In reflecting on the current Cuban economic, social and humanitarian crisis, I aim at catching the pulse of the moment to shift the crisis-based discourse to one based on pressure. I focus on two types of pressure – air and blood – to think through the pulse of the post-COVID Cuban crisis.

The public–private initiative Data Observatory Foundation was created to make large databases, such as those of astronomical observatories, available to expand and transfer of so-called “data-centric tasks” to various domains and thereby boost the development of the digital economy, data science and artificial intelligence in the country. However, in this article, we argue that data-centric initiatives like the Data Observatory Foundation may prove to be defuturing or enacting exhausted futures that reproduce the historical extractivism and coloniality of power in Latin America.

This article argues that the mobility of animal bodies is deployed to produce a distinctive form of territorial imagination in China, one which foregrounds the friction of terrain at certain sites, and conjures up state fantasies of interspecies relations as/and interethnic friendship. While much recent scholarly literature focusses on the collocation of infrastructure and state power, this article calls for attention to the ways in which states can also mobilize representations of selected sites of roadlessness, and concomitant animal-based mobilities.

A comparative ethnography of Melilla and the Canary Islands reveals that de facto borders created through excision are vulnerable to legal activism. The strategic use of the law can set back the expansion of the border project, tenuously restoring some rights for asylum-seeking and undocumented foreigners.

In response to the difficulties refugees face in finding housing, Berlin’s government has developed new housing-like shelters that offer longer-term accommodation. Drawing on literature concerning racial capitalism and urban migration governance, I explain how these shelters represent a multilayered business opportunity for revenue extraction, resulting in the ongoing displacement, spatial fixing, and continued racialization of refugees.

Following significant social and legal challenges to Australia’s colonial policy of ‘offshoring’ immigration detention, the system has become more mobile and diffuse, expanding through a range of new, ad-hoc, and established detention sites both ‘on’ and ‘offshore’. In this article, we draw upon concepts of racial surveillance capitalism and data justice to analyse a work by the Manus Recording Project Collective, titled where are you today, that sought to expose and counter the colonial border’s disappearing effects.

A market for mental health apps, designed to help millions of refugees manage symptoms of Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder and other mental health issues, has proliferated since the outbreak of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. These bite-size, on-the-go, mindfulness-based apps have emerged at the intersection of new investment models, state-of-the-art AI and surveillance and border control regimes.

Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass.

This article uses the geological notion of discontinuity – a structural break in the rock – to imagine how discontinuity might be found within the borehole itself. It does this by identifying three access points: excavation through drilling and coring, collaboration through cross-border scientific work, and imagination through art and the weird.