scale-jumping associated with the recent
neoliberal restructuring of the Americas. They
highlight not only how scale reflects the changing
territorial scope of capitalist economic organiza-
tion, but also the complex ways in which this is
ideologically refracted, culturally coded and
resisted. The boosterish visions of a neoliberal
utopia in Cascadia, the struggle for postcolonial
independence in an interdependent global eco-
nomy in the Caribbean, and the lives of migrants
operating at the US–Mexico border all highlight
how scale is reproduced through the overdeter-
mination of particular cultural geographies.
Scale in these contexts is not simply rewritten by
the juggernaut of global capital, but in each land-
scape it is produced through negotiation with
individual and collective subjects, local histories
and the environment.
We have presented the social construction of
scale – at the moment of scale-jumping – as a
complex and contradictory process engaged by
multiple actors in political struggles that span con-
tinental geographies and the spaces of everyday
life. On the one hand, scale-jumping provides an
abstract framework through which it becomes
theoretically possible to witness the re-placing
and remapping of the scope of power relations. On
the other, cultural geographers’ attention to land-
scape, text and identity illuminates how socially
and culturally inscribed agents struggle over ideo-
logy and meaning systems, and in turn interact
with patterns of governance to form a scalar fix
(Marston, 2000). This approach both deepens our
understanding of cultural geography and opens a
conceptual space to broaden our definition of
what constitutes relevant subject matter for under-
standing the rescaling of the territorial scope of
power relations. Paintings by migrants, organiza-
tional logos and tourist brochures suddenly
become critical sites for understanding patterns of
economic and political restructuring and the ideo-
logical (dis)placements through which power is
mediated, organized and struggled over.
Our objective in this chapter has been to open
geographers’ research and praxis to a greater criti-
cal sensitivity to how power operates through the
overdetermination of scale. Placing the problem of
scale-jumping, as we have in our three examples,
works to undermine dualistic notions of domina-
tion and resistance and suggest more creative ways
to approach the (re)production of cultural land-
scapes of power, domination and resistance under
neoliberal restructuring. Our case studies also
show how cultural landscapes of scale-jumping are
multiply determined sites of contestation and
struggle. Just as they are the sites through which
power is exerted, they are also constantly beingrewritten and reworked through the production of
collective subjectivities and sometimes radically
resistant and profoundly human geographies too.NOTE1 The interviews cited in this chapter were conducted
as part of Carolina Katz’s (2000) master’s thesis
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