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This dissertation examines the fundamental yet disavowed role of anti-Black enslavist legacies in shaping contemporary forms of gender-based violence (GBV) perpetration in the United States. Through contrapuntal analysis of landmark scholarship on domestic abuse perpetration, I argue that abusive men's tactics of surveillance, coercion, and entrapment both mirror and exploit the infrastructure of racialized subjugation inaugurated through chattel slavery. Applying Black feminist frameworks to seminal perpetration theories, I elucidate how Lundy Bancroft's formulation of an "ownership mentality" and Evan Stark's "coercive control" model invoke yet disavow the afterlife of mastery, an abjection reflective of white gender theory's broader refusal to reckon with its imbrication in racial violence. My conceptualization of a "geography of perpetration" illuminates the spatial strategies whereby abusive men harness the enduring prerogatives and tools of masters to ensnare women in personal life. I situate this "master's discourse" within a continuum that links plantation domination to present-day carceral and policing paradigms across disparate arenas of life. Disturbing continuities manifest in police officers' vastly disproportionate rates of intimate partner battering, epitomizing the impunity society grants to masculinity marked as legitimate, which is itself deeply embedded in enslavist notions of mastery. Ultimately, I contend that ending violence against women, first, requires abolition, and, second, that abolitionist efforts to dismantle GBV must confront its roots in the ongoing cultural and material effects of enslavism, as failing to do so risks inadvertently perpetuating the very power structures abolitionists seek to transform. Towards this end, I argue the reparations movement holds potential to catalyze an urgent reckoning with the afterlife of mastery in America as a fundamental force structuring violence against women in America, amongst a host of other ty

After a decade characterized by the leitmotif of “migration crisis,” states in the European Union (EU) are increasingly contending with questions around the integration and long-term membership of migrants to national communities. To pursue the idealized goal of integration, states are increasingly experimenting with programs that bring citizens and migrants together. Examples range from the UNHCR’s Buddies with Refugees initiative to the many state-funded programs that cropped up in 2022, enlisting private citizens in effort to house displaced people from Ukraine. The incorporation of civil society in integration showcases that, states too, see belonging as forged through everyday interactions, mundane adherence to social norms, and the formation of new affective attachments. While civil society is crucial to the existence of integration and “good citizenship” as political projects, it is also an arena to problematize and transform these concepts from the ground up. This dissertation investigates the involvement of civil society in programs developed with the goal of migrant reception and inclusion in Bologna and Torino, Italy. I employed ethnographic methods to investigate how practitioners, city residents, and migrants make sense of the growing role of civil society in initiatives aimed at supporting the long-term integration of migrants. Fieldwork yielded 75 semi-structured interviews, 110 hours of participant observation and a digital archive of more than 500 documents relating to migrant reception in Italy and at the two field sites. Drawing from feminist political geography, urban studies, and critical migration studies, this project investigates the everyday (re)forging of social boundaries and urban ideals of community. This research analyzes how residents, practitioners and migrants come together to rehearse and contest ideas of “welcome” and good community membership. In doing so, this work exposes the continued importance of hospitality as a moral orient

This dissertation research explores the nuances and contradictions of food aid for rural families in the neoliberal food regime era through a case study of Mexico’s National Crusade Against Hunger (“Crusade”), the flagship social development strategy of the Peña Nieto administration (2013-2018). Initially, the Crusade was publicized as a sweeping new commitment to guarantee food security through direct food assistance to families in extreme poverty, supporting local agricultural production, reducing post-harvest losses, and strengthening community participation. In practice, it was used in fraudulent diversion of public resources and expanded food aid contracts to channel new levels of industrial food commodities and advertising into rural agricultural communities already suffering from staggering increases in diet-related illness.Using an embodied political ecology framework and an array of ethnographic, online-archival and community-based research methods, this study evaluates the political economy, knowledge politics, and the diverse visceral (mind-body) sensations involved in the food aid for beneficiaries in two rural communities in the southern state of Oaxaca. Findings show that the Crusade captured civil society efforts to curb agri-food industry power and attenuated them in an implementation of increased food aid through monopolistic contracting. The food aid itself, in combination with accompanying nutritional education, produced contradictory material and discursive effects for local residents, especially women. Rural youth from the two communities targeted by the Crusade who participated in research training, activities and interpretation of findings in association with this project articulated their perspectives on the importance of food quality in food security, among other concerns, and gained positive experiences through expanded geographic mobility and new social connections. Centering the knowledge and perspectives of food aid beneficiaries with ex

The conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) that began in 1984 entered a cease-fire in 2010 but returned to re-intensified militarized conflict in 2015. This has led to massive infrastructural and human destruction in Southeast Turkey, accompanied by intensified surveillance and urban counterinsurgency against Kurds. As with many aspects of Kurdish identity politics in Turkey, the ways in which Kurdish queer folks are articulating, debating, and living identities are intimately and increasingly interwoven with institutions, discourses, and practices of securitization. This dissertation shows how queer and trans Kurds adopt, adapt, and use surveillance to constitute moral worlds, craft ethical subjectivities by negotiating the value of life and work with one another, the broader community, and the state. These negotiations involve vocabularies, strategies, and affective attachments derived from the longstanding militarized conflict and surveillance. Key to this dynamic is the notion of bedel, the feelings of indebtedness, loss, and obligation among Kurds to struggle for the cause of Kurdish rights. Drawing on 24-months of field research in several key sites and locations, including Kurdish LGBTI organizations and apartments rented by sex workers and “partyers” in Istanbul and Diyarbakır, the project demonstrates how securitization is affectively experienced through belonging, difference, loyalty, and betrayal. Through bedel, queer and trans Kurds in Kurdish Turkey police boundaries for their security and livelihoods, constitute moral value, respectability, belonging, and honor in the Kurdish society, craft “chameleon subjectivities” for disorienting racial and sexual violence, and collectivize an ethical politics of face to solve disputes within their community, shifting the meanings of bedel in the process.

Titled “Infrastructures of Entrepreneurship: State Reform and Development in Oman,” this dissertation explores how under pressure from low oil prices, enormous budget deficits, and a faltering economic model the Omani state has been renegotiating its relationship with global capitalism in a dawning post-oil era. To apprehend this development, I ethnographically explore how the Omani government has embarked on a multi-sited program of economic reform, in which the promotion of entrepreneurship plays an important role. Based on 12 months of archival and field research in London and Muscat, I demonstrate how the state reform project, meant to revitalize the engines of capital accumulation in one country, transcends the “economic.” It explores how emotions, bureaucratic complaints, new ideas about productivity and creativity, foreign experts, and local entrepreneurs are reworking the contours of capitalism in Oman, while seeking to transform the state, society, and the individual. This dissertation provides a glimpse into this complex and contradictory reform process and the exigencies of post-oil development under late capitalism.

Since the early 1980s, the idea of sanctuary has been critical to the work of immigration activists and local governments in the United States. While the utilization of sanctuary as both an activist practice and municipal policy has waxed and waned over the past 40 years, reflecting more extensive shifts in immigration patterns and federal policies, the notion of sanctuary has remained an important feature of debates surrounding US immigration laws, enforcement practices, and the contested meanings of belonging within the country. Following the major overhaul of the US security apparatus post 9-11, immigrant sanctuary practices and policies have again become an important vehicle for immigrant rights advocates to highlight the cruelties of the US immigration system and campaign for change. Likewise, local governments have adopted a variety of pro-immigrant policies (broadly couched under the sanctuary moniker) to improve trust between immigrant communities and local police departments, with varying levels of success. This dissertation explores the tensions between these practices and how multiple and distinct iterations of sanctuary across time and space have been researched and theorized by geographers. Importantly, it argues that an approach grounded in Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage thinking provides the most salient spatial analytic for understanding sanctuary’s many permutations. Following this tact and utilizing archival data from US news media articles, this research also works to excavate the ways that sanctuary as an idea has become territorialized within a set of discursive practices, rendering homogenous what is actually incongruous and messy. Here, the work interrogates the frequent use of the adjectival phrase “so-called” to point to how many sanctuary and immigrant welcoming practices operate as a form of cruel optimism, wherein desires for sanctuary qua protection rarely live up to their promises. Lastly, the work engages with immigrant rights activism

Background: When social and emotional learning (SEL) is taught in schools, children experience better academic and health outcomes. SEL can also lead to feelings of school connectedness. One promising intervention to teach SEL is school garden programming. Objective: This dissertation aims to answer the question of how exposure to school gardens impacts youth SEL. This question is divided into two studies and one case report that examine the existing school garden literature that measures SEL and test whether school garden exposure is associated with SEL outcomes including student self-reported learning and feelings of school connectedness. Methods: Study one is a scoping review that synthesized peer-reviewed articles examining the relationship between the five SEL components (relationship skills, responsible decision-making, self-awareness, social awareness, and self-management) and school garden exposure. When confronted with the challenge of updating the scoping review search, we wrote a computer application called Open Update Re-run De-duplicate (OUR2D2) to make the process of comparing literature review search results easier over time. We describe OUR2D2 in the case report. Study three was a secondary analysis of mixed methods data from a 2017 school garden evaluation. In this paper, we examined the impact of length of school garden exposure on third, fourth, and fifth grade student self-reported learning and feelings of school connectedness. Results: Of the 1968 identified studies in the scoping review, 8 examined SEL outcomes as they relate to school gardens. While the majority of articles with quantitative data did not have statistically significant findings, the qualitative data suggested that there is a positive relationship between school garden exposure and SEL. In the case report, we found that OUR2D2 saved our study team 21 hours of work by eliminating the task of re-screening articles from the original search. In study two, we did not find a statistic

What Is Suicide? Entanglements of Philosophy and Literature in the ‘Afterlife of Slavery’ is a critique of the racial logic of suicide. Investigations into the various causes of suicide have crowded out an understanding of the fundamental role that the Western discourse of suicide has played in producing “man” as a racializing category of being. To address this absence, I combine the methods of literary criticism and historical genealogy to reformulate suicide as a disciplinary technology that secures the moral limits of civil society. I closely read the canonical texts of Gayatri Spivak, Toni Morrison and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales—foundational figures in postcolonial, African American and Chicanx thought, respectively—to situate suicide as a central (if occulted) category in their critiques of racial reason. To historicize this concept, I survey how the theological, philosophical and socio-medical traditions have resolved the conceptual difficulty of suicide through a racial reason that reclaims the act of suicide as the prerogative of (white) modern man. Beyond a critique of the medical model of suicide studies, I claim that suicide constitutes a “racial theology” that creates an original distinction between ethical and unethical life. Not only must critical scholars of race and gender reckon with how the discourse of suicide stabilizes their critical itineraries, but academic and vocational experts of suicide—from literary studies to psychiatry—must make slavery and colonialism a premise of their inquiries.

This dissertation develops the theory of “the caring state,” in the context of Ferguson, Missouri. The caring state discusses the ways the state operates through care, empathy, kindness, and inclusion in order to commit violence, harm, and militarization. While these techniques of power appear as two different, discrete, and contradictory modes, I argue they work in tandem and are both productive of institutionalized racism. State power is often narrated through care, not in contradiction to violence, but to enable it. This dissertation is critical of the aspirational and empathetic modes of statecraft for what they conceal and make possible. I critique feminist literature on care, which unequivocally represents care as desirable, and seeks to make institutions more caring. I am also critical of the over-representation of militarism, which neglects other kinds of state power. After Michael Brown’s death, the militarization of the police force was demonstrated and broadly critiqued, while the state’s production of empathy and care was welcomed. I demonstrate throughout this dissertation that care produces violence, and what appear as contradictory modes of statecraft are integral to the function of police and other state institutions.

Recently, the issue of nutrition has ascended the development agenda with a focus on the first 1,000 days of life (the point of conception to age two) as a critical time for intervention so as to secure not just the health of the individual but also optimal global economic futures. Promulgated by high-profile issues of the medical journal The Lancet, development agencies have taken to addressing what has been coded as nutrition-specific (individual, bio-medical) and nutrition-sensitive (i.e. structural, socio-economic) solutions. My dissertation asks: how has The Lancet- enshrined narratives around nutrition come to matter in the context of India. I answer this question through a suite of qualitative methods that includes policy interviews, textual analysis, and a 12-month ethnographic study of a particular nutrition-agriculture program that was carried out in two districts of central and eastern India. I contextualize this data in chapter two through providing historical context that details the long-held tensions in colonial and post-colonial state spaces between commitments to rational, scientific state planning and strong socialist and egalitarian imperatives. The first paper (appendix A) examines the policy narratives of this new nutrition agenda, and traces how they come to circulate amongst Indian policy actors. I analyze the construction and circulation of the ‘1,000-day’ discourse using the concept of contingency, both as a way to signal radical open-ended (yet foreclosed) futurity and as everyday geographic difference and emergent life. This paper's main argument is that while the threat/opportunity of future contingency drives 1,000-days, it is simultaneously geographical contingency that complicates the ways it materializes in the particular space of India. The second paper (appendix B) examines the spatialities of responsibility within a series of body-mass index (BMI) camps that were carried out across rural India as a key health promotion practice to

With the rapid development of new digital technologies, cities are increasingly critical sites of techno-social experimentation and transformation. Through ‘smart city’ initiatives, city governments around the world are partnering with transnational technology firms to deeply integrate digital technologies—including extensive Internet of Things (IoT) sensing networks and increasingly complex infrastructures for data analytics—into everyday urban spaces. At the same time, emerging forms of digitally-mediated “platform capitalism,” represented by companies such as Airbnb and Uber, are dramatically disrupting existing economic, political and socio-spatial relations across urban contexts. In opposition to these trends, citizens’ initiatives in Barcelona, Spain are organizing around calls for “technological sovereignty,” radically rethinking existing models of urban development by claiming community control over emerging digital technologies. My ethnographic dissertation asks: Are emerging digital technologies inherently tools of technocratic governance, surveillance, and capital accumulation? Or how might they become loci for imagining and building alternative digital urban futures? I operationalize this question through three sub-questions focused on the production of alternative economies, urban space, and digital subjectivities, respectively, within the movement for technological sovereignty in Barcelona. These three sub-questions are the basis of the three articles attached as appendices. The first paper (Appendix A) explores the concept of technological sovereignty employed by activists in Barcelona, describing its basis in experiments with alternative arrangements of work and property, an ethics of care, and an engagement with municipal institutions. Reviewing existing literature on the politics of digital development in geography, I argue for the need to think beyond critiques of techno-capitalist development—and beyond binaries of techno-optimism and techno-pess

El canvi climàtic exigeix que repensem l’ordre polític global desenvolupant una formulació i una pràctica de la geopolítica que prengui seriosament el dinamisme del sistemes de la Terra i els seus efectes diferencials. Es tracta d’una geopolítica que no només requereix que repensem el que constitueix el geo sinó que repensem també què es fa i en què consisteix la política. Mitjançant estudis de cas extrets de l’organització artística britànica sobre el canvi climàtic, Cape Farewell, i en concret dels seus viatges per l’Àrtic, analitzem la manera com les pràctiques geoestètiques ofereixen una via per experimentar amb la manera de pensar sobre una reformulació geopolítica com aquesta. Per tal d’aprofundir en aquest argument, acostem la recerca contemporània sobre la geopolítica dels elements a una obra més àmplia l’objectiu de la qual és re-formular el geo com a força política. Si ens prenem seriosament els reptes múltiples que aquesta proposta planteja pel que fa als mètodes, a les concepcions de la política d’allò que és intra i inhumà, i a les composicions de les relacions corporals, anem cap als estudis geopolítics feministes en què els cossos –humans i no humans– són un indret geopolític important. Experimentant amb la geoestètica com a eina per pensar i sentir, no argumentem que la geopolítica feminista del canvi climàtic que proposem sigui l’única geopolítica feminista possible; ni tampoc tenim totes les respostes als problemes que planteja el fet de prendre’s seriosament el geo dins de la formulació de la geopolítica. No obstant això, sí que ofereixun punt de partid, Climate change requires that we rethink the global order of politics by developing a formulation and practice of geopolitics that takes seriously the dynamism of earth’s systems and their differential effects. This is a geopolitics that not only demands we rethink what constitutes the ‘geo’ but also that we rethink how we understand what ‘politics’ is, does and consists of. Using case studies drawn from the UK climate change arts organization Cape Farewell, and in particular their Arctic voyages, I explore how geoaesthetic practicesoffer a way to experiment with thinking such a geopolitical reformulation. In order to advance this contention, I draw contemporary scholarship on elemental geopolitics together with broader work that aims to reframe the ‘geo’ as a political force. Taking seriously the manifold challenges that such a proposition poses to methods, to understandings of the politics of the intra and inhuman, and to compositions of bodily relations, I turn to feminist geopolitical scholarship where bodies –human and non-human– are an important geopolitical site. Experimenting with geoaesthetics as tools to think and feel with, I don’t claim that the feminist ‘geo’politics of climate change proposed is the only possible feminist geopolitics, nor does it have all the answers to the problems posed by taking seriously the ‘geo’ within formulations of geopolitics. It does however; offer a productive and provocative place from which to begin to create geopolitics adequate to the challenges of climate change.Keywords: Climate change, feminist, (geo) aesthetics, art, Artic., El cambio climático exige repensar el orden político global desarrollando una formulación y una práctica de la geopolítica que tome en serio el dinamismo de los sistemas de la Tierra y sus efectos diferenciales. Se trata de una geopolítica que no sólo requiere repensar lo que constituye el geo sino repensar también que se hace y en qué consiste la política. Mediante estudios de caso extraídos de la organización artística británica sobre el cambio climático, Cape Farewell, y en concreto de sus viajes por el Ártico, analizamos la forma en que las prácticas geoestètiques ofrecen una vía para experimentar con la forma de pensar sobre una reformulación geopolítica como ésta. Para profundizar en este argumento, acercamos la investigación contemporánea sobre la geopolítica de los elementos a una obra más amplia el objetivo es re-formular el geo como fuerza política. Si nos tomamos en serio los retos múltiples que esta propuesta plantea en cuanto a los métodos, a las concepciones de la política de lo intra e inhumano, y en las composiciones  de las relaciones corporales, vamos hacia los estudios geopolíticos feministas en que los cuerpos –humanos y no humanos– son un lugar geopolítico importante. Experimentando con la geoestètica como herramienta para pensar y sentir, no argumentamos que la geopolítica feminista del cambio climático que proponemos sea la única geopolítica feminista posible; ni tampoco tenemos todas las respuestas a los problemas que plantea el hecho de tomar en serio el geo dentro de la formulación de la geopolítica. Sin embargo, sí que ofrece un punto de partida productivo y provocativo para empezar a crear una geopolítica adecuada a los retos del cambio cli