Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant's Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory (2023) offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). Clément Rivière interviews Loïc Wacquant on thinking the urban with Bourdieu.

Laleh Khalili's latest manuscript, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (2024), gives breath to the complex and hidden life of seafaring. Khalili provides a vivid account of the lives of seafarers who power the vast global trade network, typically hidden from land-based consumers. The researcher embarked on two voyages, twenty months apart, aboard different CMA CGM ships travelling from Malta to Jabal Ali, Dubai. Using a mix of ethnographic notes, photographs, interviews, and archival materials, Khalili reveals the living conditions aboard these cargo ships.

"Humanitarian Borders" offers us, in perhaps somewhat unexpected ways, the possibility to ‘think otherwise’ through consistently highlighting the inherent absurdity and obscenity of what Pallister-Wilkins terms the ‘humanitarianesque carnival.’

"Humanitarian Borders" by Polly Pallister-Wilkins does many things, all of them beautifully. For me, it tells the story of an island, a looping “crisis”, and a carnival.

Some care is revolutionary, and revolutionary struggles are rooted in an ethic of caring for and with. In the context of borders that kill, we need to pay attention to forms of care and life-saving that shrink borders.

Reading Pallister-Wilkins’ observations about care, control and rescue as core manifestations of both humanitarian and bordering practice alongside Black and Indigenous feminist theories, we learn how care is instrumentalized to mask inequity and violence.

Humanitarian Borders is an invitation to critically rethink (and begin to remake) humanitarian action with the ultimate aim of dismantling the ‘global colour line’.

‍“Humanitarian Borders" helps us to close the geographical and conceptual distance between Mediterranean “deathscapes”, and my own land, girt by an increasingly violent sea, a world away.

"Humanitarian Borders" is an expression of Pallister-Wilkins’ anger at the limits of a liberal politics of rescue and a caution against seeing “life-saving efforts as a panacea or as a sustainable and just ‘solution’ to the violence and harm caused by unequal mobility.”

The ocean is suffocating, and law is an important reason why. In this short film, we question the very basis of ocean law and its dependence on the land-water binary and argue for unmaking rather than fixing existing modes of law.