Economic Geographies
of Internationalization
This research program deals with economic
geographies of internationalization with a special focus on the Pacific Basin
and East Asia. This research seeks to understand how specific economic and cultural
transformations are wrought by the interaction of complex global flows of money,
power and cultural meaning with local practices, customs and economies.
In my Eikaiwa
Wonderland project I am investigating the geographies of English language
learning in Japan's English conversation schools (eikaiwa). This project
began in 1997 with dissertation fieldwork in the eikaiwa. It seeks
to describe and account for the highly gendered participation and specific nature
of practices within these schools by integrating an analysis of economic geographies
of internationalization that create demand for English langauge skills with
an analysis of the social, cultural and discursive institutions that support
the Mode of Social Regulation in Japan.
The Urban Resort
project examines how Honolulu has been produced as a space of consumption and
accumulation since 1959 by multinational investment and development of tourist
facilities around the core of Waikiki. This project uses a Growth Coalition
analysis that identifies and segments specific growth factions and actors and
integrates this with Lefebvre's conception of the production of space to explain
how a growth coalition nucleated around the concept of the Urban Resort and
how, over time, this Urban Resort, with Waikiki as its prototype, situated itself
in a transnational space-economy of tourist development increasingly funded
by Japanese capital.
I am now working on a critical cultural geography of Guam's Talofofo Falls,
examining how the Falls are produced as a space of complex, contested meanings
by their physical and sociospatial location at a nexus of Pacific geopolitical
power zones and how these have influenced the production of contested collective
memories. This space of meaning sits uneasily at the intersection of several
historical geographies of nationalism.
Another ongoing project is "Mileage Runners, Weedeaters and the 'R' Bucket:
an actor-network geography of elite frequent fliers." This project investigates
the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of elite frequent fliers.
Using an actor-network framework this research seeks to understand how the remarkable
geographies of these fliers are produced by their embedding in particular physical
aviation networks and their use of the Internet to facilitate activities such
as mileage runs and segment runs. It also considers how their activities within
this network shape components of their socio-techical-spatial system, such as
the frequent flier programs, and how their practices produce unanticipated geographies
of tourism in locations all over the world including Singapore, Paris and Iceland.
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Copyright © 2004 Keiron Bailey