Book excerpt: What becomes visible if we look at peripheral, deprived rural regions through the lens of a complex adaptive assemblage? Affective Assemblages and Local Economies uses ethnographic research and qualitative interviews with members of the public and some policy makers to examine this question. Over a year-long project in Cornwall in the South West of the UK, and the South West of Virginia, USA, the book considers what becomes visible if we understand the region through the words of ordinary people, rather than planners and policy-makers. Drawing on the Deleuzian affective assemblage, it builds the concept of the Region-Assemblage to examine the deep interconnectedness between people, objects, organisations and the processes that we find in the regions that we observe.