Showing papers in "Environment and Planning D-society & Space in 2014"

Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City

Abstract: A new wave of smart cities projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensor-based ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material-political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban “citizenship” to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities, and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? Working through an early and formative smart cities design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative from 2007 to 2008, this paper discusses the ways in which smart city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality, or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. Revisiting and reworking Foucault’s notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart cities design proposal, this paper advances an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather attends to the specific spatial-material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, this paper considers how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This re-versioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a “citizen,” and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.

A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change:

Abstract: In an interview in 1977 Michel Foucault proposed the term dispositif for a heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, and knowledges connected together into an apparatus of government. Drawing upon later articulations of the concept by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, and exploring a range of innovations in the �management� of urban life, this paper reworks Foucault�s concept as a means for understanding�and potentially contesting�new modes of government that have emerged in response to the crisis of climate change. Against understandings of �government� in terms of a totalizing plan from which new practices and technologies usher forth, this paper emphasizes the ad hoc, and ex post facto nature of �government� as a set of diverse and loosely connected efforts to introduce �economy� into existing relations in response to a perceived �crisis�. The paper concludes by exploring Agamben�s notion of �profanation� as an adequate political response to the dispositif of resilient urbanism.

The Right to Infrastructure: A Prototype for Open Source Urbanism:

Abstract: This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the �right to infrastructure� as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects; and the social organisation of the �right to infrastructure� as a political, active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the �prototype� as an emerging figure for contemporary sociotechnical designs in and for social theory.

Biodiversity, Purity, and Death: Conservation Biology as Biopolitics

Abstract: This paper draws on the Foucauldian notion of biopower to renarrate the development of conservation science in the US as a form of liberal biopolitical rule. With its emphasis on making nature live, conservation marks a shift away from a sovereign form of rule that emphasized subduing and controlling nature; today, nature is ruled not by the sword but by science. Through a discussion of key concepts in conservation biology—populations in crisis; evolution and its future orientation; extinction as death that is necessary for life; and diversity as purity—we illustrate the truth discourses, underlying logics, and calculative technologies by which distinctions within nonhuman life are made and made meaningful. We argue that conservation is biopolitical not just in that it moves from controlling individuals to statistically managing populations and species, but also in that it extends the racialized logic of abnormality in its core notions of biological diversity and purity. In the logics of conservation and ...

City as Ideology: Reconciling the Explosion of the City Form with the Tenacity of the City Concept

Abstract: This paper is a theoretical reexamination of the traditional concept of the city in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new variations on the city concept, as well as calls to discard it altogether. I argue that both options are inadequate. The city has generally been understood as a category of analysis�a moment in urbanization processes�but might now be better understood as a category of practice: an ideological representation of urbanization processes. I substantiate this claim through an examination of three tropes of the traditional city which in material terms have been superseded in recent decades in the Global North but retain their force as ideological representations of contemporary urban spatial practice: the opposition between city and country, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type.

The Eco-Scalar Fix: Rescaling Environmental Governance and the Politics of Ecological Boundaries in Alberta, Canada

Abstract: This paper engages with recent work in political ecology that explores the ways in which scale is imbricated in environmental governance. Specifically, we analyze the deployment of specific ecological scales as putatively �natural� governance units in rescaling processes. To undertake this analysis, the paper brings two sets of literature into dialogue: (1) political ecology of scale and (2) political economy of rescaling, drawing on theories of uneven development. Building on this literature, we develop the concept of an eco-scalar fix and explore its analytical potential through a case study of the rescaling of water governance in Alberta, Canada. We argue that although the �eco-scalar fix� is usually framed as an apolitical governance change�particularly through the framing of particular scales (ie, the watershed) as �natural��it is often, in fact, a deeply political move that reconfigures power structures and prioritizes some resource uses over others in ways that can entrench, rather than resolve, the crises it was designed to address. Moreover, we suggest that, although watershed governance is often discursively depicted as an environmental strategy (eg, internalizing environmental externalities by aligning decision making with ecological boundaries), it is often articulated with�and undertaken to address challenges that arise through�processes of uneven development.

Agency, Affect, and the Immunological Politics of Disaster Resilience

Abstract: Resilience has become a foundational component within disaster management policy frameworks concerned with building �cultures of safety� among vulnerable populations. These attempts at social engineering are justified through a discourse of agency and empowerment, in which resilience programming is said to enable marginalized groups to become self-sufficient and manage their own vulnerabilities. This paper seeks to destabilize this political imaginary through a critical analysis of participatory disaster resilience programming in Jamaica. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jamaica�s national disaster management agency, I argue that resilience operates through an affective economy of fear, hope, and confidence that enacts an immunitary biopolitics. The object of this biopolitics is excess adaptive capacity that results from affective relations between participants and their socioecological milieu. Participatory techniques such as transect walks, focus groups, and education programs attempt to encode and manipulate these affective relations in order to construct an artificial and depoliticized form of adaptive capacity that does not threaten neoliberal order. Recognizing the immunological logic at the heart of disaster resilience opens up new ethical and political imperatives in disaster management that value adaptive capacity as the vital force of new socioecological futures, rather than as an object of governmental intervention and control

Michel Foucault and the Smart City: Power Dynamics Inherent in Contemporary Governing through Code

Abstract: Drawing upon Michel Foucault's approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between apparatuses of discipline and apparatuses of security, the paper approaches these questions on three broad levels, namely: how contemporary ‘governing through code’ relates to its referent object (referentiality axis), to normalisation (normativity axis), and to space (spatiality axis). Empirically, the paper investigates two high-profile pilot projects in Switzerland in the field of smart electricity management, aimed at (1) the assessment of customer needs and behaviours with regard to novel smart metering solutions (iSMART), and (2) the elaboration of novel IT so...

The Biopolitical Border in Practice: Surveillance and Death at the Greece-Turkey Borderzones

Abstract: This paper examines biopolitical control practices at the Greece—Turkey borders and addresses current debates in the study of borders and biopolitics. The Greek and Frontex authorities have established diverse surveillance mechanisms to control the borderzone space and to monitor, intercept, apprehend, and push back migrants or to block their passage. The location of contemporary borders has been much debated in the literature. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of borders by demonstrating that while borders are diffusing beyond and inside state territories, their practices and effects are concentrated at the edges of state territories—ie, borderzones. Borderzones are biopolitical spaces in which surveillance is most intense and migrants suffer the direct threat of injury and death. Applying biopolitics in the context of borderzones also prompts us to revisit the concept. While Foucault posits that biopolitics is the product of the historical transition away from sovereign powers controlling terr...

What Is a Destituent Power

Abstract: The following essay by Giorgio Agamben is based on a lecture given in central France in the summer of 2013. Responding directly to recent occupations and insurrections—from Cairo and Istanbul to London and New York City—Agamben builds upon his existing work in order to develop and clarify his understanding of the political and, in particular, the notion of destituent power (potenza destituente). In contrast to attempts to affirm a constituent power independent of a relation to constituted power, which for Agamben both reproduce the governmental structure of the exception and represent the apex of metaphysics, destituent power outlines a force that, in its very constitution, deactivates the governmental machine. For Agamben, it is in the sensible elaboration of the belonging together of life and form, being and action, beyond all relation, that the impasse of the present will be overcome. Ultimately, Agamben points not only towards what it means to become Ungovernable, but towards the potential of staying so.

Bio-Geo-Graphy: Landscape, Dwelling, and the Political Ecology of Human-Elephant Relations:

Abstract: The relation between the bio and the geo has been amongst geography's most enduring concerns. This paper contributes to ongoing attempts in human geography to politicise the dynamics and distribution of life. Drawing upon postcolonial environmental history, animal ecology, and more-than-human geography, the paper examines how humans and elephants cohabit with and against the grain of cartographic design. Through fieldwork in northeast India, it develops a ‘dwelt political ecology’ that reanimates landscape as a dwelt achievement whilst remaining sensitive to postcolonial histories and subaltern concerns. The paper conceptualises and deploys a methodology of ‘tracking’ through which archival material, elephant ecology, and voices of the marginalised can be integrated and mapped. It concludes by discussing the implications of this work for fostering new conversations between more-than-human geography and subaltern political ecology.

Security Atmospheres or the Crystallisation of Worlds

Abstract: This paper makes several moves towards the study of geographies of security through notions of atmosphere. Two related claims circulate through this paper: that security is becoming attuned to what we might call affective atmospheres, whilst it is itself becoming atmospheric. The paper proceeds to develop, first, a correlation of ideas across concepts of security, power, and affective atmospheres. The following section sees security understood atmospherically, before it goes on to explore how security is increasingly attuned to affective atmospheres as its object-target. Finally, by way of conclusion, the paper offers several manners of contestation and critique. Throughout, the paper draws on a variety of secondary literature as well as primary documentary research and analysis, focusing empirically upon a set of counterinsurgency practices known as ‘atmospherics’.

Internal Colonisation and Indigenous Resource Sovereignty: Wind Power Developments on Traditional Saami Lands:

Abstract: Using the concept of internal colonisation, this paper aims to demonstrate how current disputes over wind power developments in traditional Saami mountain areas have reignited contestations between Saami people and the Swedish state. It traces the historical continuities in these contestations. It also analyses shifts in the discourses legitimising the state's nonrecognition of Saami rights to land. The paper explores three discursive frameworks that reflect these continuities and shifts. First, it traces contestations over the ownership of ‘Crown’ (ie, state) land and the paternalistic practices of the state. Second, it explores how a discourse of renewable energy is currently being mobilised to argue that Saami interests must necessarily give way to broader environmental concerns. Third, it analyses how long-standing colonial rationalities are rearticulated through market relations, as the state seeks to construct a pseudo planning market for wind power developments, which necessarily excludes Saami interests. These debates, and the ongoing resistances by Saami people to industrial encroachments on their traditional territories, highlight the fundamentally unresolved relations between the Saami and the non-Indigenous majority society in Sweden.

Caring for the collective Biopower and agential subjectification in wildlife conservation

Abstract: This paper explores turtle conservation in Odisha, India, to map the complicated manners in which animal well-being is pursued in the contemporary world. Using insights from Foucault's work on biopolitics, it offers an account of conservation as population politics, questioning the entanglement of harm and care that infuses this space of more-than- human social change. In doing this, the paper elaborates the concept of agential subjectification in order to track the mechanisms that underlie the asymmetric circulation of biopower in human-animal interactions and to develop Foucauldian scholarship for the examination of present-day manifestations of the 'will to improve'.

Botanical decolonization: : rethinking native plants

Abstract: In this paper we use an apparently marginal topic��native plants��to address two issues of concern to contemporary politics and political theory: the legacy of settler colonialism, and dilemmas of scholarship and activism in the �Anthropocene�. Drawing on the writings of Francis Bacon and based on a case study of California, we argue that planting and displanting humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor. In contrast to those who equate native plant advocates with anti-immigrant nativism, we see native plant advocacy as part of a broad process of botanical decolonization and a strategic location for ethical action in the Anthropocene.

Counterinsurgency Ecotourism in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve:

Abstract: Through analysis of a Guatemalan ecotourism project, this paper examines how tourism development is driving the militarization of conservation through a modality of violence I identify as counterinsurgency ecotourism. I look at four manifestations of counterinsurgency ecotourism: the repurposing of the army to enforce conservation law; the creation of an environmental ‘predator’ discourse; the eviction of peasants from protected areas; and the construction of military outposts. These practices illustrate that ecotourism development has become a means by which the Guatemalan state is militarizing conservation spaces in ways that revive and repurpose tactics of counterinsurgency warfare from the country's civil war (1960–96). Furthermore, this militarized approach to ecotourism development obscures the structural production of poverty, insecurity, and deforestation in northern Guatemala and undermines environmental conservation and social justice efforts. The counterinsurgency ecotourism practices identified in Guatemala resonate with many other conservation and ecotourism spaces found across the world, such as UNESCO Biospheres, as well places across the Global South with histories of counterinsurgency warfare.

Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis:

Abstract: Several decades ago, the urban--viewed as the sum of productive practices and historical experiences--was seen as the vehicle for new values and an alternative civilization. Such hopes are fading concurrently with the last illusions of modernity. Today it is impossible to write with the lyricism and modernist ecstasy embraced by Apollinaire: Paris nights are drunk with gin And blaze with electricity Green fires, flashing along their spines Tramways up and down their rails Shed tunes of mechanical folly.(1) Eventually the critique of the modern city dovetails with the critique of everyday life in the contemporary world. And yet, this conclusion leads immediately to several paradoxes. The first is that the more the city is extended, the more its social relations deteriorate. Since the end of the 19th century, cities in most developed countries have experienced an extraordinary growth, kindling considerable hopes. But, in reality, city life has not produced entirely new social relations. Everything occurs as if the expansion of older cities and the establishment of new ones served to preserve and protect relations of dependence, domination, exclusion, and exploitation. In short, the framework of everydayness was slightly modified, but its contents were not transformed. And due to the expansion of urban forms on the one hand and the explosion of traditional forms of productive labor on the other, it is plausible to claim that the condition of city dwellers (citadins) was degraded even further. These consequences are intertwined. The appearance of new technologies leads simultaneously to new ways of organizing production and to new ways of organizing urban space. The latter interact in ways that are mutually detrimental rather than beneficial. There was a time when city centers were active and productive, and thus belonged to the workers (populaire). In this epoch, moreover, the City (cite) operated primarily through its center. The dislocation of this urban form began in the late 19th century, resulting in the deportation of all that the population considered active and productive into suburbs (banlieues), which were being located ever further away. The ruling class can be blamed for this, but it was simply making skillful use of an urban trend and a requirement of the relations of production. Could factories and polluting industries be maintained in the urban cores? Nevertheless, the political benefit for the dominant classes is clear: the gentrification (embourgeoisement) of city centers, the replacement of the earlier productive centrality with a center for decision making and services. The urban center is not only transformed into a site of consumption; it also becomes an object of consumption, and is valued as such. The producers, who had earlier been exported--or more accurately deported--to the suburbs, now return as tourists to the center from which they had been dispossessed and expropriated. Peripheral populations are today reclaiming urban centers as places of leisure, of empty and unscheduled time. In this way the urban phenomenon is profoundly transformed. The historic center has disappeared as such. All that remains are, on the one hand, centers for power and decision making and, on the other, fake and artificial spaces. It is true, of course, that the city endures, but only as museum and as spectacle. The urban, conceived and lived as a social practice, is in the process of deteriorating and perhaps disappearing. All this produces a specific dialecticization of social relations, revealing a second paradox: centers and peripheries presuppose and oppose one another. This phenomenon, which has deep roots and infamous historical precedents, is currently intensifying to such a degree that it encompasses the entire planet--as illustrated for example in North-South relations. Hence emerges a crucial question that exceeds that of the urban. Are new forms arising in the entire world and imposing themselves upon the city? …

Networks, interfaces and computer-generated images: Learning from digital visualisations of urban redevelopment projects

Abstract: The project was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council RES-062-23-3305.

Territorial Phantom Pains (and Other Cartographic Anxieties)

Abstract: National loss of territory is commonly described in corporeal language of mutilation and dismemberment. In this paper I argue that this language is not simply poetic or metaphoric but that it reflects a genuine association between the individual body and the national contours, and that this identification has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. In revisiting the common trope of the nation-as-body through inclusion of insights from neuroscience, I explore what happens when a lack of fit intervenes between the physical geographical extent of the nation and the mental map held by its inhabitants. Taking Manchuria as my main focus while suggesting a much wider applicability, I suggest that �lost� territories, no longer included within the national body, remain nonetheless part of a previous national incarnation. As such, they draw national sentiments and affect, eliciting what can be labeled �phantom pains�.

Another letter from the Home Office: Reading the material politics of asylum

Abstract: In an era of technologically mediated modes of border enforcement, this paper focuses upon a seemingly more anachronistic mode of governmental intervention: that of the letter. Exploring the use of letters by the UK Border Agency to communicate decisions on asylum claims I argue that taking the materiality of the letter seriously demands a reworking of the politics of asylum. Drawing on ethnographic research within a UK asylum drop-in centre, the paper opens by offering a governmental reading of letters as things which define the limits of present and future actions, whilst fixing individuals to specific locations. The paper then destabilises such a reading by considering how letters are understood through material-discursive entanglements of things, discourses, and spaces, such that letters are understood through, and help to constitute, different atmospheres, spaces, and subjectivities of asylum. Thus I argue that it is by taking seriously the connections between materials, discourses, and affective states that we might critically interrogate framings of the state as an oppressive force shaping the lives of those seeking asylum.

Mobile Places, Relational Spaces: Conceptualizing Change in Sydney's LGBTQ Neighborhoods

Abstract: Since the 1950s neighborhoods associated with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) subjects and communities have become part of the urban landscape in many cities of the Global North. In Australia this is evident in Sydney, where particular inner-city suburbs are bracketed with �gay�, �lesbian�, and �queer� sexualities. These sexual�spatial relations are multiple and changing, with current fears about the decline of �traditional� gay village spaces coinciding with the emergence of alternative LGBTQ neighborhoods. This paper reinterprets these transformations, departing from notions of the �demise� of gay spaces, (re)conceptualizing Sydney�s LGBTQ neighborhoods as mobile and relational moorings that are not fixed and immutable but repeatedly reconstructed and regrounded from flows of people, knowledge, and capital. Moreover, such mobile practices and representations connect places, symbolically and materially constructing them in relation to each other. Consequently, rather than reading through narratives of �demise� and �emergence�, we suggest Sydney�s LGBTQ landscapes are embedded in, and (re)constituted through, a �politics of mobility�. We examine the physical displacement, representations of mobility, and embodied mobile practices underpinning these changes in inner-city Sydney. In doing so, our purpose is to make conceptual and practical connections between the significance of �place making� and �mobility� to LGBTQ lives, communities, and politics. This discussion encourages geographers of sexualities to consider the multiplicity of LGBTQ mobilities, and equally prompts mobilities scholars to be cognizant of sexual and gender politics in processes and outcomes of mobilities.

Rancière, Politics, and the Occupy Movement:

Abstract: This paper focuses on the work of Jacques Ranciere, his view of politics, and its relevance for understanding key aspects of social protest movements such as the Occupy movement. The paper outlines some of Ranciere's key concepts, such as the distinction between politics and the police, subjectivity, ‘in-between spaces’, and ‘insubstantial communities’, and attempts to locate his concept of politics within a wider spectrum of political forms in order to bring out its distinctive nature. Links are then made to the ideas and practices of the Occupy movement as an expression of politics that Ranciere has recently endorsed. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the critical questions concerning the effectiveness of this style of politics (questions of political organisation and engagement with the state) and the wider consequences for Ranciere's concept of radical politics.

Gifted Places: The Inalienable Nature of Belonging in Place

Abstract: This paper focuses on the importance of historic, social, and material connections in belonging to place. Mauss’s anthropological concept of a ‘gift’ is deployed to understand how places are cared for by a community over time. The development of tangible and intangible connections between past, present, and future people and places is explored. On the basis of in-depth, qualitative research with a group of people who have long-standing connections to their local place, memories and life-narratives are unravelled to explore the social and material relationships that place embodies. An understanding of place as an inalienable gift may create a moral duty to nurture and pass on places to subsequent generations. The research takes a phenomenological approach in order to illuminate the largely unconsidered associations between personal biographies and material places. After a brief discussion of the data collection methods used, notably photo diaries, some empirical examples are put forward to demonstrate how the research participants act as current custodians of places. The paper concludes by bringing together the different aspects of belonging in place illustrated by these vignettes and shows how they contribute to belonging in place as a moral way of being-in-the-world; that is, what I term ‘an ontological belonging’.

Street Renaming, Symbolic Capital, and Resistance in Durban, South Africa

Abstract: In early 2007 the African National Congress majority within the local government authority of Durban, South Africa, approved two phases of a street renaming process, which culminated in the renaming of over one hundred prominent streets after various anticolonial and antiapartheid ‘struggle heroes’. The process led to an unprecedented degree of public attention and debate, expressed through a range of arguments and symbolic gestures, and local state representatives responded by casting this opposition in terms of ‘countertransformation’. This paper examines the Durban case with a critical analytical perspective that sees acts of place naming through the heuristic frames of ‘text’, ‘arena’, and ‘performance’, drawing attention to the complex spatial and material dynamics that attend acts of symbolic transformation and resistance. It contributes to theoretical discussions surrounding “naming as symbolic resistance”, by arguing that a performative conception of symbolic capital and resistance may aid our und...

On the Peripheries of Planetary Urbanization: Globalizing Manaus and its Expanding Impact

Abstract: In this paper I argue that global urbanism produces peripherality in ways that cannot be adequately problematized without taking into account its actual extent and geographically uneven development. Therefore, planetary urbanization needs to engage scholarly traditions attuned to regional urbanization if the discourse is to move past limitations in the urban globalization canon and its narrow focus on cities. To that end, I examine research on extensive urbanization in the Amazon region. Illustrative case studies show how attempts to globalize Manaus precipitated territorial restructuring and sociospatial change far beyond the city's boundaries. Manaus is now a more unequal city. Selective metropolitan expansion to the Rio Negro's south bank has led to the simultaneous upgrading and peripheralization of Iranduba. Yet, the building of a city-centric regional network of roadways also shaped Roraima State's transformation from isolated borderland to bypassed periphery. Moreover, financial and symbolic appropriations of standing rainforests by metropolitan conservationism marginalize remote communities even in the absence of exploitative deforestation and resource extraction. Final remarks emphasize the need for further research on the hybrid (urban—rural) conditions and functional articulations of distant-yet-impacted peripheries. Such efforts may broaden the political horizons of planetary urbanization by informing extensive contestations of entrepreneurial urbanism.

Continuous Connectivity, Handheld Computers, and Mobile Spatial Knowledge

Abstract: As geospatial information seemingly moves from users' personal computers to ‘the cloud’, the use of the phrase ‘geographic technologies’ has increasingly indicated things beyond desktop GIS. With these shifts in the distribution of geospatial data and practices, and the rise of the geoweb as a site of inquiry, new concepts are needed to better understand the conditions of geographic technologies. In this paper I conceptualize one such element of interactivity: Connection. Here, I argue that a logic of continuous connectivity underlies the development of digital spatial media and influences the contemporary production of spatial knowledge. For those lives lived that are presumed to be ‘always connected’, interactions are figured by these connections to digital media. Many of these digital devices (especially mobile ones) become functional only through a series of connections to data and communication networks. For instance, mobile phones are in continuous communication regardless of direct use, ‘listening’...

Maintenance Work and the Performativity of Urban Inscriptions: The Case of Paris Subway Signs

Abstract: Urban inscriptions are performative devices that play a crucial part in urban assemblages. They mark sites, give places a name, designate directions. This paper questions such performativity by investigating the design and maintenance of subway signs in Paris. Studying backstage activities rather than user tactics, it shows that the semiotic production of space is mainly played out in standardization processes that are both oriented towards signs immutability and fueled by a daily consideration for their vulnerability. Such a posture allows us to take full account of the ontological variations of signs (which can be, for example, stable or unstable, consistent or fragile, immutable or mutable). Maintenance work, through which the agency of urban inscriptions is partially shaped, ensures the articulation of such a multiplicity.

Theorizing Violence and the Dialectics of Landscape Memorialization: A Case Study of Greensboro, North Carolina

Abstract: The study of the memorialization of landscapes of violence is a vibrant field both within and beyond geography. Previous scholarship has highlighted the contestation that surrounds the memorialization of landscapes of violence as well as the politics of memory that are manifest on the landscape. To date, however, little work has explicitly theorized ‘violence’; this has a tremendous bearing on the understanding of how, or if, certain ‘violent’ acts are remembered or memorialized. This paper constitutes an attempt to denaturalize violence through a foregrounding of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ violence. Through a case study of racialized violence in Greensboro, North Carolina, we argue that geographers and other social scientists must articulate more clearly how violence, as a theoretical construct, is abstracted from the concrete realities of lived experience and represented discursively and materially on the landscape. We conclude that the potential for, and actual realized memorialization of landscapes of,...

States of (in)security: : Corporeal geographies and the elsewhere war

Abstract: This paper examines embodied representations of state (in)security within three broad thematic categories: biometrics, prosthetics, and military biopower. This analysis elucidates the ways in which gender and race are put to work through representational framings of US state security. These framings, while diverse, offer similar taxonomies of inclusion—exclusion, security—insecurity, and violence against or care for certain bodies. This critical examination explicates how security is succinctly situated by autonomous state actors, ‘life politics’, and manipulations of the global—intimate through the lens of mimetic gendered and raced bodies. I argue that these various visual representations aid in reinforcing to the mainstream/white US citizen-subject that he or she remains secure within the immediate US homeland by way of the displacement of contemporary war violence elsewhere—rather than such violence circulating ‘everywhere’. A visual and discursive representation of security—insecurity illustrates a p...