No title available
$LAYYYTER
Stranger Things
will byers stan first human second
Claire Keane
noise dept.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Misplaced Lens Cap

@theartofmadeline
Xuebing Du

if i look back, i am lost
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
cherry valley forever
YOU ARE THE REASON

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
No title available
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Kiana Khansmith

PR's Tumblrdome
Sade Olutola
seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Mexico

seen from Malaysia

seen from Singapore
seen from Chile

seen from Colombia

seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Canada

seen from Malaysia
seen from Canada

seen from United States
seen from Canada
@geographywarwickteam
Upcoming political geography event
We are branching out
We have some exciting news.
Since we have been accumulating social network resources through three graduate conferences, we have now another parallel online presence that reflects this accumulation.
So please check out our new Warwick website: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/warwickpoliticalgeography
In it there would be a documentation of our past conferences, but also soon there will be updates on our upcoming activities, and other events of interest that are happening in Warwick.
The blog will still be working and regularly updated, but we hope the new website will also act as a more effective catalyst to create a network concerned with space, place and politics.
Artists’ Critical Interventions into Architecture and Urbanism University of Warwick 15-16 July 2016
“What happens when fine artists engage with architecture and urban space? What forms can such engagements take? What political issues arise at the junctures between these disciplines?During the modern period, when artists and critics have often complained that fine art is overly remote from everyday life, one common way of overcoming this gap has been to draw on the greater social efficacy that architecture can seem to provide. However, in other instances artists have used their relatively autonomous position to criticise or interrupt the relationship between architecture, urbanisation and power. This conference will explore these issues as they arise in practices spanning the period from the 1960s to the present, exploring intersections between art, architecture and urbanism both within and outside Europe and North America.”
To register and for further details: https://warwickartarchitecture.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/first-blog-post/
Introduction: The Making Visible of Carceral Politics Marijn Nieuwenhuis, University of Warwick This symposium contains a rich collection of contributions based on the screening of the French docum…
The pre-conference film screening and commentaries are now available open access on Antipode.
CSGR/SISAW Conference on Global Security and Diplomacy
The Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR) and Speaking International Security at Warwick (SISAW) are organising an exciting conference with one theme dedicated to "Geography, geopolitics, and security". Information about the conference and the call for papers can be found by following the above link.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3gSl_SNgFo)
Listen to Prof. Michael Woods’ planery address: “Assemblage, Globalization and the State”
20 May 2016- Prof. Michael Woods, University of Aberystwyth gives the planery address in the 3rd Graduate Conference of Political Geography in the University of Warwick. The address is chaired by Prof. Nick Vaughan-Williams.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIcq8DCHKyc)
Listen to the Keynote address: 'The rule of walls: an architectural reading of the State’s “legitimate” use of violence'
19 May 2016-Léopold Lambert, founder and editor of thefunambulist.net gives the keynote address in the 3rd Graduate Conference of Political Geography in the University of Warwick. The address is chaired by Prof. Stuart Elden (University of Warwick).
Looking back on this year’s conference
It’s been one week since the end of the third Warwick Political Geography conference. The event, lasting two days, is sure to echo for some time with those having participated, with faces, debates or ideas making them smile, perhaps wonder. This year’s theme was on challenging conceptions and materialisations of state space. The presentations ranged broadly and provokingly in their way of addressing this open-ended challenge. The presence of activists, professionals and academics made this engagement all the more lively and inspiring.
In the first panel, Carolina Frossard, Francesco Colona, James Ellison and Tanvi Pate reflected on how state ‘security’ is produced in specific sites and how on different bodies negotiate this project with resistance, cooperation or divergence. Supporting this engagement, case studies ranged from Manipur (Northeast India), Recife (Brazil), and Nairobi to Calais. Carolina and Francesco focused on how different actors produced ‘security’ and how technology and social ties became entangled in this. Drawing on activism, James focused on the violent production of ‘security’ in the Calais migration camps, and on the unrequited, yet growing, participation of neo-fascist militias in this regime. Following this, Tanvi discussed how the body of activist Irom Chanu Sharmila has become a site of political contest to secure the meaning of the northeastern Indian state of exception.
Following this, a second panel focused on using the question of materiality as a vantage point from which to question typical imaginations of state space. Elizabeth Alexander deployed Walters’s concept of ‘’viapolitics’’ to discuss a ship of jewish refugees in 1947. Drawing on the conference’s themes, Elizabeth probed us to think of this ship, and its entangled paths, as a prelude to Israeli state formation. Alternatively, following an STS approach, Arabella Fraser examined landslide risk governance in Colombia as a depoliticizing mechanism, which, through (faulty) mapping, made local politics of vulnerability not only invisible but also inoperable. Combined, these presentations illustrated how both in governmental and grassroots productions of state space, materiality can be thought through as a key, yet often analytically ‘missing’, point of politics.
Closing the first day, a third panel focused on the city and different forms in which urban planning had attempted to produce state space. Reflecting on Cairo, Mohammad Abotera contrasted the disappearance of public green spaces with a boom in garden-related billboards. This, he contended, illustrated deep social changes in city-space inclusion and coincided with a new ‘vision’ of urban state space, as shown in the New Cairo project. Shifting time frames, Vladimir Rizov, engaged with Haussmanian Paris and Fin-de-Siecle St. Petersburg to reflect on how documentary photography can be used to ‘read’ tensions between these quintessential urban state spaces and social bodies involved, and hidden, in them. Drawing on questions of heritage, Melinda Harlov focused on socialist and post-socialist works of memorialisation in public space in Budapest, Hungary.
Following these sessions, Léopold Lambert, founder of ‘the Funambulist’ magazine, presented the keynote address on the walls in police architecture in the contemporary context of the French state of emergency. Drawing on the day’s discussions, Léopold effectively and elegantly reflected on the role of architecture to mediate bodies through instituting violent geographies and materialities.
In the closing day, the conference turned to representation and state space as well as coloniality and state space. In the first session, focusing on representation, Thomas Jackson engaged with different forms of cartography and their relations to geopolitical representations of the Islamic State. Drawing from his fieldwork, David Scheuing reflected on the refugee exercises of mapping as alternative ways into representing their journeys. Lastly, Niklas Plaetzer employed a discussion of Arendt, Ranciere and Laclau to question the relation between political space and its representations through a concept interstitial politics. The second session, focusing on coloniality and state spaces, provoked an engaging discussion. Ricardo Marten Caceres focused in the Juarez Valley to discuss the struggles between the Mexican government and the cartels in securing space. Speaking on the Québec, Stephanie Najjar discussed the alophon system, where language serves as a basis for legal discrimination. This system, she claimed, is operationalized into a politics tinged with coloniality, as it is supported with the succour of a political discourse of francophone integrated ‘interculturality’. Drawing from Political Marxism, Pedro Salgado presented on the state-formation of Brazil in the nineteenth-century. Attentive to Brazilian dominant classes and their different involvements with international politics, Pedro pointed to the untold significance of events such as the Congress of Vienna in aligning the political fates of the Brazilian state. Lastly, focusing on gold-mining, Ximena Sierra Camargo emphasised the continuities and renewals of state support of mass extractivism in Colombia. Most importantly, Ximena noted the depth of this influence by referring to the juridical character of this support.
Concluding the conference, Professor Michael Woods presented a thought-provoking plenary directly addressed at the conference’s topic. Taking the concept of assemblage head-on, Prof. Woods sought to show how it can be used productively to understand transformations of place in the context globalization. Extending from Deleuze and DeLanda and two case studies, Prof. Woods contrasted place assemblages and transnational assemblages as two types of assemblages produced through globalisation. Following his presentation, participants engaged in an active debate on the issues raised, raising questions we were all left mulling over.
All in all, this year’s conference was an immense pleasure and a great culmination to months of teamwork in preparation. We are thankful to the presenters, the keynote speakers, the chairs and the PAIS department for making all this possible. Political Geography is a subject with increasing amounts of interest, for its inclusive way of thinking and its attention to politics and place. We hope to see you there next year!
Conference Agenda 2016
Wednesday 18th May (Math Building, MS.04)
Pre-Conference Film Night – Sur les Toits, 18:00
Discussant Panel: Film Director Nicolas Drolc, Prof. Stuart Elden, Dr. Anastasia Chamberlen and Dr. Oliver Davis.
Thursday 19th May (SU Building, Room 4)
9:30-10:15 Registration. Tea and coffee
10:15-10:30 Introductory Note
10:30-12:00 Session 1: Bodies, Security and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly)
‘Security Beyond the Walls: Public-Private Policing Arrangements in Recife’ [Carolina M. Frossard, University of Amsterdam]
‘Certainty and Uncertainty: the Negotiation of Danger Markers in Nairobi’ [Francesco Colona, University of Amsterdam]
‘Visual representations of statist violence - freedom of movement struggles in Calais’ [James Ellison, Loughborough University]
‘Irom Chanu Sharmila – The woman with the feeding tube: Body, violence and the state of exception’ [Tanvi Pate, University of Warwick]
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-14:30 Session 2: Materiality and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Chris Rossdale)
“Separatist flowers and state monuments: materializations of power and dissensus in Kurdish Turkey ” [Will Day, University of Bilkent]
“From the Angle of a Vessel: The refugee ship as a ‘viapolitical’ site of strategic political action” [Elizabeth Alexander, Royal Holloway, University of London]
“The Missing Politics of Vulnerability: The State and the Co-production of Climate Risk in Informal Urban Settlements” [Arabella Fraser, King’s College, University of London]
14:30-15:00 Tea and coffee
15:00-16:30 Session 3: The Urban and State Spaces (chaired by Lisa Tilley)
“Billboard space in Egypt: reproducing state space and dominating space of representation” [Mohammad AboTera. Cairo]
“(Dis)assembling the Urban in Documentary Photography” [Vladimir Rizov, University of York]
“State Space and the City: the ’56-ers Square in Budapest” [Melinda Harlov, Eötvös Loránd University]
16:30-18:00 Keynote Address: “The rule of walls: an architectural reading of the State’s “legitimate” use of violence” - Léopold Lambert, founder and editor of the Funambulist.net (chaired by Prof. Stuart Elden)
18:00 Drinks Reception
Friday 20th May (SU Building, Room 4)
9:30-10:00 Tea and coffee
10:00-11:30 Session 4: Cartographies and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Marijn Nieuwenhuis)
“Mapping in Political Geography: Critical Geopolitical Cartographies of the Islamic State” [Thomas Jackson, University of Cambridge]
“Whose is this space? Collaborative Cartography and a way to navigate oppressive spaces” [David Scheuing, Marburg]
“There’s a Hole in the Map: Interstitial Politics Against the Space of Sovereignty” [Niklas Plaetzer, SciencesPo]
“Derrida’s Chora and the Roma disruption of State Space in Tony Gatlif’s fim” [Emma Patchett, University of Munster]
11:30-11:45 Tea and coffee
11:45-13:15 Session 5: Coloniality and State Spaces (chair TBC)
“New topologies of recolonization and spatial violence along the Juarez Valley” [Ricardo Marten Caceres, University College London]
“The Making of Non-Citizenship: Linguistic Politics in Montreal” [Stephanie Najjar, John Hopkins University]
“The International Historical Sociology of Brazilian State-Formation” [ Pedro Salgado , University of Sussex ]
“Rethinking sovereignty and juridical forms of capital accumulation from the perspective of coloniality: The large-scale gold mining and the Constitutional State in Colombia” [Ximena Sierra-Camargo, University of Rosario/University of Kent]
13:15-14:15 Lunch
14:15-15:45 Plenary Address: “Assemblage, Globalization and the State” - Prof. Michael Woods, University of Aberystwyth (chaired by Prof. Nick Vaughan-Williams)
15:45 Concluding notes
Keynote and Plenary Abstracts
Keynote Address: “The rule of walls: an architectural reading of the State’s “legitimate” use of violence” - Léopold Lambert, founder and editor of the Funambulist.net (chaired by Prof. Stuart Elden)
The notion of “legitimate use of violence” by the state, although far from new, still allows an understanding of the way our societies operate, according to a particular societal order. The punctual action of the police is often used to illustrate this notion, but the structures that condition it rarely incorporate architecture as a key actor. This lecture therefore proposes to examine this state violence through the scope of architecture using several examples: the militarization of Apartheid Palestine, the neo-colonial police stations of the Paris banlieues (suburbs), the foreseeable policed gentrification of Molenbeek in Brussels, the dehumanizing walls and container camp of Calais. Although emerging from significantly different political contexts, these case studies have in common that they implement themselves through architecture, using the latter’s intrinsic violence in order to force a political order on bodies.
Léopold Lambert is an architect[e], writer, editor, and podcaster based in Paris and New York. His website gathers the various facets of his work (mostly since 2010), the hope being that the designed and cartographic work engages a prolific dialogue with the theoretical one (books, articles and lectures). He is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist Magazine, as well as its blog, and its podcast Archipelago. In 2010, he wrote the book Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona 2012) that examines the inherent characteristics of architecture that systematically makes it a political weapon in general, and also more specifically in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Plenary Address: “Assemblage, Globalization and the State” - Prof. Michael Woods, University of Aberystwyth (chaired by Prof. Nick Vaughan-Williams)
The role of the State in globalization has been a key area of debate among globalization scholars, with some emphasizing the erosion of State sovereignty and others arguing that the State continues to play a significant role in shaping, resisting and even driving globalization. Such debates, however, have tended to be conducted within a framework that regards globalization as a top-down, homogenizing process. Less has been written about the State within relational perspectives on globalization that emphasize the local reproduction of the global and distributed agency. This paper seeks to address this concern by considering the State within an assemblage approach to globalization and place. It first outlines key features of an assemblage approach to globalization, drawing variously on DeLanda, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Latour, before examining how both globalization as a process of assemblage/agencement, and global ‘assemblages’ as social, economic and political formations interact with ‘place-assemblages’ to reconstitute localities. Noting that this analysis may initially appear to sideline the State – highlighting micropolitics, the direct interaction of local and global actors, and an agnostic approach to human and non-human agency – the second part of the paper consequently turns to re-evaluate the position of the State. Returning to DeLanda and to Deleuze and Guattari, the paper considers the performativities of the State in practices of coding and de-coding, striation and smoothing, that disrupt, mediate and facilitate the engagement of local and ‘global’ assemblages. These actions will be briefly illustrated through examples of dairy industry restructuring in New Zealand and immigration in rural Ireland.
Michael Woods joined Aberystwyth University as a Lecturer in Human Geography in 1996, having completed his PhD at Bristol University. Mike’s research interests focus on rural geography and political geography and he has led the department’s New Political Geographies Research Group between 2004 and 2008 and since 2013. His research has been recognized with John Fraser Award for Research Excellence in Rural Geography by the Association of American Geographers in 2010. He is Editor of the Journal of Rural Studies and a member of the editorial boards for Dialogues in Human Geography and European Countryside. His publications include textbooks, Rural (Routledge, 2011), Rural Geography (Sage, 2005), An Introduction to Political Geography (1e 2004, 2e 2014, Routledge) and Key Concepts in Rural Geography (Sage, 2015), the monograph Contesting Rurality: Politics in the British Countryside (Ashgate, 2005), and edited books, New Labour’s Countryside: Rural Policy in Britain since 1997 (Policy Press, 2008), and Globalization and Europe’s Rural Regions (Ashgate, 2015).
Day 1, Thursday 19th May
Session 1: Bodies, Security and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly)
● ‘Security Beyond the Walls: Public-Private Policing Arrangements in Recife’ [Carolina M. Frossard, University of Amsterdam]
Inquiries into the ways private security shapes the materiality of cities have called attention to the proliferation of defensive architecture, fortified enclaves, and so on. Concerned with the securing, or closing off, of particular territories, these have clearly distinguished public from private, whether to describe the type of security provision in question, or to characterize the spaces under its jurisdiction. Drawing from five and half months of ethnographic fieldwork in Recife, Northeastern Brazil, the paper at hand focuses on arrangements of security that blur public and private divides, in order to reflect on the kinds of spaces these (re)produce. This exploration takes security materialities as entry points, but instead of focusing on the gates and walls that have featured prominently in past research as what separates the state from the non-state; I discuss devices that connect the former to the latter for security objectives. More concretely, I ground my analysis in two empirical cases: the analogue radio network that connects residential condominiums to state security under the “Eyes on the Street” programme, and the video-monitoring system that brings together civilians and police officers. By cutting into these socio-technical policing arrangements, I aim to explore new ways through which security governance is spatialized, and, as a corollary, what this might mean, conceptually and methodologically, for those of us dedicated to studying it ethnographically.
● ‘Certainty and Uncertainty: the Negotiation of Danger Markers in Nairobi’ [Francesco Colona, University of Amsterdam]
In this paper, drawing from eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with private security officers, police and residents of two neighborhoods of Nairobi (Kenya), I show how ‘danger’ is identified through ethno-racial, class, and spatial markers in practices of security provision. Through three exemplary urban tropes – “the inside job”, “the thug”, and “Al-Shabaab” –, I analyze how threatening subjects are enacted in security practices. Categories of class and race have fuelled imaginaries of danger for a long time and this has been widely reflected in academic debates. However, when trying to identify danger, my informants often referred to spatial markers such as place of residence, or origin. The “thug”, alongside domestic workers and private security officers (the perpetrators of “inside jobs”), is constantly associated with the nearby “slum”. Conversely the “slum” is imagined as a criminogenic space; a space where crime is endogenous and that cannot be policed effectively. Similarly, “Al-Shabaab” is associated with the neighborhood of Eastleigh in Nairobi, a Somali enclave. In the identification of danger, race, class, and space are not static, or clearly bounded, indicators, but deeply enmeshed. In the paper at hand, I analyze how my informants negotiate such entanglements, and how, in the process, categories of race, class, and space intersect.
● 'Visual representations of statist violence - freedom of movement struggles in Calais'. [James Ellison, Loughborough University]
This paper examines the documentation of statist (police, security services, and far-right groups) violence against undocumented migrants and their supporters in Calais, France. Developed from a period of engaged research in the northern French port, I will assess the collection, distribution, and reproduction of visual material that exposes the everyday brutality of border struggles. After several years of increasing conflict, last year the Calais border exploded as thousands of undocumented people arrived from conflict zones across the world to make the short crossing to the UK. As with other flashpoints along trans-European migration routes, this dramatic increase promoted a harsh and brutal solidification of frontiers, forcing back the veil to reveal the violence inherent within the nationalistic politics of European states.
Promoted by the rise of britanocentric and other nationalistic groups, the UK significantly increased its collaboration with the French government to strength the security apparatus of the border. Millions of pounds were invested in border technology (thermal imaging cameras, x-ray scanners), fences were constructed and police numbers were increased. Calais became a battlefield in the carceral archipelago of European border conflicts. A space where demands for freedom of movement are met with daily repression and brutality. The challenge of people calling for freedom of movement in Calais, and across Europe, has reinforced far-right politics not only in government but also on the street. The gains made by the French Front Nationale, particularly in Calais, coincided with a rise in militant street fascism. Attacks against undocumented people and their supporters increased, the state turned a blind eye, anticipating a shift to the right in governance and some of the security services even choose to directly collaborate with these fascist street gangs. On the other hand, this increase in freedom of movement struggles has been met with popular grassroots solidarity. In an effort to support new arrivals to the European continent from Levsos to Calais, people have autonomously organised to collect and distribute material donations, construct shelters, and cook meals for refugees and migrants corralled into camps in these borderlands.
As well as simple material support there has been a concerted effort by radical solidarity groups to organise with undocumented people to build campaigns that contradict the dominant narratives of either humanitarian assistance or the necessity of stronger frontiers. By exposing statist violence, promoting freedom of movement actions, and building strong networks to resist border restrictions, these groups through the production of digital counter-archives, have created strong counter-narratives that challenge the state’s response to freedom of movement struggles. By assessing and analysing the visual material produced as part of this counter-narrative I will draw on my own experiences collecting and distributing digital video and photography over the last year. The paper will develop theoretical intersections through the examination of Calais as a case study and this will provide the background for understanding statist violence and regimes of control as they exist in the world today.
● ‘Irom Chanu Sharmila – The woman with the feeding tube: Body, violence and the state of exception’ [Tanvi Pate, University of Warwick]
[Abstract not available publicly]
Session 2: Materiality and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Chris Rossdale)
● “Separatist flowers and state monuments: materializations of power and dissensus in Kurdish Turkey ” [Will Day , University of Bilkent]
This paper seeks to return to and reconsider, in light of theories of the state that attend specifically to struggles over the production of space, a set of events and images that have lingered since I carried out two years of fieldwork in Diyarbakir, the informal capital of Kurdish Turkey. In 2008, controversy erupted twice over municipal flowerbeds, both resulting in lawsuits against the city government on charges of terrorist propaganda. The events attracted no shortage of public ridicule, and accusations of absurdity. ‘Separatist flowers!’ was the mocking reaction of one local paper. True as this reaction is, at a certain level, these events deserve closer analysis; I aim here to place these and similar incidents within a broader history of the unfinished project to produce state space in Turkey, particularly in the contested and troubled geography of Kurdish Turkey. This means both attending to state acts of remaking landscapes and cityscapes to ‘state the state’. Drawing on Lefebvre’s remarks on monumentality, I look at controversies over mountainsides, flags, and city monuments in Diyarbakir and across the southeast. It also involves looking more closely at everyday material practices where struggles over what Ranciere terms the “distribution of sensible” occur: struggles over the color of clothes, certain charged symbols in this context such as stars or the victory sign, and orthography—struggles over what can and cannot be seen, heard, felt, and touched, which Ranciere sees as central to the political.
The push and pull of these ordinary struggles, together with the monumental projects of state-space making in the region, suggest an important material aspect of state practice and the everyday of political life in Kurdish Turkey often overlooked in more standard accounts focused on categories of rights, minorities, or formal citizenship. The focus on struggles over what can and cannot materialize also speaks to a growing body of work seeking to push theories of the state towards a greater attention to concrete practices that link people with spaces large and small, and what this might say about the study of the state and substantive citizenship.
● “From the Angle of a Vessel: The refugee ship as a ‘viapolitical’ site of strategic political action” [Elizabeth Alexander, Royal Holloway, University of London]
In the aftermath of WWII, thousands of Jewish survivors attempted to migrate to Palestine via sea routes on ships of questionable seaworthiness. The British government, intent on defending the British Mandate, deployed a military blockade of Palestine and attempted to implement a policy of refoulement. Suspect ships were identified across the Mediterranean, foreign governments lobbied to prevent their movement. Once underway, Naval destroyers were sent to capture ships suspected of participating in the Zionist operation Aliyah Bet (Second immigration). If captured, a ship was towed to Haifa, offloaded, and abandoned just offshore. Its surviving passengers were detained, caged aboard a British prison ship and either returned (refouled) to their port of origin or sent to Displaced Persons (DP) camps. These vessels of mass migration posed challenges to state control of territory and borders then as they do now.
Vessels are inherently mobile; they transit in-between and transect recognized delimiters of power and control in a specific assemblage. The objectives of governments and organizations, the motivations of passengers and crew, the clandestine nature of the operation, the routes and the sea itself contributed to the phenomena of the ships becoming mobile material settings for political disagreement.
William Waters proposes the concept of ‘viapolitics,’ as an argument for substantive, focused research on vehicles, routes and roads as a way of deepening our understanding of migration as a field of struggle and borders as a topology of power. Within the material constraints of ships, the entanglement of humans and vessels serves as a contact point for exactly this kind of analysis. This paper will examine the case of one particular ship named ‘Medinat Ha’Yehdim’ in the post-war movement of Jewish refugees. Through an analysis of several key events en route to Palestine, this ship will be interpreted as a material site of asymmetrical power contestation and strategic political action. ‘A whole field of otherwise overlooked struggles is brought into view once we investigate migration from the angle of its vehicles’ (Waters, 2015).
● “The Missing Politics of Vulnerability: The State and the Co-production of Climate Risk in Informal Urban Settlements” [Arabella Fraser, King’s College, University of London]
The paper speaks to the broad themes of the production of state space in urban areas, state spaces of exception and the production of citizenship. It critically examines studies of urban disaster and climate change risk that have increasingly invoked governmentality as a theoretical frame for understanding how urban risk governance functions. Such perspectives are useful in re-politicising understandings of urban climate change risk and vulnerability. However, the paper uses the idiom of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to question the current treatment of the politics of expertise in the governmentality literature and highlight the need to unpack the workings of the urban state. A case study of the ladera (hillslopes) programme for managing landslide risk in Bogota, Colombia, is used to show how the practices of knowledge through risk assessment are intertwined with particular practices of government in ways that produce risk and vulnerability in state-designated risk zones. Three dimensions of this are explored: the politicised assumptions of state-based risk assessments and their effects; the co-production of risk assessments with state values, discourses and practices in informal, urban areas (including norms of urban citizenship and practices of exception and flexibility) and the effect of state disunity on the production of risk (with risk and vulnerability produced in the contradictions and tensions between different state and quasi-state agencies). The paper concludes with the implications for (urban) state theory and for urban risk management practice.
Session 3: The Urban and State Spaces (chaired by Lisa Tilley)
● “Billboard space in Egypt: reproducing state space and dominating space of representation” [Mohamed AboTera, Cairo, co-authored with Safa Ashoub, GIZ]
Billboards have been increasingly dominating the skyline of Cairo for a couple of decades already with a sharp increase after 2011. Naturally, they advertise many products but it is easily noticed that real-estate advertisements have a significant share, especially gated communities. They all present some sort of a promise, so what could be the promise of the latter? Analysing their general visual and textual characteristics we can find some recurrences. There are many promised messages delivered through those advertisements out of which we shall focus on elements of the natural and built environment.
Today all advertised developments exist in the desert. Historically in Egypt, the Nile rhythm regulated both nature and urbanism in the valley. There has been a dichotomy of the valley and the desert which still continues; a binary of life and death, inside and outside, state and statelessness. Yet, this condition of nature has been dominated by the Dam followed by over-urbanisation and exhaustion of natural resources including space.
Four decades ago Henri Lefebvre predicted that by the year 2000 nature (and space) will be the new scarcity to the extent that it would require reproduction and that urban planning should be understood within this struggle over scarcity, where urbanisation is perceived as a tool for domination. In that regard, urbanisation of the desert, nevertheless expected, can be considered as a state tool to manage this struggle over scarcity. Yet, within this process we argue that mental space is also under reformation through advertisement imagery and billboards.
While billboards promise a decent urban and natural environment, they occupy ground space, cover urban and natural environments, and thus contribute to their scarcity. Moreover, they are covering the unfortunate deteriorating-by- neglect environment with a promise for a better reality for the fortunate. However, this promise of nature and reality is paradoxical. While images are promising ‘Nature’ they present trees and open greeneries which form quite a distant reality from the arid nature of the desert, bringing again the valley- centred perception of nature imposed on the desert.
Advertisements and billboards are a predictable product of a real-estate free market, yet we have reasons to believe they are also related to a State Mode of Production. After being commodified and exhausted space became also occupied by promises of a better space. It is either that the image of valley-space is expanding, or that the dichotomy is inverted so that the desert represents order, liveability and statehood as opposed to the stateless informality of the valley. Is the state producing this new space of dominance as an expansion of state space? In this paper we are attempting to understand issues of state hegemony, its mode of production of space and dominance over spaces of representation through the instrumentalisation of urban planning and its images.
● “(Dis)assembling the Urban in Documentary Photography” [Vladimir Rizov, University of York]
Photography and the urban are often beneficially interweaved. Often, photographic depictions are used as starting points for discussions on the political, social, and everyday aspects of the urban experience. This paper aims to provide a particular historic conjuncture, in which the technical aspects of photography are invoked to speak on the issue of urban space as a manifestation of the state.
Photography is a technological development that uncovered a new epoch of seeing in the centuries following its invention in 1839 (Sontag, 2008; Rose, 2001). Undoubtedly, it has gone through many changes, from its origin in the form of the camera obscura (Lovell, 1981), through various analogue incarnations (Barger and White, 1991) to contemporary digital cameras. On one hand, there are several aspects of photography which remain underemphasised in discussions of the topic; introductions to the history of photography often detail the technological affordances, the social networks of inventors, and the channels of technical and chemical expertise; common as well is the indication of photography’s rootedness in the modern, the industrial, and the technological as a whole. On the other hand, these themes and issues are seldom given a material relevance, nor are they given a specific historic conjuncture.
The central example in this paper will be the Paris of the 19th century, more particularly the Paris after Haussmann’s urban restructuring (Benjamin, 2009) as captured by the work of Charles Marville (Sramek et al, 2013) and Eugené Atget (2011). By analysing documentary photographs of post- Haussmann Paris, urban space will be revealed as a locus of state power. Urban, social, and political implications will be extrapolated through an interweaving of photographic and theoretical sources. Thus, the paper will demonstrate urban space’s relation to state power, the state’s reflection onto urban experience itself, and the wider mechanisms of control that are the interweaved with state spaces. Furthermore, in an attempt to avoid historical particularism, examples of early 20th century Petersburg (Shelaev and Shelaev, 2013) and 1960s New York (Berman, 2010) will be briefly discussed. By outlining a historic trajectory of urban state spaces and their totalised control, an argument aiming to disassemble views of historic understanding of the urban and its depiction will be provided, thus contesting fixed notions of power.
● “State Space and the City: the ’56-ers Square in Budapest” [Melinda Harlov, Eötvös Loránd University]
There is a square in Budapest, Hungary that was erected solely to fulfill state aim, which was to celebrate the 70th birthday of Stalin with an eight meter-tall Stalin statue on a more than two meters high tribune. The square had a general strong state emphasis during the Soviet area with parades and processions, and a harsh change right after that by removing the statues and changing the name of the square from Procession Square to ‘56ers Square. The political use of the territory is almost minimal from the 1990s and rather diverse public entertaining events got located there and it became the biggest free parking spot of the city. The political power expressed its will in regard the future usage of the area just in 2011, when the state bought the area from the city and its district to establish many new museum buildings there occupying the total territory without any significant allusion to the history of the site. Not just the actual physical modifications and their critical evaluation but also the political requirements towards the area and its use are going to be subjects of analysis. Therefore legal texts about the establishment of the square, the proposal for the different statues and buildings as well as speeches that were given on the tribune then podium at the researched venue are also investigated in the presentation to understand the process of expressing state space. Fortunately there are numerous visuals available about the past, the present and the planned future of the area that would not just help to visualize the topic but also function as sources of analysis by for example investigating the expressed scales and perspectives. The time frame of the study will be the period from 1949, when the state decision was made about the establishment of the square, until 2011, when the future of the area was decided. The proposed paper not only introduces this vivid narrative about the state use of an actual urban site, but also places it into the academic discourse of memory and representation.
Short Biographies:
Carolina M. Frossard is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam (AISSR/UvA). Her ongoing doctoral research inquires into how arrangements of security composed of state and non-state actors – as well as of technologies, and materialities– reconfigure the ways citizenship is performed and understood in Recife, Northeastern Brazil. Her work fits within the broader scope of SECURCIT, an ethnographic research project focused on public-private assemblages of security and citizenship in five different cities: Recife (Brazil); Miami (USA); Nairobi (Kenya); Jerusalem (Israel-Palestine); and Kingston (Jamaica).
Carolina joined SECURCIT shortly after being awarded a master’s degree in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS) – enabled by a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, the researcher’s hometown. Prior to her graduate studies, Carolina was part of the Communications and Advocacy team of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) in Latin America.
Francesco Colona is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development and part of the Centre for Urban Studies at the same university. After a Bachelor degree in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, he completed a Research Master in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, with a research on organizational strategies of armed groups and their patterns of violence against civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is now part of a research team studying “Public-Private Security Assemblages and the Reconfiguration of Citizenship” in five different cities: Kingston (Jamaica), Recife (Brazil), Miami (USA), Jerusalem (Israel) and Nairobi (Kenya). In his own research he focuses on the last city, where he tries to understand - ethnographically – how citizenship and access to (or targeting from) security is reconfigured in hybrid forms of security governance, with a specific interest on the private security industry and the resident’s initiatives.
James Ellison is a research student completing a PhD on visual representations of border violence in Calais, France. Co-supervised within the Department of Art and Design and the Department of Politics at Loughborough, his research project involves direct engagement with the everyday experiences and political struggles created by the UK / French border regime through the production of visual and social media. After several years’ worth of involvement with activist solidarity networks his research interrogates the connection between anarchist politics, media practice, and state borders. Formerly he was a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he completed an MA in Art and Politics in 2012.
Tanvi Pate is currently a Sessional Teacher at the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), Warwick. She teaches Introduction to Politics PO107 and Britain and the War on Terror PO380. She passed her Viva on 12 January 2016, her PhD thesis examined the markedly different nuclear policy of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush US administrations towards India by focusing on the three core categories of identity, inequality and great power narratives. Drawing on a critical constructivist framework, she argued that the ‘state’ becomes a constructed entity within relations of identity and difference. Building upon the postcolonial perspective of imperialism, she argued that difference was maintained in unequal terms through US nuclear foreign policy that manifested in great power narrative sites of; peaceful civilisation; unstable deterrence; democracy; economic progress; and scientific development. Identities of ‘race’, ‘political economy’, and ‘gender’ in terms of radical otherness and otherness were recurrently utilised through these great power narratives enabling the concerned administrations to maintain ‘US’ identity as progressive and developed western nation, intrinsically justifying the US role as an arbiter of the global nuclear order. The main contention was that ‘foreign policy’ is not external to the state, but in fact constitutive of the ‘state’ in terms of inscribing the boundaries that demarcate ‘inside’ from ‘outside’, ‘self’ from ‘other’, and ‘domestic’ from ‘foreign’. Thus foreign policy becomes redefined as a boundary-producing practice which attains a performative dimension through which the state- effect is constituted. Tanvi aims to continue research on state performativity, state of exception, and the making and unmaking of borders.
John William Day received his PhD in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2013. He teaches political theory and composition at Bilkent University. His interests include the anthropology of displacement and dispossession, cities and citizenship, political ecology and political geography, theories of the state, semiotics, and legacies of materialist thought in contemporary political theory.
Elizabeth Alexander is a PhD candidate in Political Geography at Royal Holloway with a focus on materiality, national identity and nationalism. Her supervisory team includes Peter Adey, and Klaus Dodds, Geography and Chris Rumford, Political Sociology. She completed a taught MSc in Geopolitics and Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her MA thesis focused on Place, Politics and the Scottish Referendum and was awarded a Pass with distinction. Prior to her recent academic experience, Elizabeth worked in as a global product management director.
Dr Arabella Fraser is a post-doctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience, Department of Geography, King’s College London. Her research interests include the governance and politics of climate risk and adaptation, the relationship between urbanisation and climate risk in the Global South, in particular in informal urban settlements, and the development of theories of institutions and environmental change. Arabella completed her PhD in the International Development Department at the London School of Economics in 2015. The thesis examined the politics of risk assessment in the informal, urban settlements of Bogota, Colombia, and the implications for theories of urban risk, vulnerability and climate adaptation. She holds a Masters in Government (LSE) and a BA (Hons) in Social and Political Science (University of Cambridge).
Mohamed AboTera was trained as an architect with both a professional and an academic career. He finished his MA in Architecture, Globalisation, and Cultural Identity at the University of Westminster in 2007. His activities include academic teaching and research, cultural project management, and architectural consultations. He is also a co-founder of MADD platform and affiliated with a number of urban initiatives. In his research he is interested in the political dimension of space, unplanned urbanism, representations and urban activism.
Vladimir Rizov is a doctoral researcher in the sociology department at the University of York. His interests revolve around documentary photography and the urban
Melinda Harlov studied (among many other subjects) communications, nationalism and cultural heritage management in both Hungarian and English-speaking educational institutions. Since 2006, she has been working in diverse cultural and educational offices that made her able to create a multinational and multidisciplinary network with members at her researched area and to experience cooperation in such environment. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at Atelier Department of European Social Sciences and Historiography at Eötvös Loránd University and she co-teaches the interdisciplinary sophomore class at McDaniel College, Budapest. Her research interest is how international norms (of UNESCO World Heritage Committee) and national requirements can be adopted to local and regional circumstances. Her comparative approach is ensured also by attending both national and foreign scholarly programs and by presenting and publishing her research at these academic media.
Day 2, Friday 20th May
Session 4: Cartographies and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Marijn Nieuwenhuis)
● “Mapping in Political Geography: Critical Geopolitical Cartographies of the Islamic State” [Thomas Jackson, University of Cambridge]
The decline of mapping in political geography has stimulated a multitude of calls to ‘re-think’ and ‘re- engage’ with cartography (Kitchin & Dodge 2007; Herb et al. 2009). Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the sub-discipline of critical geopolitics where the prevailing scholarly approach derides maps as simplified visual representations of geopolitical discourse which serve to reinforce hegemonic power relations. However, critical geopolitics has a dual responsibility in its approach to cartography. Firstly, it must continue to challenge the neutrality assumed by cartographic images by illuminating the discourse framing and reproduced by geopolitical maps. Secondly, it must offer alternative, informative geopolitical visualisations which reflect the discipline’s enduring goal to unsettle the assumptions which underpin state power.
This paper contributes to both responsibilities by suggesting an interpretive framework for investigating the performative nature of mapping in critical geopolitics. It is situated in a deep scepticism towards the representational practice as purely objective (Harley 1989; Wood 1992) and reflects the situatedness of maps in a wider performativity framework. Rather than analysis fixated on a singular cartographic text, it develops a typographic approach. It suggests that by surveying the various geopolitical visualisations which frame a particular political event or group, thematic commonalities can be identified in the ‘style’ of maps produced. The identification of broad categories of cartographic representation highlights the commonalities and disjunctions between the geopolitical imaginations of various actors. Furthermore, it illuminates the contrasting discourse which is reproduced and subverted by the content and context of cartographic practice.
This interpretive framework is then implemented in an analysis of popular representations of the Islamic State (IS). IS is of particular interest due to the weight afforded to mapping as an explanatory tool in media coverage of the crisis in Iraq and Syria. The paper identifies the deliberately wide and non-mutually exclusive categories of ‘network’ and ‘territorial’ cartographies. Generally, there is a lack of engagement with ‘network’ mapping in popular depictions of IS and it is predominantly practiced by academic cartographers (Crenshaw 2010). In the popular media, this reproduces a narrative of the group as ontologically different to previous Jihadi groups, for instance, the amorphous rhetoric associated with al Qaeda. The ongoing attachment to ‘territorial’ mapping reflects a complex relationship with the nation state as a performative lens of spatializing international politics. The various cartographies of IS demonstrate conflicting visualisations of state power and further unsettle the fixity of the state concept. Moreover, the pseudo-scientific gaze replicated in so many territorial maps continually reinforces assumptions of veracity and objectivity which bolsters the ‘precision’ understanding of modern visio-optic warfare (Gregory 2013; Gregory 2015).
● “Whose is this space? Collaborative Cartography and a way to navigate oppressive spaces” [David Scheuing, Marburg]
Public „reclaiming” is a vehicle of critical activism mostly as a way to counter authoritative interpretations of space. These crucial instances of critical emancipatory politics are met by less vocal instances on the part of the people not formally embedded within denizen or citizen discourses: can e.g. ex-felons, stateless people or refugees publicly (re)claim spaces for themselves, too? How state power plays out spatially on their experience and how it can be resisted, traversed or ridiculed is the issue of this paper.
On the Balkan route especially, this question is currently pivotal. In 2015, governments across Europe had been quick in responding to the then “crisis” of refugees on the Balkans: in closing borders to “protect” them. Attempts of refugees to claim a right to traverse and move freely have mostly been met by violent repression from the state's side. Here the state materialises in a very specialised way. It set up what has become known as the “Balkan Route Corridor” starting the now formalised transit to Central Europe at the Macedonian border. This corridor is believed to be a mere “transition space”, factually ruling out arrival or asylum in these countries from the beginning. This works on the assumption that claiming any of these would not be in the interest of refugees traversing these territories. The corridor is an instrument of vital state power – the state effectfully staging a spectacle of caging, dispersal and holding; the migrant body yet again being the terrain of state power (cf. Agamben 1995[1998]). But as has been recounted numerous times, this is not an impermeable condition nor prohibitive to social interaction as such. In this position, resistance to the corridor's logic is possible and – to a degree – a necessary condition of any “everyday life” in and around the camps.
I focus on such spatial, discursive and biographical/political violence and the conditions of repression and marginalisation from the route, through a process of collaboratively producing maps with the refugees (cf. Orangotango 2012). Collaborative “countermappings” may visualise the fractured nature of state engagement, but also its vital impact on refugees’ experiences as well as individual answers/resistances to it. These maps are produced in an encounter over the refugees’ respective situation in the camps and on the route in Macedonia (field trips in January and March/April 2016). Maps are all over the discourse of migration, but only very few projects have ever aimed at countering the general geopolitical ways of representing migration in cartography (cf. MigMap n.y.). In redrawing political spaces from the route the idea of representing space from a disengaged „above“ is countered, not obsolete (cf. Tazzioli 2015). But it hopefully will be a meaningful exchange between categorization (“refugee”) and the experience (of violence from the state).
● “There’s a Hole in the Map: Interstitial Politics Against the Space of Sovereignty”
[Niklas Plaetzer, SciencesPo]
This paper explores the idea of political space as a space in-between (Zwischenraum), i.e. as an interstitial space which ruptures the given ordering of the social. While the metaphor of “political space” plays a central role in modern political theory, the notion has predominantly been linked to the space of the sovereign state. In this state-centric tradition, “political space” has been conceived of as a unique place within a social formation: a “public space” with a discrete and determinate location, both materially and on the level of the political imaginary. This paper argues that such a metaphorical equation of politics with a certain space within a closed cartographic order eliminates the ruptural element of the political, which, in the words of Simon Critchley, always operates at an “interstitial distance” from the space of sovereignty. Through an elaboration of the concept of “political space” as a space of rupture, i.e. as a crack-like, fugitive opening which escapes its possible integration in any sovereign order, this paper aims at a reconstruction of an alternative theoretical tradition. It proposes the notion of interstitial politics by drawing from the work of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, and James C. Scott and highlights up to now unexplored similarities between their radically anti-sovereigntist political theories, while also emphasizing the specificities of their respective notions of political space. Whereas Hannah Arendt's thought has today largely achieved canonical status, it has only rarely been analysed alongside radical democratic theories of political space conceived of as the interstitial space of a rupture. After a presentation of her influential notion of political space, this paper therefore discusses Arendt's “in-between space” of politics in the context of Jacques Rancière's radical view of politics as a rupture which transforms the “space of circulation” into a “space for the appearance of a subject.” The paper then compares and contrasts Arendt's critique of sovereignty with Ernesto Laclau's critique of the “suture” of social space. Lastly, it evokes the work of American political scientist James C. Scott on “legibility” as a forceful and empirically-minded extension of this anti-sovereigntist strain of political theory. It concludes with a discussion of possible avenues for a kind of research that would take into account the ruptural element of political space.
Key words: Sovereignty, political space, interstitial politics, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, James C. Scott
“Derrida’s Chora and the Roma disruption of State Space in Tony Gatlif’s fim” [Emma Patchett, University of Munster]
According to Derrida, Plato's chora can be read as both receptacle and site, source and yet a no-place which is simultaneously not a non-place. In this sense, chora can be considered an ideal metaphor for sovereignty at the current time of crisis. Using a critical reading within the interdisciplinary framework of law-as-film, this paper will excavate a radical new reading of the space of the state. Through the films of the Romani filmmaker Tony Gatlif, a spatio-legal disruption of normative models of state space will be explored, and a radically redemptive (yet anarchic) articulation of the chora will be put forward.
Session 5: Coloniality and State Spaces (chair TBC)
● “New topologies of recolonization and spatial violence along the Juarez Valley” [Ricardo Martén Caceres, University College London]
The rise of the drug industry in Latin America is somewhat unprecedented in history: in a matter of three decades, this multi-billion-dollar business became globalized, technologically innovative, adaptable, creative, with impossibly high returns on investment and filling a market need that hasn’t shown signs of slowing down. This industry is the ultimate capitalist dream, except it is unequivocally a criminal endeavour, a brutal and unforgiving enterprise that has brought death, environmental destruction and, more importantly, a deep transformation in the structural dynamics that comprise the operativity of States and the law.
While the ongoing War on Drugs in Mexico is portrayed as a struggle between cartels and the State, the residual consequences have had deep effects on the spatial reconfiguration of sovereignty and territorial claims, transcending local actors and including powerful economic interests. Anchored by a narrative predicated on violence, death and retribution, the path of trafficking (drugs, humans, weapons) has built a network of destitute towns where territory is permanently recolonized, governance is eroded, and bare life operates in a permanent state of exception. One example of this process occurs in the Juarez Valley, a 50-mile stretch of land that runs from Ciudad Juarez, a large border city, to small village El Porvenir. A former cotton agricultural strip, this small region has seen the brutal effects of territorial dispute during the height of the drug war, producing mass migration, urban transformation and the devastating effects of violence in space. The effects of conflict have left a trail of destitute “ghost” towns that occupy extremely valuable geo-economic land which is being considered for several large scale energy projects.
This paper would aim to calibrate the emergence of an altered urban topology in the spatial fabric of the region. Furthermore, it will look to link this transformation to an ongoing process of territorial recolonization between the state, the cartels, investors and local citizens themselves, a process that all but confirms the repeated failures of the Mexican State and its struggle to claim full sovereignty on its land. At the same time, it will try to relate the specific case with the larger narratives surrounding drug trafficking and the corrosive effect it has on governmental institutions and policies. The illicit process of transit, migration and consumption, keeps leaving a series of traces along the winded routes from South America to the Mexico-US border. These paths are expansive and complex, subsisting in the nether zones of indifference and blurred geographies that lay the ground for them.
Thus, it seems worth asking how this topological assemblage (of people, goods, money) is transforming space, and what are the consequences for the State and its management of sovereignty. If the tension is essentially brought about by movement, there must be a case to be made about the static strongholds that anchor, like forts along the way, the constitution of what seems to be an indestructible network. It is at these towns where transformation seems more evident, where the territorial and the social have experienced profound adaptations that reshape the use of the urban landscape; it is also the material setting for violence, the coordinates, parallels and meridians where the ‘war on drugs’ has been performed relentlessly and where casualties have been rendered invisible from the official narratives and from space itself.
● “The Making of Non-Citizenship: Linguistic Politics in Montreal” [Stephanie Najjar, John Hopkins University]
In The Rebirth of History, Alain Badiou argues that the state is a machine for fabricating inexistence, ultimately producing groups that, once invisibilized, are excluded from membership in French society. Badiou pushes us to rethink citizenship, not as defined by the legal possession of a passport, but through membership, democratic inclusion and recognition in a given community. Such membership for Badiou, is conditioned by a set of normalizing criteria, or what he terms “identitarian normality.” This paper grounds its theoretical investigation of the relation between the fabrication of non-citizenship, “identitarian normality” and the state in Montreal’s immigrant landscape. I will focus on the French language as one criterion that defines immigrant inclusion or exclusion in Quebec. More specifically, I will offer counter-factual insights on the Quebec Francization Programs for immigrants, which are state-subsidized French immersion classes that new immigrants are encouraged and sometimes paid to attend before they integrate the Quebecois job market. Touted as a necessary toolkit for immigrant survival in Quebec, the cultural and linguistic politics of these programs are rarely questioned because the program, run by the Quebec Ministry of Immigration, Diversity and Inclusion, is perceived to be a generous attempt to spread affordable access to education in the French language and to support immigrant integration into the province’s socio-cultural fabric. Without discarding the benefits of such programs, this paper offers an alternative analysis on this initiative to “francize” immigrants driven by the Ministry. I ask: does speaking French guarantee a safe passage from non-citizenship to citizenship for the Immigrant? Put more broadly, how porous are the borders between citizenship and non-citizenship for the figure of the Immigrant and how well are these borders policed?
Attuned to the ways in which criteria for citizenship, built around racialized, gendered, and classed lines, define who gets accepted as citizen and who is posited as non-citizen, I seek to push the concept of non-citizen further. First, I put Alain Badiou in conversation with two other scholars who have written about questions of community, membership and inclusion: Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy. Secondly, I seek to racialize the concept of the non-citizen. I observe the manifestations of non-citizenship, how it is produced and enforced in light of this racialization. In doing so, I decentralize the state as principle “fabricator of inexistence” in order to shine light on other material, rhetorical, political, and cultural practices that produce and enforce non-citizenship, ultimately leading to sharply variegated landscapes of belonging and unbelonging. (Non)Citizenship is a contested terrain, the boundaries of which are an outcome of negotiations and struggle. I show that in the city of Montreal, the emphasis on speaking French as a criterion for immigrant integration is not only fashioned by the State but is also fueled by non-state actors and citizen pressure groups.
● “The International Historical Sociology of Brazilian State-Formation” [Pedro Salgado, University of Sussex]
Brazil declared its independence from Portugal in 1822, obtaining recognition from most of the world powers of that time in the following five years. But setting aside the legal aspects of this state-formation process, what are the material – social and geopolitical – aspects of this transformation? This paper draws from the international historical sociology literature and Political Marxism to read the political events in that period as outcomes of the strategies of social actors in a framework shaped by local and transnational social relations, providing an understanding of Brazilian state-formation that goes beyond the formalism of International Law, or the eurocentrism and structuralism of traditional International Relations Theories. What emerges as a result of that effort is a narrative of the formation of a national ruling class that can be traced back to the colonial period (particularly after the peak of gold production in 1750), unified not only by its direct material interests but also by its opposition to the Portuguese aristocracy of merchants and bureaucrats and by its alliance with agents of British informal imperialism. Such a narrative is not complete with formal independence, also encompassing the political upheavals under Pedro I and the ascension of Pedro II in 1840.
● “Rethinking sovereignty and juridical forms of capital accumulation from the perspective of coloniality: The large-scale gold mining and the Constitutional State in Colombia” [Ximena Sierra-Camargo, University of Rosario/University of Kent]
Question: How the mining corporations regulate through the Colombian Constitutional State in order to establish a (neo)colonial regime in a global context; and how the mining regulation which has been enacted according to legal forms, reshapes the Constitutional State in Colonial terms.
Argument: This question arises in the context of a (neo) extractivism model which has been reintroduced in last twenty years in several countries in Latin America. Currently, there is a growing presence of transnational mining companies, which have exercised their power through south global nation-states, with the key collaboration of local governments. Namely, in Colombia these actors have enacted and supported a strong large-scale gold regulation which establishes an hegemonic discourse of development and which is mainly oriented to an economic growth but that ignores different views of development. From a decolonial perspective this regulation is an expression of coloniality.
Theoretical Approach: Using Anibal Quijano’s concept of “coloniality” in dialogue with Achilles Mbembe’s concept of “indirect private government” and with Agnew’s concept of “territorial trap”, I aim to interrogate how transnational corporations have regulated through the Colombian Constitutional State and have ended up reshaping the sovereignty principle in order to carry out their economic projects in global south nation-states such as Colombia. This analysis exposes the current role of mining in the reconstitution of the domestic legal and political orders, and shows how former colonial relations are still present and are updated and crystallized through legal technocratic procedures. From this perspective, I aim to understand if the large-scale gold mining regulation in Colombia involves a ‘re-colonialization of the Constitutional State’ and/or a ‘Constitutionalization of the colony’.
Short Biographies:
Tom Jackson is currently working towards an MPhil in Geographical Research at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Alex Jeffrey. Previously, having studied at Warwick School and the University of Oxford, graduating from the latter in 2015 with a BA (First Class) in Geography. Tom joined the Department of Geography at Cambridge with a keen interest in political geography, critical geopolitics and state formation. His research this year covers a range of topics including the performativity of federal relations in the Russian Federation and cartographic representations of the Islamic State. His MPhil thesis will centre on a discourse analysis of the Dabiq, a magazine published by ISIS. From this October, he intends to remain at Cambridge and begin working towards an ESRC funded PhD. This project will explore the practice of paradiplomacy in Russia and its role in state and region formation.
David Scheuing, is a MA student of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Center for Conflict Studies (CCS) in Marburg, Germany. He holds a BA in political science and human geography and is interested in the intersecting fields of conflict studies, critical geography & cartography, the study of political macro violence, and critical migration and development studies. He is currently undertaking field research for a master thesis in Macedonia.
Niklas Plaetzer is a graduate student of political theory at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). A native of Münster (Germany), he holds a Bachelor of Arts (summa cum laude) in social sciences from Sciences Po and previously spent the academic year of 2014/2015 as a Studienstiftung scholarship recipient at the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, New York. His main research interests include democratic theory, contemporary Continental philosophy as well as the study of social movements and transitions to democracy. He is currently working on his Masters thesis under the supervision of Frédéric Gros, focussing on the critique of sovereignty in the thought of Hannah Arendt and contemporary theories of radical democracy. His work has appeared in the Journal of International Affairs (“Civil Society as Domestication: Egyptian and Tunisian Uprisings Beyond Liberal Transitology”), the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, 3:AM magazine and is forthcoming in Opium Philosophie. In his free time, Niklas enjoys Brazilian music and tries to help the cause of refugees.
Emma Patchett was most recently a Marie Curie Research Fellow on the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) ITN, completing her doctorate in migration law and the contemporary novels of the Roma diaspora in June 2015. Since then she has been conducting work as an independent researcher, and is currently working on a volume entitled 'Spatial Justice and Diaspora' for Counter Press. Her research interests include planning legislation and counter-narratives of space, radical interdisciplinary methodologies of law as a spatio-temporal aesthetic, and law as diaspora.
Ricardo Martén is currently a PhD candidate at the Bartlett DPU (UCL). His research is concerned with the urban dynamics between informality, violence and territorial patterns, as well as the role of urban design as a theoretical complement to the production of space. Ricardo is also involved in architectural practice, particularly in post-disaster and emergency shelter solutions, and has partnered with NGOs in successful projects in Haiti, the Philippines and Tanzania.
Stephanie Najjar is a first-year doctoral candidate in Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a B.A in Human Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research is grounded in mapping out landscapes of non-citizenship and racialized exclusion in the much-lauded “multicultural” and distinctly francophone city of Montreal. She is more broadly concerned with connecting contemporary debates in Political Theory and Geography around the concepts of politics, community and (non)citizenship with political concerns around racism, and immigration. A Lebanese-Egyptian immigrant to Quebec herself, she channels her training in Political Theory as well as her background in spatial thinking into the intellectual and political project of rethinking the figure of the Immigrant in the “multicultural” context. Interested in taking into account new materialisms, Gilles Deleuze and the non-human agency of matter in her study on non-citizenship, Stephanie works with Dr. Jane Bennett at Johns Hopkins.
Pedro Salgado is a PhD candidate at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, where he is a member of CAIT – Centre for Advanced International Theory. He did his MA in International Relations in the same department in 2013, having previously studied Law (Federal University in Rio de Janeiro) and Social Sciences (State University in Rio de Janeiro). His research interests include International Relations Theory, Historical Sociology, Marxism, and Postcolonialism.
Ximena Sierra-Camargo has successfully completed her LLB studies in 2003 at Universidad Externado de Colombia (with a thesis on legal pluralism and mechanisms of social control in indigenous communities). In 2008 she completed her Masters in Socio-legal Studies, at La Plata National University, Argentina (with a thesis on sexual violence, impunity, and paramilitary forces in Colombia). She is currently a PhD candidate at Rosario University, Colombia, where Dr. Julio Gaitán and Dr. Luis Eslava supervise her thesis. Furthermore, since September 2015, she is based in Canterbury, where she is a Visiting Training Fellow at Kent Law School, for one year. Her current doctoral research explores the colonial and postcolonial nature of mining in Colombia. In particular, she is studying how the constitution of Colombia as a producer of raw mining products reveals the colonial character of the global economic order. Furthermore, over the last decade, she has also been working on prominent local and international non-governmental organizations such as Colombian Commission of Jurists and for the Ombudsman’s Office of Colombia. In her legal practice, she has concentrated on the problem of internal displacement in Colombia, and monitoring the evolution of Colombia’s internal conflict.
The Warwick Political Geography Group
Is formed of researchers in PaIS working broadly with issues in the intersection of Place, Space and Politics. The group was formed from the experience of two Political Geography conferences (2014/ 2015) and is becoming increasingly more active. Our last event was a book presentation of “How the West Came to Rule: the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism” by the authors, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu (February 2016). We plan to continue ‘making space’ in International Studies and bring attention to the importance of the geographical perspective to the scholarship of politics.
The Organisers of the conference
Mara Duer [ University of Warwick] is a Phd candidate from PaIS. Her research engages with alternative conceptualizations of land by elaborating the concept of 'resistant enclosure' in the context of the expansion of extractive capitalism in the global south.
Maria Eugenia Giraudo [ University of Warwick] is a PhD candidate. Her project looks into the governance of natural resources in South America, particularly looking into agricultural commodities.
Aya Nassar [ University of Warwick] is a PhD candidate, broadly interested in the relationship between urban space and politics. Her PhD research looks into the transforming space of the capital city Cairo, during the first three decades of postcolonial Egypt.
António Ferraz De Oliveira [ University of Warwick] is a PhD Candidate at PAIS. His broad research interests lie in historicizing the concept of 'territory' and straddle literatures from Political Geography and Political Theory. His present research project engages with anarchist conceptions of territory in the long nineteenth century, with particular reference to the writings of Proudhon, Kropotkin and Reclus.
Javier Moreno Zacares [ University of Warwick] is a PhD candidate, working under Prof. Matthew Watson’s project ‘Rethinking the Market’. His PhD research focuses on the most recent Spanish housing crash, and its links to a distinct history of speculative urbanisation in the postwar period.
Conference Agenda 2016
Wednesday 18th May (Math Building, MS.04)
Pre-Conference Film Night – Sur les Toits, 18:00
Discussant Panel: Film Director Nicolas Drolc, Prof. Stuart Elden, Dr. Anastasia Chamberlen and Dr. Oliver Davis.
Thursday 19th May (SU Building, Room 4)
9:30-10:15 Registration. Tea and coffee
10:15-10:30 Introductory Note
10:30-12:00 Session 1: Bodies, Security and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly)
‘Security Beyond the Walls: Public-Private Policing Arrangements in Recife’ [Carolina M. Frossard, University of Amsterdam]
‘Certainty and Uncertainty: the Negotiation of Danger Markers in Nairobi’ [Francesco Colona, University of Amsterdam]
‘Visual representations of statist violence - freedom of movement struggles in Calais’ [James Ellison, Loughborough University]
‘Irom Chanu Sharmila – The woman with the feeding tube: Body, violence and the state of exception’ [Tanvi Pate, University of Warwick]
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-14:30 Session 2: Materiality and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Chris Rossdale)
“Separatist flowers and state monuments: materializations of power and dissensus in Kurdish Turkey ” [Will Day, University of Bilkent]
“From the Angle of a Vessel: The refugee ship as a ‘viapolitical’ site of strategic political action” [Elizabeth Alexander, Royal Holloway, University of London]
“The Missing Politics of Vulnerability: The State and the Co-production of Climate Risk in Informal Urban Settlements” [Arabella Fraser, King’s College, University of London]
14:30-15:00 Tea and coffee
15:00-16:30 Session 3: The Urban and State Spaces (chaired by Lisa Tilley)
“Billboard space in Egypt: reproducing state space and dominating space of representation” [Mohammad AboTera. Cairo]
“(Dis)assembling the Urban in Documentary Photography” [Vladimir Rizov, University of York]
“State Space and the City: the ’56-ers Square in Budapest” [Melinda Harlov, Eötvös Loránd University]
16:30-18:00 Keynote Address: “The rule of walls: an architectural reading of the State’s “legitimate” use of violence” - Léopold Lambert, founder and editor of the Funambulist.net (chaired by Prof. Stuart Elden)
18:00 Drinks Reception
Friday 20th May (SU Building, Room 4)
9:30-10:00 Tea and coffee
10:00-11:30 Session 4: Cartographies and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Marijn Nieuwenhuis)
“Mapping in Political Geography: Critical Geopolitical Cartographies of the Islamic State” [Thomas Jackson, University of Cambridge]
“Whose is this space? Collaborative Cartography and a way to navigate oppressive spaces” [David Scheuing, Marburg]
“There’s a Hole in the Map: Interstitial Politics Against the Space of Sovereignty” [Niklas Plaetzer, SciencesPo]
“Derrida’s Chora and the Roma disruption of State Space in Tony Gatlif’s fim” [Emma Patchett, University of Munster]
11:30-11:45 Tea and coffee
11:45-13:15 Session 5: Coloniality and State Spaces (chair TBC)
“New topologies of recolonization and spatial violence along the Juarez Valley” [Ricardo Marten Caceres, University College London]
“The Making of Non-Citizenship: Linguistic Politics in Montreal” [Stephanie Najjar, John Hopkins University]
“The International Historical Sociology of Brazilian State-Formation” [ Pedro Salgado , University of Sussex ]
“Rethinking sovereignty and juridical forms of capital accumulation from the perspective of coloniality: The large-scale gold mining and the Constitutional State in Colombia” [Ximena Sierra-Camargo, University of Rosario/University of Kent]
13:15-14:15 Lunch
14:15-15:45 Plenary Address: “Assemblage, Globalization and the State” - Prof. Michael Woods, University of Aberystwyth (chaired by Prof. Nick Vaughan-Williams)
15:45 Concluding notes