A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Investigates relations between policing (narrowly and broadly understood), incarceration, and the production of space and spatial knowledge. Borders, criminalized neighborhoods, detention centers, heavily securitized areas, internment camps, jails, prisons, rendition sites, and the spatial relations that they rely on and produce are explored as sites of power and subversion.
The lack of housing for returning residents reveals the intertwining crises of our housing and carceral systems—crises that COVID-19 exacerbates, but does not create. Though not often considered as part of the same struggle, housing constitutes a crucial piece of the abolitionist puzzle.
Brett Story’s "Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power" across Neoliberal America is a brilliant and timely study on prison geographies. Story, who is from Canada, arrives to the U.S. prison through her personal experiences of eviction, first as a child and then as a young student fighting against gentrification and documenting it as an amateur filmmaker.
"Spaces of Security" is a richly detailed volume examining the multiple dimensions, practices, and formulations of security that increasingly shape the conditions for modern life, as well as the discourses that have shaped how security is understood.
This paper describes our study, which was conducted as a partnership between Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI) and Roosevelt University. We review briefly our outreach and methods, and highlight some key results, before reflecting on the importance of narrative and the promise of elevating community voices for changing policy.
A succession; compounding successions; a storied stack; the superposition of time; the folds of the longue durée; materialized temporality. We see it in our mind’s eye: a peeling back that reveals the inner complexity of multi-generational dwelling and deep time. We might even imagine standing next to a cut-away, holding something for scale.
By following the transfers of armored vehicles to police, this article illuminates the logistical pathways that connect colonial warfare and domestic policing, adding an account of the material composition of police power to the historical work of critical and abolitionist thinkers.
Madeleine Hamlin's paper critically contends that the Chicago Housing Authority's important pilot program to allow a limited number of individuals with criminal records to live in their housing replicates pervasive fears of crime linking poverty to criminality.
This special issue, edited by Maya Mynster Christensen and Peter Albrecht, introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city.
With an empirical point of departure in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Metro Manila, this article by Anna Bræmer Warburg and Steffen Jensen highlights the perspective of the state police in an area that has been heavily exposed to the drug war and can be considered as one of its hot spots.
This article by Naomi van Stapele sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest “permissive spaces” for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings.