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.
The perceived color of the sky is determined by three interrelated factors: sunlight composed of many different wavelengths, molecules in the earth’s atmosphere that scatter light, and the sensitivity of the human eye. Conventional wisdom holds that the characteristics of sunlight and the atmosphere are an immutable fact of nature. However, China’s government has engaged in a campaign that seeks to control local meteorological conditions to produce blue skies on command, a phenomenon referred to here as “blueskying.”
Writing on the heels of the First World War and at the advent of the Irish War of Independence, William Butler Yeats used the concept of the gyre as an unstoppable, terrifying dynamic force. A gyre, in his poem, destabilizes the relation between human and nonhuman others, beginning as an aerial vortex and expanding to an oceanic “blood-dimmed tide.”
First deployed in West Queensland, Australia, Alphabet’s (formerly Google) Project Loon is flying balloons—essentially elevated cell phone towers—over Indonesia to provide internet to those who do not have it or cannot afford it. The Indonesian government is working with Alphabet as well as funding the start-up company Helion to make Indonesia a world leader in the use of balloons to deliver the internet.
Sovereignty has long extended through the thermal world. The manipulation of heat fueled industrial production and transportation, expanding the reach of national and colonial forces. The labor of bodies has been managed through the deployment of food and the implicit regulation of metabolisms, as well as the mass thermal communications of air conditioning. The boundaries of cities, nations, and empires have been enforced through thermal violence, whether the dumping of indigenous people on the frozen prairie or the blasting of prisoners with water cannons in subzero temperatures.
People in Nicaragua with a form of progressive renal failure called chronic kidney disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt) talk in volumes about their condition. I don’t mean that they go on and on about their aches and pains. Most of the thousands of CKDnt patients in Nicaragua were sugarcane plantation workers until they got sick.
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.”