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.
Putting research on the socio-political effects of Kenya’s new Standard Gauge Railway in conversation with geographically and anthropologically grounded scholarship on infrastructure, the article analyses how megaprojects, in spite of state spectacles of infrastructure-qua-development, are embroiled in multiple modalities of ruination.
Infrastructures, as the humanistic and social scientific literature comprising an 'infrasturctural turn' show, are systems that move water, raw materials, goods, electricity, trash, and people while shaping social identities and notions of citizenship, creating forms of exclusion and belonging, and producing environmental meanings and practices.
This article argues that biopolitical infrastructures have been central features of Turkey’s ongoing colonization of Kurdish territories and populations and that the Green Revolution, despite its promise of progress and abundance, needs to be understood as part of this history of racialized state-making.
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.
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?