Articulating corruption of infrastructural upgrading projects in Rio de Janeiro

Residents of Brazilian low-income communities have long called actions of the state “corrupt,” rhetoric that has arguably intensified in the wake of large-scale infrastructural upgrading decisions. Inspired by a new wave of critical corruption studies, in this paper I ask: how is infrastructural upgrading a key site of politics and political understandings of the state for residents in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro? How do discourses about corrupt decision-making mechanisms and money appropriation produce common sense notions of how the political system operates? And what work do these narratives do for demonstrating agency of the people living in Complexo? In answering these questions I contribute to an emerging conjunctural research agenda in global urban and corruption studies. I draw on the dual notion of articulation as central to the conjuncture: how the conjoining of political forces alongside discursive enunciations are crucial to crafting hegemonies of corruption and understandings of political and civil society. I add to this Gramscian understanding of the conjuncture a focus on how residents constitute themselves as agential subjects through discourses of corruption. By focusing on the brewing frustrations of Complexo residents, the paper argues that articulations of corruption materialized an articulated political bloc against which community members could express frustration but also, importantly, constituted a civil society demonstrating a constrained agency.     

Peace through the lens of human rights: Mapping spaces of peace in the advocacy of Colombian human rights defenders

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 4. August 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 4 Front cover WORLD CUP 2014 AND THE MILITARIZATION OF FAVELAS On the day of the World Cup final, Pamela, a member of the Occupy Alemão (Ocupa Alemão) collective, paints banners for a protest in Saens Peña square, less than a mile from where Argentina lost to Germany in Maracanã Stadium. In the run‐up to the two mega‐events – the World Cup 2014 and the Olympic Games 2016 – the Brazilian government has taken unprecedented security measures that effectively militarized and locked down the favelas. Widespread protest movements erupted that drew media attention to the disproportionate government expenditures on these spectacles, the corruption and their undesirable impact on the poor and the marginalized. ‘The party in the stadium isn't worth the tears in the favela’: mega‐events such as these do not have the same impact in every host society. In this issue, Charlotte Livingstone narrates the ups and downs during her fieldwork in the favelas. Back cover ROTATING CREDIT ASSOCIATIONS: DO WE NEED BANKS? The back cover photo shows women in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, engaged in an arisan, a rotating credit association, in 1983. When Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother, arrived in Jakarta in 1967 with the aim of researching microfinance in Indonesia, it was one of the local arisan she immediately joined. One woman is paying in while another keeps the records. Based on a lottery, each member receives a payout in turn. Arisan enable cash flow control and perform the savings and loan functions we tend to associate with banks and building societies, facilitating the purchase of almost anything ranging from a house, a motorbike to small items. The system is based on trust, where its members need to commit themselves to paying in until the last members have drawn their capital. Arisan serve many other roles too, and may be held purely for social reasons, facilitating regular meeting among family members, neighbours, housemates or workmates. Children participate in arisan early, learning how to collaborate harmoniously (gotong rojong) for small necessities such as pens and stationery. Anthropologists have long understood banks as institutions embedded within social relations. In this issue, Shirley Ardener addresses Archbishop Welby's call for the Anglican Church to outcompete payday loan companies charging excessive rates of interest at this time of austere family finances. She reminds us that anthropologists have long studied vernacular small‐scale banking systems embedded in the communities they study. Based on mutual trust, rates of interest here, if charged at all, are never as excessive as today's payday loan companies, which may exceed 5,000 per cent per annum.     

Translocalising and Relocalising Antifascist Struggles: From #KämpaShowan to #KämpaMalmö

This article explores the translocal hybrid activism surrounding two demonstrations triggered by a violent altercation between antifascists and neo‐Nazis in Malmö in March 2014. It maps the appearance and spread of the hashtag that underpinned this activism: #KämpaShowan. It also considers how the hashtag was articulated, adopted and adapted by different activists in ways that led to the emergence of a new hashtag: #KämpaMalmö. It shows how the action frames foregrounded by #KämpaShowan stimulated its translocal diffusion but were also criticised by local activists who in turn tried to relocalise the energy behind the hashtag and shift its associated action frames. The article thus reveals how antifascist activists might respond to far‐right violence with social media tactics that attract broader publics and break the isolation often caused by more confrontational street politics. It also highlights how these tactics can stretch across geographical scales involving processes of relocalisation as much as translocalisation.     

“Rousers of the Rabble” in the New Mexico Land Grant War: La Alianza Federal De Mercedes and the Violence of the State

Abstract: This paper examines the patterns of state‐sponsored and state‐tolerated violence directed at a social movement organization in New Mexico known as La Alianza Federal de Mercedes during the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1960s, Alianza mobilized a broad‐based movement of Chicano activists and Hispano land grant communities to advocate the return of lands they claimed had been stolen following the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. As a result, its leaders and many of its members became targets of law enforcement surveillance programs and counterintelligence operations. In this paper I examine the patterns of surveillance and physical violence directed at Alianza members. Confronted by Alianza's challenge to racial inequality and economic injustice, the state construed Alianza as a generalized, and racialized, threat to social order that required in response the use of coercive control and physical violence.     

Contesting coal and climate change using scale: emergent topologies in the Adani mine controversy

The Adani mine controversy is a significant new space of contestation in conflicts over coal mining and climate change in Australia. Proposed as one of the largest new coal mines in the world, the Adani (or “Carmichael”) mine has become a flashpoint between two broad coalitions—the pro‐mine coalition, consisting of governments, elements of the media, and mining interests, and the anti‐mine coalition, consisting of community groups, environmental non‐government organisations, activists, Indigenous communities, and farmers. Based on thematic analysis of news media articles and interviews with environmental actors in the Adani mine controversy, this article demonstrates how each coalition employs discursive scale frames and counter‐scale frames to represent and contest the controversy. We find that the pro‐mine coalition remains situated within a topographical spatiality, with a backwards oriented temporality, that obscures emergent topologies from their view. In contrast, while retaining capacity for operating within traditional scalar topographies, the anti‐mine coalition is more adept at negotiating topologies that increasingly define our social worlds. It is oriented towards a deep future horizon in which the Adani mine controversy represents an opportunity to reshape existing social and political orders. The sorts of scalar tactics documented here are likely at work in other resource extraction controversies, highlighting the need to attend to how scale may be being used to obscure irrationalities and injustices in extraction projects, and the potential for counter‐scale frames to help destabilise fossil fuel regimes.     

Hijacking the Narrative: The First World Forum on Natural Capital, #natcap13, and Radical Dissent

The first World Forum on Natural Capital (WFNC) was an important moment in the production of “valued” nature. It brought together bankers, CEOs, and business elites to promote financialized environmental accounting as a solution to ecosystem degradation. Anti‐capitalist activists, however, opposed the further intrusion of economic logic to environmental decision‐making and resisted its progression. While WFNC organizers were able to advance the concept of “natural capital” through traditional (print and web 1.0) media, they struggled to control the social media narrative. Digital activists were able to challenge the official narrative on Twitter and compel organizers to address the associated social and environmental justice concerns. As such, social media produced the conditions for both abstracting nature into value‐bearing commodities and, simultaneously, resisting such abstraction. Drawing on theories of counterpublic organization, public spheres of deliberation, and agonistic confrontation, this paper explores the discursive co‐production of nature in a new digitally mediated world.     

Discipline and Devolution: Constructions of Poverty, Race, and Criminality in the Politics of Rural Prison Development

Abstract:  The soaring expansion of the US prison population is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival and interview research in rural communities in the Northwestern states of Idaho and Montana, this paper explores how cultural productions of poverty and exclusion intersect with rural prison development. I examine how representations of poverty and criminality are entangled with processes of economic restructuring and the localization of economic development and social welfare. I explore the ways in which the rural prison geography of the Northwest is linked to the material and discursive construction of those in poverty and how these narratives are produced through local relations of race, ethnicity, and class. I suggest that the mobilization of these constructions legitimates rural prison expansion, increasingly punitive social and criminal justice policies, and the retrenchment of racialized and classed inequality. Further, I argue that these discursive imaginations of the poor work to obscure the central dynamics producing poverty under the neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance.     

A feminist perspective on digital geographies: activism,affect and emotion,and gendered human-technology relations in Australia

Feminist digital geographies are an important part of the digital turn currently underway in geographic scholarship. At the same time, feminist movements are taking advantage of, and emerging from, digital spaces. This article considers how the digital intersects with gender and what opportunities the digital affords feminist movements. We do so by drawing on a case study of feminist activism within Destroy the Joint (DTJ), an online social media activist group, and build a qualitative analysis of a dynamic, reflexive digital space. Qualitative studies of emotion, affect and the power of digital geographies, including social media spaces populated by groups like DTJ, demonstrate how cultural and social practices are changing along with technologies. This research does not draw on a techno-deterministic approach to digital geographies but forwards a feminist perspective that critically engages with the constraints and possibilities of the complex, paradoxical and contingent within the digital.     

Crafting the future: envisioning space exploration in post-war Britain

Prior to the launch of Sputnik, knowledge about human space travel was widely circulated by spaceflight proponents, scientists and news producers in mainstream culture through print, film and broadcast media and displayed in public sites such as museums and public exhibition spaces. Focusing on the timeframe 1947–1953, this article examines how key members of the British Interplanetary Society used a combination of craft skills, graphical technologies, and communication media to create pictures and models to support rhetorical claims that spaceflight and astronautics are legitimate fields of scientific research and space travel could and should be achieved in the near future. Production and circulation of factual knowledge about space travel was not confined to material and discursive practices in established fields such as astronomy and aeronautical engineering. Actors from other professional, non-professional, and social groups contributed to the realization of future spaceflight as an heterogeneous cultural endeavor or astroculture encompassing an array of technical processes, artifacts, craft skills, and scientific knowledge.     

Strange powers: Conservation,science, and transparency in an indigenous political project (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador are important players within global movements for indigenous rights and biodiversity conservation. Scholars, non‐governmental organizations, and donor agencies laud their efforts to protect more than 430,000 hectares of forestland from an expanding colonization front, the transnational petroleum industry, and the spillover of violence from the Colombian civil war and drug trade. In this article, I examine how a set of discourses surrounding indigenous politics enable and constrain Cofán projects. In the context of an ethnographic account of Cofán political practice, I differentiate between the ‘expressive’, ‘instrumental’, and ‘obstructive’ nature of ‘conservation’, ‘science’, and ‘transparency’, respectively. More specifically, I develop three arguments: first, that the discourse of conservation serves to express deeply held conceptions of the ties between Cofán culture, Cofán territory, and Cofán politics; second, that the discourse of science functions as an instrument that Cofán activists use to ground a political‐economic exchange with outside powers; and third, that the discourse of transparency stymies Cofán collective action and is neither locally meaningful nor politically useful. By analyzing the social life of these terms and concepts in Cofán activism, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of discursive power, which always exists in tension with the cultural sensibilities and political perspectives that it supposedly transforms.     

Disciplining Subjectivity and Space: Representation, Film and its Material Effects

Although the distinction between representation and reality is increasingly blurred, I argue that representational discourses have material effects in everyday life. By moving “outside the text” I trace the messy terrain between visual discourse and everyday life in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver by examining two questions: (1) how do discursive productions of visual culture articulate, inscribe, and discipline space and subjectivity and (2) how do aboriginal women negotiate the material consequences of those representations? Using discourse and feminist analysis, I analyse how a documentary film, produced by the Vancouver Police Department, constructs spaces and subjectivities of deviance through techniques of realism and the moral gaze of the police officers. I argue that aboriginal women negotiate these deviant representations through their experiences of racism and sexism by police officers. Consequently, aboriginal women are rendered either hyper‐visible or invisible by police officers, marked by their gender, race, and class. Combining an analysis of the documentary film and in‐depth interviews with aboriginal women, I argue that critical geographers must consider the analytical spaces “outside of the text” to explore the material effects of visual representations.     

Scale frames and counter-scale frames: constructing the problem of environmental injustice

The concept of environmental injustice raises difficult questions about on how best to measure and address environmental inequities across space, and environmental justice politics are permeated by considerable debate over the nature and spatial extent of both problem and possible solutions. This paper theorizes the politics of environmental justice as a politics of scale in order to explore how environmental justice activists respond to the scalar ambiguity inherent in the political concept of environmental justice. With a case study of a controversy over a proposed polyvinylchloride production facility in rural Convent, Louisiana, I develop the concept of scale frames and counter-scale frames as strategic discursive representations of a social grievance that do the work of naming, blaming, and claiming, with meaningful reference to particular geographic scales. The significance of scale is expressed alternatively within these frames as an analytical spatial category, as scales of regulation, as territorial framework(s) for cultural legitimacy, and as a means of inclusion, exclusion and legitimation.     

Generating a voice among ‘media monsters’: hybrid media practices of Taiwan’s Anti-Media Monopoly Movement

This article assesses how social movement actors strategically use a hybrid mix of social and traditional media to organise political actions in an attempt to influence media and public agendas. Using the case study of the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement in Taiwan, it investigates how the activists’ use of social and mainstream media contributed towards their collective action and mediated visibility. We argue that the effectiveness of social media activism is augmented by the activists’ engagement in protest actions and tactics catering to news media logics. Through their hybrid media practices, the activists were able to mobilise local and overseas groups into forms of collective and connective action and amplify the impact of protests.     

Trans youth and social media: moving between counterpublics and the wider web

Today’s trans youth grew up with the internet and online LGBTQ resources and spaces are important to these communities. This article focuses on conceptualising the digital cultural strategies that trans and gender questioning youth adopt both as social media users and producers in order to cope and thrive. Drawing on ethnographic data detailing a group of trans youth’s engagements with LGBTQ social media counterpublics and the wider web, and their movement between these spheres, in combination with close readings of online material identified as salient by the participants, this article argues that in the face of rampant transphobia and cis coded online paradigms, trans youth respond both critically and creatively. More specifically, I highlight how they resist prescribed user protocols of mainstream social networking sites as well as employ pragmatic strategies for navigating a binary gendered online world, staking out their own methods and aesthetics for self expression and community formation. Having examined the content and style of social media examples highlighted by the participants, the article contends that trans youth’s consumption and production of types of online and social media is significantly more diverse than research to date has recognised.     

Security,Resilience and Participatory Urban Upgrading in Latin America and the Caribbean

In theory, security and resilience in contexts of violence and crime are improved by participatory urban upgrading. Yet, upgrading practices actually demonstrate how vulnerabilities to violence, insecurity and crime are reproduced by state–society and intra-community power hierarchies. On the one hand, the priorities and perspectives of politicians and bureaucrats continue to take precedence over the needs and demands of residents of marginalized communities, undermining participation. On the other hand, the internal socio-political structures of marginalized communities complicate the capacity and willingness of residents and external state actors to engage with each other. The result is that upgrading programmes are not particularly successful in ordering development and security or in creating resilience. Internal processes have a greater impact on residents’ choices in their daily struggles to survive and thrive, but the resilience they create is limited because power and resources tend to be centralized and sometimes linked to crime groups. This article uses the cases of Kingston (Jamaica) and São Paulo (Brazil) to highlight these power hierarchies and how they impede the resilience project of participatory urban upgrading processes in contexts of crime and violence.     

Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): Women's grass-roots activism and social spaces in Chitrakoot (India)

Focusing on an ongoing grass-roots campaign of rural women in North India, this article examines how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective dialogue and critical reflection on issues of patriarchy and violence. The author highlights the ways in which grass-roots activists theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their visions of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform. The article demonstrates how a serious engagement with social spaces in grass-roots activism can enable us to overcome the conceptual gaps in feminist theorizations of empowerment and violence, and to apprehend more adequately the nature, content, and meanings of women's political actions.     

‘Scientific’ nationalism

This paper investigates how the discursive battle for the Flemish nation is waged in the Flemish mass media by politicians of the Flemish nationalist party, the New Flemish Alliance (N‐VA). I focus on the ‘new nationalism’ that N‐VA politicians advocate as a means to ‘banalise’ a hot Flemish nationalism. I establish that N‐VA spokespeople and especially their chairman Bart De Wever invoke discursive alliances with established scholars such as Anderson, Hroch, Calhoun and Billig. On the one hand, these alliances are used to sell their nationalism as a non‐ideological or non‐discursive project. On the other hand, the analyses of these intellectuals are used as manuals to ‘banalise’ a hot nationalism. The concept of ‘scientific’ nationalism refers to the entextualisation of scientific discourses in order to legitimate and banalise the nationalist project of the party as ‘in line with science’.