The South China Sea is politically contested from its surface to its bed. China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei all make claims on the volume of this sea — known variously (the list is not exhaustive) as “the South Sea (南海),” “the East Sea (Biển Đông),” “the Luzon Sea/the Philippine Sea,” and “the Natuna Sea.”

Although the photographic scenes claim to tell a story of what it is like to experience homelessness during severe weather, the images that coalesced around this encampment in their very representation–ironically–rendered the subjects experiencing homelessness, absent. Like the center of a vortex, the photographs performed the operation of presenting a replete image all the while absenting its alleged content.

‍An enduring image associated with the recent “fracking” boom in North Dakota’s Bakken region is a 2016 nighttime photograph of North America taken by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite. In the image, an enormous swath of illumination as bright as major cities covers the sparsely populated northern Great Plains.

The years-long legal battle between British musicians Robbie Williams and Jimmy Page over Williams's intention to build a swimming pool in his basement has recently come to a close, conditionally in Williams's favor. Page had reason to be concerned: since the late aughts, the super-basement craze among the more well-heeled that has flooded council planning committees and inspired a gimmicky BBC documentary has also wreaked havoc on neighbors.

‍The rush of air and water over a territory are not the only flows that shape its terrain. And it is movement that, “instead of being subsequent to geography, is geography” (Steinberg 2013, 157). The term “eddy” can capture not just unidirectional movement and flows but also their unpredictable, counter-intuitive, spiral-like, concentric, centrifugal, and centripetal tendencies. Eddy is both natural phenomenon and a spatial metaphor for “human vulnerability and adaptability in times of unprecedented transformation.”