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Bledsoe, Adam; Wright, Willie Jamaal
doi: 10.1177/0263775818805102pmid: N/A
This paper seeks to offer a new perspective on the interrelated questions of globalized capitalism and anti-Blackness. We engage with current geographical work on the question of Blackness, highlighting the ways in which prevailing forms of global capital accumulation—which take shape in numerous spatial and political practices around the world—coincide with acts of anti-Blackness. In recognizing the connections between capitalism and anti-Black violence, however, we choose not to frame anti-Blackness as an effect of capitalist relations. Rather, we insist that anti-Blackness remains a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism, as the perpetual expansion of capitalist practices requires “empty” spaces open for appropriation—a condition made possible through the modern assumption of Black a-spatiality. Drawing on theoretical discussions of both global capital and anti-Blackness, empirical examples of shifting global spatial-racial regimes, and the discursive and material practices of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Afro-Brazilian community Ilha de Maré, this paper attempts to forge new geographical conversations regarding current capitalist practices and the matter of Black lives.
doi: 10.1177/0263775818801957pmid: N/A
Responding to ongoing concerns that Michel Foucault’s influential governmentality analytics fail to enable the study of ‘resistance’, this paper analyses his last two lecture courses on ‘parrhesia’ (risky and courageous speech). While Foucault resisted resistance as an analytical category, he increasingly pointed us towards militant, alternative and insolent forms of counter-conduct. The paper comparatively analyses Foucault’s reading of Plato, Socrates and the Cynics, exploring parrhesia’s episteme (its truth–knowledge relations), techne (its practice and geographies), identities (its souls and its bodies) and its possible relations to the present. It concludes that Foucault viewed resistance as power; power which problematised governmentalities but could also be analysed as a governmentality itself. In pursuing parrhesia, Foucault reaffirmed his commitment to studying discourse as always emplaced and enacted, while sketching out the geographies (from the royal court and the democratic Assembly to the public square and the street) that staged the risk of truth-talking. This suggests new subjects and spaces to open up political possibilities when exploring the geographies of governmentalities.
doi: 10.1177/0263775818796502pmid: N/A
This paper considers how notions of beauty and performances at pageants transform as they move across different colonial times and spaces. It examines how gender, racial, and sexual subjectivities take shape among cisgender Filipina women who participate and organize community-based pageants on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). I analyze observations and interviews conducted with Filipina/os who organize and participate in community pageants. Based on this examination, I argue that spatial processes make apparent the shifting nature of gendered, racialized, and sexualized pageant performances. Pageant ideals change with migration as white heteropatriarchal logics, which are enmeshed in settler colonial projects of Canada, make grooves into the ways Filipino gendered sexualities come to be in Canada. More broadly, the paper speaks to the ways in which power works with and through space through the logics of race, gender, and sexuality. It outlines how racialized women’s feminine heterosexuality is made legible by liberal scripts designed for immigrants in the white settler colonial context of Canada. Thus, the paper sets in motion questions of how intersections of power are shaped by contemporary forms of colonialism.
doi: 10.1177/0263775818786251pmid: N/A
Within the existing body of geographical work on touch, the haptic and the surficial, as well as within the emerging field of haptic media studies, cartography has not yet been specifically considered. Moving beyond a technical examination of special tactile map products, this article explores the tactile, haptic and surficial qualities of everyday cartographic experiences in digital, non-digital and mixed formats. These qualities are researched through a phenomenological-aesthetic lens, a sensuous disposition and a creative sensibility, thus enacting what could be described as ‘non-representational cartography’. Drawing from multisensory visual ethnography, this paper explores the perspective of ‘tactile empathy’ through photographic/video recordings based on the matching of seen and experienced touch described by neuroscientists. Some personal ‘map stories’ generate a possible agenda for the study of haptic cartographies, which includes: representations of cartographic tactility; 3D sensations; cartographic surfaces; the spatialities of maps; gestures, or maps as a touch space. This article is complemented by a photo essay available in the Society and Space open website at the URL http://societyandspace.org/2018/06/13/haptic-cartographies-a-photo-essay/
doi: 10.1177/0263775818811140pmid: N/A
As urban populations expand, high natural amenity locales—forests, bushland, and coasts—are being transformed into highly desired, lucrative locations for new housing. This paper examines what it means to live in such an environment, tallying between the realised dream of that lifestyle and the everyday challenges (financial and labour) of navigating the elements at home. To do so, we bring two conceptual approaches into conversation: cultural geographies of home and homemaking, recognising home as a more-than-human process; and architecturally inflected geographies of buildings, attendant to building materials and socio-technical practices of maintenance and repair. Drawing on semi-structured walking interviews with 24 residents of a new coastal housing development in southern Sydney, Australia, the paper examines how coastal conditions and elements accelerate material decay, inciting and directing everyday homemaking practices: both proactive, in material selection, and reactive, in cleaning, repairing, maintaining, and replacing. We conclude by considering the differing economic rationalities of navigating the elements, and subsequent implications for household sustainability.
doi: 10.1177/0263775818756643pmid: N/A
As the saying goes, one person’s trash is another’s treasure. Analyses of current reuse movements focus generally on a politics of uncoupling from capitalist consumption traps and commodity fetishism. The perspective presented here considers other motivations by tracing desires for specific kinds of objects, from the past. I consider current reuse debates from a subcultural perspective, of inner-urban living in the late 1970s and 1980s. With the assistance of autoethnography, I delve into this urban subculture, known for its reliance on Do-It-Yourself. This included practices of Do-It-Yourself housing, furnishings, clothing and music, and the reliance on the reuse of preowned materials which, in turn, were often also discarded as part of this transient way of living. I therefore highlight the practice of disposable fast-fashion enabled through reuse. This included the display of ‘tasteless’ object d’art. With my personal history as a backdrop, I highlight the complexity of reuse politics that sometimes reaches beyond anti-consumerist imperatives. Specific reference is made to now highly collectable objects such as ‘Aboriginalia’ and other pieces emblazoned with caricatures of ‘noble savages’. The current collectability of these now rare objects, points to a subtle and often hidden politics of racialised nostalgia.
Beveridge, Ross; Koch, Philippe
doi: 10.1177/0263775818805487pmid: N/A
This article responds to both ongoing urban practices and strands of urban theory by arguing for a (re-)turn to the everyday as a means of thinking about antagonism and political possibility. We examine how the everyday might be conceived politically and wonder what it is about the current conjuncture that is fuelling the reimagining of the political possibility of the urban. We develop the category of urban everyday politics to capture the politicised everyday practices observable in our towns and cities: collective, organised and strategic practices that articulate a political antagonism embedded in, but breaking with, urban everyday life through altering socio-spatial relations. While we make no empirical claims about the current impact of this form of politics, we assert the political potential of viewing the everyday as a source, stake and site of dissensus in current urban conditions. Politicising the urban everyday offers, we conclude, a strategy for transformative politics, one in which the state recedes from view, micropolitical action is transcended and democratic possibilities lie in the transformation of the urban here and now.
doi: 10.1177/0263775818798033pmid: N/A
Recently debates have emerged concerning how atmospheric objects referred to collectively as ‘elemental’ become entangled in the operation of communication infrastructure. The paper extends these debates through research into UK emergency responders’ information sharing during emergencies. Harnessing textual analysis and an interview, the paper unpacks the protocols established to organise information sharing and explores how such protocols interweave an assemblage of technologies to share information as emergencies unfold. The evidence presented demonstrates different ways that the elemental forces physically constitutive of emergencies are incorporated into information sharing. However, it also details cases wherein these elemental forces disrupt the information sharing practices they otherwise enable and outlines the effects this disruption has on emergency response provision. Considering the case, I make three arguments to establish a distinctive approach for conceptualising the entanglement of the elements within information sharing. First, I extend understandings of the capacities that elements actualise to enable information sharing. Second, I elaborate on the notion of excess to explain how elemental forces disrupt information sharing. Accounting for its political ramifications, I demonstrate thirdly, how, by disrupting information sharing, elemental forces obstruct government attempts to comprehend the emergencies they attend and, in turn, provide resources to ensure adequate response.
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