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Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship has long done work in and on Black communities. Yet, the field's engagement with critical race studies has been rather recent and limited. This paper questions what we learn about Black living from EJ scholarship. I argue that there are two main registers of Black living in EJ scholarship: dying and activism. I draw on Black feminist geographies to think and imagine EJ work that incorporates nuance to the modalities of Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental injustice. The goal of this is not to deter EJ scholars from exposing instantiations of environmental injustice in the world, nor to undermine the deadly realities of EJ communities. Rather, this paper pushes EJ scholars to be wary of essentializing Black communities to death and decay and urges these scholars to behold Black life and futurity experienced in close proximity to death in these spaces. I provide examples of Black living and making way for Black futurity that occurs beyond the registers of dying and activism in EJ communities, such as care, Black intellectual life, and refusal, registers made apparent through a Black geographies lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the 19th-century Canadian paper money's iconographies. Discussion on the intersection of culture, society and economy; Indepth look at the consolidation of paper monies in the 18th and 19th centuries; Analysis of the design and production of paper money; Exploration of the national and imperial monetary narratives.

The commercial surrogacy industry in India administers in a way where the women working as surrogate mothers live in surrogate houses. It is a space deliberately designed and run by either the fertility clinics or a third-party agency, where the surrogate mothers are required to stay for the entire gestation period. The surrogacy industry in India utilizes the vulnerability of couples who do not or cannot have children, in order to prepare valuable and docile bodies which can serve as a platform for accumulation of wealth. This paper draws from an ethnographic inquiry of the surrogate housing facilities functioning in two cities in India: Anand and Bengaluru. The paper will argue that the surrogacy industry in India produces geographies of carceral domesticity by deploying disciplining apparatuses governing the day-to-day mundane activities of the reproductive laborers. The medical experts often resort to the narrative that these women cannot be trusted with the safety of the babies they carry, hence, justifying their confinement in the surrogate house. Further, the possibility that the surrogate mothers may develop emotional attachments to the babies they carry, which in turn, will endanger the surrogacy arrangements, also runs through such narratives of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious conversion and marriage across communal lines have long been contentious in India. The contemporary debate on 'Love Jihad' – the Hindu Nationalist conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of waging a religious war by seducing and converting unsuspecting Hindu brides – exemplifies the simultaneously geopolitical and biopolitical anxiety that religious conversion inspires. In this paper, I focus on the case of Hadiya, a young woman from Kerala, who, in 2016, found herself remanded first to her university's hostel – as dormitories are called in India – and then to her parents' home as various courts debated on the authenticity of her conversion to Islam, and her marriage to a Muslim partner. Through an examination of media discourse and court records in this case, the paper argues that in 'Love Jihad', the domestic and the carceral are rendered inextricably intertwined through an affective politics that presents desire outside the bounds of caste and religion as geopolitically misoriented. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's work on the phenomenology of orientation, I focus on the intimate geographies of the hostel, which I argue exemplifies a site of carceral convergence between nation and family, in the management of the affective disorder associated with religious conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elaborates various ways in which atmospheric negations operate by weaponising bodily vulnerability to air. It shows, firstly, how bodies remain exposed to colonial proximities of respiratory, olfactory, and sonic violence with ways that are constituted through negating site- and body-spheres. It highlights these spheric materialities by discussing the use of tear gas and skunk water, bombing of chemical warehouses, and the sonic settler aggression in Palestine, further arguing that we need to pay more attention to the irreducibility of the body to such violent orchestrations of atmospheric. Here the irreducibility of the body and the incapacity of the spheric become key matters related to what is called, secondly, the reciprocal sphereological vulnerability between the corporeal and the spheric. By paying particular attention to difference between breathing and attunement, the paper shows how a negative limit condition resides at the heart of what constitutes sphere-dwelling. Here an ontological shift in thinking atmospheric is suggested, one that starts, not from current framings aligned around the notions of vitality, affirmation, and relationality, but from the weaponisation of the fundamental incapacity of the body to overcome its own vulnerability to the air it breathes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of the open city has been used both conceptually and analytically to understand the politics of the city. The contrast between the open city and the closed city relies, in part, upon an understanding of the global systems that enfold cities and, consequently, the politics that are – and are not – afforded cities. Notions such as the postpolitical city depend not on temporality where the city has ceased to be political, but a spatialisation of politics where the (properly) political has become excluded by the closed systems that envelope cities. In this paper, we explore analytical and theoretical responses to the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire to disclose the ways that different critiques of neoliberalism and racial capitalism deploy and rely upon different conceptions of the open and closed systems of the city. Rather than settle for the open/closed binary, we seek to understand how different forms of openness and closedness afford/constrain the politicisation (and depoliticization) of city life – and its catastrophes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes work by Bruno Latour as the starting point from which to critically examine conceptual moves needed to develop a formulation of voice appropriate for an expanded environmental politics which expresses the interests of human and nonhumans alike. Adopting human language and the rational speaking subject as the benchmark for entry into political debate and decision making is a central problem for theorising an expanded politics. Strong arguments suggest that an expanded politics cannot be founded in a model for the right to speak which reproduces and divide between human and nonhuman worlds. The paper draws on this critique to suggest a conception of voice as 'voicing'. It argues that voicing as an agental socio-material assemblage is sympathetic both to Latour's more recent AIME project and Dobson's understanding of political voice grounded in agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that sensory practices that insulate individual bodies from the effects of climate disruption may enable and perpetuate a distinct form of climate change denial. Existing scholarship has established the ways in which climate-modifying technologies, such as air conditioning, reconfigure socio-ecological relationships through sensory norms. This paper extends this analysis by relating these sensory norms to contemporary discourses on climate denial. Drawing on a heatwave case study in Western Sydney, Australia, the paper explores how practices of thermal comfort for particular, often privileged, bodies may be understood as sensory enablers of climate change denial. This work encourages theoretical movement beyond the scientific and political disembodiment that often characterises contemporary climate change denial discourse, and urges greater attention to the sensory drivers of climate-related behaviours, experiences, and perceptions. This sensory approach may allow theoretical and strategic engagement with otherwise hidden social barriers to sustainable climate interventions and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intricate relationship between border control and migrations is the core puzzle of this paper, which takes voluntary returns from Morocco as a case study and autonomy of migration (AoM) as a theoretical framework. More precisely, the paper examines voluntary returns from the perspective of migrants themselves to grasp border control through the lens of its disputed, distorted and sometimes subverted implementation. The paper draws on data collected during fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Morocco, including ethnographic observations and interviews with staff from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), migrants and local intermediaries. It focuses on the case of sub-Saharan migrants leaving Morocco through "Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration" programmes led by IOM and confronts empirical data with the AoM theoretical framework. The paper demonstrates that migrants' entangled appropriations of return are defined in close relationship with a wide range of actors intervening during the process of return. Ultimately, migrants reformulate the meaning of their involvement in voluntary return into strategic, moral, relative, and symbolic terms. However, these entangled appropriations of a deportation device simultaneously reinforce social norms and institutional regulations underlying migration dynamics and border control. Eventually, the paper draws conclusions on the political effects of migrants' entangled appropriation of a deportation device on the production of intertwined im/mobility regimes between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While papers generally get better through the review process, authors often have a difficult time navigating contradictory reviewer suggestions. The desk rejecting process is also a crucial way to protect the most precious resource in the editorial process: reviewer labor. As an editor, I was impressed with the attentiveness the reviewer had paid to the arguments in the paper, and felt sure that the author would be disappointed by the review but would benefit in the long run from the analysis. [Extracted from the article]

This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing in low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing over the last decade. It looks at how new forms of biometric and facial recognition-based landlord technology automate gentrification and carcerality, reproducing racist systems of recognition and displacement. We offer these systems a genealogy and geography, looking at intersections of zoning, gentrification, eviction, and policing that have historically solidified to dispossess and incarcerate tenants of color. Additionally, this paper addresses how and why New York City has emerged as the world's epicenter of "landlord tech," mapping out several decades of urban datafication that have rendered low-income, nonwhite majority housing complexes as laboratories for surveillance experimentations today. We observe how processes of "catching" tenants for lease violations automate a longer history of racist surveillance and property-making. Yet we also highlight tenant-led resistance that has successfully thwarted facial recognition deployment and that continues to organize for landlord tech abolition today. Through affective organizing, grounded relationality, and alliance-building, tenants have created vital abolitionist space and knowledge to curb landlord technologies and the carceral logics they encode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how the atmospheric science of transboundary air pollution was employed as a technopolitical strategy to secure a nation’s volumetric territory. In South Korea, border-crossing particulate matter from China has emerged as a controversial diplomatic concern. The Korean government heavily funded atmospheric science to monitor the transboundary incursion and quantify the amount of Chinese influence. The geoscience of polluted air was mobilized to restore the nation’s aerial sovereignty when transboundary materiality threatened its political authority to regulate atmospheric territory. The paper further examines how nationalistic science was challenged by an international air quality survey called KORUS-AQ, a study co-organized by NASA and Korea’s National Institute for Environmental Research. Korean experts used the joint mission with NASA to verify the transboundary impact on Seoul’s air quality and hold China responsible. US scientists, however, challenged this nation-centered vision by highlighting the underestimated domestic sources of air pollution. As a result, the aerial survey did not generate a unilateral understanding of nature but produced multiple and even contrasting territorial imaginations on a single airshed. Atmospheric science, I argue, functioned as a geopolitical arena where different visions on volumetric governance were enacted and competed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The single-use plastic bag is the most legislated item of plastic in the world, banned in over 92 countries. The bans are largely concentrated in Africa and the Caribbean, where the plastic bags are often black and the plastic footprints small. The bans have destabilised essential economic, social, and technical arrangements of marginalised communities reliant on plastic engagements and adaptations to improvise against multiple, overlapping, incursive forms of violence. This article seeks to understand the spatial and material nature of these legislative actions and the particular item of single-use plastic they target. Acknowledging the (spatialised) material realities of the single-use plastic bag, this article argues that these bans are a legislative response to the black plastic bag as spatialised, racialised, sexualised, abject Other. Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement through a grounded reading of the spatial transformations it implicates. The paper maps multiple private and public actors who exploit cracks and connect seemingly disparate material flows (e.g., humanitarian aid, public housing subsidies) and institutional systems (e.g., humanitarian, public, private, religious) in ways that catalyze and accelerate the production of housing in order to derive profit from the opportunities afforded by the refugee crisis. Thus, developers, buyers, residents, brokers, public agents, and other actors all support a flow of informal profitable exchanges that are far from seamless economic transactions, mixing instead capitalist profiteering with human solidarity, religious morality, or kinship obligations that all buttress the possibility of these encounters and their materialization into new configurations of urban quarters. The arrangements formed through these processes, the paper shows, are strongly reflective of existing social hierarchies and inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to emerging conversations at the intersection of critical geographies of property and race by centering political grammars of reckoning and redress. Grammar is more than syntax. It is about structures of language, including the ways that words are arranged, inflected, and imbued with meaning. A focus on political grammars elucidates the rules of reference that make private property appear as a self-evident thing (e.g., the land itself) that one can own. Moreover, it orients discussions of land and property toward the kinds of reparative work necessary to dismantle and move beyond racial regimes of ownership. The paper focuses on North America, specifically the United States, while drawing on salient theoretical insights from a range of scholars and cases. It is oriented around an examination of three modes of reckoning—truth and reconciliation; state redress; and reparations as the reconstruction of society—that overlap but also have distinct meanings with different assumptions about accountability and responsibility and visions for the future. I analyze the political grammars that subtend each and consider how they call us as scholars and people to the urgent task of building more just social worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the production of settler ecologies through nineteenth century swamp reclamation projects in California. It focuses on the transformation of inland swamps into agricultural land and San Francisco salt marshes and tidelands into urban real estate. I argue that swamp reclamation was both an economic and a racial project. Swamp reclamation sought to transform perceived wastelands into productive property. Swamp reclamation was also a racial project, in at least three ways. First, it aimed to transform colonial environments for the health of the white settler body. Second, draining swamps and making solid land depended on a racialized labor force. Third, swamp reclamation was accelerated through government subsidies that largely benefitted white settlers at the same time the state of California disenfranchised Black, Chinese, and Indigenous residents and supported racial immigration policies. These formations of race, nature, and property were established by law and political economy, and undergirded by settler epistemologies of space and nature. By studying the discourses and practices of swamp reclamation in nineteenth century California, this paper contributes to scholarship on the production of settler ecologies under conditions of racial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the aspirational urban form of the 'world-class city' is produced from within the city itself. Rather than focusing on global competition between cities, the analysis considers how local actors in key industries discursively and materially produce the world-class city through their labor. The analytic of connection is introduced as central to understanding how world-class city-making projects are achieved. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombo's high-end real estate sector, the article examines how a successful broker creates and manages connections across different scales and registers. It focuses on three key areas: (1) the rhetorical connections drawn between luxury real estate and national development; (2) the connections created between wealthy foreign clients and local property owners and (3) the work of connecting disparate narratives about supply and demand for luxury housing. I highlight that against the backdrop of considerable economic and political uncertainty, connections are valuable even if they do not result in immediate profit. Offering a glimpse into the world of white-collar professionals in the luxury real estate industry, this paper underscores that world-class city-making projects are embedded in local realities even as they reflect generalized patterns of urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theory of urban dispossession as depotentiation. 'Depotentiation', as I employ the term, indicates the diminishment of imminent capacities, affects and potentialities. I propose this formulation to both complement and critique Harvey's dominant notion of accumulation by dispossession as the commodification of the urban commons and to contribute to conceptual developments on the stratified and affective dimensions of eviction. The evictions in my study operate in liminal urban spaces where there are no 'commons', but rather incomplete and fragile processes of 'commoning' and high levels of mobility and precarity. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2019 in inner-city Johannesburg in unlawful and other informal occupations, frequently termed 'bad buildings', 'hijacked buildings' or 'dark buildings' and other low-income accommodation. These are sites of extreme precarity and liminality, endurance and potentiality, where tens of thousands of inner-city residents, South African and foreign-national, live without essential services and subject to the constant threat of eviction or deportation. Dispossession of their residents operates not only through the commodification of an urban commons but also through the diminishment of urban potentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that biopolitical infrastructures have been central features of Turkey's ongoing colonization of Kurdish territories and populations and that the Green Revolution, despite its promise of progress and abundance, needs to be understood as part of this history of racialized state-making. In doing so, it joins recent literature that uncovers the local roots of the Green Revolution in domestic politics and land struggles in the global south, also revealing the entwined histories of accumulation and colonial and racial dispossession with agricultural norms and practices. Drawing on research in the records of the Economic Cooperation Administration, US Agency for International Development, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Turkish parliamentary debates, and contemporaneous journals, I show how the Green Revolution can in fact be retold as an episode in a longer history of struggles over the distribution and use of land, the construction of agricultural infrastructures, and how these questions have been complicated by class, ethnic, racial, gender, and political divisions. The paper thus situates Turkey in a transnational history of agrarian development, while also relating the adoption of high yield seeds, pesticides, and grain cultivation to projects of land consolidation, internal colonialism, and racialized methods of state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose the notion of 'German Theory' to allude to the processes of translation and circulation of theoretical ideas discussed in the German humanities and German geography across and beyond the linguistic boundaries of its origin. However, these ideas did not travel, at least not to Anglophone geography. This paper investigates why not, and it maps out the lost theoretical potential that has been foregone as a result. 'German Theory' is thus read here as a potentiality that has not actualised. More specifically, this paper studies the reception of Foucault, as it emerged in two distinct territories of thought, each with their own interpretation: first, Kittler's work on the materiality of discourse in German humanities, and second, the 'discourse school' in German geography. The latter's insistence on the textuality of discourse disconnected their Foucault reception not only from Kittler's, but equally so from ongoing debates in Anglophone geography. By reflecting on why the 'German Foucault' did not travel to Anglophone geography, I raise a speculative epistemological question about the im/potentiality of 'German Theory': could a more cosmopolitan theory have emerged from a circulation of these ideas had they travelled across linguistic boundaries? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Black liberation theology (BLIBT) as a framework to theorize "the spirit" in the alternative food and sustainable agriculture movement. While BLIBT was formally named by theologian James Cone, it was born of the struggles of Black people in the United States who believed that God called Black people to be free, and God called Black preachers to preach Black liberation. I argue that Black liberation is a grounded vantage point to understand how some Black people might find freedom through food and agriculture. In the first potion of the paper, I make a claim for the importance of studying spirituality in agrarian and food spaces, whether or not a researcher is spiritually inclined. In the second portion of the paper, I delve deeper into Cone's articulation of BLIBT, and explore how we might begin to theorize it as an agrarian mandate including: a call for an urgent food source, liberation of the individual Black body, community ownership of land, the spirit of Black religious spaces, an emphasis on land reparations, and the freedom to dream. I conclude with a call for why an attention to BLIBT is called for in our present moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure to understand the entangled histories of railroad colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and corporate power in the California desert. I examine debates over the Cadiz project, a contemporary water project that proposes to take water from a California desert aquifer and transport it to the California coast. I argue that the life of the Cadiz project depends on Cadiz Inc.'s ability to revive the legal rights and body of a little-used railroad shortline, thus bringing back a legal infrastructure and corporate power from the late nineteenth century in the service of a new corporation. In so doing, the Cadiz project enlivens the racialized dispossession of land and labor that the railroad initially required. Routing the politics of a contemporary infrastructure project through the railroad and its octopus past, I argue, places the politics of infrastructure at the intersection of laws, monstrosity, and dispossession. Drawing on economic and legal geography, this paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure, a concept that builds on what activists call zombie projects in order to show the life and death of infrastructure, and reveals how contemporary capitalists enliven old infrastructures for new purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper works against the articulation of emergency politics within an Agambenian framework of a 'state of exception' which has heretofore dominated writing about emergencies. Instead it develops a more hopeful albeit agonistic politics of emergency evacuation mobilities. By way of Elaine Scarry, Bonnie Honig, Ben Anderson and the writings of gay rights and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp, the paper explores the promise of a 'politics of promiscuity', alighting on the role of shoes in emergency evacuation mobilities in two cases. Through detailed analysis of the evacuation of the World Trade Centre during 9/11, and the debacle of the evacuation of Australian PM Julia Gillard during 'Australia Day' protests in 2012, the paper teases out the concept of promiscuity through feminist and queer reworkings of emergency politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have revived the concept of primitive accumulation to describe how explicit violence is an ongoing and structural, rather than simply historical, tool for capitalist domination. However, the relationship between the logic of capitalism and history of capitalism remains obscured. Capitalism is politically enforced and hegemonic, but ongoing instances of capitalist violence repeatedly appear as though they were breaking new ground or finding new frontiers for capitalist growth. In this paper, I offer a novel framework for understanding how primitive accumulation not only creates a capitalist material order but also a temporal order that motivates and reproduces capitalist violence. Focusing on Maasai conflicts over conservation lands in Kenya and Tanzania, I describe how primitive accumulation imposes the historical narratives that naturalize capitalism, ecological rhythms that suppress competing lifeways, and identity categories that marginalize dispossessed populations by characterizing them as primitive. This account advances key debates about settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and potential resistance by clarifying how disproportionate harm against particular populations is justified, how those justifications reproduce and naturalize capitalist domination, and how temporality represents not only a site of domination but also political struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thoroughly saturated by ordinary crisis, routinized emergency and the normalization of apocalypticism, late-modern society is nevertheless depicted as sleep-walking into crisis; a further, overlapping crisis of the 'real.' This paper explores the potential of prepper awakening narratives – the moment preppers 'wake up' to the reality of crisis – to contribute to explorations of detachment and denial in the Anthropocene. These narratives, part of the wider repertoire of prepper story-crafting, provide justification for the prepper's transition to an anticipatory subjectivity, emotionally and sensually attuned to crisis and motivated to prepare. Extending existing conceptualizations of awakening, I argue that prepper awakenings are defined by the uncanny realization of distance from an ideal state of security. To illustrate, I consider narratives of bodily vulnerability, insecurity at home and abandonment in public places, which express shock at the failure of relationality implicit to the safety fictions of these spaces. In this reckoning with the 'autonomous' modern self the agential and aware prepper emerges, but this does not in itself lead to a renewed moment of politics or production of revolutionary consciousness. Instead, the horrifying real' is recrafted as a vital space of self-reliance and resourcefulness, a place to reflect on endurance beyond this world-ending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only a select group of countries have systematically surveyed and classified, written and exhibited the history, religion and culture of others. Today, through its Belt and Road Initiative, China begins to join this group. Proclamations to 'revive' the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century have triggered a profusion of cultural sector projects – led in part by the behemoths of China's technology industries, Tencent, Baidu and Huawei – as part of the Belt and Road Initiative cooperation and diplomacy architecture. This paper argues that geocultural power arises from having the capacity to write and map geocultural histories, and that digitalisation and the new cultural economies it creates is fast emerging as a powerful means for achieving this. It demonstrates how Big Earth Data, crowdsourced imagery and VR technologies afford geocultural thinking, and parallels are drawn with nineteenth-century Europe to consider such developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the intersection between waste, value, and the right to the city within the context of the Municipal Recycling Collection Program in Salvador, Brazil. It shows how the legal recognition of recyclable-waste collectors as legitimate workers and their integration into municipal practices of waste management has not materialized into improved working conditions and has done nothing to advance their struggle for the right to the city. A critical value perspective on this specific case demonstrates that waste and "humans-as-waste" "switching" from not-value to value-in-the-making does not represent a way of escaping abjection and exploitation. Instead, the inclusion of cooperative collectors into the municipal recycling collection program has resulted in new forms of dispossession, through state-increased control over recyclables and in the municipality appropriating the value produced by the struggles, knowledge, and informal collective labor of the collectors. The right to the city for waste workers in Salvador therefore entails the right to work with dignity and the re-appropriation of waste as the urban commons to create livelihoods based on labor relations and regimes of value against and beyond capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates US immigration law as a spatial system whose application results in geographic confusion. I take the case of Barton v. Barr as a vivid example of this structure, where the petitioner was found to be simultaneously "outside" and "inside" the country under a legal perspective. Beginning from this paradox, I focus on the law's ability to produce extraterritorial folds within the country's interior, thus confining aliens into spaces that escape constitutional rules. Through an engagement with legal geography and Niklas Luhmann's work, I conceptualize immigration law as a system which lives off the repetition of operations that distributes rights and privileges to aliens by assigning a degree of foreignness to their location. The resulting paradox must not be confused for a mistake or a flawed logic. Instead, it constitutes the dispositive that allows the law to produce its effects and draw its territorial enclaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of the parochialism of urban theory have resulted in appeals for more global urban studies. Yet, the fruitful responses to postcolonial work frequently remain sequestered, reflecting the persistence of Eurocentrism as a burden shouldered largely by the so-called "South". This paper aims to shift the work implied by critiques of Eurocentrism – from the labor of translation to the chore of representation – to those whom Eurocentrism serves. We argue that recognizing the ways academics are always already complicit in Eurocentrism by working within the academy is an important starting point. Can the functions of complicity also serve to redistribute the burdens of redress and allow cultivating new possibilities to respond? To understand the functions of complicity, we take inspiration from the historical position of Switzerland on "the margins" of colonialism. Scrutinizing the history of a formally non-colonizing country reveals multiple forms of taking part in, benefitting from and assisting in colonial efforts. Applying these learnings to institutional and epistemological possibilities of working with complicity in the academy, we interrogate the potentials and limits of these functions to address the reproduction of Eurocentrism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan state’s digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and extensive experience within Kenya’s land administration system, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing, albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa’s perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation of liminality itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, thousands of Taiwanese farmers gathered in Yunlin County to protest against a government environmental management programme which attempted to address the land subsidence that has threatened Taiwan's High-Speed Rail infrastructure. New environmental monitoring technologies have been developed to deal with the land subsidence but these have, simultaneously, provoked contestation. The dispute indicates that the horizontalism inherent in traditional studies of geopolitics fails to account for the politics of verticality. Indeed, recent work on volumetric politics opens up new horizons for thinking about the exercise of power through three dimensions; the geopolitics of the underground have remained untheorised. Moreover, the existing literature on volume also fails to account for the chaotic state of the material world. From the perspective of assemblage thinking, I outline three characteristics which shape the 'geopolitics of land subsidence'. From this standpoint, this paper argues for a geographical approach to subterranean politics which puts more emphasis on volume, emergence and matter. With reference to ethnographical fieldwork conducted in scientific laboratories and in Yunlin County, I demonstrate how subterranean materials continuously frustrate the state's volumetric practices. By problematising the geopolitics of land subsidence, this paper also advances the understanding of political geology, which is seeking to 'decolonise' and 'pluralise geological thought'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article enhances our understanding of the thoroughly embodied nature of knowledge production in relation to automation by demonstrating how making sense of automation is a generative process, rather than the demystification of an already existing object of analysis. It argues that the process of knowing automation involves situated encounters that transform bodies at the level of their indeterminate capacities to affect and be affected which, in turn, contributes to the production of what automation is. Contrasting with more generalised diagnoses about how automation is deskilling or reskilling bodies, it evaluates the constitutive role of situated encounters that register in sensing bodies for reshaping capacities. Focusing on iron ore mining in Australia, an industry sector that is currently increasing its automated operations, the paper draws on a series of fieldwork encounters with people differently positioned in the mining sector. Through the presentation of five stories that incorporate combinations of these fieldwork encounters, the paper constructs a more complex picture of how automation is redefining different bodies. Rather than taken to be mere representations of automation, it argues that the listening to and telling of stories about automation is a form of encounter that redefines bodies in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the eliminatory speed of Israeli settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler organizations aim to accelerate the pace of elimination at the colonial frontiers in Palestine. We show, by focusing on the settler NGO Regavim, how such settler entrepreneurs constantly develop new techniques that challenge the slow and creeping eliminatory pace of state's administrative, legal and security bodies with an intensifying eliminatory speed we call 'dromoelimination'. By closely elaborating the ongoing events in the West Bank village of Susiya, we argue that dromoelimination operates, firstly, through accelerative state-settler dynamics that traverses beyond the eliminatory functions of the state while at the same time fundamentally reconfiguring them; and secondly, by turning Palestinian life and struggle against dispossession, forced displacement and destruction increasingly vulnerable to intensified temporalities of 'depleting time'. Settler colonialism, we contend, becomes comprehensible in a more tangible, complex and spatially nuanced terms when looked through the speed and pace of its movement: that is, through intensified and accelerated eliminatory rhythms – of dromoelimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the theory of the Paradigm of Governing and the Paradigm of Dwelling by the philosopher Fernández-Savater , this paper attempts to theorise a spatial politics of care through an ethnographic analysis of three grassroots initiatives – a social kitchen, an accommodation centre with refugees and a community centre – set up in Athens (Greece) as a counter-response to the crisis politics via austerity enforced in the country (2010–2018), as well as to the renewed EU border system (2016). The everyday politics of these self-organised groups is conceptualised as a Politics of Dwelling. The concept refers to a form of political praxis and capacity forged within the sphere of social reproduction and everyday life. It is argued that Dwelling as politics holds an emancipatory potentiality beyond capitalist relationships, which lies in (1) its situated/embodied nature, which marks collective processes of decision-making and organisation with an ethics of care, (2) the central role that space and material resources play in those processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Marx pointed out in the second volume of Capital, storage is a critical moment in the circulation of capital. Yet, despite the resurgent interest in the political economy of circulation, logistics, and infrastructures, commodity storage remains under-examined in critical human geography. This paper examines the "hidden abode" of storage by tracing attempts to control moisture and realize value in two different commodity chains: Newfoundland saltfish and American grain in the late-19th- and 20th centuries. Storing preserved codfish and grain presented different biophysical obstacles for firms, but both required interventions to discipline moisture to preserve and realize the value embodied in the commodities. Through our empirical work, we frame storage sites as infrastructural ecologies : complex, more-than-human assemblages that both constrain and enable the realization of value embodied in lively commodities. This paper contributes to debates on circulation, logistics, and infrastructures by highlighting historical geographies of storage as a novel vantage point from which to analyze the frictions and flows of value under capitalist social relations. By grounding logistics in a value-theoretical framework, this paper also contributes to recent debates regarding the value (and valuation) of nature in political economy, by highlighting the role of storage and realization in the nature–value nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2016, 200 people in the London Borough of Lambeth occupied Carnegie Library, forcibly preventing its closure by a local council rolling-out deep austerity measures. The nine-day occupation was a high-point of 15 months of struggle to 'Defend the Ten' libraries in Lambeth against an austerity agenda the council sought to smoothly administer. Through an in-depth account of the struggle, this paper tells a story of the occupation foregrounding the protracted process and persistent interventions that led up to it. In doing so, it makes two contributions to critical geographical literatures on post-crisis austerity, responding to calls for rich, processual, and multi-scalar accounts of how austerity measures are downloaded and rolled-out, as well as experienced and resisted in everyday and undecided ways. First, going beyond an account of austerity as a fiscal policy imposed on cities from above, the paper makes visible the everyday spatial violence of austerity that is rolled-out, experienced, and resisted as a slow spoiling of social infrastructure. Second, it makes sense of the ambivalent (post)politics of austerity, developing an account of everyday dissensus to reveal mundane non-evental ruptures and the emergence of demands for real democracy in a context of closure shaped by forces of dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of Morocco's new, "humane" migration policy that claimed to center human rights and integration over securitized border enforcement. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper demonstrates how the new migration policy expanded rather than dismantled the border regime, respatializing it from the edges of Moroccan territory into cities in the interior. Border respatialization was accomplished through abandonment, theorized not as an absence of government but a technique of governance that targets the racialized poor. Focusing on the experiences of migrants living in two urban spaces—an informal migrant settlement and a working-class neighborhood—this paper illustrates how abandonment limits black migrants' ability to move and transgress the border, and how these effects have site-specific, as well as racial and gendered dimensions. This analysis underscores how humanitarian migration policy may have changed the modality of border violence, but not its substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses improvisation as a liminal practice of inhabiting the in-between that marks urban spaces from squats and brownfields to communal gardens, from infrastructural maintenance and urban living labs to political protest and solidarity in times of crisis. It shows how improvisation emerges in the interstices between uncertain flux and ossified rigidities to construct in-between spaces of ambiguous political openings even in ostensibly formal, rigid contexts. To that end, it draws on documents, media reports, interviews and participant observation to analyse the multiple mutations of what eventually became the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre in Ekaterinburg, a cultural flagship in Russia's third largest city. Morphed from an abandoned office block into a memorial multi-purpose complex, the Yeltsin Centre is the product of elites and ordinary people responding to conjunctural openings in seemingly inert structures. While highlighting the political openings made possible by improvisation inhabiting the in-between, the paper also underscores the ambiguous nature of this practice and its limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent interventions in geography regarding the Anthropocene have demonstrated how Western logics of order and containment have produced massive geologic transformations. This paper focuses on odor as a sense that, when engaged critically, disrupts those logics by exposing the porousness of the body to other bodies and spaces. Visceral reactions to smell produce affective responses in the body which are informed by circulating political discourses. Thus, this paper explores how research focused on odor can reveal the complicated dynamics through which bodies are enrolled into subject formation and become a terrain of political struggle. Research on the everyday experience of hog manure in a rural Iowa watershed forms the case study through which these questions are raised. Since the transition to concentrated livestock agriculture at the end of the twentieth century, the disposal of animal waste has caused serious concern. This waste is often collected and later spread on fields across the state, producing foul odors and potential toxins. Political discourses that maintain this system claim waste is ordered and properly maintained, generating positive affective responses to foul odors and thereby maintaining support for industrialized agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the geographies of hazardous waste removal. Over the past decade, studies of disposal have demonstrated the myriad ways in which things can never disappear – they can only be transformed, transmuted, combusted, combined or any other manner of material change. This paper aims to develop understandings of the material politics of disposal by considering the matter of representation. It does this ethnographically, by following a chemical stockpile though the process of removal from its storage site in Tanzania. In examining everyday disposal practices, this paper highlights the materialities of hazardous waste in ways that have been epistemologically side-lined. Locating the analysis at the intersection of matter and representation, the paper illustrates the centrality of paper-work, diagrams, photographs and standard operating procedures in performing removal. It argues that removal is achieved through a bureaucratic spectacle; a process which obscures lingering residues and compounds their toxic effects. By attending to chemicals through the mundane work of removal, this paper opens up different lines of inquiry for studies of waste, and enriches understandings of materiality by considering how visual representations make a difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is planning without property? This question was recently posed to me following a conference presentation. In this paper, I argue that taking this question seriously reveals unchallenged assumptions about the relationship between planning and property. Focusing on Canada as a settler colonial liberal democracy, I respond to this question by looking at the Indian Act which has supported colonial dispossession and assimilation in Canada for almost 200 years and rely on Brenna Bhandar's conceptualization of "racial regimes of property" as a means of examining how racial subjects and private property are co-produced. I then look to the practices reflected in the creation of Nadia Myre's artwork Indian Act to show how Indigenous epistemologies can aid in the conceptualization of planning without property. I argue that planning without property would be an approach to planning that would be focused on identifying, making, and strengthening the human and more-than-human relationships the flourishing of life requires. Thus, planning without property would support practices of being and belonging rather than practices of exclusion and domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze the emergence of New York City's infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York's political economy and its institutions. The paper first analyzes homeless policy and infrastructural change through a reading of archival sources and government reports and documents. The second section understands oral histories conducted with men living in a New York City homeless shelter as blues geographies—insurgent, critical explanations of these institutional spaces. Shelter residents actively challenge the material conditions, relations, and values that produce homeless shelters as essential instruments of the carceral state. I argue that they activate this resistance to the naturalization of shelters, and themselves as homeless, by narrating carceral spaces as abolitionist spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kynren is an outdoor spectacular pageantry performance which tells a tale of England, drawing on myth and history, to make several claims about Englishness and Britishness. It does so in the political wake, first, of constitutional crises in the UK centred around Brexit; and second, of debates around heritage, empire, race and nation which have been driven by responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. These themselves are manifestations of broader, global trends in which populist movements have attempted to reassert state-legitimacy through nationalism, heritage and culture. This paper explores, how Kynren affectively presents and discursively performs a narrative which puts place and landscape, and specifically the place and landscape of the peripheral region of County Durham in which it is located, at the heart of nation. We argue that the ways in which this narrative is authenticated performatively through the spectacular affective atmosphere of Kynren show how and which nationalist narratives resonate most readily in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of the axioms of a "just recovery" was to redevelop the city's historic high ground. While the call to limit the city's footprint problematized low-lying geographies, the majority of which were Black, it ignored Lakeview, a low-lying, predominantly white neighborhood devastated by Katrina. Despite its vulnerability to flooding, Lakeview has thrived in the years following Katrina. Property values are rising and public and private investments are rolling in. Lakeview's unquestioned future and its (re)valorization in the wake of the storm speak to how racial regimes of property have informed the reconstruction of the city and to the role that urban planning plays in constructing and valorizing landscapes of whiteness. This paper interrogates the ongoing lives of whiteness, asking how whiteness operates as an invisible substrate within planning and property regimes. Utilizing the concept of sedimentation, it explores how planning takes part in concretizing racial formation processes and suggests that the project of sustaining white geographies lays bare deeper questions about the ways that planning enacts multi-scaled, racialized regimes of property. This article excavates the emergence of Lakeview from the backswamps of a delta city to examine the unquestioned valorizations of whiteness as a landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop a minor theory that blurs boundaries between prefigurative direct action and symbolic performance to reconsider strategies for resistance and world-building. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of economic justice organizers and activists in New Orleans in 2015, I examine two events through this minor theory: an immigration reform protest and a collaboratively written skit about income inequality. By emphasizing the performance of protest and the potential for protest through performance, I consider how these events empowered activists to make claims on spaces of the city, develop long-term embodied solidarities, disrupt dominant narratives, and en act more just alternatives. These events took place against the backdrop of intensifying racial and economic inequalities in post-Katrina New Orleans, following a long history of both repression and resistance in the city. Through performance-based direct actions, New Orleans's economic justice movement moves beyond a reactive politics rooted in outrage and anguish toward a direct action politics constructive of a more just world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilises the concept of 'hate relationships' in conversation with the literature on geographies of encounter to explore experiences of racism for those entrapped by racist encounters with those who are familiar. In so doing, we attend to the uneven and harmful risks involved in some forms of everyday urban encounter. We draw upon case notes collated by a hate advocacy service in North East England, UK, to illustrate the cumulative damaging force of enduring hate relationships. By drawing parallels with work on domestic violence, we suggest hate relationships evident in our data exhibit distinct temporalities of routinisation, whereby harmful 'low level' violence, often under the radar of the criminal justice system, gains force through repeated neighbourhood-based encounters. In so doing, we also highlight both the situated and relational spatialities at work; localised encounters marked by familiarity, racialised territoriality and experiences of fear and immobility, but also relations of entrenched disadvantage and institutional failures that sustain harm. Concerted acts of resistance look to confront and/or escape these relationships, but as forms of resolution, where additional burdens are placed on victim/survivors, these are constrained by the same violent conditions through which such relationships are allowed to take shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town's segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps onto urban apportionment we reveal how an ecology of violence – of spatialised segregation, xenophobia and sexual violence – establishes a corporeal power that constrains access to the city. Crucially, these women deploy counter practices of apportionment and their precisely attuned navigations add to our understanding of the agile repertoires of working the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a case study of Achill Henge, County Mayo, Ireland, to examine the interplay between economic crisis, rebel creativity and shifting geographies of commemoration. Built in 2011 in a remote part of the west of Ireland, Achill Henge is a highly contested monument. Unfinished and under perennial threat of demolition, the Stonehenge-like structure was originally conceived as a 'tomb of the Celtic Tiger', in reference to Ireland's ill-fated economic 'miracle' of the 1990s and 2000s. This paper examines this economic context before adopting two perspectives. Firstly, drawing on critical ideas about commemoration, we identify how the Henge remembers economic and political failure, materialising a unique site of subaltern memory. Situating it within memorial landscapes in Ireland, we explore how it can serve to critically analyse practices of traditional and contemporary commemoration. Secondly, we examine how its unsanctioned liminality produces a valuable, exemplary site at which numerous unregulated, playful, performative and political practices can be carried out, away from mainstream convention and commercial banality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the spatio-temporal dimensions of consumer activism during the Greek crisis. Existing work has provided valuable insights into the figure of the political consumer and the socio-spatial contexts in which consumer activism is enacted. The paper presents original six-year ethnographic work that extends current knowledge through exploring how the spatial and temporal dimensions of consumer activism are unsettled and reconfigured during an acute economic crisis. It builds on the concept of chronotopic dilemmas to illustrate the ideological tensions and contradictions between old and new spatio-temporal logics and practices. In doing so, the current study complements prior research focused on how distinct cultural and institutional settings mediate discourses and actions of consumer activism, by highlighting their inherently spatio-temporal (chronotopic) nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the tensions racialized migrants negotiate when politically organizing and enacting citizenship within the context of the Canadian white settler state. I focus on the experiences of Latin Americans in Toronto and the politics surrounding a cultural celebration – Hispanic Heritage Month. While some Latin Americans sought to use this event to gain recognition and assert their belonging to Canadian society, others opposed its naming, objectives and organization, and opted to create an alternative celebration – the Latin-America History Collective's Día de la Verdad/Day of Truth Rally. I demonstrate that the narratives and practices mobilized around Hispanic Heritage Month and Latin-America History Collective's Rally reveal how different forms of migrant political organizing can internalize, reproduce and contest white settler colonial social relations. Overall, this paper aims to contribute to and complicate debates on the fraught nature of racialized migrants' citizenship, politics and identity formation in Canada, by emphasizing the vast heterogeneity of Latin American communities and decolonizing possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]