Essay Archive

The Constrictions of Machinic Escape: Carl Craig and Detroit Techno’s Dislocation into Museum-Space

Techno’s extra-diegetic improvisations are linked architecturally to Detroit’s landscape of industrial modernism, in all of modernism’s productivist, futuristic, environmentally toxic, and racially exploitative dimensions.

By

Alex Liebman

Cities and the Dust of Destruction

We open the histories and contemporary terrors of war dust, its afterlives in motion, hyperactivities, and indestructible forms in cities to scrutiny. In its destructive potential, invisibility and durability dust haunts cities, their pasts and presents, erasing and generating urban subjects and subjectivities. 

By

Ute Eickelkamp and Malini Sur

The Stadium and Crises of Social Reproduction

The stadium is indispensable to the management of urban life on an increasingly volatile planet. The material conditions that produced the stadium lay the groundwork for which it becomes ready-at-hand to contain, discipline, and house bodies that have become otherwise unmanageable.

By

Morgan Adamson

Publicly Owned Private Spaces

New York City’s Open Restaurants program and similar programs around the world enclose public space, creating new spaces for policing.

By

Joshua Mullenite

Space of feminist hope: Notes from two acts

In this essay, I invite everyone to consider how every day, community-based pedagogies reinvent and practice new kinds of spatial relationality for feminist futures.

By

Ian Liujia Tian

(Post)Pandemic Urban Futures and Their Contradictions

The futures of cities worldwide are currently being contested, and calls to “imagine urban futures” have come to mean reimagining life in relation to a range of ongoing and anticipated crises including COVID-19.

By

Hiba Bou Akar

Following the Footsteps of Caretakers: Parque do Flamengo

"This perceptual shift —understanding garbage collectors as caretakers—was not only happening because I was suddenly going to Parque do Flamengo everyday, but also because at this moment we are experiencing a heightened awareness of what it means 'to take care' of our bodies and of each other."

By

Ana Corrêa do Lago

Wolves, ecologies of fear, and the affective challenges of coexistence

Wolves and other large predators make their presence felt in the wider landscape. We investigate how to grasp this affective challenge to living in a multispecies world where coexistence never comes in ‘neutral’.

By

Thorsten Gieser & Erica von Essen

Relations of Power: The U.S. Capitol Insurrection, White Supremacy and US Democracy

To locate white supremacy within the realm of militias, mobs, and Trumpism not only misunderstands white supremacy as a structuring relation, but also reinforces it by reducing it to the extraordinary and spectacular, and within the worldview of extremists. Rather, we maintain that white supremacy must be understood as a political economic and racial project that spans ideologies and political commitments within the operations of the liberal, settler state.

By

Anne Bonds, Joshua Inwood

Active, Still, Reclamation

With so much focus in recent headlines about Palestine put on the visuality of dis-placement and the excesses of conflict, can turning attention to counter-hegemonic emplacement chip away at Zionist settler colonial organizations of space?

By

Taylor Miller