In this essay, I position the logics of settler colonialism and the logics of space exploration dominion over both space on earth, and interplanetary space at the expense of Indigenous peoples. I then look to Indigenous conceptions of space as a potential foil to these colonial logics.

Katrina allowed for the ultimate greenwashing campaign for oil and gas companies to frame themselves as environmental benefactors of Louisiana’s coastal restoration program, which is funded by oil and natural gas royalties. By tying coastal restoration to the state’s fossil fuel industry, Louisiana’s precarious future is predicated on extraction, increased carbon emissions, and a secondary market of petrochemical production up and down the Mississippi River’s “Cancer Alley” for inexpensive natural gas.

When therapy is transferred online due to COVID-19, and bodies no longer meet in person, the space of the psychoanalytic consulting room is unsettled: distance, risk and intimacy are negotiated anew.

Transit networks are objects of intense political contestation and are key terrains of struggle in cities around the world. Common, as opposed to public infrastructures of transit, suggest ways of organizing mobility in resistance to state apparatuses of violence, exclusion and accumulation.

While police continue to kill Black people on city streets, private equity firms tacitly engage in anti-Black violence through dispossession, devaluation and displacement in Black communities, and thus more broadly by remaking the map of where Black people can live, move, and breathe.

This essay argues that the COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the interconnected goals of indigenous politics. Thus, it is not possible to address it solely as a health emergency. It is connected to indigenous autonomy and self-determination. It is connected to the exploitation of land and the territory. It is connected to the rights of indigenous peoples to continue to exist and exercise their cultures.

It was clear to us that everything we had been feeling - the isolation, the competition, the exhaustion, the frustration - was not something unique to our own graduate experiences.

The global pandemic has occasioned an impulse to think in monumental terms – totality, catastrophe, portal. This essay commits to a different reading that stops the rush of planning and forecasting, projecting and forecasting. It offers collective life as an analytic that keeps the focus on the ways in which the urban majority is trying to survive and cope within structures of inequality that now bear both the new imprint of COVID-19 while equally holding the continuities of older forms of distancing and exclusion.

The flourishing landscape of solidarity initiatives that emerged during the corona crisis became an object of consensual appreciation. Even critical thinkers overlooked the intensifying influence of neoliberal logics on this impressive grassroots awakening. Highlighting these logics could assist in freeing our quotidian solidarity activities from the attempts to neutralize its political potential.

Being public is essential to social and political life. Political counterpublics, including the growing “climate public” and “mutual aid public,” will be part of any just post-Coronavirus future. As the crisis continues, they are building themselves through various spaces and spatialities of publicness.