Showing papers in "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 2017"

Decolonising geographical knowledges

Abstract: This piece provides an overview of decolonising approaches for geographers unfamiliar with the field, first by examining some of the ways in which decolonial scholarship seeks to build on – and go beyond – postcolonialism. Developing these points, it turns to discuss what it means to think about decolonising geography at this particular political, institutional and historical conjuncture, examining the urgencies and challenges associated in this moment particularly for British geography. The introductory intervention then moves to examine how the remaining intervention pieces understand and address the theme of decolonial scholarship and geography.

Navigating the city: dialectics of everyday urbanism

Abstract: How might we conceptualise and research everyday urbanism? By examining the making of everyday life in a low-income neighbourhood in Uganda, we argue that a dialectics of everyday urbanism is a useful approach for understanding urban poverty. This dialectical approach examines how marginalised urban dwellers navigate the city in the relative absence of formal infrastructure systems, service provision and state welfare, and in turn exceed those limitations through forging connections, capacities and opportunities. We reveal the ‘social infrastructures’ that people put together to sustain life, as well as the limits of and placed on these infrastructures, from the legacies of structural adjustment to ongoing forms of demolition and disinvestment. We identify a set of practices that operate alongside social infrastructure – ‘coordination’, ‘consolidation’ and ‘speculation’ – important in the composition of everyday urban life. In doing so, we reflect on how we might research the dialectics of everyday urbanism, and here a ‘follow-along participant observation’ (FAPO) methodology has significant potential. Our arguments emerge from research with residents in Kampala, but open out questions for how we conceive and research everyday life and urban infrastructure more generally.

Purging the nation: race, conviviality and embodied encounters in the lives of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women

Abstract: This paper critically engages with debates on race, conviviality and the geography of encounters. Where much of this work is undertaken in multicultural places, far less is known about the doing and undoing of conviviality in mainly white localities. The study further contributes to this work by offering a richly embodied account of racism and belonging based on the biographical testimonies of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women. Through these accounts, I identify topographies of power, social inequality and forms of exclusion that disrupt the melody of multicultural conviviality. I demonstrate the visceral aspects of race as it is summoned to life in live encounters, where it is lived on the body, bleeds into the locality and congeals around imaginary ideas of the nation state. I argue that antagonistic encounters that serve to mark out British Bangladeshi Muslims as ‘Other’ perform a bigger role: purging the nation, detoxifying it from encroaching multicultural intimacies and stabilising it as white. Despite this ritual cleansing I demonstrate how respondents are implicated in new forms of civic belonging, laying claim to nationhood, locality and rights to the city that subvert and hollow out the fantasy of a white nation.

Beyond the subterranean energy regime? Fuel, land use and the production of space

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that energy should be seen as a critical aspect of changing historical regimes in the social production of space. We suggest the common definition of energy as the ‘capacity to do work’ ignores key aspects of the space required for energy in the first place (particularly the concept of power density). Articulating the basic spatial concept of power density with a historical–geographical materialist understanding of energy regimes, we argue that industrial capitalism is defined by an intensive vertical reliance upon subterranean stocks of energy that require relatively little surface land to harness. Previous modes of production were characterised by a more ‘horizontal’ reliance upon extensive territory (e.g. forests) to meet fuel needs. While attentive to the spatialities of overall energy complexes, we focus in particular on how the spatialities of energy sources affect the production of space in major and distinctive ways. Drawing from environmental and economic history, we argue the use of fossil fuels ushered in a ‘subterranean energy regime’ that not only relied on underground stocks of energy, but substantially relieved the societal demand for land-based and spatially extensive sources of fuel (i.e. wood and other organic sources). The use of subterranean fuel (first coal) not only powered machines, but revolutionised ‘heat-process’ industries like iron smelting that dramatically expanded the steel and other metal industries; thus, transforming the built environment. We then consider the spatial and land-use implications of a transition away from this subterranean regime to renewable energy sources (solar and wind). A return to the surface for energy would not be biological as in pre-industrial times, but industrial in the sense that these systems require industrial production. Moreover, the spatially extensive nature of such energy technologies should raise important political questions about existing land-use patterns and livelihoods, particularly in rural areas.

Reassembling the city through Instagram

Abstract: How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into people's uses of the city? To answer these questions, we develop a relational approach that relies on a combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. Based on in‐depth interviews and a dataset of over 400 000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam, we analyse how the city is reassembled on and through the platform. By selectively drawing on the city, users of the platform elevate exclusive and avant‐garde establishments and events, which come to stand out as hot spots, while rendering mundane and low‐status places invisible. We find that Instagram provides a space for the segmentation of users into subcultural groups that mobilise the city in varied ways. Social media practices, our findings suggest, feed on as well as perpetuate socio‐spatial inequalities.

Liminal geopolitics: the subjectivity and spatiality of diplomacy at the margins

Abstract: This paper argues that the lens of liminality has the potential to enrich scholarship in critical geopolitics by offering a nuanced approach to the geographies and ambivalence of political subjectivity. In the context of a perceived proliferation of ‘new’ actors the paper turns critical attention to what happens at the threshold between the categories of state and non-state, official and unofficial diplomacy. It asks what such a perspective on diplomacy might mean for understandings of who is, and who should be, a legitimate actor in international politics by turning to the notion of liminality as developed in cultural anthropology. This is a concept that surprisingly has been overlooked in political geography and this paper asks how geographers might engage more productively with it, particularly in light of emergent critical international relations research on liminality as a paradigm for understanding stability and change in institutionalised orders. Empirically, the paper focuses on the articulation of liminal political subjectivities and spatialities through the lens of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a coalition of almost 50 stateless nations, indigenous communities and national minorities that currently are denied a place at international diplomatic forums. Drawing on this case study, the paper examines three areas of geopolitical enquiry that the notion of liminality opens up. First is the spatiality of diplomacy in terms of the out-of-placeness of liminal actors and the construction of transformative spaces of quasi-official diplomacy. Second are particular qualities of political subjectivity, including the blurring of boundaries between diplomacy and activism, and the notion of geopolitical shapeshifters. Finally, attention turns to the notion of communitas to draw out the politics of belonging, recognition and legitimacy. The paper concludes by suggesting that the idea of ambivalence that underpins liminality is a useful provocation to take creativity and aspiration seriously in geopolitics.

Mainstreaming geography's decolonial imperative

Abstract: This commentary makes three points in relation to the theme of ‘decolonising geographical knowledge’. First, it highlights the potential that the theme has in terms of widening the imperative to decolonise geographical knowledge; second, drawing on decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory, it stresses the structural difficulty of decolonisation efforts that are conceived within extant disciplinary infrastructures; and third, it argues that decolonising geographical knowledge should encourage geographers to, in fact, turn away from the discipline as we attempt to ‘speak to’ the places, peoples, and communities on and with which we work.

Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: the geographies of a lively commodity

Abstract: This paper maps into geographies of ‘lively commodities’, commodities whose value derives from their status as living beings. In an era where life itself has become a locus of capitalist accumulation, picking apart the category of ‘liveliness’ underpinning commodification has important analytical and geographical stakes. To this end, by tracking historical geographies of commodifying lions in political economies of ecotourism in India, this paper shows how more-than-human labour and lively potentials affect commodification and influence accumulation, not simply through recalcitrance, but as active participants within political economic organisation. The paper advances and develops a triad of relational concepts – nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation – through which the political economic potency of lively commodities might be articulated and grasped. It concludes by discussing the analytical potential of this approach and its future purchase for rethinking commodity geographies.

Decolonial theory in a time of the re-colonisation of UK research

Abstract: This piece holds onto the foundation of the material conditions of the experience of Indigenous people out of which decolonial theory springs, first by exploring decolonial theory as it re-shapes practice globally, and second by recognising how radical power risks becoming harnessed and domesticated in Western academic spaces. Finally, it suggests that the Global Challenges Research Fund is not fertile ground for truly decolonising geographical knowledge in the UK.

Parasites, ghosts and mutualists: a relational geography of microbes for global health

Abstract: Scientific research on the microbiome offers an ecological model of the human, comprised of myriad forms of microbial life. The composition and dynamics of this human microbiome are increasingly implicated in discussions of health. Attention has focused on missing microbes and their links to a range of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Pathological dysbiosis is understood to result from both the excessive presence and the absence of microbes. Microbial declines have been indexed to modern hygiene and healthcare practices and there is a growing interest in the therapeutic use of beneficial microbes. This reappraisal of the salutary potential of microbes challenges the negative associations prevalent in health geography and the field of global health. This paper develops relational and multispecies approaches to health geography to examine situations of microbial excess, absence and controlled reintroduction. The analysis focuses on human relations with hookworms. Hookworms are animal members of the microbiome. They co-evolved with humans, live in us and are understood to manage the human microbiome to enable immunological tolerance. Both the excessive presence and the absence of hookworms can be pathological. They are currently the subjects of concurrent, but spatially discrete, programmes to deworm and reworm a variegated world. Focusing on this seeming spatial paradox, the analysis examines three types of human–hookworm relation: the parasite, the ghost and the mutualist. The conclusion reflects on the implications of this analysis for the human and nonhuman subjects of global health and the microbiopolitics of prevalent forms of antibiotic and probiotic healthcare.

Tears of time: a Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis approach to explore the mobility experiences of young Eastern Europeans in Spain

Abstract: This paper explores the rhythm of temporary mobility experiences of young Eastern Europeans in Spain, after the European Union (EU) enlargement towards the East. Following Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis approach, and drawing on 60 in-depth qualitative interviews, this paper investigates how rhythms are linked to youth mobility and how different interplays of rhythms are connected and disconnected in multiple ways. I argue that both the EU socio-economic context and the personal and professional life-course circumstances of young Eastern Europeans who practice mobility create different, uneven rhythms that influence their everyday lives and their perceptions of mobility. This paper highlights the issue of rhythmic change in temporary mobility, uncovering ‘arrhythmic’ mobility, reflected in the loss and insecurity in the lives of those who practice it; ‘polyrhythmic’ mobility, practised by people looking to study and/or work and expressed through uncertainty on the one hand and the possibility of establishing a certain rhythm in their lives on the other; and ‘eurhythmic’ mobility, used by those with a stable professional status in one of the EU countries, in this case, Spain. The conclusions provide a better comprehension of Lefebvre's thinking, offering insights for wider applications. They show the need to advance the theoretical and empirical understandings of rhythm in relation to mobility during the lifecourse.

The circumstances of post-phenomenological life worlds

Abstract: This paper contributes to the development of a post-phenomenological account of worlds through a discussion of the concept of circumstance. This account is developed initially through a consideration of how the concept of world figures in two important strands of contemporary thinking, namely, speculative realism and theories of affective life. By making connections across these approaches, the paper argues for a circumstantial sense of worlds irreducible to the status of surrounds for human-centred forms of life and experience. This account of worlds is post-phenomenological insofar as it does not assume the already constituted subject as the condition for worlds to take shape: instead, it attends to the circumstantial worlding of forces excessive of the subject. At the same, via a scenographic orientation it remains attentive to the affective force of life worlds, to how they are felt as a kind of circumstantial palpability.

Rethinking international financial centres through the politics of territory: renminbi internationalisation in London's financial district

Abstract: This paper revisits canonical thinking on international financial centres (IFCs) that understands them as being primarily sustained through: market liquidity; economies of competition and cooperation between financial and related professional services; and acting as interpretative nodes within global finance. In contrast, I explore the implications of foregrounding questions of power and politics in the (re)production of IFCs. Drawing on the case of the development of offshore renminbi markets in London’s financial district, I argue the state plays a vital, yet comparatively neglected, role in shaping the development and changing nature of international financial centres. In so doing, the paper calls for work in economic geography and cognate social sciences to understand finance as a political as well as an economic, social and cultural relation.

Domesticating transnational education : discourses of social value, self-worth and the institutionalisation of failure in ‘meritocratic’ Hong Kong

Abstract: This paper explores the changing spatialities of education in response to processes of internationalisation, through the lens of transnational education ( TNE). It argues that rather than producing outward-looking education, international credentials are becoming 'domesticated' - that is, they form an indistinguishable feature of existing local education systems. The paper explores the importance of discourses of meritocracy and the production of value ( suzhi) in East Asian societies and how TNE fits into a wider ideological system of biopolitical governance, for which examinations represent a key technology. It demonstrates, through data collected from interviews with students in Hong Kong, the ways in which young people have internalised their own identities as failures and argues that studying for a transnational qualification serves only to accentuate this subject positioning. We also uncover some counter-narratives to dominant discourses, or examples of 'biopolitics from below', where nascent political identities were expressed by some individuals. These exceptions offered some exciting possibilities for an alternative existence - such that the majority of young people, as well as a more privileged minority, are able to escape the damaging classification imposed by the pathologising of educational failure. The paper concludes with some reflections on why a more expansive definition of international education is now required, one that not only takes account of the spatial extension that occurs through internationalisation, but is also sensitive to domestication, and the profound ways in which foreign credentials are being enlisted in wider governance projects within their host communities.

Landscapes of extended ruralisation: postcolonial suburbs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Abstract: African cities are becoming increasingly suburban, yet we know little about suburban spaces, how they are historically produced and by whom. This paper argues that African suburbs can be usefully understood as postcolonial suburbs. The postcolonial suburb de-centres the Anglo-American suburban model and pays attention to the historical co-constitution of suburban space across colony and metropole. It draws attention to the colonial and post-colonial policies on land and housing that make suburban development possible, but also attends to the everyday ways in which suburban spaces are built through the efforts of self-builders and their house-building projects. Using the case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the paper shows how these low-density residential spaces towards the edge of the city are being shaped by the new middle classes with their appetite for large houses and private cars. But these are not copies of suburban forms from elsewhere. Architecturally they are dominated by bungalows and villas, but these buildings are self-built rather than part of large planned housing schemes. Socially the suburbs are dominated by the middle classes, but these middle classes are oriented towards the countryside rather than towards the city. Drawing on interviews with suburban residents in Dar es Salaam, I show how self-build housing projects straddle the suburban and the rural in terms of economic investments, land security and social relations. The paper concludes by arguing that the colonial and postcolonial making of the suburbs produces landscapes of ruralisation.

Linked lives and constrained spatial mobility: the case of moves related to separation among families with children

Abstract: Following considerable social and demographic change over the past six decades, macro-social theories have attempted to explain contemporary society through trends of weakening traditional institutions (e.g. state, church and family) and certainties (e.g. life-long full-time work and marriage) and growing self-articulation, individualisation, destandardisation and uncertainty. At the same time, new theories and discourses on population movement have emerged, in which emphasis is placed on mobility as both an empowering personal choice and a dominant process of modernity. The contemporary ubiquity of separation, and the corresponding rise of single-person and lone-parent households, is often proposed as one of the clearest articulations of instability, individualisation and weakening of the family. However, through regression-based modelling of geocoded British Household Panel Survey data, we use the compelling case of moves related to separation among families to demonstrate how: (1) links between related individuals can simultaneously trigger, shape and constrain (im)mobility; (2) linked lives can intersect in important ways with social, institutional and geographical structures; and (3) linked post-separation (im)mobility outcomes can often contradict individually-stated pre-separation preferences. Controlling for a range of multilevel characteristics, we find significant gender distinctions, with fathers more likely to leave the family home than mothers, and mothers less likely to break with post-separation familial proximity than fathers. Structural factors including housing-market geographies and population density are found to further shape these (im)mobility patterns. Together, our empirical analysis suggests that family dissolution will rarely herald a period of heightened individualisation, self-determination and unencumbered mobility. Indeed, a wider appreciation of the rise of non-traditional households, their complex linked lives and associated constraints could contribute to more realistic explanations of modern (im)mobility patterns and processes.

The affective right to the city

Abstract: This paper investigates the affective and performative aspects of the right to the city with a focus on the materialisation of this right, its corporeal coming into being. In elaborating the idea of an affective right to the city, I will refer to Judith Butler's performative theory of assembly, along with findings drawn from ethnographic research conducted among individuals experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia. My research suggests that the materialisation of the right to the city is embodied in the social, material and affective occupation of urban spaces. This work reveals how the body's inhabitation of place, and the affordances of the material environment, mediate the performative expression of the right to the city. It also calls for a shift from a juridical conception of the right to the city to an affective one, more accommodating of the social and material contexts in which this right is enacted. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this affective conception of rights for performative studies of homelessness in urban space.

Spatial dialectics and the geography of social movements: the case of Occupy London

Abstract: This paper develops spatial dialectics as an analytical method capable of exposing and explaining the contradictions, dilemmas and tensions that cut through the spatialities of social movements. Despite scholarly recognition of internal divides in movements such as Occupy, there is greater need to conceptualise the inherently contradictory nature of social movements, in particular by reflecting on the role of spatiality. Building on recent work on multiple spatialities of activism, the paper shifts attention to contradiction as a key factor in spatial mobilisation, further arguing that the recent turn to assemblage thought is ill equipped for such a task. Dialectics is introduced via Bertell Ollman's influential account of its ontological and epistemological bases, before turning to Edward Soja's reading of Henri Lefebvre to incorporate spatiality. Spatial dialectics disrupts the linearity of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, placing contradictions not only within the historical unfolding of relations but also within co-dependent yet antagonistic moments of space, through Lefebvre's ‘trialetic’ of perceived, conceived and lived space. Building on ‘militant research’, which combined a seven-month ethnography, 43 in-depth interviews and analyses of representations of space, spatial dialectics is put to work through the analysis of three specific contradictions in Occupy London's spatial strategies: a global movement that became tied to the physical space of occupation; a prefigurative space engulfed by internal hierarchies; and a grassroots territorial strategy that was subsumed into logics of dominant territorial institutions. In each case, Occupy London's spatial strategies are explained in the context of unfolding contradictions in conceived, perceived and lived spaces and the subsequent dilemmas and shifts in spatial strategy this led to. In conclusion, the paper highlights broader lessons for social movements’ spatial praxis generated through the analysis of Occupy London.

From where we stand: unsettling geographical knowledges in the classroom

Abstract: This piece reflects on the challenging process of implementing decolonial theory and practice in designing and co-teaching an introductory human geography course. We share these reflections in dialogue with others striving to unsettle colonial and racist knowledge production. Our main objective is to encourage geographers to learn from Indigenous movements for decolonisation and self-determination, as we work to unsettle geographical knowledges through our teaching.

Living precariously: property guardianship and the flexible city

Abstract: In this paper we examine the precarious everyday geographies of property guardianship in the United Kingdom. Temporary property guardianship is a relatively new form of insecure urban dwelling existing in the grey area between informal occupation, the security industry and housing. Young individuals, usually in precarious employment, apply to intermediary companies to become temporary ‘guardians’ in metropolitan centres, most notably in London. The scheme allows guardians to pay below market rent to live in unusual locations while ‘performing’ live-in security arrangements that are not considered as a form of ‘work’. The experiences of becoming and living as a property guardian can be ambivalent and contradictory: guardians express economic and social advantages to being temporary, while also exposing underlying anxieties with ‘flexible living’. In this paper we offer a detailed description of the various practices of property guardianship and how they must be understood, on the one hand, in light of recent geographical scholarship on housing insecurity and, on the other hand, as an example of a precarious subjectivity that has become normalised in recent decades in cities of the global North. Drawing on in-depth interviews with long-term property guardians in London, we unpack the narratives and rationales of university-educated and highly skilled individuals for whom the city is a site of intensified insecurity and flexible negotiation. In the end, we conclude that the form of permanent temporariness experienced by property guardians needs to be understood as a symptom of wider dynamics of work and life precarisation in urban centres and argue that it is imperative to extend recent geographical debates around work and life insecurity to include new housing practices and their role in co-constituting urban precarity.

Post-colonial careering and urban policy mobility: between Britain and Nigeria, 1945–1990

Abstract: This paper sets out the value of the concept of ‘careering’ to understanding the global mobility of urban policy across historical and contemporary contexts. Through a case study of one colonial and post-colonial career in urban development, we demonstrate the material and ideological connections between late colonial development in Nigeria, British reconstruction, and international consultancy. Empirically, the paper provides novel post-colonial perspectives on Britain’s post-World War II reconstruction spanning the mid-to-late-twentieth century, globalizing the geographies of the British New Town. Conceptually, the paper argues that careering provides a valuable tool for progressing the study of urban expertise and its mobility in four ways. First, it provides a tool for connecting geographically distant urban development projects. Second, careering allows us to explore intersections between urban development policies and geopolitical transformations. Third, careering allows us to see the impact of ideas, skills, experiences, affiliations and contacts formed at different stages of a career on later professional practice, slowing down and lengthening out our understandings of the processes though which urban policy is made mobile. Fourth, careering as a method demonstrates the continued value of biographical approaches to urban policy mobility, highlighting in particular professional lives worked with colleagues and contacts rather than in isolation, and foregrounding the everyday embodied nature of urban expertise. The article concludes by suggesting such approaches could be productive for the writing of new post-colonial histories of geography and its allied disciplines.

Maintenance and repair beyond the perimeter of the plant: linking industrial labour and the home

Abstract: Dominant political economic accounts of manufacturing labour draw on an intellectual heritage that has tended to over-emphasise production culture within the industrial workplace, at the expense of other work cultures such as maintenance and repair When the latter are foregrounded, new links emerge between work undertaken within the paid workplace, and that undertaken in the home and community Work that occurs outside the bounds of an industrial site is co-constituted by materials and skills engendered within, raising timely political and geographical questions around the visibility and mobility of these prosaic restorative cultures Empirically, the paper brings together two perspectives to illustrate: first, an auto-ethnographic account of the author's experience as an apprentice industrial electrician in an Australian steel mill in the early 1990s Emboldened by the work of feminist geographers, I reflect on the spaces occupied by maintenance and repair workers, with an interest in how they cultivate socio-material cultures that transpire across the bounds of paid and unpaid work Second, qualitative interviews conducted two decades later, in the homes of retired maintenance trades workers from the same plant Throughout long careers, these workers have embraced – in both attitude and praxis – the labour of maintenance and repair both at work and at home Their case demonstrates modes of living thoughtfully with materials that have the potential to reanimate the industrial city as a site of geographical enquiry The paper urges labour researchers to return to the industrial city and to look beyond the production paradigm, to explore more deeply the heterogeneity of shop-floor cultures, in order to account for the full value, and thus the potential, of industrial life

Illicit economies: customary illegality, moral economies and circulation

Abstract: This paper is concerned with how to think the illicit and illegal as part of economies. Economic geography has only recently begun to address this challenge but in limited ways. The paper shows the difficulties with those approaches, chief among which is a reassertion of the legal/illegal binary of products and actors that is contested by the more open term illicit economies. We draw on work in cultural economy to move economic geography beyond this impasse by seeing economy as practice. The paper develops a conceptual account of illicit economies connecting moral economy and the opacities produced by logistically complex global trade to highlight the importance of customary illegality in doing business. Customary illegality is the tolerance or practice of illicit activities by largely legal economic actors rather than just a focus on illegal goods or criminal actors. Illicitness is thus shown to be neither a property of goods nor of particular economic actors, but rather a transient quality often linked to circulation. The argument is illustrated empirically through three examples drawn from the food sector. The conclusion makes suggestions for future research that are empirical, methodological and conceptual.

Measuring the scales of segregation: looking at the residential separation of White British and other schoolchildren in England using a multilevel index of dissimilarity

Abstract: Within the segregation literature there has been a movement away from measuring ethnic segregation at a single scale, using traditional indices, to instead treating segregation as a multiscale phenomenon about which measurement at a range of scales will shed knowledge. Amongst the contributions, several authors have promoted multilevel modelling as a way of looking at segregation at multiple scales of a geographical hierarchy, estimating the micro-, meso- and macro-effects of segregation simultaneously. This paper takes the approach forward by outlining a multilevel index of dissimilarity that combines the advantages of using a widely understood index with a means to identify scale effects in a way that is computationally fast to estimate with freely available software to do so. To demonstrate the method, a case study is made looking at the residential separation of White British pupils from six other ethnic groups in England in 2011. It examines a claim made by the Casey Review into opportunity and integration that schoolchildren are more residentially segregated than the population at large. The results suggest that schoolchildren were indeed more residentially divided but comparison with earlier data and the general uplift in the scales at which patterns of segregation are evident suggest a trend of decreasing segregation overall and the spreading out of ‘minority’ groups.

Everyday proper politics: rereading the post-political through mobilities of drug policy activism

Abstract: This paper explores the connections between activism for drug policy reform and the post-political conditioning of urban politics. The emergent literature on policy mobilities is brought into conversation with post-political analyses on the constitution of the properly political, arguing that there has been much focus on moments of rupture in the seemingly post-political condition while ignoring ongoing political resistances, what I call ‘everyday proper politics’. Resultant analyses of urban politics are therefore often incomplete. This paper moves to address the gap between rupture and resistance through a global examination of harm reduction; a policy, practice and philosophy that embodies contemporary (post-) political contradictions. It is an evidence-based public health policy often enacted through medicalised practices across state, public and private space, yet its history and philosophy are rooted in radical understandings of participatory democracy. Exploring activism for harm-reduction policies and the ways they are made manifest in cities globally begins to unravel the paradox of radical care practice and liberalised notions of self-care that harm reduction embodies. Harm reduction, as it is mobilised across cities with divergent histories, localities and political contexts, demonstrates that its post-political framing does not foreclose a radical politics of public health but rather can enable it. This paper demonstrates that public health and post-politics intersect at the important points of health, wellbeing and urban development. In a post-political condition, public health agencies assume the role of technical experts under the auspices of advanced neoliberalisation. Yet when questions arise regarding the management of drug use, drug users’ right to health and resources that engage and facilitate these activities, it becomes apparent that there indeed remain properly political battles to fight, battles that attract extra-local audiences and coalitions from both sides of the debate that to attempt to influence policy outcomes in places far away.

The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence

Abstract: Over the last 20 years, urban political ecology has made substantial contributions to the study of urban ‘socionatures’, part of the field's aim of applying political ecology to urban space. At the same time, urban political ecology has been limited by a perspective that tends to confine urbanisation to urban spatial forms; a conflation of process and site. The city is seen to be made by and for urban metabolism, disconnected from both rural and global socionatures. This paper offers a small, empirical corrective, based on a case study of Cambodian re-urbanisation under the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide began with the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge forces in April 1975. According to the standard narrative, the subsequent destruction of urban infrastructure and forced evacuation of residents is a historical case of ‘urbicide’ and reflects a broader interpretation of the Khmer Rouge as ideologically ‘anti-urban’. Using documentary evidence, this paper reconstructs the functional role of Cambodia's network of cities under the Khmer Rouge. Contrary to the narrative, we find that cities were not destroyed. Rather, urban sociospatial practices, forms and rural–urban relations were reorganised to support the demands of rice production for foreign exchange and facilitate the administration of violence. This pragmatic reconstruction challenges claims of urbicide and contradicts the narrative of ‘dead cities’ and ‘ghost towns’. Most importantly, it challenges urban political ecology's city-centrism: the processes that reanimated Cambodia's cities were the same ones that transformed rural space and motivated the evacuation of cities in the first place. Cambodian re-urbanisation accompanied re-ruralisation, a dialectic propelled by the transition to state capitalism. In this light, we encourage an urban political ecology that looks beyond the city's cadastral limits and engages those political ecologies within which the urban is situated.

‘The ice edge is lost … nature moved it’ : mapping ice as state practice in the Canadian and Norwegian North.

Abstract: This paper explores how ‘ice’ is woven into the spaces and practices of the state in Norway and Canada and, specifically, how representations of the sea ice edge become political agents in that process. We focus in particular on how these states have used science to ‘map’ sea ice – both graphically and legally – over the past decades. This culminated with two maps produced in 2015, a Norwegian map that moved the Arctic sea-ice edge 70 km northward and a Canadian map that moved it 200 km southward. Using the maps and their genealogies to explore how designations of sea ice are entangled with political objectives (oil drilling in Norway, sovereignty claims in Canada), we place the maps within the more general tendency of states to assign fixed categories to portions of the earth's surface and define distinct lines between them. We propose that the production of static ontologies through cartographic representations becomes particularly problematic in an icy environment of extraordinary temporal and spatial dynamism, where complex ocean–atmospheric processes and their biogeographic impacts are reduced to lines on a map.

Navigating veterinary borderlands: 'heiferlumps', epidemiological boundaries and the control of animal disease in New Zealand

Abstract: This paper analyses the importance of boundaries in the control of animal disease. On the one hand, establishing geographical and disciplinary boundaries is seen to be vital to the control of disease. In practice, however, boundaries are unstable, disrupted and frequently transgressed. Disease and its diagnosis vary in space, whilst disciplinary boundaries between epidemiology, laboratory and clinical practices can collapse from the noncoherence of disease. Drawing on the concepts of ‘disciplinary borderlands’ and fluid space, the paper analyses how uncertainty over disease diagnosis establishes a veterinary borderland in which disciplines are merged and combined and difficult to tell apart. From archival research and interviews of key informants, the paper describes the history of the control of bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) in New Zealand. Focussing on disputes around the diagnosis of bTB in the West Coast region, the paper shows how the problem of non-specificity (locally referred to as ‘heiferlumps’) undermined attempts to impose a universal version of disease and control policy. In this new veterinary borderland, attempts to manage the noncoherence of disease shifted from denial to viewing disease as a moral problem in which farmers’ own knowledges were central to the definition and management of disease. In doing so, boundaries between traditional disease disciplines were broken down, and new hybrid veterinary practices established to create geographically variable disease control rules and procedures. In conclusion, the paper considers the wider consequences for the management of animal disease arising from greater farmer involvement in animal disease management

Apparatuses of occupation: translocal social movements, states and the archipelagic spatialities of power

Abstract: There has recently been an abundance of scholarly attention in geography to the assemblage-like nature of contemporary social movements. While assemblage theory has rightly emphasised the performative, translocal, discursive-material and affective aspects of social movements, less attention has been focused on the way these flexible assemblages territorialise power and attempt to order social activities in place. Through an analysis of contemporary anti-militarisation protests in Okinawa, this paper interrogates how translocal social movements use direct action tactics such as the occupation of land and sea spaces to not only resist state power, but to produce their own governance over places. Driven by different globally circulating normative perspectives on the value of national security versus personal security, these social movements have engaged in contests with states over the construction of military facilities and the practice of military activities in local environments. Analysing Foucauldian and Deleuzean perspectives on governing apparatuses, this paper investigates the spatial practices of both Okinawan social movements and the American and Japanese governments to demonstrate how occupation functions as a tactic of political praxis for both state and non-state actors.

On the colonial frontier: gender, exploration and plant-hunting on Mount Victoria in early 20th-century Burma

Abstract: In April 1922 Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. This honour was in recognition of her contribution to plant hunting and exploration, botanical illustration and anthropological knowledge accumulated about Burma during the quarter of a century (1897–1922) she spent there with her husband as part of the colonial service. While historical geographers have acknowledged that the colonies, in particular, often afforded women the space for practising science, the work of female naturalists in the field has received limited detailed scholarly attention. For Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe, her plant-hunting expeditions across Burma allow us to extend the epistemic reach of a spatial perspective developed by geographers and to demonstrate how the web of connections she developed in the colonies enabled her to circulate scientific knowledge across the globe. By focusing on a major expedition to Mount Victoria undertaken by Wheeler-Cuffe, this paper unravels the complexity of the practice of natural history within a global imperial framework through an examination of the private correspondence and pictorial archive maintained during her time in Burma.