Issues of belonging, exclusion and the creation and maintenance of boundaries have surfaced in recent considerations of the production of space, yet the relevance of boundaries and belonging for understanding the construction of landscape has remained largely implicit. In this paper, I wish to explore more explicitly the connection of boundaries, belonging and landscapes by thinking about how landscapes become spatially bounded scenes that visually communicate what belongs and what does not. My focus is on understanding how landscapes are, in part, constructed through a territorialized politics of belonging-the discourses and practices that establish and maintain discursive and material boundaries that correspond to the imagined geographies of a polity and to the spaces that normatively embody the polity. To explore this relationship, I consider a controversy surrounding the operation of a slaughterhouse in Hugo, Minnesota, which was used extensively for Ua Dab-a Hmong tradition of ritual animal sacrifice. The discourses and practices surrounding efforts to remove the slaughterhouse from Hugo, on the one hand, and to have it remain in Hugo, on the other, offer a case through which to explore the politics of belonging and the boundaries that this creates in constructing landscapes.

Public—private partnerships have excited discussion about the possibilities of creating a more responsive welfare state in contemporary American society that empowers local communities. Sceptics see these partnerships as inherently unequal such that non-profit organisations play `junior partner' to government agencies by prioritising governments' agendas. This paper contributes to the debate by examining the role of non-profit organisations that work with government agencies to provide social services. It is argued that non-profits attempt to balance both roles—playing `junior partner' and empowering community. The experiences and practices of non-profits thus show that the role of non-profits amidst state restructuring is to negotiate the multiple obligations they have to funding agencies and local communities that seek assistance. The paper draws on a case study of non-profits providing social services to immigrant and refugee communities in Minneapolis—St Paul in order to develop the argument.

In this paper we argue that nonprofit, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) constitute crucial sites at which welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism are enacted and materialised in everyday life practices. This paper responds to recent calls from geographers to move to finer scales of analysis that enrich our understanding about the geographies of welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism. Our response is based on case-study research of NGOs that provide social services to migrants in Minneapolis-St Paul, USA, and Toronto, Canada. We draw on the concept of ‘translation’ to show the agency of NGOs in articulating macroscale programmes of governance into concrete regulations that govern the conduct of everyday life. The case studies demonstrate the usefulness of seeing NGOs as translation mechanisms to current debates about the role of NGOs amidst welfare state restructuring and the rise of neoliberalism.