Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Taking the lead from social science moves to frame places as “open-ended, mobile, networked, and actor-centred geographic becoming[s]” (M Jones, 2009, “Phase space” Progress in Human Geography 33, page 5), this paper introduces how the ‘surfed wave’ can be understood as a relational place. Drawing on commentaries from surfers on the practice of wave riding, the paper will show that the surfed wave can be usefully understood in two ways: as an ‘assemblage’ (see Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity 2006, Continuum Books, London 2006), and as a ‘convergence’ (see J Anderson, 2009, “Transient convergence and relational sensibility” Emotion, Space and Society 2 120–127). Whilst the notion of assemblage suggests that surfers, boards, and waves are ‘connected’ together to form one coherent unit for the lifetime of the ride the notion of convergence suggests that the surfed wave becomes a place whose constituent parts are not simply connected together; rather, their thresholds are blurred into a converged entity/process. Theorising from the sea in this way is an important move. It demonstrates how the relational turn can encourage us not only to consider traditional places in new ways but also to consider new (watery) ‘coming togethers’ as ‘places’. I argue that these theorisations from the sea offer new perspectives on more traditional (terrestrial) places and human relationships with them.

‘Seafood consumption advisories’ that tell childbearing women which fish they should and should not eat are the dominant public health response to the accumulation, in otherwise healthful fish, of environmental pollutants that are harmful to developing fetuses. These advisories are not merely a rational response to an environmental health dilemma but, rather, a form of gendered biopolitics of responsibility for population security. First, because advisories encourage individuals to self-manage risk by altering their lifestyles, they are exemplary of contemporary neoliberal public health approaches that make individuals responsible not only for their own well-being but also for the well-being of the population. Second, advisories also combine elements of reproductive politics, including the medicalization of pregnancy, the production of fetal personhood, and enduring notions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers. As such, advisories are a gendered technology of biopolitics that intensifies the self-disciplining of women as mothers of potential, future children. In making these arguments, the paper draws from Foucault's lectures and from extensive feminist literature on reproduction and mothering to develop an understanding of biopolitics as an apparatus of power that integrally links liberal regulation and individualized discipline, and does so in ways that are both reflective and productive of gendered relations.

Since the 1980s rural Colombia has been torn asunder by the deadly conflation of political violence and the cocaine boom, fueling the displacement of four million campesinos. The northwest frontier region surrounding the Gulf of Urabá has been an unruly epicenter for this mass of dispossessed humanity, mainly displaced by paramilitaries. As an outgrowth of a complex alliance between narcos (drug traffickers) and agrarian elites, paramilitary groups simultaneously act as drug-trafficking private militias and counterinsurgent battalions, while using land appropriation and agribusiness as favored conduits for money laundering and illicit profit. Drawing on investigative ethnographic fieldwork into these dynamics in Urabá, this paper shows how state formation in Urabá is produced through the convergence of narco-paramilitary strategies, counterinsurgency, and government reforms aimed at territorial restructuring through decentralization. Relying on the conceptual cues offered by Lefebvre and Gramsci on state, space, and hegemony, I argue that Urabá's narco-driven economies of violence are not somehow anathema to projects of modern liberal statehood—usually associated with tropes of ‘institution building’ and ‘good governance’—but deeply tied to initiatives aimed at making spaces governable, expanding global trade, and attracting capital.

This paper constitutes a speculative bioethical intervention into the challenge of developing cultures of care and assembling enriched environments for genetically altered mice in laboratory environments. The principles of the 3Rs—to reduce, replace, and refine the use of laboratory animals—established in the late 1950s, are still the institutional and international starting point for humane animal experimentation. However, the proliferating diversity and numbers of genetically altered animals used in biomedical research are a challenge to the application of these universal principles. The different capacities of the many mice brought into being through scientific practices constitute biomedical experimentation as a multiple, challenging the identification of universal refinements. In this paper I argue that these capacities constitute a multitude: their indefinite number and irreducible multiplicity are both a threat to these principles and an opening to the possibility of new bioethical formulations. Drawing on ethnographic research with scientists and policy makers involved in animal welfare and biomedical research, this paper explores emerging strategies for reassembling animal welfare in the face of the multitude and the multiple. By using insights from Žižek, Haraway, and Hinchliffe, it aims to demonstrate the value of a speculative ethics, which, instead of seeking new universal principles to protect animals from harm, starts from the inevitable and particular entanglements of animal and human suffering, as a way of connecting affective capacities across space and time. This is illustrated through the experimental conjunctures of barbering mice. In conclusion, I suggest that such speculative bioethical formulations may contribute to renarrating modes of ethical engagement when sociotechnical assemblages are complex, objects and ontological forms are multiple and mutable, data are simultaneously abundant and inadequate, and formal ethical review procedures are incapable of either containing controversy or enabling critique.

This paper is concerned with the material and social transformation of a German ambulance car into a Ghanaian minibus—called tro-tros in Ghana. We track the journey of a Mercedes Benz 310 from Winnenden in Germany to Kumasi in Ghana and examine the transformation of Rettungswagen 7/83–2 to tro-tro Dr. JESUS. Tracing the car's geobiography enables us to explore a specific material relation between Europe and West Africa. Considering debates on technology transfer and transformation, we argue for a nuanced understanding of ‘fluid technologies’ that includes opportunities but also emphasises the dangers implicated in the transfer and transformation of objects. Furthermore, by locating the reused bus within international trade in discarded objects, we introduce the notion of ‘provincialising waste’ to underline changing uses and values of objects. In this paper we suggest that careful attention needs to be paid to the ambivalent geobiographies of secondhand objects.

Depictions of Lebanon in international politics have historically represented it as a ‘weak state’ whose domestic sovereignty is eroded by nonstate actors viewed as anomalies to extirpate. The War on Terror has been no exception. Since at least 2002 international efforts have aimed at reinforcing Lebanon's ‘weak’ domestic sovereignty against ‘extremist elements’. These approaches adopt a classic understanding of sovereignty as the achievable, exclusive, and measurable control by a state over a bounded territory. Such an understanding is misleading and even obstructive of peace for Lebanon. The accepted view of Lebanon as a ‘weak state’ suffering from chronic conflict and the myth of its capital Beirut as cyclically destroyed and reconstructed actually normalise imaginative geographies that ultimately impact on international action. Through the concept of ‘hybrid sovereignties’, this article goes beyond traditional views of legitimate state power and irregular nonstate ‘dissidence’ as dwelling in distinct legitimacy categories. Engaging theoretically with epistemologies of hybridity, and relying empirically on official foreign policy statements, archive material, and interviews conducted in Beirut between 2005 and 2010, the article considers Lebanese sovereignty as resulting from complex hybridisations between state and nonstate actors. Firstly, I review scholarly approaches to sovereignty and engage with the notion of hybridity to set a basis for discussing Lebanon's sovereignty beyond the ‘weak state’ discourse. Secondly, I show that ‘weak state’ approaches to Lebanon fail to account for differential views of sovereignty and weakness from inside the Lebanese political system. Thirdly, I use the notion of hybrid sovereignties to interpret political violence during two moments of intrastate conflict: the early phases of the civil war in 1975–76, and the May 2008 clashes in Beirut. In both moments, distinctions between accepted binaries, such as state/nonstate, legitimate/illegitimate, security/insecurity, and domestic/foreign, blurred. Both state actors and nonstate militias performed sovereignty practices increasingly resembling each other, and coconstituting each other through Beirut's physical environment. Exposing Lebanon's hybrid sovereignties demystifies the self-fulfilling prophecy of the ‘weak state’ rhetoric and its deadly consequences for Lebanon.

This paper is in two parts. In the first half I consider the challenge posed by the recent performative turn in critical cartography to the urban historical geographer. If maps come into being only within the diverse moments of their use, then how can we compensate for the absence of such events within the historical archive? Building on Tim Ingold's work, I suggest that one approach is to make an analogy between printed maps and musical scores, as decentred technologies whose instructions for performance are always mediated by environmental contingencies and the historical particularities of their performers. Returning a map to its original setting and ‘listening’ to the rhythms inscribed within it might enable us to uncover the specific spatial practices it once sought to produce. I then consolidate this approach via a study of Harry Beck's 1933 map of the London Underground. By locating it within the rhythmic dynamics of interwar London, I uncover the Tube Map's covert cybernetic impulse; in gesturing towards its own redundancy, it proffered a mode of cartographic practice that might impel the user toward an environmental docility that accorded with the dynamics of monopoly capitalism. Beck's map thus stands revealed as a watershed technology within attempts to orchestrate 20th-century urban life.

Taking the bare bodies that starred in the recent Air New Zealand in-flight safety demonstration and advertising campaign as its starting point, this paper stages an encounter between bareness and security in order to think about how affective atmospheres might be engineered and manipulated within spaces of aeromobility. From a representational perspective the bare bodies appeal to a particular economy of truth through the unveiling of the corporation, parodying the bareness that is a central technique associated with airport securitisation. But the bareness in the in-flight safety demonstration generates a different kind of intimacy between the corporation and the passenger that facilitates the emergence of affective atmospheres which hinge around fun and lightness. In light of theorisations that invoke the corporation as a model of the control society we finish by drawing out some of the tensions that hinge around figures of veiling and unveiling to demonstrate how affect necessarily exceeds its capture and engineering.

After Russia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2004 the domestic debate over climate science cooled and the official discourse on the causes of climate change came somewhat closer to international consensus. This paper seeks to examine how these changes in Russian policy makers' publicly communicated understandings of climate science have been brought about by analyzing the reception of international scientific assessments of climate change in Russian domestic debate. The paper takes as its analytical point of departure the literature on epistemic communities, which suggests that scientists involved in assessment processes may act as agents of diffusion of international expert consensus in their ‘home’ states. The analytical heart of the paper is a case-study analysis based on interviews with Russian scientists who have participated in international climate assessment exercises. Findings indicate that Russian participants in the International Panel on Climate Change and the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment did not play a role as ‘informational entrepreneurs’ in deliberative processes leading to key decision-making moments, although they fulfilled other important functions at the national level. The paper concludes by arguing that stronger Russian adherence to international expert consensus was part of a ‘package deal’ of already well-established international-level political and ideational positions that Russia adopted after deciding to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Consequently, conceptualizations of expert knowledge diffusion need to account for a temporal dimension, as the mechanisms of diffusion and the nature of reception of international expert knowledge may vary according to whether the country in question has been at the vanguard of a policy issue (‘policy leader’) or somewhat more of a laggard (‘policy follower’).

This paper explores the interdisciplinary terrain of ‘queer ecology’ by using the example of an urban cemetery in North London as an empirical and conceptual starting point. Though the term ‘queer ecology’ has cropped up a few times it has yet to be addressed directly in order to consider how the seemingly disparate fields of queer theory and urban ecology might benefit from closer interaction. It will be suggested that the theoretical synthesis represented by queer ecology serves to expand the conceptual and material scope of both fields: queer theory is revealed to have only a partially developed engagement with urban nature whilst critical strands of urban ecology such as urban political ecology have yet to connect in a systematic way with queer theory, posthumanism, or new conceptions of complexity emerging from within the science of ecology itself. It is concluded that queer ecology may enrich our understanding of both urban materiality and the role of metaphors in urban theory. In particular, the idea of queer ecology illuminates the possibility for site-specific ‘heterotopic alliances’ in the contemporary city.