bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Space Matters: The 2010 Winter Olympics and ITS Discontents
Authors: Boykoff Jules
Published: February 2020

The history of the Olympic Games is fraught with racism, class privilege, and questionable leadership from the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In the modern era, the Olympics have generated an increasing scale of dissent. Activists challenging the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver adopted concertedly spatial strategies and tactics. Organizing around three main issues—indigenous rights, economic concerns, and civil liberties—they linked in solidarity with civil libertarians, human rights workers, and bystander publics. This article analyzes these activist actions through the lens of geographical theory, examining how the production of space, scale bending, and the calculated construction of discursive space helped anti-Olympics activists build camaraderie and foment a meaningful challenge to the Games that resonated with the general public. Activists in Vancouver were effective, and before the Olympics dock in London for the 2012 Summer Games, it makes sense to pause and reconsider their methods of dissident citizenship.
Time as a Mode of Bio-politics
Authors: Butola B.S.
Published: February 2020

There is a paradigm shift in human approach to time. Time, which was so far considered as an entity beyond human control is being used as an effective bio-political tool. Time as a social construct (social rhythm) has completely marginalized the time as natural or biological rhythm. The ‘greatness’ of the rulers including the political and intellectual was based on their ability to use time effectively to control, manipulate and maneuver their respective subjects at various times in the past, and introduced their own time schedule in the form of calendars, time tables and clocks etc. In the name of scientific and technological advancements, human have succeeded in getting access to the biological clocks of every organism and using the same for value generation and profit maximization and ultimately creating new colonies.
“The Hard Hit is Still to Come”: An Intifada Imaginary
Authors: Rizk Philip
Published: February 2020

On 11 February 2011, Egyptian protestors from across the country forced their long-time president, Hosni Mubarak, out of power. A revolution does not happen in a vacuum. Thus I want to challenge two widespread notions regarding the events in Egypt. First, toppling ar dictator, does not constitute a revolution until political and economic structures are transformed. Thus, I claim that the Egyptian uprising in early 2011is more akin to the Palestinian Intifada than to a revolution – that is, an uprising against an occupation – though in this case a local one. Second, the demonstrations that started 25 January 2011 did not simply emulate the nearby Tunisian protest movement, but came from attempts, especially by workers in the past few years, to demonstrate against economic exploitation and corruption. By focusing on this earlier history I argue that, in Egypt, a revolutionary uprising is still in the making.
Waiting for War (and other Strategies to Stop Gentrification): The Case of Ras Beirut
Authors: Ross Robert , Jamil Lamis
Published: February 2020

Analyses of gentrification have found a wide variety of causes and strong evidence that it leads to residential displacement. Insofar then that gentrification can be seen as a problem, there is an alarming need to develop appropriate solutions. Most researchers have only tacitly offered possible strategies for limiting gentrification. Moreover, most of these solutions rely on market-based approaches, which seek to manipulate conditions that appear to cause or limit gentrification, rather than aiming at its foundations. Researchers and policy makers have thus failed to address the root cause of the phenomenon—capitalist urbanization. This paper uses the case of gentrification in Beirut to illustrate the dangers of market-based approaches to studying and confronting gentrification. It concludes that we can stop gentrification by removing housing from the ironclad grip of capitalist commodification and exchange.
Towards a Critical Geography of Gambling Spaces: The Australian Experience
Authors: Young Martin
Published: February 2020

I attempt to develop a critical geography of gambling in Australia with particular reference to the proliferation of electronic gaming machines (EGMs), the Australian variant of the Vegas-style ‘slot-machine’, devices that have infiltrated nearly all settlements in the country over the past two decades. As a starting point, I borrow from David Harvey's analysis of the dual logics of power within ‘capitalist imperialism’ to reveal the dialectical relations between the state and capital that have been responsible for the mass-production of local EGM spaces of consumption. I develop the argument that EGM gambling, through its reproduction of bounded spaces, represents a new wave of global capital accumulation where local citizens are reconstituted according to the imperative of global aleatory consumption. The overlay of the postmodern on the logic of capital accumulation amounts to a stunningly efficient form of exploitation where consumption has been reduced to the pure cash nexus. A new set of dependencies has emerged in that the state, social service sector, and gambling industry have become terminally reliant on the most disadvantaged members of society to resolve their internal contradictions. Thus, there exists a continued need for capital and the state to resolve the contradictions between the consumer and citizen, modern and postmodern, leisure and harm, private sector income and public service provision, local markets and global products, individual harm and community benefit. Given this dialectical relationship between state and industry, and the level of dependency its development has engendered, we may expect the continued expansion of EGM gambling spaces as long as capital accumulation is the key goal in the neoliberal economy of Australia.
Indian Companies Engaged in Agricultural “Land Grabbing” in Africa: The Need for Indo-african Solidarity Linkages
Authors: Rowden Rick
Published: February 2020

Indian agricultural companies have been involved in the recent trend in large-scale overseas acquisitions of farmland, criticized as “land grabbing”. India has joined China, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and South Korea among other nations heavily investing in large-scale agricultural projects in Africa and elsewhere. Several factors are driving India's effort to “outsource its food production,” including the Government's growing strategic concerns about ensuring long-term food security and concerns about falling ground water tables. Eager developing country governments have also courted Indian agricultural investors, offering special incentives, including offers to lease massive tracts of arable land on very generous terms at much cheaper rates than land and water in India. The Indian Government has supported this trend through high-level trade diplomacy, foreign aid, and subsidized credit for its agricultural companies investing overseas. Critics call the trend “land grabbing” and claim there have been negative impacts on local peoples, who are often displaced in the process. The public disclosure of lease contracts between the Ethiopian Government and five Indian investors sheds light on the negative ethical, political, human rights and environmental consequences for local people in host countries. New and ongoing advocacy strategies are discussed, including the idea to establish international advocacy linkages between Indian activists fighting for small farmers rights and addressing “land grabbing” actions within India, and small farmers in Africa and elsewhere facing similar problems. One idea is for such linkages to inform Indian citizens who can take action to address the problem of land-grabbing by Indian companies operating overseas. International land rights advocates see a common struggle in which land deals must involve transparent and participatory relations between governments, companies and local democratic communities.
From Labor Geography to Class Geography: Reasserting the Marxist Theory of Class
Authors: Das Raju J.
Published: February 2020

Class analysis has never been hegemonic in Human Geography, or indeed, in any other social science, although it had some visibility in the 1960s and the 1970s. Recently the claim has been made for a resurgence of class analysis, as with in labor geography and new working class studies. I subject this claim to a brief critique. Although labor geography has shed some light on workers’ agency, its underlying view of class is very problematic. I then offer a map of an alternative view of class more rooted in the Marxist tradition. In mapping the class theory in the form of a dialectical synthesis, I briefly elaborate selected conceptual theses on class. These theses together aim at conceptualizing class as a social-material relation of exploitation that exists at multiple levels, and as (tendentially) connected to class unity, consciousness/ identity and struggle. The theses show class to be a spatial and multi-scalar process. The paper also discusses briefly and illustratively why class matters, in particular, as far as the analysis of social oppression based on race and gender, and (uneven) economic development is concerned. It is about time to move from the labor geography type approach, whose dominant and narrowly-defined agency-oriented concerns include social-democratic manipulation of landscapes of capitalism, to a dialectical-materialist class analysis of social-geographical issues, which has more radical ambitions and which will encompass a less voluntarist and more radical labor geography.
Whose Food Footprint? Capitalism, Agriculture and the Environment
Authors: Wallace Robert G. , Kock Richard A.
Published: February 2020

Many of the world's largest agribusinesses and their NGO grantees have launched an aggressive public relations offensive claiming highly capitalized monocropping is the only food regime with the production efficiencies needed to both protect the environment and feed a growing population. We critique the proposition as the latest evolution in declensionist greenwashing. In the context of a new land rush in Africa, where 60% of the world's undeveloped farmland remains, Big Food apologias are shifting from what have long been defensive maneuvers covering for the sector's destructive practices to brazen rationalizations such practices are the sole means of saving the planet. The narrative seeks to justify devolving food security into the hands of a small cartel of agricultural conglomerates pressured by the kind of land loss and environmental damage the industry helped bring about in the first place. There are eminently viable alternatives, however. Communal projects in conservation agriculture embody living refutations of the agribusiness program. With the right state support, these latter efforts, some already feeding millions, are in a demonstrably better position to sustainably feed and employ local populations, support broad food sovereignty, and protect wildlife, health and the environment for generations to come.

Muchos de las compañías de agronegocios más grandes del mundo y sus ONGs han lanzado una agresiva ofensiva de relaciones públicas argumentando que el monocultivo altamente capitalizado es el único régimen alimentario con las eficiencias productivas necesarias para proteger al medio ambiente y alimentar a una creciente población mundial. En este artículo cuestionamos esta idea como el más reciente lavado de cerebro declesionista. En el contexto de una nueva fiebre colonizadora en África, adonde se encuentran el 60% de las tierras cultivables poco desarrolladas, la apología de la “Big Food” está girando de maniobras defensivas de las prácticas destructivas del sector a una racionalización de la idea de que tales prácticas son la única forma de salvar al planeta. Estas narrativas buscan justificar la necesidad de dejar la seguridad alimentaria en manos del pequeño cártel de conglomerados agrícolas, debido a la pérdida de tierras y los problemas medioambientales actuales, que la industria contribuyó a causar originalmente. No obstante, existen, evidentemente, alternativas viables. Proyectos comunales de agricultura conservacionista refutan rotundamente el programa de los agronegocios. Con el adecuado apoyo del estado, estos esfuerzos (algunos de los cuales ya alimentan a millones) están en una posición claramente mejor para alimentar y emplear poblaciones locales en forma sustentable, para garantizar la soberanía alimentaria y para proteger el medio ambiente y la salud por varias generaciones.
The 18Th Annual Critical Geography Conference
Authors: Kenney-Lazar Miles , Lauermann John
Published: February 2020

The 18 th Annual Critical Geography Conference: Constructing a Radical Politics in an Age of Crisis took place in November 4–6, 2011, at Clark University, in Worcester Massachusetts. In this report the conference organizers summarize the results and offer some insights on the challenges and opportunities of mobilizing politically through the critical geography community. We argue that institutionalized actions within the academy, like this conference, are political events. We highlight the need for critical geographers to focus using the intellectual, financial, and institutional resources of the academy to facilitate activism and open new political spaces.
Return to the City of Quartz: Excavating the Future 20 Years On
Authors: Tarr Alexander R.
Published: February 2020

This paper revisits Mike Davis’ seminal City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles twenty years after it was originally published. It argues that the book continues to provide an indispensable model for left, politically engaged forms of urban research. The paper criticizes the apocalyptic readings of City of Quartz that have multiplied over time and instead suggests that Davis be read for his emphasis on an urban dialectic—the constant and ongoing struggles over urban form, politics and culture that shape the geographies of Los Angeles to this day. To this end, the paper looks to the city's more recent history, especially current battles being fought over the future of downtown L.A., to illustrate how we might continue to use Davis’ framework for critical analyses of urban power. At the same time, the paper addresses inadequacies of what has been called the “L.A. School” and its singularly postmodern approach to urban questions that fail to provide coherent understanding of the material realities of modern American cities. It argues that something like an L.A. School can be more properly grounded in the historical-materialist, even socialist, forms of writing and thinking developed in works like City of Quartz and much of the critical urban geography that came in its footsteps. Ultimately the paper is a call for scholarship on Los Angeles to be deeply engaged with both the concrete and abstract dimensions of a place, not for the sake of theory alone, but to further radical praxis in Los Angeles and all American cities.
Grabbing “Green”: Markets, Environmental Governance and the Materialization of Natural Capital
Authors: Corson Catherine , MacDonald Kenneth Iain , Neimark Benjamin
Published: February 2020

Over the past two decades, the incorporation of market logics into environment and conservation policy has led to a reconceptualization of “nature.” Resulting constructs like ecosystem services and biodiversity derivatives, as well as finance mechanisms like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, species banking, and carbon trading, offer new avenues for accumulation and set the context for new enclosures. As these practices have become more apparent, geographers have been at the forefront of interdisciplinary research that has highlighted the effects of “green grabs”—in which “green credentials” are used to justify expropriation of land and resources—in specific locales. While case studies have begun to reveal the social and ecological marginalization associated with green grabs and the implementation of market mechanisms in particular sites, less attention has been paid to the systemic dimensions and “logics” mobilizing these projects. Yet, the emergence of these constructs reflects a larger transformation in international environmental governance—one in which the discourse of global ecology has accommodated an ontology of natural capital, culminating in the production of what is taking shape as “The Green Economy.” The Green Economy is not a natural or coincidental development, but is contingent upon, and coordinated by, actors drawn together around familiar and emergent institutions of environmental governance. Indeed, the terrain for green grabbing is increasingly cultivated through relationships among international environmental policy institutions, organizations, activists, academics, and transnational capitalist and managerial classes.

This special issue of Human Geography brings together papers that draw on a range of theoretical perspectives to investigate the systemic dimensions and logics mobilizing green grabs and the creation of new market mechanisms. In inverting the title – “grabbing green” instead of the more conventional green grabs – we explore how “the environment” is being used instrumentally by various actors to extend the potential for capital accumulation under the auspices of “being green.” Using a diversity of empirical material that spans local to global scales, the papers reveal the formation of the social relations and metrics that markets require to function. They identify the “frictions” that inhibit the production of these social relations, and they link particular cases to the scalar configurations of power that mobilize and give them shape.
Consume, Connect, Conserve: Consumer Spectacle and the Technical Mediation of Neoliberal Conservation's Aesthetic of Redemption and Repair
Authors: Igoe Jim
Published: February 2020

Global green grabs are facilitated by a logic in which environmental damage of economic growth is putatively mitigated by environmental repair elsewhere (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012: 242). A remarkably similar logic informs green consumption, whereby “the very consumerist act buys your redemption from being a consumer” (Žižek 2009).1 Indeed, experiences of consumer redemption are visually linked to environmental repair at a distance. While direct causation between these experiences and grabbing green are practically impossible to discern, their parallels and interactions reflect larger shifts in the political ecology of capitalism. I situate these parallels and interactions in my introduction, before turning in detail to visually mediated relationships between consumers and conservation, based on promises of redemption and repair. I conclude with the relationships of green consumption to realignments of conservation and capitalism, and their implications for environmental awareness and collective political action.
Grabbing ‘Green’: Cynical Reason, Instrumental Ethics and the Production of ‘the Green Economy
Authors: MacDonald Kenneth Iain
Published: February 2020

This paper traces the institutionalization of Environmentalism as a pre-condition for the production of ‘The Green Economy,’ particularly the containment of the oppositional possibilities of an environmentalist politics within the institutional and organizational terrain of a transnational managerial and capitalist class. This is a context in which many environmental organizations – once the site of planning, mobilizing and implementing opposition and resistance to the environmentally destructive practices of corporate industrialism – have become part of a new project of accumulation grounded in enclosure, access and the production and exchange of new environmental commodities. This transformation reflects what Sloterdijk (1988) has termed cynical reason – an enlightened false consciousness; and my concern in the paper is to think through ‘The Green Economy’ and its coincident instrumental ethics as an iteration of cynical reason and an expression of institutionalized power. Specifically, I focus on the development of ‘global environmental governance’ as a statist project that concentrates sanctioning authority and resource allocation in centers of accumulation (e.g., the Convention on Biological Diversity and its funding mechanism the Global Environment Facility) and facilitates the containment of Environmentalism as an oppositional politics through demands that it assume conventional forms of organization, projectification and professionalisation and through facilitating a redefinition and redeployment that shifts environmentalism from a space of hope to an instrumentalist mechanism in rationalist projects of accumulation.
Fixing Carbon, Losing Ground: Payments for Environmental Services and Land (IN)Security in Mexico
Authors: Osborne Tracey
Published: February 2020

Community-based carbon forestry has grown rapidly in Chiapas over the last decade, where small farmers with communal land tenure are increasingly turning to forest activities as a supplement to income. Communal land rights, however, are under siege because of neoliberal shifts in agrarian reform that make the privatization of communal land a legal possibility for the first time in generations. In this paper, I argue that the requirements of Mexico's national Payment for Environmental Services (PES) program for legible boundaries and the long-term storage of carbon appear to be facilitating land certification, the initial step toward privatization. This is being accomplished through a new set of governing technologies and rationalities associated with land security. As national and state level bureaucracies retreat from providing social supports, they simultaneously enable market-driven sustainable development initiatives that require the certification of land. Combined with the logics and simplifications necessary for the commodification of nature, project participants’ ideological commitments to land security have facilitated certification and an internal land market. I argue that certification, by itself, drives local land markets, producing land insecurity without privatization. This, in turn, threatens land access for the most marginalized members of communities. I illustrate the ways in which this phenomenon has played out in La Corona, a community in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico.
Uneven Territorialization and Sea Turtle Conservation in Neoliberal Costa Rica
Authors: Ramírez-Cover Alonso
Published: February 2020

The commodification of nature through environmental conservation always requires appropriate institutional frameworks to be put in place. Such frameworks often entail making market-conservation practices the only viable choice for accessing and using natural resources. State territorialization constitutes a driving process as it delineates the authority required to determine who has access to and control over natural resources, how and when. In a neoliberal context, such processes of territorialization tend to involve and be oriented by several non-state actors encouraged by interests of securing the means for environmental conservation and capital accumulation. However, by referring to the case of a small Costa Rican protected area called Las Baulas National Park; this article argues that conflicts may also arise between the chosen stewards – in this case, tourism-related real estate entrepreneurs and conservationists. Moreover, in contexts determined by contradicting scales of governance such conflicts may render neoliberal territorialization partial and unclear.
Comparative Policy Analysis: Introduction
Authors: Peet Richard
Published: February 2020

Policy regimes are systematic approaches to policy formation made by sets of government or governance institutions that steer capitalist economies in different directions – different enough to matter vitally to billions of people. Comparative policy analysis proposes systematically examining the formation of these public policy regimes across a number of societies. This research and action framework focuses on the rise to hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism, a universal ideology that, most obviously, stresses markets, enterprise, profit, privatization, deregulation, free trade, unrestricted movements of capital and profits, etc., all enforced by the exercise of state power exclusively in the interest of the capitalist class. Neoliberalism has been widely adopted by states as the guiding ideological structure for economic policy making. But neoliberalism encounters resistances from socio-political traditions that, contained by capitalism, reflect a different conception of society and economy. The interaction forms the varieties of “neoliberalisms”.
Deepening Neoliberalism via Austerity and ‘Reform’: The Case of Ireland
Authors: Fraser Alistair , Murphy Enda , Kelly Sinéad
Published: February 2020

The current economic crisis – the ‘great recession’ – raises numerous questions about neoliberal ideas and practice, not the least of which is whether (and if so, how) neoliberalism can survive it. Our paper takes on these issues using the case of Ireland. This is the first proper neoliberal crisis in Ireland. From the early 1990s to 2008, Ireland was held up by many neoliberal champions as a place that gained from deregulation, openness to inward investment, and low corporation tax rates. But the build-up of contradictions in Ireland exploded rapidly in 2008, when its property bubble burst and private banks and government finances collapsed. Rather than examining what caused Ireland's crisis, we look at what has happened between 2008 and 2013. We focus on structural adjustments regarding the property, finance, and labour markets and then on the government's austerity programme as a whole. In addition to demonstrating how these adjustments have been an attack on workers and ordinary citizens, we identify some particularly striking elements, which we use to argue that a new phase of disturbance and restructuring is deepening and extending neoliberalism's influence in Ireland.
Contradictory Policies of Neoliberalizing India
Authors: Ahmed Waquar , Chatterjee Ipsita
Published: February 2020

This paper examines the tensions and contradictions within the Indian state in its production of socio-economic policies. Pressure of global governance institutions, multinational corporations, and neoliberal states of the global North that back such corporations, have been instrumental in the production of -friendly economic policy in India. Additionally, in representing the interest of the national bourgeois, the Indian state has been receptive to ideas that favor marketization of the economy. However, public pressure, where the poor constitute the majority of the Indian population, has compelled the Indian state to also strengthen welfare. In examining this contradiction of the simultaneous production of neoliberal and welfare policy, we analyze the case of the public distribution system (which is being marketized) on the one hand, and the employment guarantee scheme (that demonstrates strengthening of welfare) on the other.
Resisting Austerity: The Case of Greece”s Powerworkers and Steelworkers
Authors: Gialis S.E. , Herod A.
Published: February 2020

This paper studies workers’ agency in the context of government austerity measures in contemporary, crisis-hit Greece. It focuses upon the spatial aspects of two cases of worker mobilisation. The first of these involves powerworkers who supported widespread popular protests against a new property tax designed to raise government revenues. Importantly, the government had sought to collect this tax by adding it to people's electricity bills, a novel method which generated massive opposition. The second concerns strike activity engaged in by steelworkers employed at the Greek Steelworks SA in Aspropyrgos, in the capital region of Attica. These workers were responding to the company's taking advantage of new laws designed to increase flexibility in labour markets by allowing employers to fire more people than they otherwise would have been allowed to do. The paper analyses the different tactics employed in both of these quite different efforts to challenge Greek austerity measures. In analysing these different tactics we explore the role of in-place and trans-local networks of solidarity in response to government policy. A deeper understanding of such factors, we would suggest, may contribute to strengthening the prospects of workers’ struggle in places and spaces where painful capital devaluation diminishes workers’ rights and dismantles social and employment protections.
Chronic Food Insecurity in Kenya's Asal Areas: Naturalizing Uneven Development Through Depeasantization and Deproletarianization
Authors: Shanguhyia Naomi , McCusker Brent
Published: February 2020

Food security and insecurity is often conceptualized in narrow, economistic or technicist terms that simply postulate an inefficiency in production or exchange as the root cause of food security. More elaborate notions put issues such as “access” at the center of their theoretical frameworks. In this paper, we examine food insecurity as a state of being that exists when various modes of production disarticulate. This disarticulation is examined within the governance process to determine how policy affects or inhibits change in the mode of production in rural Kenya. This paper contributes to the literature on depeasantization by explicating the role of the state in social and economic transformation. It is argued here that “food security” has been a convenient excuse to first depeasantize and then deproletarianize large swaths of people.
Toward Radical Risk Reduction and Revolutionary Adaptation: Climate Disasters, Agriculture, and Capitalist Modernity
Authors: Schuhrke Jeff
Published: February 2020

Disasters happen with increasing frequency, resulting in greater devastation, due to global warming. This happens all over the world, particularly in the Global South. Risk reduction and adaptation to climate change are vital strategies for ensuring safety, wellbeing, and perhaps survival, for millions of people. Decades of studies in the social sciences have led to the realization that disasters are more a product of structural inequality, and socially constructed vulnerability, than they are purely “natural” hazards. This is particularly evident when it comes to the age-old disaster of famine. While this suggests that risk reduction and adaptation strategies must be fused with radical politics, the United Nations’ joint policy concept of disaster risk reduction/climate change adaptation nevertheless seems firmly tied to the hegemonic world order of capitalist modernity. An alternative solution to climate change disasters would be a more radical, revolutionary set of projects, that I term radical risk reduction and revolutionary adaptation.
The Genealogy of Contemporary Nature/Forest Conservation
Authors: Khan Mohammad Tanzimudin , Lynch Tony
Published: February 2020

We seek to understand the contemporary adaptive co-management framework of natural/forest resource conservation. To do this we trace the genealogy of adaptive co-management and its call for the “democratic participation” of “all stakeholders”. We show how this inserted commercial agents as stakeholders, thus providing contemporary neoliberal accumulation regimes with a problem-solving framework for natural/forest conservation shaped by, and amenable to, their characteristic managerial discourse of “flexibility”, “innovation”, “voluntary self-regulation”, “incentivization”, “partnership”, “network(ing)”, “social learning” and “local knowledge”.
Contrapuntal Memories? Remembering the Holocaust in a Post-9/11 World
Authors: Micieli-Voutsinas Jacque
Published: February 2020

This essay traces the post-9/11 mapping of Holocaust memory throughout the United States as it converges with the U.S.-led war on terror and the memorialization of September 11th at the World Trade Center. For instance, comments made by George W. Bush during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns equated Barack Obama's advocacy for communications between the U.S. and former Iranian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the appeasement of Hitler at the onset of WWII. For scholars of memory, the (geo)political importance of such exchanges should not be taken lightly or go unnoticed. Building upon geographies of memory, as well as recent texts within Memory Studies, this essay theorizes the post-9/11 spatial diffusion of Holocaust memory as it is evoked and disseminated in relation to, and within, other landscapes of memory in order to shape the (geo)political present.
Enforcing Traditional Cultural Property Protections
Authors: Benson Melinda Harm
Published: February 2020

There are many challenges associated with enforcing the protections afforded Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs) under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). This paper examines how the rules and procedures that animate the law can create a striking disconnect between what the law appears to provide and what it actually delivers. After providing some brief background regarding the literature of legal geography and the protections offered to TCPs, this paper outlines some basic information regarding how administrative law polices both the entry to and operation of the formal legal space known as the federal judicial system through various jurisdictional requirements. It also addresses how mitigation requirements under Section 106 of the NHPA have been undermined as a result of legal processes and interpretive case law. As a relevant example, it uses the current controversy over proposed uranium mining on New Mexico's Mount Taylor. Deemed eligible for federal designation as a TCP in 2008, Mt. Taylor provides a case study in the challenges associated with protecting sacred lands within the processes and frameworks of the current legal system. While the NHPA gives the appearance of honoring Indigenous ontologies, its materialization often results in little more than bureaucratic procedures giving only the appearance of adequate treatment by limiting judicial enforcement.
Toward a (New) Materialist Politics of Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPS), OR Encountering the Rubber-Bands of Space-Time and Capacities of Place
Authors: Curti Giorgio Hadi , Moreno Christopher M.
Published: February 2020

In this paper, we explore how an injection of new materialist understandings and insights related to culture, bodies and assemblages offer creative— and much needed— modes of engagement with Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs) as “capacities of place.” We do this by intersecting the formal purpose and intent of TCPs with some of the perspectives and practices of the different Indigenous and cultural communities with whom we have worked over the years. Ultimately, our goal with this paper is to demonstrate how a focus on what TCPs do inclusive of Indigenous worldviews and parallel new materialist insights hold significant political implications and empowering possibilities for different communities by expanding understandings of the ways tangibility and integrity relate to TCPs through embodied practices of culture-place assemblages and the rubber-bands of space-time.
Gender, Nature and the City
Authors: Poli Corrado
Published: February 2020

An ecological and eco-feminist critique may promote an innovative environmentalist urban policy. A new relation between humanity and nature implies a different aesthetic and architecture of the city. In the past, in control of the public sphere, men built their cities according to their attitudes and values. Traditional (masculine) behavior produced an efficiency based in dominating a resilient nature. This approach is no longer viable given the environmental crisis. Women are the privileged subjects of radical change, assuming a leadership role in the environmentalist movement and proposing cities envisaged according to a new way of thinking and feeling that accords with a reconsidered relationship between humanity and nature.
“Blue is the New Green”: Representational Space and the Effective Co-Optation of Environmental Justice Discourses in Pennsylvania's Unconventional Natural Gas Drilling
Authors: Cruger Katherine M. , Finewood Michael H.
Published: February 2020

This paper points to the importance of studying the intersection of public policy debates, spatial practice, and land use by applying Henri Lefebvre's spatial trialectic in a critique of the ongoing debate over hydraulic fracturing in western Pennsylvania. In this case study, the oil and gas industry appropriates established environmental justice discourses to assert that (1) fracking is clean and environmentally responsible, (2) it will help sustain local families and communities for many generations to come, and (3) fracking locally results in scalar, global benefit. Furthermore, the industry employs ad-hominum attacks and debunking strategies to frame anti-fracking activists as impractical alarmists. Through this rhetorical representation of space, the industry defines the process and associated values of fracking as desirable, inevitable, and most importantly, a sustainable process with just outcomes. Ultimately, the material reality of how the risks and benefits are distributed across the local, national, and global landscape through spatial practice is masked. Focusing exclusively on discourse ignores the real material conditions that give rise to and result from that discourse. Therefore, we argue Lefebvre's (1991) trialectic offers a way to address the interplay between representations and discourses of space and material reality.
Migrant Workers in Ontario's Tobacco Belt: An Examination of Workplace Dynamics
Authors: Bridi Robert Michael
Published: February 2020

Recent critiques by scholars conducting research on the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program and labour geographers assert that there has been a lack of emphasis in the academic literature on the relevance of the formal workplace for developing an understanding of the social relations between capital and labour. In this article, I address these critiques through an empirical examination of workplace dynamics on two small-scale tobacco farms in Delhi, Ontario, Canada. My analysis draws upon original empirical evidence from interviews with three Mexican and nine Jamaican workers, two union representatives, and two farm owners. I argue that the farm is not simply a site for producing tobacco with economic efficiency, but an arena of struggle in which workers confront their employers, and a place of critical contests in the politics of production.
Ethical Trade and Public Enterprise: Controlling Consumption in Ontario's Liquor Market
Authors: Fridell Gavin
Published: February 2020

This article examines the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) as a form of ethical trade. Its unique public mandate, rooted in “con trolling consumption” and semi-monopoly, has been central to its relative success as well as its general disregard by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and ethical trade advocates, who focus on the actions of private corporations and individual consumers. Exploring the political significance of this oversight, its gaps and slippages, this article argues that the LCBO would do very well by standard CSR metrics, while also transcending them in several ways. The LCBO contributes billions of dollars to the public purse, acts as a form of “hidden developmental state,” negotiates prices with suppliers on the basis of “fair and equitable treatment,” and employs a unionized workforce with comparatively strong labour conditions. Recognizing this offers both a challenge to the dominant understandings of CSR, and the fantasies of a “harmonious market society,” while pointing to a wider perspective on a more transformative political vision of ethical trade.
‘Payments for Ecosystem Services’ and Property: The Expansion of Exclusionary Land Management Practices in Costa Rica
Authors: Matulis Brett Sylvester
Published: February 2020

The practice of making “payments for ecosystem services” (PES) is about the formation of new social relations between land managers and the human beneficiaries of functioning ecological systems. More specifically, it is about establishing economic relations that (theoretically) transfer financial resources from “users” of services to “producers” who institute prescribed land management practices. Interpreted as a form of “neoliberal conservation”, this approach to environmental governance can be seen as a driving force in the commodification, marketization, and financialization of nature. Hinging on “clearly defined and enforced” property rights, it can also be seen as a factor in the expansion of individualized private ownership. Troubled by this renewed prospect of privatization, critical scholars have done well to challenge the new enclosures of land and resources. But what about when PES operates in areas where private ownership rights are robust and widespread? Are we to believe that the tendency towards privatization poses no threat because those areas are already “lost” to private ownership? This paper considers how the social relationships that constitute property are shifting under the prescribed management practices of PES. I present evidence from Costa Rica's national PES program to suggest that, even on lands that are ostensibly already privately owned, these new practices are resulting in an expansion of exclusionary management. The objective is to demonstrate some of the reasons why financialized approaches to conservation are a problem in “already neoliberal” economies and to offer some conceptual tools for challenging the uncritical assumption that PES is harmless in areas where private ownership is already well established.
The Race to Death: The Production of Ritual Expertise in Brighton for Matter Out of Place
Authors: Jassal Lakhbir K.
Published: February 2020

This paper brings together an instance where Indian cultural difference is recognised, and accommodated, by the state or its agents, albeit in very different circumstances. The distinctiveness of these circumstances reveals a great deal about the minority status of Indians in British society, historically, and in contemporary times. This paper explores ritual expertise as a key element in transactions of necropower and draws on case studies in Brighton to explore the accumulation of culturally specific knowledge and the right to exercise this knowledge.
Concrete Jungle: The Planetary Urbanization of the Ecuadorian Amazon
Authors: Wilson Japhy , Bayón Manuel
Published: February 2020

This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of a post-neoliberal political project under conditions of planetary urbanization. We conceptualize planetary urbanization in terms of a tendency towards the real subsumption of space to capital on a global scale, through which capital is empowered as an abstract form of domination. We then relate this tendency to the ideology of ‘systemic competitiveness’ that has dominated the post-neoliberal project in Latin America, arguing that it threatens to strengthen the power of capital-as-subject. This relationship is illustrated by the Initiative for the Regional Infra-structural Integration of South America (IIRSA), and its incorporation into the post-neoliberal experiment currently underway in Ecuador. We focus on a series of IIRSA-related projects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, through which the real subsumption of space is disaggregated into three intertwined dimensions: territory, nature, and everyday life. In each case, we show how the ideological structure of post-neoliberalism unwittingly promotes the real subsumption of space and the empowerment of capital. However, the uneven dynamics of planetary urbanization imply that these projects are only succeeding in reproducing existing conditions of formal subsumption on an extended scale. The paper thus develops a materialist understanding of planetary urbanization in order to explain the failure of a political project to achieve its unintended results.
Mutual AID, Environmental Policy, and the Regulation of Faroese Pilot Whaling
Authors: Fielding Russell , Davis John E. , Singleton Benedict E.
Published: February 2020

This paper examines the evolution of unwritten regulations and formal government policies in the control of the Faroese pilot whale drive, or grindadráp. This form of whaling has occurred in the Faroe Islands since at least the sixteenth century, probably much longer. Informed by theories of anarchist geography, we discuss specific policies, both formal and informal, regulating when and where whales may be pursued, actions of whalers in boats and onshore, equipment permitted for use, and the distribution of meat and blubber from the hunt that have developed over the centuries in response to internal or external pressures and calls for change. Our discussion gives special attention to a recent change in the regulation of grin-dadráp, namely the requirement, beginning in 2015, that whalers who participate in the killing process—as distinct from other aspects of whaling—be certified as having attended a training course on the subject. We conclude with a discussion of lessons learned through a reading of anarchist geographies as applied to the topic at hand.
Value and Nature: From Value Theory to the Fate of the Earth
Authors: Walker Richard
Published: February 2020

Value is central to Marx's theory of capitalism, but it is a concept more honored in the breach than taken to heart. What value is there in value theory? How does it illuminate the problems for which critics of capitalism seek answers? Value theory did different things for Smith, Ricardo, and Proudhon, let alone Marx, and it has to evolve to serve contemporary purposes. One of these is making it speak to the central role of natural resources in production; another is to integrate nature with complex labor; yet another is to delineate all forms of exploitation in search of capitalist profit; and, finally, it must help us unmask the destruction of the earth through unlimited accumulation of capital.