The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.     

Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror

This article proposes the concept of the biometric border in order to signal a dual-faced phenomenon in the contemporary war on terror: the turn to scientific technologies and managerial expertise in the politics of border management; and the exercise of biopower such that the bodies of migrants and travellers themselves become sites of multiple encoded boundaries. Drawing on the US VISIT programme of border controls (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology), the article proposes three central themes of the politics of the biometric border. First, the use of risk profiling as a means of governing mobility within the war on terror, segregating ‘legitimate’ mobilities such as leisure and business, from ‘illegitimate’ mobilities such as terrorism and illegal immigration. Second, the representation of biometrics and the body, such that identity is assumed to be anchored as a source of prediction and prevention. Finally, the techniques of authorization that allow the surveillance of mobility to be practiced by private security firms and homeland security citizens alike. Throughout the article, I argue that, though the biometric border is becoming an almost ubiquitous frontier in the war on terror, it also contains ambivalent, antagonistic and undecidable moments that make it contestable.     

Chokepoint: Regulating US student mobility through biometrics

Many US public schools, struggling with perceived issues of safety and security, have installed a host of different biometric devices – vein scanners, automated fingerprint identification systems, iris scanners, GPS-enabled identification badges, and facial recognition software. Schools turn to these devices in hopes of securing school space by sorting and tracking students, visitors, and school staff based on their pre-determined risk profiles. As such, this article proposes that tracing these new forms of school security provides insight into how the politics and practices of biometric technologies are fundamentally geographical in nature. That is, biometric devices not only verify identity according to risk assessments, they also work to manage mobility by regulating where school bodies can go, when, and for what purposes. Moreover, this article analyzes how these risk profiling tactics, widely adopted by schools across the United States, necessarily borrow from the strategies used in sites of colonial occupation. Looking at schools in this way can help us plot how biometric bordering and resultant security decisions unfold at other sites of mobility beyond state (smart) borders, highways, toll booths, and ports of entry in order to formulate new “spaces of enclosure” (Amoore, Marmura, & Salter, 2008) and “dividing practices” (Nevins, 2002), thus bringing students into “closer proximity” to military relations of force through these “war-like architectures” (Amoore, 2009).     

Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)

This paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co‐constitutive.     

State power in blue

In this article I explore how geographers might go about studying the everyday contexts of police power, given specifically the emphasis today in political geography on the practice of state power. Rather than endorse police practice as a relatively accessible and straightforward realm for researchers, I emphasize instead the uneventful and sometimes disappearing aspects of police work which makes it hard to excavate and interrogate, especially for non-police. Reflecting on various fieldwork experiences, I argue that the basic methodological tools that geographers have at their disposal to bring down the ‘blue wall’ of police practices can do the opposite: produce a tentative mode of knowledge which grasps, qualitatively and quantitatively, at the problem of the social and force relations of policing. I conclude that rather than a fix to the cruddiness of police power, accepted qualitative and quantitative methodologies constitute the ‘blue wall’ of police practice.     

‘I am going,with or without you’: autonomy in Bolivian transnational migrations

Autonomy has often been seen as a precondition for achieving gender equality, yet feminist scholarship has been rather ambivalent towards it. In this article, I explore this ambivalence by drawing on the experiences of migrant women, particularly mothers, focusing on the ways in which they negotiated their mobility with their partners. By analysing women's experiences of migration within a context of multi-sited and longitudinal, itinerant ethnography, I historicise their life accounts and place them within a broader framework of social and economic structural changes. On this basis I explore the concept of autonomy, particularly in relation to the exercise of women's agency within a context of market-oriented neoliberal reforms. I also question the potential of women's autonomy for gender equality and argue that there are at least two reasons for feminist scholars to continue being ambivalent towards autonomy.     

Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo do Alemão

Activists and journalists in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro are using social media to intervene in the violence that shapes their communities. In this article I draw on critical urban and digital media theory to understand how militarized policing, the spatialization of race, and discourses of criminalization influence favela populations. I examine how these discursive and material violences are motivating residents to autoconstruct new digital communities. Through digital autoconstruction, journalists and activists are using social media technologies to safely direct mobility, to witness police violence, and to unsettle socio‐spatial imaginaries of endemic crime. As such, they are deploying digital practices to disrupt material, epistemological, and discursive mechanisms of social control. These actions show that digital technologies are always‐already embodied and take shape through material histories, such as those of racialized state violence. Journalists and activists in Complexo do Alemão ultimately demonstrate that targets of violence are not simply victims of digital and violent surveillance, but are active in creating new digital relationships of care across diverse scales, transforming these technologies in the process.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

Thai migrants in Singapore: state,intimacy and desire

In this article, I analyse Thai migration to Singapore, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2004–06) to discuss the experiences of male construction workers and female sex workers in negotiating heterosexuality during their temporary residence. I argue that these Thai migrants engage in transient heterosexual encounters as one of many calculated, strategic ways of negotiating their intimate identity and subjectivity in the survival circuits of this global city. Their transient sexual acts are intimate products of negotiated moves, which form a major part of their semi-anonymous, temporary life in a foreign land. The sexual practices of Thai migrant workers in Singapore, I argue, are best understood by taking the following factors into account: the host government's regulation and control of its migrant population; the foreign workers' economic and social situations of mobility as inscribed in their highly dynamic traveling biographies; and their rationalized willingness and desire to embrace transient sexual intimacies as part of their employment and/or struggling lives in the global city's survival circuits.     

‘A room of one's own’: the meaning of spatial autonomy for unmarried women in neoliberal South Korea

This article explores the experiences of single South Korean women in their late twenties to late thirties in their pursuit of an independent living space. Looking at the struggles of these women to acquire ‘a room of one's own’, I first argue that the process of their spatial independence reveals the problematic inherent in South Korea's heterosexually marriage-centered housing and loan-lending structure. Further, rather than simply portraying these women as victims of the structure, I argue that the dominant interpretation of spatial independence of single women inadvertently buttresses the ideal selfhood of the neoliberal labor market. Applying Foucault's theorization of the technologies of the self that are instrumental to liberal governmentality, and Marxist theories of labor and finance capital in late capitalism, this ethnographic study engages in a broad discussion of changes in subjectivity and structure that take place under conditions of neoliberalism. In contributing to discussions of neoliberalism, I show that a progressive liberal ethos is not innocent of the development of neoliberalism.     

The mobilities of forced displacement: commemorating Karelian evacuation in Finland

In this article I discuss the mobilities of forced displacement. I analyse the politics of mobility by connecting the multiple scales of experienced mobility with the representational and non-representational strategies of sense of place. The aim of this article is twofold: to illustrate the different collective cultural narratives of displacement, and the ontological bodily memories. Three narratives of Karelian displacement are discussed. To capture the bodily memories, I also apply the philosopher Jacques Derrida's (1995) ideas on khora. Khora originates in Plato's Timaeus. Derrida's one interpretation of khora is a half-way-place, which is midway between space and time. I argue that khora as a non-topological concept deepens the understanding of existential place relations and also provides a fresh conceptual basis for the analysis of non-representational aspects of experiential place. Empirically, I focus on the commemoration of Karelian evacuation in Finland. I argue that the festivity called the Trail of the Displaced consists of several culturally representational and embodied non-representational mobilities which explain the complexities of spatial belonging among displaced communities.     

Policing authoritarian neoliberalism in South London

In pointing out the exclusionary and nondemocratic reconceptualization of states following the financial and Eurozone crises, research by geographers and critical political economists on authoritarian neoliberalism (AN) has shed light on key state transformations. Exploring the criminalization of council estates and the policing of three austerity-ridden south London districts, this article contributes to efforts to expand the concept of AN further by centering questions of violence and physical state power in the form of discourses and practices of (criminal) punishment and policing. Building on qualitative work with local young people and interviews with former police officers, community leaders and activists, I demonstrate the spatial dimension of AN and the role of policing logic and mechanisms for its administration in south London. I argue that through post-crisis austerity measures and long-term mechanisms of criminalization, young people perceive their home neighborhoods as insecure and alter how they navigate them. Further, I show that spaces of inclusion and welfare, such as social housing estates and schools, have been reimagined as sites of exclusion and punishment, often administered by police.     

The railway panopticon: State formation,carceral power,and everyday policing in the late-nineteenth-century train station

Historical scholarship on the formation of the state in the United States has focused on the national and state governments and has searched for state power in courtrooms, barracks, and legislative chambers. This article reveals the growth of municipal state power in an unlikely place: the large urban train station, a crucial transportation chokepoint. Using nineteenth-century St. Louis as my primary example, I focus on how both police and non-state actors took advantage of an emergent place of constricted mobility. Rather than imprison people to punish criminality, subalterns caught in the railway panopticon were disciplined according to then-prevailing gender and racial norms. I argue that the intersection of networks there created a place where local police and their allies could surveil, check, and potentially stop more people than in any other place in the urban landscape. This article refocuses the history of state building on a more prosaic location than the halls of government and traces the history of police as enforcers of the racial norms and patriarchal order. Central railway stations became, unintentionally, key sites of state formation and carceral power. This research reveals the spatial heterogeneity of the state's strength, provides a genealogy for contemporary racially inequitable policing, and creates a framework to investigate other places where state and non-state actors can exercise particular power over everyday people.     

Individual Accessibility Revisited: Implications for Geographical Analysis in the Twenty‐first Century

Analytical methods for evaluating accessibility have been based on a spatial logic through which the impedance of distance shapes mobility and urban form through processes of locational and travel decision making. These methods are not suitable for understanding individual experiences because of recent changes in the processes underlying contemporary urbanism and the increasing importance of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in people's daily lives. In this paper we argue that analysis of individual accessibility can no longer ignore the complexities and opportunities brought forth by these changes. Further, we argue that the effect of distance on the spatial structure of contemporary cities and human spatial behavior has become much more complicated than what has been conceived in conventional urban models and concepts of accessibility. We suggest that the methods and measures formulated around the mid‐twentieth century are becoming increasingly inadequate for grappling with the complex relationships among urban form, mobility, and individual accessibility. We consider some new possibilities for modeling individual accessibility and their implications for geographical analysis in the twenty‐first century.     

‘Just looking’: domestic workers' consumption practices and a latent geography of Beijing

The post-socialist Chinese city has been an important site to explore the formation of modernity in its everyday shape and manifestations. A common way of understanding urban experiences is through the prism of consumption. Rural migrants in the city cannot compare with urban residents in terms of their consumption level, but they are seen to be equally enthusiastic in partaking in consumption, and their identities are also believed to be (re)shaped by consumption practices. Drawing on several years' extensive ethnographic research in Beijing, this article suggests that these scenarios cannot adequately account for the diversity and complexity of rural migrants' experience in the consuming city. In this article, I put forward a methodological argument for considering the lived spatiality of ethnographic subjects in conceiving and considering consumption. Then, through an investigation of how migrant domestic workers use urban spaces, I consider the ‘dialectic of freedom and constraint’ which marks their agency and their individual choices and decisions. Finally, I explore the social production of space by considering migrant domestic workers' ‘subversive’ behaviours within rather than in opposition to the capitalist commercial logic and space. This discussion demonstrates that consumption practices are at the same time spatial practices, and despite the many obstacles and constraints, migrant domestic workers are actively availing themselves of the opportunities that the city has to offer. This creative process is crucial if we are to gain a new and more nuanced understanding of consumption as a social practice. I further argue that it is also a process by which rural migrants hold on to their sense of dignity and self-respect in an environment of exclusion and discrimination.     

MAPPING CHILDREN'S POLITICS: SPATIAL STORIES,DIALOGIC RELATIONS AND POLITICAL FORMATION

This article confronts a persistent challenge in research on children's geographies and politics: the difficulty of recognizing forms of political agency and practice that by definition fall outside of existing political theory. Children are effectively “always already” positioned outside most of the structures and ideals of modernist democratic theory, such as the public sphere and abstracted notions of communicative action or “rational” speech. Recent emphases on embodied tactics of everyday life have offered important ways to recognize children's political agency and practice. However, we argue here that a focus on spatial practices and critical knowledge alone cannot capture the full range of children's politics, and show how representational and dialogic practices remain a critical element of their politics in everyday life. Drawing on de Certeau's notion of spatial stories, and Bakhtin's concept of dialogic relations, we argue that children's representations and dialogues comprise a significant space of their political agency and formation, in which they can make and negotiate social meanings, subjectivities, and relationships. We develop these arguments with evidence from an after‐school activity programme we conducted with 10–13 year olds in Seattle, Washington, in which participants explored, mapped, wrote and spoke about the spaces and experiences of their everyday lives. Within these practices, children negotiate autonomy and self‐determination, and forward ideas, representations, and expressions of agreement or disagreement that are critical to their formation as political actors.     

Bipolar antagonism and multipolar coexistence: framing difference and shaping fear in two Caribbean cities

This article proposes a new approach to urban geographies of fear, focusing on the connection between fear and cultural understandings and representations of difference. Much of the existing work on the relationship between fear, urban space, and social difference tends to take social difference as more or less given. In this article, we argue that how differences (such as ethnic, political or class differences) are framed has strong implications for geographies of fear. The article suggests that dualistic and nondualistic framings of difference influence levels of fear and that this becomes visible in the use and perceptions of urban space, and in the built environment through the erection of physical barriers. These spatial factors, as they limit mobility and interaction, tend to reproduce the specific framing of difference. Two discursive modes of representing difference are discussed. The first, ‘bipolar antagonism’, is based on a dualist rhetoric of irreconcilable opposites. This is contrasted with ‘multipolar co-existence’, in which social categories are understood as multiple or hybrid, with flexible or fluid boundaries, and as not necessarily antagonistic. This argument is elaborated through a comparative analysis of social–cultural and spatial processes in two Caribbean cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and Paramaribo, Suriname.     

'Gendered Exclusions': women's fear of violence and changing relations to space

This paper examines how women's fear of violence is realised as spatial exclusions. Quantitative surveys on fear are used to show the number of women who are afraid, and the nature of the most frightening places. However, it is argued that quantitative surveys are of limited value in approaching the mental and social processes behind fear and in understanding the fear-related production of space. Qualitative research methods are used to explain the matter in more depth. It may be argued that fear is a consequence of women's unequal status, but it also contributes to perpetuating gendered inequalities. The paper reveals multiple experiences that change women's relations to space. Experiences and attempts at violence, and incidents of sexual harassment produce a space from which women are excluded on account of their gender. Social and emotional aspects, such as increased feelings of vulnerability, lack of social support, and a feeling of not having control over what is happening to oneself, have spatial consequences. These feelings often increase along with ageing, injuring, bereavement or moving to another place, as well as pregnancy and motherhood. I argue that the spatial exclusions in women's lives are a reflection of gendered power relations. Women's subjective feelings contribute to the intersubjective power-related process of producing space. Urban space is produced by gender relations, and reproduced in those everyday practices where women do not-or dare not-have a choice over their own spatial behaviour.     

Collapsing contexts: social networking technologies in young people’s nightlife

In the latest discussions of children and young people’s new geographies of leisure and pleasure, one controversial issue has been how digital technologies co-produce and reconfigure young people’s everyday worlds. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with 40 young people who regularly use social networking technologies in their nightlife experiences in Zurich and Lausanne, two nightlife hubs in Switzerland. Informed by Danah Boyd’s concepts of ‘collapsing contexts’ and ‘imagined audiences’, this article enables a critical engagement with young people’s emerging understanding of their nightlife contexts, which are increasingly permeated by networking technologies. I show how social networking spaces facilitate the coming together, or collapse, of various social contexts which induce young people to imagine multiple audiences, including authority figures, in their nightlife practices. These collapsing contexts and imagined audiences, I argue, present new perspectives on debates about control and surveillance in young people’s contemporary urban nightlife.