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.
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.
Through materializing colonial legacies, monuments create a mnemonic, forming and sustaining a colonial memory, life, and place. Through artistic intervention, Black activists affect a set of alternative place-making and narrative practices, creating a distinctly Black infrastructure.
This essay investigates how energy, infrastructure, and geopolitics create the bitcoin mining zone, an infrastructure space that attracts bitcoin miners and capital to travel across the world in pursuit of cheap electricity and infrastructure.