Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Elsa Noterman
Social & Legal Studies, 2023
What is a wall to a child? It may be an obstacle course, a balance beam, a “car,” a seat, a home ... more What is a wall to a child? It may be an obstacle course, a balance beam, a “car,” a seat, a home for spiders and ladybugs, a place to play hide and seek, a support to lean on when learning to walk, a perch for cats, a musical instrument to be played with sticks and hands. Rather than just a barrier, the wall can also become an incitement to explore that which lies beyond it. So how does a wall become just a territorial marker—a designation of private property, an imposing boundary line that cuts through space, dividing mine and yours? And what can children's engagement with the boundary, and the legalized attempts to prevent and punish their boundary-crossing, tell us about the social work of private property? In addressing these questions, we aim to take seriously the iterative “why?” of small children when confronted with territorial rules and related violence.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022
As Philadelphia’s postindustrial River Wards landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from co... more As Philadelphia’s postindustrial River Wards landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from construction projects settles on surrounding parks, gardens, and homes, and in the lungs of residents. Concerned about the reemergence of the area’s toxic history—especially the material legacies of lead refineries—and its impacts on their children’s health, local parents are organizing to understand and address the risks associated with the circulation of this “fugitive dust.” In this article, I examine latent and emergent risks of urban redevelopment by tracing the indeterminate, intimate trajectories of toxic dust as it traverses the spatial and temporal boundaries of property and proprietary subjects. In doing so, I consider the ways it disrupts racialized notions of improvement and refigures questions of socio-environmental justice. Finally, in considering the possibilities for more just urban futures informed by present pasts, I attend to the fugitivity of dust: how its indeterminacy not only unsettles, but potentially escapes, the improvement–waste dichotomy in urban development praxis.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
Under threat of enclosure in rapidly gentrifying cities, some urban commoners are turning to lega... more Under threat of enclosure in rapidly gentrifying cities, some urban commoners are turning to legal tactics to ward off dispossession. In this article, I explore the contested legal geographies of urban commoning, considering some of the challenges, stakes, and opportunities that emerge in the effort to gain legal recognition. Specifically, I examine the use of the doctrine of adverse possession by Philadelphia gardeners to claim title to the community farm they cultivated as an urban commons for decades. In the context of a neoliberal settler colonial city, I argue that the gardeners’ adverse commoning, involving an il/legal counterclaim to property, facilitates consideration of the ways urban commoners are both enrolled in normative property regimes and have the potential to resist these regimes through errant performances of proprietary continuity, exclusivity, notoriety, and hostility.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021
Urban Geography, 2020
“Taking back” has long been a rallying call of urban social movements asserting land rights. This... more “Taking back” has long been a rallying call of urban social movements asserting land rights. This call often involves seeking to ward off dispossession by taking possession. Scholars rethinking property beyond the normative “ownership model” have explored the seeming paradoxicality of resisting dispossession through legal forms of possession that reproduce deprivation. In this paper, I consider the possibilities for taking back the concept of possession itself by examining claims to “vacant” property in Philadelphia. I put taking back through a citywide “land bank” in conversation with the taking over of a poor people’s movement that occupies government-owned properties as a means of survival and political mobilization. I argue that outside or on the edge of legal recognition, the effort to take back property functions not as an end in itself, but rather as an explicitly political taking on of the notion of possessive ownership.
See full article at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2020.1743519
Gender, Place & Culture, 2020
Amid broader discussions of the continuities of racism and sexism on campuses in the United State... more Amid broader discussions of the continuities of racism and sexism on campuses in the United States, we bring together Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ with intersectional feminist geographers’ focus on the politics of knowledge production to suggest that the academic department is a key site for anti-racist feminist intervention. Specifically, we survey our organizing experiences as members of Women in Geography (WIG) at UW-Madison, a long-standing group that supports female, non-binary, and gender-queer graduate students, faculty, and staff affiliated with geography. We argue that departmentally-situated groups such as WIG can cultivate anti-racist feminist praxis as collective feminist killjoys through diverse tactics that identify multiple points for intervention. In this paper, we focus on two specific tactics that WIG developed between 2016 and 2019, which include organizing feminist academic professional development activities and conducting a climate survey for geography graduate students. Critically reflecting on WIG’s interventions in academic professionalization and climate, we find that a collective feminist killjoy orientation facilitates recognition of, and intervention in, shared - and differential - precarity.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2017
Advocates of 'slow scholarship' have called for building relations of care and solidarity across ... more Advocates of 'slow scholarship' have called for building relations of care and solidarity across the university. But, when academia is romanticized, the possibilities for these relations are limited. To de-romanticize academia, we frame universities as terrains of struggle between competing political projects with colonial and decolonial histories. Nostalgia for the university is often tied to an ideal of liberal democracy. Feelings of anxiety about 'speed-up' originate in the liberal ideal of the slowly deliberative citizen in the public sphere. We show that this over-politicizing of temporality has the converse effect of depoliticizing other important political struggles. While jettisoning these problematic assumptions of 'slow scholarship' advocates, we maintain their desires for building relations of care and solidarity. This requires revealing the university's 'temporal architectures' and 'spatial clockworks'—how some people's temporally and spatially privileged situations are interdependent with others' oppressed spatio-temporal situations. For example, the (slow) scholarship of tenured faculty is dependent on the (sped-up) time and labor of graduate students, contingent faculty, and service workers—as well as the constrained spatio-temporal conditions of off-campus domestic workers and incarcerated persons. These intertemporal and interspatial relations intersect with other dynamics, including racism, sexism, labor exploitation, and bureaucracy. We demonstrate an approach of intertemporally and interspatially reflective scholarship through analyses of the movements of #theRealUW and #DismantleDukePlantation at our own campuses, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Duke University. This allows us to envision possibilities for solidarity across different struggles, for expanding alternative modes of study and temporal sub-architectures, and for amplifying already existing forms of resistance in the university’s undercommons.
Antipode, 2016
Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistanc... more Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistance, people on the economic margins resist threats to their livelihoods by opting to share resources. The processes involved in managing these “commons” are often messy and paradoxical amid differing livelihood concerns and subject positions. Unevenness tends to emerge along new and existing lines of power. Rather than reducing such tendencies to a “tragedy” to be eliminated, I argue that grappling with uneven relations offers a more dynamic account of commoning: “differential commoning”. This paper takes as its example the residents of a “manufactured housing” community who organized as a cooperative in response to the threat of eviction. Their struggle to collectivize, I suggest, illustrates the need for a more situated conceptualization of commoning, rather than a concept defined within the rigidity of economic rationality or the homogeneity of some imagined community.
Antipode, 2014
The term “safe space” dates to the late twentieth century women’s movement, but it has since been... more The term “safe space” dates to the late twentieth century women’s movement, but it has since been used in many different contexts. In this paper, we review and analyze historical and contemporary “safe spaces”. These include “separatist” safe spaces in women’s, anti-racist, and feminist communities, “inclusive” safe space classrooms, and safe spaces in which (non-human) objects are central. We argue that safe spaces should be understood not through static and acontextual notions of “safe” or “unsafe”, but rather through the relational work of cultivating them. Such an understanding reveals several tendencies. Namely, safe spaces are inherently paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries (safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries. Renegotiating these binaries is necessarily incomplete; a safe space is never completely safe. Even so, we encourage the critical cultivation of safe space as a site for negotiating difference and challenging oppression.
ephemera, 2017
In the last two weeks of February 2015, the University of Wisconsin System and UW-Madison adminis... more In the last two weeks of February 2015, the University of Wisconsin System and UW-Madison administration went on the defensive against the hemorrhaging of state support for higher education in Governor Scott Walker’s proposed Biennial Budget – including USD300 million in budget cuts to the university (the largest cut in the 44-year history of the UW System). However, in order to more clearly understand the situation, the budget cuts and university restructuring need to be analyzed within a larger historical and political context – one in which a push for privatized education has happened not simply due to partisan divisions at the state Capitol, but also because of financial and material incentives for the UW System. While the unprecedented cuts can be viewed as part of a nationwide trend of the contraction of state educational funding, they should also be viewed alongside the university administration’s ongoing attempts to gain more control over construction projects and the student fees that pay for them. While university administrators position themselves as defenders of public education who are losing control of state financial support, we argue at the outset of our article that it is quite evident that they have been complicit – if not proactive – in seeking further separation from the state in order to gain the ‘flexibility’ to access and increase the student tuition dollars necessary to remain competitive within an academic capitalist market.
Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, 2012
Universities, as well as other educational institutions, are currently facing economic instabilit... more Universities, as well as other educational institutions, are currently facing economic instability, debt and an uncertain future. The squeeze on Higher Education is, like the crisis of capital, global. But so too is the emergent resistance. People around the world are challenging the neoliberal model of the university, which produces ‘skilled’ workers to be put to use for the (re)production of capital. The ‘double crisis’ of the economy and the university has made campuses once again sites of resistance, and the “new student movement can be seen as the main organized response to the global financial crisis”. These struggles have not only formed spaces for opposition – to budget cuts, the increasing precarity of labor, rising education costs – but have also featured calls for new models for education to “transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls.’” In this chapter we will investigate recent attempts to create alternative spaces for radical pedagogy and knowledge commons inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy, exploring several spaces of pedagogical praxis and to reflect on the potential for radical pedagogy and knowledge production.
Universities, as well as other educational institutions, are currently facing economic instabilit... more Universities, as well as other educational institutions, are currently facing economic instability, debt and an uncertain future. The squeeze on Higher Education is, like the crisis of capital, global. But so too is the emergent resistance. People around the world are challenging the neoliberal model of the university, which produces ‘skilled’ workers to be put to use for the (re)production of capital.
The ‘double crisis’ of the economy and the university has made campuses once again sites of resistance, and the “new student movement can be seen as the main organized response to the global financial crisis”. These struggles have not only formed spaces for opposition – to budget cuts, the increasing precarity of labor, rising education costs – but have also featured calls for new models for education to “transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls.’” In this chapter we will investigate recent attempts to create alternative spaces for radical pedagogy and knowledge commons inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy, exploring several spaces of pedagogical praxis and to reflect on the potential for radical pedagogy and knowledge production.
Book Reviews by Elsa Noterman
Urban Studies, 2015
Urban Studies Review of Christina Handhardt's book Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the P... more Urban Studies Review of Christina Handhardt's book Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (2013)
Other by Elsa Noterman
Papers by Elsa Noterman
Uploads
Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Elsa Noterman
See full article at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2020.1743519
The ‘double crisis’ of the economy and the university has made campuses once again sites of resistance, and the “new student movement can be seen as the main organized response to the global financial crisis”. These struggles have not only formed spaces for opposition – to budget cuts, the increasing precarity of labor, rising education costs – but have also featured calls for new models for education to “transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls.’” In this chapter we will investigate recent attempts to create alternative spaces for radical pedagogy and knowledge commons inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy, exploring several spaces of pedagogical praxis and to reflect on the potential for radical pedagogy and knowledge production.
Book Reviews by Elsa Noterman
Other by Elsa Noterman
Papers by Elsa Noterman
See full article at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2020.1743519
The ‘double crisis’ of the economy and the university has made campuses once again sites of resistance, and the “new student movement can be seen as the main organized response to the global financial crisis”. These struggles have not only formed spaces for opposition – to budget cuts, the increasing precarity of labor, rising education costs – but have also featured calls for new models for education to “transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls.’” In this chapter we will investigate recent attempts to create alternative spaces for radical pedagogy and knowledge commons inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy, exploring several spaces of pedagogical praxis and to reflect on the potential for radical pedagogy and knowledge production.