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The text examines the connections and intersections that exist among the three topics set out in the title. First, the logic of extractivist practices as the dominant expression of the accumulation model of this time, its effects on territories and ways of life, and the intense process of hybridization of a nature exiled from social processes (Whatmore, 2002). Second, the construction of a ‘single world’ and the dispossession of relational geographies; Finally, the conflicts of valuation about these natures, understood according to this reading key, as part of opposing political ontologies exercised by the different actors who take an active part in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past two decades saw a growing attention to the role of design for the geography of education and simultaneously shifted architectural attention towards the understanding of different forms of pedagogy. Yet, careful empirical engagements with the material architecture of contemporary school buildings and the experiences they mediate are still scarce or missing. Focussing on how mechanisms of control are imagined and practiced in the design and use of school buildings, this article fleshes out a picture of the performative spatial machinery of schools. It will do so drawing on designers' accounts, plans and visions for a Building Schools for the Future (BSF) building in Liverpool, UK and on accounts of the experiences of different school dwellers. Overcoming the dualist understanding of education as an activity that happens in objective frames of learning (the static architecture of the schools) or the subjective interpretations of users (the perception of teachers and students), we trace specific practices of 'dwelling' in the school building and identify architectural and designerly techniques for modulating control. Instead of dissipating or reducing control, or merely re-producing the classic forms of power, this versatile and porous type of architecture, we argue, multiplies and diversifies the forms of 'polycentric' control exercised through various intersecting lines of sight and sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cleanliness, mobility and quality of urban air has regained political legibility in debates on post-pandemic cities. To contextualize the political and epistemological significance of air in urban contexts, we suggest looking at the under-researched experience of premodern cities and bodies, how they developed a complex ecological imagination and solutions guided by findings from Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. While we do not romanticize these efforts, we argue that they represent an overlooked archive through which the post-Enlightenment mechanization, securitization and abstraction of air can be challenged. Turning to recent findings from both more-than-human thinking and microbiology as applied to air (aerobiome), we acknowledge that microbiome science is a result of laboratory science; however, we argue that findings from microbiome science point to a reanimation of air as something that cannot be fully instrumentalized or securitized as in modernistic programs of biopolitical control. By drawing on the on the experience of the Hippocratic tradition as a catalyst and a proxy for wider ontologies of flows and corporeal porosity across the Eurasian landmass, we suggest arriving at an affirmative reconceptualization of human-environment entanglement based on notions of permeability and a non-binary ontology of flows. This more-than-human approach may not only complicate the alleged simplistic view of the "West" as a dualistic monolith but act also as bridge and companion to Indigenous and Southern ontologies and experiences of life, non-life, matter and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article maintains a constant discussion between relational ontologies, local Aymara ontologies, based on ethnographic data collected in recent years. The ambiguity of the Aymara term khanapa, which designates tutelary beings and at the same time cosmic places, is intervened from the home altar, domestic space in which one catholic image is present, which refer us to a place where part of my ancestry comes from. The relationships with these being based on correspondence that allow us to perceive the landscape as something alive or vivified, are portrayed in the festivities dedicated to these images in the town of Peñas. On the other hand, these relationships allow us to appreciate the transformations that took place with this being that we are dealing with in this article until she took the form that composes the altar of the house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the incommensurable and incommensurable nature of subalternity, which materializes a position without an identity whose intelligibility is complex, especially when we try to access the configurations of its ontopolitical schema. Subalternity constructs a binary opposition to the nation-state. It is necessary to fight for the production of new criteria of legibility of the educational and cultural subject. This problem is reduced to an obstruction in its ontopolitical and existential rules of intelligibility of a wide constellation of specific heterogeneous groups amalgamated through political, structural, relational, contingent and historical issues that determine their units of cultural legibility. The method employed is that of critical documentary review, organizing a critical corpus of review works derived from intercultural studies, subalternity and postcoloniality. Each of them are key to promote other types of epistemological performances in this regard. Among the main findings and conclusions, we note that subalternity documents a deeper methodological problem: we do not know exactly what the cultural and political agency of such groups consists of. The only thing we should not forget is that we, educators, are at the service of subaltern groups, our task is to learn from their environment, to become a disciple of their cultural space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/context: In this article I propose to analyze the sacred wrappings and the concept of wrapping among the Maya, based on the use of the ontological theoretical framework present in anthropology and archaeology. Two examples of a possibility of such an approach are presented for the study of the textile wrappings present in the Mayan and Mesoamerican territories, from the concept of relational ontologies and by means of native conceptions and theories. With this, we seek to conceptually define the ceremonial bundles based on notions of Mayan thought itself. Methodology: based on an analysis of ethnographic data, I reflect on the notions of pixan (souls) and pix (wrapping something) in order to approach the concept of wrapping that defines ceremonial bundles. Thus, the two cases that exemplify such reflections are the Martín Bundle, patron and protector of a Tz'utujil community of Lake Santiago Atitlán in Guatemala, and the image of a ceremonial bundle in a scene of enthronement in the Tablero del Palacio de Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. Conclusions: With the examples presented, I propose to think of the bundles as elements that protect and give a materiality to the pixanes of the other world when they are present in the ordinary world. As such, the wrapping would function as a body for another form of existence in the first example, and as an element of protection for powerful objects, which ends up breeding a relational field between such artifacts as a whole, as presented in the second case. Originality: I hope with this initial reflection to contribute to a discussion about the use of the ontological theoretical framework in the study of archaeological and ethnographic materials in the Mayan area, based on reflections on concepts proper to these peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case for addressing nonhumans as actors in geopolitical processes such as boundary making and enforcement. The challenge of this line of argumentation is to account for nonhumans as actors without enacting dualistic ontologies that locate the natural and social in separate realms. To address this methodological challenge, I present a posthumanist political ecology. I elaborate my argument and methodological approach in relation to my research on the environmental dimensions of U.S. border security. Specifically, I examine how deserts, rivers, Tamaulipan Thornscrub, and cats inflect, disrupt, and obstruct the daily practices of boundary enforcement, leading state actors to call for more funding, infrastructure, boots on the ground, and surveillance technology. As my research illustrates, taking nonhumans seriously as actors alters explanations for the escalation of U.S. enforcement strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]