of landscape representation, looks outside the discipline to literary and social studies for appropriate theory and methodology, and feels neither qualms nor guilt about doing so. This is not meant to imply that the ' material culture ' strand is somehow moribund; Deryck Holdsworth (Penn State), speaking on ' The social production of shelter for industrial workers ', proved the contrary. In a profusely illustrated talk, Holdsworth portrayed a material landscape woven out of lines of diffusion. His presentation displayed, alongside the barns, cookhouses and bunkhouses constructed in the field, a striking rhetoric of close-up, tracing the ' signature ' of artefacts, zooming in from a wide angle to reveal the texture of the land.

Text, though, rather than texture, was a more frequently used term at this gathering, connot ing a fragility and insubstantiality of meaning in landscape. The metaphor of landscape as text

was employed by several speakers, notably James and Nancy Duncan (Syracuse) and Jonathan Smith (Syracuse), but its use met with some unease. Discussion focusses on the need to examine more critically, and in particular to historicise, the notion of text, and the concomitant act of reading, rather than to employ it as general metaphor. Stephen Daniels' (Nottingham) paper emphasised the need to historicise metaphors of textuality and theatricality in landscape research, the metaphors themselves becoming the object of study in his analysis of the dialectic of word and image in Gentile Bellini's depictions of Venetian state ritual and Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'. Brian Stock (Toronto), in his excellent concluding paper, likewise addressed

vision and text, displaying an extraordinary breadth and depth of historical knowledge, from c. 1000 AD onwards.

The necessity to historically and locally contextualise was also stressed by Derek Gregory (University British Columbia), whose paper addressed the context of theory. Discussing

Habermas' theory of communicative action, Gregory emphasised the geography of its formation, and the impossibility of understanding Habermas without reference to the situation of divided post-war Germany, in particular the legacy of revulsion, fear and guilt left by the Third Reich. The paper itself had an intriguing intellectual context, discussing someone noted for his advo cacy of the project of modernity from a postmodern perspective. Two other papers, by David Ley (University British Columbia) and David Matless (Nottingham), took postmodernism as their starting point, their differing conclusions illustrating the many and unresolved tensions in a term still, perhaps by definition, undefined. Ley, in his analysis of the ' moral landscapes ' of

Vancouver's housing co-operatives, sought to propose an' ontology of difference ', a postmoder nism holding a potential for consensus and morality.

Some suggested Ley's vision held interesting parallels with Habermas' hope of a potential for 'communicative action' in modernity. Matless by contrast stressed a postmodernism which refused the essential or universal, and which viewed attention to difference less as a moral opportunity than as a means of highlighting the local operation of power relations, and the contestable and relational nature of local and national identity. Both Matless and Mona Domosh (Loughborough), in a paper co-authored with Denis Cosgrove (Loughborough) considered the implications of postmodernism and post-structuralism for the process of writing, Matless focussing on the writings of Italo Calvino and James Clifford, and Domosh and Cosgrove addressing issues of authorship and authority, and the problem if problem it be, of relativism. Theirs was notably, and regrettably, the only paper in the conference to address the question of gender, and the implications of feminist theory for Cultural Geography. Sadly though the discussion which followed failed to go much beyond the simple dismissal of ahistorical and essentialist conceptions of femininity and masculinity.

A lack of direction in discussion was perhaps the chief failing in this symposium. There was certainly no shortage of rich material, yet between the papers there seemed at times a curious constraint on debate, with over-openness producing uncertainty on the part of some, and a

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334 Conference reports

narrow surety of stance directing the part of others. The conference as a whole was perhaps approaching what were thought to be common themes from very different standpoints, without realising the difference. Everyone talked texts, but all with a different idea of what a text might be, and the full potential of a rewarding conference went unrealised. Authority may be a dreaded term in cultural circles, but' New Directions 'perhaps required a touch ofdirection to push it on its way.

David Matless, University of Nottingham

Opencast coal mining: identifying the issues

Report of a seminar held at the University of Durham, 27-28 February 1989

This seminar was held as part of an ESRC-funded project on British Coal and Opencast Mining, jointly based in Durham and Manchester Universities. It was the first of a series of such seminars

which are an integral part of the project, intended to provide a forum where different interests can put forward and debate their views on opencast mining.

It began with an introduction by Huw Beynon, Professor of Sociology at Manchester Univer sity, one of the project directors, setting out the purpose of the seminar in the context of the objectives of the project. The first paper was an overview paper by Beynon, Cox and Hudson 'Opencast coal mining: the issues'. The remaining papers were organised into three main blocks. The first was concerned with the relations between opencast mining and the planning system. It consisted of three papers: 'Mineral Guidance: three variations upon a theme? ' (L A

Rutherford and J D Peart, Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic); Opencast coal-a local authority viewpoint' (C Offord and G. Halliday, Northumberland County Council); and 'When is an environmental assessment appropriate? ' (P Tomlinson, Ove Arup and Partners).

In the second session, the focus switched to markets. It contained two papers by energy consultants: ' The market for opencast coal ' (M Prior) and ' The international coal market and the UK '(W H Fischer). The final session considered two papers that were presented, along with others that were submitted but not presented. The two papers presented were: ' A CPRE view on opencast coal mining (R R Bate and G K Wilson) and ' Too much emotion and people telling stories! '(A Pratt, Durham Area Miners Support Group).

The seminar successfully brought together a wide range of people interested in issues raised by opencast, leading to valuable discussion. In future seminars, a similar pattern will be followed, with representatives of British Coal and private sector opencast operators being invited to put forward their views, as well as other academics working on opencast coal mining.

Ray Hudson University of Durham

Note The revised conference papers will be available in mid-1989 as Beynon, H, Cox, A and Hudson, R (eds)

Opencast Coal Mining: views on the issues. Further details of this and a series of Working Papers can be

obtained from Mrs J Dresser or Dr A Cox at Durham University (Tel. 091-374 2461 and 091-374 2445, respectively).

Deindustrialisation and new industrialisation in Britain and West Germany

Report of British-German Geographers' Symposium at Hull University and Cambridge University, 2-8 April 1989

This international symposium was organised principally by Trevor Wild, Heinz Heineberg and David Keeble, and received generous financial support from the Anglo-German Society for the

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