A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
As palm oil travels from oil, to seed, to market, this controversial substance becomes associated with moral notions of ‘purity’. We take a multi-temporal and multi-scalar approach to understanding this process: examining current and historical literatures on economic botany and lipid chemistry, we unfold the tactics by which these palms and their oils are purified, and identify how these are reproduced in current marketing trends. Purity, this reveals, is a dream. Though this dream is unattainable, it has shaped plants and their oils, human bodies, and ecosystems, all the while masking the troubling consequences of its doing so.
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.
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.
New York City’s Open Restaurants program and similar programs around the world enclose public space, creating new spaces for policing.
Though not an exhaustive list, these are many of the main areas we cover.
