Andres Rodriguez – författare

The centre may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, students, and missionaries who took to the field on China's southwestern border at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China's claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed large in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, these fieldworkers undertook a nation-building exercise to unite a disparate, multi-ethnic population at the periphery of the country. They saw themselves as a vanguard force, foreshadowing the policies of social development and intervention that would be pursued during the Cold War decades later. Drawing on Chinese and Western materials, Andres Rodriguez exposes the transformative power of the fieldworkers' efforts, which went beyond creating new forms of political action and identity. His incisive study demonstrates that fieldwork placed China's margins at the centre of its nation-making process and race to modernity.

Geographers (and other social scientists) working in local and regional development ultimately seek to understand how—and to what extent—local and regional policy can positively affect economic growth and progress. This area of research and study throws up difficult and challenging questions, such as: what are the sources of regional development? And how do we account for the uneven development of regions, an apparent feature of geographical development in general, and one which seems to be reinforced by globalization?This new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for a comprehensive reference work to allow users to make better sense of the voluminous scholarly and practical literature on these and other issues. Indeed, the sheer scale of the research output—and the breadth of the field—makes this title especially welcome.Local and Regional Development has been assembled by the same editorial team behind Routledge’s award-winning Handbook of Local and Regional Development (2010) (978-0-415-54831-1). The collection is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the material in its intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars, advanced students, and policy-makers as a vital one-stop research resource.