Are You in This Country? How “Local” Social Relations Can Limit the “Globalisation” of Customer Services Supply Chains

Abstract: The relocation of thousands of call centre and back office jobs from the UK to subcontractors in India in the early 2000s led to extensive speculation that the “globalisation” and “jobs flight” of service work was underway. Yet as this article illustrates some call centre customer services do not easily transfer to different local, social and cultural contexts. Call centre operations are embedded in local social relations and taken for granted skills that are difficult to reproduce outside of the locality which has produced them. Nevertheless the spatial dispersal of work can be as much a political process as it is an economic one. This article, which follows the journey of 1000 call centre jobs from the UK to India, illuminates how subcontracting service work “offshore” can facilitate a transformation of the employment relation and an escape from a difficult to discipline labour force.     

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.     

Building a City For “The People”: The Politics of Alliance‐Building in the Sydney Green Ban Movement

How can we act to contest urban injustice? This article grapples with this question through an analysis of the green ban movement that emerged in Sydney in the 1970s. For a time, this unruly alliance of construction workers, resident activists, and progressive professionals powerfully enacted a radical right to the city, blocking a range of unjust and destructive “developments” worth billions of dollars and proposing alternative development plans in their place. Drawing on archival research, I demonstrate how the figure of “the people” was crucial to their action. The article examines the rights and the authority that was invested in “the people” by green ban activists, and traces the work of political subjectification through which “the people” was constructed. “The people” was not invoked as a simple majority or as a universal subject whose unity glossed over differences. Rather, in acting as/for “the people”, green ban activists produced a political subject able to challenge the claims of elected politicians, bureaucrats and developers to represent the interests of the city. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this construction of “the people” for urban politics today.     

State Discourses of Indigenous “Inclusion”: Identity and Representation in the Arctic

Arctic decision‐making processes are often praised for including Indigenous peoples. Yet, state practices of “inclusion” may also inadvertently delimit what can be meaningfully said from a stage already set for a highly specific role as “Arctic voices”. This paper draws on reflections offered by Norwegian and Icelandic state personnel on the meanings of Arctic statehood and identity, showing how often well‐meaning attempts to “include” may serve the includer more than the included—indeed, may serve to uphold the same power structures they seemingly seek to improve. In so doing, the paper contributes both to understandings of Arctic statecraft and to work seeking the “peopling” of geopolitical concepts such as the state. By focusing on the operation of dominant discourses, the paper argues that current prescribed performances of “inclusion” are not enough in a region marked by histories of dispossession, assimilation, and colonisation.     

“Peace is Our Only Shelter”: Questioning Domesticities of Militarization and White Privilege

Abstract: This paper traces how Los Angeles peace activists tried to make visible the grave domestic effects of Cold War militarization. Women Strike for Peace went beyond a focus on the productive relations between the state, military and industry captured by the term “military–industrial complex” to analyze how reproductive spaces were part of this complex. In opposing war, they challenged what I am calling militarized domesticities: how war‐making shapes the ‘home front’ and home as the spaces national security states claim to protect. I build on feminist antiracist intersectionality theories to situate the military–industrial complex per se within broader processes of the militarization of society and daily life. The questions become how do gendered processes of militarization—that work in conjunction with relations of white privilege—produce and connect differently situated “private” spaces or home places? How might strategies for dismantling the military–industrial complex emerge from the contradictions of these processes?     

“Mongrel City”: Cosmopolitan Neighbourliness in a Delhi Squatter Settlement

Abstract: This paper examines the construction of a “cosmopolitan neighbourliness” which emerges in a Delhi squatter settlement in the context of communal violence. Through interviews with over 80 inhabitants, I suggest that an openness to “others” in the settlement is produced in order to construct a home for oneself in an exclusionary city through a series of relational constructs—between the “cosmopolitan” city and the “parochial” village; between the “murderous” city and the “compassionate” slum; between the exclusionary urban public sphere and the “inclusive” neighbourhood sphere. The squatter settlement is internalised as a microcosm of a “mongrel city”, a place which through its set of oppositional constructs becomes inherently “urban”. “Cosmopolitan neighbourliness”, however, remains fragile and gendered. It is a continuous strategic practice that attempts to bridge across differences of caste and religion through gendered performances that avert and discourage communal violence even when the city becomes murderous.     

2. BOOTSTRAPPING,SELF‐BINDING,AND OTHER METAPHORS OF ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM

In Images of History, Richard Eldridge deploys the metaphor of “bootstrapping” to describe the possibility of a mutually constitutive interaction of historical understanding and reflection on political ideals outside of and beyond the notion of a completed theory or teleological development. Although “bootstrapping” does considerable work in the book, it remains relatively unthematized in itself. This article explores the concept of bootstrapping in both Eldridge's book and in a number of disciplines. In doing so, it aims to make three critical observations. First, while Eldridge rightly seeks to energize our sense of historical openness, the argument is usefully enriched by the adjacent field of political theory, where “boot‐strapping” is often paired with “self‐binding” to describe how self‐creating processes might be arrested and stabilized. Second, Eldridge's use focuses on individual dispositions, but the concept of “bootstrapping” points to the need to pursue understanding of collective processes of self‐institution. Third, when extended to the natural world, “bootstrapping” calls for scrutiny of the relationship between human self‐creation and nature as a site of emergence and self‐organizing phenomena.     

Urban Pacification and “Blitzes” in Contemporary Johannesburg

The term pacification is regularly used in urban scholarship as a euphemism for state violence and social control. However, this term is used loosely and is underexplored as a concept. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing recent critical theory on pacification, which argues that the term captures the combination of war and police power in the replication of capitalist order. This concept will then be applied to a case study of “blitzes”, a practice which became central to urban management in Johannesburg from the late 1990s. Originally, the word was used to refer to aggressive raids led by the police in “trouble” spots, but has since been expanded to include inspections on general services. Understood as pacification, blitzes reflect how the state is constantly engaged in a low‐intensity war against perceived “disorder”, which is intended to control and discipline spaces in South Africa's largest city.     

2. CONSTRUCTIONS OF “HOME,”“FRONT,” AND WOMEN'S MILITARY EMPLOYMENT IN FIRST‐WORLD‐WAR BRITAIN: A SPATIAL INTERPRETATION

In First‐World‐War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters.     

‘A NEW SEASON FOR PLANNING’: URBAN GARDENING AS INFORMAL PLANNING IN ROME

This article investigates the relationship between urban gardening and planning by building upon the results of field research on gardening initiatives in the city of Rome, Italy. The work is aimed at suggesting that, while often associated in geography and planning literature with urban informality practices (e.g. accidental city or self‐made urbanism), urban gardening actually presents the character of a distinctive form of people's interaction with urban space, here defined as “informal planning”. This includes practices that are intentionally put forward by local dwellers with the intention of urban space planning and organizing public life in the absence of legal definition, guidance and funds provided by public authorities or the private sector. Urban gardening cases in Rome exemplify the emergence of informal planning and show how, by questioning the counterplanning tradition that understands urban gardening as an antagonist spatial practice opposing institutional planning, informal planning can open up collaborative possibilities. A new mode of interaction between citizens' agency and the formal planning initiatives of local administration can lead to creative solutions to address some of the problems associated with the neoliberal transformation of the city space, most notably the decrease in public space and its deterioration.     

The Study of Local Public Economies: Multi‐organizational,Multi‐level Institutional Analysis and Development

One important extension of the IAD framework has been to the study of local public economies. These are multi‐organizational, multi‐level arrangements defined as the set of governmental jurisdictions, public and nonprofit agencies, and private firms that interact in various patterns to provide and produce public goods and services within a specific locality or region. Commonly, the localities or regions studied from this perspective have been U.S. metropolitan areas, often defined as a central city and its surrounding or adjoining county. Localities can be delineated, however, on various terms, and in the IAD framework, it is the geo‐physical nature of a locality that, in substantial part, drives the analysis. One of the strengths of the approach is its capacity to explain local variations in public organization as a function of the geo‐physical diversity of localities, while at the same time developing empirical generalizations and normative principles that apply across diverse regions. What, for example, might the organization and governance of a complex metropolitan area have in common with the organization and governance of a complex protected area, such as the greater Yellowstone eco‐region or the Adirondack Park? Construing both sorts of regions as local public economies can enhance our overall understanding of public organization at the same time that it permits a more nuanced understanding of diverse localities. Such work contributes to the ongoing IAD project of “understanding institutional diversity.”     

“Spreading the Wealth”: Justice Tom C. Clark's Wide‐ranging Efforts to Open the Doors of the Law Clerk Ranks

Associate Justice Tom C. Clark retired from the Supreme Court at the conclusion of its 1966 term to avoid even the appearance of impropriety when his son, Ramsey, became the U.S. Attorney General. “I believe it would be best for me to retire,” Clark wrote one well‐wisher, “Litigants have enough problems without having a father‐son psychology to face. And while there is no actual conflict the potential is there and the appearance of justice is as important and effective as the real thing.” ¹ Clark had served on the Court eighteen years, and he began his retirement with a three‐month, state‐sponsored goodwill trip around the world, which was cut short when he contracted hepatitis in Thailand.     

Exploring the Political Potential of the Local State: Building a Dialogue with Sheffield in the 1980s

This article explores the political potential of the local state through an engagement with the case of Sheffield City Council in the 1980s. The new municipalism movement has generated renewed interest in the “local” and “urban” as transformative projects. The local state holds a pivotal if problematic role in these debates, often seen as the decisive force facilitating or impeding transformation. In building a dialogue with 1980s Sheffield, we provide a less certain account of the local state's potential. Sheffield occupies an ambiguous position within and beyond traditional municipal labourism and therefore provides a potent example to explore tensions within municipalism between state and autonomist visions of politics. In Sheffield, radical intent turned into a more cautious governmental programme in the city, notwithstanding glimpses of political alternatives. The experience of those years provides insights on the contingencies of bringing movements and state politics together in what was then called “local socialism”.     

The production of emancipatory feminist spaces in a post-socialist context: organization of Ladyfest in Romania

Ladyfest – a Riot Grrrl feminist do-it-yourself festival – has been organized independently in cities around the world since the year 2000. The emancipatory spaces that activists at Ladyfest seek to cultivate through workshops, music, and art provide seeds of inspiration for transformative social change. The main strength of the festival is the capacity to strengthen networks. This article discusses how the idea for this festival arose in Olympia, Washington, expanded to other locations, and was later organized by young feminists in Romania. In 2005, young women in Timisoara organized the first such festival in their city with a community of women from both inside and outside of Romania, and held another festival in Bucharest in 2007. Retrospective interviews are used to unpack the meaning of such organizing in a post-socialist context with reflections on how feminism has changed in Romania over the past decade. Specifically, the analysis of this event offers insight on how the production of space can be used to catalyze interconnections between emancipatory feminist spaces, the mode of production, and flows of feminist knowledge and concepts.     

“Compassionate” Strategies of Managing Homelessness: Post‐Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco

Abstract: After almost 30 years of Federal retraction from anti‐poverty initiatives, many American cities have been left with the dual burden of intensified poverty and far fewer resources to combat the problem. At the same time, such devolution has afforded cities the authority to forge poverty policy at the local level, such that the familiar neoliberal imperatives of state retraction and the mobilization of territory for capitalist expansion are frequently tempered by more progressive political imperatives at the local scale. What has thus emerged is a deeply ambivalent policy landscape, of which “kinder and gentler” poverty management strategies are a central feature. Using the example of a recent homeless program in San Francisco, “Care Not Cash”, this paper argues that such poverty management strategies, while less punitive than their revanchist predecessors, nonetheless introduce a new set of exclusions to the service delivery system, many of which are obscured by the language of compassion. In order to illustrate those new exclusions, I describe the city's homeless geographies—the public spaces, shelters, service sites, and housing models—that have been produced and reconfigured according to a logic of managing homelessness through the provision of care.     

“Lachkabinett” und “großes Fest” der Physiker. Walter Grotrians “physikalischer Einakter” zu Max Plancks 80. Geburtstag

“Funhouse” and “Big Celebration” of the Physicists. Walter Grotrian's ?Physical One‐Act Play”? for Max Planck's 80th Birthday. On the occasion of Max Planck's 80th birthday on April 23, 1938, a “big celebration of the physicists” (großes Fest der Physiker) was celebrated at the Harnack‐House in Berlin. The festivities were organized by the German Physical Society. Part of the ceremony was a “Physical One‐act‐play” (Physikalischer Einakter) written by the Potsdam astrophysicist Walter Grotrian. The actors of the humorous play were chief protagonists in the development of quantum theory such as Debye, Sommerfeld and Heisenberg. In this essay we analyze Grotrian's drama against the background of both the festive event and the professional and social setting of the physicists. We argue that below the level of comedy a number of characteristic and normally unexpressed aspects of the epistemic culture of the German physics by the end of the nineteen‐thirties is treated in the play.     

“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control,Self‐valorisation,and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

There are growing concerns over current and future incarnations of routine work, based on the rise of technology and its perceived impact on skill requirements in the labour market. Drawing on Autonomist Marxist (AM) literature, the following article demonstrates how and why workers are likely to play a role in maintaining meaningful forms of work. Complimenting labour process research, which focuses on the role of worker “resistance” in the workplace, we develop a more nuanced perspective on worker agency and the human potential to create meaning through self‐governance in even the most unlikely service work encounters. Taking resilience and reworking agencies as subtle forms of “self‐valorisation”, we show how different spaces of routine work are mobilised for reproducing human connections and values in ways which act in opposition to management’s control and the evolution of unpleasant work environments.     

Material,Political, and Biopolitical Dimensions of “Waste” in California Water Law

California's state constitution prohibits the “wasteful” use of water; however, waste is subjective and context dependent. This paper considers political, biopolitical, and material dimensions of waste, focusing on the role of legal processes and institutions. The paper examines a case involving legal accusations of “waste and unreasonable use” of water by the Imperial Irrigation District in Imperial County, California. The determination that water was being “wasted” justified the transfer of water from agricultural to urban areas. However, defining these flows of water as a waste neglected water's complexity and relationality, and the enclosure of a “paracommons” threatens to bring about negative environmental and public health consequences. The paper shows that the project of discursively labeling certain material resource flows as waste and re‐allocating these resources to correct this moral and economic failure relies upon legal processes, and carries political and biopolitical implications.