Necrocapitalism in the Gig Economy: The Case of Platform Food Couriers in Australia

Although recent deaths of multiple couriers on the road have raised awareness of the dangers of on-demand food delivery, there remains limited government regulation of the industry in many jurisdictions. In this article, we argue that the labour conditions of platform couriers in Australia constitute a case of necrocapitalism (Banerjee), a contemporary form of accumulation through which organisational structures harness the power of debilitation and death for economic gain. After contextualising food delivery within the Australian gig economy, our analysis underscores how necropower operates through courier labour. We illustrate three dimensions: how this form of labour entails corporeal risks and harms; how these harms are heightened by platform infrastructures; and how strategic regulatory inaction maintains necropolitical orders. The article concludes with a reflection on how this contemporary example of necrocapitalism illuminates intersecting vectors of domination underpinning the logics and practices of platform governance.     

What exactly do REDD+ projects produce? A materialist analysis of carbon offset production from a REDD+ project in Cambodia

This article attempts to re-ground analyses of carbon markets by examining the material relations of production of a REDD + project in Cambodia. It focuses on how surplus value is extracted from labour at various points in the production chain of Verified Carbon Units (VCUs). Using extensive field work conducted over three years on a REDD + project in northern Cambodia I argue that VCUs are neither actual avoided units of deforestation and emissions, nor mere imagined or socially constructed commodities. Rather VCUs are packages of technical and affective claims attached to particular REDD + projects which are created through material labour processes. Only by examining the use-values that are created through these labour processes can demand for VCUs be properly understood. This article will start by giving a background to the Oddar Meanchey REDD + project (OMREDD + project). It will then examine the writing of the project document and examine the verification process and consider how these formed critical parts of the commodity production process. After that it will examine how the project collapsed on the ground and yet VCUs were still sold in the market. Finally the article will consider how the claims of the OMREDD + project were challenged by critical work and how future interventions against REDD + projects can successfully undermine the claims of REDD + projects and the extraction of surplus value.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

The "Moral Hazards" of Microfinance: Restructuring Rural Credit in India

Abstract:  This paper explores how economic ideas are produced, how they travel, and how they are contested, in complex and contingent ways, in particular places. It stems from events that took place in coastal Andhra Pradesh, India, where I conducted fieldwork on microfinance programs during 2007. I begin by tracing how the practices of microfinance—and the ideas and rationalities underpinning them—have been increasingly globalized as a development tool since the 1970s. I then move on to describe the proliferation of various microfinance programs across Andhra Pradesh over the last decade. In the closing section, I consider the implications of a recent protest that took place against commercial microfinance institutions in the region.     

Bringing Organizations Back In: Multilevel Feedback Effects on Individual Civic Inclusion

Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between organizations and individuals is not clear‐cut: Organizations interpret policy for individuals, and individuals experience policy through organizations. Thus, scholars have argued for a multi‐level model of feedback effects illuminating how policies operating at the organizational level reverberate at the individual level. In this theory‐building article, we push this insight by examining how public policy influences nonprofit organizations’ role in the civic life of beneficiaries. We identify five roles that nonprofit organizations play. For each role, we draw on existing research to identify policy mechanisms that either enlarge or diminish nonprofits’ capacity to facilitate individual incorporation and engagement. From these examples, we derive cross‐cutting hypotheses concerning how different categories of citizens may need policy to operate differently to enhance their civic influence; whether policy that is “delivered” through nonprofits may dampen citizens’ relationship with the state; and how the civic boost provided by policy may be influenced by the degree of latitude conferred on recipient organizations.     

Networks and place in Montreal's independent music industry

The significance of networks for independent music producers has been well established in the urban‐economic geography literature and the literature centred on cultural industries. In this article, we seek to build on this literature by considering how place‐based attributes mediate network development; that is to say, how the unique characteristics of place (such as historical and cultural attributes) determine networking outcomes among spatially proximate actors. Specifically, we consider the importance of place through an examination of Montreal's independent music industry. Drawing on 46 semi‐structured interviews with key actors in the industry, we illustrate how Montreal's bilingual identity contributes to network dynamics within the industry.     

The Romantic Anti-Capitalisms of Short-Term Rental Hosting

This article focuses on how Airbnb hosts in the Boston metro, San Francisco, and Washington, DC respond to legislative short-term rental (STR) regulations. I trace how hosts justify their multiple STR practices by way of the civic good all while foreclosing a debate about the potential negative effects of their monetisation. I show how hosts displace the displeasing aspects of STRs onto the abstracted category of the “Investor Host”, a stand-in for foreign investment capital and indifferent corporations. I argue that STR owners replicate what Iyko Day calls “romantic anti-capitalism”, a mode of critiquing capitalism that valorises the local and concrete uses of capital while displacing capital's destructive effects onto an abstracted and racialised other. I build on Day's theorisation by demonstrating how there are multiple genres of romantic anti-capitalism that function differently based on a person's structural position within settler-colonialism.     

Playing with Infrastructure like a Carishina: Feminist Cycling in an Era of Democratic Politics

This article discusses transit infrastructure as a site of radical possibility and limitation in an age of participatory democracy across Latin America. I focus on multiple spaces of participation in Quito, Ecuador to elucidate how citizenship and infrastructure are co‐produced through gendered processes. I first analyse city space of Quito from a gendered and infrastructural lens to consider how urban environments are dictated by violence and insecurity. Then, against this backdrop, I explore the spatial strategies of the feminist bicycle collective, Carishina en Bici, which translates from Quechua to “bad housewives that cycle”. Here, I draw on the concept of “deep play” to reveal how public practices in Quito question the equitable impacts of local democratic experimentation. To examine Carishinas’ spatial practices, I focus on an urban alleycat race, the Carishina Race, to show how strategic practices of solidarity reinsert feminist possibilities in urban space.     

Kamapim gutpela man: Papua New Guinean and Chinese refinery workers' changing understandings of becoming a good man

This article adds to research on emerging masculinities in the Pacific by analysing how Papua New Guinean and Chinese male employees' intercultural work experiences impact their perceptions of becoming a good man. The idea of a good man acts as a benchmark for assessing the adaptability of Papua New Guinean employees to new work environments and determining if Chinese colleagues are their desired partners. I illustrate this point by first considering ‘becoming’ as an alternate framework to the binary framework reflected in earlier research. I next describe how Papua New Guinean workers impress their Chinese supervisors through negotiations and concessions about industrial and subsistence farming time, as well as how working with Papua New Guinean workers alters Chinese employees' perceptions of work. Finally, I demonstrate how employment practices foster Papua New Guinean workers' evolving perspectives on becoming a gutpela man (‘good man’) and Chinese employees' evolving perspectives on becoming a good person, a vital route to becoming a chenggong man (‘successful man’). This article proposes characterizing emerging masculinities as hybrid identities that are context-dependent, interculturally exchanged and temporal by presenting two parties' new thoughts on becoming a good man. This article demonstrates modulatory power dynamics in the Chinese refinery based on a two-way narrative as opposed to portraying Chinese management as the dominating force.     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.     

(Re)Producing and challenging gender in and through urban space: women bicyclists’ experiences in Chicago

This research, which uses an intersectional feminist methodological approach, explores the relationships and intersections among women, public urban space, and bicycling, and the gendered processes through which the use of space is claimed, negotiated, and constrained. It builds on the existing scholarship on the gendered nature of public space, and uniquely uses bicycling as the site of inquiry. Drawing primarily from interviews with women cyclists in Chicago, this article explores how gender and other social identities are constructed, challenged, and constituted through an interaction with public space, urban processes and structures, and societal expectations and attitudes. It brings to the forefront and centers these narratives and empirically contextualizes them by linking the scholarship on the gendered (and raced, classed, and sexualized) nature of public space with the scholarship on women’s participation rates and barriers to bicycling. This research examines, through the everyday lived experiences of bicyclists and their multiple subject positions and privileges, how the gendered nature of public space affects the participation and experiences of women cyclists; how public space is negotiated and constrained; and how gender can be both (re)produced and challenged in and through urban space via women bicyclists’ actions. In particular, the research findings explore how women bicyclists must demand and negotiate public space; how their movement and activities are constrained in public space; how gender roles and social reproduction issues intersect with bicycling; and how social, quasi-advocacy group bicycle rides are used as a strategy, with mixed results, to address barriers to women bicyclists’ mobility.     

Troubling meanings of family and competing moral imperatives in the family lives of young people with a parent who is at the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a narrative study of young people with a parent who is at the end of life to examine how family lives are troubled by life-limiting parental illness. Young people struggled to reconcile the physical and emotional absence of family members with meanings of ‘family’; the extent to which young people could rely on family to ‘be there’ in these troubling circumstances was of practical, emotional and moral significance. Our discussion is situated in the context of an English end of life care policy predicated on the ideal of a good death as one that takes place at home accompanied by family members. We explore how the shift away from family as a site for nurturing children towards family as a space to care for the dying is experienced by young people, and consider how these competing moral imperatives are negotiated through relational practices of care.     

Political geographies of urban demarcation: Learning from Nepal's state-restructuring process

In this paper we use the case of Nepal to advance political geographic analyses of how, during moments of rupture, territory act as an important political technology in state restructuring, and how urban demarcation along with other territorial structures of the state will play a significant role in this process. Nepal has experienced more than three decades of state-restructuring characterized by consecutive political and constitutional crises, including close to ten years of violent conflict. Within the brief period between 2014 and 2017, more than 230 new municipalities were demarcated on top of the existing 58. In our analysis we unpack why and how the number of municipalities is quadrupled at that particular moment of time and how this is shaped by and have implications for re-configurations of Nepal's territorial structures. This is achieved through a historical analysis of how the state's politico-administrative system has been mapped, reasoned and challenged. The analysis is based on official documents, such as census data and reports, legislative acts, public debates and academic analyses of processes of administrative and political reforms and conflicts in Nepal since the early 1990s. It therefore engages with a rich literature on conflict, the post-conflict situation and the restructuring of the state. Based on our findings we argue that urban demarcation is an important part of a states' political technology complex, and warn against trends in studies of urbanization to question the analytical bearing of differentiating the rural and urban. Showing that Nepal's recent urban boundaries have been justified by the need to achieve a better geographical balance, we conclude by arguing for the need for studies of urban transformations that critically examine whether and how the new territorial structures in their implementation contribute to balance geographical and social inequalities.     

Pakistan,Uranium and the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1970–1980

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assisted Pakistan with exploring the front end of the fuel cycle. Drawing on new primary sources gathered from extensive fieldwork in Pakistan as well as the IAEA's archives, this article sheds new light on the changing direction and performance of the Pakistani nuclear program during the 1970s, focusing on the exploration of uranium. The analysis highlights the competing priorities faced by the IAEA at this time – specifically, how to handle the increasingly politicized balance between technology diffusion and non-proliferation – and how this affected the Agency's support for the nuclear program in Pakistan, as the program was secretly shifting away from nuclear energy toward a weapons project.     

Homeboys: uses of home by gay Australian men

In this article, I explore connections between space, the body and the nation by analyzing state-introduced leisure activities in a village in Indonesia. While leisure activities are voluntary and are more enjoyable than more formal nation-building activities, I investigate how they are politicized and intimately tied to the state's nation-building agenda. Focusing on national programs of volleyball, takro (an indigenous game played with a rattan ball), and Gerak Jalan (marching competitions), I examine how the state's national ideology has been translated into recreational programs that attempt to ‘improve’ the bodies of citizens and to inculcate national ideology in the citizenry. Through the creation of various recreational landscapes and programs, citizens are encouraged to spend their free time in particular pursuits that serve national goals. Finally, I discuss how the leisure activities introduced by the state are, despite hegemonic intentions, unevenly practiced and examine how citizens resist, ignore and renegotiate the intended meaning of the activities.     

Emergence of a region. Exploring the role of spatial planning in the emergence of high-tech region ELAt using assemblage and actor-network theory

ABSTRACT

Regions or regional development have not only gained importance in spatial planning, but also got fuzzy meanings. Originally regions refer to a specific geographical demarcated area, often with an inductive historic or cultural meaning. In the meantime, in our networked world, the concept also refers to transport regions based on models of daily urban systems, or functional regions based on distinctive urban or social functions. Within the post-industrial era, the concept also gained importance as economic regions. In this paper, we will explore how regional concepts emerge out of specific economic interest concerning technological innovation. We will focus on a cross-border municipal case, for example, the triangle Eindhoven–Leuven–Aachen. With the help of the assemblage and actor-network theory, we will show how the identity of regions is translated by evolving actor-networks, and how these actor-networks are influenced and adapted by those alternating regional identities themselves. From these insights, we will come up with some ideas and propositions how regional planning could play an important role within these co-evolving processes.     

The architecture of power: François Mitterrand’s Grands Travaux revisited 1

Building on earlier research, this paper proposes a more refined analysis of how the main decision‐making processes pertaining to the grands travaux were established in the very early stages. Informed by consultation of official archival sources to which access was obtained by special permission (dérogation), it shows the manner and extent of the personal intervention by François Mitterrand, and offers new insights into his attachment to the Grand Louvre project, which drove the wider programme of architectural and cultural projects. It shows how and why a set of disparate projects were packaged into a flagship policy, and sheds light on the conflicts of power within the machinery of government under the Fifth Republic, especially relating to cultural policy during the Lang years. It shows how the highly politicised context motivated Mitterrand’s drive to circumvent normal administrative processes in order to mark his presidency with a cultural stamp.     

Sir Edward Grey,France, and the Entente: How to Catch the Perfect Angler?

ABSTRACT

This article will focus on the nine-year relationship between British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and the French Ambassador at London Paul Cambon, principally during the years 1912 to 1914. It will show how the French perceived Sir Edward Grey himself, his foreign policy, and his understanding of the Entente. It will analyse the means by which Cambon in particular, and through him the French in general, sought to coax from the Foreign Secretary some form of Franco-British alliance. It will do so by analysing three things: first, what Paul Cambon hoped to obtain from Sir Edward Grey and how; second, the Anglo-German Haldane Mission in which Grey's manoeuvring got the better of Cambon; and third, the Grey-Cambon letters of November 1912, when Cambon got the better of Grey. More broadly the article might be seen as an example of how ambassadors seek to secure policies from the country to which they are accredited and how foreign ministers attempt to parry them.     

Intellectual Migration and Economic Thought: Central European Émigré Economists and the History of Modern Economics

Summary

This article examines the life and thought of Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor, two Hungarian-born British economists, to suggest how the personal background and émigré status of these economists changed their view of the British economy and the economic policy recommendations they put forward as high-profile government advisers in the post-1945 period. This article combines research on inter-war intellectual migration and the history of British economics and economic policy making after the Second World War. It shows how the large scale migration of Central European intellectuals to the English-speaking countries affected the academic, intellectual and cultural lives of the host countries; it also suggests how economics, a relatively young social science discipline, has been crucially enriched by the contributions of exiles from old Europe, and how the mainstream paradigm of modern economics, the so-called neoclassical synthesis, was the result of the cross-fertilisation of ideas facilitated by the physical movement of academics and thinkers.