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.
"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.
As a perspective and a praxis, Red Natural History urges those of us who take the side of the common to see ourselves as part of the storm that arrives from the past, not to produce chaos, but to rupture the status quo, draw capitalism’s structural violence and injustices into the open, and orient our struggles for a livable and egalitarian future for all.
NAA is working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to define and organize around a counter-tradition of natural history, a Red Natural History, which sees the world not as a wealth of natural resources available for possession or profit, but as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This first text situates this inquiry within NAA’s history of practice, telling the story of how we came to believe it is necessary to name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. The second delves into the question at hand, sketching out our collective’s provisional definition of Red Natural History.
In the context of intense debate regarding the relationship between race and capitalism – and the usefulness of formulations like “racial capitalism” – William Conroy suggests a way forward through the lexicon of uneven and combined development.
The matter, politics, spatial and labor dynamics of global waste plays a crucial, albeit frequently erased, role in our pandemic now. The understories of pandemic waste impacts are vast, and often framed in terms of loss: from grappling with food system and supply chain losses, to techniques for avoiding spoilage; from popular narratives of lock-down effects on single-use plastics, to PPE and hospital refuse management. Wastewater tracing, however, has gained particular interest and praise as a tactic of revaluing waste amidst outbreak. I examine the viral politics of sewer-shed epidemiological tracing trends as a complex tool for SARS-CoV-2 public health management and increased surveillance.
A short visual history of the Four-level Stack interchange, considering its early presentation as an engineering marvel, its symbolic role in film and TV, how it has come to signify urban complexity and machine intelligence as well as being a contested site of exclusion.