(Re)crafting belonging: cultural-led regeneration, territorialization and craft beer events

Abstract

This paper contributes to debates on the use of cultural events to regenerate urban areas. Cultural geographers have identified the influence of such events in informing urban belonging, whilst being cautious towards the politics associated with claims of diversity and inclusion. Yet, what seldom features in such geographic accounts are the ways events influence, and are influenced by, inclusions and exclusions beyond their temporal and spatial confines, including how territorial processes flow in and across both online and offline spaces. In this paper, we thus adopt Brighenti's (2010) relational approach to territoriality to reveal the fluid and heterogeneous ways the Independent Manchester Beer Convention renders processes of inclusion and exclusion within, and beyond, the time and space of the craft beer event. Utilising fieldwork observations at the 2018 and 2019 conventions and 4,300 social media posts associated with the 2019 convention, we identify how particular subjectivities come to be included and excluded in different ways through the event. We argue that recognition regarding the fluidity and heterogeneity of territorial boundaries, and the role of affordances in shifting such boundaries, are imperative in the utilization of cultural events in generating inclusions through cultural-led regeneration.

Gender and craft drinks

“…Further still, social media platforms are creating new spaces for predominantly young women to share their passion and knowledge for craft beer with Facebook groups, such as ‘ Women in Beer ’ and ‘ Crafty Beer Girls ’, and Instagram accounts like @girlswholikebeer, @thecraftbeergirl and @msbeercraft. The potentially empowering impact of these developments is noted by de Jong and Steadman (2021) in their recent study of the Independent Manchester Beer Convention, or Indy Man, event in Manchester in the North of England where the use of social media hashtags #womeninbeer and #beeryladies to coordinate a meeting up of British based women‐only craft beer groups, taking over a section of the event venue as both an online and offline territorializing processes (de Jong and Steadman, 2021).…”

“…While the craft drinks sector has given rise to many new formats of drinking space, such as beer festivals (Thurnell‐Read, 2017), micropubs (Hubbard, 2019; Robinson & Spracklen, 2019) and brewery taprooms (Wallace, 2019), which are less beholden to enduring historical expectations about how alcohol is sold and consumed and by whom, these spaces do still tend to be dominated numerically, socially and culturally by men. As de Jong and Steadman (2021: 12) observe, craft beer spaces often allows for exclusionary gender performances and a ‘masculine territorialization’ which leads to ‘a form of social control enacted by some attendees seeking to identify the space as associated with a certain category of user’. Similarly, Spracklen et al.…”

Rural space and the local food landscape: consumers’ construction of food localness through the politics of belonging

“…Scholars usually use the politics of belonging as a theoretical lens to study citizenship dynamics (Antonsich, 2010), for it concerns a community’s understanding of “membership” (Yuval-Davis, 2006). However, the politics of belonging is a dynamic process of boundary-making, embedding people and place (de Jong and Steadman, 2021), which constructs spaces as “boundaried” carriers of meanings (Trudeau, 2006). For instance, Lähdesmäki (2020) argues that institutions, such as the EU, regularly borrow symbols of heritage sites from state members and re-locate them in an abstract “European” space “that functions as their (new) home” (p. 993).…”

Social geography II: Space and Sociality

“…Combining assemblage theory with topological thinking, De Jong and Steadman (2021) show how gendered territories take shape through offline and online spaces of craft beer events and place-making. The authors argue that masculinist craft beer events could feel exclusionary to women but online techniques inviting women-only groups to gather during the event allowed for ‘a more feminised territorialisation of space to unfold’ (De Jong and Steadman, 2021: 14). Such acts of reterritorialisation and solidarity in the near and far thus challenge – even if only temporarily – gendered power geometries in urban landscapes.…”