Search

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]

Geographers and others have recently addressed the problematic of area studies by suggesting alternate ways to recognize the connectedness of peoples and places. However, some areas seem so self-evident as to resist their undoing. One such area is the nation state. In this paper, I examine the resilience of the nation state as area through the example of Japanese studies. I discuss the emergence in the United States of Japanese studies as a field, and thus Japan as an area worthy of study, due to its enemy status in World War II, which highlights a troubling disciplinary origin in interrogation that still haunts the academy. I continue by explaining how Japan’s postwar amnesia of its pre-1945 empire and the influence of one research monograph in particular helped produce the enduring notion of a homogeneous and spatially isolated Japan. Subsequent decades of research have tried to undermine this notion, albeit without questioning the ontology of Japan itself. In this paper, I outline challenges to unthinking the nation state as area, including existing institutional barriers and the role of Japanese studies as a source of professional identity, both in general and for me personally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are currently in what might be termed a "third phase" of ocean enclosures around the world. This phase has involved an unprecedented intensity of map-making that supports an emerging regime of ocean governance where resources are geocoded, multiple and disparate marine uses are weighed against each other, spatial tradeoffs are made, and exclusive rights to spaces and resources are established. The discourse and practice of marine spatial planning inform the contours of this emerging regime. This paper examines the infrastructure of marine spatial planning via two ocean data portals recently created to support marine spatial planning on the East Coast of the United States. Applying theories of ontological politics, critical cartography, and a critical conceptualization of "care," we examine portal performances in order to link their organization and imaging practices with the ideological and ontological work these infrastructures do, particularly in relation to environmental and human community actors. We further examine how ocean ontologies may be made durable through portal use and repetition, but also how such performances can "slip," thereby creating openings for enacting marine spatial planning differently. Our analysis reveals how portal infrastructures assemble, edit, and visualize data, and how it matters to the success of particular performances of marine spatial planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the recent broadening of the US military’s overseas mission into what it calls ‘full spectrum operations’ and critiques how it is being enabled by what I term ‘full spectrum law’. The paper explores the important doctrinal shifts that took place in the US military from 2005, when it declared for the first time a commitment to ‘stability operations’ as a military responsibility equal in status to offense and deterrence. This, I argue, has reinforced an already dominant US national security discourse in which military and economic security interests are firmly bound. In particular, it has given the US military a broader role in the ‘correction’ of underdevelopment and the securitization of the legal and economic modalities necessary for a functioning neoliberal global economy. The paper reflects on the US military’s blending of security and development concerns and reveals how its legal framing of stability operations draws upon a ‘notional legal spectrum’ that allows for the securitization of the most broadly understood ‘instability’ and sanctions the interminable use of the US military in global interventions in an era ubiquitously cited as one of ‘persistent conflict’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the critical role played by the US immigrant detention and deportation apparatus in the construction of contemporary imaginaries of homeland security. I argue that the detention system works performatively by substantiating a paradoxical relationship between security and insecurity for system employees. Through research conducted in Ecuador with detained migrants' families and deported migrants, I scrutinize the behavior of detention personnel and the experiences of detainees. Data illustrate how the US detention system becomes an integral part of the governmental apparatus behind homeland security imaginaries. First, employees are disciplined through the constant repetition of narratives in which immigrants are immoral and untrustworthy. Second, the detention system is structured in such a way as to require employees to perceive detainees as sources of insecurity, through inconsistent policies, conditions of detention, and high volume and mobility of detainees. Consequently, I contend, employees' interactions with detainees play an important and under-recognized role in performing homeland security imaginaries by perpetuating and reinforcing negative tropes of immigrants as criminalized, dangerous outsiders. The paper contributes to understanding ways in which multiple and overlapping governmentalities work recursively in the country's immigration apparatus, as well as shedding light on the typically opaque detention and deportation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Zygmunt Bauman and Etienne Balibar's reflections on translation as its point of departure, this paper considers how the practice of translation operates through the discourse and practice of 'design'. Specifically, it considers how design translates the US - Mexico border region into both a territorializing topography of cruelty where violence directed against undocumented migrants is so extreme that it appears to us to be worse than death and a virtual deterritorializing topography of civility where a collective participation in public practices to assist undocumented migrants is possible. It does this by analyzing US defensive designs (US border fence, surveillance) that inhibit the free flow of people across this border versus design projects by Judi Werthein (Brinco/Jump), Ricardo Dominguez et al (Transborder Immigrant Tool), and Robert Ransick (Casa Segura/Safe House) that enable the safer passage of undocumented migrants crossing through this border region. It concludes by reflecting on the limits of translation. Specifically, it considers how the always incompleteness yet overloadedness of translation-the 'almost' of translation-means that the virtual deterritorializing designs discussed in this paper place border subjects in positions of almost mobility, almost legality, almost hospitality, almost cruelty, and almost civility. In so doing, these designs go some way toward demonstrating how virtual deterritorializing practices of translation might make it possible, as Etienne Balibar puts it, "to 'appropriate' or 'inhabit' a transnational political space and transform it into a new public sphere" while at the same time materializing many of the "almost civilities" that are also "almost cruelties" that are activated in any call-including Balibar's-for us to become active citizens again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that popular geopolitics needs to pay attention to the full range of the cultural economy in its analyses of popular culture artifacts. Previous work has been overfocused on the text without enough attention to production and audiencing, and as a result analyses often assume an ideological motivation to questions of genre and meaning. This paper uses as a case study the post9/11 boom of the superhero genre in Hollywood cinema, tracing it through the circuits of cultural economy. Particular attention is paid to the claim that superheroism resonates with the post-9/11 foreign policy of the United States and that this has enabled the genre to flourish at the box office. Academic and critical readings of Heilboy (2004), Superman Returns (2006), Iron Man (2008), and Heliboy I!: The Golden Army (2008) indicate these resonances with various strands of American exceptionalism, but production-focused analysis indicates that technological innovation in visual effects as well as industry economics have driven the American film industry into the current superhero cul-de-sac. Audience research indicates both viewers' critical awareness of the politics embedded in the films under consideration and also the centrality of visual effects to their appreciation. Rather than concluding that the recent flurry of superhero films is rooted in either American exceptionalism or visual effects, this paper concludes with the potential linkage of those topics through nonrepresentational theory and calls for methodological innovation that might assess this type of possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that nonprofit, nongovernmental organisations (NGO5) 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tibetans are often imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated, but Tibetan identity formation is, in fact, varied and deeply inflected by national location and transnational trajectories. In this paper I examine the frictions of encounter between three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the USA around the same time, but who differ in their relationships to the homeland. The numerically dominant group consists of refugees who left Tibet in 1959 and of exiles born in South Asia; second are Tibetans who left Tibet after the 1980s for India and Nepal; and third are those whose routes have taken them from Tibet directly to the United States. Whereas the cultural authority claimed by long-term exiles derives from the notion of preserving tradition outside of Tibet, that of Tibetans from Tibet is based on their embodied knowledge of the actual place of the home- land. Their struggles over authenticity, which play out in everyday practices such as language use and embodied reactions to staged performances of `traditional culture', call for an understanding of diaspora without guarantees. In this paper I use habitus as an analytic for exploring the ways in which identity is inscribed on and read off of bodies, and the political stakes of everyday practices that produce fractures and fault lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I engage with the literature on nationalism and popular culture to discuss the role of Captain America Comics in the production of American national identity and national interest prior to World War 2. The character of Captain America is introduced as an example of a rescaling icon, or a bridge between collective identity and the individual. Additionally, the impact of the context in which the comic was produced is discussed as a force in the construction of American identity before the 1941 entry of the United States into the war. The empirical portion of the paper is a content analysis of the first ten issues of Captain America Comics, all predating the attack on Pearl Harbor. The analysis focuses on the ways in which American behavior is disciplined through the narratives in the comic book, as well as the ways in which nationalities are scripted into a moral geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the establishment of child psychology at the end of the 19th century and with its applied uses in the field of physical education. During this period psychology evolved from a philosophical field content with generalised statements about the human soul to a scientific field concerned with measuring and individuating the psyche, This paper focuses on how while psychology quickly laid claim to establishing the contours of normative menial health it was simultaneously deployed in the service of identifying and bolstering normative physical health. As interiority was systematically brought within the realm of science, the traditional metonymic connection between physicality and morality materialised into a new relationship between the self and its numerical existence. This relationship is explored here through an examination of physical-health testing in New York schools during the Progressive Era. My aim is to draw out the manifold ways in which psychological technologies were absorbed into spatial practice, supporting the claim of this theme issue that the proliferation of psychology can be traced through multiple governing practices and into specific geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer geographers have been surprisingly slow to engage with the global turn that has existed for some time in queer studies outside the discipline. This is beginning to change but the range of sites addressed is limited largely to Euro-American ones. This paper considers the ways in which queer geographers might contribute to already-existing debates over the relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’ in global queer studies. The paper departs from Larry Knopp and Michael Brown's ‘Queer diffusions’, a paper that appeared in a special issue of Society and Space (2003, 21 461-477). Though they limit themselves to the national scale of the United States, their argument that we should destigmatize places and identities cast as ‘backward’ has obvious relevance at the global scale. Its consistencies and inconsistencies with various strands of argument within the global queer-studies literature reveal that geographers might also learn from the spatial nuance developed in these debates. Specifically, this literature review concludes that we must also destigmatize those places and identities that are cast as ‘forward’ if queer globalization is to truly be decentered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to recast the politics of obesity in the United States in light of the unsatisfactory nature of the current, popular debates on this problem. The paper begins by taking stock of contemporary discussions about obesity through a review and analysis of the popular and academic literature on the topic. We show how discussions of obesity that rely on unidimensional structural, biological, and political causes are not only simplistic but also do not adequately historicize the present so-called epidemic of US obesity. To answer the questions 'why now?' and 'why here?', we argue, requires an ontological rapprochement between the more dialectical approaches to political economy, cultural studies, and political ecology. After laying out this more integrated approach, we apply it by showing how today's twin phenomena of the discursive war on obesity and the so-called epidemic itself are better understood through the historical lens of neoliberalism, both as a political - cultural economic project and as a form of governmentality. Our argument is that some of the central contradictions of global capitalism are literally embodied. The problem of obesity in its multiple material and discursive senses can then be seen as a partial fix—in some respects, even as a spatial fix—to some of the contradictions of neoliberalism. At the same time, we contend that the neoliberal shift in personhood from citizen to consumer encourages (over)eating at the same time that neoliberal notions of discipline vilify it. Those who can achieve thinness amidst this plenty are imbued with the rationality and self-discipline of perfect subjects, who in some sense contribute to the more generalized sense of deservingness that characterizes US culture today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the cultural politics of memory and longing in northern New Mexico. The paper begins by examining the ways that, for many Hispanos, land and identity depend on remembered Spanish and Mexican pasts. It continues by showing, through the case of the violent takeover of an old land grant, the political possibilities and contemporary identities that are enabled through the linking of distant past and contemporary land politics. It also demonstrates the ways in which deviating from the past dilutes these same formations and possibilities that accompany these histories‐clearly delineated by treaties, deeds, patrimony, etc. The paper then explores--through the contemporary political struggle surrounding the dismembering of a statue erected to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Spanish arrival in northern New Mexico—the ways in which these very memories also tie Hispanos to alternative violent histories of conquest and colonialism. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates the ways that contemporary land and identity politics in northern New Mexico trap Hispanos between what they need to remember and what others will not let them forget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the Foucauldian notion of biopower to renarrate the development of conservation science in the US as a form of liberal biopolitical rule. With its emphasis on making nature live, conservation marks a shift away from a sovereign form of rule that emphasized subduing and controlling nature; today, nature is ruled not by the sword but by science. Through a discussion of key concepts in conservation biology-- populations in crisis; evolution and its future orientation; extinction as death that is necessary for life; and diversity as purity--we illustrate the truth discourses, underlying logics, and calculative technologies by which distinctions within nonhuman life are made and made meaningful. We argue that conservation is biopolitical not just in that it moves from controlling individuals to statistically managing populations and species, but also in that it extends the racialized logic of abnormality in its core notions of biological diversity and purity. In the logics of conservation and race, life produces diversity, conceived as variety of biological kinds; within that diversity exist kinds that foster ongoing life, which should be maximized, and kinds that are threats, which should be let die in the name of life in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents his view on the process of assessing whether a submitted paper is worth publishing in the U.S. Accordingly, he discussed the nature of peer review and analyzes on what makes this process fast and effective in reviewing a submitted paper. He then explores the possible reasons why there are several career lecturers and people with PhDs who declined to review a submitted paper. He also presents the conditions to be consider before submitting a paper for publishing.

In the wake of the Global War on Terror, Judith Butler has written of the 'precarity' of life, of the inevitable vulnerability of one's life in the face of the actions of strangers. Refusing to accept this, the United States has developed a form of nationalism that claims invulnerability for its citizens while treating as expendable the lives of distant others who even unwittingly associate with those who threaten the US homeland. Butler has extended this set of criticisms to Israel's policy towards Palestinian people and in doing so has been criticised as anti-Semitic. She has engaged with these questions about Jewish identity, nationalism, and toleration through an engagement with writers of the Jewish diaspora, developing what we may describe as a geopolitical perspective on identity. The value of such a perspective was given ironic point by the public controversy over the award to Butler of the Adorno Prize in 2012. This paper argues also that in responding to the biopolitics of the Global War on Terror, Butler has elaborated on some of the geopolitical bases of identity and in doing so has illuminated the academic politics of the current Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign called for by many institutions of Palestinian civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data are central to geographical technologies and provide the pathways in which geographic investigations are forwarded. The mattering of data is therefore important to those engaging in participatory use of these technologies. This paper understands 'mattering' both in the material sense, that data are products resulting from specific practices, and in the affective sense, that data are imaginative, generative, and evocative. I examine these senses of mattering, of both presence and significance, in a discussion of a community survey project held in Seattle, USA. During this four-year project, residents in ten neighborhoods were asked to collect data about their community streets using handheld computers. Residents tracked 'assets' and 'deficits' by locating objects such as damaged sidewalks and graffiti on telephone booths. These data records were then uploaded to a central server administered by a local nonprofit organization. The nonprofit worked with community residents to help link these data about their changing neighborhoods to agencies in the municipal government. Here, I argue that the legitimacy of these data practices is constructed through processes of standardization and objectification and that these processes transduct urban space. I ask, as participatory mapping practices target governing agencies with their data products, what are the implications for the kinds of knowledge produced and for its legitimacy? In other words, how does data come to matter? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the US border control strategy of 'prevention through deterrence' as an instance of biopolitics that has resulted in an alarming increase in migrant deaths over the past sixteen years. I argue that this policy renders unauthorized migrants as 'bare life' individuals whose deaths are deemed of little consequence. Geographic space has been an essential aspect of this policy, both for its presumed (though not realized) deterrent power and in the fact that it provides a moral alibi that enables policy makers to deny responsibility for the deaths. This study contributes to recent conversations on biopower and bare life by (1) highlighting the fact that biopower as it pertains to the constitution of 'the population' is far from being solely a local or national phenomenon, but rather is inherently connected to drawing distinctions between the national and the international and by (2) arguing for the significance of race in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constellates two post-Abu-Ghraib cinematic texts, John Cassar's 24: Redemption (2008) and Gavin Hood's Rendition (2007), and examines how they manage national anxieties of shame and complicity through geopolitically determined displays of compassion. Collectively, these films depict good white citizens of the world who reconcile the disillusioned viewer to the national family by feeling for racialized subjects in pain. Scrutinizing the familial aesthetics that structure both texts, I consider what normative conditions must first be met in order for the racialized subject to be included in the national family and, more expansively, the human family on which the prohibitions against torture are predicated. Following Judith Butler's argument in Frames of War that 'the human' is a norm that can be enunciated or silenced, I map the selective admission of scenes of suffering into the ethico-political visual horizon of the US and argue that their admission or emergence assuages the shame of the post-Abu-Ghraib viewer while obfuscating the US's war crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its preoccupation with issues of space, power, and subjectivity, as well as being a prominent home for immigration-related scholarship, geography includes little research on the intersection of immigration and sexuality as well as on their joint regulation through immigration law. This paper looks at the intersection of immigration and sexuality through the lens of the Cold War practice of homosexual exclusion in US immigration law. By drawing linkages between homosexual exclusion and current immigration law, I argue that homosexual exclusion is not an aberrant part of US immigration law history, that immigration law has important social control functions, and that, as a result, immigration researchers in geography attend to immigration control beyond border enforcement per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For impoverished African states the attraction of inward flows of capital is vital and migrants are one such source of finance. Some governments actively encourage this, which brings out tensions between national affiliation and more particularistic forms of identification. This paper examines this in the context of Ghana. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s there was large-scale out-migration from Ghana, creating what has been termed a 'neo-diaspora'. The migrants have mainly settled in cities in Western Europe and North America where they have developed institutional networks linking them to other diasporic locations and to Ghana. These migrants have complex identities forged from multiple meetings in numerous places. Some of these are rooted in hometown, clan, and family attachments and the obligations this brings. The current government (in line with many developing countries) is making a major play to 'harness' the diaspora for political support and inward investment. Tensions are being played out about dual citizenship and whether the migrants' economic commitments to Ghana are matched by rights as full citizens. The Ghana government has to tread a careful path between attracting investment and garnering the right sort of political support, since people in the diaspora often have an ambivalent relationship to domestic politics. One of the vehicles through which the Ghanaian state seeks to square this is through encouraging hometown associations in various cities in the global North to fund development at the local level through various local-local partnerships. Hence, the nation, the national good, and development are being promoted through particularistic ethnic and locality-based organisations, which brings to light multiple and overlapping political communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call 'distributed preparedness'. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent strategies to enforce the United States boundary with Mexico have shifted undocumented immigrants into remote lands federally designated as protected areas (as in national park or national wildlife refuge). Government and media institutions represent such entries as a threat to nature. In this paper we argue that representations and interpretations of threats to nature in border-protected areas are laden with identity attachments. In repeatedly defining that which is threatened as `American', such discourses work to draw boundaries around the nation, thereby narrating inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that discourses of terrorism financing that emerged in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks encourage the practice of ethnic/religious profiling while categorically delegitimizing and criminalizing Muslim financial networks. In partnership with these discourses are legal and regulatory frameworks that alter accountability parameters for certain classifications of money. Surveillance and monitoring have become sufficiently nuanced, granting the everyday bureaucrat powers of differentiation so as to allow certain money to remain fully mobile while other money is subject to increased tracking and suspicion. The war on terrorism finance is queried as an appropriate tactic in the effort to combat terrorism. I discuss the various facets of the discursive associations forged between terrorism finance hawala wire-transfer services and Islamic charities. Drawing upon Judith Butler's notion of ‘deeming’, I make linkages between discursive associations, sovereignty, and contemporary terrorism prevention practices. Finally, I extend David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession to argue that the frameworks of accountability broadened by the PATRIOT Act and related provisions can be and are being mobilized to seize control of undesirable financial flows and to further US economic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in disability studies has drawn attention to the changing relationship between the visual representations of disability and contemporary US capitalism. One change identified is a newfound cultural recognition of disabled sexuality. In this paper I extend these arguments by considering the kinds of sexuality projected onto the disabled body at the intersection of regimes of disability, sexuality, and neoliberalism. I provide a governmentality/queer reading of visual representations of disabled sexuality and of two self-help disabled sex manuals to argue that interest in disabled sex may witness an investment in the ongoing production of normative sexualities, what Foucault called a 'truth of the self', within the context of neoliberal spatialities of disability. Based on dominant cultural understandings of sex as 'natural', 'predictable', and 'representable', these self-help manuals serve to produce a framework that depoliticizes the claims of disability culture movements. These manuals render the project of disabled sexual liberation a personal project of self-governance that scarcely challenges contemporary structures of (neo)liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the political fortunes and identities of Irish Catholics in US and Canadian cities are explored through a comparative study of Buffalo and Toronto. Local spaces of political administration in the urban arena, such as wards, were significant in affecting the generation of sociopolitical networks of power which in turn had implications for the sense of political identity and involvement felt by Irish Catholics within these two places. The importance of such spaces, however, was also contingent on the interaction between these cities' Irish Catholic populations and wider geographies of social, economic, and ethnoreligious relations over time as well as on the topographies and traditions of political power that extended beyond the municipal scale in both societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with discourses of threat and security deployed by the United States and India after September 11. In the context of the United States these discourses have been used to justify war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and have revolved around the subject of the Muslin male as perpetually dangerous. Eager to support the United States in its war against terror, India echoed the construction of the Muslin male as dangerous, which served to fulfill India's own internal and regional supremacy agendas. Bolstered, therefore, by the emerging discourse of Muslin terrorists, in 2002 the Hindu Right was complicit in orchestrating genocide against Muslims in Gujarat where 2000 Muslims were killed and 150000 Muslims were rendered homeless. Examining these and other incidents, I examine the similarity in discourses of threat and security deployed by the United States and India. I argue that the similarity in discourses emerges because of a particular understanding of time and space. I make two interconnected arguments: first, time and the very understanding and construction of history are distorted, collapsed, and twisted such that revenge for past atrocities and the threat of future ones are used to justify preemptive military action. Second, there is a particular geography to this doctrine of threat and security that is being established by demarcating us against them. This new spatial arrangement is being formed contingent on a particular understanding of time and history as a linear singular narrative and on the creation of political alliances between India, the United States, and Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of stable markets in ecosystem services is now a major neoliberal policy initiative in the United States and elsewhere. Such markets, however, require ecosystem scientists to play a new and challenging role in certifying the value of the commodities traded, which are defined using the holistic measures of ecology rather than the uncontroversial measures of weight, volume, or time. As ecosystem science increasingly serves as a metrical technology for the commodification of ecosystem services, its fine and fragile distinctions increasingly bear the weight of capital circulation. In this paper I report on fieldwork among ecosystem assessment technicians, and suggest that this new round of the commodification of nature may overwhelm the capacity of science to provide stable representations of commodity value. The methods and techniques of ecosystem assessment must describe a nature that capital can 'see'—that has an uncontroversial measure—in order for trade to occur. However, these assessment methods currently produce unstable data that are rendered meaningful in economic terms only by dint of creative and ad hoc efforts at translation by field technicians. It is suggested that this may represent a practical limit or crisis point in the expansion of capital relations, or at least a complication in the streamlined neoliberal narratives about the commodification of ecosystem services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore discourses and resistances mobilized around the construction of an Orthodox Jewish symbolic and material concrete space, the `eruv', in two localities (one in the United Kingdom, one in the USA) where it has been at the center of heated debate and contestation. Conflicts around the reordering and redefining of this public space expose some of the limits of living with difference and normative versions of multiculturalism in the city. Through a detailed examination of two case studies in the United Kingdom and the United States I conclude that the multicultural city necessitates a recognition of symbolic as well as material spaces-and the interconnections between these-and that the notion of public space warrants interrogation as to how it is imagined, read, and experienced in multiple ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony in analyzing the relationships between US labor unions, the US foreign policy establishment, and workers in the global South. The hegemonic position of US capitalists, in relation to both US workers and states in the global South, heavily conditioned the development of American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations foreign policy during the cold war, with path-dependent effects that have carded over into the post-cold-war era of ‘globalization’. Although recent changes in the relationships between US capitalists and US labor unions have undermined the US ‘labor accord’ that reigned during the cold war, the new, ascendant transnational neoliberal hegemony has not as yet completely transformed the relationships of labor unions in the United States to those elsewhere in the world, which poses ongoing challenges for international labor solidarity, even in a context of new possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary offerings at Ellis Island Immigration Museum do little to indicate that the millions of immigrants and, later, tourists who have passed through Ellis Island cannot all have been reproductively focused and gender normative; the site, too, seems oddly unembodied. In this paper I consider representations and absences around sex at Ellis Island, arguing for strategies of embodiment that attend to the particular bodies inhabited and to the complexity, messiness, and contradictions of sexed bodies in their historical specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1998 the City of Chicago installed street furniture (including twenty-two twenty-threefoot-high, illuminated, rainbow-ringed pylons) designed to mark a gay neighborhood known as Boys Town. In this paper I describe the historical context for this project and the debates it occasioned in a US context where, sociologists suggest, sexual and ethnic identities are increasingly convergent. 1 challenge, from a visual-studies perspective, the values attached to invisibility by critics who would prefer that sexual identity remain unmarked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the emergence of a popular geography of AIDS in the US mass media in the 1980s, exploring the role of global mobility in the construction of AIDS as a national threat. Efforts to map the geography of the epidemic served to reinforce the illusion that the borders of the nation might effectively be defended against the incursions of HIV via the bodies of those marked as outside the proper citizenry. The representation of Africa as the 'cradle of AIDS', the images of crack houses in narratives about urban AIDS in the United States, and stories of White gay men 'going home to die' in the 'heartland' constructed a geography of danger linking race, sexuality, and 'home' that promised security for those within particular borders. Emphasizing the power of racialized maternal compassion as a model for the national response to AIDS, these stories described normative heterosexual domesticity as a means of fixing sexuality in place. This geography proposed that individual family units might reinforce national borders which seemed increasingly fluid in the context of global flows of populations, a construction that illustrates the intersection of space and sexuality in the representation of an emerging global health crisis and produces spatializations of danger that continue to shape the construction of 'global AIDS'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1990s, local and federal urban policymakers, neoliberal politicians, and advocates for the poor came to a broad consensus: the geographic concentration of low-income, minority residents in public housing projects located in the inner city constitutes the fundamental problem facing US cities. Accordingly, to solve the problems allegedly associated with the spatial concentration of poverty, public housing, which concentrates low-income people in the inner city, must be demolished and the residents relocated. In this paper I argue that such federal public housing policies are based on a conceptually inadequate understanding of the role of space and of spatial influences on poverty and on the behavior of poor people. The use of spatial metaphors such as the 'concentration of poverty' or the 'deconcentration of the poor' disguises the social and political processes behind poverty and helps to provide the justification for simplistic spatial solutions to complex social, economic, and political problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]