Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper considers how the technocracy contributes to the mobilisation of policy, and in doing so suggests that this allows for a systematic explanation for policy mobility that is based on a particular form of expert practice rather than ideologies such as neoliberalism. It argues that the technocracy has topographies through which different places are materially connected and through which policy knowledge flows in various forms. But it also has topologies that emerge from the practice of measurement through which often distant places can be made to loom much larger, or nearby places fade into insignificance. Together they help to materialise the spaces ‘in between’ policy-making sites through which policy is often transferred. Considering the technocracy in this way demonstrates how apparently autonomous political–economic contexts shape patterns of policy mobility and state change.

Through a critical deployment of the surface/depth metaphor, this article explores the catalytic potential of topological thinking to establish points of articulation between apparently opposed notions and canons of thought. Starting from a genealogy of mathematical developments and philosophical mediations toward the end point of geography, we address the interplay between the formal (axiomatic) and conceptual (problematic) dimensions of topology in suggesting some potentially alternative ways of re-imagining the role of topological thinking for spatial theory and human geography.

In this paper I examine entrepreneurial work in San Francisco's digital media sector to consider how affect and desire are invested in sites of neoliberal production. Drawing on recent writing on affect, I treat affect as ambivalent and coextensive with the mode of production, suggesting an approach that looks beyond the investment of value in commodities, to how desire is produced and directly located in economic infrastructures. Entrepreneurial affect functions through the embodiment of work as a site of personal “satisfaction,” the development of passionate attachments to that work, and the production of working subjectivities characterized by their “compulsory sociality.” I argue that affect functions through entrepreneurial forms of digital media work to produce and reproduce attachments to precarious working conditions. Drawing on recent debates on precariousness and precarity, I reflect on the possible consequences of affective attachments to entrepreneurial work as a primary site for the justification of precarious work practices and neoliberal modes of governance in general.

At the Joint Review Panel (JRP) for Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline across northern British Columbia, many participants presenting oral statements situated themselves as decidedly ‘ordinary’ people, with rich connections to the land and landscape. Without speaking of ownership, they nevertheless made claims to the area as their home through highly detailed articulations of knowledge and experience of its natural features. For some, it was also connected to a collective, indigenous territorial claim. In all cases, we argue that it is an articulation of ‘home,’ and that this formed the basis for the political subjectivity that led to their participation in the JRP hearings. Linking the scholarly literature on home with that of political ecology, in this paper we explore the significance of the assertion of experience and knowledge of the physical environment as the basis to claim it as ‘home’ and to assert a political right to defend it from perceived intrusion.

This article suggests that the spaces of British settler colonialism and metropolitan science were interconnected, underexamined, grounds upon which both ethnography and colonial governance developed. Focusing on the governmental and ethnographic activities of Sir George Grey during the mid-19th century it argues that the origins of ethnography and the specifically humanitarian governance of spaces invaded by settlers were co-constituted. Although anthropologists have long recognised the complicity of ethnography in modern colonialism, the relationship runs far deeper and extends far more broadly, than has been appreciated in even the most incisive critiques. That relationship was also located in violent settler colonial spaces that have been relatively neglected in the anthropological historiography. The article concludes that Grey's governmental practices, and his representations of them, established the terms upon which cultural genocide, with its logic of elimination, could be posited as a humane alternative to racial extermination. It shows that Grey's promotion of amalgamation, articulated as a preferably cultural and social extinction over a physical one, went on to influence the highest levels of colonial administration. On behalf of the British Empire as a whole, Grey thus helped to reconcile settler colonialism with humanitarian governance.

The Anthropocene, as a notion and a discursive field, is generating productive academic and broader debate. In this article, I analyse the creation of a crowdfunded climate change institution in Australia – the Climate Council – as an instance of everyday activism in the Anthropocene, and partly a function of the more-than-real. The more-than-real refers to the digital space that bore the Climate Council’s creation, and situates this spontaneous climate change activism. The broader context of this transformation included an abnormally hot spring season, a turn to conservative federal government, and already-active social media spaces. As an exploratory case study that introduces an example of activism steeped in desire, this research situates mainstream climate change activism squarely within the Anthropocene notion, where a large group of disaffected individuals transformed an organisation that they perceived as valuable. This type of climate change activism can be read as a productive possibility of the Anthropocene, and unsettles narratives of inevitable environmental devastation, while simultaneously raising questions of whether the Anthropocene concept can or should include digital spaces. The discourses working in, through and around the Climate Council transformation in the more-than-real are read as a disruption of the Anthropocene that may generate productive possibilities.

Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), the German-Jewish theologian and philosopher, presents us with what can be called a ‘politics of Judaic theology’. Focussing on the particularities of Judaic time and space in his major work, The Star of Redemption (1921), this article argues for the importance of revisiting Rosenzweig to recuperate a history of thought opposed to the entailments of secular time with sovereign territory. Essaying between Rosenzweig’s early 20th-century theology and the political present, I then bring him into dialogue with the voices of Judith Butler and Jaqueline Rose who, from the varying perspectives of ethics and psychoanalysis, insist on an originary displacement at the heart of Jewish identity and, with this, the impossibility of any project of national affirmation. Indeed, when read together with contemporary challenges to political Zionism, I suggest that Rosenzweig’s theological understandings of space and time offer an alternative – and anterior – perspective from which to critique the ambitions of the Jewish nation-state.

Through the case study of the contested British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, this paper contributes to discussions on ‘territorial volumes’ by exploring the role of the ‘elemental’ in the protracted sovereignty dispute between Spain and Gibraltar. Drawing on scholarship by Elden, Adey, McCormack and others in political and cultural geography, the paper highlights the value of foregrounding the elements of rock, water, air and fire (in the form of the sun) in attempts to understand the tensions between Gibraltar and Spain whilst also demonstrating the significant intersections between the elemental and the human body. Whilst avoiding the snares of environmental determinism, the paper makes the case for an elemental ontology that functions through and with the proclivities and molecular specificities of the elements in order to better understand the construct of the territorial volume, the relationship between elemental and bodily volumes, and the site specific geopolitical realities, fractures and possibilities that are laid bare as the elements are unearthed.

In 20th century media coverage of the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, reporters devoted an inordinately large amount of space to describing (often disapprovingly) how the people of that region utilized Cadillacs. Having been confronted with this puzzle in the archive (i.e. what work was being done by so frequently associating these territories with Cadillacs?), this paper argues that in popular imaginations, change in the world economy—especially the rise of “nouveau riche territories”—is often understood in terms of personified and objectified dramas of right/wrong, which perform the work of distinction. By drawing on an analysis of newspaper and magazine articles and bringing together consumption, psychoanalytic, and post-colonial literatures, this article makes two contributions to understanding how positional anxieties function transnationally: (1) by arguing that places like the Gulf States can have impacts on geoeconomic imaginations that far outpace their size, because these states and their people are seen to break the constellation of practices associated with having obtained the “good life”, thus creating a boundary between them and “normalcy”; and, (2) by demonstrating that stories of nouveau riche consumption gain force through interaction with psychically charged objects like Cadillacs, through a process called “extimacy”.