Disparity Despite Diversity: Social Injustice in New York City's Urban Agriculture System

Many studies have documented the benefits of urban agriculture, including increased food access, job creation, educational opportunities, and green space. A focus on its social benefits has fed an association of urban agriculture with social justice, yet there is a distinction between alleviating symptoms of injustice (such as disparate access to food or environmental amenities) and disrupting structures that underlie them. Despite its positive impacts, urban agriculture systems may reinforce inequities that practitioners and supporters aim to address. This paper reports findings from a 2‐year study of urban agriculture in New York City, which found race‐ and class‐based disparities among practitioners citywide. Using the lens of critical race theory, it argues that a failure to examine urban agriculture's role in either supporting or dismantling unjust structures may perpetuate an inequitable system. The paper concludes with recommendations for urban agriculture supporters and scholars to help advance social justice at structural levels.     

Interrogating Madrid's “Slum of Shame”: Urban Expansion,Race, and Place‐Based Activisms in the Cañada Real Galiana

Following the spontaneous occupation of Madrid's Puerta del Sol in 2011, many academic accounts have found these mobilizations new and noteworthy for their technological savvy and networked capabilities. In this article, I argue that such depictions fail to capture both the influence of Spanish urbanism's material conditions on certain disadvantaged populations, and the broad diversity of these contemporary activisms. Looking to struggles over the proposed demolition of a squatter settlement in Madrid, I demonstrate how Madrid's planning has propagated racial imaginaries to legitimate dispossession and subvert anti‐poverty policies. Second, I examine how resistance and contestation emerge out of specific urban experiences of inequality, and transcend traditional modes of activist organizing through the formation of broad coalitions between various civil society actors. In doing so, I argue that Madrid's mobilizations have paradoxically opened new avenues for the inclusion minority voices, against popular understandings that read rising xenophobia during crisis.     

Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non‐commodified, self‐managed social spaces. In response to the ever‐changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.     

Playing Politics with Sex Offender Laws: An Event History Analysis of the Initial Community Notification Laws across American States

Despite a decline in crime rates, the 1990s witnessed extensive media coverage of several high‐profile stranger abductions and murders of children. State legislators' swift response to the public's growing fear of sex offenders with the adoption of sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws raises questions about the role of politics. Punctuated equilibrium theory and the diffusion of innovation jointly provide a context to conduct an event history analysis to assess the extent to which politics enhanced legislative responsiveness to public opinion in SORN policymaking. Contrary to the commonly held belief that attributes legislative interest in SORN to salient crimes against children, the results suggest that factors such as the percentage of a conservative population, district‐level competition, and state innovativeness accelerated the diffusion of innovation of the laws.     

“Bluewashing” the Firm? Voluntary Regulations,Program Design,and Member Compliance with the United Nations Global Compact

Voluntary programs have emerged as important instruments of public policy. We explore whether programs lacking monitoring and enforcement mechanisms can curb participants’ shirking with program obligations. Incentive‐based approaches to policy see monitoring and enforcement as essential to curb shirking, while norm‐based approaches view social mechanisms such as norms and learning as sufficient to serve this purpose. The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), a prominent international voluntary program, encourages firms to adopt socially responsible policies. Its program design, however, relies primarily on norms and learning to mitigate shirking. Using a panel of roughly 3,000 U.S. firms from 2000 to 2010, and multiple approaches to address endogeneity and selection issues, we examine the effects of Compact membership on members’ human rights and environmental performance. We find that members fare worse than nonmembers on costly and fundamental performance dimensions, while showing improvements only in more superficial dimensions. Exploiting the lack of monitoring and enforcement, UNGC members are able to shirk: enjoying goodwill benefits of program membership without making costly changes to their human rights and environmental practices.     

Planting Roots,Making Place: Urban Autochthony in Port Vila Vanuatu

A contentious issue for Pacific Islanders, as well as researchers of the Pacific Islands, is ni-Vanuatu notions of ‘belonging’ to urban centres. Previous research in Vanuatu has shown that despite generations of people born and raised in Port Vila, the nation's capital, the urban centre is not generally perceived as a ‘place’ to which urban migrants can say they are from. For many, exclaiming that one is ‘from’ town is tantamount to admitting one has ‘no place’. This paper, based on fieldwork among a group of urban young men in Freswota, a residential community of Port Vila, argues that in contrast to this, Freswota young men are generating a new locative identity. Their urban community rather than their parents' home island places is emerging as their primary location of belonging and the source of their sense of self, personhood and social identification. As such, these young men are the urban autochthones of the country.     

Precarious Territory: Property Law,Housing, and the Socio-Spatial Order

Most of us access shelter over land over which other people have legally sanctioned dominant interests and powers, creating systemic relations of security and vulnerability that I term precarious property. We all live inside the territory of property, but do so under different terms. Rather than thinking of the territory of property as an exclusive space of insiders and outsiders, I think of it as a relational technology that organises forms of conditional spatial access. Territorialised expressions of law play a crucial role in organising such relations through a “property space” that frames property’s participants, their interactions, their alternatives to transacting, and the meanings of property itself. Thinking territorially about precarious property offers us both analytical and ethico-political insights, I suggest.     

The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique

This article explores the social and material repercussions of middle class aspirations in a system that is still infused by socialist aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique. We argue the activation of “middle classness” reproduces ingrained inequalities and boundaries. This is demonstrated through two ethnographic case studies of urban housing, long central to imaginaries of prosperity. First, fearing downward mobility, members of the upper middle class seek to embody a liberal ideology of “autonomy”, while simultaneously being dependent on state structures. Second, members of the lower middle class attempt to create enclaves to experiment with forms of privatisation normally only accessible to a privileged elite. Through this examination of the ways in which a spectrum of privileged urbanites attempts to secure their position in the face of a precarious future, the article outlines middle classness under contemporary capitalist conditions and how this is shaped by the legacies of the past.     

Dukarr lakarama: Listening to Guwak,talking back to space colonization

Guided by the Yolŋu songspiral of Guwak, in this collaboratively written paper we argue that the extension of earth-based colonization into space disrupts and colonises the plural lifeworlds of many Indigenous people who have ongoing connections with and beyond the sky. Listening to Guwak, we speak back to promoters of space colonization who frame their projects as harmless according to four core understandings. First, they assume that there are no people or other beings Indigenous to what they think of as ‘outer space’, and that none of the Indigenous people or beings who also live on earth have travelled to or inhabited this space. Second, they assume that space is dead or non-sentient in itself, and that it is incapable of fostering life. Third, they understand that space is cleanly separated from earth, meaning that what happens in space has no effect on earth, or vice versa. Fourth, because of these three assumptions, they do not identify any ethical objections to occupying and exploiting space.We follow Guwak as she undermines each of these assumptions, by moving through and as Sky Country. These learnings emphasize the presence and role of Law, order and negotiation in Sky Country; the active, animate, agential presence of beings in Sky Country; the connectivity and co-becoming-ness of earth and sky; and the ethical obligations to attend to and care for and as Sky Country. We contend that the argument applies to many worlds that intimately connect with, extend into (or beyond) what Western sciences call ‘outer space’. Indeed, we hope that in sharing Guwak we encourage broader conversations about Sky Country and its relations with other Indigenous worlds.     

汉代的民间宴饮与乡里社会

在中国古代,宴饮活动承载着一定的政治、社会和文化的功能,对国家权力的建构和社会秩序的维系,起到某种微妙的作用。汉代民间的宴饮活动可以分为政治性、宗教性和生活性三种类型,对建构乡里社会的秩序结构、满足百姓的精神需求和人情需要、促进基层社会关系和家族内部关系的协调,具有重要的作用。民间宴饮成为透视乡里社会形态和特征的一个特别视窗。