‘Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London

This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable people. Specifically, we explore the relationships that these women have with two environments: the quotidian (where they undertake routine everyday activities), and the gentrified (relating to changes in the spaces in which they live and work). We find that their experiences are extremely local, and heavily contingent on the services made available to them (or not) by the statutory and third sectors, and the emotional contacts they make, particularly in third sector support services. This challenges some of the literature which suggests a separation of ‘home’ and ‘work’, and which finds close associations between women who street-sex work. While places designed by the third sector are more responsive to these women, they are also more vulnerable to closure through lack of funding. This contributes to a significant degree of ontological non-linearity and ontological insecurity in these women’s lives.     

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.     

Visibly Mute: Ethical Sociality and the Everyday Exurban

In this paper, we argue for an ethical understanding of exurban environments, which we propose as symptomatic spaces of neoliberalization. We outline the idea that civility within public places is a mode of moral communication grounded in everyday encounters and embedded in the ordinary places in which they are enacted. We also advance the argument that exurban environments, as properties of neoliberal capital, employ distinct strategies to monopolize the use of space and encourage its inattentive occupation. We illustrate this through our case study in the North of England, a business and retail park which we suggest as typical of spaces produced through wider processes of neoliberalization. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the writers and theories explored throughout the piece for a critical understanding of place, one that is premised on the importance of a quotidian understanding of the social, an everyday morality.     

Young people's cartographies of school choice: the urban imaginary and moral panic

A critical geography of school choice illuminates how parental school choice reproduces unequal urban conditions. This paper contributes to this scholarship by arguing that the reproduction of urban spaces is reinforced by the ways the dominant urban imaginary shapes how youths imagine and organise their school options. I draw from the fields of critical geography, school choice, and sociology of moral panic to theorise how children's geographies are informed by the dominant urban imaginary and reconstituted reiteratively by moral anxiety. Through this lens, I analyse ethnographic data collected on school choice policy, along with interviews with 59 youth (ages 11–19) in Vancouver, Canada. My analysis demonstrates that the dominant forms of classed stigmatisation of marginalised urban schools are important to young people's rejection of those schools. My analysis also shows that moral panic and rising fears of violence underwrite the spatial patterns of youth participation in school choice.     

Legal hyper-invasiveness and anti-legal practices in contemporary Italy

This paper gives an illustration of legal hyper-invasiveness in Italy over the course of the last decades, with particular emphasis on the increase in laws and law-producing institutions: neoliberal governmentality is not characterized by a retreat of the State, rather by the extent of its reach and force. The success of legal imposition has always been partial; in recent years, however, anti-legal constituent praxes are becoming more evident both in public demonstration and in everyday conduct. Street mobilizations are fuelled increasingly by disillusion with institutional politics, pursuing explicit anti-legal aims and marked by an autonomy from political parties and trade unions. The paper also provides an ethnographical examination of the day-to-day avoidance of institutional control, revealing a growing and widespread sense of intolerance of several regulations promoted by the institutional powers. Finally, contemporary forms of repression of these constituent energies are examined; and the belief that an increase in legality will benefit citizens is questioned.     

“Who can play this game?” The lived experiences of doctoral candidates and early career women in the neoliberal university

Work intensification is a characteristic of the current neoliberal trend in academia. Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers (PhD candidates and ECRs) in geography are no strangers to this development but are rarely the focus of publications or dialogue on the (gendered) outcomes of the academy’s neoliberal agenda. Encouraged by the recent emotional turn in the social sciences and humanities, this article seeks to unveil some of the everyday particulars of life in academia for PhD candidates and ECRs under the tide of financial cuts and increased competition for funding. We explore the question: “Who can – and indeed wants to – play this game?” As three early and one mid-career academic women in four different institutions in the Global North, we make use of reflexivity, autobiographical writing, and reflection, to analyze increasingly stressful and demanding working conditions. Through the depiction of our lived experiences, we contend that the push for ever increasing outputs attends most of our time and represents a distinctly different form of scholarship than has been traditionally considered as the pathway into academia, not seldom jeopardizing well-being of young academics, one that needs to be interrogated by geographers.     

From Homo economicus to Complex Subjectivities: Reconceptualizing Farmers as Pesticide Users

Abstract: Through empirical analysis and theory, this paper critiques technocratic regimes of protection vis à vis pesticide use, which are efforts limited to technical rationality and didactic communication of pesticide risks that model pesticide users as self‐responsible individuals (ie Homo economicus). Data reveal that knowledge of pesticide risk does not translate into greater protective gear use, within the Costa Rican case presented and more broadly. This circumstance, across first and third world contexts, leads me to develop a more holistic conceptualization of farmers’ subjectivities that highlights numerous constraints—informational, political economic, cultural, individual, and environmental—to which farmers are subject. This conceptualization reveals the inadequacy of most efforts to address farmers’ protective gear use, and leads me to propose a multi‐tiered solution to pesticide problems, including an industrial hygiene approach and fostering subjectivities through participatory research involving pesticide users.     

Secular Façade,Neoliberal Islamisation: Textbook Nationalism from Mubarak to Sisi

Beneath the secular veneer of official rhetoric, nationally unified school textbooks provide a striking image of the Islamist message promoted to young people in Egypt. While distorting the struggles and complexity of Egyptian history and heritage, the textbooks construct patriotic devotion and a form of docile ‘neoliberal Islamism’ as the route to national renaissance. They present a notion of ideal citizenship where personal piety, charity and entrepreneurship are the proposed solutions to ‘Egypt's problems’. However, to actually relieve its ‘problems’, the regime has relied on religious associations for the provision of social services, depended on significant foreign assistance and periodically activated anti‐western nationalism. This article details textbook constructions of national identity and citizenship in the late Mubarak era and reflects on whether the 2011 uprising proves their failure in securing his legitimacy. It describes key changes since 2011 and explores whether the Sisi regime is offering alternative formulas of legitimation.     

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.