A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Chronicles past, present, and potential impacts of technoscientific development on the production of space. Provides critical looks into how scientific disciplines and industries influence how we analyze, categorize, experience, interpret, navigate, and represent that which we call space.
In Barandiarán's groundbreaking book, one of the questions she grapples with is: what are the criteria that a state should use to decide in favor of or against proposed natural resources infrastructure projects? Because infrastructure developments have uneven impacts across the social and physical terrains of cities and nations, they are frequently controversial, producing political liabilities and enemies as often as they reinforce or engender political alliances.
Whilst the artist behind the engraving above is unknown, the image first appeared in Camille Flammarion’s L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). It is evocative, depicting a man, on his knees, reaching through the outer limits of Earth’s boundaries toward the mysterious, markedly different space beyond.
As a variety of electromagnetic spectrum, TV signal fits well into Helga Tawil-Souri’s (2017) description of the latter as “the information age’s most political and politicized dimension”. Even more so if one focuses on the terrestrial (in American English “over-the-air”) television transmission in which Earth-based TV stations broadcast audio-visual content by radio waves to antenna-equipped TV receivers in consumers’ residences.
Harnessing textual analysis and an interview, the paper unpacks the protocols established to organise information sharing and explores how such protocols interweave an assemblage of technologies to share information as emergencies unfold.
In this paper, we draw on recent ethnographic work, observing and participating in the care of research animals and interviewing the animal technologists, to contribute to the understandings of life within the animal house.
This paper examines the infrastructure of marine spatial planning via two ocean data portals recently created to support marine spatial planning on the East Coast of the United States. Applying theories of ontological politics, critical cartography, and a critical conceptualization of “care,” we examine portal performances in order to link their organization and imaging practices with the ideological and ontological work these infrastructures do, particularly in relation to environmental and human community actors.
This paper explores the ways in which genealogical, ancestral and wider forms of relatedness are produced through human remains. It does so through focusing on the case of the controversial display of the remains of Charles Byrne (1761–83), commonly known as ‘The Irish Giant’ in the Hunterian Museum in London.
Based on the Smart Cities imaginary, the bottom-up project Stgo2020 created a self-tracking device known as Rastreador Urbano de Bicicletas (or Urban Bicycle Tracker) to record the daily trips of cyclists in Santiago de Chile and use the data gathered to help government officials make better and data-driven decisions on cycling infrastructure planning. In this article, we examine the iterative design of this technology as well as its introduction into the everyday practices of cyclists.