What Is and Isn't in a Name

Although I remain sympathetic to the narrative behind the notion of “History of Knowledge,” I argue against redrawing the disciplinary boundaries around “knowledge,” as opposed to retaining the term “science.” This is not because I think there is no place for a “history of knowledge,” and not because I am concerned that such a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries would open the floodgates of “anything goes.” Rather, I am doubtful that problems of demarcation and exclusion can be resolved solely by changing a name. I draw on my personal experience as an East Asianist to suggest that the challenges I faced trying to fit into the community of historians of science and technology would not have been solved by renaming the discipline. At the same time, I also argue that changes can and do happen without a change of name. And finally, I maintain that the word “science” has important connotations that we do not want to give up.     

The “Philosophical Bible” and the Secular State

Almost all scholars of the Enlightenment consider Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke as the founding theorists of the “secular modern state.” In contrast to the widely held view of the modern state, I argue that far from being “secular” it was the product of the sacralization of politics, which resulted from the way these philosophers interpreted the Scriptures as part of their philosophical inquiries. The analysis of the “linguistic turn” in their biblical interpretations reveals how they tried to undermine the power of the Church to claim greater freedoms for the state. Their philosophical inquiries initiated the secularization of the Christian religion and the sacralization of politics as two correlative developments, rather than the secularization of the state per se, as is usually supposed. The philosophical arguments proposed by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke helped to resolve the religious battles of Europe’s many confessions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but are still pertinent to our current very different historical context.     

Rethinking the Politics–Religion Distinction

William T. Cavanaugh argues that the politics–religion distinction presupposes covert commitments that inappropriately support a “migration of the holy” from the church to the state. Despite his strong critical instincts, several of his genealogical propensities appear to stand in tension with his commitments to constitutional democracy and the universality of grace. By contrast with Cavanaugh, John Rawls’ post-metaphysical reformulation of the politics–religion aims to identify a public criterion compatible with a plurality of comprehensive doctrines. Although I commend Rawls for retaining some form of this distinction, I question the possibility of a post-metaphysical standpoint and its compatibility with his commitment to what he calls the “fact of pluralism.” Drawing on Bernard Lonergan’s transpositions of human nature and grace in this paper’s final section, I develop an alternative account of the relationship between politics and religion that aims to harmonize some of the strongest insights from the work of Cavanaugh and Rawls.     

Sustainability as Empty Signifier: Its Rise,Fall, and Radical Potential

Until recently, the concept of “sustainability” appeared to occupy a central position in the politics of many Western democracies. Following the 2008 financial crisis, however, sustainability has been relegated to a position of secondary or tertiary significance. This article considers the rise and fall of sustainability through the theoretical lens of Ernesto Laclau, considering whether it may be seen as an example of an “empty signifier”. Through detailed engagement with Laclau's work, as well as both theoretical and empirical studies of the concept of sustainability, I argue that sustainability signifies the multiple failures of dominant discourses to recognise “the future” as a meaningful category. After examining the historical conditions under which sustainability was able to operate in this way, I go on to argue that the global financial crisis and neoliberalism more broadly have interrupted our capacity to think about the future, undermining the significance of sustainability, at least temporarily.     

The People's Climate March: Environmental populism as political genre

Contemporary political ecological research on populism has demonstrated how authoritarian and strongarm tactics come to be hitched to reductive symbolic representations of “the people,” often with disastrous environmental impacts. Advocates of “left-populism” argue that such research can give the erroneous impression that “populism” and “authoritarianism” are essentially synonymous. Skeptical of formalist arguments, Gramscians argue that populism, as a quite variegated and fundamentally spatial phenomenon, must be viewed historically, in situ. But all three arguments share a quick assessment of populism, without always attending to its embedded multiplicity. Bringing together insights from Stuart Hall and Lauren Berlant, this article seeks to expand geographical understandings of the dynamic forms and styles of environmental politics by proposing thinking of populism as a political genre. This theoretical schema helps to cut through formalist versus historicist debates while directing attention to the affective scenes through which populism is performed. In order to demonstrate the utility of examining populism's genre and scenes, I examine political essays written surrounding the 2014 People’s Climate March. Essays debated activist expectations concerning political subjectivity, tactics, scales of action, signifiers, and aesthetics for best confronting global inequality and the climate crisis alike. Through contesting the meaning of “the people” and “populism,” divergent leftist political interpretations both repeated and tweaked generic populist forms. By examining the performative construction and contestation of “the people” through languages and spaces of climate action, I advocate a humble yet still critical political ecological approach to understanding contemporary populism.     

A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

The “Realism” of Augustine's “Political Realism”: Augustine and Machiavelli

Abstract

Arendt and Tocqueville both celebrate a participatory notion of political freedom, but they have a fundamental disagreement about the role that political education should play in fostering an active citizenry. I contrast Tocqueville's “educative” conception of politics with Arendt's “performative” conception, and I explore an important but little-noted difference between the two theorists: whereas Tocqueville argues that it is the task of statesmen “to educate democracy,” Arendt warns that those who seek to “educate” adults are inappropriately aspiring to be their “guardians.” I argue that although Arendt's warnings about the dangers of intertwining politics and education are at times salutary, Tocqueville is ultimately correct that education must be a key task of democratic leadership, and he is right to suggest that politics can itself be educative in crucial ways.     

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape,Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Abstract: Canadian diamonds are marketed as “ethical” alternatives to notorious “blood diamonds”. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethical consumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumption operates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned as moral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in the form of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versus the exploitation of “dark” Africa, pristine, “white” northern landscapes, modernization via commodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning within which the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamonds also has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethical consumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North.     

Violent or non-violent action? Wartime civilian resistance in Colombia and Mozambique

Why do some communities resist armed groups non-violently while others take up arms to do so? Recent research has advanced our knowledge of the causes and consequences of wartime civilian resistance. Yet, the factors explaining the emergence and outcomes of civilian resistance do not account for how people resist. Despite its important consequences for the politics and geography of war, the issue of why civilians engage in violent or non-violent forms of resistance remains poorly understood. We rely on extensive original fieldwork to examine within-case and cross-case variation in violent and non-violent resistance campaigns during the Mozambican and Colombian civil wars. We argue that forms of resistance are linked to prior experiences of collective action, normative commitments, and the role of local political entrepreneurs. Previous experiences make repertoires of resistance “empirically” available, while prevailing local social and cultural norms make them “normatively” available. Political entrepreneurs activate and adapt what is empirically and normatively available to mobilize support for some forms of action and against others. Our analysis advances emerging research on wartime civilian agency and has significant implications for theories of armed conflict, civil resistance, and contentious politics more broadly.     

Unpacking climate services: Knowledge politics,beneficent humanitarianism and the realpolitik of risk management in China

In the last four decades, climate services (CS) have moved from being limited forecasting tools in their predictive capacity to becoming involved in the shaping of risk assessment instruments with global reach affected to enhance adaptation to climate change. Yet, they have been relatively overlooked by human geographers and critical risk theorists, whose interests have been to document the political processes involved in shaping climate change and the global scientific enterprise it has generated. By looking at the ways in which CS have been developed and exported to countries deemed as climate-vulnerable, the paper sheds light on two simultaneous kinds of knowledge politics that are occurring at the interstices of global human security aspirations and the realpolitik of local practices. The first emerges from the ways in which CS political relevance has been secured by climate scientists in the midst of grand developmentalist and humanitarian ambitions, what we have called beneficent knowledge politics. The second comes from the nitty-gritty of risk management practices in countries to which CS are exported, in this case China, and highlights how a myriad of knowledge and sensitivities involved in shaping risk and science have been overlooked by the superseding ideals underpinning the production of CS and their application to wider climate adaptation agenda. By doing so, the paper contributes to the geographies of risk and emergencies as well as to the geographies of science by enhancing our understanding of the knowledge politics at play in the development of and resistance to technocratic climate governance.     

The National Flood Insurance Program: A Case Study in Policy Failure,Reform, and Retrenchment

In this paper, I present an intensive case study of the development of the National Flood Insurance Program to advance two key arguments. First, the conventional model of adoption of general interest reform neglects an important aspect of political context: whether the relevant policy domain is one with or without “publics.” I argue that in domains without publics the politics of reform will differ substantially from the accepted model. Second, I argue that the type of learning necessary to address a given policy failure matters in reform politics. Instrumental learning is necessary but may not be sufficient for successful general interest reforms. When the social construction of a policy failure is such that many people misconceive of the fundamental purpose of a policy, social learning must take place before instrumental learning can be effective.     

Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism,the Commons,and Solidarity

Abstract: Articulations of climate justice were central to the diverse mobilisations that opposed the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December 2009. This paper contends that articulations of climate justice pointed to the emergence of three co‐constitutive logics: antagonism, the common(s), and solidarity. Firstly, we argue that climate justice involves an antagonistic framing of climate politics that breaks with attempts to construct climate change as a “post‐political” issue. Secondly, we suggest that climate justice involves the formation of pre‐figurative political activity, expressed through acts of commoning. Thirdly, we contend that climate justice politics generates solidarities between differently located struggles and these solidarities have the potential to shift the terms of debate on climate change. Bringing these logics into conversation can develop the significance of climate justice for political practice and strategy. We conclude by considering what is at stake in different articulations of climate justice and tensions in emerging forms of climate politics.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

When climate justice goes wrong: Maladaptation and deep co-production in transformative environmental science and policy

Maladaptation to climate change is often portrayed as arising from the unjust exclusion of vulnerable people. In turn, analysts have proposed knowledge co-production with marginalized groups as a form of transformative climate justice. This paper argues instead that maladaptation arises from a much deeper exclusion based upon the projection of inappropriate understandings of risk and social identity that are treated as unquestioned circumstances of justice. Drawing on social studies of science, the paper argues that the focus on co-production as an intentional act of inclusion needs to be considered alongside “deep” or “reflexive” co-production, which instead refers to the non-cognitive and unavoidable simultaneous generation of knowledge and social order. These processes have linked visions of planetary justice with an understanding of climate risk based on global atmospheric change, and an assumption that community forms an antidote to individualism. The paper uses a discussion of adaptation in western Nepal to illustrate how such deep forms of co-production have significantly reduced understandings of “what” adaptation is for, and “who” is included. Maladaptation, therefore, is not simply unjust implementations of an essentially fair model of adaptation, but also the allocation of exclusionary visions of what and for whom adaptation is for. Debates about transformative climate justice therefore need to understand how their critiques of classical liberal justice generate exclusions of their own, and to engage vulnerable people in reframing, rather than just receiving, circumstances of justice. There is also a need to examine how these circumstances remain unchallenged within environmental science and policy.     

Academic Freedom,Intellectual Diversity,and the Place of Politics in Geography

Abstract: This paper examines the conservative critique of higher education in the USA. I argue, first, that the right's call for greater “intellectual diversity” in American higher education should be understood as an attack on the professional self‐regulation and disciplinary autonomy that are central to academic freedom in this country. Second, I suggest that the right's politicization of politics in the academy brings to light the importance of our developing a vision of the university that accounts for rather than disavows the political nature of the work we do.     

Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low‐income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class‐based and racial differences in the food system.     

Islands,extraction and violence: Mining and the politics of scale in Island Melanesia

Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.     

HISTORY/PHILOSOPHY/SCIENCE: SOME LESSONS FOR PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Rheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science (the ideas of Latour, Pickering, Rouse, and others) and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

Becoming Smaller: Autobiographical Spaces of Weight Loss

Abstract: This research focuses on the spaces and politics of weight loss. It is informed by “fat studies”, critical geographical scholarship on fat, and two contrasting feminist readings of Michel Foucault's notion of “care of the self”. Using autobiography as a method of inquiry I share my experience of “becoming smaller” through weight loss dieting. I argue that losing weight for me has been paradoxical on at least three counts: first, by being a feminist scholar who critiques discourses around women and slimness while at the same time desiring to be slim; second, by my new eating patterns marking me simultaneously as both a disciplined and a disordered subject; and third, by publically and politically supporting the Health at Every Size movement but privately in my “quest” to recreate myself emphasizing shedding kilos over fitness. The article concludes that understanding these paradoxes that surround weight loss is useful for furthering understanding of a complex embodied, gendered and spatialized process.