‘La doble condición’: landmine victims,forced displacement,and disability in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio

The small body of scholarship that examines the intersection between forced displacement and physical disability draws important attention to the material difficulties simultaneously disabled and displaced people experience. Instead of focusing on disability as a condition lived against the spatial backdrop of forced displacement, this paper approaches disability and displacement as mutually referential spatial conditions. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region, this research highlights how the intersection between physical impairment and forced displacement produces both disabling spatial imaginaries of fear as well as painfully embodied rhythms of daily life. Nonetheless, this paper draws attention to urban agricultural projects’ enabling potential to produce grounding rhythms of labor for landmine victims. Finally, this paper suggests that contexts of forced displacement require close consideration of spatial imaginaries of fear as well as experiences of direct structural violence as key factors underpinning the social production of disability.     

Ordinary Geographies: Care,Violence, and Agrarian Extractivism in “Post-Conflict” Colombia

In Colombia’s agrarian spaces, war and extractivism are deeply entangled. Almost four years after the peace accords signed between the national government and the FARC guerrilla, post-conflict geographies are best characterised by the ongoing dispossession of local populations related to the entrenchment of extractivism. Drawing from ethnographic work carried out in the Colombian Caribbean on the ordinary practices and spaces of social reproduction, the ordinary geographies, this article explores gendered practices of care and their role in both sustaining and disrupting paramilitary violence and agrarian extractivism. The focus not just on the gendered effects of war and extractivism, but on gender’s constitutive role in the configuration of these processes and dynamics, allows us to contribute to recent literature on extractivism, dispossession and violence from a feminist standpoint.     

TOWARDS A BIOPOLITICS OF THE VICTIMIZED BODY

This article discusses the creation of assault as a crime against health and life as this discursive process is expressed through Swedish laws, legislative discussions, and legal practice from 1945 to 1965. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on biopolitics and sociologist Thomas Lemke’s outline to a analytics of biopolitics, the article argues that a most central component in the genealogy of assault as a crime against health and life was a shift in the first post-war decades, from a predominant legal idealistic paradigm within Swedish jurisprudence, by which assault was defined as a crime against bodily integrity, to a legal realistic epistemology, imbued with the scientific knowledge and empirical ‘truth’-producing practices of modern medicine. As an effect, new discourses around the victimized body emerged, through which prevailing knowledges and ‘truths’ around violent crime and its effects were challenged and marginalized. In this discursive process, the 19th-century legal-moral category of violent crimes finally collapsed into the overarching legal category prescribed by Brottsbalken (1965) as ‘crimes against health and life’. Consequently, the victimized body was deprived of all meaning but ‘life’ and thus created as a biopolitical space, available to series of life-governing interventions and regulatory practices.     

人口、治理与政治地理学：生命政治研究综述与展望

在西方,福柯提出的生命政治内涵得到不断发展,近年来对人文地理特别是政治地理的研究起重要推动作用。生命政治为政治地理学者提供了一个全新的视角--通过探讨地理实践中以生命为对象的权力的运行机制,能够更好的解释在地理实践中权力与人的互动关系。本文首先概述了生命政治一词的来源及涵义,并梳理出由真理的权力、治理技术与主体化构成的权力运行框架;进而从生命与权力的不同关系出发,归纳出生命政治的三个分析视角：对生命的照料、对人口生产力的提升以及对赤裸生命的排除;并基于此提出了生命政治在人文地理学中的三个应用主题,分别是人口安全与可计算空间、人口规训与生产空间以及人口排斥与例外空间;最后,从全球和跨国、全国和次国家三个尺度,分别提出生命政治理论在我国政治地理领域的应用展望。     

Framing Reparations

Since the enactment of reparations for Japanese American World War II internees in the early 1990s, the public debate on slavery reparations has gained momentum. Recently, a number of states and the U.S. House of Representatives have issued formal apologies for slavery. In light of this debate, it may be important for policymakers, as well as policy researchers, to better understand public opinion on this issue. At present, not much is known other than that most Americans oppose reparations. However, public opinion surveys yield widely varying population estimates. These differences may represent random error by an uninformed public or they may reflect complex considerations about "who" should be compensated "by whom" in "what form" and "for what" injustice. Using the results of a nationally representative question wording experiment ( n =  2,001) this article investigates whether opposition to slavery reparations is unqualified, or whether it depends on the specific policy design. Since data collection was completed before Virginia became the first state to apologize for slavery in February 2007, the study offers a window into the formation of public opinion prior to elite policy enactment. Results suggest that the public carefully distinguishes between different reparations proposals and that policymakers, as well as policy researchers, may have to be very specific when addressing an issue of this complexity.     

Unravelling the “Thin Blue Line”: Policing as an Engine of Inequality

This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the “thin blue line” symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.     

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than “provincializing” dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.     

The camp

Walter Benjamin has famously pointed out that we are living in a society in which the exception has become a norm. Giorgio Agamben adds to this claim another one, that the spatial ordering principle for this new order is the camp. This article focuses on this diagnosis. We do not, however, discuss its validity but rather unpack what is meant when the concept of camp is used. The camp is, we argue, given by three structuring principles that might contradict and overlap in various ways: a disciplinary disposit if according to which a distinction between inside and outside is established; a logic of transgression according to which the inside‐outside distinction is deliberately blurred; and finally a biopolitical rationale according to which the distinction between inside and outside is re‐established on each side so that the included are included as excluded (as bodies to be governed) and the excluded are excluded as included (within the realm of power). Finally, we claim that it is the combination of these three principles — discipline, transgression and biopolitics — that leads to a society in which the exception has become the norm. Such ‘society’ is, we show, given by a strange and paradoxical overlapping of bonding and un‐bonding, of distinction and indistinction.