This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects o... more This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects of one of the leading social and political theorists of the 20th century.
Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.
She demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.
This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveill... more This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveillance, and activism, paying particular attention to developing strengths, as well as current gaps, in the discipline's critical engagement with this emerging topic. Across its sections, we frame artificial intelligence as a societal transformation that cannot and should not be contained to one field or subdiscipline within geography, arguing, instead, that this emerging technology must be drawn into conceptual and empirical debates within all parts of our scholarly community. To conclude, the article identifies ways that geography, especially critical human geography, can contribute to better understanding the complicated and proliferating geographies of artificial intelligence in the world around us and bring a multi-faceted framework to discussions of this disruptive technology.
Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn signifi... more Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn significant attention to bordering practices, immigration enforcement, and international migration in the U.S. In Summer 2014, thousands of women and children from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. While many of these arriving migrants voluntarily turned themselves over to immigration authorities to claim asylum, the Obama administration was quick to declare "an urgent humanitarian situation" and "crisis on the border", requesting more than $3.7 billion to expand detention facilities, increase surveillance efforts, and hire additional Border Patrol agents (USBP) and immigration judges (Shear & Peters 2014; Rose 2019). This emphasis on deterrence, rather than aid or assistance, exposed not only the federal governments' inability to respond to the sudden increase in migration
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or “digital life” of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter’s networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has n... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography's engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how and where these new technologies bump up against the larger onto-epistemological landscape of the complicated articulation of space and politics. The goal is to identify a research agenda for engaging AI geographically.
This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as “invisible colleges”. The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and “double dipping”, or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a co...
This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in... more This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in relation to the US–Mexico border. Through a discourse analysis of one Mexican newspaper, I argue that discursive violence,'narratives of eviction'and silences are implicated in the construction of women as weak, sexualized objects, and Mexicans as raced, backward 'others'. In so doing, I elaborate several discursive moments, specifically,'woman as anonymous, replaceable body';'woman as victim of the border city';' ...
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or "digital life" of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter's networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally spatial technology. Rather than reflect, refract or distort, Twitter produces and (its power) is in turn produced through spatial mechanisms. We present multiple cartographic visual-izations in support of this claim and highlight the ways in which a contextual knowledge of the subject under study-the migrant caravan-can further inform analyses of Big Data.
Walker, Margath A. 2020 “Securitizing Insecurity along Mexico’s Borders” in Bissonnette, A., & Vallet, É. (Eds.). (2020). Borders and Border Walls: In-Security, Symbolism, Vulnerabilities. Routledge., 2020
This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as "invisible colleges". The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and "double dipping", or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a concept that has largely escaped attention in urban studies and geography, we highlight the usefulness of visibility as a technology of equity. En route, the paper describes and visualizes some of the impacts of the proliferation of uneven knowledge production through the coalescing of factors such as path dependency, cumulative advantage, expected inequality and the Matthew and Matilda Effects.
This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border secur... more This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and " technified " along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse's description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico's Southern Border Program (Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy's goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two interrelated arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.
This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects o... more This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects of one of the leading social and political theorists of the 20th century.
Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.
She demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.
This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveill... more This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveillance, and activism, paying particular attention to developing strengths, as well as current gaps, in the discipline's critical engagement with this emerging topic. Across its sections, we frame artificial intelligence as a societal transformation that cannot and should not be contained to one field or subdiscipline within geography, arguing, instead, that this emerging technology must be drawn into conceptual and empirical debates within all parts of our scholarly community. To conclude, the article identifies ways that geography, especially critical human geography, can contribute to better understanding the complicated and proliferating geographies of artificial intelligence in the world around us and bring a multi-faceted framework to discussions of this disruptive technology.
Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn signifi... more Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn significant attention to bordering practices, immigration enforcement, and international migration in the U.S. In Summer 2014, thousands of women and children from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. While many of these arriving migrants voluntarily turned themselves over to immigration authorities to claim asylum, the Obama administration was quick to declare "an urgent humanitarian situation" and "crisis on the border", requesting more than $3.7 billion to expand detention facilities, increase surveillance efforts, and hire additional Border Patrol agents (USBP) and immigration judges (Shear & Peters 2014; Rose 2019). This emphasis on deterrence, rather than aid or assistance, exposed not only the federal governments' inability to respond to the sudden increase in migration
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or “digital life” of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter’s networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has n... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography's engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how and where these new technologies bump up against the larger onto-epistemological landscape of the complicated articulation of space and politics. The goal is to identify a research agenda for engaging AI geographically.
This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as “invisible colleges”. The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and “double dipping”, or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a co...
This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in... more This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in relation to the US–Mexico border. Through a discourse analysis of one Mexican newspaper, I argue that discursive violence,'narratives of eviction'and silences are implicated in the construction of women as weak, sexualized objects, and Mexicans as raced, backward 'others'. In so doing, I elaborate several discursive moments, specifically,'woman as anonymous, replaceable body';'woman as victim of the border city';' ...
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or "digital life" of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter's networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally spatial technology. Rather than reflect, refract or distort, Twitter produces and (its power) is in turn produced through spatial mechanisms. We present multiple cartographic visual-izations in support of this claim and highlight the ways in which a contextual knowledge of the subject under study-the migrant caravan-can further inform analyses of Big Data.
Walker, Margath A. 2020 “Securitizing Insecurity along Mexico’s Borders” in Bissonnette, A., & Vallet, É. (Eds.). (2020). Borders and Border Walls: In-Security, Symbolism, Vulnerabilities. Routledge., 2020
This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as "invisible colleges". The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and "double dipping", or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a concept that has largely escaped attention in urban studies and geography, we highlight the usefulness of visibility as a technology of equity. En route, the paper describes and visualizes some of the impacts of the proliferation of uneven knowledge production through the coalescing of factors such as path dependency, cumulative advantage, expected inequality and the Matthew and Matilda Effects.
This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border secur... more This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and " technified " along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse's description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico's Southern Border Program (Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy's goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two interrelated arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.
The main purpose of this paper is to develop a new method for visualizing knowledge production wh... more The main purpose of this paper is to develop a new method for visualizing knowledge production which is attentive to the multiple elements embedded in research processes. In particular, we seek to problematise the representation of scholarship indicators by depicting theoretical contributions and field sites along a spectrum, rather than as discrete points, recursively and relationally constituted. The primary aim of our visualisations is to capture text and context, and codified and tacit knowledge. First, we offer a conventional representation of the location of selected dominant critical theories in Geography, arguing that current methods reinforce 'lopsided' geographies of knowledge production. Normative practices of data visualisation and representation captured in our two examples privilege certain elements centred on authorship and tend to silence the contexts informing research. Second, we borrow the term and method of chromatography, a tool used in the natural sciences but here conceived in its more literal sense of 'writing the separations'. Our 'chromatographical' representations attempt to unbundle components currently absorbed by formal indicators of knowledge production. Such counter mappings attempt to convey the relational aspect of research between countries imbricated in the propagation of exemplary critical geographic theories. We conclude with a discussion of the implications that the disaggregation of value has for scholars and their research.
Whether myth or reality, America's origin story is that of pilgrims arriving in search of a bette... more Whether myth or reality, America's origin story is that of pilgrims arriving in search of a better life and receiving an uncertain but generous welcome from the prior inhabitants. Is that what today's pilgrims can expect when they arrive? It's the Thanksgiving episode of Ethics Forward, and host Avery Kolers speaks to University of Louisville Geography Professor Maggie Walker, an expert on Central America and the geography of borders, about what is driving the current migrants' caravan and how those who live in the US may be connected to the situation facing residents of the countries of the "Northern Triangle" -- Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. What responsibilities do North Americans have to Central Americans? What would a just policy with respect to migration and borders look like? What is a border, anyway?
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Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.
She demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.
Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.
She demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.
It's the Thanksgiving episode of Ethics Forward, and host Avery Kolers speaks to University of Louisville Geography Professor Maggie Walker, an expert on Central America and the geography of borders, about what is driving the current migrants' caravan and how those who live in the US may be connected to the situation facing residents of the countries of the "Northern Triangle" -- Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. What responsibilities do North Americans have to Central Americans? What would a just policy with respect to migration and borders look like? What is a border, anyway?