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.
February and March 2018 brought a mass walkout on UK university campuses over pension reform, but also state-wide teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, university campus strikes in Canada, ongoing struggles to unionize US university campuses, student walk-outs in US high schools over gun violence, and upcoming strikes in Kentucky and Oklahoma. We invite students, graduate students, teachers of all levels, lecturers, professional staff, and union organizers to submit ideas to us.
What might it mean, Andrew Culp asks in Dark Deleuze, to 'give up on all the reasons given for saving this world' (Culp, 2016b: 66)? In response, this interview explores the pathways offered by a 'dark' Deleuze, a politics of cruelty, Afro-Pessimism, partisan knowledges, destituent power, and tactics of escape.
In this book, Paik demonstrates that the production of these so-called outsides to rights are not new nor are they specific to any particular presidential administration. Rather, they are resilient and flexible strategies linked closely with the twentieth-century rise of rights discourses themselves.
It is hard not to interpret the plaintive and frustrated reminders of citizenship status coming from Caribbean peoples in US territories, colonies really, as a clear, strategic attempt to make sure to fall on the “right side” of the state’s obligations to human beings. But there is another lesson to be learned from the demand for recognition as citizens that arises at the insular and coastal margins of U.S. empire in the wake of disasters: a clear sense that the very category of “citizen,” premised upon white supremacy in settler colonies like the U.S., has never been a secure status for income-poor people, especially people of color.
Having just published a theoretically-oriented article using "childish knowledges" in Society and Space (Kallio, 2016), I want to reflect upon this issue. Briefly, the article engages with phenomenologically-oriented political theory and the ethics and politics of recognition debate.
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.”