A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Daniel Agbiboa's 'They Eat Our Sweat' is a vivid ethnographic portrait of informal transport in Lagos, providing us with a vantage point to understand the experiences of corruption and informality in everyday urban life.
In Cartographic Memory, Juan Herrera carefully and elegantly examines Chicano movement activism and its legacies in Oakland, California’s Fruitvale neighborhood, and argues for measuring social movements’ impact in a manner that foregrounds the production the brick-and-mortar achievements of community organizations, as well as the networks of support, solidarity and care that those sites and landscapes continue to facilitate.
What if instead of an age of automation we are currently living through the dawn of a new era of exploitation?
"Menace to Empire" is notable for how it offers a relational history of US national security practices in Asia: one that situates them in relation to the other forms of violence work that have always been central to the everyday reproduction of other Pacific empires.
In Animal Traffic, Rosemary-Claire Collard combines Marxist theory with animal studies to offer a powerful analysis of how capitalism structures human-animal relations, and what the “oddity” (2020: 8) of the exotic pet case can teach us about our more common relations with animals.
Citizen Designs is a careful depiction of what democracy feels like, with all its discomforts, disagreements, and unresolved tensions. Elinoff manages to present a picture of the struggle for equal citizenship that is at once optimistic and unromantic. In this, the book makes a timely and important contribution to understandings of the relationship between politics and design
As drone use becomes increasingly democratised and diversified, Katherine Chandler’s Unmanning is a timely excavation of drone technology’s history of American political and postcolonial violence.
By urging queer activists and scholars to let go of visibility as our main focus, Thomsen points to a much broader, and potentially more life-giving, queer politics. Sewer systems, too, need to be put on queer agendas.
"Progressive Dystopia" provides a rich example of how Black Studies, and Black and other radical scholars can and do intervene in academia with emancipatory research that not only informs but can transform critical praxis.
Stamatopoulou-Robbins exposes how waste management is used to control the exposure of Palestinian bodies to slow violence, as an alternative to direct Israeli military violence, which is condemned by the international community.