Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity,Access to Justice,and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three‐year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.     

Sexing the Self: Geographies of engagement and encounter

Geographic research on the construction of sexual identity takes inspiration from two main sources. The first is the post-structural literature that suggests sexual subjects are sutured to identities created in the realms of discourse. The second is a psychoanalytical tradition concerned with the desires and disgusts experienced by sexual subjects as they seek to reconcile their inner selves with the outside world. In this paper an attempt is made to combine these contrasting perspectives by exploring the way sexualities are negotiated by individuals as they encounter a world that is both real and imagined. The utility of this approach is illustrated with reference to the author's research on sex work, which demonstrates that the making of sexual identities involves a dynamic relation between Self and Other--a relation that is subsequently encoded in representations of space. The paper concludes that the making of sexual identities can only be understood by examining the ways that representation and experience entwine in specific places to create sexual identities that are fractured, contested and always becoming.     

Negotiating the Geographies of Cultural Difference in Local Communities: Two Examples from Suburban Melbourne

This paper explores the ways in which cultural difference is negotiated in local communities through the practices and actions of local individuals, groups and the policies of local government. Cultural difference is commonly managed through policies such as multiculturalism, and critiques of such policies tend to be either in terms of celebratory discourses of inclusiveness, or in negative terms which argue that such policies reiterate models of exclusivity and paternalism. The authors draw on current research in planning and cultural geography in order to explore the ways in which actual difference is negotiated at the local level through the institutional and civic spaces of local government. Two case studies for this discussion, the City of Greater Dandenong and Moreland City Council, demonstrate the importance of the physical body and its interactions with, and activities in, place to processes of local change and policy making.     

Modes of Attentiveness: Reading for Difference in Geographies of Homelessness

Hegemonic accounts of urban homelessness, focusing on attempts to restrict homeless people's presence in public space, stress the punitive nature of current homelessness policy. In contrast, in this paper we explore the “messy middle ground” of the UK homeless services system. Examining Stacey Murphy's (2009) (Antipode 41(2):305–325) arguments regarding a shift to a “post‐revanchist” era in San Francisco, we chart the apparent similarities between developments in San Francisco and changes to the management of street homelessness bought in to effect by the New Labour government in the UK, and assess the extent to which such developments might be read as holding in tension more obviously punitive and supportive trends usually viewed as necessarily oppositional. In the final part of the paper we present a re‐reading of recent changes to the management of street homelessness in the UK through a postsecular lens. We suggest that this lens provides the possibility for a much more optimistic reading of homeless services and of the grammars of homelessness and urban (in)justice more broadly, and make the case for an alternative mode of academic attentiveness open to sometimes subtle and smaller‐scale yet nonetheless important examples of different ways of understanding and doing.     

Algorithmic War: Everyday Geographies of the War on Terror

Abstract:  Technologies that deploy algorithmic calculation are becoming ubiquitous to the homeland securitization of the war on terror. From the surveillance networks of the city subway to the biometric identifiers of new forms of border control, the possibility to identify "association rules" between people, places, objects and events has brought the logic of pre-emption into the most mundane and prosaic spaces. Yet, it is not the case that the turn to algorithmic calculation simply militarizes society, nor even that we are witnessing strictly a commercialization of security. Rather, algorithmic war is one form of Foucault's sense of a "continuation of war by other means", where the war-like architectures of self/other, here/there, safe/risky, normal/suspicious are played out in the politics of daily life. This paper explores the situated interplay of algorithmic practices across commercial, security, and military spheres, revealing the violent geographies that are concealed in the glossy techno-science of algorithmic calculation.     

In the Shell of the Old: Anarchist Geographies of Territorialisation

Abstract: This paper applies an anarchist approach to ongoing debates on the politics, nature and function of territory. Recent work in geography has problematised dominant modes of territory, but has stopped short of a systematic critique of how statist spatial imaginations and practices reproduce and perpetuate the dominance of both capitalism and authority in society. In this paper, I deploy anarchist thought and practice to argue that territory must be viewed as a processual and contested product of social relations. This is linked to the notion of prefiguration; a distinctive concept in anarchist thought and practice embedding envisioned future modes of social organisation into the present. Using examples from fieldwork with anarchist‐inspired groups, I explore anarchist prefigurative politics as a means to re‐imagine how practices of territorialisation and bordering might be deployed as part of a broader project of social transformation.     

A passage from India: Geographies and experiences of repatriation, 1858-1939

This paper examines both the imagined and material geographies of return experienced by the imperial elite as they returned from India. Focusing on Cheltenham and Bedford, I explore how the 'aristocratic' lifestyles of earlier repatriates became increasingly difficult to sustain over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although imaginatively constructed notions of return continued to imply that an upper middle-class standard of living remained attainable for those returning 'home', the majority found that they had to settle in (lower) middle-class suburban locations. In considering such changes I am also able to examine the ways in which geographies and experiences of return were influenced by a specifically imperial identity over a period of imperial decline.     

Geographies of temporary markets: an anatomy of the Canton Fair

While recent research on temporary clusters and temporary markets has emphasized the knowledge generation processes associated with trade fairs, little is known about the knowledge exchanges that are embedded in market relations at these events. This paper uses the case of the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, the largest trade fair in China, to illustrate that such events do not operate as a single market, but that they generate multiple dynamic market configurations, which entail different flows of knowledge, goods and people. In a typical case study, four types of market configurations are identified that simultaneously develop at this event. The findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of market relations, knowledge and transactions in temporary spatial settings.