Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

Governing the Homeless in an Age of Compassion: Homelessness,Citizenship, and the 10‐Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County Washington

Abstract: In 2001, President Bush announced his intention to “end chronic homeless by the year 2012” as part of his broad “Compassion Agenda”. Since then, departmental consolidation, changes in funding allocation, and continued decentralization of services provision have dramatically reshaped the landscape of homeless service provision in the US. In this paper I examine how these roll‐out policies reify and re‐entrench liberal equations of property with rational self‐governance at the local scale. Particularly, I illustrate how tropes of homeless otherness work alongside and through federal neoliberal roll‐out policies to exclude homeless voices from the formation of local social policy. In doing so, I attempt to call attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between the spatial management of homeless bodies, tropes of homeless deviance and dependence, and limits to citizenship in the context of neoliberal urban governance.     

The Receiving End of Reform: Everyday Responses to Neoliberalisation in Southeastern Mexico

Abstract: This article builds upon the literature on neoliberalism and environment as well as studies on community forestry by examining the creative accommodations that rural producers have made in navigating Mexico's neoliberal turn. In contrast to previous work that emphasizes macro‐level processes (eg privatization of public natural resources) and local resistance, I employ Bourdieu's theory of practice to examine the symbolic and material dimensions of local responses to neoliberal policy reform. Drawing on research from nine communities in the state of Quintana Roo, I argue that local producers have accommodated neoliberal policies and programs by adopting hybrid logics, property regimes, forms of organization, and modes of exchange. Moreover, I contend that these creative responses constitute elements of a longstanding “culture of accommodation” to institutional change that predates Mexico's neoliberal reforms.     

Rammohun Roy and the new language of monotheism

Rammohun Roy, the great 19th‐century intellectual, was the first Indian to respond to western ideas. His approach was selective, rejecting what he felt to be incompatible with the needs of Hindu society. This paper deals with his response to Western religious ideas. Roy sought to reform Hindu religion by claiming to restore the original monotheism of the ancient vedic‐Upanisadic period by cleansing Hinduism of its later corruption, as represented by 19th‐century Hindu Idolatry. This paper argues that firstly, Roy's claim rested on the appropriation of the Enlightenment discourse contra orthodox Christianity, for he too, like deists and freethinkers, sought to undermine institutional priesthood. However, the fundamental issue here is Roy's claim that Vedic‐Upanisadic religion was monotheistic. Monotheism is a doctine entirely rooted in the traditions of the Religions of the Book, which believe in the total “otherness”; of God, thus setting up a binary opposition between monotheism and polytheism. Hinduism, on the other hand, is more relativistic in its conception of divinity, and monotheistic tendencies in Hinduism, if it is possible to speak of Hindu “monotheism”;, are looser and more flexible. In fact, Roy's “monotheism”; is a modern reinterpretation in the light of the monotheism of the people of the Book. But while Roy was expounding his “monotheism”;. Western conceptions of monotheism were undergoing profound transformations, under the impact of the newly‐discovered Eastern religions. In other words, modern conceptions of monotheism are informed with the cross fertilisations of Eastern and Western religions.     

Disaster Capitalism and the Quick,Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life

Sea otters have barely survived centuries of colonial and capitalist development. To understand why, I examine how they have been oriented in capitalist social relations in Alaska, and with what effects. I follow sea otters through three overlapping political economic episodes, each of which shapes the next: colonial expansion and the fur trade; petro‐capitalism and the negligent neoliberal state, culminating in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill; and finally, spill cleanup and “green” capitalism, when sea otters are produced as data points and spectacle. In each episode, I describe (1) sea otters’ orientation in relation to capitalism and the state, and (2) the nature and temporality of violence and ecological loss that attends their orientation. In conversation with theorisations of extinction as a “slow unravelling”, I suggest animal life can unravel less slowly than haltingly—quick, quick, slow—and that the unravelling and animals’ orientation in capitalism are co‐constituted.     

Dangerous Holes in Global Environmental Governance: The Roles of Neoliberal Discourse,Science, and California Agriculture in the Montreal Protocol

Abstract: This paper explores how a relatively successful global environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, is currently undermined by US protectionism. At the “global scale” of environmental governance, powerful nation‐states like the US prolong their domination of certain economic sectors with the assistance of neoliberal discourse. Using empirical data gathered while attending Montreal Protocol meetings from 2003 to 2006, I show how US policy undermines the Montreal Protocol's mandate to phase out methyl bromide (MeBr). At the global scale of environmental governance the US uses a discourse of technical and economic infeasibility because, in the current neoliberal milieu, it cannot make a simply protectionist argument. The discourse, in other words, is protectionism by another name. While much of the literature in critical geography on neoliberalism has focused on de‐regulation versus re‐regulation, this paper illustrates how science, protectionism, and neoliberalism can become articulated uneasily and in sometimes unexpected ways.     

Producing Victimhood: Landmines,Reparations, and Law in Colombia

This research theorizes Colombia's 2011 Victims’ and Land Restitution Law (the Victims’ Law) as a biopolitical program that intends to foster the lives of conflict‐affected populations through providing an array of reparation measures. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia's Magdalena Medio region, I highlight how the Victims’ Law constitutes the identity of which populations count as “victims” worthy of reparations, how such parameters are contested, and how landmine survivors’ sense of themselves as “victims” is mediated via their experiences with the Victims’ Law and the reparation programs it provides. In particular, I highlight the possibilities and limitations of reparation measures that hinge on small‐scale business incubation programs for landmine victims to show how a legally recognized victimhood category presupposes “self‐responsible” neoliberal subjects who must confront contexts of conflict and state neglect.     

Neoliberal Capitalism and Conservation in the Post‐crisis Era: The Dialectics of “Green” and “Un‐green” Grabbing in Greece and the UK

“Green‐grabbing”, in which environmental arguments support expropriation of land and resources, is a recognized element in neoliberal conservation. However, capitalism's strategic interest in promoting the neoliberalization of conservation is accompanied by attempts to exploit hitherto protected natures without any pretence at “greenness”. In this paper we explore the dialectics between “green” and “un‐green” grabbing as neoliberal strategies in the reconstruction of nature conservation policies after the 2008 financial “crash” in Greece and the UK. In both countries, accelerated neoliberalization is manifested in diverse ways, including initiatives to roll back conservation regulation, market‐based approaches to “saving” nature and the privatization of public nature assets. The intensification of “green” and “un‐green” grabbing reflects capitalism's strategic interest in both promoting and obstructing nature conservation, ultimately leaving for “protected natures” two choices: either to be further degraded to boost growth or to be “saved” through their deeper inclusion as commodities visible to the market.     

Money Games: Currencies and Power in the Contemporary World Economy

Abstract: A well‐known cliché has it that “money makes the world go round” Certainly, monetary arrangements, specifically exchange‐rate mechanisms, can serve to show the degree to which markets and states intersect to direct the workings of the world economy. It is common to assume that the singular model over recent decades has been a neoliberal one based on independent floating exchange rates. I challenge this assumption by showing that a number of different combinations of money and power have operated in the recent past, creating a number of distinctive “money games”. Only one of these, the globalist/transnational, is facing a particularly severe crisis. The others, what I term the classic/territorial, integrative/shared, and imperialist/substitute provide available alternatives. The recent history, geographical features, and future prospects of the various money games are the main concerns of the essay. The analysis welcomes the recent financial crisis as providing an opportunity to further pluralize political‐economic visions beyond the perceived dominant one‐size‐fits‐all neoliberal ideology of the globalist regime.     

Tahiti: the ripples of a myth on the shores of the imagination

Influenced by Henri Lefebvre's ideas about the production of space as a continually evolving dialogic process, I trace the long post‐contact history of “Tahiti” as an entangled place where the production and product are continually intertwined. I examine more than two hundred years of historical twists and turns that result in a dialogic process of place making. Tahiti is generated when the imaginary place collides with the material existence, each reflecting and recasting the other. This intertwined history includes 18th‐century French imperialist philosophies and voyages of exploration; 19th‐century colonial intervention, romantic novels and Gauguin's colourful canvases; and 20th‐century French chocolates, Hollywood movies, French nuclear testing, postcards and more.     

Housing Regeneration and the Private Finance Initiative in England: Unstitching the Neoliberal Urban Straitjacket

Abstract: This paper responds to recent debates in human geography about ideal‐type versus contingent neoliberalism, or what Gibson‐Graham conceptualises as “strong” vs “weak” theory, by offering some reflections from an in‐depth study of the private finance initiative (PFI) in England. It first introduces the history and purpose of the PFI as the Labour government's flagship public–private partnership (PPP) approach to public infrastructure modernisation. It then critically analyses its use in inner‐city regeneration through a case study of a PFI housing scheme in the northern English city of Leeds. The paper argues that, when seen through the lens of “strong theory”, a PFI appears to be a consciously designed “neoliberal straitjacket” intended to lock‐in gentrification‐based regeneration at the neighbourhood level, guarantee long‐term profits to (finance) capital, and create powerful privatising and marketising pressures across the local public sphere. However, it is equally possible to construct a preliminary “weak theory” of the PFI that unhides its inherent contradictions and shows how everyday activism by local community actors can successfully influence and contest how neoliberalism is rolled out on the ground.     

Hume,Bishop Butler,and the Revival of Ritual in Anglophone Protestantism

A sweeping reassessment of the role of ritual, ceremony, and aesthetics took place in anglophone Protestantism between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. While the nineteenth‐century developments themselves have been extensively studied, little scholarly attention has been paid to the importance of the earlier emergence of philosophical language capable of explaining and justifying, in a Protestant context, the ritual and aesthetic dimensions of religious practice. I argue that this language, paradoxically, grew out of a symbiosis of sceptical modernity, traditional religious apologetics, and the religious “enthusiasm” of the early eighteenth century. I approach the topic through the interconnected oeuvres (and careers) of David Hume and Joseph Butler, presenting the first synoptic account of their ideas about the psychological underpinnings of religious worship, and the use made of their ideas by later generations of anglophone Protestants. As mainstream Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians confronted the challenges presented by Methodism and Evangelicalism, they found support in a synthesis of Butler's and Hume's ideas. Eventually, the beneficial role of ritual and aesthetics in religious worship came to be widely accepted throughout the anglophone Protestant world.     

Making-Home From Below: Domesticating Footpath and Resisting “Homelessness” in Mumbai

Drawing upon ethnography among footpath dwellers in Mumbai this paper argues that hegemonic ideas and practices of urban inhabitation constrain subaltern visions of home as well as public space. In doing so, it warrants an ontology of urban inhabitation that transcends occupancy politics. It is not just the neoliberal state and property-entrenching capital but also the politics of inclusion that fragments subaltern subjectivities of belonging and dispossession. By highlighting everyday practices, particularly the use of footwear, food preparation and consumption, performance of modesty, and rearing of pets, I articulate two ways in which home is experienced and homelessness is resisted through claims where interlocutors have no spatial legitimacy: by (re)producing spatial and moral boundaries and practising multiple mobilities that enable transient domesticities. This paper thus provides an expanded sense of home that moves beyond the materialities of home making, and binaries of the “private” interior and “public” exterior.     

Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

“This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too”: Neoliberalism,Racialization, and Urban Policy

In the Dutch and more broadly European context, urban policymaking has generally been studied through the conceptual lens of neoliberalism. While important, I argue that this neoliberal lens does not fully account for the design and impact of urban policies currently transforming cities like Amsterdam. Following Mustafa Dikeç's (2007, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy) understanding of urban policy as place‐making practices that normalize particular distributions of people, authorities and spaces, I propose to focus on underlying visions of the normal and the good city that shape urban policymaking. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research on Amsterdam's “notorious” Diamantbuurt, I argue that this vision is informed by neoliberalism and by racialized concerns with migrants and ethnic minorities. It entails particular classed and racialized preferences that normalize and underwrite the partial displacement that is underway in the neighbourhood.     

Asylum seekers,Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.     

The Communist Hypothesis and Revolutionary Capitalisms: Exploring the Idea of Communist Geographies for the Twenty‐first Century

Abstract: This essay starts from the presumption that “the communist hypothesis” is still a good one, but argues that the idea of communism requires urgent re‐thinking in light of both the “obscure” disaster of twentieth century really existing socialism and the specific conditions of twenty‐first century capitalism. I explore the contours of the communist hypothesis, chart the characteristics of the revolutionary capitalism of the twenty‐first century and consider how our present predicament relates to the urgency of rethinking and reviving the communist hypothesis. Throughout, I tentatively suggest a number of avenues that require urgent intellectual and theoretical attention and interrogate the present condition in light of the possibilities for creating communist geographies for the twenty‐first century.     

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation,Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.