Whereas social and political theory has long concerned itself with the description and analysis of structures—states, classes, national economies—Mezzadra and Neilson ask what we might learn about contemporary capitalism by instead studying its operations. How are the global workings of capital reshaping the state and its institutions? What are the implications of these processes for the continued encroachment of capitalism on new spaces and new realms of social life?

The celebrations of the railroad as a symbol of national unity and progress are a reminder of its continued power in writing the myth of the nation, and of the importance of challenging such nation-valorizing narratives. Karuka does exactly this in his timely and provocative book, creating new ideas with which to re-examine the well-worn story of the railroad, and studying it through a broad array of distinct cases.

Phnom Penh is being built not only on the foundation of blood bricks, but also climate change as a key driver of debt and entry into modern slavery in brick kilns. Blood bricks embody the converging traumas of modern slavery and climate change in our urban age.

‍Lines are willfully ignorant of volume. Precisely because of this, lines are forced to confront volume at every turn. As they strive to abstract themselves down to one dimension, lines must negotiate endlessly with all three stubbornly material dimensions. Their linearity is never more than a bargain of convenience, a tolerable approximation of an abstract ideal. Abstraction is not itself an abstract process.

This video feature accompanies the article “The social production of container space”. Although a sizable body of popular and academic literature explores how shipping containers have reconstituted the spaces through which they travel, the space within containers themselves remains largely unexamined.

The increasingly common conjunction of contemporary art and logistics (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015) might be cause for incredulity in some quarters—not least those of logistics specialists or art historians. However crucial to the working of contemporary economic life—so much so that theorists have taken to speak of a shift to supply chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009)—the visible manifestations of this material theory and practice of the circulation and assembly of commodities appear stamped by an inexorable banality, especially in that modular metonym for global capital as a whole, the container.

The New Silk Road presents the perspective of a world without barriers, where logistics is not a means but an end. A world in which connectivity is productive in itself. This vision, repeated over and over again by the participants of the Forum, is not just a vacuous slogan for a complex project yet to be defined.

I draw on the idea of infrastructuring to approach ethnographically the human and material components of infrastructure "in the making." While much of the literature on humanitarianism, human rights, and development has attended to politics, law, and ethics, an attention to infrastructuring moves past idealist concerns to the technicalities through which ideals become enacted on the ground.

In providing a detailed and sensitive description of the everyday realities of Mizrachi women living in Yeruham, this book offers a fresh perspective on the outcomes of this national project. By paying close attention to how these women describe their own lives, Motzafi-Haller succeeds in deviating from the stereotypical and many times paternalistic discussion about life on the social and geographical periphery.

"Carscapes" is a substantial book on the architectural impact of cars in the context of a single industrialised western country, England. Yet, the book has wider significance, as nearly every country is currently grappling with the fundamental unsustainability of mass automobility.

If the ‘mobilities paradigm’ is responsible for making roads a relevant topic of landscape research, then Routes, Roads and Landscapes is the welcome fruit of this scholarly vogue. Its strength lies in the relationships explored between historical and contemporary mobilities, and the interpretations, experiences and representations of landscape they provoked.

With rare exceptions, the moral possibilities of the city, or the immoralities of environmental choices, are rarely considered seriously. Conversely, few ethicists consider seriously the environmental structure of the things they seek to judge, the complex realities that provoke the dilemmas they self-confidently assess.That is the unavoidable if unintended lesson of Daniel Callahan’s biography, "In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics".

While disparate in their content and approaches, both of these books give a comprehensive sense of Ai’s diversity and international appeal, and are especially useful in gaining a better understanding of Ai’s relationship to China and his Chinese audience.