A. Fiona D. Mackenzie

Gender and land rights in Murang'a District, Kenya.

Conceptualising rights to land in a framework of legal pluralism, this article explores the historical nature of struggles over land by women and men in a situation of increasing land scarcity. It is argued that the manipulation of customary law and state law is instrumental in increasing gender and, more generally, social differentiation.

‘The Cheviot, the Stag … and the White, White Rock?’: Community, Identity, and Environmental Threat on the Isle of Harris

In this paper I examine the process through which different claims to ‘development’ and ‘sustainability’ were made during a recent public inquiry into an application for a coastal superquarry at Lingerbay, Isle of Harris. On the one hand, a modernist discourse of sustainable development was claimed by a corporation which attempted to frame the debate in terms of jobs versus environment, exploiting rhetorically a difference between islander and incomer. Sustainable development here became the front for an extension of corporate interest and private property. On the other hand, members of the local community drew on historically resilient symbols of collective identity, crofting, the Gaidhealtacht, and observance of the Sabbath, to claim an alternative discourse of sustainability.

Re-Claiming Place: The Millennium Forest, Borgie, North Sutherland, Scotland

In this paper I explore the metaphorical and material significance of the Millennium Forest at Borgie in the context of an emerging movement for the collective purchase of private estates in the crofting areas of Scotland. My argument focuses, first, on the means whereby the Forest, as visual art, is constituted as a site through which what Edward Said calls a ‘culture of resistance’ is mobilised and through which an inclusive sense of belonging to place is imagined. Second, I connect the poetics of resistance of the Forest with the politics of territorial land claims of the North Sutherland Community Forestry Trust, whose objective is to reverse ongoing processes of dispossession through the collective ownership and management of the 3000–hectare Borgie Forest which the one-hectare Millennium Forest borders.

Place and the art of belonging

This paper explores the connections among place, identity and visual art with reference to the Harris Tapestry, created to mark the beginning of a new Millennium on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. I focus on the material practices through which the Tapestry was created and the historical and cultural metaphors evoked through its embroidered motifs with a view to considering what it means to belong on the island. As a site where people’s stories of the past and present are translated into the visual field, the Tapestry is a deeply politicized aesthetics, making visible social relations through which both island and aesthetic spaces are constituted. Centrally, these concern rights to land, the Tapestry exposing tensions through which metaphors of belonging have been challenged and resisted through time. In this sense, the Tapestry is iconic of a ‘culture of resistance’ (Said, 1994) whose geography is island-centred rather than globally peripheral.

Claims to Place: The public art of Sue Jane Taylor

This paper explores the ways through which the public art of Scots artist Sue Jane Taylor and the practices associated with it both unsettle narratives of globalisation and conjure in their stead new narratives of place. With reference to the stories of five works/workings of art—Glencalvie and Borgie in the Highlands, Aberdeen (the onshore site for the North Sea oil industry) and Clydebank, and Lower Pultneytown, Wick—I show how the art, as evidence of a deeply politicised aesthetics, makes visible not only the specificities of historical and contemporary struggle, but is also bound up with creating and imagining new political possibilities. Art and artistic practices are understood not simply in terms of shaping meanings but as constitutive of processes of subject formation and of the ‘becoming’ of place.

On the edge: ‘Community’ and ‘sustainability’ on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides

(2001). On the edge: ‘Community’ and ‘sustainability’ on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides. Scottish Geographical Journal: Vol. 117, No. 3, pp. 219-240.

‘Against the tide’: placing visual art in the Highlands and Islands, Scotland

Within a political context where Gaelic arts are recognised as integral to the configuration of a new Scotland, this paper focuses on the art and artistic practice of a community arts centre in North Uist, Outer Hebrides, and the art of internationally acclaimed Scots artist, Will Maclean, who has worked with this centre, with initiatives to commemorate the land struggle on the Isle of Lewis, and with Gaelic arts. Drawing, at the conceptual level, on ‘the idea of place as a political project’ (Gibson-Graham 2003: 35) and a narrative of resistance that suggests a differential rather than oppositional optic (Braun 2002), I examine how art and artistic practice contribute to an aesthetics that works ‘against the tide’ and how, as part of this process, place is re-constituted.

Re-stor(y)ing North West Sutherland, Scotland

Abstract This paper focuses on two high profile projects initiated by communities in north west Sutherland as part of Highland 2007. The first concerns the Ceannabeinne Township Trail near Durness which involves the telling of the story of reistance to the Clearances of the nineteenth century. The second, Summer in the Straths, retraces the route of the Summer Walkers and highlights their contribution to social and economic life in the Highlands. The paper argues that the projects remap the land in ways that suggest an alternative imaginary to that aligned with processes of dispossession that have for so long defined social and economic practice in the area. Literally and figuratively, the projects map openings which challenge the norms through which the land is frequently cast.