Acknowledging the Racial State: An Agenda for Environmental Justice Research

Abstract:  This paper argues that environmental justice scholars have tended to overlook the significance of the state's role in shaping understandings of race and racism, and argues for the use of critical race theory to deepen insight into the role of the state in both fostering and responding to conditions of racialized environmental injustice. Critical race theory offers insights into both why and how the state manages racial categories in such a way as to produce environmental injustice, and how the state responds to the claims of the environmental justice movement. Closer attention to the interplay between the racial state and the environmental justice movement as a racial social movement will yield important insights into the conditions, processes, institutions and state apparatuses that foster environmental injustice and that delimit the possibilities for achieving environmental justice in some form or another.     

Justice and Injustice in the City

Following a recent growth of interest in questions of justice and the city, this paper considers how the work of contemporary critical urbanists compares with earlier accounts of urban justice and injustice. Our purpose in making this comparison is to consider how scholars concerned with justice and injustice in the city might better articulate the conceptual relationship between justice‐thinking and (in)justice‐documenting in their writings about the contemporary planned city. Using a selection of influential texts as evidence, our comparative commentary on past and present approaches focuses on three issues we think are crucial to this relationship. First, with the rise of analyses of the politics of difference, concepts of justice stressing procedure, process, and the hearing of multiple voices have come to the fore recently, especially in urban planning. Second, contemporary writers about geographies of justice have queried the value of using pre‐formulated, philosophical justice norms to judge outcomes and processes in particular contexts, seeing justice, rather, as intuited in the enactment of social conflicts and practices in those actual situations. Third, questions about the spatiality of justice and injustice have been aired recently asking whether justice and injustice have primarily a social rather than a spatial ontology. The conclusion of our evaluative review is that similar issues are being named and investigated now as were four decades ago, in investigations of justice and injustice in cities, but that concerted debates about theory and epistemology have elaborated the conceptual focus of discussion. We call for grounded investigations of enactments of justice as well as of injustice.     

Locating Neoliberalism in Dubai: Migrant Workers and Class Struggle in the Autocratic City

Abstract: In recent years, portrayals of neoliberalism in Dubai have often hinged on narratives about the hyper‐exploitation of migrant workers in the city. In this paper I interrogate these narratives by exploring the governance of lower‐waged construction migrants and their recent role in market‐led processes of urbanization. Through a focus on the recent growth of private worker welfare initiatives and dozens of illegal labour strikes led by migrant builders, I draw attention to the fraught and contradictory character of autocratic neoliberalism that operates in the governance of these workers, and point to workers’ bodily capital and the construction labour camp as two emergent sites in which these labour politics are unfolding. I argue that these social reproductive realms of the body and the mass‐worker household have offered a temporary spatial fix to the limitations of autocratic rule in a neoliberalizing city, while also conjuring moments of political possibility for construction migrants.