bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Economic Development: Political Ecologies of Race
Authors: Mollett Sharlene
Published: October 2024

In this chapter, I draw insights from Black feminist and postcolonial thinking to contribute to a growing engagement with the concept of intersectionality in the subfield of feminist political ecology. Employing the concept of postcolonial intersectionality, I reflect on how Black women in Latin America operationalize particular knowledges and their racialized gendered subjectivities to challenge regional imaginaries that limit livelihoods and access to natural resources. This chapter draws from ethnographic and historical data collection and is supplemented with news articles, activist scholarship, government documents and secondary resources. Together, I centre the intersectional logics of power in Bocas and argue that Afro-Panamanian women lead a material and symbolic process of place making, one that prioritizes life while struggling over carnal, gendered and racialized dispossession and the right to be recognized as human.
Poverty and Inequality: Austerity, Welfare Reforms and Insecurity
Authors: Murphy Amy Greer
Published: October 2024

This chapter centres on the ways in which austerity policies in the Global North increase the enduring and extensive gendered risks associated with poverty, inequality and deprivation and on how invisible care work increases these risks, and it examines the absence of these areas of inquiry in the field of economic geography. Caring is in many ways gendered and classed, and its invisibility is at the core of many historical and contemporary socio-economic inequalities, such as experiencing poverty. While unpaid care work provides an invaluable contribution to the formal economy and society, this is seldom acknowledged by mainstream economic geography. Despite interrogations by feminist geographers, unpaid care work remains peripheral in mainstream economic geography, largely absent from theoretical and empirical literature on labour, employment and value. Using findings from qualitative empirical research, I demonstrate how the invisibility of social reproduction contributes to gendered inequality, further amplified through the experiences of families and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the austerity state laid bare their clear risks of poverty and insecurity. The chapter draws on empirical qualitative research with mothers in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees in Northern England to highlight key findings – that women are the primary actors engaging in unpaid care work within households and communities, and that their ability to do this work to the best of their abilities and to the benefit of their families is being curtailed by welfare reforms and social security retrenchment.
The Future of Creative Industries and Labour
Authors: Brydges Taylor
Published: October 2024

The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to provide a brief overview of the evolution of creative industries research as a subdiscipline of economy geography, and second, to set an agenda for the study of creative industries and labour going forward. In pursuit of this first aim, this chapter begins by highlighting concepts, such the creative economy, creative cities and the creative class which, in turn, lay the foundation for a discussion of key critiques of this field of research. Integral to this approach is the work of feminist economic geographers, who have argued that inequality is deeply embedded in the creative industries. Whereas the creative industries have long been portrayed as cool and fun, feminist economic geographers have demonstrated how these industries are based upon an implicitly narrow and highly exclusionary conceptualization of creativity. Indeed, much of the early research in this field reinforced and reproduced entrenched inequities (across gender, race, class and more) within economic geography. Reflecting on the future of creative industries and labour, and in light of the significant upheavals of 2020/21, I present preliminary findings from ongoing research on the fashion industry in Australia. More broadly, I advocate for the need to take a more inclusive, intersectional approach to the study of the nature of creative work that is rooted in an understanding of workers’ lived experiences.
Disasters and Recovery: Postcolonializing Economic Geography
Authors: Sou Gemma
Published: October 2024

In this chapter, I argue that postcolonial theory will enable economic geographers to reinterpret and reimagine disaster recovery as a process that is not the sole responsibility of the state, and which cannot be gauged by statistically measuring the health of the economy. A postcolonial methodology offers a solid historicization of disaster contexts and how the need to adapt and be resilient among marginalized people across the world has its origins in their placation, exploitation and colonization. Postcolonial thinking can provide economic geographers with the methodology to unearth how anti-colonial and normative forms of societal and economic organization may rupture from disasters at the grassroots level. Therefore, adopting a postcolonial methodology in disaster contexts is not merely about trying to understand how a society recovers or moving beyond simple statistical measurements of the economy. It is also about exposing and thinking critically about alternative futures that take seek to address the structures that (re)produce the vulnerabilities that predicate disasters.
Postscript: Continuing the Work
Authors: Johns Jennifer , Hall Sarah Marie
Published: October 2024

We have approached this edited collection with an ambitious agenda; to create further space to develop and extend pluralized contemporary economic geographies. This is a task that can only be achieved collectively, and so it is fitting to start our ending by thanking all the contributors to the collection. The work of pluralizing and diversifying is not an equal or shared task, and we are mindful that the labour of doing ‘diversity work’ often falls to those individuals who are most deeply affected by the problems of privilege and exclusivity. Thus, a collection such as this is more than the sum of its parts, and more than can be seen written on the pages. It represents a collective vision for how to do things differently. In this postscript we take the opportunity to outline what we hope may come from this collection as part of a broader project which brings in you, the readers. This is less of a ‘last word’ and more of a call to action.
Marriage Practices
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

As marriage is seen as being at the heart of Muslim family life, Chapter 5 brings together and evaluates evidence exploring Muslim marriage practices. It assesses continuity and change in the arranged marriage system commonly used by Muslims. Reinforcing the centrality of heterosexuality and heteronormativity, the chapter draws attention to the role of Islam in informing decision-making around marriage and relationships. It critically examines gender inequality throughout, highlighting the agency of women in choosing a marriage partner and negotiating marital relationships. Later sections explore marital conflict and instability and domestic abuse. The chapter highlights that understanding of Muslim marriage practices remains partial as there is a lack of evidence about Muslims whose relationship practices are different from the majority.
A Necessary Inhumanity
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

Dissection was the principal authoritative procedure for members of the medical profession to measure, on physical and psychosocial levels, the affective bonds and formative boundaries of their identities, specifically, those of recent inductees. This chapter covers concepts related to medical conditioning in the form of clinical detachment and medical socialization through various hazing rituals involving the dissecting room. To this point, dissection photographs became an integral part of conditioning rituals. They served as a memento of an intensely formative time in students’ lives. But, more specifically, they evidenced, in an exacting manner, a singular recallable moment of student rebirth. This chapter also focuses on how the objectification or dehumanization of the dead body was essential for the cadaver’s utilization in the obtainment of medical knowledge. Of particular significance is how students formulated their new professional identities and adapted to their surroundings by using a litany of defensive techniques and conditioning through medical socialization. While the dissection photograph confirmed a new stage of professional affiliation for students, by literally fixing their identities to a tangible substrate, readers should note that their identities were not permanent. By their own admission, a student’s time in the dissecting room was transient.
The Cadaver as (Self-)Portrait
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses visualizing student life and dissecting room culture during a period of climactic upheaval in the photographic industry: the introduction of amateur handheld cameras. It focuses on the formation of student identity by way of single dissector snapshots. Until the 1890s, photographically commemorating a one-on-one relationship between student and cadaver was virtually unheard of. Moreover, handheld cameras led to an increase in representative agency; providing the next level of self-representation and self-awareness – critical awareness – which provided students with an opportunity to pass judgment on each other, in part, through the quality of their skills taking and developing photographs. By the early 1910s, the commercial availability of camera technology, such as those manufactured by Eastman Kodak, influenced both ability and convention, leading to a steady rise in single-dissector portraiture. Many took the form of real photo postcards. Although the convention never reached the same level of production as group shots by the genre’s ‘end’ in the 1930s, single-dissector snapshots had become fully integrated into the larger genre’s iconography.
Theoretical Frameworks on Migrant Smuggling
Authors: Becucci Stefano
Published: October 2024

This chapter analyses theoretical frameworks of migrant smuggling. The business model considers the actors to be criminal players, state and migrants, where each takes decisions according to losses and benefits. The social model claims that migrant smuggling occurs within the migrants’ diaspora among co-nationals. Would-be migrants rely on mediators and smugglers within their own migratory network of compatriots. So, trust goes far beyond a simple economic calculation as established by the business model perspective. But what happens when the migratory routes become longer and migrants have contact with several smugglers along different borders? Considering critical points related to both the business and social models, the chapter proposes a new theoretical perspective on the analytical distinction between hierarchical and network criminal organizations. Smuggler organizations are broken down into hierarchical groups, networks of networks, and single networks. The first tend to operate as mafia-like organizations and the others as business enterprises.
Irregular Migration Towards Southern Europe
Authors: Becucci Stefano
Published: October 2024

This chapter analyses landed migrants in Spain, Italy and Greece, focusing on organizational models of smuggling and counter-migration policies. The analysis reveals the prices paid by migrants, and the routes, hubs and systems of smuggling organizations. Smugglers along western and eastern routes are organized as networks of networks and single networks. The analysis shows that smugglers cooperate with each other, without apparent conflict. Along the central route towards Libya, hierarchical smuggling groups enjoyed an oligopolistic position after the fall of Gaddafi, while convergent interests among Fezzan and north Libyan smugglers recently came to an end. The 2017 agreement between Libya and Italy led smugglers and militia on Libya’s north coast to move from smuggling to countering irregular migration thanks to financial aid from Italy and the EU. However, the main effect of migration policies has been to change and expand smuggling routes without stopping the flows towards Spain, Italy and Greece.
Countering Wildlife Crimes in Italy: The Case of Bird Poaching
Authors: Natali Lorenzo , Troiano Ciro , Zoja Sara , Lavorgna Anita
Published: October 2024

Italy is one of the European countries with the richest biodiversity, but its precious heritage is at risk, with wildlife crimes, and particularly poaching in its various manifestations, being one of the main threats to the survival of rare or endangered species. This review chapter will focus, in particular, on bird poaching as a case study, presenting its trends, phenomenology and characteristics, the related wildlife markets in Italy, and their impact on wildlife conservation. It also offers a brief overview of the relevant national legislation and its implementation, suggesting how the system currently in place is not always adequate to confront a diffuse and socially embedded phenomenon, the social and environmental harms of which are too often not yet fully recognized.
CITES in Spain: Blueprints and Challenges of Spanish Practice on CITES and Welfare of Trafficked Victims
Authors: Fajardo Teresa
Published: October 2024

This chapter contributes to the debate on CITES with a reflection on its adaptability to the new vision adopted by its States Parties, which calls to ‘[c]onserve biodiversity and contribute to its sustainable use by ensuring that no species of wild fauna or flora is or remains subject to unsustainable exploitation through international trade’. Attempts to update CITES have been the source of interesting reforms in Spain, including the restructuring of CITES authorities and the adoption of a national plan that developed the EU Action Plan on Wildlife Trafficking. CITES implementation and case law in Spain shows that it is necessary to adapt to the new challenges posed by wildlife trafficking in the digital world. Thus, the introduction of digital permits and means of traceability will facilitate law enforcement and international cooperation. Spain has also adopted an exemplary practice regarding the destination of seized live animals, based on recovery and reintroduction that goes beyond CITES recommendations.
Introduction
Authors: MacNeil Taylor Faith
Published: October 2024

This chapter sets out the substantive content of the book and its broad themes of generational inequality, housing unaffordability and intimate relationships. The chapter includes an account of the author’s personal housing experiences and an overview of their critique of the nuclear family. The author connects the generational disjunctures posed by housing inequality to the diminishing political purchase of the home-owning family, identifying the precarious intimacies of the rented sector as fertile ground for exploring this historical moment in the history of capitalism. There is also a discussion of methods.
Conclusion
Authors: MacNeil Taylor Faith
Published: October 2024

This chapter summarises the material of the book. It revisits some of its core theoretical themes, suggesting that there are openings within the fissures presented by rentier capitalism’s corrosion of community, and its densification of everyday life within dwindling space. The author argues that these openings incorporate alternative strategies of social reproduction that signal a ‘will to become’: a desire for generational reconfiguration borne from the erosion of ‘secure’ pathways to traditional kinship structures.
Introduction: Telling Queer Stories of Conflict
Authors: Hagen Jamie J. , Ritholtz Samuel , Delatolla Andrew
Published: October 2024

There are multiple approaches to thinking through how scholars can conduct queer conflict research. Whether it is to queer conflict research—to disrupt and redefine existing methodological and epistemological frameworks of conflict research by drawing from queer theoretical propositions—or to engage with queer subjects during and after conflict as the focus of the research itself, the concept needs a degree of flexibility. As such, queering conflict research can extend beyond the study of LGBTIQ+ people’s experiences of political violence during conflict. Indeed, the difficulty behind this volume, as well as its strength, is the breadth of approaches that can be classified as ‘queer’. Rather than making a definitive claim about what queer conflict research is/is not, thus policing its boundaries, we aim to illuminate why queer conflict research matters. Queer scholars in this volume each take a stance on ‘the queer’ of their work and, in doing so, they ask how their positionality matters in queer conflict research. In this introduction, we detail how this volume brings together a series of different queer methodological approaches to address the epistemological (what), methodological (how), and ethical (why) issues of queer scholarship in studies on conflict and political violence.
The ‘Queer’ in Conflict Research as Subject, Structure, and Method: Initial Epistemological Considerations for the Early Career Researcher
Authors: Ritholtz Samuel
Published: October 2024

A tension in queer theory is whether queering a subject matter simply requires a renewed focus on non-hegemonic sexual orientations and gender identities or whether there’s a certain epistemological approach required to redress the epistemic violence present in disciplines devoid of queer and trans subjectivities. For students and scholars of political violence, this tension persists in not only how they design their research, but also how they pitch their contributions to a given literature. This chapter investigates the tensions between discipline, epistemology, and method as it relates to studies at the intersection of queer studies and political violence. It proposes an expansive queer epistemological approach that recognizes the layered knowledge regimes that impact the lives of queer and trans people, running the gambit of positivism to post-modernism. And it reinforces Matt Brim’s assertion that ‘the project of queer theory is to explore and respond to the universe of queer need, including the need to reimagine the universe of queer need’.
Queering the Politics of Knowledge in Conflict Research
Authors: Serrano-Amaya José Fernando
Published: October 2024

This chapter addresses the ethical dilemmas raised when researching on gender and sexual violence, particularly the study of homophobic violence in contexts of political transitions. As authors in the field of social suffering have observed, violence is not a self-evident experience; our knowledge of it is the result of complex processes of narration, representation, and subjectivity. In ethical terms it implies considering the reasons for calling attention to some events and remaining silent about others or how the description of experiences of victimization can be useful for advocacy but can also accentuate representations of vulnerability. This argument has particular implications in areas in which knowledge production is mostly the result of social mobilizations and activism of collective actors. There, narration, representation, and subjectivity are not only in complex relations but also in conflict and distance. This issue challenges the limited discussion of ethics mostly in the administrative regime of protocols and forms. The contribution engages with debates such as the ‘insider/outsider’ positionality or the ethics of representation calling for the need of a permanent reflexivity all through the research process and the acknowledgement of gaps and fluidity in ever-shifting research locations.
The Visual as Queer Method
Authors: Cooper-Cunningham Dean
Published: October 2024

In this chapter, I argue that scholars working on queer politics ought to be engaging with and developing visual methods to study queer insecurities in times of conflict because doing so allows the complexities of queer subjectivity, political participation, insecurities, resistance, culture, and forms of sociality to emerge beyond simplistic ‘victim’ narratives. Taking the visual as an epistemic entry point to studying conflict is necessary because the visual is often used by oppressed groups to articulate their experiences. If we focus on words alone, we risk missing the anti-queer politics that often precedes conflict escalation and genocidal campaigns because of an epistemic hierarchy in which words matter most. To demonstrate the utility of a visual approach, I outline how I have used the visual to research Russian state homophobia, pointing to how visual methods enabled me to ‘see’ queer insecurities but also queer joy and resistance. Doing so, I outline the tripartite word-image-body model that I have developed for studying security issues and conflict-related vulnerabilities. Far from just calling attention to and representing homophobic violence, the visual has been and remains a crucial part of queer politics. As such, it must be part of our queer methodological toolkit.
Queer Tools for the Ruthless Archive: Methodological Notes on Trans and Queer Exploration in Argentinean Archives
Authors: Simonetto Patricio
Published: October 2024

Archives have become a keystone of discussion of queer theory and the history of sexuality. Recently studies have addressed multiple questions about them, from the logics of their organization to the practices with which public, private, or grassroots archives preserve (or not) documentary sources. Between the dust and the mites, navigating the archives with a queer lens can be frustrating and overwhelming. Often fragmented between newspaper articles, police reports, or court records, queer lives are presented to us as the product of multiple violences. This chapter approaches the potential of queer methodologies to navigate the archives. Bringing together methodological notes of a long empirical research project about sex commerce, homosexuality, and trans* history in Argentina, this chapter rethinks the principal challenges of doing queer history in Latin American archives through three sets of questions: (i) How do we deal with the language of the Archive? With which words can we describe precarious lives usually narrated by others? (ii) What is our relationship with these documents? How do researchers feel when they activate documentary narratives? And, finally, (iii) What happens when we apply a queer perspective to heterosexual life records to consider the potential of queer disidentification to study dominant sexualities?
Entangled Intimacies, Queer Attachments: Reflections on Fieldwork with a Diaspora of War
Authors: Munhazim Ahmad Qais
Published: October 2024

As a queer, Muslim, Afghan asylum seeker, I was hesitant to return to my own community of Afghans and conduct an ethnographic study of their displacement journeys from Afghanistan and subsequent lives in exile in the US. Prior to embarking on my fieldwork, I asked myself: will they accept me as I am or do I have to hide parts of me? Will I be disrupting ethical terrains of research if I rely on secrecy? Once in the field, I came to realize that to some Afghans I was a piece of home; a displaced person, under state scrutiny just like them. To some, I reminded them of their cousin. They wanted to share a few cups of tea, flavoured with nostalgia for home. To others, my queer self was seen as a transgressor of Afghanness, failed at life and doomed in the afterlife, as they would say. How are identities and experiences of a researcher entangled with those of the researched? How do attachments to home and experiences of war and displacements trouble the ethical terrains in the field? This chapter explores these questions while advancing a diasporic feminist queer ethics of care.
Critical Perspectives on African Borders
Authors: Vanyoro Kudakwashe
Published: October 2024

This chapter situates the Zimbabwe–South Africa border in the predominant binary interpretation of African borders, which has endured over time in studies that take inspiration from Giddens’ structuration theory. It departs from these interpretations by arguing that the Zimbabwe–South Africa border is better read as a configuration of polymorphous performances that serve as an exterior geographical frontier and an interior social categorisation mechanism. This means that its main function extends beyond spatial characteristics to the deployment of multiple techniques of reinforcing the border through categorising migrants in ways that also show the centrality of time in migration governance. This relationship reveals a novel interpretation of borders that contributes to challenging the dominance of spatial perspectives in thinking about African borders. Temporality, in this context, also provides an alternative idea to theorise on migrants’ potential to evade border controls and challenge the goals of migration policies, which aids in contesting the dichotomy of agency–structure. In this way, it is possible to imagine how forces of domination and resistance feed off each other and charter a context-specific and ongoing contestation between power and agency that is productive but also does not offer a resolution to the structural issues at hand. Temporality and appropriation hence appear to be contingent frameworks to resolve the conundrums of domination and subordination in the footing of the clock, although the former takes place in ways that appropriate time through immobility without necessarily allowing the governed to shape and transform regimes of government. For Achille Mbembe, thus, power is not primarily a relationship of resistance or of collaboration but can be described as ‘illicit cohabitation’ resulting in the ‘mutual zombification’ of both the dominant and those whom they purport to dominate. This means the postcolonial state and its subjects reside within the same episteme in which wars are temporally waged, won and lost.
Introduction: Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies
Authors: Tamari Tomoko
Published: October 2024

The book explores how digital information technologies have created a huge impact on human perception and experience by engaging with three key components: animation, the body and affect. Animation in this collection encapsules not only modalities and ‘techniques’ of moving images in both ‘frame-by-frame’ analogue and computer-generated images, but also can be seen as a field of affective perception. We sense animation as an actuality in the mind, as well as seeing it as an illusion on the screen. Such emotional, sensory, and psychological experiences point to the vital role of the body. In this book, then, the discussion of affect focuses specifically on psycho-physical sensations and neuroscientific accounts to explore the dynamic interaction between human perception and moving images. Yet human perception is not simply a part of the organic body, since the body is bio-socially constituted with the capacity for agency and projecting its own subjectivity onto the environment. Hence, the book seeks to go beyond the debates that dichotomize biological/neuronal reductionism and social constructionism, in order to better understand the range of affective and embodied experiences in the era of digital information society.
Animation, Data, and the Plasticity of the Real: From the Military Survey of Scotland to Synthetic Training Environments
Authors: Väliaho Pasi
Published: October 2024

Taking contemporary military augmented reality systems as its point of departure, this article charts a concept of animation associated with topographic mapping practices. It investigates the historical development of the perceptual and cognitive assemblages from which today’s augmented reality environments partly derive, tracking their genealogy back to eighteenth-century military cartographic enterprises, and even further to seventeenth-century camera obscuras, the key ‘mixed reality’ devices of early modernity that contributed to animating the world as a repository of data. The article discusses how, in this context, the concept of animation should be understood as the world’s rendering as an object of action and influence, associated with a model of perception that was not only predicated on models of geometric rationality but also on ideas of enactive attunement between the observer and its environment. Ultimately, the article develops a concept of animation geared toward rendering the real as supple and plastic for desired transformations.
Deepfake Face-Swap Animations and Affect
Authors: Zacher Sørensen Mette-Marie
Published: October 2024

The chapter analyses face-swapped deepfakes in moving images, focusing particularly on two different applications: ‘the public speech’ and ‘the porn scene’. Face-swap technologies generate fears about their abuse: for example, in connection with fake news, advertisements, or hate crime strategies. The fear is that epistemic claims (‘He said this’, ‘She did that’) in a medium that is historically associated with authenticity may affect people differently from other media (writing, audio, still images). The chapter critically questions the affect and the temporality of deepfakes, and analyses what it is like to be depicted in a deepfaked face-swapped animation. It draws on the interrelation between affect and animation, and outlines the medial and attentional ecologies of digitized bodies. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘faciality’, Bernard Stiegler’s ‘tertiary memory’, and Mark B.N. Hansen’s notions of temporality (‘life’ and ‘artificial time’) are used to theorize about the affect of face-swaps in deepfakes.
The National and Local Dimension of the Italian Civil Protection System: Evolution and Implementation of Disaster Risk Reduction Policies
Authors: Pinto Monia Del , Chmutina Ksenia , Bosher Lee , Palaiologou Garyfalia (Falli)
Published: October 2024

The institution of the Italian National Civil Protection (NCP) in 1992 represented a milestone toward the reorganization of the national emergency management system. Its core innovation was the decentralization of functions. Although innovative in content, with reviewed procedures aiming to facilitate the implementation of local DRR measures, the new system still retains the original characters imprinted in the former set of rules: disproportionally centred on emergency response, and designed by, and for, aiders, with a technocratic perspective. The slow diffusion of the mandatory Municipal Civil Protection Plans (MCPP), and the widespread over-reliance on central aid of local administrations, show that the decentralization is formal but not substantial. MCPP codifies top-down procedures centred on the emergency response, not counterbalanced by efforts in mitigation measures and not effectively communicated to the public. With local plans designed for minor emergencies and ill-communicated to the public, the disaster management relies on external protection, expected from the activation of the NCP System. Plans are generally tested by events and updated ex-post, with the reviewed versions implemented late after the reconstruction. This chapter presents an overview of these emergency norms, their evolution, and the mechanisms reverberating on the DRR policies at the local scale.
Conclusions: The ‘Italian Case’ from a Global Disaster Perspective
Authors: Forino Giuseppe
Published: October 2024

This book aimed at exploring to what extent disaster (and disaster recovery) change the affected places. The book argues that after a disaster the affected places change how people make sense and perceive their place, how politics provides for the needs of the people, how different knowledges interact in managing affected places, as well as how organizations perform their everyday activities. The book provided a journey about these changes occurring in different post-disaster contexts in Italy. Its chapters focused on cases from the North to South of the country, from islands to mainland, and from rural to urban areas, covering a range of post-disaster environments after hazards occurred very recently (from earthquakes in 2016–2017 to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020) or decades ago (the Vesuvius eruption in 1944 or the Irpinia earthquake in 1980). In Part I, contributors shared their views on how case studies can illustrate main changes into society. In this regard, some contributors focused on the different perceptions about risk. As internationally demonstrated, risk and disaster perceptions must be taken into account to communicate and elaborate public actions and interventions (Alcántara-Ayala and Moreno, 2016). However, these perceptions vary greatly across people and communities. In Chapter 1, Dall’Ò explored this variety, demonstrating the existence of different perceptions across local communities, experts and institutions about landslide risk in a mountain area of Northwest Italy. In this area, the struggle is how to build social and political consensus around landslide risk reduction measures. To do this, exploring the way risk is negotiated, understood, and both accepted and contested locally is important to undertake fruitful ways to implement disaster risk reduction.
Theorizing Labour Mobility Power
Authors: Alberti Gabriella , Sacchetto Devi
Published: October 2024

This chapter takes a journey across different literature streams to review the study of labour turnover since the modern factory of the early 20th century, to then move to approaches to turnover and mobility power across labour process theory, comparative political economy, and critical migration scholarship. The authors explore the ambivalent efforts of capital at both facilitating and constraining mobility in the history of ‘labour capture’ and in relation to the movement of capital. The relatively unfree nature of labour in capitalism, showing elements of continuity with pre-capitalist forms of labour bondage and controls, helps in understanding why workers have always engaged with mobility strategies in the forms of desertion, migration, and quitting to counter or diminish exploitation. The theoretical literature surrounding labour migration shows how we need to promote interdisciplinary dialogue to unpack the moments of tensions that mobility engenders for management, and the opportunities it opens for workers to build forms of resistance both individually and collectively. The authors thus elaborate a compositional and transnational approach to labour migration and its autonomy that highlights the historical entrapment of such mobilities and workers’ ongoing attempts at overcoming it, in the labour process and beyond.
Kackerlackas
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Spending time amid the mice and cockroaches prompted reflection on the physical spaces of the prison as sources of stigma. Geographies of exclusion, shame and stain are explored in the context of different times and actors within prison spaces, alongside various means of navigating these.
Arrhythmia
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

What does trouble sound like and is it apparent when it is coming? Does the onset of violence have a sound and, if so, what does this tell us about assessing the climate for safety and survival? Two incidents – on the netting and a cell fire – are used to illustrate when a day has gone bad.
Jingle Jangle
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

The prison soundscape is a conduit of power and symbolic violence. Keys have a particular potency in a place which contains people, and where others are charged with their containment. This is instructive for what it reveals about the power of prison spaces, and the time and space traversing properties of sound.
Polyrhythmia Revisited
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

This chapter sums up the main contention of the book in relation to order and broad participation in the maintenance of its polyrhythmia, arguing that legitimacy is not an explanation for why things stay together, though it may be a reason why things fall apart in concerted disorder. The legacy of the Strangeways riot and the danger of history repeating itself are considered.
Pathways Through the AJS: SEND
Authors: Creutzfeldt Naomi , Kyprianides Arabella , Bradford Ben , Jackson Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Chapter 5, ‘Pathways through the AJS – SEND’, follows a similar structure to Chapter 4; it explores the ideal case help-seeker journeys for people with issues around SEND to understand how access has been compromised and which pathways to justice are difficult to negotiate or blocked. The LGSCO, the PHSO and the SEND Tribunal provide redress for SEND problems. Here too, we will draw on interviews conducted with advice sector professionals, judges, case handlers and users to present how the help-seeker journey unfolds.
Sequencing Like a State: Ciudad Guayana and the Infrastructures of Arrival
Authors: Ekman Peter
Published: October 2024

Between 1961 and 1966, a group of planners and social scientists from the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies built a midsized industrial city from scratch on a ‘resource frontier’ in post-dictatorship Venezuela. Rather than compose an old-style ‘model town’, the Joint Center sought to document the planning process itself, necessarily elapsing over time, and abstract its lessons for application to American cities and their futures. This chapter examines how they fundamentally reconceived urban and regional fabric in terms of mobility, rhythm, process, and flow. It focuses on a high-speed road, the Avenida Guayana, as a piece of region-making infrastructure and an experiment in choreographing the visual sequence of automobility as an information-rich chain of approaches and arrivals. Along transnational circuits of the Center’s own making, the Avenida Guayana offered Cold War urbanists a way to link the felt temporality of everyday life with the presumed political temporality of stepwise state ‘modernization’. The chapter argues that the transnational debates that constellated around this city still animate attempts to theorize the place of planning as a fundamentally future-making proposition.
The Multiple Temporalities of Self-Healing Infrastructure: From the F-15 Fighter to the Smart Urban Microgrid
Authors: Marvin Simon , Rutherford Jonathan
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the emergence of the smart microgrid as a logic of grid security that can seamlessly switch between ‘normal’ and ‘emergency’ configurations in microseconds. It contributes to further understanding of the evolving temporalities of urban infrastructure configurations in three ways. The chapter first locates the ‘always-on’ uninterruptible capacity of the smart microgrid in a series of concepts, ideas, and strategies developed in work on self-healing systems in a variety of contexts. It then traces the development of the smart microgrid in US military and urban contexts, exploring how it has become central to a logic of urban resilience that seeks to mitigate threats and prepare for future turbulence by pursuing the reconfiguration of grids into permanent ‘alert’ mode. Finally, it outlines the differential, asynchronous experience of seamless transition enabled by smart microgrids whereby new forms of socio-spatial selectivity are produced through infrastructure temporalities.
Speed, Suspension, and Stasis: Waiting in the Shadow of Infrastructure
Authors: DiCarlo Jessica
Published: October 2024

Infrastructure engenders temporalities that ripple with different implications across a range of landscapes and lives. This chapter unpacks the lived experiences of waiting, delay, and suspension for people living in the shadow of the construction of the Laos–China Railway. It identifies variations of waiting, suspension, and stasis as modalities of infrastructure time and contrasts them with notions of speed, progress, and promise. This disrupts linear notions of ‘China speed’ and planning or project time. Through an examination of this uneven temporal terrain across the villages and homes affected by construction between 2018 and 2020, the chapter finds that people living in the shadow of infrastructure have a particular temporal orientation that is organized around waiting, the unevenness of which exposes and further entrenches ethnic and class differences. For Lao residents directly affected by the railroad, waiting and uncertainty are coupled with hope, which bleeds into a sort of ‘cruel optimism’ as they anticipate benefits from the object responsible for their dispossession and await a promised future from which they are likely to be excluded.
Disrupting Infrastructure: Space, Speed, and Street Governance
Authors: Thorpe Amelia
Published: October 2024

In many cities, streets are governed for the car. Street infrastructure is allocated and regulated to prioritize high-speed travel for those in cars, typically at the cost of slowness for those outside them (and often, as critics argue, also for those inside the car). Yet the governance of streets is not fixed. This chapter examines a series of efforts by transport activists to reorient the form and regulation of streets in San Francisco. These include DIY (do-it-yourself) infrastructure, in which participants physically alter the form of street infrastructure (installing cycle lanes, crosswalks, and other unsanctioned ‘improvements’), and JAMs (just a minute), in which participants temporarily alter the regulation of street infrastructure (holding up traffic when car drivers illegally take over spaces allocated for cyclists). The chapter examines these as two related but distinct practices: (1) prefiguring, in which hoped-for worlds are physically brought into being; and (2) heckling, in which prevailing norms are comically and chaotically disrupted. The central claim in both is the same: the temporalities of street infrastructure are not inevitable, but the result of choices that could be changed – and that change can be fast.
Troubling Entanglements: Death, Loss and the Dead in and on Television
Authors: Michael-Fox Bethan
Published: October 2024

This chapter outlines several conceptual relationships between the medium of television and death and examines how one televisual text – the French supernatural drama Les Revenants (2012–2015) – functions to depict, explore and trouble a range of sociocultural ideas about death, loss and the dead. Both the series and its medium raise significant questions about the power of the past and the agency of the dead, offering a popular cultural venue through which audiences can encounter ideas that challenge normative assumptions. By unpicking some of these entanglements, it is possible to explore different material-discursive meanings about mortality that popular cultural sources can expound. For example, concerns expressed in the series about climate death raise ethical questions about the role of media in environmental damage and may trouble audiences whose watching of it indirectly imbricates them in that damage. Given cultural texts are always configured in various ways and are then reconfigured by audiences (always plural and always complex) whose own life experiences, hopes and material circumstances inform their engagement, a material-discursive analysis of both medium and text affords a method of unentangling some of the complexities of meaning that circulate in the sociocultural imaginary about death, loss and the dead.
A Deluge of Debt
Authors: Roche Zach
Published: October 2024

Using Montgomerie’s conceptualization of the deluge, this chapter explores the political economy of debt, followed by unpacking debt relief, including what it is and how it operates within liberal market economies. Echoing the work of political economists, I argue that the neoliberal turn of the 1970s led to a rapid growth in debt loads as wages stagnated and assets (particularly housing) inflated to compensate. This has led to such a deluge of debt that we now borrow even to pay rent. Following this, the second part of the chapter charts how the liberalization of lending was accompanied by a reform of debt relief. The common features of these reforms are outlined and hegemonic arguments against debt relief are considered, such as the belief that bankruptcy has lost its stigma. The chapter concludes that stigma has not only survived, but is also thriving, and serves as a significant obstacle to the effectiveness of debt relief. This often manifests in a ‘dirty’ rather than a ‘fresh’ start for the borrower, because debtors are so reluctant to go bankrupt that they delay the process until long after the costs exceed the benefits, a phenomenon captured by the term ‘sweatbox’.
Why is Policy?
Authors: Lewis Steven , Spratt Rebecca
Published: October 2024

This chapter shows how policy mobilities and assemblage theory (PMAT) is concerned with the ability of policy (as assemblage) to coordinate desires, and how it is the forces of desire that make policy mobile. The role of desire is also something that has not been fully explored in existing PM-informed research, and this is one of the key contributions that a conjoined PMAT approach can make to comparative and international education (CIE) research. This is a concern for questioning and problematizing assumptions around why is policy; that is, why do we even have policy, and why do policies occur in the way they do? First, this chapter will detail the concept of Deleuzian desire by addressing the question of how policy works to make certain situations desirable. It will then explore how policy research(ers) might work with an analysis of desire when looking at a policy assemblage, such as Pacific Regional Education Policy (PREP).
(Re)Assembling Comparison
Authors: Lewis Steven , Spratt Rebecca
Published: October 2024

This final chapter reflects on policy mobilities and assemblage theory (PMAT) as an attempt at creating an approach that adopts a different view and purpose towards comparison. It does not presume that you can compare two things for the purpose of determining causality or to understand one thing through the lens of a different other. Rather than reducing uncertainty, PMAT instead sees comparison as an inherently disruptive activity, providing different opportunities for sensing things differently, and thus makes possible new ways of thinking, relating and doing. This is not to say that nothing comes from comparison, but it is more about explicitly reframing the purpose for which comparison is undertaken, and the desire to which comparison is responding.
Drug Policy Constellations
Authors: Stevens Alex
Published: October 2024

This book provides a new, critical realist approach for explaining the outcomes of policy processes. It develops this policy constellations approach from theories on morality and power, using new analysis of recent policies on illicit drugs in the United Kingdom. This shows the various forms of morality and power that are held by policy actors to explain why policies which lack evidence of effectiveness remain in place. Drug policy cases – including the legalisation of cannabis for medical use, the response to the UK’s drug-related death crisis, and the UK’s ten-year drug strategy – are examined using ethnography, analysis of policy documents and debates, elite interviews, and social network analysis. Constellations of actors form around particular ethico-political bases, including compassion, traditionalism, paternalism, progressive social justice and liberty. These are different in the UK and Scottish policy fields, with a greater influence of egalitarianism and less focus on liberty in Scotland. This helps to explain different policies between the nations of the UK. Policies can be changed when members of policy constellations deploy epistemic, affective, economic, media and savvy social power to make change happen. The institutional power, conservative thinking and default paternalism of dominant constellations limit the scale and speed of change. At UK level, this institutional power is held by a long-standing medico-penal constellation which prevents substantial change on drug policy. This discussion takes a critical realist explanatory approach, which shows the ongoing influence of social and cultural structures in generating policy processes and outcomes.