A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Interrogates the spatial dimensions of state power. Contributions analyze the material practices and modes of knowledge particular to anti-statist revolt, citizenship, bordering, interstate conflict, nationalism, political representation, segregation, sovereignty, surveillance, and warcraft among other areas. Especially attentive to demands for alternative forms of political life outside formal state channels.
What is it about this conjuncture that makes the unprecedented use of force with which UC Berkeley reclaimed People’s Park acceptable and even desirable for so many? We examine the pressures and opportunities, strategies for winning consent, and counter-hegemonic tactics at different scales.
Byler finds that what’s going on in Xinjiang is not only violation of rights, nor simply authoritarianism, racism or Islamophobia, but rather the production and conquering of a new, colonial frontier of ethno-racialized global capitalism.
What happens at the UN climate negotiations? In her new book, In Quest of a Shared Planet, Dr. Naveeda Khan examines the multi-dimensional and chaotic space of these meetings. She demonstrates how diverse Global South actors, from negotiators to activists to experts, influence global climate policy, and why countries like Bangladesh keep taking an active seat at the table after decades of limited action.
In Animal Traffic, Rosemary-Claire Collard combines Marxist theory with animal studies to offer a powerful analysis of how capitalism structures human-animal relations, and what the “oddity” (2020: 8) of the exotic pet case can teach us about our more common relations with animals.
Attending to the experiences of Hawai‘i’s houseless, I unpack the meanings and practices of organized abandonment while proposing that some face structural neglect by “living with abandon.” I argue that the rupturing of life-giving relations entwined with particular places serve as a foundation of organized abandonment.
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.
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.
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.
Through a contemporary history of social conflicts surrounding the Corredor, I demonstrate how corporate and State actors work together to make corporations appear as if they were independent from the social contexts in which they operate and therefore free from responsibility for the harms they cause. Following Timothy Mitchell, I call this the “corporate effect.”