Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious environmental and social ramifications. However, it is challenging to change the consumer behaviour that drives fast fashion markets because people have complex relationships with clothing. In this study, we illustrate how the relationships that people have with clothing can be shaped by workshops that immerse them in making, mending, and modifying garments. Such experiential learning can encourage adoption of more sustainable clothing choices, such as reducing consumption of new garments and prolonging the life of already owned items of clothing. We present findings on a strand of work from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project, which explored the affective economy around clothing, and considered how emotive affects around garments operate as a conduit to self-sustain particular practices. Our significant contribution is brings political analysis firmly into the debate about sustainable clothing by merging literatures on behaviour change and affect, through exploration of a novel longitudinal (9-months) qualitative data set. At the start of the project, participants generally thought of clothes as being low-cost (and therefore disposable) items. The workshops, in contrast, presented garments and the materials from which they are made as precious, complex, and fluid –, in a process of continual possibility. For pro-environmental behavioural change, we find that immersion in the materiality of clothing mobilised affective processes, enabling potentially transformative affective encounters. Further, we found that group learning environments need to do more than simply teach approved normative values and behaviours. Pro-environmental behaviour change initiatives need to provide people with the space to create and situate their own knowledges, enabling affect to be mobilised, activated and supported by appropriate cultural milieu.

Recently scholars have started to consider the persistence of peripheries in relation to how they are represented by others outside of the region. Drawing on Foucauldian knowledge/power processes and forms of ‘internal colonialism’, powerful core regions construct and reconstruct knowledge about peripheries as a weaker ‘other’. However this denies agency to passive, peripheral ‘victims’, compromising their capacity to contest their peripherality. We challenge this using Deleuze and Guattari's assemblages and the concepts of affect and perception to develop a conceptualisation of power which allows agency to weaker entities. This enables us to develop better tools for improving peripheral development. We use an innovative Public Engagement research method and a case‐study of Cornwall in the South West of the UK to consider an alternative model with regards to how ideas become accepted and adopted. We claim that analyses of the relationships between core and peripheral regions need to understand the complex cultural assemblages behind regional identities, because this helps us to explore the sites of possibility which offer space for development.

Stateless nations across the EU have become increasingly vocal and confident in asserting a desire for autonomy, devolved governance, and independence. Meanwhile, identity politics has become a key factor of contemporary European regional development, with utility as a social, economic and governance tool. Culture has become a resource for regional branding to attract inward investment and differentiate in terms of competitiveness. The paper considers whether the utility of identity to regional development might provide an explanation for the growing confidence of EU stateless nations. We use the case study of Cornwall to explore the correlation, arguing that economic regionalism has provided a space for the articulation of national identities.

This paper uses critical political theories to engage with regional economic development as a site of exclusion, inequality, and interwoven power relationships, that would benefit from theoretical analysis. It does this through the concept of lifestyle from regional development creative industries discourses and regional branding, considering how time operates in the narratives of place used to represent and promote a region to the outside world. Using Cornwall as a case study and an analysis informed by complexity theory, the paper claims that regional narratives need to be understood not just for how they are produced and what they say, but also for the futures that they imply. It argues that whilst strategic development narratives need to be situated within an affective assemblage that resonates with popular perceptions of place, they also need to have a narrative that opens up spaces of possibility for future action and facilitates adaptation.

Within the context of the devolution process in England, Cornwall and the North East stand out in contrasting comparison. The North East was given the opportunity to vote for a Regional Assembly, which it rejected in 2004, whilst the strong popular movement for an Assembly in Cornwall was ignored by central government. This is reflected in the literature on the English Question and regionalism in the UK, which focuses on the example of the North East, and largely overlooks the grassroots support in Cornwall and the opportunities for understanding regionalism that this could provide. In this paper, we explore why this might be the case, developing a comparison between the two areas in the context of the campaigns for the setting up of directly elected Assemblies. We look at the territorial status of the two areas, how the respective campaigns were organised, the types of groups involved, the motives that were driving activists, and at each regions’ political significance to Labour. We find central control of the political agenda to be a key issue behind the failure of English regionalism.

This paper explores the ways that two rural counties are marketed, both as locations for enterprise and for tourist appeal. Secondary data sources and expert interviews provide the basis for a comparison of approaches in each case. To analyse marketing communication from the Cornish and Northumbrian tourism and regional development agencies, the Interaction Model of Communication and principles underpinning integrated marketing communications (IMC) are used.
The research evaluates the fit of the marketing rhetoric against the perceptions and lived
experiences of samples of business owners drawn from each county. A particular focus is apportioned to in-migrant business owners as they have had perceptions of their destination both before and after moving. It is discovered that social factors are highly significant, meaning that place marketers must
engage with local communities as well as their external target audiences. This deeper understanding of the ways in which perceptions of place identity and reputation
influence decision-making and communication offerings by local marketers, is a valuable insight for the way marketing is undertaken in, and of, rural areas. Beyond marketing, the findings demonstrate the significance of inter-relationships between social and economic influences in the rural economy.

Within the liberal paradigm, ethnic nationalism and identity is often conceptualised as ‘exclusive’, lacking the capacity for universal membership (Ipperciel 2007, Kymlica, 1995, Kohn, 1946), and is juxtaposed against ‘inclusive’, civic forms of identity. This paper problematises this claim, asking whether civic territorial identities also contain their own forms of exclusion. We use the New Regionalism and the identity politics of contemporary economic development to explore civic/ethnic identities in Cornwall in the context of Agnew’s (2005) observations about contemporary liberal values. We find that in Cornwall, civic forms of territorial identity that distance themselves from ethnic Cornishness are more exclusive than contemporary ethnic nationalism in the region, introducing economic rather than ethnic exclusions. This raises questions about why ethnic identity can be negatively characterised in regional development discourses and what the effects of this might be.

The politics of identity is important within regional and governance policy debates, becoming a mechanism for ‘filling in’ the democratic gaps left by the hollowing out of the state, with much discourse about constructing identities for governance purposes. This raises questions about the feasability of processes of identity construction, and whether it starts from new, or builds on existing identities. We use the case study of the Cornish campaign for Objective 1 EU structural funding, engaging directly with modernist vs ethnosymbolist accounts of nationalism, to explore the binary between instrumental, constructed identities and more phenomenological accounts.

This article explores the effect of perceptions of rural life upon the subsequent actions of counterurbanisers and the resulting impact for rural economic development in the contrasting counties of Cornwall and Northumberland. Perceptions of a high quality of life attract migrants to remote rural areas yet these areas also have high rates of economic deprivation. In-migration can stimulate rural development but in this article we hypothesise that the effectiveness of counterurbanisers as catalysts for economic development depends upon their attitudes towards the receiving community. If rural represents a slow pace of life and a step away from the pressures of modern, urban, lifestyles, counterurbanisers are unlikely to bring the dynamism to rural communities. By contrast, counterurbanisers that understand and engage with the local community are better placed to introduce new forms of human and social capital and provide valuable connections beyond the local area. Building on more endogenous development approaches, a greater understanding of the integration and economic activity of counterurbanisers can guide rural policies and highlight the significance of external representations for peripheral rural areas.