A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Foregrounds the built systems or networks that coordinate the circulation of things, people, money, and data into integrated wholes. Provides an analytical framework for critically interrogating the relation between built networks and their spatial mobilities, including attention to their institutional dimensions, political economies, and forms of life that interact with and reshape their geographies.
Whereas social and political theory has long concerned itself with the description and analysis of structures—states, classes, national economies—Mezzadra and Neilson ask what we might learn about contemporary capitalism by instead studying its operations. How are the global workings of capital reshaping the state and its institutions? What are the implications of these processes for the continued encroachment of capitalism on new spaces and new realms of social life?
The celebrations of the railroad as a symbol of national unity and progress are a reminder of its continued power in writing the myth of the nation, and of the importance of challenging such nation-valorizing narratives. Karuka does exactly this in his timely and provocative book, creating new ideas with which to re-examine the well-worn story of the railroad, and studying it through a broad array of distinct cases.
Phnom Penh is being built not only on the foundation of blood bricks, but also climate change as a key driver of debt and entry into modern slavery in brick kilns. Blood bricks embody the converging traumas of modern slavery and climate change in our urban age.
This article proposes an Internet Pigeon Network as a prototype and a critique.
This article investigates the infrastructures of dairy farming and artisanal cheesemaking in rural Kars, Northeastern Turkey. Based on my 18-month ethnographic research on dairy farming and dairy sciences of pasture-cheeses of Kars, I conceptualize these dairy infrastructures as the material web of relations, which makes dairy production possible through sociotechnical practices of obtaining milk in pastures and crafting it into cheeses.
This article draws on fieldwork among Palestinian environmentalists, Palestinian Authority bureaucrats, and municipal employees between 2007 and 2017 to show how human bodies—and their interpreted and interpretive attunements—must figure in our investigations of infrastructural spaces in the Middle East and beyond.
Why do infrastructures remain in place if they do not perform the functions which compelled their design? If soft infrastructures such as diplomatic trips do not increase bilateral trade volumes, why do they stay on the agenda?
Perhaps the most famous image of Palestinian life under the British (1917–1948) is that of the “iron cage.” This article holds on to the notion of the iron cage, but proposes to stretch its meanings in two directions.