Edited collections by Nicholas J Crane
Geography Compass, 2018
From the Geography Compass website: "A look back at the first decade of political geography in Ge... more From the Geography Compass website: "A look back at the first decade of political geography in Geography Compass suggests the active role that this section can continue to play in making sense of and orienting engagement with our changing world. To celebrate the success of the section and set the frame for future manuscripts."
"Read the full editorial written by Section Editors, Nicholas Crane and Kevin Grove, in addition to free access to relevant Geography Compass articles through to the close of 2018, here."
Journal of Cultural Geography 31(2)., 2014
Articles, essays, reviews by Nicholas J Crane
BAJO EL VOLCÁN. REVISTA DEL POSGRADO DE SOCIOLOGÍA. BUAP, 2023
El objetivo del presente artículo es dar cuenta del despliegue de procesos de antagonismo social ... more El objetivo del presente artículo es dar cuenta del despliegue de procesos de antagonismo social detonados a partir de algunas de las dinámicas más recientes de territorialización del capital en la ciudad de Toluca, capital del Estado de México. Ello implica situarnos en coyunturas específicas que han proyectado a la ciudad hacia una forma específica, una ciudad global en un proceso de metropolización e interconexión con distintas regiones del país y a nivel internacional. Los procesos de despliegue del capital en dicho contexto han sido diversos, profundos e intensos, han implicado una relación entre capital y Estado muy marcada, y han generado una transformación espacial profunda en la ciudad de Toluca y el entorno que le rodea.
Geography Compass, 2023
In the context of discipline‐wide efforts to produce more inclusive, just, and equitable norms of... more In the context of discipline‐wide efforts to produce more inclusive, just, and equitable norms of geographical knowledge production, section editors for Geography Compass identify five concrete practices by which to address systemic inequities, injustices, and exclusions through their editorial work.
European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2022
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2021
First paragraph:
Lisa Pinley Covert’s San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making... more First paragraph:
Lisa Pinley Covert’s San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site is a cultural history of the relationship between national identity and economic development. The book draws upon archival research and qualitative research with residents of San Miguel, a city in the eastern part of the state of Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City. Interviews and social engagement yielded access to private archives in order to write a history of competing visions in a city which is
now famous as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Across five chapters and a introduction, which together provide a story of San Miguel as it has changed for a century and a half, Covert reveals articulations of national identity formation and economic development upon which the form of the city has been contingent. Even if contemporary geographers might observe a missed opportunity to explicitly draw out theoretical implications of the analysis for thinking about the intersection of culture, economy, and landscape, the book will certainly be of interest to geographers, and particularly to cultural and historical geographers of modern Mexico.
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2021
The Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) government in Mexico is, within the limits of what is perc... more The Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) government in Mexico is, within the limits of what is perceived as beneficial to AMLO’s MORENA party, working in support of what have in the past primarily been citizen-led efforts to redress generalized violence. But this government’s conditional support for historically citizen-led efforts tends to neglect a wider production of social vulnerability, of which forced disappearance is a symptom. This is evident through analysis of what we call landscapes of disappearance. By this term we mean the shape given to a place, or an idealized representation of place, that facilitates disavowal of responsibility for violence by territorial authorities—which is necessary to disappear people and to perpetrate violence without accountability. Through analysis of disparate examples, we show that attention to landscapes of disappearance enables us to understand 1) how territorial authorities produce a sense of place or give tangible form to space in such a way as to naturalize violence; and 2) how activists and organizers problematize scenes in which disappearance has previously been made to make sense, and accordingly politicize disappearance. This article also promotes an approach to geographical scholarship that accompanies political-strategic theory and practice.
El gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) en México está, dentro de los límites de lo que se percibe como beneficioso para el partido MORENA, apoyando las que en el pasado han sido más exclusivamente iniciativas ciudadanas para reparar la violencia generalizada. El apoyo condicional de este gobierno a esfuerzos históricamente liderados por la ciudadanía tiende a descuidar una producción más amplia de vulnerabilidad social de la que la desaparición forzada es sintomática, lo que es evidente a través del análisis de lo que llamamos paisajes de desaparición. Por paisaje de desaparición entendemos la forma que se le da a un lugar, o una representación idealizada del lugar, que facilita el rechazo de la responsabilidad por la violencia por parte de las autoridades territoriales, necesaria para la producción de desaparecidos y para la perpetración de una violencia inexplicable. A través del análisis de ejemplos dispares, mostramos que la atención a los paisajes de desaparición nos permite comprender 1) cómo las autoridades territoriales producen un sentido de lugar o dan forma tangible al espacio de manera que naturalice la violencia; y 2) cómo activistas y organizadores problematizan escenas en las que se hace que la desaparición tenga sentido y, en consecuencia, politiza la desaparición. Este artículo también promueve un enfoque de estudio geográfico que acompaña la teoría y la práctica político-estratégica.
Human Geography, 2020
Participants in diverging US-based protest waves during the coronavirus pandemic are invoking “li... more Participants in diverging US-based protest waves during the coronavirus pandemic are invoking “liberation” as a political horizon. Especially visible are superficially libertarian protests against government “stay-at-home” orders, on the one hand, and, on the other, racial and economic justice organizing around uneven exposure to the deadly effects of the pandemic. Beginning in May 2020, the latter articulation of liberation was amplified by widespread protest against racist police violence. The coronavirus pandemic is putting into sharp relief the contradictions of “liberation” promoted by individualists and underscoring the urgency of organizing for emancipatory social solidarity.
cultural geographies, 2021
Annabel Castro’s art installation ‘Outside in: exile at home’ (2018) problematizes indefinite det... more Annabel Castro’s art installation ‘Outside in: exile at home’ (2018) problematizes indefinite detention at the Hacienda de Temixco, in Morelos, Mexico, a facility which functioned as a concentration camp for Japanese immigrants and their descendants between 1942 and 1945. The Hacienda de Temixco, like other sites for indefinite detention of Japanese-descended people in the Americas, was contingent upon making detainees’ lives intelligible for security action as the embodiment of a ‘crisis’. This essay interprets Castro’s artwork and its premiere in Cuernavaca as a creative-geographical way to engage visitors around relationships between past and contemporary distinction-making processes by which particular groups of people are refigured as threats to national security. To interpret the artwork as a creative practice of geography, we (1) briefly describe the artwork’s historical context and (2) analyze its composition and exhibition in Cuernavaca at a time when activists in Mexico and the United States were articulating a sense of solidarity that exceeds exclusionary constructions of threatened national bodies.
Journal of Cultural Geography, 2020
This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as cla... more This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as claims of universality to which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allied activists mounted a movement of opposition in 2014–2017. We position our analysis within the historical context of Lakota and Dakota resistance to settler colonialism, which has endured since the nineteenth century. From publicly available texts circulated by key actors in the conflict over the construction of this pipeline project, we identify themes that proponents of this project drew upon to articulate their representations of the land as universal. We suggest that claims like these, when naturalized in practice, have historically materialized in settler colonial landscapes. With the concept of settler colonial landscapes, we focus on ways of seeing and representing places that have facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous people from their territory as well as the construction of a settler-dominated community. In this way, we develop a cultural geographical understanding of the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes as a process dependent on claims to neutrality and objectivity.
Political Geography, 2019
First paragraph:
Andrés Manuel López Obrador and MORENA achieved a significant electoral victory ... more First paragraph:
Andrés Manuel López Obrador and MORENA achieved a significant electoral victory in Mexico on 1 July 2018. López Obrador (hereafter AMLO) became President with the most votes ever by a candidate in that race, and the MORENA coalition won an absolute legislative majority, leaning heavily on the most educated, best salaried segments of the electorate (Parametría, 2018). This can be explained as much by the strength of MORENA as by the incapacity of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its allies to reduce violence in recent years. The PRI, which dominated post-revolutionary politics and returned to power in 2012 in the figure of Enrique Peña Nieto, was defeated even in longtime strongholds. Analysts accordingly characterize this as a “historic” election, echoing AMLO, who described it as Mexico's “fourth great transformation,” with promises to stand with the poor against a “mafia of power.” For political geographers, however, the first months of AMLO's government demand analysis less of a break than of the endurance of violence, and the ongoing “disappearance” of vulnerabilized populations, by which MORENA's electoral victory was made possible.
Geography Compass, 2018
First paragraph: Recent electoral victories of right‐wing populist, ethno‐nationalist, and author... more First paragraph: Recent electoral victories of right‐wing populist, ethno‐nationalist, and authoritarian candidates or platforms provide Anglophone commentators with evidence of fundamental challenges to liberal international order, norms of multi- cultural ‘tolerance,’ and neoliberal modes of regulation. The apparent demise of liberal order is not only found in European and North American contexts (the victories of Brexit in the UK, Trump in the US, Orbán in Hungary, Kaczyński in Poland, inter alia), but also in contexts beyond or on the edges of the West (Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdogan in Turkey, and so forth). Of course, liberal norms are also under attack outside of formal electoral politics as well: commentators may note an uptick in hate crime, the organization of unabashedly white supremacist rallies in the US and Europe, complicity with authoritarian government policy in higher education, extra−/legal enforcement of compulsory displays of patriotism, or – infrequently in accounts that read these turns as symptomatic of something larger – the more “ordinary scenes and situations” of everyday life (Anderson & Wilson, 2017, p. 292). Almost always, however, these examples are interpreted like the electoral victories, as being, in essence, signs of a break from liberalism.
An essay in the book "Ejercicios de Resistencia."
First paragraph:
Entrevistéa la artista Xime... more An essay in the book "Ejercicios de Resistencia."
First paragraph:
Entrevistéa la artista Ximena Labra a principios del 2013 (Coyoacan, 3 de febrero, 2013). Al refexionar sobre su serie de intervenciones en el 2008, “Tlatelolco: odisea del espacio público”, discutimos sobre la conmemoración de 1968 en un momento histórico en el que los activistas de la Zona Metropolitana todavía estaban recuperándose de una dura respuesta policial a las protestas realizadas en contra de la toma de posesión del presidente Enrique Peña Nieto en diciembre. La obra de Labra sobre el cuadragésimo aniversario de 1968 incluía la creación de réplicas de la estela erigida en 1993 en Tlatelolco y su instalación en sitios emblemáticos de la ciudad, tales como la Plaza de las Tres Culturas, el Zócalo, la plaza en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, la plaza del Monumento a la Revolución, la plaza expandida de la Glorieta de Metro Insurgentes, y Las Islas en la Ciudad Universitaria. A fines de 2012, en medio del activismo postelectoral denominado #YoSoy132, Labra había expresado públicamente su apoyo a “los estudiantes de [ese] movimiento” a través de una carta de solidaridad firmada junto con muchos otros colaboradores del arte contemporáneo, la literatura, la práctica curatorial y la academia. En nuestra conversación se hizo manifiesta la presión ejercida por las analogías del pasado, como cuando Labra caracterizóa los participantes en la protesta de #YoSoy132 como “iguales a” los de 1968, o más poéticamente, cuando ella se refiere a los “fantasmas políticos” de México del ’68 que, en su opinión, habían resurgido en el 2012. De esta forma, Labra sugería que sus creaciones del 2008 en los espacios públicos respondían a una aparente “continuidad en la forma de fantasmas.”
The Pokémon Go Phenomenon: Essays on Public Play in Contested Spaces, 2019
First paragraph:
More than many other video games, Pokémon Go mobilizes social energy toward th... more First paragraph:
More than many other video games, Pokémon Go mobilizes social energy toward the creation and reproduction of places that are meaningful to players both in gameplay and in the physical world beyond the game. In doing so, Pokémon Go challenges the physical-digital dualism that runs through much of the popular and scholarly commentary on cyberspace. Contrary to extant literature that maintains a strong distinction between the digital and o ine worlds, this essay suggests that Pokémon Go should be understood as a mode of computation by which physical reality is produced. Basing our analysis upon post-humanist currents in the humanities and social sciences that approach representations in terms of their capacity to affect and effect, and not simply to signify (see Anderson, 2018; Barad, 2003), we argue that Poké- mon Go should be conceived as a relay in placemaking. This conceptualization draws from but exceeds Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on linguistics and communication (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 75–110), as we discuss in greater depth below. We accordingly characterize Pokémon Go as a technology that effectuates the emergence of singular places by eliciting gameplay that establishes coordinates for behavior in a given location and, in that sense, realizes a collective sense of place. We reflect upon the experience of playing Pokémon Go and examine its role in the creation of places, both in terms of their materiality and also their representation through the Pokémon Go plat- form, to show how player behavior in the physical world is affected by messages received through interactions in cyberspace. We show that the game creates a unity such that Pokemon exist in a digital-physical reality from which places are shaped, and we consider how a relational and distributed form of agency is facilitating the emergence of singular places through acts that always and necessarily introduce physical space into cyberspace and vice versa.
First paragraph:
Michael Crutcher’s Cultural Geography Specialty Group marquee lecture at the 20... more First paragraph:
Michael Crutcher’s Cultural Geography Specialty Group marquee lecture at the 2018 meeting of the American Association of Geographers is an occasion to look back at his book Tremé: Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood, and to reflect on what it means to read Crutcher’s book in this distinct conjuncture in 2018. Our moment is distinct in terms of both the vocabularies and repertoires of racial justice struggles and also the geographical debates that accompany them. Here we suggest that, in addition to all that is obviously successful about Crutcher’s book – its presentation of the historical context within which the contemporary politics of neighborhood change emerged in US cities, and its synthesis of political economic theorization with interpretation of cultural landscapes, Tremé remains especially current because of how it challenges what Joseph Winters (2016, p. 4) recently identified as “a pervasive commitment to the idea of progress in culture.” Crutcher’s analysis of Tremé challenges narratives of “racial progress” that obscure the ongoing racialization of American landscapes to instead unflinchingly engage our violent history and present. From that willingness to write through painful truths without conciliatory gestures to forward-marching progress, Crutcher’s analysis suggests the necessity of contemporary racial justice struggle.
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2017
First paragraph:
Markus-Michael Müller’s new book, The Punitive City, is a valuable analysis of a... more First paragraph:
Markus-Michael Müller’s new book, The Punitive City, is a valuable analysis of an ongoing “punitive turn” in the neoliberal governance of Mexico City. Müller suggests that we can broadly characterize this punitive turn in urban governance as a war on impoverished people, who are, according to contemporary governmental logic, an impediment to urban economic development. Muller’s book comes on the heels of more than a decade of Mexicanist scholarship from multiple disciplinary perspectives (e.g., political theory, literary studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, and criminology) that problematizes the rhetoric of “democratic transition” in Mexico and situates the contradictions and tensions embodied in democratization in a transnational context. Müller himself has substantially contributed to this literature from a geographically informed sociological and criminological perspective (see, e.g., articles in Geopolitics, Latin American Perspectives, and Third World Quarterly). This new book offers fresh insights but also synthesizes Müller’s previous writing to reveal the punitive turn in the governance of Mexico City as the combined effect of “the urbanization of neoliberalism, the securitization of urban space, and the criminalization of poverty” (p. 40). In doing so, The Punitive City also offers a grounded argument for “desecuritizing” scholarly analysis and practical engagement with the instabilities wrought by neoliberal governance of urban society.
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2017
Abstract / Resumen / Resumo
Abstract
Since the 1990s, feminist political geographers have done ... more Abstract / Resumen / Resumo
Abstract
Since the 1990s, feminist political geographers have done ethnographic research to examine the state as an effect of everyday practices, and have accordingly challenged statist theories of the political that reproduce a myth of the state’s autonomous power to determine the coordinates of political life. This article promotes a feminist turn in geographical research on state power in Latin America. We reflect on the stakes of moving away from a masculinist epistemology of the state for the regional literature, and present evidence from our research in Bolivia and Mexico that helps us theorize the state as a contingent set of social relations that ordinary people participate in naturalizing. Our analysis shows how this set of social relations may be reproduced in everyday life, and also highlights how ordinary people may organize their lives in excess of social-spatial orders given to the exercise of state power. We conclude by arguing for critical geographies of/in Latin America informed by feminist insights on the exercise of state power, both to appreciate the role of struggles over social reproduction in recent political developments in the region and also to denaturalize a social-spatial ordering of everyday life that sustains injustice.
Keywords: Bolivia, feminist political geography, Mexico, the state
Resumen
Desde la década de los 90, los geógrafos políticos feministas han realizado investigación etnográfica para examinar el estado como un resultado de prácticas cotidianas y, como consecuencia de esto, han desafiado las teorías “estatales” de lo político sobre el estado que reproducen el mito de que el estado tiene el poder autónomo para dictaminar las coordenadas de la vida política. Este artículo promueve un giro feminista en la investigación geográfica sobre el poder del estado en Latinoamérica. En él, reflexionamos sobre las implicaciones de alejarse de una epistemología masculina en la crítica sobre la región y presentamos evidencia de nuestra investigación, en Bolivia y en México, que nos permite teorizar el estado como un sistema contingente de relaciones sociales naturalizadas por la gente común. Nuestro análisis muestra que este sistema de relaciones sociales se reproducen en la cotidianidad, y resalta la manera en la que la gente común puede llegar a organizar su vida a partir de un exceso de órdenes socio-espaciales dadas para garantizar el ejercicio del poder del estado. Concluimos defendiendo la importancia de estudios geográficos críticos sobre el ejercicio del poder del estado informados por perspectivas feministas de y en Latinoamérica. Esto permite, por un lado, apreciar el papel de las luchas sobre la reproducción social en acontecimientos políticos recientes en la región y, por otro, permite desnaturalizar el ordenamiento socio-espacial de la cotidianidad que sostiene la injusticia.
Palabras claves: Bolivia, geografía política feminista, México, el estado
The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation advances several arguments. On the ... more The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation advances several arguments. On the one hand, it wishes to recover and applaud the legacies of two anarchists who were also geographers—Kropotkin (1842– 1921) and Reclus (1830–1905)—and celebrate others. Then there is an argument for anarchism to be central to a reworked radical geography today and that Marxism has crowded out anarchist voices. There are also arguments about what anarchism might mean and how this involves space. Geography is represented as anarchic in itself as a discipline and in opening Springer seeks “to remind readers that geography has never had, and nor should it desire, a single disciplinary plan or pivot” and that periodic attempts to impose one have failed. ... Springer’s book might therefore represent a coming of age for anarchist geography, making it harder for future texts on geographic thought to be judged adequate unless more care is taken with anarchist currents.
Volume 16, Number 1, April 2017
Table of Contents
Special Issue: Critical Geographies in Latin A... more Volume 16, Number 1, April 2017
Table of Contents
Special Issue: Critical Geographies in Latin America
Guest Editors: Anne-Marie Hanson and John C. Finn
Critical Geographies in Latin America
pp. 1-15 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0008
John C. Finn, Anne-Marie Hanson
The Incorrigible Subject: Mobilizing a Critical Geography of (Latin) America through the Autonomy of Migration
pp. 17-42 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0007
Nicholas De Genova
Space, Power, and Locality: the Contemporary Use of Territorio in Latin American Geography
pp. 43-67 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0009
López María F. Sandoval, Andrea Robertsdotter, Myriam Paredes
Geografías de sacrificio y geografías de esperanza: tensiones territoriales en el Ecuador plurinacional
pp. 69-92 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0016
Manuela M. M. Silveira, Melissa Moreano, Nadia Romero, Diana Murillo, Gabriela Ruales, Nataly Torres
Beyond Removal: Critically Engaging in Research on Geographies of Homelessness in the City of Rio de Janeiro
pp. 93-116 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0013
Katharina Schmidt, Igor M. Medeiros Robaina
Turismo, abandono y desplazamiento: Mapeando el barrio de La Boca en Buenos Aires
pp. 117-137 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0015
Jorge Sequera, Tomás Rodríguez
“I risk everything because I have already lost everything”: Central American Female Migrants Speak Out on the Migrant Trail in Oaxaca, Mexico
pp. 139-164 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0012
Leigh Anne Schmidt, Stephanie Buechler
JLAG Perspectives Forum:
Celebrating Critical Geographies of Latin America: Inspired by an NFL Quarterback
pp. 165-171 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0010
Sharlene Mollett
Geografiando para la resistencia
pp. 172-177 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0006
Colectivo de Geografía Crítica del Ecuador
Perplexing Entanglements with a Post-Neoliberal State
pp. 177-184 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0014
Japhy Wilson
The Challenge of Feminist Political Geography to State-Centrism in Latin American Geography
pp. 185-193 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0011
Zoe Pearson, Nicholas J. Crane
Attending to Researcher Positionality in Geographic Fieldwork on Health in Latin America: Lessons from La Costa Ecuatoriana
pp. 194-201 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0005
Ben W. Brisbois, Patricia Polo Almeida
Protest camps in international context, 2017
First paragraph:
Protest camps require and facilitate political education. But political educatio... more First paragraph:
Protest camps require and facilitate political education. But political education can also undermine the potential of protest campers to elicit radical change. This chapter examines several protest camps in post 1968 Mexico City to reveal how young protest campers cooperate in political education to the effect of reconfiguring places of activism and cultivating spaces of politics. It shows that protest camps can productively stage encounters between difference senses of the world, and that political education can intensify spatial expressions of political antagonism. At the same time, the chapter also shows how political education can sometimes obstruct the reconfiguration of places of activism. Here, political education is a mode of social reproduction that carries with it the tendency towards stability. On the one hand, then, I examine practices of political education through which protest campers prefiguratively embody alternative ways of being that challenge established vocabularies and identities of the place in which they are situated. On the other hand, I show that, as a ‘protest camp pathology’ (Feigenbaum et al, 2013, 229), political education maintains parts of the social-spatial order against which protest campers have ostensibly converged.
Uploads
Edited collections by Nicholas J Crane
"Read the full editorial written by Section Editors, Nicholas Crane and Kevin Grove, in addition to free access to relevant Geography Compass articles through to the close of 2018, here."
Articles, essays, reviews by Nicholas J Crane
Lisa Pinley Covert’s San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site is a cultural history of the relationship between national identity and economic development. The book draws upon archival research and qualitative research with residents of San Miguel, a city in the eastern part of the state of Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City. Interviews and social engagement yielded access to private archives in order to write a history of competing visions in a city which is
now famous as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Across five chapters and a introduction, which together provide a story of San Miguel as it has changed for a century and a half, Covert reveals articulations of national identity formation and economic development upon which the form of the city has been contingent. Even if contemporary geographers might observe a missed opportunity to explicitly draw out theoretical implications of the analysis for thinking about the intersection of culture, economy, and landscape, the book will certainly be of interest to geographers, and particularly to cultural and historical geographers of modern Mexico.
El gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) en México está, dentro de los límites de lo que se percibe como beneficioso para el partido MORENA, apoyando las que en el pasado han sido más exclusivamente iniciativas ciudadanas para reparar la violencia generalizada. El apoyo condicional de este gobierno a esfuerzos históricamente liderados por la ciudadanía tiende a descuidar una producción más amplia de vulnerabilidad social de la que la desaparición forzada es sintomática, lo que es evidente a través del análisis de lo que llamamos paisajes de desaparición. Por paisaje de desaparición entendemos la forma que se le da a un lugar, o una representación idealizada del lugar, que facilita el rechazo de la responsabilidad por la violencia por parte de las autoridades territoriales, necesaria para la producción de desaparecidos y para la perpetración de una violencia inexplicable. A través del análisis de ejemplos dispares, mostramos que la atención a los paisajes de desaparición nos permite comprender 1) cómo las autoridades territoriales producen un sentido de lugar o dan forma tangible al espacio de manera que naturalice la violencia; y 2) cómo activistas y organizadores problematizan escenas en las que se hace que la desaparición tenga sentido y, en consecuencia, politiza la desaparición. Este artículo también promueve un enfoque de estudio geográfico que acompaña la teoría y la práctica político-estratégica.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador and MORENA achieved a significant electoral victory in Mexico on 1 July 2018. López Obrador (hereafter AMLO) became President with the most votes ever by a candidate in that race, and the MORENA coalition won an absolute legislative majority, leaning heavily on the most educated, best salaried segments of the electorate (Parametría, 2018). This can be explained as much by the strength of MORENA as by the incapacity of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its allies to reduce violence in recent years. The PRI, which dominated post-revolutionary politics and returned to power in 2012 in the figure of Enrique Peña Nieto, was defeated even in longtime strongholds. Analysts accordingly characterize this as a “historic” election, echoing AMLO, who described it as Mexico's “fourth great transformation,” with promises to stand with the poor against a “mafia of power.” For political geographers, however, the first months of AMLO's government demand analysis less of a break than of the endurance of violence, and the ongoing “disappearance” of vulnerabilized populations, by which MORENA's electoral victory was made possible.
First paragraph:
Entrevistéa la artista Ximena Labra a principios del 2013 (Coyoacan, 3 de febrero, 2013). Al refexionar sobre su serie de intervenciones en el 2008, “Tlatelolco: odisea del espacio público”, discutimos sobre la conmemoración de 1968 en un momento histórico en el que los activistas de la Zona Metropolitana todavía estaban recuperándose de una dura respuesta policial a las protestas realizadas en contra de la toma de posesión del presidente Enrique Peña Nieto en diciembre. La obra de Labra sobre el cuadragésimo aniversario de 1968 incluía la creación de réplicas de la estela erigida en 1993 en Tlatelolco y su instalación en sitios emblemáticos de la ciudad, tales como la Plaza de las Tres Culturas, el Zócalo, la plaza en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, la plaza del Monumento a la Revolución, la plaza expandida de la Glorieta de Metro Insurgentes, y Las Islas en la Ciudad Universitaria. A fines de 2012, en medio del activismo postelectoral denominado #YoSoy132, Labra había expresado públicamente su apoyo a “los estudiantes de [ese] movimiento” a través de una carta de solidaridad firmada junto con muchos otros colaboradores del arte contemporáneo, la literatura, la práctica curatorial y la academia. En nuestra conversación se hizo manifiesta la presión ejercida por las analogías del pasado, como cuando Labra caracterizóa los participantes en la protesta de #YoSoy132 como “iguales a” los de 1968, o más poéticamente, cuando ella se refiere a los “fantasmas políticos” de México del ’68 que, en su opinión, habían resurgido en el 2012. De esta forma, Labra sugería que sus creaciones del 2008 en los espacios públicos respondían a una aparente “continuidad en la forma de fantasmas.”
More than many other video games, Pokémon Go mobilizes social energy toward the creation and reproduction of places that are meaningful to players both in gameplay and in the physical world beyond the game. In doing so, Pokémon Go challenges the physical-digital dualism that runs through much of the popular and scholarly commentary on cyberspace. Contrary to extant literature that maintains a strong distinction between the digital and o ine worlds, this essay suggests that Pokémon Go should be understood as a mode of computation by which physical reality is produced. Basing our analysis upon post-humanist currents in the humanities and social sciences that approach representations in terms of their capacity to affect and effect, and not simply to signify (see Anderson, 2018; Barad, 2003), we argue that Poké- mon Go should be conceived as a relay in placemaking. This conceptualization draws from but exceeds Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on linguistics and communication (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 75–110), as we discuss in greater depth below. We accordingly characterize Pokémon Go as a technology that effectuates the emergence of singular places by eliciting gameplay that establishes coordinates for behavior in a given location and, in that sense, realizes a collective sense of place. We reflect upon the experience of playing Pokémon Go and examine its role in the creation of places, both in terms of their materiality and also their representation through the Pokémon Go plat- form, to show how player behavior in the physical world is affected by messages received through interactions in cyberspace. We show that the game creates a unity such that Pokemon exist in a digital-physical reality from which places are shaped, and we consider how a relational and distributed form of agency is facilitating the emergence of singular places through acts that always and necessarily introduce physical space into cyberspace and vice versa.
Michael Crutcher’s Cultural Geography Specialty Group marquee lecture at the 2018 meeting of the American Association of Geographers is an occasion to look back at his book Tremé: Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood, and to reflect on what it means to read Crutcher’s book in this distinct conjuncture in 2018. Our moment is distinct in terms of both the vocabularies and repertoires of racial justice struggles and also the geographical debates that accompany them. Here we suggest that, in addition to all that is obviously successful about Crutcher’s book – its presentation of the historical context within which the contemporary politics of neighborhood change emerged in US cities, and its synthesis of political economic theorization with interpretation of cultural landscapes, Tremé remains especially current because of how it challenges what Joseph Winters (2016, p. 4) recently identified as “a pervasive commitment to the idea of progress in culture.” Crutcher’s analysis of Tremé challenges narratives of “racial progress” that obscure the ongoing racialization of American landscapes to instead unflinchingly engage our violent history and present. From that willingness to write through painful truths without conciliatory gestures to forward-marching progress, Crutcher’s analysis suggests the necessity of contemporary racial justice struggle.
Markus-Michael Müller’s new book, The Punitive City, is a valuable analysis of an ongoing “punitive turn” in the neoliberal governance of Mexico City. Müller suggests that we can broadly characterize this punitive turn in urban governance as a war on impoverished people, who are, according to contemporary governmental logic, an impediment to urban economic development. Muller’s book comes on the heels of more than a decade of Mexicanist scholarship from multiple disciplinary perspectives (e.g., political theory, literary studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, and criminology) that problematizes the rhetoric of “democratic transition” in Mexico and situates the contradictions and tensions embodied in democratization in a transnational context. Müller himself has substantially contributed to this literature from a geographically informed sociological and criminological perspective (see, e.g., articles in Geopolitics, Latin American Perspectives, and Third World Quarterly). This new book offers fresh insights but also synthesizes Müller’s previous writing to reveal the punitive turn in the governance of Mexico City as the combined effect of “the urbanization of neoliberalism, the securitization of urban space, and the criminalization of poverty” (p. 40). In doing so, The Punitive City also offers a grounded argument for “desecuritizing” scholarly analysis and practical engagement with the instabilities wrought by neoliberal governance of urban society.
Abstract
Since the 1990s, feminist political geographers have done ethnographic research to examine the state as an effect of everyday practices, and have accordingly challenged statist theories of the political that reproduce a myth of the state’s autonomous power to determine the coordinates of political life. This article promotes a feminist turn in geographical research on state power in Latin America. We reflect on the stakes of moving away from a masculinist epistemology of the state for the regional literature, and present evidence from our research in Bolivia and Mexico that helps us theorize the state as a contingent set of social relations that ordinary people participate in naturalizing. Our analysis shows how this set of social relations may be reproduced in everyday life, and also highlights how ordinary people may organize their lives in excess of social-spatial orders given to the exercise of state power. We conclude by arguing for critical geographies of/in Latin America informed by feminist insights on the exercise of state power, both to appreciate the role of struggles over social reproduction in recent political developments in the region and also to denaturalize a social-spatial ordering of everyday life that sustains injustice.
Keywords: Bolivia, feminist political geography, Mexico, the state
Resumen
Desde la década de los 90, los geógrafos políticos feministas han realizado investigación etnográfica para examinar el estado como un resultado de prácticas cotidianas y, como consecuencia de esto, han desafiado las teorías “estatales” de lo político sobre el estado que reproducen el mito de que el estado tiene el poder autónomo para dictaminar las coordenadas de la vida política. Este artículo promueve un giro feminista en la investigación geográfica sobre el poder del estado en Latinoamérica. En él, reflexionamos sobre las implicaciones de alejarse de una epistemología masculina en la crítica sobre la región y presentamos evidencia de nuestra investigación, en Bolivia y en México, que nos permite teorizar el estado como un sistema contingente de relaciones sociales naturalizadas por la gente común. Nuestro análisis muestra que este sistema de relaciones sociales se reproducen en la cotidianidad, y resalta la manera en la que la gente común puede llegar a organizar su vida a partir de un exceso de órdenes socio-espaciales dadas para garantizar el ejercicio del poder del estado. Concluimos defendiendo la importancia de estudios geográficos críticos sobre el ejercicio del poder del estado informados por perspectivas feministas de y en Latinoamérica. Esto permite, por un lado, apreciar el papel de las luchas sobre la reproducción social en acontecimientos políticos recientes en la región y, por otro, permite desnaturalizar el ordenamiento socio-espacial de la cotidianidad que sostiene la injusticia.
Palabras claves: Bolivia, geografía política feminista, México, el estado
Table of Contents
Special Issue: Critical Geographies in Latin America
Guest Editors: Anne-Marie Hanson and John C. Finn
Critical Geographies in Latin America
pp. 1-15 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0008
John C. Finn, Anne-Marie Hanson
The Incorrigible Subject: Mobilizing a Critical Geography of (Latin) America through the Autonomy of Migration
pp. 17-42 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0007
Nicholas De Genova
Space, Power, and Locality: the Contemporary Use of Territorio in Latin American Geography
pp. 43-67 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0009
López María F. Sandoval, Andrea Robertsdotter, Myriam Paredes
Geografías de sacrificio y geografías de esperanza: tensiones territoriales en el Ecuador plurinacional
pp. 69-92 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0016
Manuela M. M. Silveira, Melissa Moreano, Nadia Romero, Diana Murillo, Gabriela Ruales, Nataly Torres
Beyond Removal: Critically Engaging in Research on Geographies of Homelessness in the City of Rio de Janeiro
pp. 93-116 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0013
Katharina Schmidt, Igor M. Medeiros Robaina
Turismo, abandono y desplazamiento: Mapeando el barrio de La Boca en Buenos Aires
pp. 117-137 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0015
Jorge Sequera, Tomás Rodríguez
“I risk everything because I have already lost everything”: Central American Female Migrants Speak Out on the Migrant Trail in Oaxaca, Mexico
pp. 139-164 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0012
Leigh Anne Schmidt, Stephanie Buechler
JLAG Perspectives Forum:
Celebrating Critical Geographies of Latin America: Inspired by an NFL Quarterback
pp. 165-171 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0010
Sharlene Mollett
Geografiando para la resistencia
pp. 172-177 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0006
Colectivo de Geografía Crítica del Ecuador
Perplexing Entanglements with a Post-Neoliberal State
pp. 177-184 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0014
Japhy Wilson
The Challenge of Feminist Political Geography to State-Centrism in Latin American Geography
pp. 185-193 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0011
Zoe Pearson, Nicholas J. Crane
Attending to Researcher Positionality in Geographic Fieldwork on Health in Latin America: Lessons from La Costa Ecuatoriana
pp. 194-201 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0005
Ben W. Brisbois, Patricia Polo Almeida
Protest camps require and facilitate political education. But political education can also undermine the potential of protest campers to elicit radical change. This chapter examines several protest camps in post 1968 Mexico City to reveal how young protest campers cooperate in political education to the effect of reconfiguring places of activism and cultivating spaces of politics. It shows that protest camps can productively stage encounters between difference senses of the world, and that political education can intensify spatial expressions of political antagonism. At the same time, the chapter also shows how political education can sometimes obstruct the reconfiguration of places of activism. Here, political education is a mode of social reproduction that carries with it the tendency towards stability. On the one hand, then, I examine practices of political education through which protest campers prefiguratively embody alternative ways of being that challenge established vocabularies and identities of the place in which they are situated. On the other hand, I show that, as a ‘protest camp pathology’ (Feigenbaum et al, 2013, 229), political education maintains parts of the social-spatial order against which protest campers have ostensibly converged.
"Read the full editorial written by Section Editors, Nicholas Crane and Kevin Grove, in addition to free access to relevant Geography Compass articles through to the close of 2018, here."
Lisa Pinley Covert’s San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site is a cultural history of the relationship between national identity and economic development. The book draws upon archival research and qualitative research with residents of San Miguel, a city in the eastern part of the state of Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City. Interviews and social engagement yielded access to private archives in order to write a history of competing visions in a city which is
now famous as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Across five chapters and a introduction, which together provide a story of San Miguel as it has changed for a century and a half, Covert reveals articulations of national identity formation and economic development upon which the form of the city has been contingent. Even if contemporary geographers might observe a missed opportunity to explicitly draw out theoretical implications of the analysis for thinking about the intersection of culture, economy, and landscape, the book will certainly be of interest to geographers, and particularly to cultural and historical geographers of modern Mexico.
El gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) en México está, dentro de los límites de lo que se percibe como beneficioso para el partido MORENA, apoyando las que en el pasado han sido más exclusivamente iniciativas ciudadanas para reparar la violencia generalizada. El apoyo condicional de este gobierno a esfuerzos históricamente liderados por la ciudadanía tiende a descuidar una producción más amplia de vulnerabilidad social de la que la desaparición forzada es sintomática, lo que es evidente a través del análisis de lo que llamamos paisajes de desaparición. Por paisaje de desaparición entendemos la forma que se le da a un lugar, o una representación idealizada del lugar, que facilita el rechazo de la responsabilidad por la violencia por parte de las autoridades territoriales, necesaria para la producción de desaparecidos y para la perpetración de una violencia inexplicable. A través del análisis de ejemplos dispares, mostramos que la atención a los paisajes de desaparición nos permite comprender 1) cómo las autoridades territoriales producen un sentido de lugar o dan forma tangible al espacio de manera que naturalice la violencia; y 2) cómo activistas y organizadores problematizan escenas en las que se hace que la desaparición tenga sentido y, en consecuencia, politiza la desaparición. Este artículo también promueve un enfoque de estudio geográfico que acompaña la teoría y la práctica político-estratégica.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador and MORENA achieved a significant electoral victory in Mexico on 1 July 2018. López Obrador (hereafter AMLO) became President with the most votes ever by a candidate in that race, and the MORENA coalition won an absolute legislative majority, leaning heavily on the most educated, best salaried segments of the electorate (Parametría, 2018). This can be explained as much by the strength of MORENA as by the incapacity of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its allies to reduce violence in recent years. The PRI, which dominated post-revolutionary politics and returned to power in 2012 in the figure of Enrique Peña Nieto, was defeated even in longtime strongholds. Analysts accordingly characterize this as a “historic” election, echoing AMLO, who described it as Mexico's “fourth great transformation,” with promises to stand with the poor against a “mafia of power.” For political geographers, however, the first months of AMLO's government demand analysis less of a break than of the endurance of violence, and the ongoing “disappearance” of vulnerabilized populations, by which MORENA's electoral victory was made possible.
First paragraph:
Entrevistéa la artista Ximena Labra a principios del 2013 (Coyoacan, 3 de febrero, 2013). Al refexionar sobre su serie de intervenciones en el 2008, “Tlatelolco: odisea del espacio público”, discutimos sobre la conmemoración de 1968 en un momento histórico en el que los activistas de la Zona Metropolitana todavía estaban recuperándose de una dura respuesta policial a las protestas realizadas en contra de la toma de posesión del presidente Enrique Peña Nieto en diciembre. La obra de Labra sobre el cuadragésimo aniversario de 1968 incluía la creación de réplicas de la estela erigida en 1993 en Tlatelolco y su instalación en sitios emblemáticos de la ciudad, tales como la Plaza de las Tres Culturas, el Zócalo, la plaza en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, la plaza del Monumento a la Revolución, la plaza expandida de la Glorieta de Metro Insurgentes, y Las Islas en la Ciudad Universitaria. A fines de 2012, en medio del activismo postelectoral denominado #YoSoy132, Labra había expresado públicamente su apoyo a “los estudiantes de [ese] movimiento” a través de una carta de solidaridad firmada junto con muchos otros colaboradores del arte contemporáneo, la literatura, la práctica curatorial y la academia. En nuestra conversación se hizo manifiesta la presión ejercida por las analogías del pasado, como cuando Labra caracterizóa los participantes en la protesta de #YoSoy132 como “iguales a” los de 1968, o más poéticamente, cuando ella se refiere a los “fantasmas políticos” de México del ’68 que, en su opinión, habían resurgido en el 2012. De esta forma, Labra sugería que sus creaciones del 2008 en los espacios públicos respondían a una aparente “continuidad en la forma de fantasmas.”
More than many other video games, Pokémon Go mobilizes social energy toward the creation and reproduction of places that are meaningful to players both in gameplay and in the physical world beyond the game. In doing so, Pokémon Go challenges the physical-digital dualism that runs through much of the popular and scholarly commentary on cyberspace. Contrary to extant literature that maintains a strong distinction between the digital and o ine worlds, this essay suggests that Pokémon Go should be understood as a mode of computation by which physical reality is produced. Basing our analysis upon post-humanist currents in the humanities and social sciences that approach representations in terms of their capacity to affect and effect, and not simply to signify (see Anderson, 2018; Barad, 2003), we argue that Poké- mon Go should be conceived as a relay in placemaking. This conceptualization draws from but exceeds Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on linguistics and communication (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 75–110), as we discuss in greater depth below. We accordingly characterize Pokémon Go as a technology that effectuates the emergence of singular places by eliciting gameplay that establishes coordinates for behavior in a given location and, in that sense, realizes a collective sense of place. We reflect upon the experience of playing Pokémon Go and examine its role in the creation of places, both in terms of their materiality and also their representation through the Pokémon Go plat- form, to show how player behavior in the physical world is affected by messages received through interactions in cyberspace. We show that the game creates a unity such that Pokemon exist in a digital-physical reality from which places are shaped, and we consider how a relational and distributed form of agency is facilitating the emergence of singular places through acts that always and necessarily introduce physical space into cyberspace and vice versa.
Michael Crutcher’s Cultural Geography Specialty Group marquee lecture at the 2018 meeting of the American Association of Geographers is an occasion to look back at his book Tremé: Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood, and to reflect on what it means to read Crutcher’s book in this distinct conjuncture in 2018. Our moment is distinct in terms of both the vocabularies and repertoires of racial justice struggles and also the geographical debates that accompany them. Here we suggest that, in addition to all that is obviously successful about Crutcher’s book – its presentation of the historical context within which the contemporary politics of neighborhood change emerged in US cities, and its synthesis of political economic theorization with interpretation of cultural landscapes, Tremé remains especially current because of how it challenges what Joseph Winters (2016, p. 4) recently identified as “a pervasive commitment to the idea of progress in culture.” Crutcher’s analysis of Tremé challenges narratives of “racial progress” that obscure the ongoing racialization of American landscapes to instead unflinchingly engage our violent history and present. From that willingness to write through painful truths without conciliatory gestures to forward-marching progress, Crutcher’s analysis suggests the necessity of contemporary racial justice struggle.
Markus-Michael Müller’s new book, The Punitive City, is a valuable analysis of an ongoing “punitive turn” in the neoliberal governance of Mexico City. Müller suggests that we can broadly characterize this punitive turn in urban governance as a war on impoverished people, who are, according to contemporary governmental logic, an impediment to urban economic development. Muller’s book comes on the heels of more than a decade of Mexicanist scholarship from multiple disciplinary perspectives (e.g., political theory, literary studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, and criminology) that problematizes the rhetoric of “democratic transition” in Mexico and situates the contradictions and tensions embodied in democratization in a transnational context. Müller himself has substantially contributed to this literature from a geographically informed sociological and criminological perspective (see, e.g., articles in Geopolitics, Latin American Perspectives, and Third World Quarterly). This new book offers fresh insights but also synthesizes Müller’s previous writing to reveal the punitive turn in the governance of Mexico City as the combined effect of “the urbanization of neoliberalism, the securitization of urban space, and the criminalization of poverty” (p. 40). In doing so, The Punitive City also offers a grounded argument for “desecuritizing” scholarly analysis and practical engagement with the instabilities wrought by neoliberal governance of urban society.
Abstract
Since the 1990s, feminist political geographers have done ethnographic research to examine the state as an effect of everyday practices, and have accordingly challenged statist theories of the political that reproduce a myth of the state’s autonomous power to determine the coordinates of political life. This article promotes a feminist turn in geographical research on state power in Latin America. We reflect on the stakes of moving away from a masculinist epistemology of the state for the regional literature, and present evidence from our research in Bolivia and Mexico that helps us theorize the state as a contingent set of social relations that ordinary people participate in naturalizing. Our analysis shows how this set of social relations may be reproduced in everyday life, and also highlights how ordinary people may organize their lives in excess of social-spatial orders given to the exercise of state power. We conclude by arguing for critical geographies of/in Latin America informed by feminist insights on the exercise of state power, both to appreciate the role of struggles over social reproduction in recent political developments in the region and also to denaturalize a social-spatial ordering of everyday life that sustains injustice.
Keywords: Bolivia, feminist political geography, Mexico, the state
Resumen
Desde la década de los 90, los geógrafos políticos feministas han realizado investigación etnográfica para examinar el estado como un resultado de prácticas cotidianas y, como consecuencia de esto, han desafiado las teorías “estatales” de lo político sobre el estado que reproducen el mito de que el estado tiene el poder autónomo para dictaminar las coordenadas de la vida política. Este artículo promueve un giro feminista en la investigación geográfica sobre el poder del estado en Latinoamérica. En él, reflexionamos sobre las implicaciones de alejarse de una epistemología masculina en la crítica sobre la región y presentamos evidencia de nuestra investigación, en Bolivia y en México, que nos permite teorizar el estado como un sistema contingente de relaciones sociales naturalizadas por la gente común. Nuestro análisis muestra que este sistema de relaciones sociales se reproducen en la cotidianidad, y resalta la manera en la que la gente común puede llegar a organizar su vida a partir de un exceso de órdenes socio-espaciales dadas para garantizar el ejercicio del poder del estado. Concluimos defendiendo la importancia de estudios geográficos críticos sobre el ejercicio del poder del estado informados por perspectivas feministas de y en Latinoamérica. Esto permite, por un lado, apreciar el papel de las luchas sobre la reproducción social en acontecimientos políticos recientes en la región y, por otro, permite desnaturalizar el ordenamiento socio-espacial de la cotidianidad que sostiene la injusticia.
Palabras claves: Bolivia, geografía política feminista, México, el estado
Table of Contents
Special Issue: Critical Geographies in Latin America
Guest Editors: Anne-Marie Hanson and John C. Finn
Critical Geographies in Latin America
pp. 1-15 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0008
John C. Finn, Anne-Marie Hanson
The Incorrigible Subject: Mobilizing a Critical Geography of (Latin) America through the Autonomy of Migration
pp. 17-42 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0007
Nicholas De Genova
Space, Power, and Locality: the Contemporary Use of Territorio in Latin American Geography
pp. 43-67 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0009
López María F. Sandoval, Andrea Robertsdotter, Myriam Paredes
Geografías de sacrificio y geografías de esperanza: tensiones territoriales en el Ecuador plurinacional
pp. 69-92 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0016
Manuela M. M. Silveira, Melissa Moreano, Nadia Romero, Diana Murillo, Gabriela Ruales, Nataly Torres
Beyond Removal: Critically Engaging in Research on Geographies of Homelessness in the City of Rio de Janeiro
pp. 93-116 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0013
Katharina Schmidt, Igor M. Medeiros Robaina
Turismo, abandono y desplazamiento: Mapeando el barrio de La Boca en Buenos Aires
pp. 117-137 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0015
Jorge Sequera, Tomás Rodríguez
“I risk everything because I have already lost everything”: Central American Female Migrants Speak Out on the Migrant Trail in Oaxaca, Mexico
pp. 139-164 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0012
Leigh Anne Schmidt, Stephanie Buechler
JLAG Perspectives Forum:
Celebrating Critical Geographies of Latin America: Inspired by an NFL Quarterback
pp. 165-171 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0010
Sharlene Mollett
Geografiando para la resistencia
pp. 172-177 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0006
Colectivo de Geografía Crítica del Ecuador
Perplexing Entanglements with a Post-Neoliberal State
pp. 177-184 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0014
Japhy Wilson
The Challenge of Feminist Political Geography to State-Centrism in Latin American Geography
pp. 185-193 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0011
Zoe Pearson, Nicholas J. Crane
Attending to Researcher Positionality in Geographic Fieldwork on Health in Latin America: Lessons from La Costa Ecuatoriana
pp. 194-201 | DOI: 10.1353/lag.2017.0005
Ben W. Brisbois, Patricia Polo Almeida
Protest camps require and facilitate political education. But political education can also undermine the potential of protest campers to elicit radical change. This chapter examines several protest camps in post 1968 Mexico City to reveal how young protest campers cooperate in political education to the effect of reconfiguring places of activism and cultivating spaces of politics. It shows that protest camps can productively stage encounters between difference senses of the world, and that political education can intensify spatial expressions of political antagonism. At the same time, the chapter also shows how political education can sometimes obstruct the reconfiguration of places of activism. Here, political education is a mode of social reproduction that carries with it the tendency towards stability. On the one hand, then, I examine practices of political education through which protest campers prefiguratively embody alternative ways of being that challenge established vocabularies and identities of the place in which they are situated. On the other hand, I show that, as a ‘protest camp pathology’ (Feigenbaum et al, 2013, 229), political education maintains parts of the social-spatial order against which protest campers have ostensibly converged.
Stuart Aitken’s The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation draws from and contributes to contemporary debates in the geography of children and young people to examine the how young people exercise political agency by relating to and producing space. The book comes at a time when geographers and other scholars of young people are renewing debates on the specificity of young people’s politics, and on how to theorize the political. This is evident, for example, in Space and Polity 17(1), a special issue on “Children and Young People’s Politics in Everyday Life.” The stated goal there, and in many other recent publications on these themes, is to achieve conceptual and theoretical consistency for geographical research on young people’s politics. Amidst these debates, Aitken’s recent book does not lead us towards consensus. But the book does convincingly demonstrate young people’s potential to intervene in how we collectively make sense the world, and how young people may productively introduce dissensus into everyday life. Aitken presents or reinterprets his three decades of research with young people, from his critique of adultist research on young people in the 1990s (e.g., Putting Children in Their Place) to his more recent methodological experimentation in the context of research on the geography of families and communities (e.g., The Awkward Spaces of Fathering). As a collage of writing, photographs, mental maps, and other forms of representation, this book stands an aesthetic intervention in geographies of young people that draws attention to young people’s less frequently recognized modes of political participation, and which pushes theoretical debates on solidarity, development, and citizenship that extend beyond the sub-disciplinary literature.
This course is organized around key themes in the study of Turkey, including nation building, state formation, social-cultural difference, popular culture and cultural production, political violence, and landscape change. Our learning will draw from multiple disciplines and fields of study including anthropology, art and architectural history, cultural studies, geography, and political science. Informed by an interdisciplinary literature, most of our learning will focus on dynamics within the national territory or at sub-national scales (for example, particular urban regions, cities, or provinces). In addition to developing a command of these dynamics in national context, we will also learn to situate the perspectives of the authors we are reading in wider fields of debate.
Beyond the national scale, you will also develop an understanding of Turkey that illuminates ongoing and headline-grabbing dynamics at larger scales. Turkey is a country of enormous geo-strategic importance. You can accordingly anticipate developing proficiency in, among other things, debate around the composition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Turkey’s fraught relationship with the European Union (EU), a much-heralded rapprochement of Greece and Turkey in the Aegean, the enduring conflicts and shifts in population geography related to the Syrian civil war, and geoeconomic and geopolitical realignments that are prompted and tested by intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and regional tensions in the wider Eastern Mediterranean.
The course begins with an introduction to landscape as an object of study in the social sciences and humanities, and to landscape interpretation as a methodology. For this, we begin to read across a trans-disciplinary literature, from a geographical perspective. In subsequent weeks, we focus on selected examples of landscape study in the Americas, which allow us to consider how landscapes have been made meaningful for social-ecological processes in the hemisphere. We will also use visual material (e.g., films) to understand how representations of places come to matter socially and ecologically, or how discourses of landscape matter for social and ecological relations in particular places. Through conversational lectures and class discussions, we also learn how to study landscapes
(i.e., with what methods and concepts), in order to develop shared understandings of processes through which landscapes of the Americas have been constructed. Taught at a university in the United States, this course on “the Americas” challenges us to think about how and why the signifier “America” is often, especially among people in the U.S., assumed to refer specifically to the U.S. We accordingly situate landscapes in hemispheric context, through a lens of transnational history.
Students in Political Geography learn to think about the relationship between politics and space at multiple scales and in global context. We examine selected themes in the sub-discipline, develop a historical understanding of intellectual and social change in the sub-discipline, and develop a capacity to use key concepts for political-geographical research and writing. Students come to the course while working on both undergraduate and graduate degrees. The course has been customized to appropriately address all students who are eligible to register for it.
We begin the course by querying the practice of doing Political Geography, and we learn to recognize how norms of doing Political Geography have changed over time, even if some continuity (in concepts, methodology, and disciplinary identity, for example) extends over decades. In subsequent weeks, we attend above all to contemporary political-geographical approaches to key themes, including the state and state power, national identity and nationhood, forms of democracy and anti-democratic movements, geopolitics and international relations, political economy, and cultural politics. Through a mix of seminar-style discussion and lecture, as well as through the presentation of diverse texts for interpretation (films, fiction, examples of propaganda, and peer-reviewed scholarship in Political Geography and cognate disciplines), we develop shared understandings of key processes through which political geographies have been constructed.
This upper-division course is taught online. To be a successful student, you must actively engage with course material (lectures, readings, videos, handouts, and discussion boards) that I post to our course webpage, which is described in greater detail below. We will also meet once each week, using our Zoom classroom. See more details below, under “Habits of Successful Students in this Online Class.”
This course is organized around theories and cases of conflict at multiple scales. Selected theories reflect priorities in the interdisciplinary literature on conflict, and selected cases are meant to highlight distinctions and also to suggest relationships between disparate regions. You will also do some independent research through the university library system. Writing assignments and group discussions will facilitate development of shared understandings of cases, theories, and methodologies in the study of conflict.
This course is taught in person, unless the societal or institutional conditions require us to change modality. Any such change will be duly communicated. To be a successful student, you must regularly attend our class meetings and actively engage with course material (lectures, readings, videos, handouts, and assignments). See more details below, under “Habits of Successful Students.”
This course begins with an activity that prompts us to account for our preconceptions about world regions, as well as an example of how regions are made. In subsequent weeks, we focus on processes through which regions take shape, and we substantiate our understanding of these processes with examples of regions and their histories. Emphases of this course include regional and national identity formation, state formation, migration, environmental change, and trade and the production of value through economic circuits. We cannot discuss all regions in one semester, but the course provides tools with which students can develop an understanding of regions we do not have time to examine in the course.
In this upper-division course, we learn the sub-discipline by examining selected themes in contemporary cultural geography, reviewing an intellectual and social history of the sub-discipline, exploring compelling case studies from a cultural-geographical perspective, and deploying key concepts and cultural-geographical methods in our research and writing. You are provided with an overview of cultural-geographical approaches to landscapes, places, and cultural politics, a foundation in key concepts (landscape, place, culture), and some training in how to do research as a cultural geographer. You learn the intellectual history of concepts and methods, and develop or refine a cultural-geographical way of seeing the world through engagement with US-based and international examples.
We begin by familiarizing ourselves with key cultural-geographical concepts and situating these in a broader field of debate and intervention. We move systematically through epistemological debates that have defined the sub-discipline, in particular around how we conceive of culture and how “culture” is related to place and/or landscape. This helps us recognize how norms of doing cultural geography have changed over time. The second half of the course—overlapping with the movement through epistemological debates—has us focus on key themes in contemporary cultural geography: place making, race and class, national identity formation, the relationship between nature and society, and so on. Throughout the semester, we situate our engagement with these themes in social and intellectual context.
This course promotes careful reading, sustained engagement with sub-disciplinary debates, and making modest claims and interventions in those debates in contributions to class discussion. Success in this course demands that you regularly prepare for and attend class. I expect habits of careful reading and organized note taking. I further specify our expectations below.