Freedom Isn't Free: Free Will in La vida es sueño Revisited

This article analyzes the structural composition of the chicana/o novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra, by Tomás Rivera, a book that has become a collective point of reference for chicana/o culture and community. Its structure will be explained, including the importance of personal and collective memory as elements that evolve every chapter as a fragmentary part of a whole. The classical concept of "art of memory" joined to the rhetoric of discourse opens a new perspective to analyze this fragmentation and helps the reader to understand the connection of its elements. Finally, the idea of "theater of memory" may be applied to the novel's chicana/o universe as a dramatic device for structuring the narrator's personal memories, achieving a final literary composition similar to a memorable, collective altarpiece full of impressive images from this community's daily struggle in the 1960s.     

The shifting context of academic geography in Canada

Academic geographers are working in a system in flux. A series of interconnecting and overlapping social, political, and economic processes have resulted in a shifting academic climate for geographers and geography departments. This viewpoint brings forward evidence from multiple areas of study to provide a synthesis of this changing context. Challenges to geography include the role of “facts” and “truth” in society, neoliberal university contexts as workplaces, and generational change, among many others. This paper asks more questions than it answers, with an aim to promote an engaged and informed debate among geographers about our “place” in Canada's shifting academic context.     

Illuminating the Path to Grand Pari(s): Architecture and Urban Transformation in an Era of Neoliberalization

This article examines the architectural exhibition associated with the large‐scale Grand Paris urban development project initiated in 2007 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Through a close examination of the exhibition, I argue that imaginative representation is crucial to urban transformation, here acting to justify and naturalize neoliberal reforms. While the ten international teams of architects tasked with imagining twenty‐first century Paris presented sometimes radical scenarios, the architectural proposals are also used by the state to secure a sense of regional coherence, to reaffirm the imperative of economic growth, and to deny broad sociospatial conflict. The futural aspect of speculative regional development is redoubled in the prospective architectural visions, thus solidifying the dominance of a marketized mode of urbanization. While this cooption of architectural designs emerges from the unique circumstances of contemporary Paris, it also speaks to the broader promise and limits of imaginative urbanism and large‐scale architectural intervention.     

A Platform for Art: Infrastructural Citizenship Beyond Monumentality in Toronto’s Transit Art

The flourishing of transit art globally reflects a widespread belief in the power of aesthetic practices to promote infrastructural and civic revitalisation. This article analyses how transit art engages spaces and practices of publicness and how art explores ideas of mobility in Toronto. It argues that while arts are frequently deployed to reproduce status quo relations of power and to bolster elite and exclusionary forms of urbanisation, they can also work to challenge these. Through the notion of infrastructural citizenship, I show how arts can unsettle grounds of public space and public life and illuminate the contentious relations that cohere in public transit space. Overall, I claim that transit networks are a key platform through which the politics of public art are staged and that despite existing constraints, there are many affordances for transit art to critically intervene into neoliberal urban processes.