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This paper examines the continuity of the Israeli settler colonial project into the contemporary moment – as manifested in the city of Tel Aviv – and its transfiguration into current socio-political and spatial processes in the urban arena. It offers a close reading of a case study from which such continuity emerges, exposing the settler colonial terms of production of Tel Aviv in current entrepreneurial real-estate projects. The case study under analysis is of the Giv'at-Amal neighbourhood, established on the emptied Palestinian village of Jamassin in the war of 1948, now facing eviction by private entrepreneurs constructing a luxurious residential compound. The paper aims to expose the ways in which the urban entrepreneurialism in Giv'at-Amal reproduces the settler colonial logic of devaluation, erasure and replacement of existing inhabitants of the land. It further conceptualises the area as an urban frontier, in which current neoliberal restructuring plays an active role in the ongoing production of the settler colonial urban space. By so doing, it aims to undermine the notion that settler colonial projects of replacing existing people and geographies are completed historical events, and to re-articulate them as ongoing contemporary processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary discussions of human–environment relations see habits as enabling forces of change (becoming) in contrast to traditional views of habit as routine and restrictive elements of identity (being). Vital life (becoming) is realised in habit through body repetition (Ravaisson) or through material force (Deleuze). This paper argues for the significance of the pragmatist work of John Dewey that shares this dispositional, enabling view of habit, but denies any dualism between life and mechanism. The paper explores Dewey's idea of habits as mechanisms of natural forms of organisation that have different life force, depending on the situational qualities of environment–human transactions. This approach also implicates habit in problematisation. The paper goes on to discuss the implications of pragmatist thinking for understanding human–environment relations and the place that habits have in intervening in and reforming those relations through social activism and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the enormous drapes that had been covering a new building in central Melbourne were thrown off in early 2015, an extraordinary sight was revealed: a colossal image of a face staring down the city's civic spine. This moment of unveiling marked a fascinating moment for Indigenous–settler relations in Australia, but especially urban, densely settled Melbourne. For the face is that of William Barak, ancestor and leader of the Wurundjeri people, whose country was stolen and remade into what we now know as Melbourne. That an early land rights champion is represented in the built form at such a pivotal location in the city that dispossessed his people offers an opportunity to consider the forms of violence, appropriation and misrepresentation that are perpetually constitutive of settler-colonial cities. Drawing together critical Indigenous scholarship, settler-colonial studies and geographies of memorialization, the paper analyses the building to demonstrate the contemporary workings of settler-colonial urbanization. The paper analyses the representational politics the building performs, the history of land sales since contact and the role of the site in a wider imperialist planning project to reveal the intimate nexus of land, property and recognition politics that work to continuously secure white possession of Indigenous lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2017, Uber Technologies Inc. launched a new service called Uber Movement. Designed by a team of 10 engineers, the new service provided a select number of cities access to Uber's vast trove of transportation data. One of the first cities to partner with Uber on this initiative was Washington, DC. Playing directly to the city's longstanding "smart city" aspirations, the initiative was greeted warmly by city officials eager to market the region as a symbol of data-driven urban growth and smart technology. Largely missing from this response, however, was any mention of Uber drivers themselves. Over the course of the paper, and drawing on 40 interviews conducted with Washington, DC-based Uber drivers, we examine the labor conditions that we argue are central to the production of Uber's smart data. Beyond placing labor more centrally in critiques of the smart city, the paper suggests that the experience of Uber drivers offers us a window into the type of smart city on offer. As we argue, the city that emerges from our interviews is less a city defined by data-driven growth, than it is a city defined by alienation and isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the significance of the newly conceived Canada Infrastructure Bank in relation to the political economy of settler colonialism in Canada. I argue that the Canada Infrastructure Bank is a fundamentally colonial institution that marshals private capital to reproduce and extend the jurisdictional power of the setter state. The Bank is an arms-length financing institution whose purpose is to leverage private and institutional capital for investment in large scale, nation-building infrastructure, including infrastructure that supports resource extraction in remote and northern Canada. The first section of the paper examines the specific configuration of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. I suggest that the need to attract private investment into certain kinds of infrastructure development must be understood in relation to state struggles to exercise territorial jurisdiction over Indigenous lands and resources. This struggle is reflected in the specific configuration of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. The second part of the paper focuses on some of the implications of pension securitization. The Canada Infrastructure Bank has deliberately been designed to leverage Canadian pension fund capital; I ask what it means to grow settler workers' savings through investment in privatized, resource development infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seaports at global margins rarely feature in contemporary discussions of the logistics industry. This paper brings together recent geographical writing on logistics with discussions of margins as paradoxical sites of inclusive exclusion. Building on fieldwork on the docks of Freetown, Sierra Leone – a port that experts in logistics problematize as a 'contaminated' place within the global shipping community – this contribution shows that seaports at global margins are in fact at the centre of key projects of global circulation. While logistics embodies universal aspirations to connectivity, it is profoundly dependent on the uneven terrains of global capitalism. To make this case, this contribution traces the interventions of a global terminal operator and the US Coast Guard to reposition a port at the margins and discusses their effects on logistical and political orders. In doing so, this paper offers a critical perspective on the power geometries of the global logistics industry. Logistics in this view is not only a political technology that creates seamless interconnectivity and transforms heterogeneous places with diverse socialities, political configurations and technological infrastructures into zones of global circulation. The implementation of logistics is also an intrinsically controversial, precarious and contested project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Amazon is currently experiencing a rapid growth in the building of transport infrastructures. While national governments have portrayed infrastructure development as greatly enhancing economic and geographical integration, critical approaches largely describe such development as a destructive process of resource extraction and dispossession. While these views differ radically in relation to the ends and effects of current and future infrastructure projects, they both conceive infrastructure as reflective of an inexorable process of state and capitalist expansion region-wide. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which this very process is conditioned, and sometimes hindered, by a wide array of normative, social and political (dis) orders. In this paper, I draw attention to the ever conflicting and contingent nature of infrastructure building through an ethnographic account of the land conflicts present in an ongoing road project in the Colombian region of Putumayo. Specifically, I look at the tensions and disputes arising from the project's attempts to make a target space and population legible in order to make them governable. By showing how such attempts have consistently failed and led the project into various states of suspension and uncertainty, the paper sheds light on the deep embedding of infrastructure in everyday dynamics of state-making and unmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the field of migration management features a politics of expertise through which migration is enacted as a reality that can be managed because it can be precisely quantified. For instance, the International Organization for Migration maintains a "Global Migration Flows Interactive App." This interactive map suggests that the number of people migrating from country A to B can be exactly known at any point in time. This enactment of migration sits in contrast with the widely acknowledged unreliability and noncoherence of migration statistics. This paper investigates how this tension is negotiated through the production of "strategic ignorance" (McGoey) about the known limits of quantifying migration. Drawing on work from ignorance studies we highlight four practices producing strategic ignorance: (1) omission of the significant gap between recorded immigration and emigration events, (2) compression of different accounts of migration into one "world migration map," (3) deflection of knowledge about the specifities of different methods to production sites of statistical data, and (4) usage of metadata for sanitizing the statistical production process of any messy aspects. Our analysis shows that the politics of expertise in the field of migration management are intertwined with a politics of ignorance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary labour markets around the world are pushing more and more people into cycles of un/underemployment, or what has been labelled precarious life. This paper adds to work on precarity's lived experience, first, by highlighting the production of a precarious lower-middle class group in the global South – young educated underemployed men in Egypt. It then uses five months of ethnography to trace the emotional endurance of precarity with rural migrants in Cairo who work in call centres. Departing from recent emphasis on political forms of resistance or creative survival arising from precarious lives, the paper extends both culturally specific accounts of hope and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism to a post-revolutionary Egyptian context, showing how, despite lingering anger regarding structural explanations for precarity, my interlocutors repeatedly coped with a sense of suspension through engaging in forms of consumption which distracted their minds, and hanging on to a globalised meritocratic terrain through self-help, Hollywood movies, and religious narratives, which offered 'cruel hope', promising success to those who work hard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ways of knowing "the Roma" as a category of people. It attends to mobility and its obstructions, and the ways that coincide with bureaucratic, institutional, and everyday modes of sorting and racializing groups of people. Our case study is situated in Romania. Whereas "the Roma" do not exist as a category in the Romanian national registry of citizens, mainstream public discourses regarding "Roma migration" have significantly proliferated over the past decades. Yet, how do authorities come to know "the Roma" and how do they render groups of citizens into racialized populations? We examine two bureaucratic practices in Romania, the census and the registry of citizens, and show how the latter is enacted through various "technologies of vision." We focus on the category of "the Roma" as a material semiotic configuration enacted by various "data" regarding issues such as territorial segregation, phenotypic appearance, smell, and dialect. Situated at the intersection of Border and Surveillance Studies, Romani Studies, and Science and Technologies Studies, this paper contributes to debates about how "the Roma" are rendered visible in practices of identification and migration management in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Moria hotspot in Greece as a logistical site which fulfills two different functions within the European migration and border regime. It locates, contains, and sorts individuals locally at the external borders of the EU and creates, inserts, and processes data for controlling people on the move. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece, including interviews with local administrators from the Registration and Identification Service, Médecins du Monde, Frontex and Hellenic Police and a collection of internal and publicly available planning, policy, and management documents and handbooks, the paper scrutinizes how both the movement of migrants and data is organized at the site. By developing an analytic lens of logistics, it outlines a specific mode of infrastructuring which aligns staff from different organizations with databases, devices, and migrants all in one place and organizes mundane practices such as filling out forms, taking fingerprints, signing, and entering datasets along a chain. That way the hotspot is able to locate, sort, and detain those who arrive at the hardened EU border and to create a data infrastructure for controlling, monitoring, and governing further movement by processing data through the bureaucratic channels of the EU's transnational control assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we engage with the Goŋ Gurtha songspiral, shared on/by/with/as Bawaka Country in Yolŋu Northeast Arnhem Land, Australia, to provide a basis for re-thinking responsibility in the context of ongoing Eurocentric colonising processes. Goŋ Gurtha encourages us to consider two key aspects of responsibility – response and ability. We argue that Yolŋu relational ontologies conceive response-abilities as requiring an ability to pay close and careful attention as part of more-than-human worlds, and an imperative to respond as part of these worlds. As such, rather than being responsible to or for others, we seek to respond as, emphasising our emergent co-becoming in more-than-human, situated, ethical ways. Goŋ Gurtha guides the paper through four aspects of these response-abilities: response-abilities as songspirals; response-abilities as continuity; response-abilities as academics and response-abilities beyond Bawaka. In doing so, we understand response-abilities as more-than-human co-becomings enacted in contingent ways that none-the-less need to be grounded in deep obligations of more-than-human kinship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi's unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods' quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered infrastructural assemblages that enable water's circulation across neighborhoods but also serve to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation. Here, gendered infrastructural practices and labor to negotiate and supplement fragmented components of water infrastructure shape subjectivities and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. These infrastructural assemblages expose both the situated experience of urban liminality, as well as its transcendent possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Detroit, Michigan, the urban poor fear they are being displaced and replaced by water. As part of the city's recent redevelopment efforts, planners have proposed creating green and blue infrastructure zones to manage urban flooding and mitigate the volume of overflow storm and sewer waters that pollute the Great Lakes each year. The areas slated for these water retention zones are the same marginal neighborhoods where Black residents face frequent foreclosures due to water debts and mass shutoffs from water and sewer services. This paper explores how water materializes and mediates uneven landscapes of livability, as well as new modes of living in common among those excluded from the urban commons. I introduce the concepts of "bluelining" and "blues infrastructures" in order to think through the contested assemblages of water, race, and space at the margins of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both in public imagination and scholarship, begging is often associated with passivity, waiting, inactivity and as such defined as the opposite of 'real work'. During two years of fieldwork with people sleeping rough in Paris, I observed my informants to the contrary describe begging as their occupation. In this paper, I present an ethnographically grounded argument that the people experiencing homelessness I accompanied over the course of two years experienced begging as labour which involved constructing and supporting emotional narratives of neediness, deservingness and personal connections in scripts, stories and hustles. My interlocutors often understood this labour to be a hopeful one, one that structured their day (and thoughts) but also one that enabled their projets de vies, their struggles into the future. In the wake of overwhelming suffering and structural violence, I observed begging not only a short-term fix for consumption but also as keeping the future open – the more long-term future of eventually leaving the street behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Nogueira argues that this labour of hope - designed to reclaim access to productive activities - was crucial in sustaining their political resistance, she demonstrates how it also bound them to an "affective governance" regime which works through constantly displacing hope for relocation into an undetermined future as state actors offer preconditions, delay decisions, and push vendors to other spheres of government. This collection of papers traces the "labours of hope" which are both enabling and challenging the reproduction of capitalist relations in the contemporary moment. While work combines the theoretical and practical activity of humans that goes into sustaining life, labour is a specific aspect of work constituted by the alienation of the labourer and appropriation of surplus labour by capital through wages ([6]). [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines two space science infrastructures in Hawai'i, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). It considers how scientific observation and colonial occupation are co-constituted through the production of apparatuses – extensive material practices and arrangements that iteratively produce subject–object relations. By analyzing TMT and HI-SEAS as apparatuses, we show how both involve the active ordering of space, time, and matter in ways that are dependent upon existing settler colonial relations while enacting specific subject positions key to the projection of settler colonialism across space and time. TMT materializes the Archimedean point, or view-from-nowhere, on which Western scientific "objectivity" depends, while HI-SEAS works to produce ideal colonizer-subjectivities and orient their bodies to the spatialities of the colony. Engaging Native Hawai'ian, Indigenous, and allied anti-colonial critiques, we argue that social science of outer space research must critically address the colony, as its basic logics are foundational to the practices of contemporary space science and imaginaries of space exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'We are in the process' was the phrase used by my Nepali interlocutors, soon-to-be migrants, who were waiting for their departure abroad for months on end. Based on conversations with irregular migrants, this paper explores the relationship between time and power, focusing on the political economy of waiting. It suggests that making people wait has become a key technique of governmentality used by the migration industry actors to control aspiring migrants' movement, exploit their desires and hopes, and extract surplus value, turning the migration industry in Nepal into a major system of profiteering. Forcing aspiring migrants to wait in a state of suspense (not boredom) for departures that are imminent but not certain, unscrupulous brokers create an affective state in suspended subjects, which allows those in power to prey on migrants' vulnerability and their hope for a better life, pushing many of the aspiring migrants into grave debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the writings of homeless and formerly homeless memoirists from the United States and United Kingdom, this paper examines how the voices and ideas of those who experience homelessness are consistently removed from public debate and historical memory. While people without homes are discussed at length in journalistic and academic texts, their own voices are rarely at the center of such conversations. Memoirists argue that this exclusion is not passive or benign. They attest to persistent efforts to make their voices heard, even as newspapers, television stations, and other institutions of knowledge obstruct their efforts. In this way, homeless voices are actively and repeatedly displaced by the commentary of elite experts. Based on these insights, I engage with literature in geography and subaltern studies to advance a new understanding of subalternity as a process of epistemic displacement. Moving beyond deconstructive approaches to representation, I argue that challenging subalternity involves disseminating subaltern scholarship, journalism, and expertise to confront society's failure to listen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stasis has reemerged in recent accounts of resistance. In this paper that draws from ethnographic research with a youth antiauthoritarian community in Cyprus and their long-term occupation of a city square, I provide a broader theorization of this multi-semantic concept that has hitherto been missing from accounts on stasis commonly found in literature on the squares movement(s). I argue that stasis constitutes a key form of resistance to modern forms of power by pausing the circulation of capitalism and scheduled time and subverting the production of subjectivities that support such circulation. By drawing on Nicole Loraux's interpretation of stasis as "movement at rest," I overturn the negative connotations often associated with stasis as (unwanted) immobility by showing how stasis can be a desired political action that includes forms of mobility and circulation within it. Developing this theorization further, I analyze stasis as a threshold to critical political subjectivization, as productive of ipostasis (existence) that enables the subjects under stasis to appear in political terms and exercise their right to politics. I thus contribute to recent literature on the political potential and existential necessity of occupying practices that allow for a politicizing of the urban everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the engagement of critical geographers from Northeastern Brazil with regional planning, aiming at transforming society by acting on their region's spaces. Extending and putting in relation literature on planning theory in the Global South and geographical scholarship on decoloniality, I explore new archives showing how the planning work that these geographers performed from 1957 to 1964 was an example of the 'South' re-elaborating and putting into practice notions arising from 'international' literature, such as that of 'active geography', and pioneering critical uses of instruments, such as mappings and statistics, that have often been associated with technocracy and political conservatism. Connected with peasants' struggles and with a theoretical framework that is cognisant of the colonial histories and insurgent Black and indigenous traditions in the Northeast, these geographers' works show that there is no 'Southern Theory' without a concrete engagement of scholars with social and political problems, one which is not limited to 'participation', but aims at challenging the political powers in place. Although not devoid of contradictions that are analysed here, the experiences of these Southern geographers acting in and for the South can provide precious insights into current (Northern or Southern) scholarly programmes aimed at resisting oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-war property reforms in transitional Cambodia plunged the country into new conflict: a war of land. Under the guise of 'beautification', 11% of the capital's residents have been displaced in under two decades in a wave of violent gentrification, enacted through forced eviction and dispossession. Mounting resistance shows signs of taking effect, however, evincing a turning point in state–society relations. Here, the government has trialled a new approach, moving from techniques of violent expropriation towards a conciliatory method, built on dialogue, consultation and negotiation. Responding to calls for more work on resistance to gentrification and success in the fight to stay put, in this paper, I investigate these claims, bringing the literatures on gentrification and post-politics to bear on the evictions crisis in Cambodia. Drawing on testimony of former residents and media analysis, I examine techniques of removal and resistance in a case study of the eviction and demolition of Cambodia's White Building (1963–2017). I argue that recent shifts are not an abandonment of the state's compulsion to expropriation, exclusion and expulsion but a subtle modification of its gentrification strategy: away from the naked coercion associated with its own kleptocratic variant of authoritarian neoliberalism towards the post-political manufacture of hollow consent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nuclear power plants, with their promise of boundless cheap energy, are archetypal figures of progress modernity. As we acknowledge the limits of industrial progress and growth-based capital, places for where the dream is now over, and whose inhabitants are finding ways of living through its transition, offer emergent practical ontologies based on maintenance, bricolage and necessity. Through the case study of the atomic city of Visaginas, Lithuania, this paper addresses the question of how to account for forms of life that emerge in the aftermath of high modernity. Here, infrastructures operate as residual cultural and material resources for practical ontologies and world building after progress. Building on emerging scholarship on the political aesthetics of infrastructure, I suggest that their ontological transition involves what Fisher describes as the 'memory of lost futures', a future anterior that, through the remains of material connections, technocultures and cultural memory, provide limits and conditions for emergent ways of living 'after progress.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks how the logics of globalized supply chains—particularly through fixes, risk, speed and stoppages, and motility—are articulated in carceral space. We employ critical logistics in conversation with carceral geographies and critical mobilities to examine prison transfers, the routine movement of incarcerated people between carceral sites, as a logistical system designed to fix carceral crises; which is to say, to make prisons viable. This work emerges from preliminary research on prison transfers, conducted from 2018 to 2019, including interviews with advocates and formerly incarcerated people and analysis of data and administrative documents obtained from the New York Department of Corrections, among others. First, we locate the emergence of contemporary practices of logistical transfer management ("transfer logistics") in the prison boom of the 1980s–1990s. We then examine the present-day transfer system to consider how risk calculation and carceral fixes inform movement throughout prison constellations as well as how transfers disrupt the fragile worlding that happens in prisons. Finally, we turn to how these logics are being reshaped and reiterated in the era of neoliberal urban planning through "justice hubs." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the mutually affecting intensities in family households that occur through the use of energy for parenting, care and making home in the societal context of energy capitalism. Our work draws on sensual energy ethnographies with 13 families in regional New South Wales, Australia. We extend Deleuze and Guattarri's related concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight into energy geographies to draw attention to the socio-material, subjective and affective dimensions of being and becoming a parent, providing care and making home. In doing so, we open up questions around how families use energy and how this relates to the politics of care. We consider the possibilities for lines of flight to bring about social change to escape energy capitalism and help care for humans, more-than-humans and the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the policy concept and community enactments of 'shared responsibility' for disaster resilience in the context of wildfires in Victoria, Australia. Since the state-wide Black Saturday fires of 2009, we contend, first, the State's decreasing ability to protect its citizens has shifted the responsibility for adapting to uncertainty to individuals, and second, this responsibility has been translated into compliance approaches to disaster risk management. We develop the concept of two distinct imaginaries at play: the reactive and the relational life. Policy discourse invokes a reactive life, a normative resilience maintaining the status quo, rather than a potentially transformative relational process enabling citizens to be 'response-able'. Facing uncertainties, government legitimacy hinges on increasing citizen safety, with decentralised community resilience programs intended to manage and reduce disaster risk by emphasising shared responsibility. For citizens, however, 'shared responsibility' reveals an increasing tension in relation to the risk and uncertainty associated with life on the newly designated 'fire-prone' periphery, and within expectations of government. We conclude that the emphasis on responsibility as the work to be done in community-based resilience programs demands a more nuanced set of expectations that reflect citizens' relational life as a starting place for rethinking safety and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper articulates the subversive and political potential of an object-orientated view of urban creativity. Drawing upon object-orientated philosophies, it further develops the political and subversive potential of the creativity rhetoric to argue that nonhuman material agency is an important factor in propelling subversive behaviour into sustained political change. By focusing on the agency of objects and their ability to challenge our own behaviour in the city, the paper posits a three-stage articulation of subversive creativity; the spark, the spread and ethics. From this, the paper argues that creativity can be posited less as a mechanism of change that is all too often co-opted and reappropriated by normalising forces, but as a subversive force that has a potential to create alternative and sustained political subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming 'smart'. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 'future' as a blueprint for social power relations in postcolonial urbanism. It addresses a crucial gap in the rich scholarship on postcolonial urbanism that has largely ignored the 'centrality of time' (Chakrabarty, 2000) in the politics and speed of urban transformations. This paper takes postcolonial urbanism as a 'colonisation of/with time' (Adam, 2004) that reaches across spaces, scales and times of the past, present and future to produce cities as spatio-temporal entities. Using the lens of 'futuring' (Urry, 2016) as a practice of imagining and governing cities through speed, this paper analyses India's national 100 Smart Cities Mission through a set of popular myths that create a dialectic relation between past and future. It suggests that smart cities in India are marked by the deployment of two parallel mythologies of speed - nationhood and technology. While the former refers to a mythical moral state, the latter refers to transparent and accountable governance in order to produce smart cities in the image of the moral state. The paper concludes that while postcolonial future time is imagined at the scale of the smart city, there is a simultaneous recalibration of its governance at the scale of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the creation of an original theoretical framework, this paper demonstrates the value of a deeper engagement between autonomist Marxism and (urban) geography. By spatialising arguably the autonomists' key theoretical contribution – class composition – the paper develops the ideas of technical and political spatial compositions. These dialectically intertwined concepts provide a framework with which to analyse the relationships between shifting urban spaces and struggles, and clarity is therefore added to another key autonomist concept, the evocative yet nebulous 'social factory'. Applying these to Buenos Aires, the paper focuses on various spatial conjunctures, exploring their emergence and the immanent potentials for radical spatial politics they afford and preclude. In particular, the paper provides a detailed reading of the complex role Buenos Aires' 'informal' settlements play in both perpetuating and resisting a neoliberal, financially extractive economy. The benefit of a 'spatial composition' framework is twofold: it provides a periodising heuristic with which to originally and usefully approach urban struggles, and, in unpacking the 'social factory', it can be applied widely as a form of radical geographical praxis. The paper thus makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to an exciting, emerging autonomist (urban) geography, as well as to studies of Buenos Aires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses long-term research in an Indian village to develop Karl Mannheim's notion of each generation's 'fresh contact' with their inherited social and environmental setting. I examine how a generation of young people re-apprehend their local environment following a period of migration. I argue that young people aged between 25 and 34 who have lived outside their locality re-appraise their village economically and spiritually when they return home. I point to the social nature of this 'fresh contact', its spatial character, and the high degree of reflexivity that young men display in discussing their own agency as a generation – a point that emerged especially clearly in their discussion of the term 'mahaul,' a Hindi word meaning 'atmosphere'. The paper contributes to geographical and anthropological work on youth agency by highlighting the utility of notions of fresh contact in specific social conjunctures, such as the migration of a particular cohort. At the same time, it suggests the importance of placing alongside Mannheim's work an explicit focus on the spatial nature of fresh contact, the sociality that constitutes cohorts as generations, and young people's reflexive capacity to theorise their generational agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how datafication is creating new topologies of education policy. Specifically, we analyse how the creation of data infrastructures that enable the generation, communication and representation of digital data are changing relations of power, including both centralised and dispersed forms, and space in education. The paper uses conceptual resources from cultural topology and infrastructure studies to provide a framework for analysing spatial relations between educational data, discourses, policies and practices in new governance configurations. The paper outlines a case study of an emergent data infrastructure in Australian schooling, the National Schools Interoperability Program, to provide empirical evidence of the movement, connection and enactment of digital data across policy spaces. Key aspects of this case include the ways that data infrastructure is: (i) enabling new private and public connections across policy topologies; (ii) creating a new role for technical standards in education policy and (iii) changing the topological spaces of education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink anthopocentricism within the cultures and societies they study and to take account of more-than-human agencies and perspectives. This poses key methodological challenges, including a tendency for animal geographies to focus very much on the human side of human–animal relations and to fail to acknowledge animals as embodied, lively, articulate political subjects. In this paper, we draw on recent ethnographic work, observing and participating in the care of research animals and interviewing the animal technologists, to contribute to the understandings of life within the animal house. In so doing, the paper makes three key arguments. Firstly, that studying how animal technologists perform everyday care and make sense of their relationships with animals offers useful insights into the specific skills, expertise and relationships required in order to study human–animal relations. Secondly, that animal technologists are keenly aware of the contested moralities which emerge in animal research environments and can offer an important position from which to understand this. Thirdly, that storytelling (exemplified by the stories told by animal technologists) is a useful resource for animal geographers to engage with complexity in human–animal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to offer a new perspective on the interrelated questions of globalized capitalism and anti-Blackness. We engage with current geographical work on the question of Blackness, highlighting the ways in which prevailing forms of global capital accumulation--which take shape in numerous spatial and political practices around the world--coincide with acts of anti-Blackness. In recognizing the connections between capitalism and anti-Black violence, however, we choose not to frame anti-Blackness as an effect of capitalist relations. Rather, we insist that anti-Blackness remains a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism, as the perpetual expansion of capitalist practices requires "empty" spaces open for appropriation--a condition made possible through the modern assumption of Black a-spatiality. Drawing on theoretical discussions of both global capital and anti-Blackness, empirical examples of shifting global spatial-racial regimes, and the discursive and material practices of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Afro-Brazilian community Ilha de Maré, this paper attempts to forge new geographical conversations regarding current capitalist practices and the matter of Black lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urban populations expand, high natural amenity locales--forests, bushland, and coasts--are being transformed into highly desired, lucrative locations for new housing. This paper examines what it means to live in such an environment, tallying between the realised dream of that lifestyle and the everyday challenges (financial and labour) of navigating the elements at home. To do so, we bring two conceptual approaches into conversation: cultural geographies of home and homemaking, recognising home as a more-than-human process; and architecturally inflected geographies of buildings, attendant to building materials and socio-technical practices of maintenance and repair. Drawing on semi-structured walking interviews with 24 residents of a new coastal housing development in southern Sydney, Australia, the paper examines how coastal conditions and elements accelerate material decay, inciting and directing everyday homemaking practices: both proactive, in material selection, and reactive, in cleaning, repairing, maintaining, and replacing. We conclude by considering the differing economic rationalities of navigating the elements, and subsequent implications for household sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently debates have emerged concerning how atmospheric objects referred to collectively as 'elemental' become entangled in the operation of communication infrastructure. The paper extends these debates through research into UK emergency responders' information sharing during emergencies. Harnessing textual analysis and an interview, the paper unpacks the protocols established to organise information sharing and explores how such protocols interweave an assemblage of technologies to share information as emergencies unfold. The evidence presented demonstrates different ways that the elemental forces physically constitutive of emergencies are incorporated into information sharing. However, it also details cases wherein these elemental forces disrupt the information sharing practices they otherwise enable and outlines the effects this disruption has on emergency response provision. Considering the case, I make three arguments to establish a distinctive approach for conceptualising the entanglement of the elements within information sharing. First, I extend understandings of the capacities that elements actualise to enable information sharing. Second, I elaborate on the notion of excess to explain how elemental forces disrupt information sharing. Accounting for its political ramifications, I demonstrate thirdly, how, by disrupting information sharing, elemental forces obstruct government attempts to comprehend the emergencies they attend and, in turn, provide resources to ensure adequate response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the processes through which movements emerge and are rendered perceptible or imperceptible, building upon the writings of geographers, mobility scholars and philosophers who have sought to overcome or efface the binary of mobility/stasis without flattening differences or overlooking questions of 'the political'. The paper does this by distinguishing between 'molar' and 'molecular' movements, drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Fe'lix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to trace how perceptions of movement and stasis emerge in a world that is in process and becoming. The molar and molecular are not presented as opposed terms in binary tension, but as overlapping tendencies or 'segmentations'. I argue that a focus on movements and political forces that are becoming-molar and becoming-molecular requires mobility scholars and political theorists to move beyond narrow definitions founded upon binaries of mobility/stasis, the political/apolitical, and micro/macro. In doing this, the paper seeks to advance debates in geography, mobility studies and contemporary philosophy on processual thinking, vibrant matter, micropolitics and the politics of affect. Drawing upon the example of the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank, I then examine how molecular movements and affects are important for understanding the multiple movements and complex materialities of seemingly static molar entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how notions of beauty and performances at pageants transform as they move across different colonial times and spaces. It examines how gender, racial, and sexual subjectivities take shape among cisgender Filipina women who participate and organize community-based pageants on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). I analyze observations and interviews conducted with Filipina/os who organize and participate in community pageants. Based on this examination, I argue that spatial processes make apparent the shifting nature of gendered, racialized, and sexualized pageant performances. Pageant ideals change with migration as white heteropatriarchal logics, which are enmeshed in settler colonial projects of Canada, make grooves into the ways Filipino gendered sexualities come to be in Canada. More broadly, the paper speaks to the ways in which power works with and through space through the logics of race, gender, and sexuality. It outlines how racialized women's feminine heterosexuality is made legible by liberal scripts designed for immigrants in the white settler colonial context of Canada. Thus, the paper sets in motion questions of how intersections of power are shaped by contemporary forms of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to ongoing concerns that Michel Foucault's influential governmentality analytics fail to enable the study of 'resistance', this paper analyses his last two lecture courses on 'parrhesia' (risky and courageous speech). While Foucault resisted resistance as an analytical category, he increasingly pointed us towards militant, alternative and insolent forms of counter-conduct. The paper comparatively analyses Foucault's reading of Plato, Socrates and the Cynics, exploring parrhesia's episteme (its truth-knowledge relations), techne (its practice and geographies), identities (its souls and its bodies) and its possible relations to the present. It concludes that Foucault viewed resistance as power; power which problematised governmentalities but could also be analysed as a governmentality itself. In pursuing parrhesia, Foucault reaffirmed his commitment to studying discourse as always emplaced and enacted, while sketching out the geographies (from the royal court and the democratic Assembly to the public square and the street) that staged the risk of truth-talking. This suggests new subjects and spaces to open up political possibilities when exploring the geographies of governmentalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While batteries are ubiquitous in modern life, they often go unnoticed; that is, until they stop working. Each time a battery dies and becomes waste, our modernist expectations of convenient, reliable energy sources, and our unexamined dependence on these volatile combinations of heavy metals, plastics, and chemical pastes is exposed. In this paper, we document and visualize battery waste flows across North America to reveal the anxiety-ridden processes through which we manage, mismanage, and attempt to forget about battery waste. Drawing on Lacan’s seminar on Anxiety, this paper contributes to understandings of the role of psycho-social objects in constituting both material landscapes of risk and the symbolic structures of capitalist modernity that repress these risks in the interest of continued economic growth. We examine the “total management narrative” around battery waste as a Lacanian phantasy preserved through dysfunctional responses to underlying anxieties about the continued production, circulation, and distribution of toxins necessary to the maintenance of modern life. In challenging these total management narratives, we argue that processes of denial, disavowal, and foreclosure only partially mask the myriad ways that battery waste escapes, exceeds, or endures our practices of disposal and recycling, producing problematic and often environmentally unjust outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to understand the production of the city through informality. In particular, informal practices related to the momo (dumpling) industry, concentrated in the “urban village” of Chirag Dilli, are analysed in their dialectic relationship with formal planning and legislation in Delhi. We use a Lefebvrian framework that views city-making as an interaction of formal representations in the form of master plans, etc., informal and formal spatial practices (including momo production and living patterns) and representational (imagined) spaces related to neighbourhoods and the city. Drawing on primary qualitative data, we examine how informality informed the formal planning. The uneven application of state legislation, in turn, fostered particular informal practices (such as momo manufacturing) and the emergence of a distinct urban morphology and of new cohabitation practices. The informal momo industry also altered the representational associations made with both the Chirag Dilli neighbourhood and the city of Delhi. The paper shows how informal practices constantly interact with formal frameworks to co-produce urban space and consequently the city. We argue that informal practices are not necessarily in conflict with formal planning or subverting it, but that they play a central role in their own right for the production of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon the example of High-Cost Short-Term Credit products accessed via digital interfaces and devices to examine practices of interface design and the operation of digitally mediated power. Utilising interviews with High-Cost Short-Term Credit website designers and users of these products, the paper shows how these interfaces are designed and tested to manage frictions: practical, affective or emotional contestations that interrupt or stop users from applying for these products and entering into credit and debt. We suggest that the key role of interface design is to manage these frictions by guiding action in such a way to minimise negative affective states at key thresholds of the application process. The management of friction is enabled by practices of data-driven design, where the contingency of human response is engineered through analytics in order to increase rates of application. Working through the example of High-Cost Short-Term Credit, the paper complicates a notion of control as a smooth or automatic operation of power, instead emphasising the necessity of both continuity and discontinuity as key to modulating action in a digital age. To understand the specificity of interface interactions and move beyond existing work on control, we offer a vocabulary of friction, thresholds and transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on and challenges existing paradigms around movement and mobilisation in and with the city. This focus is provoked by a community arts project called ‘Flat Out’, in which the researcher collaborated with the Drum Intercultural Arts Centre and Birmingham Royal Ballet, on a dance project with members of the community in the Lozells and Newtown areas of the city. The paper pushes for more deeply embodied and more highly politicised versions of place ballet and urban vortex, introducing a concept of choreography that comes from dance practice, and working through decolonial and postcolonial theories. A brief auto-ethnography of the author’s Birmingham childhood illustrates that movement repertoires are diverse, historically and spatially conditioned, and, in the case of Birmingham, located within an ongoing ‘decolonial churn’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on a study of children’s outdoor play in a ‘white, working class estate’ in east London, this paper argues that social-material processes that are characteristically massy, indivisible, unseen, fluid and noxious have, problematically, remained hidden-in-plain-sight within multidisciplinary research with children and young people. For example, juxtaposing qualitative and autoethnographic data, we highlight children’s vivid, troubling narratives of swarming rats, smearing excrement, and percolating subsurface flows of water, toxins and racialised affects. In so doing, we develop a wider argument that key theorisations of matter, nature and nonhuman co-presences have often struggled to articulate the indivisibility of social-material processes from contemporary social-political-economic geographies. Over the course of the paper, as children’s raced, classed, exclusionary, disenfranchised narratives accumulate, we recognise the urgency of reconciling microgeographical accounts of play and materiality with readings of geographies of social-economic inequalities, exclusions, ethnicities, religions, memorialisations and mortalities. To this end, we initiate an argument for a move from intersectional to extra-sectional analyses that might retain intersectionality’s critical and political purchase, whilst simultaneously folding social-material complexities and vitalities into its theorisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers infrastructure from the point of view of disorder. During the last few years, waste management controversies have proliferated in Greece, reflecting a generalized feeling of mistrust towards the authorities. In this context, and in relation to the socio-economic crisis that erupted there in 2010, a set of diverse and even antithetic practices, imaginations, and circulations of flows have (re)emerged around waste treatment processes. By looking at the intermingling of formal and informal practices around waste flows and landfill processes in Athens, the paper asks how uncertainty, contingency and instability shape the governance and everyday experience of waste infrastructures. Examining the ways in which the normalization of regular disruption and instability plays out in waste treatment in Athens, it makes the case for understanding disorder as inherent to infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the politics of boredom? And how should we relate to boredom? In this paper, I explore these questions through cases where the disaffection and restlessness of boredom have become a matter of concern in the UK and USA at the junctures between Fordism and neoliberalism, and amid today's resurgence of right-wing populism. I argue that what repeats across the critique of the 'ordinary ordinariness' of Fordism, the neoliberal counterrevolution and today's right-wing populism is a 'promise of intensity' – the promise that life will feel eventful and boredom will be absent. As I make this argument, I reflect on the role of critique in the context of the multiplication of modes of inquiry that has accompanied the interest in affect across the humanities and social sciences. Rejecting the dismissal of critique in some affect-related work, I advocate for and exemplify a type of 'diagnostic critique' based on the practice of conjunctural analysis as pioneered by Stuart Hall and colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literatures on sustainability transition and transformation increasingly emphasise the role of spatiality and local agency. This paper argues that relational thinking has much more to offer this debate than presently acknowledged, particularly in revealing the geographical interconnections between dispersed nodes of action and innovation. We use relationality to show the interconnections at work in exchanging and negotiating sustainability interventions between cities and across scales. Using the mass transit planning process in Addis Ababa as a point of entry, we trace how the city's transformation is negotiated at the intersection of local agency, the Ethiopian national political setting and international networks. A host of actors from different scales come together as transformation is assembled by aligning extensive local experience with elements mobilised from elsewhere. This relational mobilisation perspective arguably infuses hope into the debate, because it opens new ways of identifying seemingly insignificant actions and actors elsewhere and recognising them as potential drivers of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enclosure of urban ecological commons into private property has facilitated the growth of the neoliberal service sector in Mumbai, India. These changes are brought forth through a reworking of communally managed land into narrowly understood public space, which has paved the way for private development. At the helm of Mumbai's urbanization is a power alliance between state and elite non-state actors across colonial and neoliberal regimes. The process has gravely impacted subsistence and livelihood activities of fisher communities residing in proximity to the development, disproportionately affecting fisherwomen. This paper centers fisherwomen's urban worlds to analyze the uneven legibility of existing spatial patterns. Across various scales, the categorical and material reworking of land–water commons has reduced resource availability. Women bear a greater, although underrecognized, burden in maintaining lives and livelihoods within this changing landscape. The relative illegibility of fisherwomen's spaces, however, allows some everyday activities to continue unnoticed despite ongoing processes of enclosure. My analysis of the enclosure of urban ecological commons and its gendered dimensions advances a dialogue between intersectional feminist and urban political ecology on colonial–neoliberal continuities, categorical exclusions in public–private binaries, and gendered urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in recent debates on humanitarianism and security in migration by introducing the notion of 'pop-up governance'. It reflects on our two year-long fieldwork on Lesbos, Greece at the peak of Europe's migrant reception crisis (2015–2017). We present recent developments in border and migration management in the EU and we position these within recent migration debates. We then present the two main facets guiding migrant reception and governance in Lesbos, namely humanitarianism and security. Through our interviews with humanitarian and security actors we show how top-level government decisions followed and resembled the flexibility and adaptability of humanitarian and security operations. We define this turn as 'pop-up governance', which comprises a practice-based, abruptly introduced and retractable set of governance mechanisms responding to the situation at hand. We argue that the seemingly disorganised management of migration actually bore hallmarks of a new, flexible and adaptable mode of governance. Finally, we show how 'pop-up governance' can help move beyond present understanding of governance based either on the rule or its exception. This has important implications for our comprehension of migration, humanitarianism, security and the governance of vulnerable populations and contemporary socio-political crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how bordered reality is being imposed and resisted in the context of where we are placed right now, 'Greece'. Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. We approach this process methodologically from the situated angle of the embodiment of resistance in the concrete experiences of people (including the researchers ourselves), whose narratives reveal the distracted spatial coordinates of the 'hotspot regime', which becomes a traveling control device. Rather than approaching the hotspots on the five Greek border islands as geographically fixed entities we introduce the concept of the mobile hotspot to show how the logic of the hotspot suffuses the uneven geographies of a bordered reality. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to critically explore the density, tensions, and conflict-ridden nature of movements within, around, and against the hotspots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]