The Colonial History of the 1905 Aliens Act

The passing of the Aliens Act of 1905 was a defining moment in British immigration law and history. This article investigates the influence of settler-colonial immigration restriction laws on the passing of the Act, and questions the current historiographical inclination to focus solely on the influence of American immigration restriction laws. By analysing the trajectory of contemporary public debates, the evidence given to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1902–03) and the political discussion on various bills, the article shows that the existence of colonial immigration restriction laws played an important role in the formulation and passing of the 1905 Aliens Act. Putting the Act in this larger context highlights its colonial derivation, but also its uniqueness: the British Act's defence of asylum, the exception extended to those landing as political and religious refugees, has no parallel in either early US law or any of the settler-colonial laws.     

Nurses across borders: global migration of registered nurses to the US

Like many other global north countries, the US is facing a nursing shortage. In the last few years, such nursing shortages have been identified as part of a broader ‘global crisis’ in nursing. Resorting to importing internationally educated nurses is a popular strategy to address the shortfall. Importing nurses into the US is not new. However, the current shortage is different because of greatly intensified efforts to recruit nurses from overseas, and because of the unprecedented scale of global nurse migration. This article uses an analysis of Census data to track the trends and geographies associated with internationally educated registered nurses (IERNs) in the US since 1980. I show that there are important subnational differences in the distribution of IERNs; most are concentrated in a few states. By paying particular attention to subnational geographies within the US, I draw attention to the variations in and implications of the distribution of IERNs and how this impacts public policy discourses associated with the transnational migration of IERNs into and within the US.     

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question,Geo‐economic Realities,and the “China Threat” Imaginary

Abstract: Despite emergent trends of geo‐economic integration between nation‐states, the role of realist‐driven geopolitical calculation appears highly enduring. This paper explores the potential contradictions between state‐centric geopolitical concerns and transnational geo‐economic formation through an exploration of China–US tensions over Taiwan, a territory of indeterminate geo‐legal status and which China regards as its own province. I consider how the Taiwan Relations Act, a domestic public law of the US that frames US–Taiwan relations and has a major influence on East Asian geopolitics, could contradict emergent “China region”, and possibly even China–US, geo‐economic integration. This is because the US‐sustained arms sales to Taiwan rest on imagining and containing China as a “threat”, while geo‐economic integration entails enrolling China as a strategic partner, if not an ally. Consequently, the Taiwan issue could stifle the enhancement of Sino‐American relations at a historical juncture when the Chinese and American economies are more intertwined than ever.     

Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai

Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in Lane 49, a public housing community in downtown Shanghai. Utilising feminist geography and feminist political theorisations of material permeability this article contributes to Chinese geographies of protest, providing a local epistemology of housing activism which demonstrates the importance of drawing materiality into understandings of activist tactics. The article also contributes to radical geographies of protest by deconstructing the idea of public protest in a public place and thus offering opportunities to demonstrate how, through blurring public‐private binaries, protest can emerge and survive in authoritative governance regimes.     

Between neoliberalism and cultural conservatism: spatial divisions and multiplications of hospice labor in the United States

This article offers a critical geographic understanding of hospice work in Seattle Washington, and the US generally. It highlights the spatial divisions of labor between home and institutions in hospice care, as well as divisions within the home (where the majority of hospice occurs). It further shows how these divisions produce multiplications of labor for women carers in the home. I interpret these divisions and multiplications of labor as manifestations of neoliberal welfare state restructuring. A certain cultural conservatism, however, is also potentially reproduced by these geographies. These interpretations situate hospice work in a social theoretical context, and look beyond neoliberalism as the singular rightward keel of social policy.     

The story of Comanche: horsepower,heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.     

Circulation,modernity, and urban space in 1960s Beirut

In this essay, I explore the role of circulation in Beirut’s urban space and society in the early 1960s. Drawing primarily from the Lebanese francophone newspaper L’Orient, I show how the rise of automobility in postcolonial Beirut brought with it the imposition of certain kinds of moral and civic geographies that prescribed how citizens should use and move through the city. I argue that the newspaper’s narratives about matters of infrastructure and traffic law abidance reveal concerns with not just how people moved through the city, but with the everyday configuration of a rational, modern, biopolitical order.     

The 1985 Supplementary Extradition Treaty between the United States of America and the United Kingdom: an exercise in soft power

The relationship between the United States of America, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland during the years of conflict in Northern Ireland has been the topic of significant scholarly literature, but rarely has this literature examined the statecraft behind US interventions in Northern Ireland in the years before the election of President Bill Clinton. In this article, I will use a range of recently declassified state papers and a series of personal interviews to examine the introduction of the 1985 Supplementary Extradition Treaty between the United States and United Kingdom and show how the British government successfully manoeuvred their American counterparts, in both the Executive and Legislative branches, towards ratification of both the extradition treaty and the Anglo-Irish Agreement Support Act of 1986.     

Heritage and scale: settings,boundaries and relations

While recent years have seen increasing interest in the geographies of heritage, very few scholars have interrogated the difference that scale makes. Indeed, in a world in which the nation state appears to be on the wane, the process of articulating heritage on whatever scale – whether of individuals and communities, towns and cities, regions, nations, continents or globally – becomes ever more important. Partly reflecting this crisis of the national container, researchers have sought opportunities both through processes of ‘downscaling’, towards community, family and even personal forms of heritage, as well as ‘upscaling’, towards a universal understanding of heritage. While such work has had critical impact within prescribed scalar boundaries, we need to build a theoretical understanding of what an emergent relationship between heritage and scale does within the context of dynamic power relations. This paper examines how heritage is produced and practised, consumed and experienced, managed and deployed at a variety of scales, exploring how notions of scale, territory and boundedness have a profound effect on the heritage process. Drawing on the work of Doreen Massey and others, the paper considers how the heritage–scale relationship can be articulated as a process of openness, pluralism and relationality.     

Shutting Down the Machines of Destruction: Possibilities for Agrarian Life on the Protest Blockade

The protest blockade is one tool for seeking liberation from the state while living within it. I offer a critical analysis of the protest blockade in agrarian struggles for land and life in Indonesia and beyond. I specify my discussion with a retelling of a Sumatran land-back movement of smallholders and landless workers who twice turned to the blockade to reclaim their land from a plantation company. I consider how these blockades and others in Sumatra and Borneo created direct-action power, thereby expanding people's possibilities for livelihood and autonomy in landscapes of extraction and exploitation. Blockading action is a process that unfolds from within as activists challenge the legitimacy of their rulers and set out to create more emancipatory spaces and territories. When protestors blockade the bulldozers, logging trucks, and other machines of capitalist exploitation of workers and ecologies, they seek to disrupt the infrastructures and commodity flows of the dominant political-economic order as well as open up new agrarian possibilities. These protest blockades are central to the anarchist, Indigenous, and decolonial politics that motivate direct-action protests across the globe.     

Sunflowers,youthful protestors and political achievements: lessons from Taiwan

ABSTRACT

In 2014, an interesting youth movement collective started small p political and big P Political action and resistance in Taiwan. Their protest was against the way a major trade agreement proposed between China and Taiwan was being non-democratically pushed through the Taiwanese legislature. In this article, we provide an analysis of the activities of the Sunflower Student Movement (SSM) as a means to record a relatively little-known youthful and youth-centric successful uprising. It serves to place the SSM, and other East Asian-based protests, on the map of young people’s political geographies, and explores the paradoxical political and spatial practices pursued by young Taiwanese. This case study makes visible the interconnectedness of big P/small p politics of everyday youth geographies within an Asian context.     

A place to remember: scaling the walls of Angel Island immigration station

This paper considers the restoration and presentation of Angel Island Immigration Station, a federal facility in the San Francisco Bay that between 1910 and 1940 worked to prevent the arrival of Chinese laborers to the United States in accordance with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The production of Angel Island Immigration Station as a national historic landmark is delineated through the social construction of scale. I discuss efforts to achieve a leap in the scale of the site's significance and how this brings forth new management regimes that change the format of the interpretation there. In particular, narrative construction, landscape design, and revised tours, insert a standardized story of Chinese exclusion into the national memory. This paper shows how the imperative to increase the scope of recognition—to petition nationally for status and funds—requires a repackaging of stories to affirm popular American ideals of freedom over those that challenge the nation's persecution of Chinese immigrants.     

Poetic child realism: Scottish film and the construction of childhood

With this essay I suggest a move towards poetic realism in the representation of children in Scottish movies. After a brief discussion of the landscape context of film geographies I turn to the roots of Scottish film realism in British Free Cinema, with specific reference to filmmakers’ use of landscape and place‐characters. I then argue that Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay moves most fully towards the context of poetic child realism. Ramsay frames and foments a quirky poetic realism with non‐professional child actors placed in carefully crafted landscapes to create important moral and social stories that evolve from a series of shocks and an emotive collision of ideas.     

Being genealogical in digital geographies

In this intervention, I trace the genealogies of the recent heralding of digital geographies as a boundary object for scholarship and scholars foregrounding the digital in geography. Building off of previous efforts to be technopositional in digital geographies, I make an entreaty for further being genealogical by attuning to the insider/outsider positionalities that have informed this particular endeavour of intellectual community‐making in Anglo‐American geography. While genealogy is not an exercise in historical narration, it works against dehistorical narratives of digital technologies and of the disciplinary frameworks within which they are engaged, destabilizes technopositional privileges, and has the potential to engender more inclusive digital geography futures.     

A QUESTION OF IDENTITY: A REVIEW OF RECENT WORK ON BLACKS IN CANADA

In 2010 the US declared the Lake Erie water snake a recovered species, but in Canada the snake is still considered to be an endangered species. After explaining the legal similarities between the Ontario Endangered Species Act and the American Endangered Species Act, this article examines a case study with landowner interviews from one US island and one Canadian island. It is concluded that landowner attitudes toward conservation and private property are very similar. Thus, it is argued that bureaucratic differences, particularly institutional capacity and implementation styles, enabled the US but not Canada to recover the snake. The article concludes with a discussion of the need for better communication between the two countries for the purposes of biodiversity conservation.     

The “Battle of Seattle” revisited: Or,seven views of a protest-zoning state

Increasingly, the expression of dissent at major events is controlled with a territorial strategy – it is banned from some areas and confined to others. One of the more notable uses of this strategy was in Seattle in 1999 during the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization. After widespread unrest forced the cancellation of the conference's first day of events, the City of Seattle erected what it termed a “restricted access” zone, and what its critics termed a “no protest” zone. I use the Seattle events to consider what it means for the state to zone the expression of dissent in such a fashion. I extend and complicate Mitchell's notion of a “dialectic of public space” by outlining seven different perspectives from which one can view the protest-zoning state. This multiplicative nature of the state, I suggest, provides yet more reason to be skeptical of state efforts to confine dissent. Because the state is inherently a contested object, it must remain susceptible to robust discussion of its practices.     

“A plantation can be a commons”: Re‐Earthing Sapelo Island through Abolition Ecology

This paper is based on the 2018 Neil Smith Lecture presented at the University of St Andrews. It considers the plantation past/futures of Sapelo Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Islands forming an archipelago along the US Southeastern coast. I work through the abolitionist efforts of the Saltwater Geechee’s who have resided there since at least 1803 to better understand how we can mobilise an emancipatory politics of land and property and to produce commons that work to repair and heal the violence done through enslavement and ongoing displacement. I weave together a series of historical threads to better situate linked ideas of abolition democracy and abolition geography, and to extend the notion of abolition ecology as a strategic notion to connect Eurocentric based political ecologies with the emancipatory tradition of Black geographies.     

The construction and destruction of a colonial landscape: monuments to British monarchs in Dublin before and after independence

Where cities evolve in contentious political circumstances and make the transition from a colonial to a post-colonial state, aspects of the urban landscape such as public monuments, street nomenclature, buildings, city plans and urban design initiatives take on particular significance. Collectively they demonstrate the fact that the city is the product of a struggle among conflicting interest groups in search of dominion over an environment. As one group seeks dominance over the other the urban landscape often becomes the canvas upon which this power struggle finds expression. Public statues in particular serve as an important source for unravelling the geographies of broader political and cultural shifts. These issues are explored here with reference to Dublin City and the monuments erected to royal monarchs before the achievement of political independence in 1922, namely Kings William I (1701), George I (1722), George II (1758) and Queen Victoria (1908). The fate of such monuments in post-colonial Dublin and the ways in which the fledgling state and particular groups within it sought to express their new found power through both the official and oftentimes wilful destruction of these royal statues is then examined. The paper illuminates the power of public monuments as symbolic sites of meaning and explores their role in the construction of a landscape of colonial power. It also demonstrates how monuments become sites of protest, as symbolic in their removal as in their erection.