Guest editor Mary Thomas presents this forum, convened to contribute to the growing body of critical commentary on this range of injustices, which offers insights from an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose work examines various aspects of US carceral society.

In Spaces Between Us, Morgensen recalls his first visit to a rural retreat in southern Oregon belonging to the Radical Faeries, a back-to-the-land collective of predominantly white urban American gay counter-culturists. In his efforts at decolonization, Morgensen takes issue with the means by which queer politics achieve citizenship through normatively non-Native belonging to a settler nation.

A burning cop car or a burning police station are unambiguous in their message and in their aspirations for a just world; they cannot be coopted by the status quo just like land back to its caretakers cannot be put into practice by the settler state. This is spirit of the Water Protector, the possibilities I tried to capture in Our History Is the Future: the courage to struggle, and the courage to win.

Thinking relationally means not creating an uncritical parallelism between Asian Americans and Black communities and instead recognizing the ways the groups are racialized differently. This requires acknowledging the model minority images and logics used to locate Asian Americans within an economically stratified society. The model minority image erases recognition of anti-Asian racism and its illogic dismisses the necessity of dissent, while particularly denigrating Black struggle.

Practices of global development have been critiqued for reproducing a notion of the suffering poor as bare life; passive, despairing and devoid of both hope and potentiality. In contrast, this article treats the experience of hope not as external to the governance of underdeveloped life but as a biopolitical technology central to its formation.

I’d like to consider several ways that geographers might revisit the legal and spatial categories frequently mobilized to interpret the contemporary landscape of immigration policing in the United States, and then consider how such conceptual innovation, mobilized by geographically-attuned scholarship, might substantively contribute to popular resistance against Trump’s immigration agenda in the months and years ahead.

To locate white supremacy within the realm of militias, mobs, and Trumpism not only misunderstands white supremacy as a structuring relation, but also reinforces it by reducing it to the extraordinary and spectacular, and within the worldview of extremists. Rather, we maintain that white supremacy must be understood as a political economic and racial project that spans ideologies and political commitments within the operations of the liberal, settler state.

This paper investigates US immigration law as a spatial system whose application results in geographic confusion. I take the case of Barton v. Barr as a vivid example of this structure, where the petitioner was found to be simultaneously “outside” and “inside” the country under a legal perspective.

Detainees are being transferred from Guam to Saipan as a way to restrict access to asylum, effectively shifting the border from island to island across the region. This reconfigured carceral landscape has not been without controversy and power struggles over resources among governing bodies on the islands.

Over the last few years, the sacred Mountain of Mauna Kea has been the site of an ongoing war between Hawaiian land defenders and imperial forces. Initiated by plans for the construction of a piece of next-generation astronomical infrastructure, the battle speaks to a larger fight against colonial occupation and the role of infrastructure in maintaining the cultural, spiritual, and political hegemonies that produce it.