Geographies of dissociation: Value creation, ‘dark’ places and ‘missing’ links

In this paper we seek to contribute to cultural economic geography debates on the social construction of economic value. We widen the focus on already well-studied associations between branded commodities and other entities representing non-monetary values to also include so far understudied dissociations. Dissociation denotes practices of weakening or obscuring negative links between a branded commodity and other entities in order to let the
desired associations overrule undesired ones. We highlight the strategic agency behind such dissociations and thus focus on actors’ proactive relational work to prevent negative associations to become salient and reactive practices of managing reputational crises. The paper situates the study of dissociations in human geography and pays particular attention to the geographies of dissociation along territorial, relational and topological dimensions.