Ecological States by Jesse Rodenbiker

Rodenbiker’s contributions to an ecologically-engaged political ecology, and the approach that this offers to the study of China, makes Ecological States such a compelling and essential read, and one that will provide a roadmap for many scholars.

Carbon Sovereignty by Andrew Curley

Carbon Sovereignty refuses easy arguments; this book is invaluable as a story of coal in the Navajo Nation and expansively provides us with a slew of theoretical concepts and methodologies for all of us who study colonial capitalism, resource and energy geographies, or temporal geographies.

At War with Women by Jennifer Greenburg

Greenburg’s beautifully written narratives reveal the ways in which military personnel differentially embrace or resist counterinsurgency programs. Her rich analysis offers readers a detailed overview of gendered military operations, and like all exceptional research, this book moves the reader to reflect and ask new questions.

Subaltern Frontiers of Agrarian Urbanism

Through a carefully crafted ethnographic narrative, Tom Cowan’s book Subaltern Frontiers deftly juxtaposes the overlapping geographies of land, caste, property, rent, labour, discipline, and offers a rich account of how entrenched agrarian relations of land and property endure and how they continue to configure social geographies of unevenness and difference.

Delivery as Dispossession by Zachary Levenson

Zachary Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City provides a stunning ethnography and meticulous theorizing of housing politics in contemporary Cape Town. His core argument is as elegant as it is powerful: if the apartheid state delivered housing to Black South Africans at the far-flung outskirts of the city to justify their dispossession from prime land in the urban core, then the post-apartheid state flips this logic.

European Cities Book Review Forum

While Noa K. Ha and Giovanni Picker's introduction strips the sociological canon on the European city of its most widely held certainties, the ten chapters empirically assemble alternative and typically unnamed modalities of urban life and politics.

Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean by Camilla Hawthorne

Hawthorne offers us a richly researched and profoundly engaged analysis of what she describes as the mutually constitutive relationship between race and citizenship. Put differently, the book elucidates the politics of Black belonging beyond borders.

Coal, Cages, Crisis Roundtable Roundtable

Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis excavates the carceral geography of Central Appalachia to remind us there are other futures for the region beyond the extractions of prison and coal.

A Choreography of Being in Good Relation: Rehearsals for Living Book Review Forum

A choreography of being in good relation is a poetic speculative letter, an archive for future ancestors of how abolitionist activists leaned into world-building amongst a series of world endings through breath, love, and communion.

A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers by Jack Gieseking

Despite unjust policies, lack of economic and political power, and threats and experiences of violence, lesbians and queers created everyday spatial belonging in New York City from the early 1980s to the late 2000s. In A Queer New York, Jack Jen Gieseking provides a compelling model for how to use anti-metronormative methods to read lesbian-queer relationships to urban space through historical geography derived from multigenerational group interviews and archival research.

Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century by Kai Bosworth

One of the many contributions of Kai Bosworth’s Pipeline Populism is that it not only takes the emotional dynamics of climate politics seriously, but also analyzes a richer range of affects beyond hope and despair.

Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable by Eric Stanley

Writing with care and fierce determination, and drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews as well as a wide array of anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer and trans scholarship, Stanley precisely and compellingly analyses the ways in which advances in LGBTQ rights in the US have perpetuated rather than ameliorated an ‘atmosphere of violence.’

On Telling Nuclear Stories: A People's Atlas of Nuclear Colorado

How do nuclear materials produce and unsettle narrative itself? This forum reckons with the very nature of nuclear storytelling, examining complex relations of waste and memory, responsibility and repair.

Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta by Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay

Streets in Motion inventively combines archival and ethnographic methodologies to unpack the street in the Global South. Viewed through the dialectical interplay of motion and obstruction, the urban process structured by the drives of capital reveals an irreducibly contingent and historical aspect. This innovative motion-obstruction dyad forms the compelling framework for the book and the central concern of this book forum.

Properties of Rent: Community, Capital, and Politics in Globalising Delhi

Rent is far more than an economic relation denoting the temporary use of property. Rent is also a social, political, and emotional relation woven together by caste, kinship, and community; as such, rent decides who lies inside and who lies outside registers of value. A brilliant book that is a must-read by urbanists of South Asia and beyond, Properties of Rent tells us first and foremost why vernacular theories of capitalism matter.

Counterpoints: A Response

Being so many things at once allows Counterpoints to open a space for conversations that recognize the manifold histories, layers, and ongoing resistances to displacement while inviting multiple modes of engagement. It is through coming together and working through these conversations in practice that we will collectively find ways forward.

Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds by Colin McFarlane

Fragments of the City practices what it advocates, the benefits to urban scholarship of working with the incomplete and the provisional, alongside multiple emerging situations and voices on the ground. In Colin’s hands, the city is many things at once, unsettled and always in the making, with a multitude of possibilities simultaneously in motion.

Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World by Jairus Grove

Savage Ecology decenters and recenters humans and technology in an era of unending war.

Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam by Thuy Linh Tu

"Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" unmasks neat epistemic divides between war and beauty, harm and care. Thuy Linh Tu asks how skin and practices of caring for skin are sites of racialized war-making and knowledge-making, of violent histories and ambivalent futures.

Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment by Aren Aizura

Through discussion of archival and documentary evidence as well as ethnographic material on gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura brilliantly and beautifully lays out the importance of thinking transness through the lens of mobility and motility, while “tak[ing] seriously how travel and mobility themselves are concepts freighted with the history of global and transnational travel and its representation: colonial and imperial exploration and settlement and migration by sea, land, and air” (2018: 3). 

At Europe’s Edge by Ċetta Mainwaring

Mainwaring sheds critical light on the importance of seemingly ‘marginal’ actors to the generation of European migration policies, highlighting the central role that Malta has played in the constitution of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ as well as the animating role that migrants have played in shaping Mediterranean space.

Imagining Afghanistan by Nivi Manchanda

Afghanistan neither fully fits under epistemological frameworks of colonial governance nor is it viewed as a completely ungovernable space. How race, war, and knowledge production come to shape Afghanistan in this quasi-colonial conceptualization is one of the book’s significant contributions and Manchanda traces this through various registers in the chapters including formulations of the state of Afghanistan, the idea of the ‘Tribe,’ and representations of Afghan women and men.

Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador

What happens when a postcolonial left, unified by its commitment to contesting the global neoliberal order, finds itself divided on the tactics and strategic horizons that might remake their society anew?

Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua

The reviews collected in this forum, written by scholars of logistics, maritime capitalism, and the Indian Ocean world, travel with Dua in asking what we can learn from situating piracy within economies and social worlds of protection.

DEAR SCIENCE and Other Stories [A Sparing Introduction and Embrace]

Please don’t colonize my hearts…

The Black Shoals by Tiffany Lethabo King

"The Black Shoals" is a distinguished multi-layered and deeply analytical text that offers provocative interventions that when taken seriously provide a roadmap, for human beings, to be in better relation with one another and, as scholars, to engage deeply in questions of the human on the road to liberation.

The Migrant’s Paradox Forum

These works provide me with an axis not only to ask how nationally contrived immigration policies settle in space, but also how everyday configurations of refusal are convened in the urban margins.

Our History is the Future by Nick Estes

Estes’ insurgent history demands that we reject the limp gestures of “reconciliation” and “reparations” symbolically extended by the settler state, and that we instead work to return the land to its original caretakers, and with it, a new world and a way out of climate catastrophe and colonial relations.

For the War Yet to Come by Hiba Bou Akar

The promise of urban planning is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring not only development but also peace. But as Hiba Bou Akar shows in this celebrated book, what followed the 1990 ceasefire was not peace but a “war in times of peace.”

Violence Work by Micol Seigel

This essay serves as an introduction to the book forum for Micol Seigel’s "Violence Work". I provide context for the reviews gathered here and offer some additional reflections on the place of her book within literatures on policing and organizing for abolition that has been rapidly changing the political landscape.

Gay, Inc. by Myrl Beam

Grounded in Beam’s experiences of frontline work and careful inquiry into the history and political economy of LGBTQ nonprofits in Chicago and Minneapolis, this book offers a persuasive indictment of the nonprofit form, as well as a deeply felt mediation on how savvy grassroots organizers struggle with its constraints.

Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis

We explore the implications of Lewis' argument that confronting unjust aspects of the surrogate industry requires not simple opposition to its technologies, but rather an abolition of the hetero-patriarchal private capitalist form in which surrogacy is embedded.

Transpacific Geographies

The critique of transpacific spaces is not merely an intellectual project, but one that is constituted by and constitutive of material politics and activism on the ground.

Decolonizing Extinction By Juno Salazar Pareñas

Based on ethnographic research in two orangutan rehabilitation centers in Malaysian Borneo, the book urges us to think about mutual but unequal vulnerability in the face of annihilation.

Black Food Geographies By Ashantè Reese

Black Food Geographies’ emphasis that food geographies are made, lived, and experienced shows that there is much more to be gained through food geographies research – expressly through the condition of Black communities.

Food Justice Now! By Joshua Sbicca

The food system has been widely recognized as the source of many social and environmental problems but also as a catalyst for action. Critical scholars have demonstrated, the capitalist, industrial food system is doing exactly what it was designed to do – exploit labour and land to concentrate resources and power in the hands of corporations (Clapp, 2012; Holt-Giménez, 2017). Over the past few decades, there has been a rise of scholarship and activism that aspires to confront inequities in the food system and develop viable alternatives.

Grounded Authority By Shiri Pasternak

The book is focused on long-standing anticolonial struggles in territory that is, at least as the colonial powers-that-be understand it, in the western part of the province of Québec, about three hours’ drive north of the Canadian national capital in Ottawa, Ontario.

Capital City By Samuel Stein

In this well-written and accessible book, Sam Stein explains the role of the state in creating gentrification. In popular discourse, gentrification has often been seen as a “private” phenomena.

In The Long Run We Are All Dead By Geoff Mann

This is an extraordinary book. It is lucid, compelling, insightful, and a tremendous achievement. It is dense and scholarly but also fascinating, moving, gripping even. Geoff Mann really wants you to understand, he wants you to see what he sees, and he has a gift for involving you in the process of discovering all the threads and alleyways that animate this study.

A House Of Prayer For All People

A House of Prayer for All People by David K. Seitz is based on nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a large, predominantly LGBT and evangelical Christian church located in Toronto, Canada.

Police: A Field Guide By David Correia And Tyler Wall

In 'Police: A Field Guide' (Verso, 2017), David Correia and Tyler Wall provocatively argue for a "redefined language of policing" in order to get out of the trap of "copspeak", which typically legitimates police activity and provides few avenues for thinking critically about police practices. This forum collects and extends those commentaries, highlighting the book's challenges and contributions to debates over police power, incarceration, abolition, military and law enforcement technologies and black feminism.

Carving Out The Commons By Amanda Huron

This book forum grew out of an “author meets critics” session at the April 2018 meeting of the American Association of Geographers. Lisa Bates, Nate Gabriel, Stephen Healy, and Heather McLean all responded to the book there, raising important questions about feminist theory, black feminist theory, theorizing capitalism, and the utility of the idea of the commons.

Deregulating Desire By Ryan Patrick Murphy

The recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ 2017 David Montgomery Award for the best book on a topic in U.S. labor and working-class history, Deregulating Desire offers an empirically rich and beautifully written account of the politics of gender, sexuality and race in late 20th-century U.S. flight attendant organizing.

Endangered City by Austin Zeiderman and Hydraulic City by Nikhil Anand

This review forum stems from an author-meets-critics session on Austin Zeiderman’s Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá and Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. The session was organized by Asher Ghertner and held at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, MA. The forum includes reviews by Malini Ranganathan, Diane Davis, and AbdouMaliq Simone, with an introduction by Asher Ghertner and responses from the authors.

Queer Clout By Timothy Stewart-Winter

This review forum stems from an author-meets-critics session on Timothy Stewart-Winter’s Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, organized by David K. Seitz. The session was held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco.

Space, Politics, and Aesthetics by Mustafa Dikeç

A special review forum on Mustafa Dikeç’s Space, Politics and Aesthetics, published by Edinburgh University Press as part of its "Taking on the Political" book series. The review forum includes contributions by David Featherstone, Gillian Rose, Japhy Wilson, Mark Jackson, and Nigel Clark. The reviews are followed by a response from Mustafa Dikeç.

Transforming Citizenships by Isaac West

Health Rights Are Civil Rights By Jenna Loyd

This book forum considers the insights and challenges of Jenna Loyd’s Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963-1978. Loyd is an intellectually expansive scholar whose work addresses a number of fields, including detention, immigration, prisons, militarism, and health.

Under Bright Lights By Bobby Benedicto

This review forum follows from an author-meets-critics session on Bobby Benedicto’s Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene, organized by Natalie Oswin and held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago.

The Paradoxes Of Planning by Sara Westin

This review forum on Sara Westin’s The Paradoxes of Planning: A Psycho-analytical Perspective originated in an author meets critics session that Christian Abrahamsson and I organized for the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago earlier this year.

Geografias Malditas By Joseli Maria Silva, Marcio Jose Ornat, And Alides Baptista Chimin Junior

On An Ungrounded Earth By Ben Woodard

Ben Woodard’s On an Ungrounded Earth is an innovative work of philosophy with a powerful aesthetic allure. It is also a timely book situated at the intersection of two emerging trends in contemporary thought: so-called ‘speculative realism’ in Continental philosophy, and the ‘geological turn’ in the humanities and social sciences.

Red Tape by Akhil Gupta

Sapana Doshi of the University of Arizona organized an author-meets-critics forum on Gupta’s 2012 Duke University Press book Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India for the 2012 Association of American Geographers meeting in Los Angeles.

Relocations by Karen Tongson

Meredith Raimondo and Lorena Muñoz each offer a review of Karen Tongson's Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. They were part of an author-meets-critics panel organized by Jasbir Puar at the 2012 Association of American Geographers meeting in New York. Relocations was published in 2011 by New York University Press.

The Autonomous Animal by Claire Rasmussen

At the 2012 AAG conference in New York City, Michael Brown organized an author-meets-critics panel for Claire Rasmussen's 2011 book "The Autonomous Animal: Self-Governance and the Modern Subject". Read reviews by panelists Robert Lake and Matthew Wilson, and Claire's author response.

Cities Under Siege By Stephen Graham

Michael Katz organized a symposium on Stephen Graham's 2011 book, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism at the 2011 annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Boston. Read the reviews of panelists George Steinmetz, Alice O'Connor, and Jennifer Light.