Feminist Geography

This article addresses some of the opportunities and challenges the Afro-Caribbean American author faced whilst researching Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. Despite perceptual insiderness as an Afro-Caribbean person, the author’s positionality had multiple dimensions, often shifting within complex identity-related contexts. These ideas and concepts will be illuminated through analysing the complexity of transnationalism, class and transcendental identity as they intertwined whilst an oral history project progressed. Positionality is rarely totally binary and this article provides some insight into how perceptions of insiderness and outsiderness can influence oral history in terms of interviewing, analysis and dissemination.

In this collection, several authors – ranging from early career to well established academics – consider the role of women and the female voice in academia. This compilation developed from a conference session organised by the Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) Ireland group, at the Conference of Irish Geographers in University College Cork (UCC) in 2017. In the first piece, Ahern and Mc Ardle consider why this discussion is necessary at all, ruminating on examples from both within and outside of academia. Till then brings in her experience working in Ireland, the US and beyond, and reflects on the importance of including all voices, and challenges scholars to end gender discrimination in Ireland. Manzo then reflects on how female work in academia, similar to community organising, can be considered invisible, devalued labour (Daniels, 1987). Yet she focuses on the positives of this, outlining the women-centred community organising model, the social capital that is involved, and th...

On 25 February 1999, Guatemalans received the much anticipated report of the United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), Memory of Silence, which detailed wartime atrocities and decades-long American support of the Guatemalan army. This document followed the earlier release of the Catholic church's own REMHI report (Recuperation of Historical Memory Inter-diocesan Project), Guatemala: never again . Using the recently released reports and databases of the CEH and REMHI, we explore the significant use of testimonio as a tool of shared witnessing, collective remembrance, and individual recollection of the special brutality directed against Maya women. Through testimonio, the outcomes of visible and invisible terror and violence in Guatemala are articulated as personal, social and geographic spaces of terror, all of which are gendered and racialised. With the civil war officially over, Maya women of Guatemala see the spaces of terror diminish. Given debates over testimonio, however, the grounds for assault and denial remain fertile.

Ausgabe der Feministischen Geo-RundMail Nr. 85 (April 2021) zum Thema "feministische digitale Geographien".
Mit Beiträgen zu den Themen: digitale Arbeit, Platforum Urbanism, gig economy, digitale Methoden, feministische digitale Initiativen, Instagram, soziale Medien, uvm.
Beiträge sind auf Deutsch, Englisch und Espanol.

This article addresses the life and works of a virtually unknown lady explorer, Octavie Renard-Coudreau (1867-1938), who continued an Amazonian exploration 'alone' after the death of her husband, the maverick French geographer Henri Coudreau (1859-1899). It extends and connects two main bodies of scholarship, the first on women travellers and feminist historical geographies, the second on scientific couples and collaborative partnerships in the history of sciences. I argue that, in addition to textual analysis, the social, biographical, cultural and political contexts of these travels allow a better understanding of the ambivalences that characterised Western travellers and scholars, both men and women, in imperial contexts. This helps avoiding essentialism and recovering the experiences of marginalised figures in the history of geography. The story of Octavie Coudreau has elements of originality that can stimulate new reflections on these points, also because her travel experience was not in the hegemonic Anglophone context, and she was acquainted with unorthodox and dissident geographers of that time. This article also contributes to studies on the influence which anarchist geographers such as Elisée Reclus, a supporter of the Coudreaus, exerted on explorers, though Octavie seemed to keep her distance from this former socialist inspiration.

This article analyzes how documentaries and docudramas about the homicides of 1,500-plus women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico offer competing narratives about the respectability of victims, yet reinforce the “virgin-whore” dichotomy and their corresponding spatial formations. For instance, activist mothers of disappeared women in Juárez have publicly denounced the official government’s theory that each disappeared woman led a secret “double life” that made them vulnerable to a dangerous lifestyle: virgin by day and whore by night. Activists seeking redress for their daughters emphasize so-called virgin values. However, in popular media, the state’s explanation of the double life as the cause of these murders has been recreated for film audiences in local docudramas distributed on the streets of Juárez. I argue that both genres of cinematic representations rebuild a case against the victims rather than the perpetrators. I demonstrate that, in casting blame upon victims, the spatial politics embedded inside the logics of the double life reinforce binaries about public and private spheres. Spatial discourse about public space as posing considerable risk and harassment threats for women has been interpellated in a complex and important way in struggles to prevent further sex crimes. This analysis interrogates the limitations of the rebuttals made against mainstream discourses by activist mothers as they reinscribe the virgin-whore binary.

This paper analyzes the role of Black agrarians in resisting systemic racism within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). My central argument is the class-action lawsuit, Pigford et. al., v. Glickman, levied by Black farmers against the USDA in 1997 was a "general strike," a term coined  by example of what W.E.B. Dubois to describe the self-emancipatory praxis of formerly enslaved Black men and women during the Civil War. The legal suit, combined with the resistance embodied in the efforts of agricultural advocate, Shirley Sherrod, represent a general and gendered strike against the USDA in an attempt to further Black agrarians’ contemporary struggles for justice, land, and livelihood.

anarchistische geographien stellt die erste umfassende deutschsprachige Publikation dar, in der geographische Perspektiven und Konzepte mit Kämpfen, Praktiken und politischen Ideen von Anarchismen zusammen gedacht werden. In den Beiträgen des Bandes wird unter anderem an die mit feministischen Positionen geteilten Zugänge zu Wissen und Macht, Diskurse kritischer Pädagogik und die Migrations-, Stadt- und Wohnungsforschung angeschlossen und spezifisch anarchistische Perspektiven auf diese angewendet. Zudem werden ideengeschichtliche und konzeptionelle Debatten der anarchistischen Bewegung und der Disziplingeschichte der Institution Geographie aufgefächert und Anschlüsse an aktuelle akademische Diskurse zum Verhältnis von Anarchismen und Geographieren, wie sie in den letzten Jahren in anglo-, franko-, und lusophonen Sprachräumen geführt wurden, hergestellt.

We would like to thank our colleagues and friends at the South Sudan Women's Empowerment Network for their support for our research and their comments on this article. We would also like to thank all the women we interviewed who participated in the conference and who permitted us to record their words and actions. Professors Lucy Jarosz and Dawn Couch provided valuable commentary on earlier drafts of this article. Finally, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided thoughtful, critical, and valuable comments and reflections on our work.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies

Vol 14, No 4 (2015)

Table of Contents

Themed Section:
The Sexual Politics of Austerity

Introduction: The Sexual Politics of Austerity
Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Gavin Brown
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1259/1109


Marriage and the Spare Bedroom: Exploring the Sexual Politics of Austerity
Gavin Brown
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1098/1121


Low Income LGBTGNC (Gender Nonconforming) Struggles Over Shelters As Public Space
Michelle Billies
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1125/1123


The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism and Austerity in an ′Exceptional′ Country: Italy
Cesare Di Feliciantonio
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1104/1122


Queer Responses to Austerity: Insights from the Greece of Crisis
Konstantinos Eleftheriadis
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1159/1128



Themed Section:
Geographies of Capital Punishment in the United States: The Execution of Troy Davis

Introduction: Geographies of Capital Punishment in the United States - The Execution of Troy Davis.
Joshua F Inwood
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1082/1129


If I am Troy Davis, I Failed Troy Davis: Abolishing the Death Penalty through an Antiracist People’s Geography
Nik Heynen
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1084/1130

Bare Life, Dead Labor, and Capital(ist) Punishment
James Andrew Tyner, Alex Colucci
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1155/1131


Life and Death in the Racial State: Collateral Consequences and the Execution of Troy Davis.
Joshua F Inwood, Melanie Barron
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1083/1133


Justice versus justice: Geographies of the Death Penalty and Place-Based Activism in the Troy Davis Case
Audrey Kobayashi
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1072/1135



Research

Reframing urban controlled spaces: Community gardens in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa
Efrat Eizenberg, Tovi Fenster
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1161/1136


Latin America’s Large-Scale Urban Challenges: Development Failures and Public Service Inequalities in Lima, Peru
Antonio Ioris
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1189/1138


Palestinian, Arab, American, Muslim: “Looping Effects” of Categories and Meaning
Anna Mansson McGinty
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1156/1139


With the Current, Against the Wind: Constructing Spatial Activism and Radical Politics in the Tel-Aviv Gay Center
Chen Misgav
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1160/1140


For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University
Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058/1141


Making Space for Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Struggles and Possibilities
The University of Kentucky Critical Pedagogy Working Group, Carrie Mott, Sandra Zupan, Anne-Marie Debbane, R. L.*
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1296/1143


Inner-Suburban Neighbourhoods, Activist Research, and the Social Space of the Commercial Street
Heather McLean, Katharine Rankin, Kuni Kamizaki
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1295/1144


„Naturgesetze der Kultur“: Die Wiener Geographen und die Ursprünge der „Volks- und Kulturbodentheorie“
Norman Henniges
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1076/1146

Feminist geographers have criticized affective and non-representational geographies for not taking into account social differences. This paper brings feminist accounts of emotion and affect into dialogue with affective and non-representational geographies in order to develop a feminist more-than-representational geography. In a first step, three shared commitments of a non-representational research agenda are presented: (1) a focus on everyday practices and the body, (2) a focus on the unconsciousness, and (3) affect as a more-than-human force. In a second step, I summarize feminist geographies‘ critiques of non-representational geographies. Drawing on an ongoing research project on the transnational market of surrogacy, I then discuss the benefits and challenges of a more-than-representational agenda for geographical research.

ACME, Vol 2, No 2 (2003)

Table of Contents

Themed Sections: (1) Borders and Immigration (2) Critical Forum on Empire | Various Articles

Equality, Justice and the Problem of International Borders: The Case of Canadian Immigration Regulation
Harald Bauder, 167-182

Gender, Inequality and Borders
Valerie Preston, 183-187

A Borderless World: Dream or Nightmare?
Daniel Hiebert, 188-193

The EU and the Utopia and Anti-utopia of Migration: A Response to Harald Bauder
Ulrich Best, 194-200

Some Reasons and Conditions for a World Without Immigration Restrictions
Franck Düvell, 201-209

Immigration and the Spectre of Hobbes: Some Comments for the Quixotic Dr. Bauder
Michael Samers, 210-217

The Last Word … ?
Harald Bauder, 218-220

Research

Hardt and Negri's Empire and Real Empire: The Terrors of 9-11 and After
David Moore, 112-131

Negotiations and Fieldworkings: Friendship and Feminist Research
Kath Browne, 132-146

Between Being and Looking Queer Tourism Promotion and Lesbian Social Space in Greater Philadelphia
Marie Cieri, 147-166

Forum

Introduction: Critical Forum on Empire
Scott Kirsch, 221-226

Empire Goes to War, or, The Ontological Shift in the Transatlantic Divide
Claudio Minca, 227-235

Globalización o Imperio: ¿Nuevas Tendencias Del Capitalismo Contemporáneo?
Blanca Ramírez, 236-241

Globalization or Empire: New Tendencies in Contemporary Capitalism?
Blanca Ramírez, 242-247

Empire and Citizenship
Joe Painter, 248-253

Co-curators' essay, to accompany the exhibition 'Shaping Geographies: Art | Woman | Southeast Asia', held at Gajah Gallery, Singapore, 2019-2020. Featuring ten contemporary women artists and one contemporary women’s artist collective, all with links to Southeast Asia: Suzann Victor, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Geraldine Javier, Nguyen Trinh Thi, I-Lann Yee, Anida Yoeu Ali, Tintin Wulia, Kayleigh Goh, Muslimah Collective, IGAK Murniasih, and Fika Ria Santika.

Relatively high wages and the opportunity to be part of an upscale, globalized work environment draw many in India to the call center industry. At the same time, night shift employment presents women, in particular, with new challenges alongside the opportunities. This book explores how beliefs about what constitutes "women's work" are evolving in response to globalization.

Working the Night Shift is the first in-depth study of the transnational call center industry that is written from the point of view of women workers. It uncovers how call center employment affects their lives, mainly as it relates to the anxiety that Indian families and Indian society have towards women going out at night, earning a good salary, and being exposed to western culture. This timely account illustrates the ironic and, at times, unsettling experiences of women who enter the spaces and places made accessible through call center work.


Visit the author's website at https://www.working-the-nightshift.com/ and facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=106631019373960.

DESCRIPTION Brings political geography to life-explores key concepts, critical debates, and contemporary research in the field. Political geography is the study of how power struggles both shape and are shaped by the places in which they occur-the spatial nature of political power. Political Geography: A Critical Introduction helps students understand how power is related to space, place, and territory, illustrating how everyday life and the world of global conflict and nation-states are inextricably intertwined. This timely, engaging textbook weaves critical, postcolonial, and feminist narratives throughout its exploration of key concepts in the discipline. Accessible to students new to the field, this text offers critical approaches to political geography-including questions of gender, sexuality, race, and difference-and explains central political concepts such as citizenship, security, and territory in a geographic context. Case studies incorporate methodologies that illustrate how political geographers perform research, enabling students to develop a well-rounded critical approach rather than merely focusing on results. Chapters cover topics including the role of nationalism in shaping allegiances, the spatial aspects of social movements and urban politics, the relationship between international relations and security, the effects of non-human actors in politics, and more. Global in scope, this book: • Highlights a diverse range of globally-oriented issues, such as global inequality, that demonstrate the need for critical political geography • Demonstrates how critiques of political geography intersect with decolonial, feminist, and queer movements • Covers the Eurocentric origins of many of the discipline's key concepts

What might it mean to think of 'the single' as a potentially queer subject and in what ways does singleness pose a challenge to heteronormative conceptualizations of the lifecourse and household formation? In this paper I explore some of the contested meanings of ‘home’ for those who are single; and examine how single people have created new forms of home and new spaces of at-homeness with those with whom they are not biologically (or romantically) related. I conclude by asking how we might help foster, build and create new forms of dwelling that might better match single people’s imaginings and desires for a home outside of heteronormative coupledom. Ultimately the paper argues that the exclusion of the figure of the single is one of the key omissions in the work of those interested in challenging the geographies of exclusion and inequality.

This paper emerges from experiences of using participatory visual methods in my own on-going PhD research with women experiencing homelessness and housing issues, and draws upon the methodological issues encountered along the way. In recent years, the visual has become increasingly acknowledged as a central part of geographical inquiry. Emphases on the multi-sensory and emotional aspects of experience are of significant value to geographic research and knowledge. For feminist geography, in particular, participatory visual methods hold much potential. Compatible with feminist geography's concerns with demystifying voyeuristic, distanced, and disembodied claims to knowledge and insistence on the importance of the personal in research relationships, participatory visual methods may offer feminist ways of doing research. Some have cited their potential to re-position the research participant as 'expert' and to decentre the usual research hierarchies in which the researcher imposes her meanings on the findings. However, assumptions of a 'real' reversal of power risks falling dangerously close to mythologies of 'hygienic research' which presents over-simplistic accounts of the research process. Here, I argue that much can be gained if participatory visual methods are to engage with debates at the heart of critical feminist geographies, with a specific focus on research relationships, and the exploration of the complexity of women's lived experiences.

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

Update: If you'd like to watch an accurate, funny, and brief take on Eco-Nihilism, please go to #wisecrack on Youtube: Did South Park Turn Anti-Capitalist, where the central argument from Eco-Nihilism is quoted at several junctures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_MglOKUFRg.

I may not have made South Park directly--but Wisecrack--close enough!!

Wendy Lynne Lee

This is the preface for Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield), February 2017.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739176887/Eco-Nihilism-The-Philosophical-Geopolitics-of-the-Climate-Change-Apocalypse.

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road,  tells the story of a dying father’s heroic effort to protect his child from starvation, violence, and disease as they struggle to cross the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what’s happened to bring about so tragic and terrorizing a circumstance, but we’re nonetheless drawn to the stark images McCarthy evokes and, though we work feverishly to deny that such a tragedy could befall us, we can imagine it.

Indeed, for Syrian refugees, Niger Delta villagers, Northwest Kenyan pastoralists, Chukchi Sea coastal fishermen, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, Mexican fishermen, Pennsylvania farmers, indigenous Sengwer, the citizens of Kiribati Island’s thirty-two atolls, and many more, fables like The Road reek of a reality already poisoned nearly beyond repair and foreshadow future crises—environmental, economic, geopolitical, social, and moral—for which the prospect of recovery seems little more than fiction.

Such crises are as predictable as are the implications of an economic system, namely, neoliberal or conquest capitalism, whose objectives and governing logic are, I’ll argue, inherently incompatible not only with the just, the good, or the beautiful—but with life itself. Conquest capital devours and digests values, ethical, civic, and aesthetic, reducing each to that single value without which it can neither replicate itself nor grow: exchange. In so doing it generates a state of affairs that can only rightly be described as pathologically nihilistic: capitalism destroys its own existential conditions through the wholesale commodification of the finite ecosystems upon which it depends. It cannot do otherwise and be capitalism. Hence, to continue down this road guarantees a future disfigured by the violence consequent on abject desperation and subjugation not only to domination by multinational corporations, but ultimately to more prosaic though terrorizing prospects—like thirst.

“Akşam eve döneceğimiz saate göre rota belirlemek, evden çıkarken şehrin nerelerinden geçeceğimize göre kıyafet seçmek gibi gündelik hayatımıza dair ayrıntılar yanında bir de pek görünür olmayan konular var: ekonomik imkânlarımız dolayısıyla seçme imkânımız varsa, şehrin neresinde oturmak daha güvenli ve rahat? Mahalle hayatı, çocuğu olan bekâr bir kadın için siteye göre daha mı güvenli? Yaşadığımız yerde çevremizle kuracağımız ilişkilerin sınırları olmalı mı? Erkek arkadaşlarımızın eve girip çıkması sorun olur mu? Ailemizin ya da arkadaşlarımızın oturduğu mahallede yaşamak, kolaylaştırıcı olabilir mi?”

Şehirde yalnız yaşayan kadınlar, fizikî şiddet tehdidiyle sınırlı olmayan korkuların kıskacındalar, çoğunlukla. Adeta davranışlarına, bakışlarına sinmiş bir ihtiyatla yaşıyorlar. Gözetilmiyor ama gözetleniyorlar. Sadece sosyal ilişki rejiminin ve mekânların “erkekliği” değil, bekâr kadınların sosyal politikaların menzili dışına itilmiş olması da, onların yaşamını zorlaştırıyor. Oysa, yalnız yaşayan -kimisi de çocuklukadınların varlığı, özellikle büyük şehirlerde giderek genişleyen bir vakıa.

Ceren Lordoğlu, mekâna feminist açıdan bakan çalışmasında, İstanbul’da farklı sınıfsal ve kültürel konumlardan bekâr kadınların bu meseleyle nasıl baş ettiklerini inceliyor. Nasıl taktikler geliştiriyor, arkadaş, aile, komşuluk, mahalle ilişkilerini nasıl kuruyor ve nasıl hissediyorlar?

Intersectionality is a theory that seeks to capture the multiple relationships between power structures such as gender, race, class, sexuality or age. It is currently considered a field of research in itself and is conceived as one of the most important contributions of feminist theory. In the field of geography, it is recently being consolidated as a relevant approach, but the theoretical and methodological proposals are still scarce. In this article I situate Geographies of Intersectionality as a fruitful field of research, with many possibilities of theoretical development and practical application. With this aim, through empirical research on the access of youth to the city, I present the Relief Maps as a tool to work on the Geographies of Intersectionality from a geographical perspective and placing special emphasis on the emotional dimension as an indicator of inequalities.

During the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the word "beguine" was used by women to identify themselves as members of a wide-spread and influential women's movement. The same term was used by their detractors and overt opponents, with the highly charged negative meaning of "heretic." The etymology of the term “beguine” and ultimate origins of the movement have never been satisfactorily explained.

- On 12 March 2018, Mauritius celebrated fifty years as an independent nation amidst much fanfare. Yet behind the nation’s official image of multicultural ‘unity in diversity’ lurk deep socio-economic inequalities and inter-ethnic tensions that are insistently critiqued in its literature. This book analyses how the idea of belonging – a sense of attachment to, and identification with, a place or people – is articulated in a range of contemporary francophone Mauritian novels. The island-nation’s complex, contested history and the multi-ethnic composition of its modern-day population mean that belonging is a central but fraught issue in both reality and fiction. Adopting an eclectic, multi-dimensional theoretical framework, Waters explores how affirmative forms of affective belonging intersect with, and are frequently inhibited by, the exclusionary ‘politics of belonging’ at communal, national and international levels. Waters offers in-depth and comparative analyses of novels by Nathacha Appanah, Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, Bertrand de Robillard, Amal Sewtohul and Carl de Souza. Despite their striking thematic and formal diversity, these novels are shown to be characterised by a common rejection of dominant discourses of ethnic, diasporic affiliation and by a strong, common commitment to the ongoing, future-orientated project of Mauritian nationhood. As such, this book offers an original insight into the dynamics of belonging and exclusion in diverse, multi-ethnic societies.

This article explores how the corporate body and its desire for capital scripts workers' bodies through heterosexual desire. I draw on the case of Enron, the Texas-based energy company currently embroiled in legal action for fraudulent accounting practices. These practices are tied to a corporate culture that, in the desire for revenue accumulation, hid debt and misinformed employees and stockholders. Drawing from mainstream media accounts of the Enron scandal, I examine the role of gender in the exposure of Enron. First, I look at how media narratives frame the exposure of Enron by a female journalist and a female whistleblower. Then, following the uncovering of Enron's fraudulent financial strategy, the August 2002 issue of Playboy Magazine featured the 'Women of Enron' revealing their own 'assets'. My second task is to analyze this Playboy spread in the context of the Enron fall. Through an investigation of the exposure of Enron by these two sets of women, the 'good' girls and the 'bad' girls, I draw out parallels between Enron's desire for capital with a desire for the female body. Further, I make note and comment on the conspicuous absence of the male body in these narratives.

Feminist political ecology is a subfield that brings feminist theory, objectives, and practices to political ecology, an analytical framework based on the assumption that ecological issues must be understood and analyzed in relation to political economy (and vice versa). Feminist political ecologists suggest gender is a crucial variable – in relation to class, race and other relevant dimensions of political ecological life – in constituting access to, control over, and knowledge of natural resources. In addition, research in feminist political ecology demonstrates how social identities are constituted in and through relations with nature and everyday material practices.

This commentary makes a case for a more rigorous treatment of the body as a material and political site within the sub-field of urban political ecology. I propose an embodied urban political ecology grounded in a feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial approach consisting of five orienting propositions. They include attention to metabolism, social reproduction, intersectionality and articulation, emotion and affect, and political subjectivity. Although applicable to political ecology broadly, I focus on the urban because of how often the body is mobilised in conceptualisations of cities and infrastructure despite the fact that material embodiment remains under-studied and disparately theorised in the subfield. I suggest that theoretical and empirical attention to embodiment in these five key arenas can deepen understandings of the terrain of environmental politics and potential transformation within the subfield of urban political ecology.

El arroz ha configurado culturas, identidades y geografías afrodiaspóricas en las Américas. En el Caribe Colombiano, los procesos de modernización agrícola a lo largo del siglo XX re-configuraron las geografías negras del arroz al transformar los paisajes agrarios y negar valor a los saberes y prácticas agrícolas de la gente negra. Este artículo analiza el tongueo, una práctica de recolección de arroz que se generalizó en los años 1970s y 1980s en el municipio de Marialabaja-un territorio histórico afro campesino. Mediante el tongueo, mujeres, niñas y niños recogían y pilaban el arroz que las máquinas recolectoras no lograban cosechar. Las historias narradas por mujeres tongueadoras re-significan esta práctica como un espacio femenino de goce, socialización y transmisión de memoria cultural. Tomando elementos teóricos de las geografías negras y el pensamiento espacial feminista latinoamericano se argumenta que el tongueo constituyó una práctica territorial encarnada al interior de los regímenes territoriales de la modernización agrícola. Al dar cuenta de cómo se configuran geografías negras en articulación con procesos racializados de cambio agrario en Colombia, se busca contribuir a ampliar el campo de las geografías negras más allá de la literatura Anglo-céntrica, desde el diálogo con debates latinoamericanos sobre territorio y cuerpo-territorio.

Spatial Activism in the City: Perspectives of Body, Identity and Memory
PhD Abstract

The research focuses on spatial and urban contexts of activism, gender and sexuality in Tel Aviv, with the aim of understanding the modes of creation and construction of physical, socio-cultural and symbolic spaces of activism. Special emphasis is given to the research arenas and activities occurring within them through three concepts – body, identity and memory – and the complex interactions between them. The research focuses on spatial politics and how it is constructed and reproduced through spatial activism in the contexts of gender and sexuality, particularly feminist and LGBT/queer activism. Theoretically, it is based on theories of social movements and activism, political geography, and feminist and queer geographies and theories. Its theoretical aim is to broaden the knowledge and understanding of activism from a geographical-spatial perspective that, unlike other social scientific disciplines such as sociology or political sciences, has been relatively neglected in the political activism literature.

Based on a qualitative research design that includes 51 in-depth interviews, participant observations and visual materials such as mental maps, the research has been conducted in three different organizational arenas in Tel Aviv: City Center for the LGBT Community in Gan Meir, Bayit Banamal in the Tel Aviv port, and Beit Achoti (My Sister’s Home) in a downtown neighborhood. These arenas differ from each other in their geographical locations in the city, the community they produced, and the nature of their activity. The common aspect to all three is their involvement in issues of gender or sexuality and that a regular activity takes place in all.

The main conclusion emerging from examining these arenas is that spatial activism striving to promote significant social and political change can take different forms and address different publics with different identities, and is not necessarily a conventional expression of resistance and protest, though it can also appear in this form. In many cases social and political change can be achieved by means of spatial activism in a variety of public and also semi-public spaces, including government and private sector spaces, and not only those that fully or purely identified with civil society. Wherever spatial activism occurs there is potential for constructing autonomous spaces that also enable the construction of a third activist space that brings together different people with different identities and experiences of activism.

Another, related conclusion is that spatial activism that operates in organizational arenas and not necessarily in spaces and configurations of ad-hoc protest affects the daily life and personal and collective spatial management of individuals, and creates “an activist lifestyle” in which spatial activism becomes an integral and significant part of the individual’s life.
Finally, despite the common tendency to view activism as limited only to certain social classes or to “professional activists” who consider activism their goal in life, the cases examined in this research indicate that spatial activism can emerge not only from a variety of physical and social-cultural locations but also in a variety of identity configurations. Thus, the importance of spatial activism lies also in the fact that enables many people to be involved, among them those who do not regard themselves as activists.

What is the relationship between Foucault’s concept of biopower and Deleuze’s concept of control? Despite the similarities between these two concepts, there is not a single scholarly article that solely thematizes this question, nor a comparative survey of the answers given so far. This essay aims to fill this lacuna. Drawing on Deleuze's unpublished and untranslated lectures on Foucault, the original thesis of this essay is thus that biopower and control are the same concept of power in both content and form.

Syllabus for an interdisciplinary overview of scholarship on Infrastructure, with attention to new critical directions, STS, infrastructure as public good, materiality, ethnographic approaches, with attention to feminist approaches. The rubric of infrastructure includes the physical materiality of cement and cables, a sense of systemic networks involving material and immaterial elements, and governance by capital and law. There is a growing body of work that considers the relationship of infrastructure to class, race, and citizenship but less scholarship that highlights gender, sexuality, or feminist and queer approaches. This course considers the rubric of infrastructure in its conventional form and in light of more recent critical studies, for example those informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) or ontological theories as a way to advance our capacity to interpret actually existing materiality and structures, including their failures and unintended consequences, and apply this to identifying how and where infrastructures are relevant to analytical questions asked of specific concrete circumstances (such as students' research questions and areas). We will explore promising directions and potential avenues for bringing feminist and queer questions to the analysis of material/immaterial systems at the public/private divide. Readings include quotidian sources from technical literature, history, ethnography, and relevant theoretical resources. Taught Spring 2015, Women's Studies & Cultural Anthropology, Duke University.

Queer geographers have recently begun to examine the lives of transgender persons, a heretofore gap in the literature. This article examines the experiences of incarcerated trans persons in the United States, thus extending this nascent trans geography work by considering a new population in a new space. As some scholarly and activist research has shown over the last decade or so, U.S. trans persons are incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate and face harsh conditions while imprisoned. First-hand accounts of trans prisoners’ experiences are however limited due to the difficulty of accessing this population for research purposes. Working in cooperation with a Montreal-based organization that facilitates pen-pal communications between queer persons inside and outside penitentiaries in the U.S., we conducted qualitative research with twenty-three trans feminine individuals confined in facilities in several states. Our findings unfortunately corroborate the findings laid out in the small existing literature on trans prisoner issues, demonstrating that they endure harsh conditions of confinement. We detail these conditions here, while also pointing to informant responses that offer insight into the ways in which trans incarcerated persons cope with the hypermasculine and heteronormative environment of the U.S. prison. These results are offered in the spirit of advancing a queer abolitionist politics that centers the knowledge and experiences of trans incarcerated persons.

This article provides a review of contemporary literature related to gender and the city, drawing primarily from Anglo-American feminist geography, but also architecture and urban planning. It first reflects back on early feminist interventions in the modern city, often referred to as the ‘municipal housekeeping’ movement or early ‘feminist materialism’. In this movement, middle-class female reformers drew upon ideological associations between women and homes to address ‘material’ concerns related to home/housing, health, and urban politics. I reflect on this activism to raise awareness of early feminist praxis and to suggest that these three themes (and the materiality that links them) remain important areas for investigation within feminist geography, especially as cities have been ravaged by neoliberal austerity and are embroiled in a global recession. Using new feminist materialism as an organizing theme, I argue for a refined and reinvigorated material gendered urban research that addresses home/housing, health, and urban politics. This feminist materialism is decoupled from restrictive versions of structuralism, attentive to embodiment, encompassing of intersectionalities, focused on the everyday and beyond, and attuned to social justice and feminist praxis.

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.