Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper ‘missing people’ gain an unstable presence through their (restaged) testimonies recounting individual occupations of material urban public space during the lived practice of absence. We explore ‘missing experience’ with reference to homeless geographies, and as constituted by paradoxical spatialities in which people are both absent and present. We seek to understand such urban geographies of absence through diverse voices of missing people, who discuss their embodiment of unusual rhythmic occupations of the city. We conclude by considering how a new politics of missing people might take account of such voices in ways to think further about rights-to-be-absent in the city.

This paper situates recent events in the US–Mexico borderlands in relation to modalities of power used in the expansion of US imperial hegemony. Specifically, I link acts of legal suspension to expedite construction of border barriers on the US southern border with genealogies of imperial dispossession and racial violence to build an argument about imperialism as a way of life in the US. In so doing, my goal is to support ongoing efforts to forge coalitions better able to contest legal suspension as a predominant technique of government.

This paper examines how discrepant governmental rationalities and processes produce friction and shifting experiences of subjectification as transmigrants cross borders. Using the experiences of mainland Chinese marriage migrants in Singapore as an example, the paper explores the notion of ‘transgovernmental friction’ and how it reinforces state boundaries, reshapes body politics, and animates waiting as an active practice that transforms migrant subjectivities. Locating the workings of governmentality, mobility, and space in the domain of transnational marriage and family, the paper brings to light the friction and crevices of governmental processes across borders and the embodied politics of im/mobility.

This paper expands on recent attempts to destabilise the static, bordered, and linear framings that typify human geographical studies of place, territory, and time. In a world conceptualised as open, immanent, and ever-becoming, scholars have turned away from notions of fixity towards fluidity and flow, and, in so doing, have developed networked, ‘flat’ ontologies. Recent attempts have gone further, challenging the horizontalism inherent in such approaches by opening up a vertical world of volume. In this paper we contend that such approaches are still somewhat lacking. The vertical element of volume is all too often abstract and dematerialised; the emphasis on materiality that is typically used to rectify this excess of abstraction tends to reproduce a sense of matter as fixed and grounded; and the temporality that is employed to reintroduce ‘motion’ to matter has the unintended effect of signalling a periodised sense of time that minimises the chaotic underpinnings and experiences of place. We argue that the ocean is an ideal spatial foundation for addressing these challenges since it is indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual reformation, and that a ‘wet ontology’ can reinvigorate, redirect, and reshape debates that are all too often restricted by terrestrial limits.

This paper examines the production of local and remote knowledge about the flows of a large Italian lake (Lake Como) on the basis of a dual ethnographic engagement with lake fishermen and computer modellers. The focus is the relationship between these two ways of knowing a lake, in relation to the lake itself and the places where the knowledge is produced. I first argue that despite being seemingly located at different edges of the environmental knowledge spectrum—the local and the remote and computer-mediated—the fishermen's and scientists' knowledges emerge from similar forms of skilled engagement in their respective environments. In other words, knowledge develops in place and fisherman and scientist do not know the same place in different ways; rather they know different places in similar ways. This raises the question of what kind of places these environmental modelling labs and offices are, and how they relate to the places they talk about, which are located elsewhere. I propose here the use of Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia to model this complex articulation of the ‘here’ and ‘there’ in environmental modelling.

Fish consumption advisories (FCAs), or voluntary state recommendations for foraging and consuming fish from compromised waters, place the onus of negotiating contaminated environments squarely upon individuals who consume local fish. As a result, peoples who eat fish caught from local waters for reasons of food insecurity, cultural practice, or religious practice are ignored, producing environmental inequalities. This paper examines the political history of FCAs in a specific geographical context, New York State, in order to assess the explicit environmental governance frameworks through which these inequalities are generated. It demonstrates that FCA policy is principally an outgrowth of a conservation movement geared towards support for recreational anglers and not those who fish for subsistence. However, conservationism is not the only governance framework at work, as this paper also demonstrates that commercialized processes of neoliberal environmental governance substantially mediate scientific data that inform FCA recommendations. In this way this study illustrates how multiple frameworks—conservationist, neoliberal, or other—can, and often do, intertwine to construct environmental policies.

For over two decades, geographers concerned with undoing what Judith Butler has referred to as ‘the conceit of anthropocentrism’ have brought animals in from the margins of thought. Geography's contributions to animal studies have been diverse, but a key consideration has been a retreat from thinking with animals toward a plural, more-than-human analysis. A recent privileging of ‘spaces of encounter’ with nonhuman others challenges the significance of animals altogether, equating them to other nonhuman entities—along with nonliving processes, the movement of molecules, viruses, forces, and affects that circulate and connect in ‘events’ and ‘sites’—on the terrain of ethical and political conflict. There is much at stake here in terms of how geographical methods are carried out and how response, analysis, and political action proceed. In what follows, I reflect on field notes from an ethnographic encounter with lobster experimentation in a neuroscience laboratory to contrast thinking ‘with animals' and ‘with encounters’. I assess the implications of each for transforming who and what we consider in ethical and political terms. I find that while the encounter moves beyond the limitations of more traditionally defined animal studies, a corresponding focus on the present loses sight of wider temporal and spatial relations—including the political economies—that are relevant to the elements in any encounter. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Astrid Schrader, I argue for a geography of the encounter that ‘expands the present’ rather than residing in it, with consequences for the ‘new materialism’ movement. In the case of the lobster experiment, this leads me to consider how scientific practices with animals are also immediately a part of ongoing trends in the US that ‘militarize’ biological life. In conclusion, I argue that concern for animals in the laboratory ought to expand to include concern for past and future political conditions of life, death, and the production of knowledge.

In this paper I examine the practices of encountering of Occupy London, and argue that they provide a means for rethinking the production of territoriality. Specifically, I argue that boundary making not only involves hierarchical relations of power-over but also the articulation of bottom-up power-to. I first examine literature on boundary making, and propose encountering as a more appropriate vocabulary to represent this practice in the context of urban activism. I then conceptualise encountering as the articulation of power-to, a moment in the production of territoriality from below, bringing together Holloway's dialectical understanding of power and Lefebvre's writings on territorial autogestion and urban encounters. In the remainder of the paper I examine practices of encountering in Occupy London on the basis of militant research with the movement that combined ethnography, interviews, and archive analysis. The paper focuses on the spaces of the General Assembly and the protest camp, exploring how encounters were productive of new social relations and highlighting key tensions. In particular I note the inevitable ephemerality of activist encounters and tensions over institutionalising encounters, and I end by calling for greater attention to the power relations involved, warning against assumptions that encounters of power-to necessarily lead to positive outcomes.

This paper examines, at the global scale, the biopolitical strategy of racism that Foucault articulated in the context of 19th-century Europe. Through my historical analysis both of the emergent notion of race and of biometric production of racial knowledge during Japanese colonialism, I endeavour to delineate a circulation of a political rationality of modern racism, which became globally generalised and constitutive of the formation of a non-Western nation-state. I argue that this emergence of global biopolitics, however, should not simply be reduced to a unitary operation but needs to be understood as the process of multiplication that reveals both the continuity and the contingency of the biopolitical strategy of racism in relation to particular spatiotemporal configurations. Furthermore, through an archaeological reading of Foucault on modern racism, I will suggest that Foucault's Society Must be Defended, albeit arguably underdeveloped in its geographical scope of analysis, can shed light on the operation of biopolitics and modern racism beyond the history of Europe.

It has been hypothesized that the celebrated geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus was a decisive influence on several concepts that are characteristic of the Annales School, the historical French school of the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, such as longue durée, material history, space-movement, and geohistory. Yet no systematic research exists on the topic. In this paper, on the basis of textual analysis and new archival materials recently published in France, I argue that Reclus's influence particularly affected the Annales's founder Lucien Febvre, and that it springs from not only Febvre's scholarly interest in Reclus, but also his early engagement in socialist milieus and sympathies for both anarchism and figures like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Finally, I show how these topics could be useful for present debates on critical social theory and radical geographies.

This paper historicises the emergence (and subsequent power) of geographical abstractions. Following Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, I argue that one of the central features of modern capitalist society is rule by abstractions. As both Derek Sayer and Henri Lefebvre argue, such abstractions enact forms of violence within the societies subjected to their rule. The three geographical abstractions I consider are space, nature, and scale. Whilst I argue that some forms of abstraction are transhistorical, my interest is more in how these transhistorical abstractions rub up against new forms specific to capitalist societies. In particular, following Alfred Sohn-Rethel, I am interested in the role played by the exchange abstraction in producing distinctive spatial relations, a commoditised nature, and new forms of scalar hierarchy. The paper sheds light on the utility of a historical–geographical materialist approach for situating the production of violent geographical abstractions and envisaging a world free from their domination.