Running road races as transgressive event mobilities

Running is a unique form of mobility because while it involves traveling over distance, it is not usually done as a means of transportation. Although running can and does take place almost anywhere, bringing together hundreds or thousands of runners at a time via an event known as a road race enables a different, transgressive occupation of space that no one runner could accomplish on his or her own. In this paper, based on participant observation, I argue that the transgressive but sanctioned nature of the mobilities that road races allow, by temporarily taking over a space devoted to motorized vehicles and turning it into a space for pedestrians, defines these events as unique moments that are only possible through the collective nature of this usually solitary form of mobility and that allow for the pleasure of being transgressive without the risks that transgression normally entails. The paper further argues for considering ‘event mobilities’ as more than traveling in order to participate in an event, because some kinds of mobility are only possible in the context of an event.     

Rethinking State-Society Relations in Vietnam: The Case of Business Associations in Ho Chi Minh City

The growing private sector in the post-reform Vietnamese economy and its new forms of mobilisation have led to newly emergent social forces that have shaped internal state agendas and political deliberations. With a view to exploring the nature of institutional change in Vietnam, I argue that business associations have played a crucial intermediary role between the state and the private sector over past decades. These associations and the spaces of governance that they constitute are neither characteristic of autonomous actors as suggested by liberal theory nor a form of state corporatism. This paper adopts the “state-in-society” approach, which contends that the state and society should be considered through new governance spaces within the state. These spaces create institutional mechanisms for interaction between the government and business, and provide a framework for deliberative engagement between state and non-state actors. This framework will be tested through an examination of associations of small and medium enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City and their connections to the city authorities. I argue that business associations will be accommodated by the state and will coalesce with existing bureaucratic interests. This proposition contributes to the new research agenda that applies the state-in-society approach to post-socialist institutions.     

A neoliberal nexus: Economy,security and the biopolitics of citizenship on the border

In this paper I explore what the development of an expedited border-crossing program called NEXUS reveals about the changing political geography of citizenship in contemporary North America. Developed after 9/11 as a high-tech solution to competing demands for both heightened border security and ongoing cross-border business movement, NEXUS and other so-called Smart Border programs exemplify how a business class civil citizenship has been extended across transnational space at the very same time as economic liberalization and national securitization have curtailed citizenship for others. The biopolitical production of this privileged business class citizenship is explored vis-à-vis the macroscale entrenchment of neoliberal policy through NAFTA and the microscale production of entrepreneurial selfhood. By examining how this transnational privileging of business class rights has happened in an American context of exclusionary nationalism, the paper also explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the development of new spaces of exception defined by exclusion from civil rights. Examples of such exclusion include ‘expedited removal’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’, two forms of American anti-immigrant control that have been developed in concert with expedited border-crossing programs. Examining these forms of expedited exclusion and comparing the carceral cosmopolitanism they produce with the soft cosmopolitanism of the NEXUS lane, the paper ends by offering an argument about the relationship between the neoliberal privileging of transnational mobility rights and its exclusionary counterparts.     

New Frontiers of Philanthro‐capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism

Digital technologies that allow large numbers of laypeople to contribute to humanitarian action facilitate the deepening adoption and adaptation of private‐sector logics and rationalities in humanitarianism. This is increasingly taking place through philanthro‐capitalism, a process in which philanthropy and humanitarianism are made central to business models. Key to this transformation is the way private businesses find supporting “digital humanitarian” organisations such as Standby Task Force to be amenable to their capital accumulation imperatives. Private‐sector institutions channel feelings of closeness to aid recipients that digital humanitarian technologies enable, in order to legitimise their claims to “help” the recipients. This has ultimately led to humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulating capitalist logics in ways that reflect the new digital humanitarian avenues of entry. In this article, I characterise this process by drawing out three capitalist logics that humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulate in the context of digital humanitarianism, in an emergent form of philanthro‐capitalism. Specifically, I argue that branding, efficiency, and bottom lines take altered forms in this context, in part being de‐politicised as a necessary condition for their adoption. This de‐politicisation involves normalising these logics by framing social and political problems as technical in nature and thus both beyond critique and amenable to digital humanitarian “solutions”. I take this line of argumentation to then re‐politicise each of these logics and the capitalist relations that they entail.     

The work that parks do: towards an urban environmentality

Cities today are typically framed as sites of capitalist development, while the urban park is theorized as an indirect response to the emerging hegemony of industrial production in the nineteenth century. Yet, this historical framing tells us little about the process through which our notions of ‘the city’ and of ‘nature’ are produced, or how this knowledge affects the formation of urban people's identities. The discursive formation of the capitalist city can be traced to specific historical moments, one of which is the construction of urban parks during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, which I argue was instrumental in producing a new knowledge of the capitalist city by creating a boundary between the social space of the city and the natural space of the park. Using Philadelphia's Fairmount Park as a case study, I draw on archival photographs and annual park commission reports to explore the formation of park subjects during this period and shed light on diverse economic practices that were once widespread in and around the city but whose erasure was ultimately a prerequisite for the successful formation of an urban discourse organized around the construction of the city/nature boundary.     

Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature

Abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the “dirty” history and geography of enclosure, as both an instance of primitive accumulation and a production of nature. Specifically, I reconsider the English enclosures as a struggle over the land‐use designation of “waste”. Whereas both open fields and common waste lands were an essential and valuable part of the common right economy, advocates of enclosure came to see these same lands as wasted commons; lands that were potentially, but not yet, improved. This dialectic of waste and potential permeates the fabric of the nature produced through enclosure, which I name terra economica. Typically, this terrain has been understood as a passive repository of free resources, extending across absolute space. While such accounts consider the making of nature into a universal means of production, it is equally important to consider the ways in which nature is produced as a universal condition of production.     

Tom's Tambu House: Spacing,Status and Sacredness in South Malakula,Vanuatu

This paper is based on video footage I filmed in South Malakula in April 1996. It explores the case of Tom Moses, a man who claims to speak with God. He has constructed a house on the outskirts of Milip village which he has declared tambu, or taboo/sacred. Around it he envisions a new living space, following directions given to him from God. I argue that Tom's enterprise can be understood in terms of a spacing—status—sacredness nexus. This nexus is grounded in a pre-Christian Malakulan sociality revolving around men's houses, ancestral worship and grade-taking rituals. This takes place with a lived Christianity which in many contexts is expressed as a departure from kastom. As such, I argue that this ‘spatial’ analysis can help us understand dimensions of local human relationships which purely discursive analyses sometimes eclipse.     

Piot,Personhood, Place and Mobility in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs.     

Remembrance of Things Passed: Memory,Body and the Politics of Feasting in New Ireland,Papua New Guinea1

This paper explores the connection between body and memory for the people of the Lelet Plateau of central New Ireland. Through an examination of the processes by which memories of mortuary feasts are created and circulated, I draw attention to the embodied nature of memory as a central facet in the politics of feasting. The approach taken here differs from other prevailing approaches to the body and memory in its exploration of the ways in which memories are created through and within the body, rather than seeing the body, or things representing the body, as signs that are utilised for remembering. In particular, I examine the forms of sorcery which target the participants' bodies, making them experience diarrhoea as a mnemonic process. It is through this that a significant memory of the feast is created, one which stands out notably from numerous other memories, and is the means by which remembrance of the event is transformed into fame for the host.     

Mobile Media as New Forms of Spatialization

Abstract

The physical space has historically served as an important support for human expression. However, the production of location-based information has been consciously used as means of social control by the hegemonic power, which decides what can be publicly displayed, and what should be hidden. With the development of mobile media, space has gained new dimensions, resulting in a sort of hybrid space where digital information overlays the physical space revealing what was previous unknown about a place. As mobile devices become increasingly present in our society, they should be understood as a social interface to our experience of space, serving not only as means to consume information, but also tools for communication. This paper discuss the current mobile media practices, such as mapping, urban electronic annotations, location-based mobile games, and smart mobs, which creates opportunities for new forms of human expression, reappropriations of space, and contestation of hegemonic power.     

传统村落神圣空间形态、当代价值及其研究范式再认识

神圣空间是中国传统村落重要的空间形态，但理论界对神圣空间时有“存续论”和“废弃论”的学术争议，对其内涵、类型、流动性发展趋势以及新的研究范式也缺乏深入解读，这对人们深入认知传统村落神圣空间带来了困惑和迷茫。通过文献梳理，认为：神圣空间的内涵是“空间+意义”的综合。在传统村落中空间形态有两类，一是具有明显可观察性的宗教信仰性神圣空间，二是一切不可让渡或不可化约的人文意义的神圣空间。在内容研究方面，学术界对第一类型的神圣空间研究着墨较多，但研究特点表现在对神圣空间“本身”进行阐释。对第二类型神圣空间建构性的解读属于新兴研究类型，研究主要将传统村落神圣空间看作是社会建构的过程和动态性实践的产物。在流动性视角下，学术界更注重对传统村落神圣空间与流动性互动产生的社会经济、文化和环境之间建构和生产的研究，认为“神圣空间作为文本”更符合新的社会事实及其推动下的研究议题。不同认知范式具有差异性，相互补充是人们整体认知传统村落神圣空间的基础，也对乡村振兴实践中传统村落文化的整理、挖掘以及塑造社会经济发展具有重要指引。     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

Environing technologies: a theory of making environment

ABSTRACT

The central proposal of this article is that environing technologies shape and structure the way in which nature becomes environment, and as such used, perceived and understood. The argument builds on the understanding that environment is the result of human intervention. Technology is here understood broadly as a terraforming practise, materially and conceptually. We suggest that the compound environing technologies enable us to see environmental change on multiple scales and in new registers. That technologies alter the physical world is not new; our contribution focuses on the conceptual, epistemological, economic and emotional appreciation of systems and aggregates of technologies that is part and parcel of material change. The environing technologies that enable such articulation and comprehension hold potential in the future transformation that our societies need to undergo to overcome the crisis of environment and climate.     

Being(s) in relation at home: socio-natures of patio ‘gardens’ in Managua,Nicaragua

Human–nature relations of home have been gaining more attention in geography, especially in the study of gardens. This article contributes to this growing literature, but in contrast to much research, it examines human–nature relations in the patios (garden) of homes in a marginalized barrio (slum) of Managua, Nicaragua. I suggest that the human–nature relations in these patios need to be understood differently than those in North American and European gardens. Based on research carried out in Managua, I argue that such relations are at the centre of everyday domestic activities and are critical in producing home as a liveable space in the city. The article draws on feminist geographic understandings of home and current work around human–environment relations, and identifies three different sets of socio-ecological relations: corporeal, aesthetic and economic. It argues that these three different relations between humans and the plants and trees in their patios are critical in the imaginaries around home and in the production of habitable spaces in cities, as well as to our understanding of urban natures.     

‘That street is taking us to home’: young children’s photographs of public spaces

ABSTRACT

Children’s identities constitute and are constituted by the everyday spaces they inhabit. Though there are innumerable accounts of what adults think public spaces like subways and city streets mean to children, fewer recorded accounts exist from young children themselves (Faulkner and Zolkos 2016, “Introduction.” In Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity, ix–xvii. Lexington: Lanham.). In this work I explored 2- – 5-year-old children’s conceptions of public space through the photographs they took and the narratives they told in and around those images. I focused on how children imaged their spaces, how their narrative fragments added layers of story to the images’ contents, and how their photographic performances acted as ‘visual voice’ (Burke 2005, “‘Play in Focus’: Children Researching Their Own Spaces and Places for Play.” Children Youth and Environments 15 (1): 27–53.), highlighting for us how they see themselves and their positions within the larger urban environment. The young children’s photographs depicted their growing autonomy and mobility within an urban context, attunements to non-human forms of the city, and knowledge of what it means to live in their communities.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Cathedrals of the surf zone: regulating access to a space of spirituality

This paper explores the place of the surfed wave as not simply a site of human–nature relations, but also as a space of spirituality. Surfing is widely considered as a sport of hedonism and risk, but this paper suggests it can also be understood as a means to experience the transcendent. By first introducing the surf zone as a space of liminality and transformation, this paper illustrates how the surfed wave is a cathedral for surfers' ‘aquatic nature religion’ (Taylor, B. (2007a) Focus introduction. Aquatic nature religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (4): 863–874; Taylor, B. (2007b) Surfing into spirituality and a new, aquatic nature religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 75 (4): 923–951). Due to the religious nature of the surfed wave, the paper suggests that the informal (b)orders surfers use to regulate the surf zone—understood here as the codes of surfer-provenance and surfer-positioning—do not simply regulate access to the surf zone in a territorial sense, but also they effectively regulate access to the experience of relational spirituality.     

Between crime and colony: interrogating (im)mobilities aboard the convict ship

Recent literature in carceral geography has attended to the importance of mobilities in interrogating the experience and control of spaces of imprisonment, detention and confinement. Scholars have explored the paradoxical nature of incarcerated experience as individuals oscillate between moments of fixity and motion as they are transported to/from carceral environments. This paper draws upon the convict ship – an example yet to gain attention within these emerging discussions – which is both an exemplar of this paradox and a lens through which to complicate understandings of carceral (im)mobilities. The ship is a space of macro-movement from point A to B, whilst simultaneously a site of apparent confinement for those aboard who are unable to move beyond its physical parameters. Yet, we contend that all manner of mobilities permeate the internal space of the ship. Accordingly, we challenge the binary thinking that separates moments of fixity from motion and explore the constituent parts that shape movement. In paying attention to movements in motion on the ship, we argue that studies of carceral mobility must attend to both methods of moving in the space between points A and B; as micro, embodied and intimate (im)mobilities are also played out within large-scale regimes of movement.