Society and Space is pleased to offer a conversation with Scott Rodgers, Clive Barnett, and Allan Cochrane, the authors of “Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the media-urban nexus.”

The open site is pleased to offer a conversation moderated by Tim Markham of Birkbeck with Scott Rodgers, Clive Barnett, and Allan Cochrane, the authors of “Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the media-urban nexus."

While many geographers and political theorists have argued that materials augment capacities for political experimentation, provoke public outrage, or shape power relations, others suspect that focus on the vague politics of matter is largely a force for rendering political contestation inoperable. In Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline, Andrew Barry sidesteps both arguments, instead arguing that materials are bound up with the availability or transparency of information.

The map hides the interdependence of regions and countries in many domains, and the ways in which the “developed” and the “developing” world interact with and affect each other. The stigmatization of certain countries suggests that the problem at hand has only “national roots,” narrowing the debate towards “national solutions” in the form of development.

I argue that we might consider asylum not as a process or a legal status, but as a material-discursive collective that takes shape differently across different spaces. The materials that constitute asylum – the forms, letters, certificates, bodies and belongings – take meaning and make meaning as they are enrolled in, and become part of, new spaces, discourses and practices.

Settler colonialism, like other forms of domination, divides as it conquers. In Israel/Palestine, this fragmentation is most visible in the landscape of the so-called future Palestinian state where settler roads and apartheid walls strangle autonomous enclaves that are themselves receding.

As the Israeli attack on Gaza intensified in July 2014, a large poster made an appearance in front of some hotels in Mumbai that depicted icons of prominent U.S. products and read, “Indian Hoteliers boycott Israeli and U.S. products.” Boycott has a long history and political resonance in India dating back to anti-colonial struggles from the early 20th century and also from the anti-apartheid movement when India boycotted South Africa. This most recent boycott, however, does not have the same tenor or carry the same moral or ethical weight.

Almost a month after the local Ferguson Police Department killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, members of the Ferguson community demand justice. While the situation in Ferguson is complex, we nonetheless want to draw attention to the ways the violent death of Michael Brown and the subsequent community uprising is indicative of the work that violence accomplishes within our present neoliberal and racialized condition in the United States.

I discuss here the spatiality of migrant labor flows and control that underpin capitalist labor exploitation and led to the riot in Singapore, and conclude with a short reflection on the question of spatial justice in the Asian global city.

The devastation to which Gaza has been subjected in the last few weeks seems to be yet another repetition of Israeli settler-colonial apparatus’ habit of destruction. Gaza has become emblematic of this habit, because in recent years it has so frequently been subjected to bombing while under a state of siege, but like all settler-colonialisms, the violence of the state is rooted not in an episodic “cycle of violence” but in the very ideology and practice of the settler-colonial movement.