A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
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.
This piece is about multiethnic and heterogeneous urban street markets, the death of migrants in the Mediterranean, and the redemptive power of multilingual talk in shaping transcultural interaction and struggle.
The opaque networks of undocumented migrants and spatial stories point instead to a more fluid, unstable and hidden set of connections, with a spatial history that is often evasive and difficult to pin down.
As opposed to the endless extolling of the business ethos of (certain) migrant diasporas – an extolling that helps stage newer iterations of the good/bad migrant dichotomy – Hall captures the more solemn reality that scores the migrant, race and small-business interface.
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.
Who is ‘the Settler’? What does this category animate and what does it bely? Despite the vast scholarship on histories of settler colonisation, the complex figure of the settler remains largely taken for granted. This lends itself to a banal decolonial politics that urgently requires critique.
As industrial livestock operations further embed technologies in production, both animals and humans alike face a reality where technology increasingly shapes their existence. How can we understand the impact of these technologies?
A decade after Japan’s 3.11 triple disaster, what kind of social forms and futurities have Fukushima’s treated water enabled or disabled? In what ways has Fukushima’s treated water as infrastructure made and remade material worlds and life worlds?
Today, there is a movement to re-enclose the creative commons, turning creative outputs into financial assets. NFTs imagine a world where having an immutable record of ownership transfers is substitute for the flow and remixing of ideas. It is a static approach to a dynamic world.