Contestation, negotiation, and experimentation: The liminality of land administration platforms in Kenya
This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan state's digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and extensive experience within Kenya's land administration system, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing, albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa's perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation of liminality itself.
Atmospheric negations: Weaponising breathing, attuning irreducible bodies
This paper elaborates various ways in which atmospheric negations operate by weaponising bodily vulnerability to air. It shows, firstly, how bodies remain exposed to colonial proximities of respiratory, olfactory, and sonic violence with ways that are constituted through negating site- and body-spheres. It highlights these spheric materialities by discussing the use of tear gas and skunk water, bombing of chemical warehouses, and the sonic settler aggression in Palestine, further arguing that we need to pay more attention to the irreducibility of the body to such violent orchestrations of atmospheric. Here the irreducibility of the body and the incapacity of the spheric become key matters related to what is called, secondly, the reciprocal sphereological vulnerability between the corporeal and the spheric. By paying particular attention to difference between breathing and attunement, the paper shows how a negative limit condition resides at the heart of what constitutes sphere-dwelling. Here an ontological shift in thinking atmospheric is suggested, one that starts, not from current framings aligned around the notions of vitality, affirmation, and relationality, but from the weaponisation of the fundamental incapacity of the body to overcome its own vulnerability to the air it breathes.
The potential politics of the porous city
This article discusses the concept of porosity and what it might offer critical urbanism. It engages recent scholarly and practical writing on the "porous city," outlining three sets of contributions that porosity offers in analyzing contemporary urbanization patterns and in orienting planning, policymaking, and knowledge production. First, the porous city offers a critical epistemological lens focused on flow and relations, which supports mobile and infrastructural ways of viewing and knowing the city. Second, the porous city suggests the ontological features of interpenetrating geographies and temporalities, which take the urban to be a topological space of potential politics. Third, the porous city entails an ideal to which planning practice should aspire, particularly in relation to forms of urbanism and city-building that are open to multifunctionality, difference, and dynamism over time. While each of these represents a promising direction in critical urban praxis, we argue that porosity also has its limits. The porous city is conceptually malleable and normatively ambiguous and it risks overreach as well as recuperation within exclusionary and exploitative urban development agendas. We claim that the porous city should not be treated as a comprehensive global ambition, but rather, is most valuable when used to discern and build discrete architectures of power.
Nowhere land: The evicted space of Black tenants' rights in Montreal
Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a well-organized tenants' movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants' rights in the city. During the same period, however, an emerging police, government and media discourse cast Black communities as criminal 'ghettos', and a variety of mechanisms, including new policies meant to protect tenants' rights, were used to evict criminalized Black tenants. Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants' rights. The racial limits of tenants' rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city. The tenant, the article concludes, is never just a tenant, but also a racial subject - a subject formed at the edges of blackness. In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants' rights presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place.
The place of the dead, the time of dictatorship: Nostalgia, sovereignty, and the corpse of Ferdinand Marcos
In 1993, the body of former Philippine dictator, Ferdinand E Marcos, was moved from Honolulu, Hawaii, where he died in exile, to a private mausoleum attached to his ancestral home in Batac, Ilocos Norte. Preserved and placed in a refrigerated coffin while his wife, Imelda, lobbied for his burial at the Heroes' Cemetery, Marcos's body remained on display until 2016, when permission for his interment was granted by the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the Marcos Mausoleum prior to the controversial burial and at the protests that came in its wake, this essay examines the sense of loss and longing that has animated the rise of authoritarian nostalgia. Banished yet unburied, the dictator's embalmed corpse, I suggest, speaks to what remains unmourned under democracy and which thus always threatens to return-namely, a figure of unfettered freedom and authority, whose power might be said to extend over life, death, and time itself. I argue that it is this figure-the figure of a sovereign gone missing-that authoritarian nostalgia takes as its object and which grows more seductive in light of the hollowing out of popular sovereignty that has come to define the post-revolutionary experience.
Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of 'being earthbound' arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it. The first sense is oriented to a political ontology of process, which arose as human actions - political, technological, scientific - nullified modernist conceits separating humans from nature. The second sense is one of earth alienation, which is referenced specifically to a scientific praxis coincident with advances in science and technology that alienates common sense experiences in politics. Though not unqualified, these two senses of being earthbound anchor our argument that Arendt offered prescient resources for understanding the political in the Anthropocene at the intersection of science, capital and world. The article ends by contrasting Arendt's account of being earthbound with Bruno Latour's recent interventions on the politics of Gaia.
Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: Learning animal geography research skills from animal technologists
Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink anthopocentricism within the cultures and societies they study and to take account of more-than-human agencies and perspectives. This poses key methodological challenges, including a tendency for animal geographies to focus very much on the human side of human-animal relations and to fail to acknowledge animals as embodied, lively, articulate political subjects. In this paper, we draw on recent ethnographic work, observing and participating in the care of research animals and interviewing the animal technologists, to contribute to the understandings of life within the animal house. In so doing, the paper makes three key arguments. Firstly, that studying how animal technologists perform everyday care and make sense of their relationships with animals offers useful insights into the specific skills, expertise and relationships required in order to study human-animal relations. Secondly, that animal technologists are keenly aware of the contested moralities which emerge in animal research environments and can offer an important position from which to understand this. Thirdly, that storytelling (exemplified by the stories told by animal technologists) is a useful resource for animal geographers to engage with complexity in human-animal relations.
Restructuring of the labour market and the role of third world migrations in Europe
"This paper is an analysis of the way in which the changes in the labour market and in the occupational structure in Europe affect the situation and the role of Third World migrants." Changes in European labor migration patterns since the 1960s are first analyzed. The author notes that "intra-European migrations were industrial migrations because manufacturing and building industries were the most important and growing economic activities....Present-day migrations are postindustrial migrations. Immigrants work mostly in service activities and not infrequently in the informal economy. In any case migrant workers are located in the secondary labour market. The picture is made more complex by the fact than many immigrants are alegal or illegal because of the restrictive immigration policies in European countries."
Mapping children's politics: the promise of articulation and the limits of nonrepresentational theory
Reflecting wider debates in the discipline, recent scholarship in children's geographies has focused attention on the meanings of the political. While supportive of work that opens up new avenues for conceptualizing politics beyond the liberal rational subject, we provide a critique of research methods which delink politics from historical context and relations of power. Focusing on the use of nonrepresentational theory as a research methodology, the paper points to the limits of this approach for children's political formation as well as for sustained scholarly collaboration. We argue instead for a politics of articulation, in the double sense of communication and connection. An empirical case study is used as an illustrative example.